I have said that many times on this blog and I will say that today: there is "another West" which we, all those who oppose the Empire, should never forget. This is a West which you will never ever see in the corporate media and it is formed by innumerable individuals who don't go into politics, don't organize demonstrations and who simply live a life of spiritual freedom, away from the degenerate, ugly, deceptive and evil order which the so-called "elites" have imposed upon us all. I mentioned this "other West" in my Submarines in the Desert post and I won't repeat it all here. I will just say that I get amazing letters from that "other West" almost every day.

These letters which, if I posted them here, nobody would believe are genuine and I would be accused of making them up. I show some of them to my wife, but even to her I say that "if I showed you how many such letters I get you would probably have a hard time believing me". I can sincerely say this: these letters have changed my view of humanity, quite literally, and now I know, I really *know* something crucial: we are truly everywhere (as David Rovics put it) and there are a lot of us (even if we often feel isolated).

Yesterday I got such a letter and it deeply moved me. I replied to its author and asked for his permission to share it with you (without revealing any personal details). He agreed. So here it is:

Dear Saker,

I am sorry to write you because I know that you are very busy and you provide such a valuable service to me and so many others that are seeking the truth about Ukraine. I hope my message does not burden you and disturb your work or leisure.

I am an American, so totally disgusted with my country and its leadership. What lies and propaganda that are directed at Russia, Novorussia, its citizens and its determined and honorable soldiers makes me ashamed of my country. In addition when I try to explain the truth to people just how the war in Ukraine started with our usual coup tactics I get blank stares of disbelief. No one wants to hear that our government is driven by evil desires that are ruining the lives of so many innocent people. It is so very sad.

I have been reading your site for a long time and just now have added Fort Russ, Novorussia Today, Colonel Cassad, and some others that are speaking and showing the truth.

I am a carpenter, but have no work now. I have not had work in many months and am on the verge of losing my home. I have no savings and feel sad that I can not contribute to your site or to the victims in East Ukraine that my country is helping to kill and destroy. Often at night as I try to sleep I think about those who are suffering so, that are being attacked by our stooge government in Kiev. It eats at me and makes me so sad for humanity, I have no way to help and my fellow Americans, or at least most of them seem to not care at all.

Please forgive me for reading your precious truth and insight and not sending you your rightful due. I promise, if I shall get work or become employed I will not forget you and never will I forget my brothers and sisters in East Ukraine. May God bless you always and may he distribute justice to my evil American government.

Sincerely your eternal friend,

"Carpenter"

Douglas County investigators say five people are dead after what police call a tragic incident.

Deputies with the Douglas County Sheriff's Office were called out to Willow Tree Court Saturday afternoon.

Channel 2's Tyisha Fernandes reported that investigators were keeping people far away from the scene because there were still victims in the street.

"We had multiple victims shot in the street," said Chief Deputy Stan Copeland, of the Douglas County Sheriff's Office.

Residents told Fernandes they were traumatized by what they saw.

Police say at least seven people were shot in the street and in one of the houses. The seven people range in age from toddlers to adults.

"Some of those are siblings, so some (of) these (people) are related. We just don't know who is who right now," Copeland said.

The unthinkable happened to a family in Arizona. Their three-year-old daughter mysteriously collapsed while her parents were away from home, and she died shortly after. As horrible as that tragedy was, Khloe's death was only the beginning of the devastation to the Shoars family. Child Protective Services immediately came in and took away all seven of their other children, placing them in various foster home settings around the area.

The children now don't have their parents, or even each other, as they try to grasp what has happened to their sister. None of the children, ranging in age from 2 to 9 years old, have been placed with family or friends, and they cry to come home. They don't understand what has happened, and neither do their parents, Jeff and Tabitha Shoars.

"It's like a bad nightmare you can't wake up from," says Jeff.

No charges have been filed against anyone, yet the state of Arizona has already begun the TPR process, Termination of Parental Rights.

I.F. Stone, the urge to serve, and remembrance of wars past

Well, it's one, two, three, look at that amputee,
At least it's below the knee,
Could have been worse, you see.
Well, it's true your kids look at you differently,
But you came in an ambulance instead of a hearse,
That's the phrase of the trade,
It could have been worse.

-- First verse of a Vietnam-era song written by U.S. Air Force medic Bob Boardman off Country Joe McDonald's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag"

There was the old American lefty paper, the Guardian, and the Village Voice, which beat the Sixties into the world, and its later imitators like the Boston Phoenix. There was Liberation News Service, the Rat in New York, the Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta, the Old Mole in Boston, the distinctly psychedelic Chicago Seed, Leviathan, Viet-Report, and the L.A. Free Press, as well as that Texas paper whose name I long ago forgot that was partial to armadillo cartoons. And they existed, in the 1960s and early 1970s, amid a jostling crowd of hundreds of "underground" newspapers -- all quite aboveground but the word sounded so romantic in that political moment. There were G.I. antiwar papers by the score and high school rags by the hundreds in an "alternate" universe of opposition that somehow made the rounds by mail or got passed on hand-to-hand in a now almost unimaginable world of interpersonal social networking that preceded the Internet by decades. And then, of course, there was I.F. Stone's Weekly (1953-1971): one dedicated journalist, 19 years, every word his own (except, of course, for the endless foolishness he mined from the reams of official documentation produced in Washington, Vietnam, and elsewhere).

"What's missing is any sense of connection to the government, any sense that it's 'ours' or that we the people matter."

I can remember the arrival of that newsletter, though I no longer know whether I subscribed myself or simply shared someone else's copy. In a time when being young was supposed to be glorious, Stone was old -- my parents' age -- but still we waited on his words. It helped to have someone from a previous generation confirm in nuts and bolts ways that the issue that swept so many of us away, the Vietnam War, was indeed an American atrocity.

The fourth wave of forced conscription in Ukraine is going very poorly for obvious reasons:

First, everybody who wanted to go already went, and many of them have returned disillusioned, or haven't come back at all. The army stories about of lack of food, working weapons and vehicles, and basic human decency, as well complete absence of spare underwear, are all over the internet.

Second, the government has consistently lied to the conscripts, e.g. telling them that they would have to go for three weeks of training, and instead holding them for six months in the trenches.

On May 26th, the president has personally promised 1000 UAH per day to the soldiers, veteran's benefits, and that only volunteers would be sent to the frontlines; in reality, the majority of wounded conscripts can not even prove they've ever served, and none at all have seen the promised money. Now that nobody wants to serve, the president is promising 1000 UAH per day... yet again.

Third, the rapidly deteriorating situation in the country has led to general disillusionment with the "usurpers" in Kiev:

As 2015 began, the world received a sobering message. Not only have the number of Ebola cases exceeded 20,000, but in some affected countries, especially Sierra Leone, the virus is still spreading. The death toll now tops 8,000 and the usual answers to how this outbreak got so huge so quickly - poverty, bad governance, cultural practices, endemic disease in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone - are giving way to a deeper questioning of the poor public health response. Critics are turning to the structural causes of weak health systems and increasingly showing that international lending policies, including and especially those employed by the IMF, should carry much of the blame.

The IMF has been active in West Africa for many years; the first IMF loan to Liberia was in 1963. And for almost as long, public health activists have pointed to the detrimental effects of the strings the IMF attaches to its loans, known as conditionalities, which more often than not constrain investment in public sector health services. As a December 2014 comment in medical journal, the Lancet explained, the IMF has provided support to Guinea and Sierra Leone for nearly two decades, and to Liberia for seven years. All three countries were engaged in IMF programmes when the Ebola crisis began. IMF conditionalities meant countries have had to prioritise repaying debt and interest payments over funding critical social and health services. Countries such as Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia have had to limit not only the number of health workers they were able to hire (Liberia had only 60 doctors before the Ebola outbreak, Sierra Leone had 136), they've also had to cap wages to a pitifully low level to meet broader IMF policy directives. The Lancet comment also points out that in Sierra Leone, IMF-mandated policies explicitly sought to reduce public sector employment. In 1995 -1996, the IMF required the retrenchment of 28 per cent of public employees. The World Health Organisation reported a reduction of community health workers from 0.11 per 1,000 population in 2004 to 0.02 in 2008. Caps on wage spending continued into the 2000s. The Lancet authors state, "By 2004, [Sierra Leone] spent about 1.2 per cent of GDP less on civil service wages than the sub-Saharan African mean."

Imagine being a 6-year-old boy.

You get off your school bus and begin to walk home.

You are greeted by a man who lures you to his truck.

That man drives off with you and tells you you'll never see your mother again, and that you will be nailed to the wall of a shed.

You are terrified, of course, so you start crying.

The man pulls out a handgun and threatens to hurt you if you don't stop crying.

Then the man binds your feet and hands together with plastic bags and covers your face with a jacket.

He takes you to his house, carries you to the basement, and leaves you there for a little while.

Well this is just bonkers...

Multi-agency armed raid hits Rawesome Foods and Healthy Family Farms for selling raw milk and cheese.

According to a blog posted on the LA Times website:

Guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid's target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.

"I still can't believe they took our yogurt," said Rawesome volunteer Sea J. Jones, a few days after the raid. "There's a medical marijuana shop a couple miles away, and they're raiding us because we're selling raw dairy products?"

Cartons of raw goat and cow milk and blocks of unpasteurized goat cheese were among the groceries seized in the June 30 raid by federal, state and local authorities - the latest salvo in the heated food fight over what people can put in their mouths.

As flames dramatically shoot from the engine of the right wing of a plane, one of the passengers on the window seat had the presence of mind to capture it on a smartphone.

The VivaColombia Flight 8023 scheduled to go from El Dorado International Airport in Bogota to Rionegro was forced to make an emergency landing at its origin after the malfunction.

Passengers heard a bang just after take-off at around 7pm, said news website Las 2 Orillas, and the remarkable amateur footage by a passenger sitting over the wing shows what happened.

A man who stole the purse of a dying elderly woman who was lying in the road having been hit by a lorry is being sought by Greater Manchester Police.

The 82-year-old was killed when she was struck on Leigh Road, Leigh, at about 11:45 GMT on Wednesday.

Police said that after the crash, officers were told a man "was seen to steal her purse before leaving".

The man is described as white, about 6ft (1.8m) tall, between 30 and 40 and of medium build with a brown beard.

Det Sgt Neil Lawless said it was "one of the most disgusting crimes I have ever investigated".

"I find it hard to believe that someone could stoop so low to commit such a horrific offence," he said.