SitRep #5: Life and Death Under Neo-Confederate Barbarism (Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia)

SitRep #4: Revelations of Our Masters' Relentless Malevolence

Censorship by Wealth and Stealth: How Our Capitalist Masters Murdered Press Freedom; Why They Persecute Julian Assange

SitRep #5: Life and Death Under Neo-Confederate Barbarism

08 April 2019

(Note: The socioeconomic and environmental Apocalypse is undeniably upon us. But the lies, deceptions and betrayals promulgated by the One Percenters and their minions no longer hide how -- in accordance with their shock-doctrine -- they are using the Apocalypse to impose the ultimate regime-change: the reordering of human society into Neoliberal utopia: Ayn Rand opulence for our masters, serfdom and slavery for the few selectively bred 99 Percenters they allow to survive. The following merely adds to the preponderance of evidence.)

***

Please Read These Next 3 Reports (Even If You Read Nothing Else Herein)
My recommendations as the past week's most vital reports, chosen for how the events and trends define our overlords' intentions and therefore shape our world, the U.S. Empire and the probable doom both of our species and our planet.

America the Barbaric
The gleeful USian embrace of barbarism is no accident. It is instead an unprecedented national orgy of prideful self-fulfillment, its present horrors mind-boggling, its potential horrors far in excess of those inflicted on our species by Germany c. 1933-1945.

How the South Won the Civil War
To understand this is to understand how and why the U.S. Empire is not just "America the Barbaric" but also the de facto Fourth Reich.

The Death Penalty is Getting Crueler
See also: Supreme Court's Death Penalty Ruling Leaves Legal Experts Aghast plus earlier stories, US Supreme Court ruling guts ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” and Supreme Court Delays Buddhist’s Execution, but Not Muslim’s, Over Faith Adviser As the ChristoNazi ideology of the Robbers' Court becomes ever-more obvious, so does its ever-more-slippery slope toward theocratic fulfillment of the Bible's innumerable examples of religiously motivated rape and divinely mandated genocide and mass murder including that children be stoned to death for disobeying their parents.

Ecocide: the Relentless ChristoNazi/Capitalist Assault on Our Environment
Obviously our Capitalist overlords know Mother Nature always bats last. Just as obviously, that's why they're obstructing any effective action against Climate Change. They're depending instead on their wealth and mastery of technology to enable them to establish their Neoliberal (Neo-Confederate) dream-world even as the deteriorating environment kills off as many as 7.2 billion women, children and men -- 95 percent of the 99 Percent.

CO2 Levels Are Now at a 3 Million-Year High

The Privatization of Wildlife: How Ted Turner Scored Yellowstone Bison

Paradise Lost: Reflections on the Camp Fire

Logging Is the Leading Driver of Carbon Emissions From US Forests

Free Market Solutions to Climate Change Aren't 'Realistic'

The Madness Driving Climate Catastrophe

Chernobyl's Disastrous Cover-Up Is a Warning for the Next Nuclear Age

Critics of the Green New Deal Are in the Pocket of Big Oil

Why Recycling Is a ‘Pseudo-Solution’ to Reducing Plastic Waste

RSN: Three Mile Island's Murderous Legacy Still Threatens Us All

Mozambique Floods Cover More Ground Than NYC, Chicago, D.C. & Boston

In Middle East and North Africa, Environmentalism Is Espionage

Imperial Warmongering for God, Profit and Sadistic Pleasure

In Vietnam, the Empire's methodology of global conquest was aptly summarized by the infantry officer who tried to mansplain the necessity of destroying Bên Tre to save it for Capitalism and Christianity. Now -- having extermimnated whole nations to grant them such salvation -- the Empire is destroying the entire planet to save it for Jesus and his Wall Street puppetmasters.

The Pentagon Wins Again

UNICEF: A Child Dies Violently in Honduras Every Day

The CIA: Surprise, Kill, Vanish

Trump Administration Revokes ICC Prosecutor's Visa Over War Crimes Probe '

Venezuela Won't Become 2nd Syria': Lavrov Sure S. America Won't Back Military Invasion v. Maduro

To Ramp Up Fear Of Russia In Africa, NYT Downplays Massive US Military Presence On Continent

Why There'll Be No US-Russia Reset Post-Mueller

Miscellaneous Atrocities and Outrages
Random examples of the sneering sadism, brazen moral imbecility and police-state omnipotence by which our overlords amass unfathomably pornographic profits as they methodically reduce us to corporate serfdom and penal slavery.

Why aren’t Boeing executives being prosecuted for the 737 Max 8 crashes?

Boeing CEO praised “streamlined” oversight of 737 plane that crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia

The bizarre story of the L.A. dad who exposed the college admissions scandal

ICE Arrests More Than 280 in Texas in Largest Workplace Raid in a Decade

Chicago Suburban Cops Call for Kim Foxx's Resignation Over Jussie Smollett Case

Identity Rules: A Report from Reddening Chicago

WikiLeaks warns that Julian Assange faces imminent eviction from Ecuador’s London embassy

The Border Patrol's Reckless Use of High Speed Chases Has Killed and Injured Hundreds Since 2015

US Senate fails to restore sweeping cuts to food assistance for Puerto Rico

New U.S. attorney on safe injection sites in Seattle: 'Don't go there'
Bad head: what the story says is the feds -- determined to exterminate junkies by any means other than overt (and therefore unfashionable) death-camp facilities -- will not allow safe, medically monitored self-injection sites in Seattle or anywhere else.

The South Dakota Legislature Has Invented A New Legal Term To Target Pipeline Protesters

GM Squeezed $118 Million From Its Workers, Then Shut Their Factory

Centrist Dems Are Trying to Block a Universal $15 Minimum Wage
The Democratic (sic) Party demonstrates its faithfulness to its Republican overlords.

Wendy’s Owner Gives Big to Trump While Refusing Farmworkers’ Demands

Kids in Cages: Donald Trump's Brilliant Re-Election Strategy. Will It Work?
Ever more unabashedly ChristoNazi, the Trump-Pence Regime has already assured its re-election merely by institutionalizing the bottomless hatred and bigotry that has always poisoned the hearts of the USian white-supremacist majority.

DOJ Report Finds Widespread Rape, Murder, and Torture in Alabama Prisons

University of Arizona Students to Face Criminal Charges for Protesting Campus CBP Event

Democrats Promised to Go After Trump's Taxes. Why Are They Dragging Their Feet?
Another definitive betrayal by the Democratic (sic) Party.

Collusion in Plain Sight
Uninformative head from Counterpunch; the report exposes how Mueller and the Democratic (sic) Party
methodically ignore the evidence of Trump's brazenly ongoing collusion with ChristoNazis, also with corporate criminals, banksters, mobsters.

A Neoliberal “Wall of Values”
Another uncommunicative head from Counterpunch. The nonsensically titled report reveals the strategy and tactics by which the Neoliberals are demonizing -- and thereby neutralizing -- the Left whether pseudo or real.

How Trump appointees helped the makers of BOB jogging strollers fight off a safety recall
Occasionally even the Josef-Goebbels-wannabees of the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine report unpleasant truths.What better way to boost their credibility? But never forget the propagandist's trick of sandwiching lies amidst undeniable truths.

Nancy Pelosi Believes in Nothing
As of 2015 -- the last year for which Open Secrets has made the data available -- Pelosi is the sixth wealthiest member of the House and the seventh wealthiest member of Congress. Thus like any other Capitalist, she will do whatever she deems necessary to preserve and enhance her own $101 million net worth.

Arizona Students' Free Speech Rights Challenged in Border Agent Visit Protest

Intelligence Report Appeared to Endorse View Leftwing Protesters Were 'Terrorists'

Sitting Pretty on a Sinking Ship: Neoliberal Feminism
How feminism is co-opted -- perverted, actually -- to serve our Capitalist masters.

That Kiss, and Other Daily Indignities

Why Don't Schools Teach Children Morality and Empathy?

Sometimes the Racist Malice Is Too Obvious to Hide
Whether in a nation founded to preserve slavery or a technology invented to facilitate maximum surveillance and genocide, the evil intent of its founders prevails until the nation and its technology are no more.

Standardized Testing is a Tool of White Supremacy

Former Louisiana Officer Wayne Welsh, Who Shared Racist Facebook Meme, is Now the Chief of Police

Report: IRS More Likely to Audit Those Living in Poor, Mostly Black Counties

NAACP Shows How Fossil Fuel Industry Manipulates Communities of Color

'Reasserting White Power': Behind the Psychosis That Gave Rise to Blackface

Media and Censorship
The growing realm of state secrets and the shrinking realm of what our masters allow us to know measures our descent from a charade of democratic process to the enthusiastic embrace of tyranny.

Weaponized Social Media Is Driving the Explosion of Fascism

YouTube has done too little, too late to fight misinformation

Media Blackout As Israel's Largest Banks Pay Over $1 Billion In Fines For US Tax Evasion Schemes

NewsGuild-CWA journalists ask tough questions on Equal Pay Day

Irritating Facts About Korea that Many in the West Would Rather Not Know

Economic Inequality Could Spell the End of American Democracy
A telling example of how allegedly "alternative" media -- in this instance Truthdig -- soft-pedals the present crisis, steadfastly denying the fact the pretense of U.S. "democracy" ended on 22 November 1963. Thus by pretending (the charade of) democracy continues, they avoid confronting the necessity of revolution -- that for us, we the people of the 99 Percent, it's either socialism or extinction.

An unprecedented leak from Saudi Arabia exposes torture of dissidents

Chicago Elects First Black Lesbian Mayor—But Not All Progressives See It As a Victory
The malevolent purposes of disinformation and co-optation -- the strategy and tactics at which the Democratic (sic) Party is the all-time master -- is always creation of the confusion and delusion that facilitates tyranny.

Healthcare
This is one of two lost causes the ultimate combined result of which will be nothing beyond another explosive increase in the fuck-it-why-bother-to-vote faction of the increasingly alienated citizenry. (The other lost cause is the quest for the restoration of net neutrality.) They are lost causes because neither universal healthcare nor net neutrality can ever be achieved in the United States by anything less than (hopefully nonviolent) revolution. Meanwhile...

Pelosi Accused of Deploying 'Most Dishonest Argument' Against Medicare for All

Behind Bars, Co-Pays Are a Barrier to Basic Health Care

Sparks of Anger, Murmurs of Rebellion
But absolutely nothing to indicate the emergence of effectively organized and disciplined resistance.

Union Locals Build Support for the Green New Deal’s “Just Transition”

Rep. Jared Huffman is (Officially) the Only Openly “Humanist” Member of Congress

Boeing’s Homicides Will Give Way to Safety Reforms if Flyers Organize

Flood of Comments Shows Public 'Utterly Repulsed' By Trump Plan to Take Food Stamps From 750,000 People

(Standing Up) For Venezuela
Genuinely sophomoronic head rewritten to summarize the report's encouraging disclosures. But the question remains: will the U.S. succeed in its scheme to use Venezuela to provoke World War III?

Out Of Patience: NYC Nurses Take On Hospitals For Better Staffing

Haiti At The Crossroads
Another bad head. What the story says is Haitians are approaching revolution -- but no one can be sure what kind.

Wolf pack living west of Cascade Mountains for first time in decades

All Of This, We Have To Defend
Again another uncommunicative headline. What the story is about is how Mexicans are resisting Capitalism's misogynistic hatred of our Mother Earth and our natural environment.

Seattle's queer community finds refuge in nature

Tulsi Gabbard Is A Sheepdog, Greens Howie Hawkins Is 2020's Only Real Peace Candidate

Ms. Cortez Goes to Washington

Florida Sex Workers Demand Decriminalization After Massive Raids

Commonwealth v. Mohamed
An amazing story that, though true, could mislead us into thinking more than a tiny few USian ChristoNazis might be won over by reason.

75% of Scotland's Electricity Now Green; and All Cars Electric by 2032
It is with no small amount of ethnic pride I note the metaphorical chasm-spanning bridge suggested by two facts: firstly, how my Scots ancestors were amongst the last peoples in Europe to surrender their minds to the enemies of the Great Goddess; secondly, that it is the Scots who are amongst the first to begin officially re-embracing her environmental dictates.

Federal Judge Strikes Down Girls-Only School Dress Code as Unconstitutional

Belt and Road Initiative in Full Swing in Europe
Alas, making the U.S. Empire economically irrelevant -- precisely what China, Russia and the European Union are attempting in their own defense -- will neither save our environment nor protect us from a Capitalist cabal that lives and dies by the ChristoNazi slogan "Better Dead Than Red," the One Percenters' unequivocal pledge they will destroy the planet rather than surrender their unprecedented dominance.

Stuff to Think About
Essays I respectfully suggest you read and contemplate.

Gender, Class and Capitalism

Freedom Rider: Remembering April 4th

American Exceptionalism is at the root of the Fake News Epidemic Attempting to Overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

If Only He Knew: First, Assume Women Aren’t People

Surveillance Capitalism Is Destroying Our Freedom and Our Intimacy

Socialist Principles Have Always Been Part of Black American Tradition

LB/7 April 2019

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Posted at 03:52 AM in Antifa, Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Feminism, Healthcare, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, Humanitarianism, LGBTQ , Marxism, socialism, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Poor People, Religion, Seniors , Spirituality, Web/Tech, Weblogs, White Supremacy | Permalink | Comments (0)

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INTRODUCTION

For about 25 of my 64 years as a writer and photographer, newspaper journalism seemed a promising career. But as my colleagues moved stealthily rightward, I moved ever-more-openly leftward, until eventually I was left...outside. Permanently. Hence "Outside Agitator's Notebook," which evolved into the more closely focused "Dispatches from Dystopia." Under either name it was originally a regularly updated anthology of reports, analyses, commentaries, photographs and other anti-capitalist testimony from the ecogenocidal dystopia that neoliberal capitalism -- our species' newest euphemism for resurrected nazism -- has made of our world. But the life-threatening shock of a censorship incident (see "Probable Final Dispatches, End of Dispatches," 17 April 2020) has reduced it to far less frequent publication. Meanwhile our species' dystopian epicenter remains the post-humanitarian United States of America, which with its ruling cabal of morally imbecilic plutocrats, its hopelessly subjugated and often vindictively craven Moronic Majority and its Moron Nation empire of global-conquest racism and general malevolence, is indeed the de facto Fourth Reich, the actual birthdate of which will eventually be recognized as 22 November 1963 – that is, if our species somehow miraculously survives the terrifying thermonuclear/biochemical arsenal that maintains the Empire's ecogenocidal omnipotence. (¶)-Dispatches will nevertheless continue -- albeit on a far more relaxed schedule -- to chronicle our relentless subjugation by neoliberal capitalism as it (inevitably) reverts to its traditional might-makes-right savagery. Just as capitalism previously transformed itself into Italian Fascism and German Nazism, capitalism now matures into a nazism of uniquely USian form and content. By examining the more devastating details of what is being done to us, DfD shows how ours is a dystopia characterized as much by the mindlessness of Moron Nation's "zieg-heil"-equivalent chanting of “USA! USA! USA!” as by the brutality such chanting invariably celebrates – the ecogenocidal atrocities the capitalist ruling cabal perpetrates in the name of “profit,” “growth” and USian “exceptionalism.” (¶)-Why “USian” rather than "American"? Because to call this exceptionally fascist empire “America” is to slander as fascists or nazis all humanitarian-minded peoples of North and South America who valiantly and often fatally resist enslavement by USian nazis, whose obscene present-day skills at the imposition of tyranny and enslavement were perfected by the legions of German Nazi war criminals the government and its capitalist owners adopted as advisors and comrades-at-arms c. 1944-1947. And, yes, “humanitarian” versus “anti-humanitarian” are the only terms that adequately differentiate the two now eternally hostile subspecies into which capitalism has finally divided Homo sapiens sapiens. On one side are those of us who cling to the so-called Golden Rule and its variants, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the ultimate form of which is Marxism's “from each according to ability, too each according to need.” On the other side are the moral imbeciles – nazis, fascists, Ayn Rand disciples and all the other psychological zombies that are Capitalism's unique and uniquely apocalyptic spawn. (¶)-But what then is capitalism? Though traditionally defined as economics alone, it is in fact the quintessential patriarchal ethos, the diabolical methodology of building a global empire by conquest and genocide both obvious and clandestine, with post-conquest world governance originally patterned after the despotic management of antebellum slave plantations. Capitalism is thus the forefather of fascism and Nazism, which are its only possible socioeconomic offspring. Behind its seductive cloak of euphemisms and Big Lies (“manifest destiny,” “easy credit,” “economic freedom,” “self-made man,” “entrepreneur,” “no down payment,” “rugged individualist,” “you too can be rich,” “free will,” etc. ad nauseam), capitalism is the stench of burning flesh and rotting corpses; the shrieks of napalmed children; the despair of families evicted into the permanent degradation of filth, untreated disease and constant fear of murder, enslavement by arrest or kidnapping that defines USian homelessness; the final agonies of maliciously abandoned patients condemned to death by the deliberately genocidal costs of health care. (¶)-Ultimately capitalism is the boundless Evil of global dictatorship by the Christian white male .01 Percent, a tiny, ruthless cabal of capitalist aristocrats for whom infinite greed is ultimate virtue and for whom the snuff-film sadism of class warfare provides the ultimate entertainment. Under capitalism's Fukushima-deadly, Ayn Rand credo of serial-killer moral imbecility – absolute power and unlimited profit for the .01 Percent and its ruling-class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us – these obscenely wealthy despots now impose on us their increasingly overt paradigm of nazi governance. Not that we the (formerly exempt) people should be surprised; the merciless regimen that is now ours is how the capitalists have always tyrannized our sisters and brothers in America's First Nations, in the USian ghettos and in all capitalism's victim-realms abroad. (¶)-Moreover much of our plight is of our own making. We the people of the United States long ago surrendered to our capitalist overlords. We submit to denial of health care that is everywhere else on this planet deemed a human right; we submit to enslavement by debt; to the outsourcing of our jobs; to bankruptcy; to foreclosure; to eviction and homelessness; to imprisonment in numbers hitherto unequaled in human history; and most of all to the biggest Big Lie of all – the suicidal delusion we somehow remain free despite the capitalists' no-longer-deniable theft of our liberty and their snickering revocation of the few prefaces to economic democracy our now-powerless unions had once managed to win. Our confinement is ensured, not just by our cowardice but by the invisible but inescapable cage of total surveillance: the electronic barbed wire that has reduced our entire planet to a monstrous concentration camp. (¶)-Cast off as “surplus human capital” when we are deemed no longer exploitable for profit, we are then methodically exterminated. We are slaughtered as cannon-fodder in the empire's endless wars of profit and conquest; we are murdered by the bullets and truncheons of the federalized and militarized local police; we are fatally poisoned by capitalism's malignant toxification of our environment; we are slain by denials of health care and social services that are in fact deliberate, euphemism-cloaked policies of slow-motion genocide. (¶)-Meanwhile our overlords pornographically multiply their own wealth by knowingly destroying the planetary conditions upon which all sentient life depends. More recently – as if to demonstrate the infinite magnitude of their Evil by provoking unsurvivable thermonuclear apocalypse (and not coincidentally in fulfillment of a malevolent scheme by Adolf Hitler himself) – they have imposed on the Ukraine the anti-Russian war-mongering and anti-Jewish violence of an avowedly nazi puppet government. And now the USian tyrannosaur has come home to gorge on its final and terminally ironic meal, the denizens of Moron Nation itself, not just the Moronic Majority who by their conditioned ignorance and prideful hatefulness loosed this demonically insatiable monster on the entire world, but every last one of us, every child, woman and man who is not part of the ruling aristocracy. (¶)-In these times -- the darkest and most hopeless era of our species 200,000-odd years -- our ability to effectively resist is obstructed not only by the USian regime of inescapable surveillance, but by the dreadful undertow of Moron Nation's intellectual and psychological paralysis: the deliberate deceptions and outright ignorance fostered by the capitalist “education” system; by capitalism's “mainstream media” propaganda machine (which is owned by the same smirking plutocrats whose vassal politicians so gleefully oppress us); and by the never-ending physical and psychic terrorism of capitalism's manufactured crises. (¶)-Yet resist we must. As always, art – sometimes even unwittingly – depicts our present circumstances and so foretells our future. The pagan renaissance, its resurrection of our Mother Earth as the variously named Great Goddess and the emergence of the Gaia Hypothesis as the scientific endorsement of our planet as "alive, conscious and self-regulating" tell us that even now -- though the fires of liberation seem extinguished by Stygian darkness -- their embers yet glow hot beneath the ashes, there to be once more blown aflame should we somehow find the courage and will to do so. As is said in "Biko" by the poet/musician Peter Gabriel, "You can blow out a candle/ But you can't blow out a fire/ Once the flames begin to catch/ The wind will blow it higher." Or as is said in "The Dawn Will Come" by the poet/composer Trevor Morris, "Shadows fall/ And hope has fled/ Steel your heart/ The dawn will come." (Links to each work below.)

For More Information...

A far more complete and autobiographically detailed version of "Introduction"
was published as a regular blog post – its substantially larger type also making it much more easily readable – on 23 March 2017 under the title “New Name, New Urgency as Capitalism Bares Its Nazi Fangs.”

Links relevant to Introduction

"...actual birthdate of which will eventually be recognized as 22 November 1963 -- that is, if our species somehow survives...""
The late Mae Brussell was perhaps the world's most diligent researcher into the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose (technically unsolved) murder marks the beginning of the USian descent into its own form of nazism.
"...chronicle our relentless subjugation by capitalism..."
We the people of the 99.9 Percent are being methodically reduced to slavery and serfdom by capitalist governance -- absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and their ruling class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression for all the rest of us -- and the CIA's Operation Chaos exemplifies capitalism's darkest and most malevolent aspects.
"Once the flame begins to catch/ The wind will blow it higher."
Peter Gabriel's eulogy for Stephen Biko, one of the martyrs of the South African anti-apartheid movement.
"Shadows fall and hope has fled; steel your heart; the dawn will come..."
Whether wittingly or not, composer/poet Trevor Morris has in this piece come closer than any human bard to answering an ancient riddle: "what song do the Birds of Rhiannon sing, and to what quest are we thereby summoned?"

Fire Survivors

These are some of the very few photographs that survived the 1 September 1983 arson fire that destroyed my life's work, not just most of my pictures but nearly all my writing including three books in progress and all the associated research, which I had stored with a friend in Washington state for safekeeping until I had achieved a permanent address after my return to New York City. Significantly, the fire was ignited at the exact instant I was meeting with the late Cicely Nichols, an influential book editor who believed my meticulously researched, photographically illustrated 150-thousand-word "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" and its re-definition of the 1960s Counterculture as the first wave of a spontaneous revolution against patriarchy would be one of the most important works of the 20th Century; she had thus promised to mother it to mainstream publication. Some of the photos shown here escaped the flames because they accompanied me to Manhattan in my portfolio case; others were produced digitally from negatives dug out of the rubble a year later. The images of obvious print-quality were made on DuPont Varilure paper, which had the highest silver content of all commercial papers and thus produced such intense tonalities, they often seemed illuminated by their own internal light sources. But that sort of photographic quality is now forever beyond our common reach, either gone like Varilure or so prohibitively expensive it is available only to the obscenely pampered dilettantes who produce the aesthetic pabulum favored by the .01 Percent. Photography as I knew it is dead -- as dead as my career was after the fire and its ensuing clinical depression -- but this body of work provides a glimpse of what was lost both in "Dancer" and in my more general photojournalism. All photos copyright Loren Bliss.

Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit

In photography, a sandwich is a collage made by printing two or more negatives simultaneously. Collage is a medium that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember -- probably since I was a child experimenting with finger paints, glue and newspapers -- but I never took it seriously until, sometime in my early 20s and still thinking myself a painter-to-be, I discovered the works of Jasper Johns. Now it seems to me making sandwiches is to conventional photography what poetry is to prose: not just an intellectual exercise, but the opening of a doorway to the Mysterious Otherness I know as the Muse, from whom (sometimes in fulfillment of that Jungian/McLuhanesque notion of art as prophecy) the currents of real creation invariably flow, whether swift and startling as a lightening strike or slow and soft as cottonwood seeds adrift on subtle summer air. (Collage and photographic sandwiches copyright Loren Bliss 2009-2012.)

Graffiti: a Sampler

When I returned to New York City in 1965 I was immediately impressed by the contrast between the graffiti I had encountered "out in America" -- the South and Middle West -- and what I saw in Manhattan. While the form and content of graffiti is sociologically important – possibly a semiotic indicator without peer -- I found the graffiti of Manhattan singularly appealing, the intellectual and aesthetic equivalents of a long-overdue breath of fresh air, and within a few days I had begun documenting it with 35mm and 120 film. (The opening photograph of this series was obviously made far from Manhattan, but I included it to establish an essential contrast.) Many more details about this particular body of work, which I briefly resumed when I went back to the City again in 1983, then abandoned after that year's career-terminating fire, are in my post of January 7, 2010. Yes I regard the best urban graffiti as genuine art, but too much of it, alas, is nothing more than a human variant on the mammalian practice of marking territory with spurts of urine: "I wuz here." All photos by Loren Bliss, copyright dates as noted.

Faces of the Fight

Supporters of health care reform and a much smaller number of health care reform's opponents -- each faction identified by its picket-signs -- gathered for the "town hall" meeting called by U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) in Lakewood on August 25, 2009. Originally set for Lakewood City Hall, the event was rescheduled and moved to Lang Stadium to accommodate an unprecedented mobilization of pro-reform people. Cops estimated the crowd at about 2500. Photos by Loren Bliss copyright 2009.

RELEVANT WEBSITES

Americans United for Separation of Church and State
A vital website that is often our only source of accurate information about the terrifying effort to impose zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the United States.
Associated Press
This is the major U.S. wire service, a co-op of member newspapers and broadcasters. Hence AP is (somewhat) less censored than monopoly-owned USian mainstream media, which is the world's first privately owned, for-maximum-profit variant of Josef Goebbels' Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. (To access AP's reports of the day's national and global news, click on the AP logo at the upper left corner of the page.)
Best Site for Suppressed Assassination Facts
The late Mae Brussell was our most relentless researcher into the murder of President John Kennedy and many other such outrages. Her legacy is a damning list of the USian Empire's darkest secrets.
Best, Most Thorough Documentation on the CIA's Destruction of the 1960s Counterculture
Ms. Brussel outdid herself in her nobody-dares-publish-it investigative report exposing how the CIA's Operation Chaos destroyed the 1960s Counterculture. (My assumption is the Agency, with its Ivy-League analysts and their knowledge of pagan mythology, recognized the Counterculture's anti-patriarchal, resurrection-of-the-Goddess direction, understood it as a far greater threat to Capitalism than Marxism and responded with the murderous efficiency inherited from Gestapo predecessors.)
Consortium News
Superb reporting and analysis. Founder/Editor Robert Parry exposed Reagan's Iran-Contra scheming and has been persecuted by the capitalists ever since.
der Spiegel
Mainstream German newspaper that is often a valuable source of news about Western European politics.
Global Research
A genuinely independent news site -- neither definitively Left nor Right -- that often covers stories suppressed by U.S. Mainstream Media, which (let us never forget), is owned by the same One Percenters who own the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties and thereby control all U.S. governance at every level.
Gun Owners of America
Fanatically hard-Right (and often Christonazi as well), it is nevertheless the best source for information about the One Percent's efforts to forcibly disarm the U.S. 99 Percent.
International Marxist Archive
All of Marxism's defining texts defiantly uploaded to the Internet by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as its final contribution to humanity's eternal struggle for economic democracy -- without which there is no democracy at all.
LA Progressive
A Los-Angeles-focused website, albeit similar to the pre-Murdoch Village Voice in that it often publishes censorship-defying reportage and commentary relevant to 99 Percenters everywhere in the United States.
Popular Resistance
A daily newsletter featuring essential tactical and strategic analysis plus vitally informative reports of news suppressed by the "mainstream media" propaganda machine.
Rewire
Probably the most in-depth coverage of women's issues, LGBTQ issues and general human rights issues available on the U.S. Internet today, bolstered by decidedly professional reportage and editing.
Second Amendment Foundation
Unmistakably conservative, it is also the best source on legal action in defense of our right to keep and bear arms.
Southern Poverty Law Center
Best source of information on the burgeoning plague of Nazi, Christonazi and KuKluxKlan-type hate groups in the USian imperial homeland.
The Hartmann Report
Though Thom Hartmann is a social democrat, a pacifist and an habitual defender of the "Democratic" (sic) Party, much of his investigative reporting is nevertheless superbly valuable, as he dares cover many stories routinely suppressed by the mainstream media propaganda machine.
Theocracy Watch
Cornell University's in-depth source on the escalating campaign to impose zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the USian Homeland. It is flawed only by its refusal to recognize the Democratic (sic) Party's mostly clandestine collaboration with the openly theocratic Republicans -- a collaboration revealed in frightening detail by Jeff Sharlet's "The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power"; Harper: 2008. (2023-ACCESS DENIED BY CENSORSHIP.)
Ultra Violet
Perhaps the most powerful racially integrated gender-equality organization in the United States.
World Socialist Web Site
The day's most important news, typically with the only in-depth Marxist analysis available on the U.S. Internet -- this despite constant interference by the Empire's privatized, for-profit censorship apparatus.

Loren Bliss

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