It could be described as the alchemy of disarmament. Lead to Life: A People's Alchemy for Regeneration is the project, and its goal is peace, justice and regeneration.

"Intention in medicine is defined as the healing process of a wound," reads the website. "Our intention through Lead to Life is to transform that which ends life into that which sustains life -- to facilitate an alchemical healing process that can physically transform both our weapons and our imaginations."

Weapons are literally being melted down and turned into shovels, which are then used to plant trees. The disarmament process that the project uses collects weapons that are donated from the general public, as well as weapons housed in police departments that have been rendered dormant and disposable after investigations have been completed. Then, partnering with local artists and metalsmiths, the weapons are literally transformed into shovels and tools which are then used in ceremonial tree plantings. The project is based in Oakland but has just completed a tree-planting ceremony in Atlanta.

To see more stories like this, visit "Planet or Profit?" Bronte Velez, the creative director, and Kyle Lemle, the program director, co-founded the project in 2017.

Velez is a multimedia artist, life-long student and designer engaged with the praxis (theory + action, as she describes it) that lives at the intersections of critical geography, Black liberation ecologies and creative place-making.

"This project, Lead to Life, and my soul work, begin with the unnecessary and horrific murders that fall largely upon my own communities -- Black, Brown and Indigenous communities -- and especially the children of these communities," she told Truthout.

Lemle is a community forester, musician and organizer working at the intersections of environmental justice and cultural regeneration.

"I come to the story of our work haunted by another form of violence -- violence against the Earth," he said. "The election of the current president is calling us to look deeply at the cultures and cosmovisions that elected him -- the greed, fear and hatred -- both ancient and alive. For me, it is no coincidence that the administration deleted the White House web pages on civil rights and climate change in the same click, the day he took office."

Transforming Violence

Lead to Life: A People's Alchemy for Regeneration's Creative Director Bronte
Velez and Program Director Kyle Lemle, holding a RAWTools trowel made from a gun.

For Velez, the work began with her dear friend Harry sending her an image of the Van Gogh bike path located in the Netherlands -- a glow-in-the-dark path honoring Van Gogh's Starry Night painting.

When she saw the image of the bike path, Velez was immediately flooded by memories of X'avier, her dear friend who was shot and killed five years ago by a 14-year-old on the Kirkwood bike path in Atlanta. The teenager, now 18, is serving three life-sentences with an additional 15 years. X'avier's mother told Velez she felt neither healing nor justice by way of this sentencing. A similar grief fills Velez now.

"I always and in all ways think about the design of things -- what things are made up of, what oppression is made up of, how evil arrives to itself," she said. "When I saw the glow-in-the-dark bike path, I wondered if the conditions of X'avier's murder would have been the same had the Kirkwood bike path been designed differently?"

Velez explained that she stared at the image and asked herself questions like: Could you kill someone with that much imagination and beauty around you? And then to further strengthen that question: What other environmental conditions are necessary for a community to support that kind of creative infrastructure? What other life is supporting the sustainability of imagination in this place?

Lemle feels similarly about the necessity of the project regarding Earth.

He believes that the care for our common home is being deleted, and what's being empowered instead is the glory of the individual money-maker, and a system that benefits the separate and fenced-in individual at the expense of all other beings -- especially people of color, Indigenous peoples, animals and future beings.

"I imagine a world where, as we walk, what trails behind us is not waste, is not desert, is not forgotten, but where our shadows grow as gifts," Lemle said. "Where our footsteps are not violence, our actions yield no shame, where we don't need earphones and medical masks to shield us from the mess we've made."

Lemle's dream job when he was a child was to literally be Johnny Appleseed. Today, his heroes continue to be the tree planters of the world -- like Wangari Maathai, the legendary Matriarch of Kenya who, through planting trees, helped bring down an oppressive political regime. What interests him now is how, through the process of healing the Earth, we can also heal our relationship to it.

"There are the weapons destroying the world, and the tools to repair our world," Lemle said. "And the technologies are as ancient as they are alive. They are not hiding deep in the forest. They are the forest. Trees stabilize our climate. Trees bring the rain. Trees, for many, are home to the gods. For me, it has always been about the trees."

Simultaneously, Velez's work in the project reminds us of how, as she explained, gun violence in the United States results in tens of thousands of deaths and injuries annually, from suicides to homicides to mass murders to police brutality.

"The reverberations of trauma must go somewhere, and as I have learned in my study of 'waste management,' there is no such thing as 'away'," she said. "Our bodies and lands are crowded with the histories of violence that daily affect us and inform the way we grow or do not grow."

"I am thinking of the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, lovers, friends -- of the air and soil and land, who must absorb the impact of these traumas," she said. "The question I am left with asks, 'Can we disrupt patterns of oppression by transforming the processes by which they are designed?' I believe that when we disrupt those patterns, there is more room to breathe, to feel, to heal, to rest."

Synthesis and Focus

Lead to Life is a labor of love for several people and groups.

One of them, Micky ScottBey Jones, describes herself as "the Justice Doula," and is a womanist contemplative activist, healer, nonviolent direct-action organizer and consultant who facilitates conferences, workshops, pilgrimages and online conversations. She is working as a supporting partner to the project, primarily by her work with The People's Supper, a project that aims to repair the breach in interpersonal relationships across the US which have been injured by political, ideological and identity differences.

Jones hopes that as the result of Lead to Life, people are able to spend a few hours being human with one another -- connecting to their own stories and the stories of others.

"We so often come to interactions with another person focused on the potential transaction: I need to check out of the grocery store, I need my child to listen to me, even, I need to catch up with this friend and find out the latest in their life," she said. "Rarely do we sit down with another person to just be human together, to breathe in their story without needing to give advice, share an answer or correct what they are saying."

Jones's hope is that her work with The People's Supper inspires those involved in the project to bring this mentality to their own dinner tables.

Sarah Thompson is Lead to Life's connector at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, in Atlanta, Georgia, (the King Center).

She told Truthout it was important for her to be part of Lead to Life because it brings the metaphors of swords into plowshares into physical reality.

"Lead to Life is a reminder that, as the minerals taken from Earth are healed and restored, we are healed," Thompson said. "We are healed when the alchemy of community comes together to melt down the barriers between us and [we] experience the flames of passion for life. It is also important to be a part of this project because it is an artful and soulful way to honor those impacted by gun violence."

Thompson hopes that the project results in more people becoming excited about discovering the ecological analysis of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As she sees it, not only did Dr. King preach about the connections between humans -- precious connections that were being destroyed by racism and racist systems -- he spoke of the interrelated cosmos, too.

"By choosing to feature parts of MLK's sermons that focus on transformation of our relationships with one another and the Earth, it allows people to see and read King in a new way," Thompson said. "He was an important strategist, and his voice is as important now as it was a half century ago."

Thompson is grateful that the King Center partnered with Lead to Life for a week of events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which was April 4. She reminded us how, as a victim of gun violence himself, during his life, Dr. King spoke out about gun violence on both the interpersonal and structural levels.

"He named militarism as one of the 'triple evils' that are incapable of being conquered when 'machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people'," she said. "We are invited to be led to life in a new way after experiencing the embodied transformation offered through the community rituals of eating, dreaming, storytelling, melting and singing that Kyle and Bronte created."

Michael Martin is also a partner of Lead to Life. Martin is the founder and executive director of RAWtools, a Colorado-based group which describes itself as "replacing narratives of violence with communities of creation."

RAWtools is actively looking to partner with organizations and projects that do work toward turning swords to plowshares.

"It's rare that we get to work with a project like Lead to Life that fits so well with our own mission and vision," Martin said. "The idea of swords turning into plowshares and guns into garden tools requires us to make changes to the systems of violence and restore these very systems into tools that bring life."

He believes Lead to Life does this and brings a much-needed aspect of ritual into the process.

"Our world is quick to move from one thing to the next without recognition of transition that often includes joy and pain, trauma and celebration," he said. "Ritual is a vital role in the alchemy of our communities, and Lead to Life does it beautifully."

Martin, a former youth and young adult pastor, wants to see whole neighborhoods making a transition to weapon-free environments.

"How better can we do that than to literally plant that environment with tools made out of guns?" He said. "And not just plant them, but recognize this transition as a paradigm shift in how we move from exploiting each other to giving life to each other."

While RAWtools' mission is to "disarm hearts and forge peace," Martin thinks Lead to Life has created a beautiful process to do exactly that.

"Gun violence speaks from a variety of issues that need to be addressed, like racial and environmental injustice that Kyle and Bronte are so wonderfully passionate about," he said. "It speaks from places of loneliness and marginalization, where violence seems like the only option."

Martin believes Lead to Life offers another way to help folks transition from these spaces of loneliness and hurt and into spaces of support and love.

Backstory and Moving Forward

Lemle and Velez met when they were both inaugural recipients of the Spiritual Ecology Fellowship. The concept of spiritual ecology creates the space for that necessary gap between reverence, stewardship and environmental justice to be sutured. On a bus ride together, they found themselves, as Lemle described it, "Discovering the intersections of our work, with ease, magic, whimsy and spontaneity, and a profound collaboration was birthed with the intention to bridge restorative and environmental justice through our project."

"Inside of that excitement, many beautiful questions arose that now guide our praxis through Lead to Life," he added.

Their work is aimed at designing answers to these questions, according to Lemle:

* What does a reconciliation process with the Earth look like? Who is invited into that process?

* What does a public, human-to-human reconciliation process look like? What does deep, sustainable community healing look like beyond fleeting actions? What does a #BlackLivesMatter tree planting look like?

* What are the physical technologies of the spiritual ecology movement? As the spiritual ecology liturgy does not itself sequester carbon or pull the toxins from our rivers, what are the tools that people can hold and the actions that people can do to remember our deepest roots and answer the prayers of our great-great-grandchildren?

Lead to Life was born in order to answer these very questions. Thus, the project intentionally chose the US to create their alchemy and cultural healing work due to the fact that Lemle calls it "the heart of imperialism and violence against people and planet."

Lemle and Velez's hope is that even within the current climate of pervasive environmental racism, gun violence and desecration of the land, Lead to Life will serve as an immediate enactment of values. In that way, it is participatory culture creation, and in the context of violence, their ceremonies can leave people with a dignified and honorable memorialization.

Lead to Life recently converged in Atlanta for a series of events around the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's assassination to hold a People's Supper, a Swords to Plowshares ceremony, a permaculture action day. The events culminated in a tree planting ceremony at the King Center.

Lead to Life will bring their work to cities across the US, starting in Oakland, California, later this fall. Furthermore, Lead to Life is launching a "National Call to Disarm & Transform" in partnership with RAWtools' Swords to Plows program.

For every gun they receive, Lead to Life will transform it into a garden tool and plant one tree. Leveraging their network of metal artists and civic partners across the US and the #OneLess campaign, Lead to Life will send a "Call To Action" to millions to join them.

Lead to Life sees pausing in an era dominated by urgency as an act of resistance in order to generate alternatives to violence.

The project's physical act of "turning swords into plowshares" creatively fulfills the prophecy Dr. King invoked throughout his speeches. According to Lemle and Velez, gun metal will be liberated from histories of murder, and the soil and air where violence took place will be remediated by the trees.

"Our goal is to release powerful content to inspire nationwide action on gun violence through creative nonviolent direct service and ecological restoration," Lemle said. "We believe that people will only stand up to take action when they feel resonance at the soul level."
(c) 2018 Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last 10 years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards.

WRITE DOWN: I, Uri Avnery, soldier number 44410 of the Israel army, hereby dissociate myself from the army sharpshooters who murder unarmed demonstrators along the Gaza Strip, and from their commanders, who give them the orders, up to the commander in chief.

We don't belong to the same army, or to the same state. We hardly belong to the same human race.

IS MY government committing "war crimes" along the border of the Gaza Strip?

I don't know. I am not a jurist.

It seems that officials of the International Criminal Court believe that the acts of our soldiers do constitute war crimes. They demand an international investigation.

To prevent that, our army command proposes an Israeli military investigation. That is manifestly ridiculous - an army investigating itself about acts committed on direct orders of the Chief of Staff.

As was published in advance, sharpshooters were posted along the border fence and ordered to kill "ringleaders" of the unarmed protesters on the other side of the fence. The Gaza leadership had announced that these unarmed protests were to take place every week, after Friday prayers, until Naqba Day.

During the first two Fridays, 29 unarmed people were shot dead and more than a thousand wounded by sharpshooters.

For me this is not a judicial question. It is a crime, not only against the unarmed protesters. It is also a crime against the State of Israel, against the people of Israel and against the Israeli army.

Since I was a member of that army on the day of its foundation, I think that it is also a crime against my comrades and me.

THIS WEEK a short video, recorded by a soldier at the time of such an action, was widely seen in Israel.

It shows the action from the angle of a soldier who was obviously standing next to a sharpshooter. The sharpshooter sees the demonstrators from a distance of hundreds of yards. The hairs of his sights move at random, than settle on an individual. He shoots. The person drops on the spot. A joyous cry "Yesh" is heard all around from unseen soldiers who have been watching. "Yesh" means "got him", a jubilant yell, such as would accompany a hunter's success in killing a rabbit.

Many hundreds of thousands of Israelis have seen this film by now, since it was shown for the first time on TV. Except for a few articles and letters to the editor (in Haaretz), there has been no protest.

This did not happen overseas, in some remote colony. It happened right next to us, 45 minute's drive from my home.

The killer was not a hardened mercenary. He - and the joyous soldiers around him - were just ordinary youngsters, drafted at the age of 18 like most Jewish Israelis.

All of them were just "following orders". (Remember?) We have not heard of one single case of a soldier refusing orders.

UNTIL TWO weeks ago, I had the highest respect for our highest officer, the Chief of Staff, Gadi Eizenkot. Surrounded by officers who are mere military technicians, he seemed an officer who, in spite of his unmilitary appearance, was well capable of upholding the dignity of the army against the punk who serves as Minister of Defense.

No more. Eizenkot has given the murderous orders. Why, for heavens sake?

Like the British in India and the white racists in the US, the Israeli government does not know how to deal with unarmed protest. It has never encountered it. It does not exist in Arab tradition.

: By chance this week I saw the classic movie about Mahatma Gandhi. The British tried everything - they beat him and myriads of others into pulp, they shot thousands of others. When Gandhi and his followers suffered this torment and did not hit back, the British eventually admitted defeat and went away.

So did the white racist opponents of Martin Luther King in Alabama. A Palestinian follower of his came to this country at the beginning of the occupation and tried to convince his countrymen to try this method. The Israel army opened fire, and the Palestinians reverted to the armed struggle.

Not this time. The (violent) Islamic Hamas in the Gaza Strip calls on the population to try unarmed protest, tens of thousands follow. This can lead to unforeseen results. One of them is the sharpshooters' order to kill more or less at random.

WHEN I stated publicly that I am ashamed, a reader accused me of hypocrisy. He cited from my two books about our (1948) War of Independence, in which I had described atrocities to which I was a witness.

Sure, there were atrocities (as in every war). The perpetrators were soldiers of all ethnic and social groups. But they were denounced by some of their comrades (also of all ethnic and social groups). Most soldiers were in the middle, following the most persuasive.

Now the picture is different. Not only is the shooting of the unarmed protesters, far from the fence, done by order, but there seem to be no other voices. The military and political leadership is united. Even in civilian society, voices against the mass murder are very few.

HOW DO the Israeli media react? Well, they don't. This momentous event in Israel's history is almost ignored.

Fortunately for the perpetrators, there are plenty of events to take our minds off them and their actions. President Bashar al-Assad has apparently used chemical weapons against his rebels. The Israeli media are having a feast. How awful! How barbarous! How Arab!

Then there is the problem of the 36,000 "illegal" (meaning non-Jewish) African workers who have entered Israel. The government wants to throw them out. Decent Israelis very properly want to prevent this. That is a full-time job. No time for the Gaza Strip.

: And there is, of course, Holocaust Memorial Day, which happens conveniently this week. One can write endlessly about this awful chapter in our history. What is Gaza compared to this horrible event?

WHAT ABOUT our media?

The sorrowful fact is that the Israeli media have reverted to what they were in the early days of the state: an instrument of the government. It took my news magazine dozens of years to break that habit. For many years we had a decent press, with some wonderful journalists and broadcasters.

No more. A few are left, but the great majority of the press is now coordinated with the regime ("gleichgeschaltet" in German). Two minutes on Gaza. 20 minutes on what's happening in Syria. 10 minutes for the latest (imaginary) outbreak of anti-Semitism in the British Labor Party.

Most of the journalists and broadcasters, honest and well-meaning people all, are not even conscious of what they are doing (or not doing). They are innocent of any other thoughts.

WHERE IS the "Left"? Where is the so-called "Center"? They have not disappeared, as some lament. Far from it. A shift of some percent or a move of one of the small parties would suffice to topple Binyamin Netanyahu.

But they all seem to be paralyzed. Nobody dares to speak out against the killing, apart from some faint whispers. Even the many admirable groups of youngsters who fight against the occupation, each on some special sector, are silent about the Gaza killings.

No mass demonstrations. No huge protests. Nothing.

So we, too, are to blame. And perhaps more than others.

Having already violated every tenet of international law in its proxy jihadist war against Syria, including the seizure of one-third of the country, the United States invoked a Non-Law, a Law That Never Was, to justify its missile strikes against fictitious "chemical warfare" facilities. Syrian President Assad "kills his own people," said Trump, leader of the nation whose police kill more of its "own people" than any country except (fellow white settler state) Brazil, and whose prisons entomb one-quarter of all the world's inmates. (One out of every eight prisoners on the planet is an African American.)

On the Saturday morning after the bombs fell in Damascus and Homs, Omalii Yeshitela, chairman of the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations, held a press conference in St. Louis to denounce Washington's aggression. "If you can use that justification," said Yeshitela, "that, somehow, the Syrian state is attacking its own people and, therefore, the U.S. can rain missiles, along with France and England, on Syria, then what would prevent Russia from attacking the United States because of all the people that the United States is killing in our communities, all of the starvation that is imposed on our communities, the fact that more than a million Africans are lumped up in prison?"

In his post-strike statement, President Trump called chemical weapons "uniquely dangerous" -- as if such uniqueness provided legal justification for Washington's act of war. But the United States has been poisoning "its own" Black people for generations. "They talk about chemical warfare, but books have even been written about how crack cocaine was introduced into the community through the CIA -- the same CIA that's involved in murdering people in Syria and other places around the world," said Yeshitela.

The United States began in smallpox-infected blankets and mountains of Native American scalps-for-bounty, and remains true to its genocidal imperatives. "We live in a country today where people are living in concentration camps that are euphemistically referred to as Indian reservations. What is it that would keep another country from attacking the United States based on that?" asked Yeshitela.

Imperial Shriek

The fading empire refuses to accept the humiliation of defeat of its jihadist proxies, the head-cutters Washington and Saudi Arabia have nurtured as a foreign terror legion since deploying them against a leftist government in Afghanistan and its Soviet ally almost 40 years ago.

The billions in cash and arms that flowed into jihadist structures in Syria and Iraq since 2011 equipped and financed an al Qaida army (al Nusra) mighty enough to absorb and dominate a menagerie of other murderous Islamic factions, and to finally birth ISIS, the death cult caliphate. But the Syrian Arab Army, with the help of Russia, Iran, and its Shia neighbors in Lebanon and Iraq, is now on the cusp of retaking the bulk of its national territory -- except for the vital region of its oil fields, upon which the U.S. military sits like flies on shit.

Aside from the remaining head-hunters, Washington's only indigenous ally in Syria is an army of Marxist Kurds who were among the prime victims -- and fiercest resisters -- of the American-sponsored jihadist onslaught. For years they were tacit allies of Syria's government -- whose secularism they share -- in the struggle against the U.S.-sponsored barbarians. But Don Uncle Sam made them an offer of protection-or-else that they believed could not be refused, and the Kurds are now pawns -- as is the whole planet, in a sense -- to Washington's quandary: How does the world's sole Superpower remain in a region where it is despised, after its proxy forces have been defeated? And if it cannot remain, is it any longer The Superpower?

Washington is answering this imperial existential question the only way it can, with its awesome war machine, oiled by lies that no one believes outside the western corporate information bubble. There was no chemical attack by Syria, this month or last April or in August of 2013. All lies, but derivative of the much bigger lies that sought to justify the U.S.-Saudi-Turkish-French-British (and, of course, Israeli) war against, first Libya, and all but simultaneously, Syria: that these were civil wars, rather than naked imperial aggression.

Huge lies require powerful megaphones to mold the minds of the host country population, the only people that can (theoretically) shut down the U.S war machine without firing a shot. The Iraq war so repulsed the U.S. public, it became politically impossible for George Bush to "stay the course," or for Pentagon planners to contemplate another large scale American invasion of the region. The only alternative was an enormously beefed-up al Qaida to wage holy terror wars that the corporate media would dutifully "report" as civil wars of an "Arab Spring."

Most white Americans bought into the lie because they wanted to: imperial-mindedness is white privilege on a global scale. Blacks have historically opposed U.S. militarism, but they acquiesced to Obama's aggressions and neutered their own peace politics because they wanted to -- in deference to the Black family in the White House.

But Obama-Time is over; the spell is broken. Donald Trump is the sum of all Black fears and loathings, an arch racist who is perceived as rendering the entire planet unsafe for people of color. Blacks are primed to oppose all of his policies, foreign and domestic. Black people are the only U.S. group that shares the general global distrust of U.S. foreign policy motives. Moreover, Black America is inherently skeptical of U.S. power structures, because Power in the U.S. has always lied about Black people -- and about people of color elsewhere in the world.

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms ...
The Hollow Men ~~~ TS Eliot

It began back in 2015 with a low rumble, like something buried deep in the Earth had rolled over in its sleep: GOP Rep. Jim Bridenstine, representing Oklahoma's first district, was retiring at the end of his term. Hardly anything about the announcement was newsworthy outside of Tulsa and Wagoner; maybe one person in ten thousand could pick Jim Bridenstine out of a line-up. As it turns out, he was the leading indicator of an explosive trend. Bridenstine was the first, but will certainly not be the last.

Two years after Bridenstine's announcement and 15 months into the presidency of Donald Trump, the floodgates have opened: The Republican House members who are either leaving the House after the 2018 midterms or have already left in disgrace include Sam Johnson, Lynn Jenkins, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, John J. Duncan Jr., Dave Reichert, Charlie Dent, Dave Trott, Jeb Hensarling, Lamar Smith, Frank LoBiondo, Ted Poe, Bob Goodlatte, Joe Barton, Bill Shuster, Gregg Harper, Ed Royce, Darrell Issa, Pat Meehan, Rodney Frelinghuysen, Trey Gowdy, Tom Rooney, Ryan Costello, Dennis Ross, Jason Chaffetz, Tim Murphy, Pat Tiberi, Trent Franks, Blake Farenthold, Kristi Noem, James Renacci, Raul Labrador, Steve Pearce, Diane Black, Evan Jenkins, Luke Messer, Todd Rokita, Lou Barletta, Marsha Blackburn, Ron DeSantis, Martha McSally and Kevin Cramer.

Leading the charge toward the exits is none other than Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who confirmed on Wednesday that he is stepping down and leaving office after 2018.

That is 43 departures, compared to the Democrats' 19, and the roof has not finished caving in quite yet. As Republican dysfunction and Trumpian mayhem continue to command the day, more departures are certain. Democrats need to pick up 24 seats in order to wrest back control of the House. The Cook Political Report scores 86 seats as being competitive, with 66 of those currently held by Republicans.

For remaining Republicans who still have to row their way to safety in an increasingly perilous election season, Ryan's sudden departure was a knife thrust under the fifth rib. "It's just another illustration of the harbinger of things to come," Terry Sullivan, former campaign strategist for Marco Rubio, told The Hill. "There's no Republican who's optimistic about the November elections. If the leader of Republicans in Congress doesn't want to be there, what is the reason they should be?"

What began two Novembers ago as an all-encompassing Republican victory, a takeover of two branches with a stranglehold on the third, has devolved into a chaotic stampede to avoid the looming and seemingly insurmountable "Blue Wave" to come. "This is the Watergate pattern writ large," writes Rick Wilson for The Daily Beast. "In 1973, Republicans were screaming that the investigation was nothing but a Fake News Witch Hunt. They lost 49 House seats and eight Senate seats in 1974, two months after Nixon resigned."

Take a bow, soon-to-be-former-Speaker Ryan. The representatives who believed you to be the party's economics whiz kid, who elevated you to the Speakership after Boehner bolted, who even went so far as to nominate you to be vice president in 2012, have finally come face to face with the real man behind that aw-shucks smile. The view is not pleasant. Rather than act as the leader of an equal branch of government, Paul Ryan played the part of amiable doormat to the most ridiculous president since Andrew Johnson, and the whole caucus is about to pay a gruesome price for it.

Yes, Ryan helped see the recent massive tax cut into fruition, but this was not some herculean endeavor. Getting Republicans and Democrats in Congress to agree that rich people deserve more money is about as difficult as squeezing toothpaste out of a tube. Ryan's lifetime quest to shatter the social safety net he once depended upon may not have been fully realized yet, but he helped put enough of a beating on Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security that millions will feel the pain of it for many years to come.

That was always the truly insidious part of this man with the boyish face and a pocketful of debunked economic theories. If you asked him, Ryan's seeming goodwill would pour out of his doe eyes as he explained that all he wanted was to help people. Trouble is, he never made clear which people those were until the largest transfer of wealth in modern history was completed. Then he left. Mission accomplished.

The GOP is Trump's party now. Mitch McConnell still rules the Senate, but with an ill electoral wind blowing even in that august chamber, he has little choice but to staple himself to a wildly oscillating wrecker who is so twisted that his own lawyer now exists only as a stack of captured boxes deep inside FBI headquarters. Every GOP election campaign is going to come down to a bunch of petrified Republicans trying to out-Trump each other with the base while hoping Fearless Leader isn't caught building a dacha on the Volga River.

If you think I exaggerate the circumstances for congressional Republicans, consider this: The current GOP front-runner for Ryan's seat is an avowed white supremacist named Paul Nehlan. After a peaceful counter-demonstration in Charlottesville was attacked by fascists and Nazis, resulting in the murder of one protester, Nehlan tweeted, "Incredible moment for white people who've had it up to here & aren't going to take it anymore." This, along with a barrage of racist and anti-Semitic garbage, got Nehlan bounced from Twitter, but despite cries of outrage from the Wisconsin Republican Party, he's at the top of the list to replace Ryan. Also, Donald Trump likes him. In Republican-world these days, that's all that seems to count.

One could call this the end of an era, except that Paul Ryan has only been Speaker for about as long as it takes to boil an egg. His years in office stand as a towering example of how far one can go in Republican politics if you cling relentlessly to the trickle-down theory while gnawing at the base of Medicare like a beaver felling an oak. A part of me will always wonder if things could have been different for Ryan had Joe Biden not laughed in his face on national television way back in 2012.

I think everyone knew the Michael Cohen hearing on Monday would make news. It was anticipated that Judge Kimba Wood would decide whether or not the president would be granted a restraining order against his own Department of Justice, preventing them from searching the documents and other items seized from his attorney's office and homes last week. And we knew that Stormy Daniels and her attorney, Michael Avenatti, would attend, so there was sure to be a ton of press and wall-to-wall coverage.

Wood had said on Friday that she wanted to know how many clients Cohen represented, and who they were, before making a determination as to whether or not the search was improper. When Cohen's attorneys said they didn't have that information, she told them to make sure their client was in court on Monday, prepared to answer the question. Everyone was eager to hear the answer.

But nothing prepared us for the news that Cohen only represents three clients: President Trump, deputy Republican National Committee Finance chair Elliott Broidy -- and Fox News host Sean Hannity. Nobody saw that one coming.

Since all the lawyers had been told Friday that this question was on the agenda for Monday's hearing, there was no reason for those who actually knew the answer to be surprised that it was asked. In fact, Cohen's lawyers argued that they were prepared to immediately appeal any decision to reveal the third client's name, since he was adamant about not wanting to be publicly identified. The judge was unmoved and demanded the name. They gave it. There was no appeal.

Since Sean Hannity had clearly told Cohen that he didn't want his name to be public, it seemed odd that he didn't have a prepared statement ready just in case. He had to know there was at least a 50-50 chance he'd be revealed. Instead, Hannity dribbled out explanations on his radio show, on Twitter and through statements over the course of the day, asserting that he had never paid Cohen or put him on retainer and that there was no third party involved. Likely Hannity was trying to reassure his wife that he didn't have a "Stormy" issue.

The Fox host is now claiming that he saw Cohen as a pal he consulted on a casual basis about some innocuous real estate matters. Nonetheless, he definitely considered it to be an attorney-client relationship, demanding that the appropriate privilege be recognized and all communications be off-limits to government agents.

Hannity seems to want it both ways, but that's not really going to work. He can probably claim that his communications with Cohen are privileged, but he also needs to explain why, if their consultations were so trivial, he hasn't simply admitted it and waived the privilege. He's within his legal rights to assert that privilege, of course, but making a federal case involving the president out of an apparent trifle doesn't seem too smart.

Moreover, this is a man who is worth more than $80 million. Hannity owns a private jet, which he lent to his old friend Newt Gingrich during the 2016 campaign so the former speaker could go meet with Trump in Indiana to be vetted for the vice presidency. It seems unlikely that a man of such means would consult a thuggish fixer such as Cohen for routine legal advice when he can clearly afford any top-drawer attorney he wants.

No, it's obvious that Hannity is claiming attorney-client privilege over something he doesn't want people to know about. Whatever it is, if government prosecutors weren't suspicious before, you can bet this amateurish legal move ensures they are now.

None of this would even have come up, if Trump's lawyers had not objected to the Department of Justice's "taint team" process, which is used routinely in cases where there are issues of attorney-client privilege. If Hannity isn't implicated in any crime, the taint team would have looked at his communications and realized there was nothing there that the FBI and prosecutors working on Cohen's case even needed to know about.

But Trump and his people believe the FBI and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York are all part of a "deep state" conspiracy and cannot be trusted. Indeed, the president's lawyers demanded that the president be allowed to personally review all the documents, prompting the judge to ask if he really had the time for such a project. (He actually does, but it might mean forgoing some golf, tweeting and "executive time," so that's probably out.) As Salon's Matthew Rozsa pointed out, that gambit didn't work for Richard Nixon and it's unlikely to work for Trump either.

Judge Wood did not accede to the request to review the documents, but despite her stated "faith in the Southern District U.S. Attorney's Office that their integrity is unimpeachable," she is considering appointing a "special master" to play some role in the process, perhaps to show that she understands the president's concerns. (Personally, I think every government legal official involved in these Trump cases should learn from James Comey's mistakes and just play it by the book.)

This part of the story will likely end up being another sideshow, as far as the Trump presidency is concerned. But if anyone thought that Sean Hannity had any integrity, this ended it. Even Alan Dershowitz came down on him on his own show on Monday night:

Our health, well-being, food security, energy and economic progress depend on healthy, diverse nature. Clean water and air are essential to human life and health. Nutrient-rich soils are necessary to grow food. Diversity makes the ecosystems on which human life depends resilient.

But, as more than 550 experts from over 100 countries recently warned, "Biodiversity - the essential variety of life forms on Earth - continues to decline in every region of the world, significantly reducing nature's capacity to contribute to people's well-being."

On March 22 in Medellin, Colombia, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services' 129 member states approved the experts' four extensively peer-reviewed regional reports. Researchers examined more than 10,000 studies over three years to assess the state of biodiversity and to determine the causes and solutions for declines in Africa, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe and Central Asia.

IPBES chair Sir Robert Watson said, "The best available evidence, gathered by the world's leading experts, points us now to a single conclusion: we must act to halt and reverse the unsustainable use of nature - or risk not only the future we want, but even the lives we currently lead. Fortunately, the evidence also shows that we know how to protect and partially restore our vital natural assets."

The reports conclude that "biodiversity and nature's capacity to contribute to people are being degraded, reduced and lost due to a number of common pressures - habitat stress; overexploitation and unsustainable use of natural resources; air, land and water pollution; increasing numbers and impact of invasive alien species and climate change, among others."

According to the University College London's Tim Newbold, lead researcher for a 2016 study the reports reference, "For 58.1% of the world's land surface, which is home to 71.4% of the global population, the level of biodiversity loss is substantial enough to question the ability of ecosystems to support human societies."

Biodiversity of plants, animals, fungi and other organisms is important. Each species plays a unique ecosystem role. Diverse nature offers numerous ecosystem services, including ensuring we have access to a variety of foods and medicines. It also creates resilience - a variety of species ensures that some will continue to function if others fail.

In the Americas, species populations are on average 31 per cent lower than when European settlement began. With increasing climate change impacts, that's expected to rise to at least 40 per cent by 2050. The report notes that Indigenous Peoples and local communities have slowed or reversed declines in some areas through "a diversity of polyculture and agroforestry systems," but warns that Indigenous local knowledge and languages, and the cultures associated them, are also threatened or dying.

The economic consequences alone are staggering. Researchers estimate that land-based natural systems contribute services worth about $24.3 trillion a year to people in the Americas - equivalent to the region's gross domestic product - and about $3.6 trillion in Canada. As one example of the costs of addressing the problems, the report shows the "annual cost of managing the impacts of invasive alien zebra mussels on infrastructure for power, water supply and transportation in the Great Lakes" is more than $500 million.

Although many solutions lie in government policy, individuals can also help. Watson told National Geographic that eating less meat, wasting less food, using water more efficiently, reducing toxic chemical use and shifting from fossil fuels are all necessary. He also said Indigenous and local knowledge are invaluable to helping us learn how to live better with nature, and that cross-border collaboration is essential because nature doesn't recognize human boundaries.

Emma Archer, co-chair of the African assessment, said citizen engagement is also needed: "As citizens, we need to vote and lobby for political leaders and policies that support these choices."

As a Desmog Blog article points out, "Many of the solutions for stemming the loss of species would have simultaneous benefits for the climate, such as protecting and restoring ecosystems (which can store more carbon), cleaning up energy sources (fewer greenhouse gas emissions), and practicing more sustainable and diverse agriculture (lowering emissions, storing carbon)."

When somebody starts complaining about the removal of the monuments to armed sedition from the public spaces in the South, you can remind them that they are merely the outward expressions of a commitment to a system of American apartheid, to the habits of bigotry and white supremacy that persist to this day. And then, when this person insists that those habits are parts of a dead past, you can tell them about Louisiana. From The New York Times:

Louisiana is one of only two states in the country allowing a non-unanimous jury to convict a defendant of a felony, and a Louisiana lawmaker says it is time for the practice to end. Sen. J.P. Morrell says the unusual rule is a remnant of the Jim Crow era, stemming from a constitutional convention in 1898 and longstanding efforts to maintain white supremacy after the Civil War. And he wants a change. "This is something that is wholly unnecessary that was born of this fusion of racism and disenfranchisement," he said. "It's a self-defeating, illogical position to have two jurors say 'we don't think he did it,' then prosecutors to say we met our reasonable doubt standard." The New Orleans Democrat has proposed a constitutional amendment to require all 12 jurors in felony cases to agree on a verdict. The measure is gaining steam in the state Capitol.

The current system goes back to a loathsome event called The Convention of 1898. The purpose of that convention was to re-establish white supremacy and an apartheid political system now that Reconstruction had run its sadly truncated course. Of course, Louisiana had been in a state of open rebellion and white-supremacist terror almost since the day Robert E. Lee rode away from the farmhouse at Appomattox. In 1866, a racist mob attacked a Republican political parade in New Orleans and 150 African-Americans were killed. (Among the rioters were New Orleans policemen and firefighters, as well as a slew of Confederate veterans.) In 1873, 150 black citizens were killed by a white mob in Colfax.

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A year later, a domestic terrorist group called the White League, also largely composed of CSA veterans, many of whom had seen "action" in Colfax, attacked Republican officeholders in a place called Coushatta and overthrew the legitimate government of that parish. They forced white Republican officials to sign promises to leave the state and then killed some of them when they tried. (One man had his arms and legs broken and then was set on fire.) Not long afterwards, the White League launched an unsuccessful coup against the Reconstruction government of New Orleans that culminated in the so-called "Battle For Liberty Place," in which white-supremacist guerrillas for a time routed a militia force headed by former Confederate general James Longstreet. Chickens roosting and all that. In fact, one of the monuments to sedition removed by the administration of Mayor Mitch Landrieu was a memorial to the "heroes" of Liberty Place. This did not refer to Longstreet and his men.

There were naturally political elements to all this turmoil. Much of the violence of the 1870s was prompted by the election in 1872 of William Pitt Kellogg, a Republican, to be the state's governor. The Confederate extremists refused to recognize Kellogg's legitimacy and the state didn't settle down until President Ulysses S. Grant sent in federal troops to maintain order. And the Colfax massacre resulted in one of the more heinous Supreme Court decisions at the time: the 1876 decision in Cruikshank v. U.S., in which the Court ruled that the participants in the massacre could not be tried under the anti-Klan Enforcement Act of 1870 because the 14th Amendment's rights of due process and equal protection applied only to state actions, and not to the actions of individuals. This case was central to the rise of white-supremacist terror in Louisiana and elsewhere. In 1883, the Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional.

"GAINING STEAM." IN 2018.

With all these ducks in a row, and with Plessy v. Ferguson having established the constitutionality of "separate but equal" two years earlier, the Convention of 1898 was called with the express purpose of disenfranchising African-American voters and establishing the legitimacy of Jim Crow government. The state constitution produced by the convention included a poll tax as well as the notorious provisions allowing local registrars to disqualify black voters for not knowing how many beans were in a jar, or being unable to recite a specific passage from the state and federal constitutions. These barriers persisted until the early 1960s.

Also included in the 1898 constitution was the provision calling for non-unanimous verdicts in felony jury trials. A proposal to get rid of that is "gaining steam" here in 20-bloody-18. The statues are gone now, but not all the monuments to a bloody and seditious past are as easily removed.
(c) 2018 Charles P. Pierce has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently 'Idiot America.' He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.

A truly terrible thing happened recently in Las Vegas when some locked-and-loaded, armed and dangerous psychotic homicidal sniper mercilessly fired 540 rounds of live ammunition a minute into a crowd of helpless and defenseless people in Vegas.

Within minutes after this heartless massacre by a crazed gunman happened, American media went crazy and provided us with 24-hour coverage of this horror -- coverage that lasted for weeks. Sheldon Adelson, billionaire owner of the Bellagio casino, publicly deplored that something as horrendous as this could even happen and immediately started planning ways to help the survivors. Our entire nation was shocked and in mourning.

Now let's compare this horrendous sniper attack in Vegas with the recent horrendous sniper attack by uber-locked-and-loaded, armed and dangerous Israeli neo-cons who mercilessly fired 540 live rounds of ammunition a second into a crowd of helpless and defenseless people in Gaza.

"What sniper attack in Gaza?" you might ask. "Never heard of it." And yet even though 18 people were slaughtered and almost a thousand more were wounded by psychotic homicidal snipers firing into a helpless and defenseless crowd in Gaza, American mainstream media said almost nothing about it. And Sheldon Adelson not only made no public protest against this heinous and merciless act in Gaza, he totally applauded it -- and probably even helped finance it as well.

I'll never patronize the Bellagio again.

There is, however, one major difference between these two horrendous sniper attacks. On the one hand, I can always go off to Vegas at a moment's notice -- whereas, on the other hand, Gaza is the world's largest concentration camp. No one goes in. No one goes out. Except in a body bag. Plus, of course, they don't have any casinos in Gaza. Hell, thanks to Israeli neo-cons like Adelson and Bibi Netanyahu, trapped citizens of Gaza don't even have electricity. They barely even have food.

In the park today I saw a teenager watching two little kids, one of whom apparently stole a piece of candy from the other. The teenager rushed up to the two of them, reprimanded one of them, and stole both of their bicycles. I felt like it was my turn to step in at that point, and I confronted the bicycle thief. "Excuse me," I said, "what makes you think you can commit a larger crime just because you witnessed a smaller one? Who do you think you are?" He stared at me for a while, and replied: "the U.S. military."

There is no crime larger than war. There is no way to legalize it. The Kellogg-Briand Pact bans it, and the United Nations Charter bans it with narrow exceptions that have not remotely been met by any of the U.S. wars of the past 17 years. A small crime cannot justify a larger one. In 2002-2003 Iraq could have had all the weapons the warmongers were lying about. Or it could have not had them. It didn't make the slightest difference legally, morally, or otherwise in justifying a war.

Now, Syria could have used chemical weapons. Or it could not have. The question is not uninteresting or amoral or unimportant or boring, but it is completely and utterly irrelevant to the question of war.

So, yes, it's fun to point out how often they've lied and how they lack any proof of their claims and so forth. But do so with the understanding that you're being played, you're being manipulated into conceding that if they ever can make a case that some crime has been committed, that will justify them in killing large numbers of people and risking global apocalypse.

It won't. The problem is not that Trump wants to start a war before the inspectors can determine whether a war is merited. War cannot be merited. There is no such thing as mass murder getting justified by someone else committing murder with the wrong type of murder weapon. This is ludicrous nonsense.

What if Iraqis really had taken babies out of incubators in Kuwait? What if the Vietnamese really had shot back at the invaders in the Gulf of Tonkin? What if the Spanish really had strip-searched a woman or blown up the U.S.S. Maine? Once the media has got you debating some such question as if it's an application for a license to kill and kill and kill and kill, you've failed at the task of spotting the war lie. The lie is not the answer. The lie is the question.

Imagine if whenever 12 people were killed with a bomb or guns the "International Community" had to kill the nearest 20,000 people with poison gas. Why is the reverse so acceptable? It shouldn't be. It isn't legal or moral or decent or popular enough for the warmongers to let us have a public vote before they do it.

Trump's threat of war - the threat itself - is a violation of the UN Charter, which Congress pretends does not exist, but which the U.S. Constitution makes the Supreme Law of the Land along with every other treaty that the United States is party to.

But those Congress members telling Trump he cannot commit the crime of continuing and escalating one of his many wars without Congress, are obliged to act - and not by "authorizing" the crime. Rather, they are obliged to prevent it - and not to wait and punish it after the fact. The tool available to them is impeachment and removal from office. The list of impeachable offenses is not exactly lacking.

Dear propaganda ansager Hannity,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling, and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your ability of covering up all of the Fuhrer's crimes, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Rethuglican Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 04-28-2018. We salute you Herr Hannity Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence