Manzanar Historic Site, Detention Camp for !st, 2nd, & 3rd Generation Japanese-Americans Imprisoned WWII

Tags: Owens Valley CA, Beautiful and Ugliness, Water, Mountains, Deserts, Racism, World War II

Racism against Japanese-Americans also had an economic motive. The White Farmers Alliance petitioned President Roosevelt to expel all Japanese-Americans regardless of citizenship with about half being citizens of birth and their parents who came from Hawaii. The Japanese-Americans produced 80 percent of the truck farm fruits and vegetable products in the Western States and their children owned valuable land that the White Farmers coveted. Many deeded their land to White friends who did not return the land after the war.

The racist Assistant Secretary of State tried to keep Jews in the killing fields in Europe so he influenced Roosevelt to expel the Japs even though both the Naval and FBI intelligence found not one likely to be disloyal to the USA. Many Americans of Italian and German descent committed sabotage, but were not imprisoned en masse like the Japanese-Americans.

Those who ran the Manzanar prison camp made sure they diverted most of the meat and condiments such as salt and served partially cooked rice and other scraps to the inmates. After finally releasing the medical records from Manzanar, I found I was a very malnourished little boy during my imprisonment. I know my father was trapping birds, rabbits, and catching fish to try to keep us fed. Luckily small children don't remember much and parents don't talk about it.

So far the Obama administration is not willing to punish those really responsible for Reagan enhanced migration of illegal immigrants taking jobs away from Americans. Once meat packing was a prestigious jobs with high pay. It was made into a dangerous job with low pay with our government looking the other way. Most racist incidents mushroom during poor economic times. Remember Germany in the 1930s.

Jim Kawakami, May 6, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

NY Times Excerpt: ... Some Owens Valley wonders are less natural. A giant pipe near the rim of the Owens River Gorge is one reminder that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power owns 312,000 acres of Eastern Sierra land. About 35 percent of the city’s water supply originates in the rivers, streams and groundwater of this region, and is carried downhill for more than 200 miles through multi-million-dollar aqueducts.

That water was famously hard won more than a century ago, largely through questionable maneuverings by William Mulholland, the department’s first superintendent and chief engineer. His tactics would later help inspire the movie “Chinatown.” In the 1920s valley farmers (soon to lose precious water for their crops) foughtLos Angeles by dynamiting the aqueduct and opening weirs to let the river flow into Owens Lake. Today the exposed lake bed is a strange feature, wet in some sections and white with saline in others — an unusually visible example of the effects of water diversions. ...

After a day in the Alabama Hills, we went roughly parallel to the river as we drove to Manzanar National Historic Site, where United States citizens and residents of Japanese descent were held in a detention camp during World War II. The federal government, fearful of sabotage, made more than 10,000 men, women and children live in wood and tar-paper barracks after forcing them from their homes and businesses. The barracks are gone, but the free interpretive center, in the auditorium of the former Manzanar High School, does a fine job chronicling this American shame.

Exhibitions mix old newspaper clippings, racist cartoons and radio broadcasts that illuminate the nation’s hysterical mood with artifacts evoking daily life at Manzanar: a gardener’s lawn mower, a child’s sketch of a watchtower, a basketball scorebook from Block 16, its game results neatly recorded in pencil.

“I was learning, as best one could learn in Manzanar, what it meant to live in America,” reads a quotation from John Tateishi , a man who had lived in Manzanar as a child. “But I was also learning the sometimes bitter price one has to pay for it.” ... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/travel/07owens.html?hpw=&pagewanted=all

Marvelous and Provocative Book about Cancer, Racism, Scientific Ethics and Crippling Poverty, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”

Tags: Rebecca Skloot, Reviewed NY Times, Dwight Garner, Henrietta Lacks, Ethics in Science, Poverty, Racism,

Rebecca Skloot who grew up in Portland, Oregon is considered one of the best science columnist and this book which I have read about half, shows clearly that highly educated scientists, medical researchers, and journalists can be just as corruptible as anyone else including those on Wall Street. She will have two book audiences here and I will attend the one at the University of Oregon.

Skloot's book is unusual for a non-fiction book because she is able to make science human with all of their flaws including greed, dishonesty, and exploitive tendencies. She switches between the science and the horrible toll the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks whose cells are forever, but she died in 1951 of cervical cancer. Cervical cancer, once detected, are frequently fatal. A very recent study shows that these cancer cells are able to deactivate some Vitamin D needed to activate our T-Cells which can fight the cancer. This problem may apply to all cancers, but data shows that those with enough Vitamin D in the blood and stored in their tissues have a much greater chance surviving all cancers.

The doctors at John Hopkins removed her cancerous cells to try to have living cells without informing her family or Henrietta Lacks. Without these first surviving cells and still surviving now, we might still be in the stone ages for biological science. Dwight Garner, of the best reviewer at the Times I have noticed so far, does a superb job in bringing out what Rebecca Skloot wanted to convey in her book which took about ten years to write.

Skloot first became interested in the HeLa cells when she was a rebel in high school and was sent to an alternative school and forced to go to a community college to fulfil her requirements for biology. When she was in graduate school, a long report was required to get her Masters in writing. She again resumed her interest in these forever cells and found that practically nothing was known about Henrietta Lacks. So Skloot left graduate school to learn more driving in a Honda without a muffler. But she found that the Lacks family had been double-crossed so many times by scientists and journalist that they essentially refused to talk to anyone. Skloot called every day for a year before she finally established contact, but what eventually led to her success was her inherent generosity and genuine caring for the plight of the Lacks family.

Since our society including the science community tends to punish independent people, I am afraid that nations which allow more freedom to be different will thrive. If Hitler won, our world would be a lot less innovative. We allow the best to go their own way whether they are minorities or not in science, but not as much as I like, because funding is now extremely important for science. in graduate school, my thesis topic fought what the establishment supported from Harvard and other places of great influence. Eventually we won, but the battle was bruising.

Rebecca Skloot's book reads more like a novel with humanity exuding from its pores.

Jim Kawakami, April 18, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Reviewed by Dwight Garner, New York Times Feb 2, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/03/books/03book.html?sq=Rebecca%20Skloot%20Garner&st=nyt&scp=1&pagewanted=all

Frank Schaeffer, Founder of the Religious Right, Speaks Out Against FOX News Vicious Untrue Comments

Frank Schaeffer's books and lectures gave the Right Wing the theoretical basis for justifying the actions of the Religious Right including even murder by directing them to select contradictions in the Old Testament and ignoring Jesus' Teachings. Republican Gomorrah by Max Blumenthal interviewed the major leaders in the Right Wing and dug into how their personalities and paranoia led to our current religious leaders including the recently deceased Falwell.

I found it very disturbing that almost crazy people with no Christian Ethics are running the disciples of the Religious Right. Schaeffer's teachings misinterpreted or extrapolated led to radicals and crazies who elected the most radical Republicans in their primaries and won elections by using smear tactics and lies with money from multimillionaires and billionaires who wanted to use them for profit and to enhance their wealth and power.

Recent research has shown those who were born in crowded cities became Schizophrenic at more than twice the rate of the general population. Apparently New York City has about 30 percent of the residents in need of psychological or psychiatric care. Those who grew in less conflicted homes are much more sane. Here is a case finally published after many rejections by establishment journals when race is mentioned as an important factor in mental illness with Caribbean Blacks having many more cases of Schizophrenia than the rest of the British population. African based people's in all income brackets seem to have a higher rate of Schizophrenia although no genetic basis has been established.

The researchers have determined that Epigenetic environmental factors over-write the genes by controlling whether the genes are off or on as we have seen many times among identical twins with one prone to cancer and the other not. Stress, for example, causes one identical twin to have many more wrinkles than her sister.The November 2009 Scientific American has a short summary of these results. http://discussion.pbs.org/viewtopic.pbs?t=79040

It is well known that Ireland has a very high rate of Schizophrenia. I suspect most of it is in Northern Ireland where many Scot-Irish who immigrated to the USA South and further spread into the mid-west and California's Orange Country. This probably accounts to some extent to their radical Republican view of the world. Mental illness, I suspect, is not an off or on thing but a gradation to insanity like some of those at FOX news and especially the House Republicans.

Even before he had the final clarity, Schaeffer became increasingly disturbed by the people attracted to his teachings. In Geneva, Switzerland, his colony was somewhat akin to a Hippie colony and even attracted Bono and homosexuals. Schaeffer called Falwell stupid and Robertson crazy in his interviews with Max Blumenthal in "Republican Gomorrah," a book well worth reading to understand the Republican Right.

Jim Kawakami, Oct 23, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Obama vs. FOX

October 23, 2009By Frank Schaeffer
Source: Afterdowningstreet

Frank Schaeffer's ZSpace Page

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22930

... Frank Schaeffer is the author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and the forthcoming Patience With God: Faith For People Who Don't Like Religion (Or Atheism). ...

President Obama is getting criticism for going after Fox News. I fault the White House too: for not going far enough. The real issue is not Fox's right wing "bias." The real issue is that FOX News seems to be trawling for assassins. Here's the letter White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs should write. Or maybe it should come from the head of United States Secret Service.

Dear Rupert Murdoch, since you are responsible for what is on Fox News I have a question for you: Do you ever wonder how you'll be remembered by Americans and the world (not to mention your children) if someone takes a shot at President Obama, and when asked why they did it, quotes the misinformation spouted by Fox News as their "reason?"

You have dozens of far right and dangerous and/or crazy seeming commentators working for you but let's just talk about one as an example of the rest. What of Glenn Beck?

Does the name Father Charles Coughlin ring a bell? Do you want to be remembered as the facilitator of today's version of that deranged radio personality and hater who hounded President Roosevelt? What if a Coughlin devotee had assassinated Roosevelt? Instead of just being a nasty footnote to American history, Coughlin would be remembered as another John Wilkes Booth. What if Coughlin had had someone with money and virtually unlimited influence backing him and amplifying his remarks? How would we feel about his backer?

Glenn Beck is a second rate, not terribly bright Coughlin-type demagogue with rather dimwitted followers. And you are the paymaster making his silliness dangerous by giving him a voice that would otherwise be heard only by those who happened to hear him barking at the moon on some lonely street corner.

You've given today's Coughlins -- the haters -- a national platform. And they have taken the lies of the "birthers", "deathers", "Obama-is-the-Antichristers" etc., nationwide. It was a bad day for America when you became a citizen for the sole purpose of purchasing TV stations and invading us with your far right agenda. But you've gone way past politics, even the politics of hate. You have legitimized actual insanity by widespread repetition of extremist racist and religion-based lies to the sort of people who believe the earth is 6000 years old, that Jesus will come back soon and send everyone not like them to Hell, that Obama is the Antichrist. In other words, you've got the keys to the national asylum, are stirring up the inmates and threatening to unlock the door!

Here's a sample (compiled with the help of Media Matters and the online magazine Crooks and Liars) of just a small stock of the incendiary rhetoric and bare-faced lies your money pays for.

Fox News host Glenn Beck has:

# said President Obama has, "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,"

# flirted with the idea that FEMA is building detention camps,

# suggested that President Obama is purposefully "tanking" the economy to force young people to work for AmeriCorps, ...

You can't claim you're not having a baleful impact. How about this? According to the Boston Globe ("Secret Service Strained" October 18, 09),

"The unprecedented number of death threats against President Obama, a rise in racist hate groups, and a new wave of antigovernment fervor threaten to overwhelm the US Secret Service, according to government officials and reports, raising new questions about the 144-year-old agency's overall mission." ...