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INTRODUCTION

  • HOW DO I CHOOSE STORIES
    for inclusion in the "Coronavirus Update"? Essentially -- and in keeping with today's (unequivocally apocalyptic) context -- it is a matter of relevance plus probability of censorship.  I ask myself three  questions: firstly, is a given story useful – a term in this context I use as synonymous with relevant. If the answer is yes, I than ask, secondly, how likely is it to be suppressed by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine. And here my rule is one of inverse returns: the less likely I think I am to see the story disseminated via the MMPM, the more likely I am to include it in these daily anthologies. Reports that pass the first two tests are each then subjected to the third and final test: do they include indications from which we might evolve estimates of our situations accurate enough to facilitate effective response? If the answer here is also affirmative, the report in question will always be included in the daily update. Meanwhile the first two criteria generate a lengthy list of possibles I winnow down to probables and thence to musts, a process that takes approximately seven or eight hours each day. (¶)-Beyond that, it's on the basis of my news judgment as it evolved during my 64 years as a writer, photographer and editor, three decades of which were in the working press. (Despite an on-and-off involvement with the alternative press that began in 1963, all but about three of those first 30 earning-years were primarily in the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine, at least half in jobs where much of my responsibility was deciding what stories we would publish and on what pages they would appear. My job titles ranged from sports editor and associate editor to city editor, news-and-picture editor and editor-in-chief. (¶)-For most of those years, it seemed a promising career. But as my colleagues moved stealthily Rightward, so did I move ever-more-openly Leftward, until eventually I was Left...outside.) (¶)-Meanwhile "Dispatches from Dystopia," dispatchesfromdystopia.net, which evolved from the less sharply focused "Outside Agitator's Notebook," has under the deadly pressure of the coronavirus pandemic become precisely what its title and domain name describes. It is an ongoing anthology of reports, analyses, commentaries, photographs and other anti-Capitalist testimony from the Dystopia that Neoliberal (neo-fascist) Capitalism has made of our world. It's epicenter is the post-humanitarian United States of America: our species' self-inflicted Moron Nation and its empire of global-conquest malevolence, the de facto Fourth Reich, the true birthdate of which will eventually be recognized – if indeed our species somehow miraculously survives the present era – as 22 November 1963. (¶)-Dispatches thus chronicles our relentless subjugation by Capitalism as it (inevitably) reverts to its traditional might-makes-right savagery and – just as Capitalism previously transformed itself into Italian Fascism and German Nazism – as it now matures into a Nazism of uniquely USian form and content. By examining the details of what is occurring, 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 genocidal, ultimately ecocidal atrocities the Capitalist Ruling Class 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 USiaNazi enslavement. 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, its only possible 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, filth, deadly danger of untreated disease and constant fear of 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 One 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 One 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 the Capitalist victim realms abroad. (¶)-Moreover much of our plight is of our own making. We the People 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, in the person of Donald Trump and his appointees, the USian tyrannosaur has come home to gorge on its final and terminally ironic meal, the denizens of Moron Nation itself, the people who by their prideful ignorance and hatefulness loosed this demonically insatiable monster on the entire world. (¶)-But in these times 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 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. And as it says in a breathtakingly apt, wrenchingly poignant anthem grown increasingly popular far beyond its video-game origin, “shadows fall and hope is gone; steel your heart; the dawn will come.”

For More Information...

Links relevant to Introduction

Fire Survivors

  • After the Demonstration Failed
    These are some of the very few photographs that survived the 1983 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. Some of these photos shown here escaped the flames because they were with me 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 One 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 and what might have been. All photos copyright Loren Bliss.

Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit

  • Goddess emergent (1), 1968 (blue variant c. 2009)
    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 fulfilment of that 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

  • Gun Graffiti
    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

  • Health Care For All!
    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.
  • 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.)
  • Communist Labor Party
    Communism as it is evolving in the United States after the murder of the American Dream and the slaying of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy.
  • Communist Labor Party's Harry Bridges Club (Facebook)
    Communism as it is evolving in Tacoma, Washington.
  • 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 ChristoFascist 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.
  • 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.
  • RT
    Formerly "Russia Today," it accurately covers U.S. news the "mainstream media" propaganda machine routinely suppresses. Its notable work includes the nation's best coverage of the Occupy Movement (2011-2012), and the ongoing struggles of Black Lives Matter, Water Protectors and other such groups against the Empire's now-openly-fascist policies of homeland governance.
  • Second Amendment Foundation
    Unmistakably conservative, it is also the best source on legal action in defense of our right to keep and bear arms.
  • Socialist Worker
    An informative Marxist website in the United States, with news reporting and analysis that is usually far superior to anything fed us by capitalism's "mainstream media" propaganda machine.
  • Southern Poverty Law Center
    Best source of information on the burgeoning plague of Nazi, ChristoFascist and KuKluxKlan-type hate groups in the USian imperial homeland.
  • TASS, the Russian Wire Service
    Vital reading, especially now that the USian Empire's plans for global conquest have rekindled the so-called Cold War.
  • 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).
  • TruthOut
    Generally reliable crowd-funded news site sometimes featuring cogent sociological analysis by Henry Giroux. Discussion thread's potential limited by Discus, which discourages posting of comments written off-site.
  • Ultra Violet
    Perhaps the most powerful racially integrated gender-equality organization in the United States.
  • World Socialist Web Site
    The day's news, typically with the most in-depth Marxist analysis available on the U.S. Internet -- this despite constant interference by the Empire's privatized, for-profit censorship apparatus.
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08 December 2019

Forget the Impeachment Charade; Here's a Taste of Real News

NO I DIDN'T STUTTER; yes I regard "impeachment" as an archetypal Neoliberal crusade, infinite noise and zero action, intended to preserve the ecogenocidal Big Lie of USian "democracy" by protecting the perpe-traitors whether governmental or cor-pirate while providing sufficient circuses to distract Moron Nation from its ever-worsening lack of bread whether edible or spendable. 

(For detailed elaboration of my views about impeachment -- which thus far is the Democratic (sic) Party's scam of the century -- go to comment threads here,  here and here. )

Now on to an anthology of reports I recommend as essential to our understanding of the ever-more-nightmarish era in which we Working Class folk abide (upper and lower case -- "upscale" and "downscale" in newsroom parlance --  as in originals) :

Dangerous Levels of Warming Locked In by Planned Jump in Fossil Fuels Output
As I concluded last year and have been saying ever since -- no doubt why I am the target of (thus far) low-intensity electronic harassment -- the ever-more-blatantly obvious explanation for such deliberately ecogenocidal policies is that our Neoliberal Masters have weaponized terminal climate change to serve their Shock-Doctrine agenda of perpetuating their technological omnipotence by radical population reduction. Which if you read their ideological sequels to Mein Kampf is to be by elimination of 90  to 95 percent of the present global population: thus to (A)-exterminate all so-called "surplus" humans and (B)-position the survivors for easy reduction to inescapable slavery by their omnipotent Masters. Indeed it is not hyperbole to state the Masters' long-term goal is to transmogrify the entire planetary economy into a modern variant of the antebellum slave plantation, policed of course by the highest-tech, most viciously zero-tolerance  slave-patrol surveillance ever known. (Cheap, too -- especially with all-seeing airborne drones that kill on sight.)

Patriot Act extension concealed in funding bill passed by House Democrats
The party of Barack the Betrayer and the Clinton War-Crime Family continues its real-world function as the Fifth Column of the party of Ronnie the Nazi and Gerald the Pardoner. (And yet Moron Nation is brain-warped-ignorant enough to continue believing the Democratic (sic) Party, like Jesus or Santa Claus, will rescue it from Neoliberal ecogenocide.)

Under Trump, LGBTQ Progress Is Being Reversed in Plain Sight
A core part of Abrahamic religion's misogynistic agenda is exterminating human sexual freedom and (again) reducing all women to chattel by keeping them barefoot and pregnant and otherwise effectively burka-ed on the outskirts of town and beyond the Pale of society. (This of course is but a subset of the inbred misogyny by which all three Abrahamic religions -- Judasism, Christianity, Islam -- justify their ecogenocidal hatred of our Mother Earth.) (Disclosure: I have lesbian and gay kinfolk, hence am acutely conscious of how this often-deadly malevolence already wracks their lives.) 

Unprecedented 'Architecture of Surveillance' Created by Facebook and Google Poses Grave Human Rights Threat
As I have pointed out more times than I can count, what else might one expect when the computer as we know it is a product of IBM's collaboration with Nazi Germany to facilitate the Holocaust, and the Internet itself is the purposeful creation of the USian imperial war machine?

Half of American Men Can’t Handle the Prospect of a Woman President
Misogynists R Us. See also New Trump Advisory Board Member: ‘Men And Women Are Not Equal’

A Miscarrying Woman Nearly Died After a Catholic Hospital Sent Her Home Three Times
Christianity as USian state religion: yet another of the innumerable atrocities piusly inflicted. 

The US Is Not 'Losing' Its Democracy, It's Already Long Gone
As I said on the comment thread, "However if the Capitalists are to be properly caged and controlled, we must first recognize that they are all -- every patriarchal one of them -- quite literally the deadliest predators ever to prey on this planet."

Virginia labor targets ‘right to work’; governor may stand in the way
Again, the party of the Betrayer in definitive Fifth Column action.

Michael Bloomberg Formalizes Anti-Gun, Climate Crisis Campaign Agenda
Exactly as I predicted, with Bloomberg's tyrannical intent camouflaged by instigating fearful hatred against legal firearms owners and pretending to cope with the climate-crisis. In truth the climate-crisis part is  still more Obamanoid "change we can believe in,"  political sleight-of-hand as maliciously deft as anything I have yet seen. Meanwhile ask yourself why -- if not to clear the way for final imposition of zero-tolerance Neoliberal tyranny -- would our Masters be imposing forcible disarmament on legal, law-abiding firearms owners? (Alas, Moron Nation is ignorant enough -- and therefore gullible enough -- to fall for Bloomberg's lies.)

Trump administration food stamp cuts spell hunger and destitution for millions
As I said in the comment thread of an earlier story on this atrocity:  "Again, genocide by any other name: the defining policy of Neoliberalism, the rationale for which is given by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf (NSDAP Printing Office, Munich: 1930; Ford Translation, Elite Minds Inc., U.S.A.: 2010). See especially page 247: The struggle for daily bread conquers the weak, sickly and undecided...If any other process were the choice of Nature, all development and evolution would cease and the progress so far achieved would reverse...Given equal opportunities for survival and reproduction, the worst part of a species would increase so much faster than the smaller numbers of quality members...A correction that favors the dominance of the better individual must take place. Presumably I need not point out that slashing food-stamps for nearly 700,000 hopelessly impoverished humans is just such a 'correction.'" The earlier story is here.

“Booming” Economy Means More Bad Jobs and Faster Race to the Bottom
The core intent of the Neoliberals writ in homeless camps and permanently destroyed human lives.

Responses of African-American Women to Washington’s Paid Family & Medical Leave Program
Recognizing the intensifying sadism of Moron Nation's resurrected racism, Black women say they're terrified of being fired should they dare claim the benefits to which in Washinghton state they are now legally entitled -- a modern variant on minority-peoples' old-as-the-Empire fear of being lynched merely for asserting their rights.

Here -- because whenever possible I like to end these periodic preachments with less-pessimistic reports -- is further evidence  dogs (and canines in general), are this planet's true apex species: Loyal sheepdog tries to hunt down truck transporting his flock to the slaughterhouse

LB/8 December 2019

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Posted at 11:25 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Environmental crisis, Guns: Forcible Civilian Disarmament, Healthcare, LGBTQ , Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Poor People, Religion, Seniors , Web/Tech |

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