Thursday, November 23, 2017

"Alice's Restaurant" - A Thanksgiving Eve Tradition


52 years ago (Nov. 29, 1965) the Berkshire Eagle printed a little article about two young men being fined 25 bucks for dumping trash. Little did we know at the time that the incident, which ran on page 25, would become the basis for Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant. Here's our original story from 1965: Source



"Alice's Restaurant" - A Thanksgiving Eve Tradition on American Pastimes

Tom Leonardi

According to his biographer Joe Klein, “one of the last things that Woody Guthrie did before he died was to listen to a recording of his son Arlo singing a long, convoluted talking blues about how he’d been arrested for littering in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and how he’d parlayed that ‘criminal record’ into a means of dodging the draft and avoiding the war in Vietnam.” Whether Woody could actually comprehend the story or even knew it was Arlo singing and story telling will never be known. He was in the final stages of the neurologically debilitating Huntington’s Disease and would succumb to it within a few short weeks.

Because of Arlo's recording however, fame came to Woody’s oldest son much earlier in life than it came to him. Arlo Guthrie was raised in Howard Beach in Queens, New York. He had just graduated from the Stockbridge School in Stockbridge Massachusetts where he had met Alice & Ray Brock who both taught there. The couple lived in an old church and served large meals for friends and family. On Thanksgiving Day in 1965, 18-year-old Arlo and his classmate Rick Robbins were arrested in Stockbridge by police officer William Obanheim for dumping trash left over from Thanksgiving dinner at the Brocks. The two had originally planned on taking it to the town landfill but it was closed for the holiday. In court a few days later they pled guilty. 

Courtesy of the Guthrie Center

The judge, the Hon. James E. Hannon was actually blind. And as Arlo points out, “in a typical case of American blind justice” he found them both guilty, fined them $50, and made them collect their garbage. Guthrie and Robbins hit the road as performers immediately afterward. According to Robbins, “we followed the footprints of Woody and Cisco [Houston].” The original song “Alice’s Restaurant” was a fauxadvertising jingle that Arlo had composed for the Brocks. He began to include it in his stage repertoire and during performances he started telling the story of their arrest and conviction and its effect on his Viet Nam era draft status: "you want to know if I'm moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses, and villages.... after being a litterbug?"

But it wasn’t until 1967 that the song and story reached a larger audience. That year he performed it at the Newport Folk Festival and then during a WBAI radio broadcast. WBAI is the New York City Pacifica station; a non-profit community station. Arlo’s performance was hugely popular and often requested by the station’s listeners but WBAI only played the tape during fund-raising pledge drives. Its popularity in New York served to get Arlo a record contract and the song was released in 1967 on a long-playing album (at 18 minutes long the song and monologue couldn’t fit onto a 45 rpm single). The album reached #17 on the pop charts. A 45-rpm single called "Alice's Rock 'n Roll Restaurant" was also released by the record company but predictably it tanked.

In 1969 United Artists and director Arthur Penn released a film version of the story that featured Hollywood actors as well as Stockbridge locals including Officer Obanheim. Said Officer Obie: “If anyone is going to make me look like a fool, it will be me." 

Officer Obie
As Arlo performed “Alice’s Restaurant” throughout his career he would periodically change the monologue to reflect current social concerns and political situations. A few of these other versions have been released on CD. "Alice: Before Time Began" was first recorded in 1969. Its satirical account of cockroach armies took on the military. A version recorded in 1990 at the Kerrville Folk Festival addressed policies of the first President Bush.

In 1997 Arlo re-recorded his entire debut album for CD: This recording, "Alice's Restaurant: The Massacree Revisited" includes an updated narrative that involves a visit to Jimmy Carter’s White House and a discovery there related to Richard Nixon. One version or another of “Alice’s Restaurant” has been featured on American Pastimes every Thanksgiving Eve since KZFR has been gracing the airwavs.

Arlo purchased the old Trinity Church in Stockbridge in 1991. The church, formerly owned by the Brocks and site of the infamous 1965 turkey dinner has been developed into The Guthrie Center, a non-profit interfaith church foundation dedicated to providing a wide range of local and international services.

Alice Brock went on to open a variety of restaurants and has written a number of cookbooks. Officer Obie was forced into retirement after over 30 years on the Stockbridge police department. He evidently beat up another peace officer.

Rick Robbins, Arlo’s friend and co-conspirator in garbage dumping continued to sing and tour into the late 1970’s when he settled down and became an architect and house builder. In the mid 1990’s he began to perform again, recording a number of CD’s with musical support from Rory Block, Eric Weisberg, John Sebastian, Garth Hudson, and others. In recent years he has toured extensively with Ramblin’ Jack Elliot.  SOURCE:

The secret Jewish history of “Alice’s Restaurant”










You want to feel old?
This is the fiftieth anniversary of the song “Alice’s Restaurant,” by Arlo Guthrie.
Well, sort of. The song was released on the album of the same name in September, 1967. The events that the song commemorates actually occurred two years before that, on Thanksgiving, 1965.
But, nevertheless, if you are of a certain age, nothing says Thanksgiving more than “Alice’s Restaurant.”
For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about, here is a Cliff’s Notes version.
“Alice’s Restaurant” consists of Arlo Guthrie delivering a long, guitar-accompanied monologue (a talking blues, really — an art form that his father, the iconic American folk singer, Woody Guthrie, had perfected) about his arrest for littering in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, by the Stockbridge chief of police, William Obanhein, a.k.a. Officer Obie.
At the time, Arlo was living with Alice and Ray Brock in a deconsecrated church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts (more about that later).
Ultimately, as the song’s second part tells us, Arlo’s arrest record was at least partially responsible for preventing him from being drafted and serving in the war in Vietnam.
Two years later, the movie “Alice’s Restaurant” was released. It stars Arlo as himself.
Jewish geography lesson: For many years, I spent summers in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts, where the song takes place. For me, and for so many, the Berkshires are a magical place — the only place where I ever truly relax.
The discerning tourist can find all of the places mentioned in the song (with the exception of the scenes at the draft board, which take place on Whitehall Street in New York City).
  • In Stockbridge, you can visit the original location of Alice’s restaurant; it is, in fact, “around the back, just a half a mile from the railroad track” off Main Street.
  • For many summers, I used to dump our trash at the Stockbridge town dump, which is probably where Arlo should have dumped his trash in the first place. I could do that, legally, because I had a sticker from the “master garbologist.”
  • Officer Obie’s extended family still lives in the area; he was a well-known and beloved figure.
As for the church, it is still there, as well. It serves as the Guthrie Center, a wonderful concert venue, and home to the Guthrie Foundation, a permanent memorial to the legacy of Arlo’s late parents.
(Check out this song about Woody’s legacy, written and sung by my friend, Doug Mishkin).
Which brings me to the Jewish stuff.
Arlo Guthrie is Jewish, through his mother, Marjorie Mazia Guthrie. 
Fun fact: when Arlo celebrated becoming bar mitzvah, at the Howard Beach Jewish center in Queens, the presiding rabbi was none other than Meir Kahane.
Kahane would go on to become the leader of the Jewish Defense League, and then, in Israel, of the extreme right wing, anti-Arab Kach party.
Kahane was assassinated in 1990 by El Sayyid Nosair, who was linked to Osama bin Laden — thus becoming the first American victim of Al Qaida.
Arlo Guthrie and Meir Kahane — together. Think of it.
Back to Woody Guthrie.
Guthrie was not Jewish, and yet, he wrote a bunch of Hanukkah songs. This one is one of my favorites.
Guthrie’s guitar was adorned by a simple message, placed there in 1941: “This machine kills fascists.”
As we prepared to enter World War Two, it was the right message.
And, while we are not fighting foreign wars against fascists right now, the anti-fascism sentiment still stands.
One last thing about Woody Guthrie.
When Guthrie lived in Brooklyn, he lived at the Beach Haven apartments, which was a property that had been developed by Fred Trump — as in the father of the current president.
As others have noted, the older Trump was not particularly interested in having blacks rent his properties.
Which would lead Woody Guthrie to write a song about Fred Trump:
I suppose Old Man Trump knows
Just how much racial hate
he stirred up in the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed that color line
Here at his eighteen hundred family project.
The spirit of protest, birthed by Woody Guthrie and sustained by Arlo, is still alive in our time.
And for this, we surely must give thanks.   SOURCE

Woody Guthrie's Hanukkah Songs

Joshua Eli Plaut
Here is a recent American tale of old wine in new vessels. Part of our national folklore reveals that Woody Guthrie, the iconic American folk troubadour and songwriter, composed Hanukkah songs. In a 2003 concert, the Klezmatics, a popular Grammy Award-winning Klezmer band, performed Hanukkah songs showcasing lyrics written from 1949 through the early 1950s by Woody Guthrie. The lyrics had laid fallow and long-forgotten in Guthrie’s archives until their discovery in 1998 by Woody’s daughter, Nora Guthrie. Nora asked the Klezmatics to write original music for the lyrics, which fuses strains of Klezmer music with American folk and bluegrass. The 2006 album, “Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanuka,” comprises many different songs, including “Happy, Joyous Hanuka” and “Hanuka Tree.” Two of the eight songs, “The Many And The Few” and “Hanuka Dance,” had lyrics and melodies penned entirely by Guthrie. The songs were in part biographical. Woody was married to Marjorie Mazia, a Jewish dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company who was the daughter of Aliza Greenblatt, an activist and Yiddish poet. Nora remembers “For Hanukkah actually, we had a hat—we didn’t get presents—but we had a hat with different amounts of Hanukkah gelt, and every night we’d pick out five cents or twenty-five cents of gelt. My mother played piano, and we used to sing and dance every night.”*
At the 2003 debut concert with the Klezmatics at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, folk legend Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son and Nora’s brother, joked that as children they would dance “around the Hanukkah tree.” "Happy Joyous Hanuka" counts down each candle on the menorah (“Seven for the sons of Hannah that died/Six for kings and the tricks they tried/Five for the brothers Maccabee”), while “Hanuka Tree” has a lively simple melody (“Round and around my Hanukah tree/Round and around I go/Round and around my Hanukah tree/Because I love you so”). According to Nora, most of Woody Guthrie’s Hanukkah songs seem to have been written in November or December within five days of each other “because he had bookings in December for children’s Hanukkah parties in assorted Brooklyn community centers.” As was his wont, Woody would “write songs only for the gig a few days before and then go on to other songs for other gigs.” For the Guthrie family, a family of improvisers not of traditions and for whom the approach to religion was “all or none,” the tree was a “Christmas tree, a Hanukkah tree, and a holiday tree. It was a fluid thing!”
Indeed, the popularization of Woody Gutherie's Hanukkah songs by the Klezmatics demonstrates the vital role that music plays as an intrinsic cultural force contributing to the Americanization of this Jewish holiday, as it coexists with Christmas.
*Telephone interview with Nora Guthrie, August 17, 2011.
Aliza Greenblatt (Yiddish: עליזה גרינבלאַט‎, September 8, 1888 – September 21, 1975) was an American Yiddish poet. Many of her poems, which were widely published in the Yiddish press, were also set to music and recorded by composers including Abraham Ellstein and Solomon Golub and were recorded by Theodore Bikel and Sidor Belarsky, among others.
Her daughter Marjorie, a dancer in the Martha Graham Dance Company, was for a time married to folk musician Woody Guthrie. Greenblatt was the grandmother of folk musician Arlo Guthrie

Alice Brock: An Artful Life

JUNE 7, 2017 5:00 AMVIEWS: 198
Alice_Brockby Jeannette de Beauvoir
Alice Brock is no washashore. “I was conceived on Long Point,” she says, smiling. “Oh, wait, you don’t want to start that far back?”
It doesn’t matter how far back you begin in Alice Brock’s life; it’s all interesting, as attendees at the Heritage Day that will be celebrated in her honor at the Provincetown Public Library on June 13 will get a chance to hear.
Maybe it started out on Long Point. Or maybe it started during the summers her father worked for Peter Hunt and the family lived on Commercial Street—“the best summers of my life,” says Brock. She decided then that she wanted to live in Provincetown forever.
There were a couple of rather famous detours on her way back here, however. Brock got married and headed out to Stockbridge to teach at a prep school run by a left-leaning scholar whose assumption was that everyone—faculty, staff, and students—were equals. “It was the mid-sixties,” Brock remembers. “My husband played the guitar, kids would come and hang out at our house on campus all the time. We were bohemians…or maybe beatniks.”
One of the kids who played and sang with Brock and her husband was Arlo Guthrie.
Brock’s mother bought the couple a church as a wedding present; her husband, an architect and sculptor, turned it into living quarters. It was a magical place, complete with bell tower and an arch made by New Bedford shipbuilders who simply reversed their usual approach to curves and space. Parents trusted Brock and her husband, as they were teachers, and more and more kids came to stay, to play, to talk. “But there I was, cooking for all those voracious teenagers!” says Brock. “That had to stop.”
Her mother found the solution: “She said, ‘there’s a diner in Stockbridge that’s for rent. I’ll help you, and you can get paid for your cooking.’” Brock smiles. “I always leap before I look, so I said, why not?”
That leap eventually brought about her extraordinarily popular cookbook, Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook, not to mention a song that became an anthem for the age, Arlo Guthrie’s anti-war hymn, Alice’s Restaurant. It was a golden time. “I loved it; it was all a lot of fun. Arlo’d been called up for the draft and that’s when he came up with the song…We were just all these hippies against the war. We lived as if the world was the way we wanted it to be.” She pauses. “That’s the way we still live.”
It was time to go to Provincetown. “I’m very lucky, because I don’t care about money,” says Brock. “When I run out of money, some more comes in, somehow. I spend the money on other people, and as it goes out it makes room for more to come in.”
Although she never took an art class, Brock had always been making things. “I love to recycle objects,” she says. “I even used to carve little figures out of sticks of chalk. I made a movie out of a roll of adding-machine tape, with narration. I always felt I was an artist, but I never saw it as a way to make money, it was all very personal. Before moving here, I had one art show in the Berkshires. Everything got sold—and I felt completely bereft! Then I came to Provincetown and I was part of a fall arts festival. I hung things for the first time—for the first time, I had a gallery. And I loved having a gallery!” She had that gallery for the next forty years. “I always enjoyed talking with all the people who came in…you have to understand, the sixties, it was a wonderful time for most people, and they love going back to that time. And so I sold art!”
And she has continued to sell art. Her stones, adorned with pictures of women and of cats, can be found literally all over the world. While she no longer has a gallery on Commercial Street—“this is the first time that I don’t have a view of the water”—this summer on weekends she’ll be in one of the art shacks on MacMillan Pier, where everyone will have the opportunity to take home an Alice Brock painting, stone, or book.
Though she now has emphysema and requires oxygen, Alice Brock is still creating, and still in love with the place where she was conceived. “I love Provincetown with all my heart,” she says. “Every day I feel blessed to be here.”
Alice Brock will be the guest of honor at this year’s Provincetown Heritage Day celebration at the Provincetown Public Library, 356 Commercial St., on Tuesday, June 13 at 6 p.m. The event will feature a Q&A with Brock and is free and open to the public. For more information call 508.487.7094 or visit provincetownlibrary.org.







69 Commercial Street


69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2011), by David W. Dunlap. 
Alice Brock, 69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2011), by David W. Dunlap.Alice Brock Studio | R & R Place
Anyone of a Certain Age will almost certainly share the author’s quiet pleasure in knowing that Alice M. (Pelkey) Brock, the Alice of Alice’s Restaurant, wound up practicing her delightful art right here in Provincetown. She moved to Cape Cod in 1979 and declared three decades later that she was grateful for every “beautiful day in paradise” (Jane Roy Brown,  “After Alice’s Restaurants,” The Boston Globe24 February 2008). “Thank God for the National Seashore,” she said. “There’s still the beautiful light, and there are still a few crackpots left. I never want to go anywhere. People say, ‘Don’t you want to go away in the winter?’ The only place I would want to go would be a place like this, and I’m here now.”
Alice and Zina Pelkey, Provincetown (ND). Courtesy of Alice Brock. 
Poem by Harry Kemp. 69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2011), by David W. Dunlap.In fact, she had been here before. Though Brock is closely associated in the popular mind with Stockbridge, Mass., her Provincetown bona fides are exceptional. Her parents were Mary Dubro Pelkey (±1909-2010) and Joseph F. Pelkey (1911-2010), who met here. As Brock herself notes, she was conceived here. And even though she was born in Brooklyn, her arrival was announced in the pages of The Advocate. Pelkey, a professional silkscreener and alumnus of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, had made a name for himself locally working with Peter Hunt, managing the Christmas Tree Shop at 443-445 Commercial Street. Pelkey also ran the Art Mart on a wharf near the center of town, 251-253 Commercial, known variously as Jot Small’s, Heinrich Pfeiffer’s or Charley Cook’s. And he was an Advocate contributor.
The Pelkey family — father, mother, two girls and one dog — spent summers in Provincetown, living in a big room behind the Christmas Tree Shop. There is a charming picture of Alice and her sister, Zina, seated outside Hunt’s Peasant Village complex at 432 Commercial Street. Harry Kemp dedicated a poem to Pelkey in 1944; one of his better ones, in fact. “Last Word,” it is titled.
Alice Brock, left; Arlo Guthrie, upper right. Courtesy of Alice Brock.
Brock’s name entered the national lexicon in 1967 with the release of Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Massacree. “Alice’s Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant, that’s just the name of the song,” Guthrie said at the beginning of an 18-minute talking blues ballad about his arrest for illegally dumping debris from Ray and Alice Brock’s home after discovering that the Stockbridge town dump was closed on Thanksgiving. The jauntily meandering song is, by and by, a lampoon of the police and the Selective Service System and the stupidity of officialdom in general; popular enough in its time that it inspired a movie, Alice’s Restaurant (1969), in which Pat Quinn played Alice. The song is still broadcast on radio stations around the country as a Thanksgiving Day anthem.
69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2012), by David W. Dunlap.Brock got out of the restaurant business long ago. With Davis E. Gates, she purchased 69 Commercial Street in 1983 from Francis P. and Elizabeth A. Kelley. The house was constructed around 1860 and was the property of William A. Couilliard at the turn of the 20th century, when it was denominated 52 Commercial Street. Adeline and Emil Souda acquired it from Couilliard in 1942. Adolphe Robicheau, who acquired it from Marie Souda in 1962, undertook some astonishing changes, many of which Brock inherited.
Robicheau, a ballet dancer and instructor from Nova Scotia, operated 69 Commercial as a boarding house. He also transformed it into a dramatic expression of Catholic piety, drawing on his talents as a set painter for the Boston Ballet. He built a private chapel on the third floor that was consecrated by the bishop of Fall River, Brock said. He installed a pipe organ, an altar, stations of the cross, a baptismal font, a prie-dieu and icons. A lot of them. “The whole house was filled with icons,” Brock recalled, “including martyrs with their eyes gouged out.” She removed almost everything but a stained-glass window.
69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2011), by David W. Dunlap.Brock divided the property into condominium interests in 2007 and sold the bottom part of the house to Richard Allan O’Reagan (b 1963). He is one of the Rs in “R & R Place,” as the sign says over the side entrance to his unit. The other R  is Richard Allen Hanson II, whom O’Reagan married in 2011.
No. 69 is now the Alice Brock Studio, where Brock sells her artwork. She is the author or  illustrator — or both — of Mooses Come Walking, written with Guthrie (Chronicle Books, 2004), How to Massage Your Cat (Chronicle Books, 2003), My Life as a Restaurant (Overlook, 1976) and Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook (Random House, 1969).
“I never formally studied art or took lessons, but all my life I have made things, drawn pictures and illustrated stories,” Brock said in an artist’s statement. “Being an artist was never a career choice. It’s my survival technique. Until recently, I rarely showed my work in public”
“I am a serial painter. One is never enough. There are so many possibilities. I want to explore them all. I enjoy repeating images in various configurations. The dynamics of relationships intrigues me. In my mind, objects have personalities, shapes can convey emotions and every carrot has a story.
“One of my favorite materials is the common beach stone. I draw on them and then I put them back on the beach. I also put them along the bike paths, behind the baked beans in the supermarket, on fence posts and in flower pots. And I sell them.”
69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2011), by David W. Dunlap.
Found by serendipity (when not purchased), the stones have wound up being placed in or carried to the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Louvre and the Hermitage; the top of Denali and the bottom of the Grand Canyon; and beaches in New Zealand and Venezuela. One was tossed over the Great Wall of China. I like the idea that Alice Brock found her way back home to Provincetown after many years of journeying and now dispatches little bits of Provincetown — and herself — on journeys of their own.



"New Arrivals" notice in The Advocate, 13 March 1941.

69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2011), by David W. Dunlap.

69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2008), by David W. Dunlap.

69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2011), by David W. Dunlap.69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2011), by David W. Dunlap.

69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2011), by David W. Dunlap.

Alice Brock Studio.

69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2011), by David W. Dunlap.

"How to Massage Your Cat," by Alice M. Brock (Chronicle Books, 2003).

69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2011), by David W. Dunlap.

69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2011), by David W. Dunlap.

Tableau by Susan Baker. 69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2011), by David W. Dunlap.

69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2011), by David W. Dunlap.

69 Commercial Street, Provincetown (2011), by David W. Dunlap.



Alice's Restaurant - Original 1967 Recording


Friday, February 17, 2017

CAUGHT: The Young Turks Advocate Violent Riots!


HOLD UP. Did the The Young Turks actually advocate for violent protests in America? Yes, yes they did. EXPOSED by Steven Crowder.




"Young Turks are offensive to me! I am a descendant of Armenian survivors of the genocide perpetrated by "the young turks"- google it!! Cenk ungar is an idiot!"

"So he's okay making a statement that the Right would plant people in a crowd to commit violence, but when actual fact is given that the Dems did that at Trump rallies it's silence."

Anna Kasparian being on that show is like a Jew being on a show called "The Hitler Youth" 

(Her great grandparents on her father's side experienced first hand the Armenian genocide in 1915the Armenian Holocaust, was the Ottoman government's systematic extermination of 1.5 million Armenians, mostly Ottoman citizens within the Ottoman Empire and its successor state, the Republic of Turkey)



Young Turks & the Armenian Genocide



The Young Turks were the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide. The Young Turk Movement emerged in reaction to the absolutist rule of Sultan Abdul-Hamid (Abdulhamit) II (1876-1909). With the 1878 suspension of the Ottoman Constitution, reform-minded Ottomans resorted to organizing overseas or underground. The backbone of the movement was formed by young military officers who were especially disturbed by the continuing decline of Ottoman power and attributed the crisis to the absence of an environment for change and progress. Working secretly in unconnected clusters under the watchful eye of the Hamidian secret police, the Young Turks succeeded in overturning the rule of the autocratic sultan when the Ottoman armies in European Turkey openly supported the movement. Abdul-Hamid's reinstatement of constitutional and parliamentary rule in July 1908 ushered in a brief period of legalized political activity by a panoply of reformist Turkish parties as well as Armenian political and revolutionary organizations. The Young Turks earned further public support when their intervention was required to suppress the April 1909 counter-revolution staged by the palace.


At the center of the Young Turk Revolution stood the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) (Ittihad ve Terakki Jemiyeti) formed in 1895. Its members came to be known as Ittihadists or Unionists. The most ideologically committed party in the entire movement, the CUP espoused a form of Turkish nationalism which was xenophobic and exclusionary in its thinking. Its policies threatened to undo the tattered fabric of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. Taking advantage of the political confusion reigning in the aftermath of the First Balkan War which the Ottoman Empire lost in 1912 to its former subject states, the CUP seized power in a coup d'etat in January 1913. As it led the empire to a partial recovery in the Second Balkan War, the CUP monopolized political power domestically by bringing the Parliament completely under its influence. It also began to steer away from the long-held Ottoman foreign policy of alliances with Great Britain and France, and forged a stronger military cooperation with Germany. Moreover, the CUP compensated for the Ottoman retreat in the Balkans by promoting Pan-Turkism, an expansionist program designed to challenge Russia in its southern tier. By the time World War I broke out in August 1914, the CUP constituted a chauvinistic band which had subordinated the Ottoman state to its Turkist ideology. It also propelled the country into war against its better interests by entering into a secret accord with Germany.


To consolidate Turkish rule in the remaining territories of the Ottoman Empire and to expand the state into the so-called Turanian lands in the east, most held by Iran and Russia, the CUP devised in secret a program for the extermination of the Armenian population. From the viewpoint of Ittihadist ideology and its new and ambitious foreign policy, the Armenians represented a completely vulnerable population straddling an area of major strategic value for its Pan-Turanian goals. Ottoman misrule had made the Armenians, a prosperous minority despite its political disadvantages, sympathetic to Russia. To the Ittihadists, the global crisis of 1914 represented a rare opportunity to change the fortunes of the Ottoman state and to use the cover of war to embark upon a policy of both internal and external social engineering the likes of which had not been attempted or imagined. Once again they gambled on the element of surprise, subterfuge, and radical daring, this time against a civilian minority population.


Even though the initial advance of Ottoman forces in 1914 into Russia and Iran did not result in a permanent expansion, on the whole the Ottoman armies held Allied forces in check until 1916 and did not capitulate until 1918. The main thrust of the Armenian Genocide, however, was implemented within the first year of the war, years ahead of any imminent collapse. While the mass deportations of the civilian Armenian population was carried out in the spring and summer of 1915 and were completed by the fall, the systematic slaughter of the Armenians had started earlier with the murder of the able-bodied males already drafted into the Ottoman armed forces. By expropriating the movable and immovable wealth of the Armenians, the CUP also looked upon its policy of genocide as a means for enriching its coffers and rewarding its cohorts. The elimination of a commercially viable minority fulfilled part of the nationalist program to concentrate financial power in the hands of the state and promote greater Turkish control over the domestic economy.


Enver, Talaat, and Jemal, who were responsible for these policies formed the governing triumvirate which had concentrated power its hands with the January 1913 coup. The triumvirs divided the governance of the Ottoman Empire among themselves.


A young military hero who married into the Ottoman dynasty, Enver provided the most public face of the CUP. As Minister of War he coordinated the buildup of the Turkish armed forces with German financial, logistical, and planning support. In an ill-conceived plan of attack, he precipitated land warfare against Russia in the Caucasus in the dead of winter. His December 1914 campaign cost an entire army lost in a period of four weeks. In his capacity as the Deputy Commander-in-Chief (the honorary command being reserved for the sovereign), Enver exercised ultimate control over the Ottoman armies which carried out major atrocities, first in 1915 and then with renewed vigor when Turkish forces broke the Russian line in 1918 and invaded the Caucasus. The forces under the command of his brother, Nuri, and uncle, Halil, spread devastation through Russian Armenia and carried out massacres of Armenians all the way to Baku. Talaat as Minister of the Interior in Istanbul ran the government for a figurehead grand vizier. He was the mastermind of the Armenian Genocide and coordinated the various agencies of the Ottoman government required for the deportation, expropriation, and extermination of the Armenians. Jemal who was Minister of the Navy controlled the southern part of the Ottoman Empire as virtual viceroy from his seat in Damascus and was responsible for checking the British line in Egypt. As commander of Syria, the concentration camps and extermination sites fell within his jurisdiction. Beyond the government ministries, the CUP also operated secret groups for the purpose of infiltrating enemy territory and for promoting Pan-Turkism in neighboring countries. The most infamous of its operations was the Teshkilâti Mahsusa, Special Organization, composed of outlaws especially recruited to carry out the CUP secret agenda. The high purpose of their mission was evidenced by their disposition at the command of two major CUP ideologues, Dr. Nazim and Dr. Behaeddin Shakir, both of them medical professionals, the prime organizers of the on-site implementation of the Armenian Genocide. Lastly, the CUP entrusted local command of the genocidal process to the provincial valis, or governors-general, who were made responsible for the execution of Talaat's and Enver's orders.


With the defeat of the Ottomans in World War I the denouement of the CUP became a drawn out matter pursued by all their opponents. Fully cognizant of the Allied threat to hold them responsible for war crimes, the CUP cabinet ministers resigned from the government with the signing of the Armistice of Mudros in October 1918. The key Ittihadist leaders fled Turkey, while the rank and file went underground. The post-war Ottoman government convened tribunals in 1919 to hear testimony on the conduct of the war and the implementation of the Armenian Genocide. While many second rank figures were prosecuted individually, the party as a whole was indicted for the crimes of conspiracy and massacre. The verdicts found the accused guilty of capital crimes, but the principal culprits were only tried in absentia. To bring them to justice, a clandestine group was formed by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnak Party) to seek out and execute the Ittihadists in hiding in Germany and Italy. Vowing vengeance they tracked down Talaat in Berlin where he was assassinated in 1921. Behaeddin Shakir was also killed in Berlin in 1922, and Jemal in Tbilisi in 1922. Enver in a last adventure met his end in 1922 in Central Asia leading a cavalry charge against an advancing Red Army unit. Though most of the CUP chieftains had taken refuge in Germany, Jemal and Enver had established contact with the Bolsheviks offering their services in the cause of one more revolution. In the meantime, as he led the Turkish Nationalist movement, Mustafa Kemal distanced himself from the Ittihadists but absorbed into his forces former CUP members prepared to switch allegiance. In 1926 Kemal himself stamped out the remaining cells of the CUP when they were accused of plotting his assassination and sent Dr. Nazim and others to the gallows.
--Rouben Paul Adalian


Pope Francis described it as the "First genocide of the XX century", causing a diplomatic row with Turkey. The bishop of Rome defended his pronouncement by saying it was his duty to honour the memory of the innocent men, women and children who were "senselessly" murdered by Ottoman Turks 100 years before he became Pontiff. 

The Globalist Long Game - Redefine Liberty Activism As Evil "Populism"



Berkeley Unified School District: Fire Yvette Felarca

                                                           Petition 



Source: http://canadafreepress.com/article/tucker-takes-on-a-proud-violent-berkeley-protester.-it-goes-...badly-for-he

Friday, January 27, 2017

Scientists have moved the time of the Doomsday Clock - Concern over Donald Trump’s cabinet picks and Climate Change

Scientists have moved the time of the Doomsday Clock - Concern over Donald Trump’s cabinet picks and Climate Change

Scientists have moved the time of the Doomsday Clock counting down humanity’s dying days closer to midnight, with the dials now set at two and a half minutes to 12am – the highest danger level facing the planet since 1953.
A global failure to fight climate change and concern over Donald Trump’s cabinet picks were cited as reasons for the increased threat to the planet. The clock had been set at three minutes to midnight since 2015.
The threat posed to democracy by fake news and the influence exerted on elections were also cited as reasons for the new time, according to a panel of scientists involved in the process.
The appropriate symbolic time is deduced each year by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist. The new reading brings the threat closer to midnight than it’s been since the height of the Cold War – when it reached 11:58pm.
Speaking at the announcement, theoretical physicist Lawrence Maxwell Krauss said, “US and Russian leaders need to come together to reduce nuclear arms” adding that “President Trump and President Vladimir Putin can act together as statesmen or act as petulant children dictating our future.”
When asked what was the single biggest factor in moving the hands forward, Professor of Meteorology David Titley said the dissemination of facts and science expressed through a “verbal looseness” was a particular threat.
Former US Ambassador to the UN Thomas Pickering said the team behind the change was equally concerned with today's situation as it was during the height of the Cold War. “It takes us back, comparatively, to an age of great uncertainty,” he said.
Krauss warned of the economic impact of the US nuclear arsenal, saying Trump’s proposed modernization could cost $1 trillion.
“It’s a devastatingly large economic program that has limited rationality,” Krauss said.
“The fact that we have a large fraction of our nuclear weapons on our high-alert status raises the possibility of an accidental nuclear war which has almost happened a number of times in its history.” Source: 

For those too young to remember
Duck And Cover (1951) Bert The Turtle


And now for another point of view . . .

"The warming community has utterly failed in its climate models and predictions about the climate"

Breaking: “Clearly, the planet is getting colder,” said Casey, president of the Space and Science Research Corp. 
While the direction of climate change cannot be determined based on a single event, the collection of record-breaking winters shows that the planet is getting colder, climate expert John Casey tells Newsmax TV. [Video]
“Just about every American can now see that we’ve had a series of brutal, record-setting winters that are starting earlier, staying longer and breaking records that are 100 and 150 years old,” Casey told J.D. Hayworth, who was joined by Republican strategist Ford O’Connell, on “America’s Forum” Wednesday.
“The warming community has utterly failed in its climate models and predictions about the climate,” he said. “We are facing some stark realities right now that say without doubt that we are heading into a new cold era.”
Casey, who worked as a consultant for NASA and was a White House space program adviser, is the author of “Dark Winter: How the Sun is Causing a 30-Year Cold Spell,” in which he argues that the planet is currently undergoing a cooling trend.
“If we look at the facts based on the five major global temperature data sets that our company tracks and evaluates on a regular basis, we see that the story of 2014 being the warmest year on record was in fact just a story,” he said.
“According to our analysis, using the best science and technical data available, 2014 was a warm year, an important year, but merely another warm year in a strain of years that have been essentially stable for the last 18 years — where there has been no effective growth in global warming,” he said.
_______________________________________________________________

Updated NASA data on the polar ice cap is showing results that are contrary to all who claim global warming is receding it. Reportedly, global warming (better known presently as climate change) has not caused any recession of polar ice.

According to a report by Forbes, a NASA satellite instrument revealed that the Earth’s polar ice caps have not receded at all since it began its measurements back in 1979. From what was shown in its data, total polar ice has generally remained above the post-1979 average, a finding that contradicts the most-frequently spoken claims by those who push global warming as the primary reason why the polar ice caps are receding.


Polar Ice Cap
Greenland’s polar ice caps have been affected by global warming or climate change. Many global warming believers are actually traveling to said polar ice caps to see them. [Photo by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images]
To be fair though, the aforementioned information on the polar ice caps not receding is taken as a whole. What scientists who pushed the the global warming agenda kept concentrating on was the sea ice loss, often associated with huge chunks of the polar ice cap itself falling into the ocean. Beginning in 2005, said sea ice receded at a modest pace for several years and by 2012, it was approximately 10 percent from the 1979 measurement. This fact has many of the same scientists, who push the global warming or climate change agenda, screaming it is the reason why 10 percent of sea ice has receded. In the full scope of things, 10 percent is considered a poor number to utilize as “proof.”
Actually, an article written by Daily Mail back in 2013 reports the opposite of what all the global warming and climate change enthusiasts are pushing. According to their report, the polar ice caps were growing by 29 percent in a year, a result that has caused them to coin the term “global cooling.” As visual proof, the report provided NASA photographs of the Arctic Ocean’s polar ice cap in August of 2012 and August of 2013. By comparing the photographs, there is clearly an expansion of said ice cap from the previous year.


Sea Ice, Arctic Ocean, Polar Ice Cap
The Daily Mail provided a graphic of two NASA photographs of the Arctic Ocean’s polar ice cap in August of 2012 and August of 2013. Comparing the two pictures, it is shown said ice cap has increased. [Image via Daily Mail]
Despite the aforementioned sources showing that the polar ice caps have generally not receded, many global warming and climate change enthusiasts are still crying wolf, pushing the agenda the polar ice caps are melting away. All anyone has to do is do a simple internet news search (Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.) for “polar ice caps” and they will find numerous articles on the doom and gloom caused by global warming and climate change. What’s funny is that some of those articles even have fixed countdowns that have already passed, yet have not come true.
With that in mind, one person who should be shoving his foot in his mouth is former Vice President Al Gore. Back in 2007, while receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for campaigning global warming especially through An Inconvenient Truth, he predicted there would be no more polar ice caps by 2014. Seven years later, we had a polar ice cap that is thicker and covers 1.7 million square kilometers.


Al Gore, global warming
Former Vice President Al Gore was the biggest pusher when it comes to the threat of global warming or climate change. [Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for New York Times]
Ultimately, scientists are going to pick one side or the other when it comes to the condition of the polar ice caps. It is safe to say that it has somehow become the measuring stick for scientists trying to prove if the planet is either warming or cooling. Source: 
“That’s a stark change from what we’ve been told.”
(Now if someone would tell the Pope)
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Source: Vatican: Jews don’t need Christ to be saved
Pope Francis prays for climate summit in Paris to succeed?