Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

WHEN I FINALLY ABANDONED my effort to make Dispatches a weekly news site and decided instead to retain its title but post only when events and (dwindling) creative impulses so demanded, my notion was I'd normally write maybe one post per month -- unless of course some breaking story required the 21st Century online equivalent of an Extra.  

(Yes I am old enough to remember when newsboys -- and very occasionally newsgirls -- hawked papers on the street: "Extra, Extra, read all about it...")

(No, not "just like in the movies"; "exactly as in what used to be real life" instead.) 

But then the net neutrality story took a new and damnably revealing turn that underscores my most recent anti-censorship essay and again demonstrates how the Left destroys its own credibility not only with censorship per se but with malicious disinformation -- in other words by behaving exactly as the ChristoNazis, Original Nazis and fascists routinely behave -- and thereby, like our enemies, serving our Overlords by further spreading chaos and confusion amongst us all, we the people of the ever-more-savagely oppressed 99 Percent, we who are ever-more-undeniably the planet's [only] remaining human beings.

Quoth the website Demand Progress in a 1 October 2019 email (bf as in original): 

A federal court just threw out a key part of Ajit Pai's repeal of net neutrality—a game-changer in the fight for net neutrality...But while we didn't get the complete win we wanted, allowing states to enact their own strong net neutrality protections is a huge deal. And we can still win at the federal level by pressing the Senate and presidential candidates to act. 

This grotesquely misleading pitch for an "emergency donation" then jumps to somewhat-less-deceptive, light-faced huckstering inside:

A federal court has just thrown out part of Ajit Pai's repeal of net neutrality. This ruling also means the 2020 presidential candidates need to step up and pledge to restore net neutrality — and we’re working hard to push them to do so. But we can’t act without your help, and time is of the essence.

All of which illustrates the knife-edged relevance of Chris Hedges' 2015 essay, "Our Mania for Hope Is a Curse" -- an essay every (allegedly) Leftist U.S. website save the notably courageous Popular Resistance has long ago maliciously suppressed as contrary to the mandatory USian  cult of (tyranny-preserving) clinically delusional optimism: 

The naive belief that history is linear, that moral progress accompanies technical progress, is a form of collective self-delusion. It cripples our capacity for radical action and lulls us into a false sense of security...

But to challenge it, to state the obvious fact that things are getting worse, and may soon get much worse, is to be tossed out of the circle of magical thinking that defines American and much of Western culture. The left is as infected with this mania for hope as the right. It is a mania that obscures reality even as global capitalism disintegrates and the ecosystem unravels, potentially dooming us all...

The 19th century theorist, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, dismissed the belief, central to Karl Marx, that human history is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality...

"Its regressive march," (Blanqui asserted) "goes back through every stage of privilege to human slavery, the final word of the right to property.”

And again it is the eloquently truthful Mr. Hedges who tells us why not only revolution but even the most minimal humanitarian reforms are impossible at present and will undoubtedly remain so for as long as the USian ethos of compulsory delusion paralyzes the Occidental mind, exactly as our diabolically Machiavellian masters intend: 

Only those who accept the very real possibility of dystopia, of the rise of a ruthless corporate totalitarianism, buttressed by the most terrifying security and surveillance apparatus in human history, are likely to carry out the self-sacrifice necessary for revolt.

Meanwhile Credo -- a self-proclaimed "progressive" marketeer that implicitly promotes the notion Capitalism is humanitarianism -- a vivid example indeed of what George Orwell aptly labeled "doublethink" --  has nevertheless (to its credit) reported the partial truth about net neutrality's extermination. 

Quoth Credo:

Yesterday, a federal appeals court affirmed that the Federal Communications Commission's murder of the internet was lawful.

But then of course the Credo text continued pimping the Democratic (sic) Party's hallucinatory agenda of Hope and Change-We-Can-Believe-In by absurdly claiming the same bipartisan cabal of perpe-traitors can somehow (as if by magic) be pressured to restore net neutrality on a national basis -- never mind the lifetime (hence effectively eternal)¹  ChristoNazi control of the Supreme Court forever nullifies all such efforts.        

Not surprisingly, the most factually complete report of this ongoing Neoliberal atrocity -- an atrocity that will undoubtedly be grown to national proportions by the Robbers' Court -- is by a harder-to-censor wire service, specifically the Associated Press, the text of which was also featured by TruthDig:

The Federal Communications Commission could dump rules that keep internet providers from favoring some services over others, but couldn’t bar states like California from enacting their own prohibitions, a federal court ruled.

While Tuesday’s ruling handed Trump-appointed regulators a partial victory, consumer advocates and other groups viewed the ruling as a victory for states and local governments seeking to put in their own net neutrality rules.

The FCC’s 2015 net neutrality rules had barred internet providers such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon from blocking, slowing down or charging internet companies to favor some sites or apps over others.

Once again the Norman Vincent Peale disciples  and all the other power-of-positive-thinking pimps are confronted with the ultimate truth their historically illiterate, clinically delusional belief "the arc of history bends toward justice" is one of the two the most monstrously crippling Big Lies ever imposed on human beings. 

The other Big Lie? The equally delusional, equally paralyzing belief in "eternal life" -- which commands its deliberately duped millions to submit to the Neoliberal horrors by which our masters are slowly exterminating us and to focus gaining on the nonexistent rewards of "heaven"  instead.

All that said, the many-times-cited reason I seldom bother to report anything about the net-neutrality squabble is my recognition of Neoliberal murderousness tells me any notion of its restoration is but pie-in-the-sky.

Why?

Because one of the primary objectives of the Neoliberal (NeoNazi) New World Order is the malicious denial -- ultimately the zero-tolerance denial -- of any  information that might be useful to us, we the people of the 99 Percent, lest we awaken to the fact "Neoliberal" is already secret synonym for "enslavement"
___________________________

¹The death of net neutrality is "effectively eternal" because whatever reality prevails at the moments of our deaths is literally "forever" in the sense that any change, tyrannizing or liberating,  that takes place after one's death -- the permanent eradication of one's consciousness -- can never be known by the dead.

*****

A Dozen Relevant Reports I Hope You Will Read and Contemplate

NORMALLY I WOULD have set these aside to be posted as recommended reading once each month. But the last week produced so many such stories, my collection-file was soon overflowing. Hence:  

Report Highlights Gender Inequality Worldwide
Women are often at a disadvantage compared to men. A study shows where in the world the situation is especially dramatic -- and which countries are the closest to reaching gender equality. Description: conceptually useful geographic details of the patriarchal/Abrahamic/Capitalist/Neoliberal/NeoNazi horrors with which we are already familiar.

Secret Israeli Nuclear Test Covered Up to Help Jimmy Carter’s Re-Election
Former President Jimmy Carter covered up a nuclear weapon test by Israel in 1979, declassified reports have suggested. His administration feared that making the discovery public would damage his bid for re-election. U.S. satellites picked up a “double flash” signal associated with a nuclear explosion in the South Indian Ocean in September 1979. This led to an emergency at the White House, according to Foreign Policy magazine which obtained the documents.

Washington's Coastal Tribes Are Working to Escape Rising Sea Levels
For the Native tribes that have historically lived along Washington’s Pacific coast, the threat of rising waters is real and imminent. As a result, many must grapple with the forced relocation of entire villages to higher ground before their homes are submerged. Dystopic Observation: But, as always -- this misleadingly optimistic report not withstanding -- our genocidal overlords continue doing everything in their white-supremacist power to condemn the tribes to extinction, whether by surging sea levels or myriad other mechanisms of slow-motion genocide. 

One Year after Khashoggi Murder, US CEOs Flock to Saudi Arabia
At least 40 US executives are preparing to attend the annual Future Investment Initiative (FII) conference, dubbed “Davos in the Desert,” at the end of this month. Many of them bailed out of last year’s event, held just weeks after Khashoggi’s killing, sending subordinates to represent them in order to avoid being seen as openly endorsing the murderous methods of the Saudi monarchy. Casting such qualms aside this year, senior executives from Wall Street’s top financial firms—Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and BlackRock—are all listed...

Boeing Engineer Filed Complaint Alleging Culture of Profit Over Safety
A senior Boeing engineer filed an internal ethics complaint this year following two fatal 737 Max crashes, claiming that the company rejected a safety system during the plane's development to cut costs though it could have reduced the risks, according to the New York Times. In the complaint, which Boeing has sent to the Justice Department, the engineer Curtis Ewbank alleged, "Boeing management was more concerned with cost and schedule than safety or quality," according to the newspaper, which has reviewed the complaint...Ewbank also called out Boeing's chief executive Dennis Muilenburg for publicly misrepresenting the safety of the plane, the newspaper reported. DO: Welcome to the deadly skies of Capitalism.

NATO Rejects Putin's Request to Ban Missile Deployments in Europe
At the end of this week NATO announced a bombshell that’s gone largely under-reported given the Ukraine transcript brouhaha and Democrats’ push for impeachment.

Bigots Welcome on America's Police Forces
In June, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting identified hundreds of police officers across the country who were members of closed racist, Islamophobic, misogynistic or anti-government militia groups on Facebook. We sought reaction from more than 150 law enforcement departments about their officers’ involvement in these extremist groups. Yet only one department – the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, which fired a detective for racist posts – has publicly taken any significant action.

Democrats Refuse to Include Gang Members in 'Red Flag' Laws
Democrats showed their lack of interest in gun control laws that address the real source of gun violence this week when they refused to include gang members in “Red Flag” laws. DO: Thus the Democratic (sic) Party's role as chief perpe-traitor of the Ruling Class effort to frog-boil all us Working Class folks to compulsory pacifism continues apace -- never mind the ChristoNazification of the federally militarized local police means the cops' storm-trooper allies will of course -- exactly as in Nazi Germany -- be allowed to keep their weapons and thereby given carte blanche to terrorize us at will. (This report is unapologetically linked from a Rightist website because all major U.S. Leftist sites forbid pro-Second-Amendment coverage.)   

US Census Report: Inequality Grew Rapidly in 2018 to Record Levels
Social inequality in the United States is rapidly reaching unprecedented levels, according to US Census data published Thursday. The past year saw a staggering transfer of wealth from the bottom 90 percent of the population to the top 10 and top 5 percent. This is the intended result of the bipartisan social counterrevolution intensified by Barack Obama and carried to a fever pitch by Donald Trump, who has slashed corporate taxes and regulations with no opposition from Democrats in Congress.

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders Blow Past Joe Biden in Fundraising Race
Presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders greatly eclipsed former Vice President Joe Biden in fundraising over the past three months, placing progressive Democrats on strong footing in the crucial final stretch before primary voting begins. RELEVANCE: The significant part of this story is its comment thread, specifically -- again apropos our censorship topic -- the overwhelmingly negative reaction I got for pointing out that Sanders' heart attack makes him un-electable. 

The Corporate Democrats (and Alicia Garza) Spewing Get-Sanders Slanders
Once the Bernie Sanders threat has subsided, Elizabeth Warren will be required to further neuter herself to allay the fears of billionaire Democratic donors...The War of/on Terror and Russiagate – both involving mass psychological warfare operations to stamp out domestic resistance to the global U.S. imperial offensive – signaled that the Lords of Capital’s tolerance for dissent was approaching zero. The contradictions of late stage capitalism and the increasing precariousness of U.S. empire squeezed all vestiges of liberality out of the boardrooms, as was reflected in the content of their ever-consolidating media. DO: written before Sanders' heart attack, this essay approaches genuine prophecy.

Earth’s Magnetic Field Mysteriously Pushing North Pole to Siberia
Earth’s magnetic field, the basis for modern global navigation systems, is constantly in some state of flux. However, it now seems to be going haywire, pushing the North Pole closer to Siberia, and no one’s sure why. The field changes as the molten metals surrounding the earth’s solid iron core churn and flow, creating electric currents and a corresponding magnetic field. As a result, the magnetic poles tend to shift slightly as a matter of course...(but)...The north magnetic pole sped across the International Date Line last year at a rate of 55 km per year, more than three times as fast as it moved before the mid-1990s. Now located in the Eastern Hemisphere, it’s moving away from Canada and approaching Siberia. Important detail: This report includes the most spectacular photo of the Aurora Borealis I have ever seen.

*****

IF WE ARE ever to cope with what is being done to us, we need to first transcend decades of carefully induced clinical delusion and admit why the Neoliberal (NeoNazi) Ruling Class is  reducing  our  once  beautiful  and productive nation to naught but a continent-sized miasma of burnt forests, slums, homeless camps, concentration camps, prisons and ever-more-heavily guarded military cantonments. The reason we are being drowned in destitution is simple: the Capitalists' genocidal exploitation of people and ecocidal rape of Nature is far more profitable in colonial realms more easily terrorized to submission.  Thus our domestic overlords are turning back to their ancestral source of obscene wealth: we the people, whom our overlords are quickly reducing to slavery -- which they in their greedy sadistic malevolence hail as the ultimate form of profiteering.

LB/4 October 2019

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