This e-mail from today, July 6 is in response to our recently posting a 1 hour 10 min episode:

Hi Pinky,
I’m really glad you posted a video about the occupation in Iraq. I agree and a lot of other voters agree that this is the number 1 issue on our minds. However I notice your videos are getting way too longer tho. Over an hour is a huge time commitment in today’s world. I’m sure you would be able to influence more people, especially busy people like me if you’d stick to your shorter lengths. Busy people tend to be highly educated with jobs and other commitments. Personally I can do 20 minutes tops and 5 is even better. I totally support you guys but I think your going in the wrong direction with the timing.
David

My reply:

Hello David. We realize many people have attention-span and commitment problems when it comes to certain kinds of activities: self-education, cleaning up the environment, stopping bombs from falling on children, etc. Our assumption is that your ‘lack of time’ is simply a reflection of your priorities, and we don’t think it makes sense for us to get involved with such matters. For example, no one would appreciate it if we advised them to free up an hour in their busy schedule by not watching American Idol, skipping a few meals (or trips to the bathroom for that matter), or simply waking up ten minutes earlier every day for a week. That would be pointless and annoying. So our policy is to not care about whether or not you have time to watch our episodes. Thanks. Bunny

E-mail number two, from Gigi:

Scientists call it an atom smasher. I was wandering if you guys heard of it. It’s also called LHC. The main purpose with this LHC is to find dark matter. (or find out more about dark matter.) They’re spending over millions of dollars to make this work. It was suppose to be launched in 2012 but it is now announced to be launched this year. (2008 Early August) Many scientist fear it will create a black hole and destroy the earth. Sounds like a sci fi movie doesn’t it? I was wandering if you guys can look more into it. In my personal opinion, it doesn’t sound like it’s worth it. What do you guys think? - Gigi

And here is my reply to Gigi:

Dear Gigi, I have not heard about the LHC (”Large Hadron Collider”, I looked it up) before receiving your e-mail. I am interested in anything that has the ability to make black holes, even if they are micro black holes. And of course any machine that can possibly crush the entire planet into nothingness is an attention catcher. To be practical though, our (cats) backgrounds in particle physics is fairly limited and we’re probably not the best group to be asking about the safety of this project. For example, the European Organization for Nuclear Research has assured the public via its website that although the LHC will be able to produce “an energy that no other particle accelerators have reached before”, higher energy levels are routinely produced in nature during cosmic-ray collisions. Do I know what cosmic-ray collisions are? No. Should I concerned? I have no idea. Thanks for the e-mail though, I will be thinking of you when I read in the headlines that Switzerland has disappeared into a black hole. Thanks, Bunny

End of Bunny Mailbag for today.

- Bunny

Every weekend we (Bunny, Kim, Mimi, and I) try to make it a point to have a ‘articles’ meeting. We sit around and exchange copies of the most important or interesting articles we’ve encountered during the week. At today’s meeting one of the articles Mimi presented was especially helpful in allowing me to get a clearer picture of what’s really going on behind the U.S.’s incessant calls for sanctions and military strikes against Iran. It’s written by Michel Chossudovsky and is called Iran: War or Privatization: All Out War or “Economic Conquest”?

Like everybody else, I like articles that provides new information. But I especially like articles that answers a question that I’ve been confused about for a while. And even better than those kinds of articles are the articles that asks a question that I hadn’t thought of asking, then gives me a moment to realize that I don’t know the answer to this new question, and then finally answers the question for me! Awesome! Well this article is exactly like this.

Here’s a few excerpts from the article:

“Tehran is to allow foreign investors, in what might be interpreted as an overture to the West, to acquire full ownership of Iran’s State enterprises in the context of a far-reaching “free market” style privatization program…

It is important to carefully analyze this decision. The timing of the announcement by Iran’s Privatization Organization (IPO) coincides with mounting US-Israeli threats to wage an all out war against Iran…

…Is this decision by Tehran to implement a far-reaching privatization program, in any way connected with continuous US saber rattling and diplomatic arm twisting?

At first sight it appears that Tehran is caving into Washington’s demands so as to avoid an all war.
Iran’s assets would be handed over on a silver platter to Western foreign investors, without the need for America to conquer new economic frontiers through military means?

But there is more than meets the eye.

Washington has no interest in the imposition of a privatization program on Iran, as an “alternative” to an all out war. In fact quite the opposite. There are indications that the Bush adminstration’s main objective is to stall the privatization program…

…Now why on earth would the Bush administration be opposed to the adoption of a neoliberal-style divestment program, which would strip the Islamic Republic of some of its most profitable assets?

If “economic conquest” is the ultimate objective of a profit driven military agenda, what then is the purpose of bombing Iran, when Iran actually accepts to hand over its assets at rock-bottom prices to foreign investors, in much the same way as in other compliant developing countries including Indonesia, the Philippines, Brazil, etc?”

Do you know the answer to this? If not, please go read the article! The article is kind of like the Raed Jarrar talk, in that after reading it you be more able to decode the illogical “news” we are constantly getting pounded with here in the U.S. Since our so-called leaders seem to be in near-universal agreement over how important it is for us to destroy Iran, it seems that resistance to this kind of predatory thinking will have to come from a well-informed citizenry.

Read Michel Choussudovsky’s article here.

Thank you,
pinky

Why is my title all weird-looking? Well, because every time this video has been posted somewhere on the internet, it’s been pulled down very quickly. Hopefully using this top-secret, un-Google-able spelling tactic will help it stay under the radar a bit longer!

This eye-opening documentary was produced for French television by Marie-Monique Robin. It hasn’t been shown to the American public yet (will it ever?) - which is too bad, because this documentary will blow your mind. Try to watch it as soon as possible (now is a good time!), as no one knows how long the video will be online before it’s pulled again. The Hemowai Bros. are fighting corporate America and risking lawsuit in order to try to get everyone this information.

If you drag your feet and the video (below) is no longer available, please consider ordering the DVD from the filmmaker and hold screenings for your friends. Spread the word - M0ns@nt0 must be stopped, and can be stopped, but it will take the efforts of lots of ordinary citizens to do it. The future of the planet is in your hands!

If the above video doesn’t work, you can try going here.

Thanks,
pinky

Thank you Phiya for sending us this important report by F. William Engdahl called Iraq and Washington’s ‘seeds of democracy’. An excerpt:

“In May 2003 Paul Bremer III, was put in charge with the imposing title, Administrator, of a newly created Coalition Provisional Authority or CPA… As head of the CPA, Bremer moved swiftly to draft a series of laws to govern Iraq… One of the Orders mandates that no elected Iraqi government will have the power to alter the US-imposed laws. The new laws, or Orders, as they were called, would insure that the economy of Iraq would be remade along lines of a US-mandated ‘free-market’ economic mode… This ensured unrestricted foreign business activities in the country. Investors could also take 100 percent of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country. They would not be required to reinvest and they would not be taxed…

Buried deep among the Bremer laws was Order 81, ‘Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety Law’. At the heart of Order 81 was the Plant Variety Protection (PVP) provision. Order 81, states: ‘Farmers shall be prohibited from re-using seeds of protected varieties or any variety mentioned in items 1 and 2 of paragraph (C) of Article 14 of this Chapter.’

In plain English, this gives holders of patents on certain plant varieties, i.e. large foreign multinationals, absolute rights for 20 years over use of their seeds in Iraqi agriculture. The protected plant varieties are Genetically Modified or Gene Manipulated (GM) plants, and an Iraqi farmer who chose to plant such seeds must sign an agreement with the seed company holding the patent that he would pay a ‘technology fee’ and an annual license fee for planting the patented seeds.

Any Iraqi farmer seeking to take a portion of those patented seeds to replant in following harvest years would be subject to heavy fines from the seed supplier. Iraqi farmers would become vassals, not of Saddam Hussein, but of multinational GM seed giants.

Iraq is part of Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, where the fertile valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers created ideal conditions for crop cultivation. Iraqi farmers have existed since approximately 8,000 B.C. and had developed the rich seed variety for almost every variety of wheat used in the world today. They did this through a system of saving a share of seeds and replanting, developing new naturally resistant hybrid varieties through the new plantings.

For years, the Iraqis had held samples of such precious natural seed varieties in a national seed bank, located, ironically, in Abu Ghraib, the city made infamous as a US military torture prison site in 2004. Following the US occupation and various bombing campaigns, the historic and invaluable seed bank in Abu Ghraib vanished, a possible further casualty of the Iraq war…

Order 81 on Intellectual Property Rights, was not negotiated between a sovereign government and the WTO, or another government. It was imposed on Iraq without debate, from Washington. According to informed Washington reports, the specific details of Order 81 on plants were written for the US Government by Monsanto Corporation, the world’s leading purveyor of GMO seeds and crops…”

Please read the whole report here.

By the way, according to a scientific study we read in the journal Science last year, all “domestic cats” (hate that term) alive today are supposedly descended from ancient ancestors who roamed the area that now includes Iraq. So all you apathetic cats out there, why not put those stupid TV remote controls down and do something about the exploitation of your ancestors’ home town.

Bunny.

I came across this quote by Helen Keller today: “I don’t give a damn about semi-radicals.”

Think about it.

Bunny

We got an interesting e-mail the other day from a guy named Darren:

Pinky (and friends),

I love your show… I recently watched the movie about the American War, and I was thoroughly impressed (as usual)…. However, I disagree with one of Bunny’s conclusions….It is a very important point that is not in history books….

Bunny asks why the US “Chose to devastate Vietnam to such an extreme” driving them “to the brink of annihilation”. Bunny then says the Vietnam War “was that way by design”. All of this is correct. But Bunny says that “the strategy failed”. However, it worked perfectly.

We bombed Vietnam to the brink of annihilation - it will take a hundred years for Vietnam to recover fully. Now, there are American sweatshops in Vietnam - we have access to the Vietnamese market, just as we wanted. And we guaranteed the failure of Communism as a political model for the region - which secured other Asian markets for the US.

The US involved Latin American coups / wars of the last 60 years or so also demonstrate this principal - we either secure Latin American markets, or open them to the US with ultra violence and destruction - which guarantee open markets out of simple desperation.

Best wishes,
Darren

My reply:

Hi Darren,

Actually, in my report, when I said “the strategy failed” I was referring to the U.S. leadership’s inability to get the Vietnamese - both in the South and in the North - to capitulate to foreign domination. Since it was the U.S. that eventually had to evacuate Vietnam in 1975, I still stand by this statement.

On the other hand your comments suggest an interesting possibility - that U.S. leaders somehow had a decades-long strategy that linked total social, economic, environmental, etc. destruction of their country to eventually enable the U.S. to re-enter Vietnam as master to Vietnamese labor and markets. This would seem plausible to me, except that in my review of Vietnam War-era governmental documents I haven’t been able to find a paper trail that clearly demonstrates this kind of long-term vision on the part of the U.S. leadership. I’m not saying I’m willing to completely rule this kind of logic out; I just don’t have the documentary evidence here in front of me to say, “A-ha! Here it is, directly from the mouth of McNamara…” (or Johnson, or Kissinger, or Nixon, or whomever). If you could point me in the right direction with a list of citations that illustrate your point I would appreciate it.

I think the U.S. - at least for a while - really did believe that Vietnam could be brought under U.S. control through a combination of traditional military force (”if only we could bomb them hard enough…”) and ideological coercion (”winning hearts and minds”, etc.). It’s easy to find documents that show how many brilliant (and I’m not being sarcastic here) policy makers and war planners at the State Department and Pentagon mistakenly believed this, especially during the earlier phases of the war. But by 1968, long before the U.S. would be physically ejected from Saigon (1975), many of these same planners were already reaching into their bag of tricks for new tools (especially triangular diplomacy with China and the Soviet Union, and much later, devastating trade embargoes) in search of ways to salvage the U.S.’s damaged reputation and political standing among other nations, economy, national culture, etc. So while I agree with you that the U.S. corporate elite currently enjoys very lucrative access to Vietnamese labor and markets, I don’t think this is because of visionary planning. Rather I think it just proves that the U.S. wields an impressive diversity of coercive tools, and is capable of successfully changing to new strategies when others fail.

Bunny

[ Note from Kim: I think it's good to point out though that Darren and Bunny are in agreement that the main point is the US wanted to control Vietnam. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again!" ]

[ Bunny: Yeah that's true but I just wanted to be clear that I like to start with documentary evidence and then proceed with an analysis from there. If Darren can provide us with the documentation then I am more than happy to change my perspective. There's no reason why we can't release The American War: The U.S. in Vietnam, Version 2.0 ]

[ Pinky: Thanks Bunny. That was a good e-mail. And yes, it would be great to re-do that episode; it's one of my favorite ones we've done so far. But I think it would be easier to watch if we added more moving pictures and other stuff. ]

Just received an interesting reply to my reply to Darren (July 23 entry). Here it is:

Bunny, Thanks for the reply….

I respect that your report was based on the enormous body of first hand documentation on the Vietnam War. It is disturbing how much information is available to the public but ignored in favor of convenient myths….

However, analysis of US foreign policy provides numerous case studies which support the idea that a campaign of brutal violence and destruction will promote cooperation out of necessity (beginning with Germany / Japan during WWII….and yes, I understand there is a huge difference between WWII and the Vietnam War).

Whether we supported a government friendly to US interests (El Salvador), a government installed by the US (Vietnam, Iran) or we simply destroy everything (Japan), the goal of submission seems secondary to creating an environment of pathetic desperation (West Bank and Gaza haven’t submitted, but they are pathetically desperate).

I asked Noam Chomsky about this, and he agrees that, “In general US policy towards the third world — the former colonies - was to ensure that their markets and resources would be open to exploitation by Western, primarily US, concentrated capital. There’s plenty of evidence on this, and it goes right to the present…” (Chomsky).

Domination and occupation are two different things- a country can be dominated without occupation, although an occupation cannot succeed without domination. The US failed to occupy Vietnam (literally or through a puppet govt), but we were able to dominate the country and eventually gain access to labor and markets.

Two main elements of colonialism are exploitation and pacification. The goal of colonialism is to exploit- generally, to the highest degree possible. Pacification is the method of control- to prevent the colony from using resources, labor, and markets for its own interests (occupation through domination).

Massive destruction- (natural, man made, economic or literal) can pacify a civilian population (domination without occupation). It may or may not achieve access to resources, labor or markets…. but if a country is in ruins, its rejection of predatory capitalism is usually destined to multiply suffering (North Korea…).

A united, communist Vietnam destroyed by the Vietnam War would not serve as a model for a popular communist movement in other third-world countries- no country wants to adopt a form of government that will instigate the US. At the very least, the Vietnam War persuaded other nations that communism (or socialism, which the US tried to equate with communism) wasn’t a wise decision. In the best case scenario (for US policy makers) neo-colonialism takes hold very strongly- like in Latin America, SE Asia, or more recently, Iraq.

If you wanted to do an analysis of the Vietnam War’s success/failure, it could be broken down this way:

objective- prevent the spread of communism SUCCESS
objective- To occupy Vietnam or install a government FAILURE
objective- To dominate Vietnam SUCCESS

Bunny: “When I said “the strategy failed” I was referring to the U.S. leadership’s inability to get the Vietnamese - both in the South and in the North - to capitulate to foreign domination.”

Once again, a country can be dominated without being occupied. We were unable to occupy Vietnam, but able to dominate them. In reality, it isn’t even necessary to fight, let alone occupy- it is possible to get others to fight for you (El Salvador fought itself, we provided weapons and training) and it isn’t even necessary to fight at all (sanctions, natural disasters, famine).

As Kim pointed out- “the main point is the US wanted to control Vietnam.” To a certain degree, we did / do. Of course, to a certain degree, we didn’t / don’t, but this is assumed, since historically we lost. I think this is relevant to the Iraq War, since the objective of the War has changed from securing WMDs, to removing a brutal dictator, to bringing democracy to the region. The lack of a clear objective implies the intention of domination in Iraq as well.

Sorry for the lengthy reply….

-Darren

And here is my reply to the above:

Hi Darren,

Thank you for your reply. No need to apologize for its length - 95% of the e-mail we receive is brief and stupid, so I view your e-mail as a good thing.

I agree with your basic points. I actually don’t have any qualms with your assertion that the U.S. has found various ways to successfully infiltrate and control certain aspects of Vietnam’s economy. But I think you are attempting to clarify something I wasn’t talking about. Again, my original point was only that in ‘75, the U.S. leadership did not order an evacuation of Saigon with a knowing smirk - saying “Ah, this is all going according to plan…!” I was not trying to access what we now know would come later. The U.S. evacuation from Vietnam is evidence of a failed military and political policy. I think it’s extremely important to acknowledge that regardless of the current economic and political relationships that exist between the U.S. and Vietnam today, the Nationalists’ ejection of U.S. forces from Vietnamese soil in 1975 was a powerful statement which holds many important historical lessons. It’s too easy to say, “The strategy worked perfectly.” This was a Third World nation throwing a military superpower off their land! Obviously the meaning or symbolism of this event cannot be the same for Americans (or other First Worlders) and for people of the colonies. Now, when you say that the domination did not end with the physical expulsion of U.S. forces, of course I agree with you. But I think this is a different (though historically linked) lesson that must also be studied.

At any rate, I’ll post your reply in the blog. It makes many good points and it’s good to have some back and forth. Hopefully a few people will feel intrigued enough to do some research of their own. That’s the main thing.

Thanks,
Bunny

By the way, I got a pissy e-mail today asking why I’m blogging so much instead of Pinky. The short answer is Pinky’s real busy with episode research and writing and that takes priority over blogging. So in the meantime I do more blogging. I always try to put a little picture of myself at the beginning of any entry I write so if you see my face and don’t like my blogs, skip it.

- Bunny

Here is an e-mailed question we received yesterday that I forwarded to Daisy:

Hi - I very much liked your [How To Solve Illegal Immigration video], but I must point out that to me the two categories of settlers and indigenous peoples doesn’t seem to apply to the predecessors of African Americans who were, literally, dragged here kicking and screaming… Have I missed something? (from Maryellen)

Daisy’s response:

There’s no doubt that slaves from Africa were oppressed, murdered, and then some. But within the framework of settler colonialism, slaves brought from Africa are settlers. They certainly are not native. There are numerous examples of native peoples enslaved by settlers but I don’t think that’s what the e-mail is inquiring about. Practically all of Africa was colonized by European states - therefore (most) Africans in Africa were colonized. However African slaves brought to the Americas were not colonized; they were enslaved - which is also despicable but basically a different form of violence. So both groups - native peoples and slaves - were/are victims within the centuries-long historical trajectory of Euro-American Imperialism, but they’re still different classes within the settler/native paradigm.

People get confused because they want to mix the native/settler dichotomy with other dichotomies - oppressed vs. oppressor, good vs. evil, etc., but this results in a faulty analysis. One can also make distinctions between different motivations or circumstances for settler mobility - for example, settlers who arrived in the New World seeking gold and other kinds of fortunes, settlers fleeing oppression elsewhere, settlers enslaved and brought kicking and screaming. It would be wrong to say that there aren’t enormous differences regarding how and why these different groups of of non-indigenous people came (or who were unwillingly brought) to the “New World” from elsewhere. But these differences do not negate one’s status as a settler within the settler colonialism paradigm. Just one example: historically speaking, the ruling class in the U.S. has treated black people as a threat and has responded with a thousand different mechanisms of oppression. But the perceived threat of black ascendancy to political and economic power is not based on African Americans’ reclaiming of native land. This in itself is an important difference; please consider the implications.

The presence of slave labor almost guarantees the rapid economic development of settler states, which obviously benefits from the exploitation of that labor. And because this exploitation takes place on native land, this in turn generally accelerates the displacement, removal, assimilation, killing, etc. of native peoples living within the territorial boundaries of the newly formulated settler state. This is not to say that slaves from Africa were happy to participate in the genocide against Native Americans; you could say their status as settlers was forced upon them.

- Daisy

Thanks to Daisy for taking the time to respond.

Please go to the next diary entry to read Daisy’s response to a second question regarding the How To Solve Illegal Immigration video.

~ pinky

Here is Daisy’s response to a second e-mail, also regarding the How To Solve Illegal Immigration video:

I just saw your video on illegal immigration and I found it very informative, interesting, and insightful. I just have a comment on something on it.

In it, you make a distinction between “Native Americans” and Mexicans. I don’t know if you know enough of our history (Mexicans) but Mexicans for the most part ARE native peoples. About 30% of Mexicans in Mexico are pure indigenous and another 68% are mainly “mestizo” mostly Native-Mexican and Spaniard as compared to 1% of all “Americans” being pure (government recognized) indigenous. In Guatemala, native peoples are about 45% of the people. You can see these demographics in Wiki or the CIA factbook, among other places.

The brown race (not “red”, known as “Native Americans”) does not magically begin and end at the US/Mexico border. [...] When any discussion or reference is ever made of “Native Americans”, it almost always refers to indigenous peoples of the U.S. or even Canada, but never Mexico. I am Chicano from East LA. My family has been in L.A. since 1920 on my mother’s side, and on my fathers just as long, but coming from Arizona. My family was Purepecha from Jalisco but you won’t recognize that as well as Choctaw, Apache, Ute, etc. since again, the fallacy that Native peoples are solely from the U.S.

Many of the poorest of the poor from Mexico and Central America coming here are indigenous. They come from places like Puebla, Oaxaca, Yucatan, Chiapas, etc. and many speak mainly nahuatl and k’iche’. This big part of our history and identity not told or understood perpetuates the wrong belief that we are simply “aliens” as much as anyone else from anywhere in the world.

Thank you,
Randy

And here is Daisy’s response:

Randy, Your letter helps point out a problem in the video - thank you. I’d like to comment on this.

As an example, there is a part in the video during which I say:

“In the first group of course there are those people who are currently being labeled illegal immigrants. Most of them are recent immigrants, most notably from Mexico.

The second group are also immigrants, but they are immigrants who have been here longer, maybe a hundred years or maybe even going all the way back to the Mayflower or something like that.

And actually there’s actually a third group, a forgotten group that’s been made practically invisible over the past two hundred or so years, and that’s the original Native inhabitants of these lands.”

This way of explaining is confusing because I am simultaneously using two different categorical systems: the so-called “legal resident vs. illegal immigrant” argument, and also the “native vs. settler” model. I chose to explain the situation in this way in an attempt to draw attention to the continued (imposed) invisibility of native people living within the territorial boundaries of the U.S., even as U.S. politicians and media commentators ask the question, “Who has a right to be here?” This can be confusing because the “legal resident vs. illegal immigrant” model is itself a settler construct, and, as you point out, does not take into consideration whether those ‘immigrants’ are native or not. In fact, we could say that the “legal resident vs. illegal immigrant” model is a favored way to frame the so-called ‘immigration crisis’ precisely because it conveniently leaves native people out of the equation. With native people out of the way, ruling class settlers are able to position themselves as legitimate owners and masters of this land; public outcries over how subsequent waves of ‘illegals’ are sullying their turf is to be expected.

I decided to use the term ‘illegal immigrants’ in the video because this is a widely used term at the moment. But in an attempt to keep things simple, the term itself manages to drag many other assumptions and problems into the discussion along with it. In hindsight, I probably should have, at the very least, noted that many of the so-called illegal immigrants from Mexico or elsewhere are also indigenous to their respective regions. This definitely complicates matters to a certain extent, but my failure to mention this created a lost opportunity - for example, an opportunity to raise many (generally) unconsidered implications regarding indigenous peoples’ rights vis-à-vis certain settler constructs (in this case, ‘national borders’, citizenship, etc.).

It’s my opinion that if enough people begin to challenge the legitimacy of oppressive settler constructs (for example, settler states [The United States of America, Canada, New Zealand, etc.], settler concepts [illegal immigration, the justice system, the Constitution, blood quantum, etc.], and so on), the conceptual and political terrain can be transformed and we will all be better positioned to turn our attention to righting the historical wrongs which we are now living and perpetuating. This is, as I understand it, one of the long-term objectives of The Pinky Show project.

- Daisy

Thank you Daisy for replying to Randy. And yes, this is one of our long-term objectives. Looooooong term! I doubt I’ll live long enough to see it realized, but I know that all play and no work guarantees that absolutely nothing happens.

By the way, we have not forgotten about the episodes about colonialism, settler colonialism, nation states, and all that other stuff. I know it’s been a long time since I mentioned that we are working on them but alas, we’re still working on them. Some subjects are just more challenging to research and write clearly about (to me, anyway)! So although Bunny and I are constantly working and re-working these scripts we’re not going to release them until we’re as happy as we can be with them, even if we know that 5 minutes after we publish them to the internet we’ll be unhappy with them and want to change them some more! We are being extra careful with these episodes because we think that they really do have the power to help radically transform the way people think about history and society. Once the perspective moves, everything looks different.

But at any rate please stay tuned. We’ve been doing a lot of research/writing the past few months, but in August-October we’ll be right back in the production phase of things, so we’ll have more episodes rolling out as we finish them off. Please take care.

~ pinky

[ Note from Bunny: This Q & A highlights something we're always struggling with here at The Pinky Show. In an attempt to make things as simple and widely accessible as possible, we often find ourselves leaving out huge amounts of extremely important information, ideas, and perspectives. Personally I see this as a form of intellectual violence. The only way we can justify it (barely) is to say that our mini-presentations are meant to instigate more curiosity, questioning, and dialogue. Anyone who thinks The Pinky Show is a good one-stop source for any final word on complex issues is not going to end up very smart. When more people become comfortable with the idea that anyone can do research - research of ALL kinds, not just book research - into complicated matters, then hopefully The Pinky Show will become obsolete. ]

[ Note from pinky: Thanks for saying that Bunny. You could say the same thing about schools. ]

[ Bunny: Yup. ]