Antifa

Duke U's Capitalists Prove It's (Mostly) ChristoNazi Chaos-Seekers Who Flatulate Fake News; Thanks to Our Species' Deadliest-Ever (Failed) State, They Now Pimp Mass Extinction

image from lorenbliss.typepad.comPhotographic illustration by Loren Bliss ©1968, 1974, 2012

(One of those sudden mysterious creative  impulses prompted me during a night of darkroom work  in 1968  to contemplatively sandwich a '67 negative of Hare Krishna dancers with a '67 neg of  anti-Vietnam-War protestors; I impulsively added the moon with my photo-editor's punch in '74 while contemplating whether to print it for a Seattle gallery show, as I then did. It survived the '83 arson only because it was among the mounted prints  with me in my portfolio case. Today, I am astounded by how relevant these images remain.)

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(Author's Note: because this is such a long post -- 8606 words -- I respectfully suggest
separate reading and contemplation periods  for each of the eight passages
set off by the five-asterisk dashes [*****] as complete essays.)

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IRONICALLY, IT'S THE (Kapitalismus-uber-alles) Business Administration Department at (private) Duke University that has exposed our Masters'  academese-obscured, price-censored, banner-headline-caliber abstract of horrifying (real) news  soon downsized to a crisis-minimizing fourth paragraph predictably buried by the Republican Fifth Column at Politco.com,which -- despite obvious attempts by the authors of each text to discourage perusal by Working-Class1 readers -- proves beyond question how and why a tiny cult of deliberately chaos-fostering fake-news perpe-traitors are intentionally destroying the already dis-United States.

It also proves our Masters' choice  of ecogenocidal psychopaths -- the potentially suicidal snot-bombers our Masters' vassals most likely sought in focus-groups and then probably recruited and paid to propagate with their Big Lies  the deceitfully named "Neoliberalism" (sic) that euphemistically hides its mutated Nazism as "Neoliberalism" (again sic't)  (each sarcastically quotation-marked sic as an entree to exposing how "Neoliberalism" (sic't once more) is now protected by a cloak of Goebbels-caliber disinformation) to conceal our Masters' thorough Nazification of "Neoliberalism" (sic) --  originally  by the secret  renewal and export of the apocalyptic ideologies of Original German Nazism and by OGN's ChristoNazi, NeoNazi and Neofascist pseudo-mutations, and thus sic't one last time in this essay. 

My point is, "Neoliberalism" is neither new or liberal; it is every bit as much deception -- and therefore yet another proof of Ruling Class malevolence --  as "change we can believe in."

Meanwhile let us never forget Neoliberalism's sources include Ayn Rand's wretchedly written fictional popularizations of the Nazi ethos, all critically damned as literary garbage that would never have been published save for Plutocratic intervention and is now all-too-often-required reading in what are therefore falsely described as "literature" classes. These often-mandatory Ayn Rand studies invariably seduce Moronic-Majority types to embrace a Nazism they are thus often unable to recognize as such.

As I describe in a subsequent essay below,  it is just such ignorance that enabled someone I had presumed to be friend for nearly 40 years to send me a deluge of pro-Nazi links (fake news included), and when I criticized the choices in a return email, the response was first a long silence followed by a denunciation of me in print as an enemy, the only mercy thus shown being the omission of my name, perhaps with the knowledge its publication might combine with the fact I am a known anti-Nazi, a position that today is becoming as dangerous as it was to have been  an advocate of civil rights in the Jim Crow South, which I also was. 

Too bad most of us have forgotten that among the parents and grandparents of today's Nazis were the murderers of 41 Blacks and civil-rights advocates, their courageous but fatal dedication to the quest for freedom now reduced by the moral imbecility of the present to little more than -- what? A struggle for nothing? Given what this nation has become, who can doubt the final triumph of their enemies? Capturing the government so all but maybe  three solidly "Democratic" (sic) far-west states (with enough combined economic power to easily support themselves), and the much smaller (and therefore less economically able) eastern states, our Masters have already made of most of the national interior a potential New Confederacy, the ad hoc militias of which no doubt await our Masters' marching orders with the same insane eagerness that defined the Southron traitors of 1861. 

The diametrical opposite of yesteryear's well-armed abolitionists, too many of us who  oppose these traitors are cravenly disarming themselves -- an apocalyptic expression, I fear, of the cowardice that makes a soldier fling away his rifle and surrender to the enemy in hope of mercy that ends when the victorious soldier then kills the surrenderer, instantaneously by shooting if there's not an ammunition shortage; by much more grotesque and agonizing methods if ammo is in short supply.  In any case it's a battlefield occurrence far more common then a lifelong diet of USian war propaganda will ever allow us to believe. (To my knowledge Hollywood has never made -- nor ever will make -- a genuine anti-war film, especially of the sort produced by the Soviet Union.) But that's an aside, another of our paths for future exploration. The critical point here is extent to which, thanks to the another Fifth Column service provided our Masters by the "Democratic" (sic) Party's anti-gunowner movement, the populations in those states that are mostly likely to be victimized by Nazi aggression are increasingly disarmed. Thus they are literally reduced to the mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood that defines slaves. Which is precisely how the Democrats are busily ensuring how once fuse of civil war is lit, any anti-Nazi stronghold is doomed,  making the outcome of any future struggle to preserve the coastal states from Nazi conquest  pathetically obvious.

Thus today the utter futility of the Civil Rights Movement and the ultimate sacrifices made by its 41 martyrs is accepted as proven fact; indeed today's Nazis hail the  murders as examples of  the proper response when any member of the üntermenschen demands recognition of rights the Supreme Court is busily nullifying, obviously intent on terminating every civil protection we the people have ever managed to obtain.   In some instances the Nazis have actually used CRM and its subsequent undoing as proof of the rightness of white supremacy; they claim the Black quest for equality itself proved the Ku Klux Klaim  that while Blacks are biologically human, their brains have never evolved beyond those of the apes by which they were ancestored. That such inferiors would dare rise up, say the Nazis, merely  proves they were fools; the subsequent undoing of their foolishness, now 100 percent successful, is thus manipulated  to further confirm their creed of white supremacy.   

Having been a small but sometimes influential part of CRM -- the latter because I managed to remain a member of the working press during most of my remaining time in Tennessee   -- the Klan made at least four attempts on my life  -- possibly six, if I count two attempted vehicular assaults while traveling the era's two-lane blacktop highways, though these might only have been early explosions of road rage prompted by the obvious superiority of the machines that facilitated my escape, the Porsche whose emergency brake would later save my life, and a friend's Triumph TR-4 I was driving as practice for post-Porsche participation in a mountain-road rally. 

In retrospect, and from an increasingly physically disabled old age, my escapes from martyrdom tend to seem ever-more-miraculous. In reality they were the due to a combination of factors, paramount among them the defensive  prowess of a fine German shepherd, later poisoned in retaliation,  and the killer-discouragement inherent in my own already well-known skill with firearms. While I was and remain a firm believer in political nonviolence, I have also always believed that when you are attacked as a  lone individual, especially at home or while out-and-about as when grocery shopping,  you should defend yourself with whatever force is necessary to remain among the living.

Knowing  CRM  as I do, I am ever-more-convinced it was the last genuinely enlightened mass movement the United States will ever produce. Its internal factionalism -- ideological differences ranging from  gradualism to various intensities of belief in non-violent protest -- was always obvious during strategic and tactical discussions. But, by mutual consent, it was never allowed to overwhelm the intensity of our belief in our collective right -- "Black and White Together" was the era's slogan -- to  fulfill the Constitution's supposed intent by achieving for Blacks and other peoples of color the same degree of freedom allowed us whites. For whatever reason, we have since shed what I now must suppose was merely a veneer of civilization -- the mutual tolerance that actually, for a brief period starting in maybe 1932 and undoubtedly ended forever in Dallas on 22 November 1963, enabled us to function as a unified modern society.

However, given how, thanks to my British/Canadian heritage, I knew from boyhood the so-called "American Revolution" was at its heart a reaction to the British judiciary's 1772 ruling that Blacks are fully human, the fact we as a nation seemed to be moving ever closer to to fulfillment of the goals of the few abolitionists who were among the Founders always felt, to me, like too much of a miracle to prevail. As indeed it proved to be,  overthrown not by invasion, but by the most in-depth, all-encompassing, ultimately omnipotent program of subversion ever undertaken by any known human agency. 

How did it win? It adjudged greed to be the only truly common human denominator,  targeted its subversion accordingly and has been incessantly victorious ever since. Behind this I sense (but surely cannot prove) the same invisible force that reached out to me in 1983 to validate my life's work with arson at the exact moment I was meeting with the well-connected freelance editor who had pledged to bring its most important project to publication That all such hopes have since been slain by our Masters -- that the deaths of the movement's martyrs were now obviously all in vain -- pains me to such an extent it indeed makes my physical survival seem all the more miraculous. Perhaps, as even many avowed secularists are coming to believe, ours' truly is an accursed species. 

Returning to present-day events, let us not allow our daily dosage of horrors real and fake to distract us from how the fake-news onslaught by  ecogenocidal psycopathic liars includes doing whatever our Masters prescribe to further -- generally by concealment --  the terminally devolutionary terraforming of our earthly Motherland. Among the ever-more-obvious long-range purposes  of the ongoing Fake News Onslaught is generating sufficient quantities of what we might term "crisis fog" -- i.e., the sense of bewildered hopelessness produced when self and community are repeatedly trashed by storms and evictions and other disasters  even as the U.S. response to the pandemic makes it clear our Masters have unquestionably weaponized the virus to rid themselves of us "surplus workers."

Add in the ongoing threat of world war; the anxiety produced by looming Nazi victory and radically intensified by the probability the Nazis have already conquered the dis-United States;  growing fears of runaway inflation, and of course Covid, which the permanently Nazified SCOTUS has weaponized into a sure nation-killer, which means the death rate will continue to soar accordingly.  It's no surprise national anxiety is soaring.

As the mainstream media propaganda machine is showing its pro-Nazi bias by not telling us, Biden the Beguiler could quickly end inflation fears by re-creating the Office of Price Administration, the agency that kept Capitalism's top-hatted, silk-suited closet-Nazi predators  from destroying the nation with their greed c. 1941-1947). OPA was created by executive order, which means Biden could do it again, which in turn means his refusal to do so is an excellent indication of the strength of the financial tethers by which our Masters have reduced all oval-office occupants to naught but obedient puppets. A new OPA to ameliorate the ever-more-apocalyptic spasms of our Masters greed?  Not a chance; I think it safe to assume there is not a single professional politician anywhere in the United States  who has not been enslaved by our Masters' bribery  since the Supreme Court knowingly destroyed the nation with its Citizens United decision in 2010 -- about which more in a moment.

For now suffice it to say the court's traitorous redefinition of dollars as words and thus due the same constitutional protection made it legal for the plutocrats to financially enslave every politician in the land. As a result we now live under a de facto dictatorship infinitely more cunning and technologically powerful than any of its human predecessors -- a realm in which SCOTUS is now removing all the remaining obstacles to our Masters' final achievement of their fathers' and grandfathers' traitorous dreams of a Nazi United States, Hitler's ever-more-obviously anointed successor-nation  fulfilling der Führer's of a thoroughly Nazi world. 

One of the many indexes to our Masters' (absolute) power is  the extent to which they're using the court's atrocities to distract us from our species' deadliest most pressing crisis ever. Our Masters have generated a crisis fog -- real and fake news included -- so thick it seems to have  cloaked terminal climate change to invisibility. But in truth we have made it invisible for the same reason the anti-war movement is not even a shadow of its former self: war is another of the threats about which about which we are convinced we can do nothing whatsoever. And it is also surely true no anti-war movement in the post-JFK U.S. has ever done more than spawn a flurry of news reports that subsequent events proved were nothing more than introductions to obituaries, as at Kent State University and Jackson State College; and if we choose to close-focus this matter, let us start with Karen Silkwood, then expand our vision into all the other murders of heroic individuals and celebrities and then of folks who were unfortunate enough to have been somewhere at the wrong time, all these deaths linked by political undertones.

Obviously a long-ago lover spoke an ultimate truth as we watched Jack Ruby murder Lee Harvey Oswald;  we were eating room-service breakfast  and watching CBS News: "My god, we live in a banana republic," she said, her olive-green eyes flooding with tears. To which, 59 years later, I can only add, "You were right; and now Donald Trump intends to be top banana." Which awakens my investigative-reporter's mind just enough to make  me wonder if maybe his seeming unstop-ability is ultimately just the result of knowing where more bodies are buried. Such is life -- and death -- in a plutocracy ruled by an invisible cabal of zillionaire moral imbeciles.  

Meanwhile -- thanks to the combination of crisis-fog and the daily unfolding of additional horrors both real and faked -- our ultra-misogynistic Masters continue unchecked their ecogenocidal aggression against our Mother Earth, seemingly intent on reducing her back to the bug-ruled planet into which she properly began evolving in the Ordovican, a mere 480 million years ago. This is accomplished by any number of policies, court-edicts, toxins and diseases -- among the vectors  the same tiny let's-inflict-globally-irreversible-chaos cult of (mostly) ChristoNazis and NeoNazis,  the most obviously  hateful of the anti-mask/anti-vax agitators.

Now perhaps it will also dawn on us the irremediably Nazified U.S. Supreme Court obviously shares the nation-destroying intent of the fake-news mongers. The court is, now and therefore probably forever, reduced to yet another of our Masters' most reliable puppets. It is   ruled is by a sextet of ecogenocidal theocrats,  a trio of whom began our Masters' Citizen United's SCOTUS-approved funding of the federal union's destruction. The fact of  the court's lifetime appointments ensure its one remaining function is to legitimize whatever our Masters want done to complete the ChristoNazification of the entire nation.

The presence of solid pockets of continued anti-Nazi, anti-theocratic resistance in some of the coastal states -- see maps here and here --  is a threat our Masters obviously intend to suppress by more typical Nazi methods, for  vivid previews of which go here and here. Warning: both these films have scenes of the mass murders by which the German Nazis proudly defined their rights as world-ruling  übermenschen.  Nevertheless I urge you to view them precisely because they show us what is sure to happen here in the dis-United States once our Masters' SCOTUS vassals have given them enough mechanism of control, the extermination of opponents becomes no more difficult than  ordering a servant to take up a swatter and kill the houseflies that, thanks to terminal climate change, are descending on us in ever increasing numbers. (Note that in the polio era, the housefly was considered the deadliest  disease-vector on the planet.) That servant is in all probability someone who recognizes such servitude as a modern form of enslavement but also recognizes our Masters' omnipotence and thus knows or at least senses our species has been reduced to such an oppressed state,  there is no longer any nation in the world committed to slavery's overthrow; resistance truly is futile. 

Meanwhile  our Masters have  knowingly dosed our obviously disintegrating nation's NeoConfederate rabble with deadly ChristoNazi lies and paranoia, much of  it vectored by the fake-news snot-bombers. The Moronic Majority's impassioned belief in these falsifications has grown so imperative, SCOTUS  is now making law of them. Hence their  relentless edicts of anti-humanitarian subversion include an allegedly "Constitutional" foundation for an utterly terrifying expansion of the anti-vax/anti-mask suicidal snot-bombers' cult's alleged "right" to exterminate the entire global population by what is now undeniably our Masters' biological warfare weapon

In other words, SCOTUS has unleashed de facto lynch mobs of murderously unmasked and suicidally un-vaccinated snot-bombers to infect us with  the virus that has already proven itself the doomsday bug for at least 18 million dead women, men and children -- our Nazi-controlled government's most radical escalation yet of the deadly snot-bomber onslaught by which Covid's homicidal vectors have repeatedly attacked us since the pandemic got here in late 2019.

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BUT IS THE U.S. truly the world's deadliest failed state? Here are more links to help you decide for yourself:

The proto-Nazi exterminators of the North American First Nations  literally built the United States on a foundation of rotting corpses -- the murdered bodies of at least 95 million native women, children and men -- as far as anybody knows, the deadliest holocaust in the 200,000-plus years of our species' existence. Nor has anything since ever quelled our national blood-lust: by 2007, the Empire's post-World-War-II body-count was already approaching 30 million.

In 2010, SCOTUS issued the Citizens United edict, about which -- inspired in large measure by the MSNBC-broadcast original of the above-linked Keith Olbermann video -- I wrote of the court's decree with properly prophetic harshness, the accuracy of my suppositions since fully confirmed,  in small part by how maybe five years later the newly corporatized Typepad maliciously deleted this post from its 2010 archives.  The same fate also disappeared another of my more controversial 2010 Typepad posts that again would have been forever lost but for its preservation by the Internet. Each piece was censored from my 2010 archive by the same plutocratic takeover that destroyed a mostly Left-leaning blogger-nest that made national news with its journalist-protecting Typepad "Bailout" in 2008 and '09.  For whatever unknown reasons -- most assuredly not design considerations -- its new, avowedly Capitalist owners also reformatted the outlet’s type schedule, thus turning these two measured and visually proofed one-line headlines into a layout-besmirching two lines, with (as you will see via the links) the second line an obtrusively dangling single word – a visually distracting “widow,” as they were pejoratively (and correctly) labeled by yesteryear’s molten-alloy typographers.

In 2013, former State Department official William Blum declared our bogus "democracy" America's Deadliest Export.  In 2017, we learned "how US imperialism continues to kill the people and planet."

On  5 September 2019 -- with the start of the pandemic disaster still at least three months in the future --  Newsweek  ranked the U.S. as "Among Worst Countries in the World to Live In." 

Come April 2020, Covid's skyrocketing body-count was  not only proving to the world the deadly magnitude of our national failure, but doing so amidst a rising fog of above-confirmed suspicion our Masters were weaponizing the virus as part of their (final) solution to what they see as the only (real) threat to 21st Century Capitalism: a growing surplus of laborers -- that is,  way too many Working Class children growing into way too many Working Class  women and men making way too many more Working Class babies. Nor is such Ruling Class cruelty unprecedented;  think not just of the obviously permanent termination of the child tax credit and the ongoing destruction of the socioeconomic safety net in general; reflect also on the fate of  slaves deemed surplus or otherwise unwanted during the trans-Atlantic passage from Africa. Thus, at least to the observant, do our modern Neoliberal (Neonazi) overlords reveal their slave-trader lineage, ideological and often genealogical as well.

Now, in 2022, the fact our Masters deliberately sustain the world's highest Covid-death toll as a matter of policy not only underscores the extent to which the U.S. is a failed state but strongly suggests the failures are beyond reversal and thus will only worsen until the nation disintegrates completely.

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SCOTUS ALSO CONFIRMED, unintentionally of course,  the scholarly hypothesis about secular art that so infuriates the theocrats.

Which -- if I may veer aside to acknowledge the one possible bright spot hidden in the court's infectious darkness -- surely does add to the already conclusive body of evidence amassed by Carl Jung and Marshall McLuhan2 that proves secular art far more usefully prophetic than its allegedly "sacred" counterparts, witness this Jackson Browne piece from 1974:

Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them, only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived...

Yes of course I know the standard proof of secular prophetic art is "The Scream," but I believe the Supreme Court's ChristoNazi majority has now proven Browne's apocalyptic vision to be at least as accurate for the 21st Century as Edvard Munch's insights are known to have been for the 20th Century.  The all-encompassing horror Munch portrayed in his 1893 paintings has long been recognized as our species' most accurate prelude to the 20th century, which -- were human societies still capable of recognizing historical truth -- we would know was shaped entirely by our Masters' body counts. It is thus hardly surprising the now-inescapable, probably bottomless trauma of the apocalypse Browne correctly foresaw is becoming the common though yet mostly unacknowledged denominator of consciousness for every one of us who has thus far managed to escape or at least resist the mental zombification imposed on us by today's ever-more-omnipotent GOP. 

Originally "GOP" was an acronym for "Grand Old Party," the (formerly rational) Republican Party. It gave us a kindred synonym, "Grand Army of the Republic," for the U.S. soldiers who's epic courage and determination seemed for a time to have defeated the Confederate traitors.3 But today's GOP differs from the original to the same degree as humanitarian reason differs from homicidal mania; today's GOP is instead a growing Sturmabteilung of lockstep-obedient perpe-traitors led by a Hitler-worshiping cabal of Greed-Obsessed Plutocrats and their vassalage of Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and Adolph Eichmann emulators in the global economy, the mainstream media propaganda machine (MMPM) and planetary governance at each of its five levels: international, imperial, federal, state and local. Thus yesterday's (merely) Moronic Majority becomes the Murderously Moronic Majority of today.

The German Nazi hierarchy and their Capitalist collaborators  -- wherever and however the U.S. protected them from rightful Soviet vengeance via Operation Paperclip and many other still-classified rescues during and after World War II -- would surely be proud to see how, 78 years later, their ideological graduates are completing the subjugation of the global population into a de facto Fourth Reich and -- as if they truly believe their rocketry can enable them to escape the consequences -- hastening the reduction of our species' planetary motherland back into the bug planet from which it evolved. The  ecogenocidal magnitude of the geoengineering in question has already convinced a small but expanding minority we are being conquered by predatory extraterrestrials -- that our morally imbecilic human Masters were long ago bribed to submission by guarantees of eternal omnipotence  and are now behaving accordingly, reshaping the global environment to the conquerors' specifications and forcing whatever remains of the Working Class into permanent slavery. Absurd? Let us hope -- but given the never-ending chaos of lies and disinformation by which the Plutocrats and their vassals began poisoning our minds in 1945, who now can distinguish truth with unassailable certainty?   

Which is precisely why I shrug off, often with an uplifted social-finger,  the "conspiracy theorist" slander invariably directed at any of us who dare point out how rapidly accumulating evidence at the very least suggests our world is now ruled by some top-secret but nevertheless all-powerful Nazi International -- perhaps  the final form of the conjectural ODESSA organization

Worse, given our definitively ecogenocidal post-World-War-II history,  if such a Nazi International exists -- as the post-WW-II years (and particularly the decades after the murder of JFK) surely suggest -- it is ever-more-obviously sponsored by the U.S. government both domestically and abroad,  and it is therefore also most likely headquartered in the United States, probably -- typical of all such U.S. intelligence operations --  hidden beneath the fake legitimacy of a benignly named bureaucracy, research foundation or other such organization.4 

I suspect I need not point out how these developments thoroughly legitimize a formerly taboo question: was the  preservation and propagation of Nazism the true purpose of Operation Paperclip? Is that why our Masters then infiltrated thousands more Nazis to protected  havens in the United  States?

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TERMINAL CLIMATE CHANGE or TCC -- as it should have been labeled from the beginning, but obviously wasn't, apparently because the Goebbels disciples in governance and on Madison Avenue rightfully feared the TCC-concept's confirmation of the looming apocalypse might terrify the increasingly subjugated Moronic Majority into open rebellion -- was instead disguised as "global warming." Thus our Masters' entire response to the looming ecogenocidal disaster was never more than a Disney-like effort to conceal its all-season magnitude and minimize its horrors by  coating the deadly crisis  with the emotional chocolate of an implicitly cuddly euphemism. 

Which -- now the true body count and cultural cost  of terminal climate change has become so overwhelming it's beginning to escape the censors -- should leave us all wondering to what extent our Masters' privately owned, for-profit versions of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda are censoring the pandemic reports. 

Meanwhile, one of the less obvious issues of this increasingly apocalyptic era is the extent to which the content of our informational media, alternative and mainstream alike, is being reshaped by the evidence we -- our species and our planet -- are doomed. Have some of our Masters eased their censorship? It would surely seem so -- though my best guess is they hope to make the news so traumatically depressing, we can no longer bear reading, hearing or viewing it at all. Already it perpetuates (and often intensifies) the anguish generated by our helplessness. Even I -- for whom sociopolitical journalism was my financial lifeblood -- now regard the news as a prime depressant and avoid it more often than I can comfortably admit.

Truth is -- unless one is a Trumpite, or ranks among the plutocrats and plutocratic vassals who have been disguising Neonazi racial and ethnic ecogenocide as Neoliberal economic austerity at least since my late father helped defeat Sen. Barry Goldwater's 1964 Republican presidential campaign by cross-referencing Goldwater's ideology to its sources in Mein Kampf -- there is literally no longer any such thing as "good"  news. Indeed,  because of the hybridization of undeniably terminal climate change and the ever-more-probably terminal Covid pandemic by the Court's knowingly murderous and now irrevocable imposition of "herd immunity," it is increasingly likely there will never again be "good" news -- news that's reassuring or confidence-building -- for any of us in the Working Class.

As a direct consequence, an ever-growing number of us hide beneath whatever shields, real or metaphorical, we might find to protect ourselves; as best we can, we tune out the skyrocketing frequency of disasters that redefine the outside world exclusively in terms of its new Gaian deadliness,  proving it more divinely capable of self-defense than we ever allowed ourselves to imagine and now -- as if vexed to terminal fury by six millennia of patriachal  ecogenocide -- increasingly hostile to human survival.

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THE MORE ASTUTE amongst us -- at least those reasonably familiar with our species' history since the advent of patriarchy -- are at last beginning to realize the extent to which we've all been conned by the Christian notion the universe displays a "moral arc" toward "justice." This is indeed one of the most destructive Big Lies ever. The historical truth is the diametrical opposite; under patriarchy, any "moral arc" is determined solely by our Masters, who constantly refine their  technology to compel ever-more zero-tolerance compliance. Thus "progress" inevitably leads toward ever more inescapable subjugation. The bloody physical trauma inflicted by the overseer's whips and the lynch mob's grisly extermination parties is replaced by the less obvious but demonstrably more crazy-making psychological trauma mandated by Neoliberal "austerity" and the inescapable 24/7 surveillance by which it's  enforced; while the homeless camp may have replaced the death camp as the most obvious symbol of our Masters' intent, the Nazi ideology that sustains their underlying greed remains as impregnable as ever. No matter what we do, in the end it seems we cannot escape the down-pressing burden of our Masters' ever-more-crushing tyranny, the cause of its terrible permanence pointedly revealed by Audre Lorde: "The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House."

Often  -- as a growing plurality is already doing -- we thus reject the entire concept of democratic process; we view its weakness and permanent failure as conclusively proven by the breathtaking speed with which the Neonazis are conquering the planet. Already they're reversing the humanitarian outcomes of World War II, nullifying the U.S. Civil War and even cancelling the positive results of our domestic Masters' violent exit from the British Empire.   Nor -- given how the defeat of the Soviet Union has robbed us of the only historically proven antidote to Nazism --  can I  rationally blame the dropouts; I nearly became one myself.  Thus -- though no one has yet dared make public an authoritative analysis of the statistical proof -- it is clear there is within the so-called "progressive" community5 an accelerating trend toward what amounts to unconditional surrender:  the abandonment of all political activity.

To me, the potential consequence of that likelihood is by far the most terrifying prospect facing us today. The ranks of us who  resist the Plutocracy's campaigns to reduce us all to prideful ignorance and morally imbecilic self-obsession are rapidly dwindling; the why-bother shrinkage of the electorate combines with  Biden the Beguiler's innumerable "change-we-can-believe-in" betrayals to almost certainly guarantee Christonazi victory in November and in 2024. For those of us who know enough history to foresee the looming horrors, our (entirely rational) anxiety is often so intense it cannot be accurately described in any known human language, though Edvard Munch surely did a proper job of communicating it as a visual artist. 

Hence  I'll say it once more: it is  ever-more-probable there will never again be any "good"  news for Working Class humans.

*****

DRIVEN BY A surprisingly relentless inclination to keep writing and photographing even in the face of what is obviously irreversible humanitarian defeat, I began contemplating nearly a year ago how I might  radically minimize my reliance for Dispatches content on the endless litanies of disaster, lies and disinformation we're now routinely force-fed 24/7 by media whether Left, Right or center.  Eventually I began weighing various approaches to  transforming Dispatches into a  grammatically disciplined and therefore more accessible anthology of present-day selections from the journal I began keeping in 1956,  my 16th year; Dispatches' new content will henceforth be focused way more on aesthetics, social history and examples of something I think of as "indicative weirdness" than on politics per se.

It will also include factual descriptions of the often-curious, sometimes downright eerie events that inspired some of my most telling photographs, sustained my 24-year effort on "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" and prompted a  quest, inspired by discoveries on the East Coast,  for Pacific Northwest archaeological anomalies; my success unearthed yet more of the sort of evidence catalogued by the New England Antiquities Research Association. If  substantiated, this evidence resoundingly refutes our Masters' misogynistic claims of white patriarchal intellectual supremacy -- no doubt another reason why, as many of you know, my attempted contribution to this material -- my photos, drawings, site maps -- was itself among the potential forever nullified by the 1983 arson.6  But with this new Dispatches format, I may try to reclaim from memory a few of those losses.

My new  content will thus include carefully selected passages of what ethics require I clearly label "speculation" -- never mind these are actually the same sort of insight -- its accuracy confirmed by subsequent events -- that underlay "Dancer." Spontaneous, fleeting and frequently unsought, these days it most often arrives amidst the near-daily meditation by which, thanks to more than two years of ongoing quarantine, I am finally naming, examining and (somewhat) ameliorating the ultimately unhealable  trauma of being suddenly reduced to an emotional orphan, as I was, aged only a bit more than five years, by familial reaction to my birthmother's violent attempt at post-partum abortion, eerily on the Summer Solstice eve of 1945.

I have yet to determine which behavior is more representative of the traditional Midsummer-Eve rites: my birthmother's homicidal madness or the love for his son that compelled my father to rescue me and forcibly confine her violence to our living room floor until the police rescued us both by carting her thoroughly shackled self off to jail. But soon after that, my father fearfully concluded my mother's genetic legacy had reduced me to a "goon boy," his favorite pejorative, usually soon followed by the oft-repeated, always-deeply wounding accusation I was "just like my mother." Meanwhile all but one member my birth-mother's family --  my birthmother's older sister, the aunt whose beneficence literally saved me from the worst consequences of Dyslexia -- decided my existence was more threatening to the expansion of their already substantial life-insurance profits than even my privately institutionalized birthmother had been. Thus in 1957 they permanently ended my summertime visits by evicting me after I brandished a firearm to rescue my 79-year-old maternal grandfather from a club-wielding 18-year-old thug I feared would easily kill him. Apparently he -- and all the rest of my birthmother's kin save the aforementioned hero-aunt -- feared the odium of a never-more-than-hypothetical police response far more than they feared the threatened death of their patriarch, who did die maybe six months later, in '57's mid-November as best I recall. I attended his funeral only because there was no way I could escape it; afterward I was defiantly absent from every one of that emotional-orphan-making family's funerals; I couldn't attend my rescuer-aunt's 2004 funeral because my eternally hateful birthmother delayed sending me her obituary by two months, resulting in some metaphysical suspicions I will probably address in a future essay.   

My subsequent adult life was thus inevitably shaped by so many epics of  disastrous romance, I knew by 1970 -- my 30th year -- that reduction to an  emotional orphan had rendered me permanently unfit for parenthood or marriage. Nevertheless, as age draws me ever closer to death, Covid has quite astonishingly granted me a privilege nominally denied all Working Class people merely by its prohibitive price: that of an extended interlude for the introspection and journal-writing without which I'd have never discovered the meditative self-healing potential   U.S. for-profit health "care" typically tries to hide from Working Class discovery. Meanwhile  anything approaching the requisite degree of therapeutic excellence is affordable only by the tiny minority that can afford it -- that is, the obscenely rich.

To repurpose my Zen-like cogitations for the new Dispatches, I had to relearn to trust my intuition enough I now in meditation keep pen and paper handy to record anything of apparent significance I might recognize; the results repeatedly confirm my  suspicion it is only the theocratic stranglehold of Abrahamic religion that keeps   our more adventuresome scientists from following their Soviet counterparts;  liberated as they were from religious taboos, they were reportedly investigating all sorts of psychic-phenomena questions including whether there truly is some aquifer-like cosmic reservoir of collective consciousness  accessible only via maximum mindfulness. In any case,  I'd decided I would publish many of these internal visions as vignettes.

In my choices of what might be relevant I'll be strongly influenced by what I know of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The population of Rome itself, estimated as at least a million (and possibly twice that) at the empire's height, had shrunk to  about 25,000 by the 13th Century.   This is among  our best indications of the depth of Dark-Age reality forced onto the entire Occident; the magnitude of cultural collapse is also measured by the superstitious destruction of libraries and the church-enforced scientific and technological ignorance that led to the  loss of  central heating and the abandonment of aqueducts, running water, indoor plumbing and municipal sewerage  -- so-called "modern conveniences" lost for the next nearly 1500 years. Such is the pattern by which our species waxes and wanes, the individual microcosm of birth and death writ large in the societal macrocosm of rise, failure and collapse, its universal truth repeatedly proven by the failed empires archeology has since unearthed on every continent save Antarctica.

While each of these discoveries tells us we humans could survive apocalyptic conditions in the past, that is clearly no longer true today. The cooperative skill and instinct that facilitated our survival through four ice ages and who knows how many other disasters is precisely the same skill and instinct that gives us socialism -- precisely why our Masters are doing everything the can to condition it out of us. Which is the ultimate  reason both for Neoliberalism and its underlying Nazi content.  At the same time our  Masters' misogynistic hatred and contempt for our planetary Mother -- the  ecogenocidal venom at patriarchy's core -- combines with their chemical, biological, radiological and thermonuclear weaponry to doom us all, even as their now-inescapable surveillance makes effective resistance impossible. Our Masters and their chosen vassals literally possess the  omnipotence previously granted only to divinities. Thus when we finally recognize what Barack the Betrayer7 long ago prompted me to denounce as "the imbecility of hope," we are reduced, logically and correctly, to utter hopelessness.

Seems to me we now have but two choices: one is surrender (which my ethics and sense of personal honor  forced me to reject); the other is the profoundly difficult task of ferreting out the faint, often nearly invisible traces from which we might yet evolve new pathways to Working Class liberation.

Among these traces are, or so I believe,  the three extensively footnoted and now event-confirmed hypotheses upon which I  built "Dancer." Firstly, I confirmed the spontaneous resurrection of the goddess-symbol, both as science (the Gaia Hypothesis) and -- via music, visual art and literature -- as alternative spirituality.  Secondly, with an appreciative nod to McLuhan, I hypothesized from these developments and from the rise of the Counterculture itself the probable existence of some  hitherto-unidentified human instinct to collectively organize ourselves for mutual protection and sustenance even when its prophetic compulsions are not consciously recognized; I was particularly impressed by the spontaneous emergence and explosive growth of the Counterculture's environmentalist, feminist and back-to-the-land factions, likewise by  the popular  rediscovery of primitive technologies. Lastly, I identified an   anti-patriarchal aesthetic solidarity implicit throughout the Counterculture's creative output -- the one quality I felt might have transcended the induced ideological hostility by which our Masters  keep us divided into warring factions.  The late Cicely Nichols obviously agreed; she repeatedly said she believed "Dancer" would  be  "among the most influential works of the 20th Century." Apparently so did our Masters; no doubt  that's what got "Dancer"and all the rest of my significant work burned.8

***** 

THOUGH BY THE closing days of 2021 I had pretty much finalized my plans for resurrecting Dispatches,  I remained unsure how to introduce the new format. As I sometimes do when I am genuinely perplexed, I consulted the I Ching, the Wilhelm/Baynes translation (Princeton University Press: 1997).  The text is at least 3,000 years old and is -- as far as I know -- the only oracle ever thoroughly investigated by Carl Jung, after which he wrote approvingly of it in his "Forward" to the Wilhelm/Baynes translation.  Jung's endorsement of this mode of seeking clarity has always been sufficient approval  for me to make it my own; hence via coin-toss, I asked the oracle what might obtain "if I turn these stories and fragments" (that once went into my journals) "into Dispatches posts." It responded with the 46th Hexagram, "Pushing Upward," the judgement of which is "supreme success." The two changing lines elaborate:

"Six at the beginning means:
Pushing upward that meets with confidence
Brings great good fortune."

"Six in the fifth place means:
Perseverance brings good fortune.
One pushes upward by steps."

The changed lines create a new hexagram, in this instance the 5th, "Waiting (Nourishment)," its judgement as follows:

"If you are sincere,
You have light and success.
Perseverance brings good fortune.
It furthers one to cross the great water."

The appended "Image" is especially telling:

Clouds rise up to heaved:
The image of waiting.
Thus the superior man eats and drinks,
Is joyous and of good cheer.

So I opted to wait, sensing the possibility of some pivotal discovery or event. That was on 28 December 2021; then on Thursday, 13 January 2022, the Neonazi-conquered U.S. Supreme Court  officially weaponized Covid-19 into our Masters' 21st Century equivalent of Zyklon B, a brazen, viciously ecogenocidal decree that forever rejects promotion of "the general welfare" as part of our national purpose. It does so by granting the Trumpites and other anti-vax contagion-vectors the right to inflict the so-called "herd immunity" that turns the un-vaccinated and never-masked moral imbeciles  into -- it cannot be said too often -- potentially suicidal, obviously murder-minded snot-bombers.  Far worse, it turns all of them into ambulatory Petri-dishes for the breeding of ever-deadlier Covid-19 mutations. It could spawn the ultimate doomsday bug and so exterminate our entire species. At the very least, the court's permanent Neonazi majority has smirkingly  condemned who-knows-how-many-more of us to death and financial ruin -- which should tell us all we need know about our Masters' long-range intentions. It also reveals something of the treacherous intent behind the "Democratic" (sic) Party's post-John-Fitzgerald-Kennedy function as the ChristoNazi Fifth Column.

But its most damning message is that any pretense of U.S. humanitarianism is gone forever.

Instead we may soon discover we Working-Class humans are inmates of a nation become a de facto death camp,  a place wherein it is now entirely legal for the defiantly un-vaccinated and anti-masked Neonazis and their Nazi and Neoconfederate collaborators  to exterminate as many more of us as possible by deliberately spreading -- knowingly and therefore with murderous premeditation -- a virus that can literally mutate to slay us all. Nor -- thanks to the Neonazi-conquered courts -- will these bacteriological Ted Bundys ever again face even the most minimal forms of justice.    

All of which marks the impact and consequences of Thursday morning's SCOTUS atrocity as tantamount -- both personally and societally -- to "crossing the great water."

About the latter I will for the present utter no more than two statements, firstly how I fear the court has inflicted a wound on our nation that, just as the Dred Scot decision did,  is already solidifying  our divisions to the point civil war is again inevitable -- this time with all the apocalypse-accelerating  chemical, biological, radiological  and thermonuclear horrors of modern warfare;  secondly how it should be obvious to anyone with what in Appalachia is termed "a lick a sense" the post-JFK "Democratic" (sic) Party has quite deliberately and with Oberkommando der Wehrmacht cunning confined themselves (and us) to a political cage from which escape is impossible.

About the former, the personal, suffice it to say that, as if precursory to the SCOTUS decree, someone we'll call Person X -- someone I had for nearly 40 years foolishly presumed a dear and trusted friend -- denounced me as no longer worthy of companionship. I should have seen it coming; instead I dismissed   X's occasional, invariably brief but always perplexing expressions of admiration for Ayn Rand's Goebbels-clever fictionalizations of Mein Kampf as situational rather than existential. My mistake;  X finally tested -- I suspect intentionally -- my acceptance or rejection of the definitively ecogenocidal, anti-humanitarian, incipiently mass-murderous, morally imbecilic arrogance and elitist self-obsession known to be the psychological epicenter of Nazism, but which also lurks,  often clandestinely, yet always with full Nazi potency, in the darker corners of the mental Draino that, in its pre-Esalen/pre-Charley-Manson forms, was already government-asset-brazen enough to pimp itself as "the human potential movement."  Needless to say, from X's perspective I failed the test, even as from my own viewpoint I amassed a perfect score. And thus was, by this Person X, declared an enemy and irrevocably dismissed. And so, resigned to the traumatic fact my composition speed was radically reduced by the loss of neurotransmitter-nicotine's temporary anti-dyslexia medication when I finally permanently beat its addiction on 23 September 1995, I began this writing.

But as it turned out, the interval suggested by the "Waiting" hexagram was substantially lengthened, first by my de-nicotinized dysklexic difficults at writing, next by the nagging intuition I should continue my observant wait -- an intuition confirmed on 19 January by the Duke/Politico disclosures I discovered quite by surprise -- which discovery immediately compelled a total revision of my originally intended post, including rewriting six of the eight essays I had written in the wake of the SCOTUS Covid horror.  

*****

MAKING ART, IT seems, remains the one activity most essential to my life, even as I approach my 82nd year. Having written, re-written and edited this essay, I feel as if I've stepped into a cloud of quiet joy: a sense of being bless-ed from without, a feeling as perplexing to my Newtonian/Marxian/agnostic self as it is encouraging to that atavistic wellspring at the core of my consciousness, the cauldron  from which I sometimes guzzle the diverse but always thirst-quenching nectars of my Picto-Celtic, Norse, Saxon and Iroquoian genes. I guess I took that sense of blessedness for granted in my 60-odd years as a working professional; I realize now I'd have given up journalism long ago but for the encouragement of this hitherto unrecognized but obviously protective cloak. And amidst the hurly-burly of pandemic and quarantine and the political terrors the Nazis inflict upon us all, in my heart-of-hearts I tried to do just that -- but instead discovered I cannot. Which surely feels -- at least at the moment -- as a welcome blessing of its own.  

I'm ending this beginning by introducing another new Dispatches topic: what might be termed "metaphysical" stuff, including material I had self-protectively excluded from "Dancer,"  among the exclusions some very compelling evidence the ancient liturgies of the goddess retain invocatory power even after thousands of years of concealment and fragmentation. But before anyone supposes I'm about to surrender to Moron Nation gullibility, let me reassure you all I'll temper any associated text both by my solid grounding in basic university-level science including physics, astronomy, geology and archaeology plus by my investigative journalist's tendency to distrust anything, my own personal experience included, that cannot be objectively confirmed. Those interested in a factual account of the incident I now recognize as the beginning of "Dancer" may read it here.

Also I do  not yet know how frequently I will publish; I am leaning toward monthly or bi-weekly, though that is an ongoing decision-making admittedly influenced by the realization geriatric reality may make my production of new material somewhat random.

Another quandary through which I am working -- probably already obvious to critical readers -- is whether the (alleged) distinctions between Nazis, Neonazis, Neoliberals and fascists have any real validity in the face of their ever-more-unified and therefore ever-more-murderous assaults. While I'm leaning toward calling them all Nazis on the basis of their shared ethos  and footnoting the reasons why, the question remains open, and I would appreciate any suggestions or observations you readers might choose to offer, for which  my thanks in advance.   

Meanwhile let us never forget that in times such as these, survival itself is a revolutionary act. May we all remain safe, healthy and determined.
__________________

1 The definition of "Working Class" used herein is that implicit in Marxism: like the statistically incorrect but nevertheless usefully descriptive "99 percent," it describes those of us who are neither plutocrats nor plutocratic vassals, are thus entirely dependent on wages or commissions and are thus never more than a layoff or firing away from potentially deadly disaster.

2 Until I began the memory-confirming research that generated the above links, I knew neither of Walter Benjamin nor of his valuable contribution to the implicitly anti-patriarchal quest to re-legitimize the prophetic functions or art and literature.

3The New York and Michigan cemeteries of my youth were filled with  Grand Army of the Republic markers, most of them still bedecked with flags and repeatedly honored with fresh flowers.

4Two books and a Netflix film do a thorough job of documenting the Christonazi infiltration of USian governance at all levels. The books are The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power  (Jeff Sharlet; Harper: 2008) and American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America (Chris Hedges; Free Press: 2006). I heartily recommend each text. The Nexflix film, which I have yet to watch, has the same title as   Sharlet's work and is said to be based on his reporting. Will I watch it? Probably. Will I review it? Maybe. 

5Here I use "progressive" in its broadest sense, from Marxian to social democracy and thence rightward to the vast array of pseudo-Leftists who serve our Masters' by agitating the culture wars that foster identity politics and thus perpetuate the ultimately suicidal divisiveness that defines today's domestic and global Working Class. As to the U.S. "Democratic" (sic) Party, I believe it forever renounced any right to claim the "progressive" label when it unconditionally surrendered to the Warren Commission, thereby granting total victory to the (already Nazified) perpe-traitors of the 22 November 1963 coup.

6"Dancer" was a thoroughly footnoted manuscript of about 150,000 words illustrated by approximately 100 photographs; it and all the rest of  my significant work -- clippings of published work, 31 years of photography, 27 years of journals, a near lifetime of reference files, awards etc. -- was destroyed by arson on 1 September 1983.

7It came to me last night while revising this piece that Obama's treachery may be the best evidence yet of our Masters' unprecedented cunning: how better, with maximum deniability,  to legitimize the nation's infamous white racism than by electing as its first Black president a class-traitor whose subsequent betrayals hurled enough metaphorical gunpowder to explode the existential Nazism of the  Moronic Majority's whites  into today's now-obviously unstoppable Neonazi onslaught.         

8In what  was obviously a "fuck-off-or-die"message from our Masters, the fire was lit at the exact moment I was meeting with Nichols to finalize our working agreement; the ignition time was preserved by a melted electric clock adjacent the fire's point of origin.   

LB/13-22 January 2022, with typographic revisions and minor editing 29 March 2022.

--30-- 

 


We of the Ever-More-Destitute 99.9% Are Ever-More-Obviously Ruled by History's Greediest, Most Cunning Tyrants, which Ever-More-Undeniably Defines the Imperial US as Our Planet's Ultimate 'Shithole Country'

 (But let us first contemplate the Mother our survival commands us to defend; may Her radiance empower us to forever dispel the patriarchal darkness.)   

IMG_20230304_135802_103Photograph by KD ©2023: from a work-in-progress, an unabashedly worshipful embrace of our Mother Earth.

******************

I CANNOT REMEMBER, in all the decades I've followed such matters, a more relentlessly disturbing -- and not infrequently terrifying -- outpouring of news reports, whether from within the USian imperial homeland and its European colonies or from an oft-provoked Russian Federation that appears increasingly on the brink of precisely the sort of internal chaos that could make a world-ending, human-species-exterminating thermonuclear apocalypse unavoidable.

Meanwhile political conditions here in the Disunited States have deteriorated to such a depth of vindictively inflicted hopelessness that Hitler Wannabe Donald Trump's infamous characterization of non-white nations as "shithole countries" unquestionably now applies at least as accurately to the alleged "land of the free," wherein working-class existence is ever-more-obviously defined by a methodically engineered and maliciously imposed regime of  steadily intensifying socioeconomic and political oppression. Thus our tragically afflicted nation becomes a toxic variant of  the "rough beast, its hour come round at last" foretold by William Butler Yeats in "The Second Coming," revealing itself to be a relentlessly sadistic remake of Caligula’s Rome, Marie Antoinette’s France and Nicholas II’s Russia in which bottomless moral imbecility and irremediable corruption grant an infinitely evil aristocracy the absolute freedom to do whatever it goddamn well pleases to any and all of the rest of us.

Here – each of these reports chosen specifically for the fact it has seemingly managed to escape the ever-more-oppressive USian censorship apparatus – are 13 examples of the atrocities we now accept as the defining aspects of our daily routine, the most recent afflictions in an ever-metastasizing plague of horrors that in a just and mindful world would have long ago provoked revolution:

Though the case is admittedly mostly circumstantial, it cannot be said too often that 90 years of evidence proves far beyond judicially required certainty our plight dates from the 1933 Bankers' Plot, the collaborative effort in which the Wall Street aristocrats conspired with Hitler and Mussolini to nazify the nation into what their genetic and/or ideological descendants have made it today, the de facto Fourth Reich, the ultimate model of patriarchy as a theocratically brain-policed slave state, the global arsenal for terminal apocalypse and the ecogenocidally misogynistic reduction of our Mother Earth back to a bug planet.

*****

From the Comment Threads of Other Websites:

As cited above, on Skyrocketing State Terror in the Age of Counterterrorism.

Thank you, Mr. Gould-Wartofsky and LA Progressive, for this superbly analytical report. Meanwhile those who claim there is anything genuinely "leftist" about the present-day "Democratic" (sic) Party -- which in post-JFK operational truth has repeatedly proven itself to be nothing more than the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party -- are either tragically ignorant of genuinely leftist ideologies or are obediently parroting a Trumpite Big Lie.

***

As cited above, on   Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s partial student loan forgiveness plan, 43 million borrowers denied debt relief.

Predictably, Biden the Beguiler's intentionally fraudulent pledge of student-loan debt relief has proven itself yet another classic example of "change we can believe in" -- the most malevolent Big Lie ever fed the terrifyingly gullible USian electorate.

The pivotal, ultimately damning fact in this ongoing charade -- in which the "Democratic" (sic) Party desperately seeks to maintain its ever-more-transparent disguise as something other than the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party's Fifth Column -- is there is no possible way even the most delusional of the Beguiler's advisors could have imagined the Christonazi cabal that now tyrannizes the nation via the Supreme Court would let any student-debt-relief plan stand. 

Precisely as Comrade Grey points out, the Beguiler ensured  the Christonazis had -- and have -- "the best conditions for them to block the program," which they will obviously continue to exploit to maximum ruling class advantage.

At least as important as the financial considerations cited by Sebouh80 is the political fact any truly effective debt relief would be tantamount to manumission from the lifetime wage slavery that effectively prohibits any and all meaningful anti-capitalist resistance by the debtors. It does so by the constant threat of retaliatory job loss underscored by the fact student loans cannot be discharged via bankruptcy.

This method of prohibiting any such activism, which dates to the Johnson and Nixon regimes' efforts to suppress opposition to the Southeast Asian War, is in fact the original, underlying purpose of runaway higher education costs.

***

Wisconsin’s “Democratic” (sic) Governor Signed Largest Private School Voucher Boost in 30 Years

This is merely additional (irrefutable) proof the post-JFK "Democratic" (sic) Party is nothing more than the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party.

(Don't forget it was Wisconsin also spawned Sen. Joseph McCarthy, purgemaster of the c. '50s-'60s persecution not only of Communists but -- in truth -- anyone whose politics were to the left of fascism, all intellectuals especially included.)

***

“Twitter Files” Journalist Matt Taibbi Claims IRS and FBI Retaliation

How many times must it be said? The USian "mainstream media" propaganda machine -- social media included -- is the world's first privately owned, for-maximum-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

And exactly like the Third Reich's Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (RMVP), its present-day descendant in the Nazi-war-criminal abetted de facto Fourth Reich is ultimately under the command-and-control of the respective nation's secret police, in each instance weaponized to serve the infinite evil of the ruling tyrants.

***

Of Course Greta Met with Zelinsky

I wonder if Ms. Thunberg realizes the tragic extent to which she has been co-opted by the USian imperial brain-police apparatus -- or if she does not, how she will respond when she awakens to the bitter truth of our now-eternal powerlessness. (Because I have enormous respect for her passion, I see her as an innocent in the same way we of the old '60s Counterculture were innocents, smug [and therefore utterly vulnerable] in the foolish belief our righteousness protected us from contamination by the Infinite Evil that has threatened the world since the advent of patriarchy and which -- with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- achieved the terminally misogynistic ecogenocidal omnipotence over our Mother Earth and all her children that was always the patriarchs' ultimately apocalyptic purpose.)

***

5 Elements of Fascism and Their Exact Expression in Trump, the White Christian Nationalist Movement He Leads and the “Republican” (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party He Rules

With respect to Mr. Reich -- he is definitely cognizant of the threat implicit in today's "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party -- I believe he errs in labeling its ecogenocidal toxicity "fascism." Instead -- especially given the admiration today's so-called "Republicans" express for Hitler -- it is clearly an USian variety of nazism (lower-case "n") -- particularly given its notion of Western-European ancestry/non-Jewish whites as the planet's master-race. There is also the fact it has been credibly reported Trump's favorite book is Mein Kampf -- reports surely confirmed by how the strategies and tactics employed not only by Trump but also by his rivals within the party's dominant like-minded faction are obviously so derived. In this context, it seems to me a grave downplaying of the threat to call our adversaries and their lethal intent as anything other than nazis and nazification.

***

Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023): Chronicler of American carnage

I knew McCarthy in East Tennessee at the University of Tennessee c. 1959 and c. 1962-1964 while he was living in the Sevier County back country and writing The Orchard Keeper.

Though nominally he denounced any and all intellectually focused  conversation as mere "holding forth," in what I recall as our one genuinely "serious" chat, he repeatedly and emphatically cited Rachel Carson's Silent Spring as the most important (and most infinitely damning) text  our species would ever publish. When I replied that Carson's disclosures might be for what was then called the conservation movement what Uncle Tom's Cabin had been to abolitionism,  he  said that could never happen because our species was too pridefully ignorant and too sociopathically self-obsessed.

Point being, if we are to understand his extreme negativity -- which most assuredly is not to justify it -- I believe we have to look at Carson's influence (which has since morphed into the ruling-class-environmentalists' academic  demand for exterminating 90 percent of the working class population), and the fact that concurrent with the publication of Silent Spring, the Tennessee Valley Authority, his father's pride and joy (and my own father's favorite, sometimes tears-in-his-eyes example of beneficent socialism), TVA was already under relentlessly savage attack from the Neoconfederate and proto-Christonazi right. Meanwhile the "Democratic" (sic) Party's alleged efforts to defend and preserve TVA -- especially after the coup of 22 November 1963 -- were ever-more-obviously nothing but charades.

Utterly deprived of humanitarian resources by Nazi-war-criminal-abetted capitalist   censorship, terrorism and weaponization of religion, McCarthy's work thus exemplifies the only aesthetic tolerable to the USian ruling class. 

Afterthoughts: (1)-I should have added that McCarthy’s apocalyptic negativity – albeit far more lyrically expressed than the prideful ignorance and methodically shrunken vocabulary of the Moronic Majority nominally permit– is precisely the helplessly subjugated, ever-more-forcibly conditioned hopelessness by which our self-anointed divine-right masters seek to guarantee no one will ever again dare rise up to challenge their ecogenocidal patriarchal omnipotence; (2)-While the bourgeois environmentalists demand for extermination of 90 percent of the global working class has since been trivialized as a right-wing conspiracy theory, it is in fact anything but. See for example the full text of one of Eric Pianka's speeches and the accompanying commentary as cited by Wikipedia, here. There is also the fact a few of the wealthier students at Huxley College, Western Washington State University's  environmental-science school, were already openly advocating such a final solution c. 1982-83, when I was living in Bellingham. (3)-I err in attributing the call for genocidal reduction of the 99.9 Percent exclusively to the influence of Silent Spring; Carson’s work is actually one of two such goads. The other is The Population Bomb, by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, which was published in 1968. A third factor is of course the sneering, Marie-Antoinette-caliber contempt with which the USian aristocracy – the academic elite most assuredly included – regards the 99.9 Percent, particularly our caste-sisters and caste-brothers who lack college degrees and/or work in fields wherein higher education is not required.

LB/30 June-2 July 2023

-30-

      


Republicans Join Democrats to Forcibly Disarm U.S. Civilians

Fearing Revolution, the Plutocrats Unite for Class War against
Legal Gun Owners, Retaini
ng the 2nd Amendment as Propaganda but
Imposing Prohibitive Fees and Taxes, Thus Redefining Self-Defense  
as the
Exclusive Privilege of Our Masters and Their Collaborators

***
Still Doubt the DemoPublicans' Back-Room Unity? Read On

***
Plus See Below for DfD's Long-Promised New Monthly Format

WHAT I HAVE ASSEMBLED  here is hitherto obscured but nonetheless compelling proof the Trump/Pence Regime -- secure behind its ever more crippling effluent of Nazi-style Big Lies and other Josef-Goebbels-type deceptions -- is so terrified by the intensifying likelihood of socialist revolution, it is now collaborating with the Democratic (sic) Party to forcibly disarm all U.S. Working Families. 

The proof is in the following jig-saw puzzle of reports, which with an uplifted social-finger of journalistic defiance are hereby assembled into a revealing whole. Which I assure you is no -- say again NO -- conspiracy theory; it is instead the geography of an infestation.

Firstly, for context -- the historical framework inside which we'll piece the puzzle together --  we should review the Powell Memo, the Mein Kampf of Imperial Neoliberalism, thus to confirm our understanding of the fascist ideology1 by which we are subjugated and enslaved.

Secondly let us note that gunowner taxation is implicitly approved by Heller's Paragraph 2, a fact concealed by the media hysteria --  a cunning cacophony of equally distracting pros and cons --  engendered by its revocation of the Washington D.C. ordinance that outlawed handgun ownership:

Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited...For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms... (Emphasis added.)

Note too the date of the Heller decision -- 2008 -- and that it was authored by the late arch-conservative Anton Scalia; for deeper background, see also the Encyclopaedia Britannica's clearly written, exceptionally unbiased and therefore contextually useful history of the Second Amendment, including its Imperial Roman origins. 

Then, as if in (surely coincidental) climactic conclusion, we add the following links, watching, perhaps smirking as the topic-puzzle comes together, dates-of-occurrence punctuating its relentless unfolding:

2009 -- Targeted Taxes on Getting Abortions, Buying Guns, and Exercising Other Constitutional Rights
2013 -- New gun control strategy: Tax 'em
2015 -- Why Exactly Are We Taxing Guns?
2017 -- Hey, NRA! What About Patients' Gun Rights?
2018 -- A Gun Rights Group Says Trump Has Gone From Supporter "To The Gun-Grabber In Chief"
2018 -- Repeal the Second Amendment? Gun-Control Advocates Say No - The Atlantic
2019 -- Elizabeth Warren Introduces Sweeping Gun Control Plan
2019 -- Here’s The Document The White House, Barr Are Using To Push Gun Control On Republicans
2020 -- Florida REPUBLICAN Senators Vote for Massive Gun Control Bill
2020 -- NH: Republican Gun Confiscation is Still Moving

(Capitalization and punctuation as in originals)

I trust I need not thrice repeat this is NOT conspiracy theory. It is instead a choreography of the evolution of an idea mostly as shaped by reactions to Heller -- a decision blessed or cursed as a pivotal victory for the right to keep and bear arms -- hereby revealed as its (presumably) unintentional death-blow instead. 

*****

WHAT WE SHOULD be asking ourselves is how often the Republicans join with the Democrats in expanding and sustaining tyranny. 

The immediate answer is  found in the Democrats' reliably overwhelming support for the Patriot Act, most recently last November.

But a more damning answer is to be found in the historical fact that whatever tyrannies our Capitalist Masters demand, their vassal-politicians immediately set aside their charade of squabbling, then unite to grant it with bipartisan obedience -- a malevolently Capitalist bipartisanship exemplified by its Neoliberal destruction of public education and its robbery of Working Families' ability to think rationally; by the re-enslavement of women through outlawing abortion, radically restricting access to birth control and tacitly encouraging sexual harassment to drive females from the workplace; and by subjugation of the entire 99 Percent through forcible disarmament.

Thus we confront the re-emergence of class struggle's original and ultimate forms: not between Workers and Bosses, but between Masters and Slaves. 

As regular readers know, I closely watch certain Rightist websites. Why? Because -- with malicious censorship on the Left now at least as prevalent as on the Right -- such sites (especially after we've learn to read between their lines of bias),  are surprisingly reliable sources for news the Left wants to keep hidden.

Meanwhile our shock-doctrine2 Masters weaponize their bipartisan terror of socialist revolution and further weaponize climate change as the ultimate form of regime change. 

Apropos firearms, our Masters' bipartisan intent is to disarm us all, to thereby reduce us to the helplessness of mandatory pacifism  (yes, even in the face of murderous attacks by criminals),  thus condemning us to the compulsory victimhood that has always defined serfdom and slavery.

Apropos women's rights, our Masters' bipartisan intent is to (again) reduce "female" to  a synonym for "powerless" -- not the least because every real revolution since 1789 has been started by women. Thus the Machiavellian anti-abortion cunning of the Democratic (sic) Party -- first exemplified by Carter the Christer's endorsement of the Hyde Amendment, next by Barack the Betrayer's cunningly obscured betrayal of abortion rights, more recently by voting records they try to hide behind lies and disinformation -- is ultimately more effective than Republican demagoguery at imposing compulsory Working Class motherhood, complete with all its mandatory impoverishment and ever-expanding criminal liability.

Thus the Democrats' ultimate Big Lie -- "change we can believe in" -- yet prevails.       

But -- precisely as our Masters have already done with the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments and are now doing with the Second Amendment -- they leave the wording of the Bill of Rights intact.

Ask yourself: what more effective propaganda to preserve -- particularly amongst the pridefully ignorant3 -- the truly monstrous, ultimately apocalyptic Big Lie of "American democracy"?

Nor is this on any way a new strategy; it merely expands the deluge of Big Lies intended to sustain the core Moron Nation deception: that we the people of our species' most ecogenocidal Empire are yet allowed the protections provided by our (alleged) constitutional "rights." 

Note how the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments have already been nullified by the Patriot Act. Note too how their nullification is broadened and  pointedly underscored by the Robbers' Court's subsequent repeals of gay, lesbian and transsexual (LGBTQ) rights and of religious freedom for atheists, agnostics and spiritual nonconformists -- now soon to expanded by the Robbers' Court's intent of outlawing abortion nationwide.      

Thus the Second Amendment has also been nullified -- this by judicial sleight-of-hand including the censorship-obscured anti-legal-gunowner carte blanche cunningly buried amongst the pro-Second-Amendment distractions of  Heller.

And since Citizens United has now clearly defined money as speech, what is to prevent our Masters from further defining prohibitive cost -- whether for firearms,  contraception or anything else -- as "constitutional" forms of prohibition, censorship and regulation? 

*****

Indications: Stuff I Already Read, Here in Case You Missed It

(Capitalization and punctuation as in originals)

 

Our Mother/Our Selves

Verily, as we do unto our Mother Earth, so we do unto ourselves.

Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don't Know Why

Earth Just Had Hottest January Since Records Began, Data Shows

Worst Locust Swarm to Hit East Africa in Decades Linked to Climate Crisis

UN warns of major shock as Africa locust outbreak spreads

Ozone Layer Recovery Is Being Undermined by Pollution From US Companies

UN Biodiversity Chief: Humans Risk Living in an 'Empty World' With 'Catastrophic' Consequences

Bumblebees Face Extinction From the Climate Crisis

5,000-year-old tree in Scotland is changing from male to female4

 

Calamity by Contagion

Even after her metamorphosis from bugs to mammals, our Mother Earth remains fatally buggy. 

The coronavirus pandemic: A global disaster

World Health Organization warns of global risk from coronavirus outbreak

Top 10 Myths About Bedbugs

Climate Change May Release Ancient Viruses From Melting Tibetan Glacier

Viruses, Epidemics and Experiments: The History of Biowarfare

 

Theocracy Triumphant

Too many of us remain oblivious to the threat of resurgent patriarchal religion, especially when its deadly misogyny is financed by our Masters and hybrid with fascism.

El Salvador: The Country Where Having a Miscarriage Can Land You in Prison

Rick Wiles: God Has Sent the Coronavirus to “Purge a Lot of Sin Off This Planet”

Trump Spiritual Adviser Paula White Orders End to 'Satanic Pregnancies'

There's a Video Posted on the Official White House YouTube Page Calling Homosexuality the Devil's Work

Writer Calls Egalitarian Marriages “Functionally Homosexual”

Christian School Expels Girl for Wearing Rainbow Sweater on Her Birthday 

Tampon tax break faces resistance in Tennessee

The FBI Makes a Bizarre Claim About Pro-Choice Terrorism

FOCUS: America May Be Nearing the End of the Roe Era

 

Josef Goebbels Prevails

After all that’s gone down, who among us still doubts the predatory Neoliberal cunning that prompted our morbidly Machiavellian Masters to pervert our so-called “mainstream media” into our species first-ever privately owned for-profit Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Indeed our Masters brought it home with their Nazi fellow-collaborators after Germany lost the war.  

The “Afghanistan papers”: The criminality and disaster of a war based upon lies

Why the Buttigieg Campaign Tried to Have Me Arrested for Handing Out Information About Medicare for Al

Listening to Mike Pence’s history, you might think it wasn’t Soviets but Americans who liberated Auschwitz

The FBI Has Been Lying About Seth Rich

The US Government Lies Constantly, And The Burden Of Proof Is On The Accuser

 

World’s Highest Standard of Living

For a broader perspective on the unchanging bounty of USian Exceptionalism, go here. And here. And here

Marianne Williamson Is the Canary in the Coal Mine for American Democracy

The Trump administration’s surveillance dragnet

Black Lives Matter Excluded from Los Angeles Women’s March

The Cops & the Klan Go Hand in Hand!”

A Bank Called the Cops on a Black Man Trying to Deposit the Money He Won in a Racial Discrimination Lawsuit

Cops and Spies Chase Blacks and Leftists While Violent Whites Grow Bolder

Oakland, California: With guns drawn, police evict homeless mothers from house

Keeping Homeless Families Homeless, by Force

Homelessness in Koreatown: a parallel neighborhood of unhoused people has grown up around the existing community.

The Shame of Child Poverty in the Age of Trump

Seattle bureaucrats aid Amazon charge Sawant with ethics violations

Why Are Democratic Candidates Taking Money From Union-Busting Lawyers?

Florida: Man arrested after allegedly driving van into GOP registration tent

After 18 Years of US Occupation, Poll Finds Zero Percent Of Afghans Thriving, 85 Percent "Suffering"

Taxpayers Shell Out $1M After Officers Force Mom to Give Birth into a Toilet, Letting Baby Die

 

Enslavement as Convenience

In keeping with the strategy and intent of Neoliberalism, our Masters long ago conditioned us to value convenience over freedom. Hence the unstoppable popularity of self-enslavement by electronic media: the irrestably seductive opiate cunningly engineered to dumb us down -- and numb us down -- even as it tethers us to 24/7 surveillance. (Hence too the notorious, convenience-centered inability of USian whites to liberate themselves, much less anyone else.)    

The Joys of the Digital Revolution Bring the End of Privacy

Freedom Rider: The Internet Does Washington’s Dirty Work

 

Lest We Forget

Claiming to focus on human life while ignoring or denying the determinism of its socioeconomic and political contexts is no different from pretending to study mammalian  reproduction while ignoring or denying the sexuality by which it obtains. How so? Because -- once we transcend the ideological blindness imposed on us to sustain Capitalism -- we recognize the extent to which contexts determine how we live and die, just as sexuality determines reproduction. 

Average U.S. Citizens Have “Little Or No” Influence On Government Policy

How American Racism Influenced Hitler

Wall Street's Fascist Plot to Seize the White House

How IBM Helped Nazi Germany Exterminate Those It Deemed 'Unworthy of Life'

The Modern Education System Was Made to Foster “Punctual, Docile, and Sober” Factory Workers

Poverty Is the New Draft

Why the Left-wing Needs a Gun Culture

 

But Is It Really Ecogenocide?

Why else – save to exterminate “surplus” Working Families, permanently enslave the survivors and reorder all human society into the global equivalent of an antebellum slave plantation – would our Neoliberal Masters feign such total paralysis in the face of humanity’s deadliest disaster?

The Toxic Reach of Deepwater Horizon's Oil Spill Was Much Larger - and Deadlier - Than Previous Estimates, a New Study Says

Environmental Protesters Are Being Criminalized Around the World

US Listed Climate Activist Group as Extremists Alongside Mass Killers

Wall Street Invading Wet’suwet’en Territory

Puerto Rico's Disasters After the Earthquakes

The Evil List: 30 Tech Companies That Are Doing the Most Harm

No Safe Level of Air Pollutions;: Major Study Links Cardiac Arrests With Fine Particulate Matter Exposure

How Economic Despair Drives Workers to Their Deaths

Study: Nearly 500 Million People Worldwide Struggle to Find Adequate Work

Where United States' Climate Migrants Will Go As Sea Level Rises

Japan Races to Build 22 New Coal-Burning Power Plants, Despite Climate Risks

Latest UN plan to address catastrophic decline in biodiversity—more empty platitudes

The Environmental Burden of Generation Z

 

Sparks Against Despair

Though history proves the “arc of the universe” bends toward tyranny rather than justice, we should also cherish a certain truth powerfully evoked by 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.”

Global Poll Finds Majority Believe Capitalism More Harmful Than Good

Gallup: 60% of Americans Say They Could Vote for an Atheist President

Making Rebellion Attractive: Why the Establishment Still Hates John Reed

Bernie Sanders Leads Trump, All 2020 Candidates in Donations From Active-Duty Troops

Just Get On And Go! Olympia Transit System Goes Fareless

Atlanta Turns 7-Acre Vacant Lot Into Largest Free Food Forest In The Country

Dog sleuths sniff out crop disease hitting citrus trees

Orangutan in Borneo offers its hand to;rescue a man from snake-infested water5

Takes a village: Bear foster mom raises cub saved by dog

Thunberg: Indigenous Peoples Lead the Fight Against Crisis;

We Need to Ask Many Questions of Our Nation;s Mainstream Media. Here Are Just a Few.

Propagandists Cry About Bernie’s Online Base Because It’s Effective, Not Because It’s Mean

 

Yes, dear readers, this is at last the long-promised new Dispatches format. I will post monthly, with occasional "extras" as events demand.

(Sorry, Charlie; our Masters only want intimidated tuna -- especially now, with survival itself increasingly criminalized as revolutionary defiance -- the real meaning of the ever-escalating wars against refugees and homeless people.)  

_____________________________________________

1When we consider the patriarchal origins of the Empire's ecogenocidal capabilities and intentions, it is at least arguable the Powell Memo is the Capitalist aristocracy's 20th Century update of the colonial aristocracy's outraged reaction to the 1772 British Supreme-Court Equivalent's ruling that Blacks are humans and therefore have human rights -- which historical truth I learned in childhood from my second-generation British (English/Scot/Canadian) father. Thus the so-called "American Revolution" was the antithesis of liberation. Indeed it was the original "regime change." Then as now it is intended to preserve what today -- Neoliberal euphemisms not withstanding -- we recognize as the core mindset of Nazism: genocide (against all First Nations peoples);  enslavement (of Africans); and murderous discrimination against all other minorities -- precisely the precedents Adolf Hitler borrowed from the United States. Nevertheless I find it more useful to regard 1934 as the visible starting point of present-day USian Ruling Class malevolence, specifically the One Percenters' aborted-but-never-prosecuted fascist coup, which would have reduced the U.S. to a slave state while making it the resource-dominant and therefore ultimately triumphant fourth member of Hitler's later Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis. Even then, our Masters' long-term motive was global conquest, and from their morally imbecilic perspective, alliance with Hitler and enhancement of his horrors was the shortest, cheapest path to victory. Remaining free to subvert our freedom at will, the same cabal of unimaginably rich aristocrats helped perfect the Nazis' genocide machine even as they financed the seditious rise of ChristoNazism and countenanced (if not mandated and commanded) the coup that, on 22 November 1963, not only murdered President John Fitzgerald Kennedy but slew the Republic as well.

2We all owe Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism; Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, New York: 2007) a debt of gratitude for what amounts to a breakthrough volume of strategic intelligence-analysis detailing how our Masters are weaponizing Nature to re-order human society into their Neoliberal global (slave-plantation) model.  Indeed it Ms. Klein exposes the malevolence and manipulative cunning by which the Powell Memo  is ever-more-lethally enforced, not the least as the 20th Century revision of the Declaration of Independence.                  

3As I noted in a recent "what-is-to-be-done" e-mail to friends, we the people are so dumbed down, there is no longer any antidote for the submissiveness of the Moronic Majority -- the vast number of U.S. citizens, minorities included, who by socioeconomic definition are Working Class but reflexively side with our Masters -- even now, when there are no longer any rational doubts about Ruling Class capabilities and intentions: the former the de facto omnipotence granted by the diabolical combination of total surveillance and cell phones, the latter the ever-more-obvious ecogenocidal reordering of human society into a global slave plantation. Note too how how the Moronic Majority will break down shopping-center doors -- even commit murder -- to fit itself with the 21st Century slave collar, i.e., the cellphone. As a friend of mine observes, we have thus become a nation of "I-Phone Zombies."    

4Thanks to Tigerlille for spotting this story and sending me its link. The story prompts at least two significant questions. (1)--Is accelerated gender plurality a multi-species response to patriarchy-inflicted apocalypse? (2)--What relevant lessons does our Mother Earth thus beseech us to learn?

5Thanks to Tigerlille for this story too, which -- vitally, I believe -- shows us a truth of mammalian solidarity too long rejected as "primitive superstition."    

LB/15 February 2020

-30-


The ChristoNazis Want Greta Thunberg Burned as a "Witch"

Condemning All Environmentalists as "Pagan Barbarians," a Leading Fascist Journal Damns Greta as a New "Joan of Arc," Thus Implicitly Threatening Her with the Martyr's Hideously Painful Death by Fire

I MISSED THIS STORY when it broke last September because Wonkette -- the website that chose to ignore The Federalist's terrifyingly obvious lynch-mob agitation but otherwise scooped the world by sarcastically reporting that publication's potentially murderous accusations -- is unfortunately but justifiably disreputable for its identity-politics vindictiveness and is therefore almost never taken seriously by the Internet sources1 on which I am most dependent for my daily doses of relevant information.

But before we can acknowledge the full horror of The Federalist's position, we need to understand the magnitude of its threat: yes, dear readers, there truly are masses of alleged humans out there in Neo-Confederate White Christian America who intend to bring back public executions including witch-burnings and the stoning of adulterers, adulteresses, persons of nonconforming sexuality and so-called "heretics," disobedient small children included.

And these days their de facto neo-Confederate nation -- for which see the color charts linked below -- is nearly all the geographical U.S.A. save parts of 13 coastal states2 and perhaps a few more cities.3

Quoth Joe Bageant in a 2004 Dissident Voice report that today is recognized by most of us on the Real (socialist/pagan) Left as terrifingly prophetic:

Christian Reconstruction...calls for the death penalty in a wide range of crimes, including abandonment of the faith, blasphemy, heresy, witchcraft, astrology, adultery, sodomy, homosexuality, striking a parent, and ''unchastity before marriage'' (but for women only). Biblically correct methods of execution include stoning, the sword, hanging, and burning. Stoning is preferred, according to Gary North, the self-styled Reconstructionist economist, because stones are plentiful and cheap. Biblical Law would also eliminate labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools...Reconstructionist doctrine calls for the scrapping of environmental protection of all kinds, because there will be no need for this planet earth once The Rapture occurs...

Its impact on politics and religion in this nation have been massive, with many mainstream churches pushed rightward...Other mainstream churches...flinch and bow to the Reconstructionists at every turn.

Lest the Christian Reconstructionists be underestimated, remember that it was Reconstructionist strategists whose "stealth ideology" managed the takeover of the Republican Party in the early 1990s. That takeover now looks mild in light of today's neocon Christian implantations...

I say again, dear readers, those paragraphs were written in 2004. Now the ChristoNazis -- because that is precisely what they are -- own the executive (the presidency), the judiciary (the courts), the U.S. Senate and the 30 states that are effectively Republican and therefore ChristoNazi despotisms including the eight Republican states (see color charts here) in which the Democratic [sic] Party allegedly polled as the majority party in 2018.

And let us stop delusionally ignoring the fact the ChristoNazi control of the Supreme Court of the United States, SCOTUS  (and now more appropriately the Robbers' Court),  is guaranteed -- effectively forever -- by its lifetime appointments, which are most assuredly long enough to enable them to inflict every bit of the Apocalypse they so eagerly seek.  

Hence by every imaginable criteria that actually matters, the ChristoNazis and their fellow Jewish and Islamic theocrats -- all with their sadistically Abrahamic god and his biblically endorsed mechanisms of salvation by torture including public stonings of sexual nonconformists and public burnings of heretics and witches -- are winning, and not just here in the United States.

In other words, Greta Thunberg and all of us in the growing but ever-more-marginalized multitudes who support her cause -- especially those of us who properly regard her as speaking with or perhaps even "channeling" the voice of our Mother Earth (no matter  whether we as dialectical materialists view such notions as merely [albeit compellingly] metaphorical or we as Gaians embrace such notions with our hearts and thus find them no less compellingly real than the haunting voice of the pagan liturgist Lisa Thiel) -- we are in bitter truth far more at risk from the ChristoNazis and their ilk than we are from any of our other environmental afflictions.

Hence also my eternal astonishment at those of us in the Working Class who accept without question the Ruling Class claim the imposition of forcible civilian disarmament will magically lessen our jeopardy -- a claim no less absurd than the childhood notion that whenever Froggy the Gremlin plunks his Magic Twanger, the resultant mischief drives all the Jeopards  away.

As for me, I lived far too long amongst the Southrons -- a bit more than 15 years total, including most of my boyhood and teens (1943-1948; 1950-1959) and the first three years  of my post-Regular-Army adulthood (late 1962-early 1965) -- to be ever so foolish as to under-estimate either the irremediable hatred that rules the Christian-white-supremacists' hearts or the equally irremediable cunning and savagery of the lynch-mob sadism that froths through their veins. Such is the source of the antebellum venom that poisoned this nation even before it attained nationhood and is now expanded by the Rightist mastery of postbellum technology and propaganda into a methodical poisoning already sufficient to nearly triple the 11 states of the old Confederacy in the Neo-Confederacy of the 21st Century. And it's because of those 15 years -- my involuntary familiarization with the deadly malevolence of white racism -- that I know from experience sometimes only skill with a firearm will keep you alive. 

Precisely why I maintain it is always better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun but didn't have it.4

___________________________

1For the record, these are Reader Supported NewsTruthdig,  CounterPunchPopular ResistanceLA Progressive, World Socialist Web Site, Patheos, Truthout, and of  course the Associated Press, each hyperlinked here for easy access.

2Alaska (which is infinitely more [lower-case] libertarian/anarchist than it is ChristoNazi or fascist); also the socioeconomically dominant, typically coastal parts of Washington, Oregon, California and Maryland, plus most (if not all) of New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. (Note my deliberate omission of Delaware, a de facto fiefdom of the DuPonts and their Neoliberal/fascist co-perpe-traitors.)

3As they come to me -- additional cities in which I have worked and/or known more than momentarily pleasurable times or to which I have longstanding personal connections but otherwise in no particular order: Asheville, N.C.; Chicago, Ill.; Minneapolis, Minn.; Missoula, Mont.;  Oak Ridge, Tenn.;  Ann Arbor, Mich.;  and let us not forget New Orleans, La., where alas I have never set foot but am strongly connected by the shared experiences of  two late and most beloved friends, the writer Joy Kidstry and the jazz musician, singer, arranger and lyricist Melinda Moen). This is of course is by no means an all-inclusive list; readers will no doubt know of many more such inland or Southron locales themselves.

4Non-grammatical change of tense -- "need a gun but didn't have it" -- is deliberate; the seemingly incorrect transition from present tense to past tense is intended to suggest an unarmed victim's probable demise in any such encounter whether the assailant(s) be quadrupedal or bipedal.    

 

*****

Recommended Reading

Probably 90 percent of the approximately 100 links per day I read online merely underscore the endlessly depressing truths of our era, which by themselves are no longer news save when they inflict high-mortality disasters  -- still more of the evidence we are prisoners of the most helplessly hopeless/hopelessly helpless era in all our species' approximately 250,000 years.

But I choose these essays and reports not for any underscoring function they might have but because they provide new details or grant us sharpened focus on older details that are being expanded or reconsidered.

I hope you'll find at least a few of them worth reading and contemplation. (As always, the use of capital and lower-case letters in the links duplicates the up-style or down-style modes of the sources.)

 

History Our Masters Desperately Want Us to Forget

The true legacy of US central banker Paul Volcker (1927–2019)

How "American Exceptionalism" Hides Shame, Creates Stupidity and Dangerous Imperialism

How Kshama Sawant Defeated Amazon

 

Rightists, Leftists Twisting Education into Ideological ‘Correctness’

Bill targets school riflery teams, citing gun culture;

Tennessee lawmaker calls for ending higher education to kill‘liberal breeding ground’

 

Realpolitik: Goebbels, Bismarck and Machiavelli Forever Proven Right

Democrats combine impeachment and collaboration with Trump

Congress Quietly Cut 'White Nationalists' From Measure to Screen Military Recruits

Trump Adviser Caught on Tape: Voter Suppression Key to GOP Battleground Efforts

Study Shows White Evangelicals Want Christian Supremacy, Not “Religious Freedom”

Israeli snipers target Gaza protesters in the eyes

Royal Canadian Mounted Police advocated live ammo against pipeline protesters

Why So Many People Who Need the Government Hate It

 

Ecogenocidal Matricide: the Patriarchal War Against Our Mother Earth

Biosphere Collapse?

Climate Change Fueled the Australia Fires. Now Those Fires Are Fueling Climate Change

Regulators halt attempt to hit solar customers with big fees

The US and Other Rich Countries Stonewalled $300 Billion Climate Relief Fund

Amazon Threatened to Fire Employees for Speaking Out on Climate, Workers Say

The Great Dismantling of America's National Parks Is Under Way

The Collapse Of Civilization May Have Already Begun

 

From the Top 25 Censored Stories of 2018-2019:

Ukrainian Fascists Trained US White Supremacists

US Women Face Prison Sentences for Miscarriages

 

'Twas the Season to Be Jolly

Christmas 2019: More than half a million homeless in America

A Grim New Definition of Generation X

Trump Tells Evangelical Rally He Will Put Prayer in Schools

Another Kentucky coal company refuses to pay miners

Army Veteran's Prosthetic Legs Repossessed After VA Refuses to Pay for Them

US alcohol-related deaths doubled between 1999 and 2017

New study shows link between auto plant closures and opioid deaths in working class America

"Democracy for Sale": Cambridge Analytica and Big Tech's History of Manipulating Elections

36th Out of 41: Social Justice Index of Developed Nations Puts US Near Bottom

Onward, Christian Fascists

 

And for all of us in the fast-growing Marginalized Multitude -- already our species' largest demographic group ever --  may our New Year at least be notably happier than the pivotally bad year our (allegedly) human Masters intend to inflict on us.

LB/11 January 2020

-30-


Ten Reports That Exemplify Our Intensifying Wretchedness

(Which I Re-Post Here in Hope They'll Help Shape Our Responses)

AGAIN, THOUGH I had not planned on writing anything  more in this space for probably another month, some breaking stories demand attention well beyond the aggrieved but fleeting glances by which we now routinely (and often suicidally) try to defend ourselves against the horrors they expound.

Why pay these disturbing reports additional heed? 

Because most come from the alternative press, which means they received little or no coverage in the so-called "mainstream press" owned and operated by our overlords, the privately-owned for-profit successor to Josef Goebbels' Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda that now peddles the Big Lies, disinformation and maliciously manufactured confusion central to the USian Empire's Neoliberal agenda of suppression, conquest and enslavement.

And because the reports featured here are what they are,  there is always a chance -- never mind ours is the most rationally hopeless of all human epochs -- of someone finding ideas therein for activism that might ameliorate the horrors our masters are bringing down upon us all.  

Sea 'Boiling' With Methane Discovered in Siberia: 'No One Has Ever Recorded Anything Like This Before'
Researchers on an expedition to the East Siberian Sea said the "methane fountain" was unlike anything they had seen before, with concentrations of the gas in the region to be six to seven times higher than the global average.  Observation: This is the newest report on the bobsled-speed with which terminal climate change is intensifying. Meanwhile our Neoliberal overlords are obviously escalating their efforts to weaponize the Apocalypse and thereby exterminate 90 to 95 percent of the 99 Percent and permanently enslave the survivors.

This report, brought to us by Reader Supported News, also exemplifies the sorts of information we are routinely denied by the Imperial USian censorship and brain-warping apparatus, the most ruinously effective such program in all human experience -- which is precisely why we should be doing everything in our power to preserve RSN, the censorship-nullifying source of so many vital stories. PLEASE therefore contribute to help RSN continue providing the most relevant summary of vital news available on the English-language Internet.  

Sexually Transmitted Diseases Hit New Highs Again in US
More than 1.7 million cases of chlamydia  were reported last year. The infection rate rose 3% from 2017. It’s the most ever reported in a year...About 580,000 gonorrhea cases were reported. That’s the highest number since 1991. The rate rose 5%. Scientists worry antibiotic resistance may be a factor. And the syphilis rate rose 15%. About 35,000 cases of the most contagious forms of the disease were reported — also the most since 1991. Factual Observation: These disasters are entirely the fault of the Fundamentalist Christians and their diabolical, intentionally murderous campaign to abolish sex education as well as all public health and reproductive care. Indeed their Prosperity Gospel Jesus is fast becoming humanity's most deadly enemy.

White College Kids Burn Latina Author’s Book After She Discusses White Privilege
But while some students at the Statesboro, Ga., school expressed disgust and shame, others defended the actions. Note: Do not dismiss this atrocity as "just the South"; uncontested brain-warping by Neoliberalism has made such neo-Confederate bigotry the defining characteristic of nearly all the USian interior states (in addition, of course, to all the original state perpe-traitors of secession).

War on Plastic Waste Faces Setback as Cost of Recycled Material Soars
For years the cost of making plastic products from recycled flakes was cheaper than relying on virgin plastics made using fossil fuels, meaning the sustainable option was an economic option too. But...new plastic is becoming cheaper to make due to a flood of petrochemicals production from the US driven by the shale gas boom. Note how this deliberately ecocidal trend is imposed on the world by -- what else -- the USian Empire (which by any accurate accounting is by far the most deliberately ecogenocidal empire that ever murdered and enslaved our kinfolk and otherwise infested our probably doomed plane).   

Wildfires and Forced Blackouts Lead to Multiple Deaths in California
The past week of events in California underscores the complete bankruptcy of the entire capitalist system, which subordinates every aspect of life—including the most basic needs of the population such as electricity—to the profit interests of the financial aristocracy. With all control over this vital resource left in the hands of the executives of the utility monopolies, Californians are offered the miserable choice: burn to death in wildfires or die prematurely when forced blackouts power down your ventilator or cause you to get into a car crash from the lack of stoplights. In a scene reminiscent of the French aristocracy at Versailles on the eve of the Great French Revolution, on the day of the public announcement that the mass shutoffs would go forward, PG&E staged a party for their top clients at a Sonoma County winery. Observation: The California wildfire crisis is a bitingly accurate summation of our true circumstances under Capitalism -- doomed no matter what we do or don't do, and so damned for as long as we indulge ourselves by remaining subjugated beneath the iron heels of the Neoliberal/ChristoNazi jackboot.   

Just 100 Companies Will Sign Humanity’s Death Warrant
Basically, a tiny number of sociopaths make the decisions that are currently dooming us all, and as much as I’d like to tell you otherwise, those people don’t even notice if we all march outside in colorful hats...Point is, the only protests that create change are those that interrupt the flow of business, because these corporations will not give up easily. Too much profit rests in the balance for them to stop their prolonged execution of the human race. Observation: And yet there are still those ignorant multitudes so willfully deluded they cannot accept the ever-more-obvious truth the One Percenters are methodically weaponizing  terminal climate change to facilitate the imposition of the aristos' own ecogenocidal Neoliberal World Order -- the organizational model of which is the antebellum slave plantation expanded to worldwide magnitude.   

Trump Asserts Unchecked Presidential Powers
In the wake of the eight-page letter sent Tuesday evening by the White House to the House of Representatives declaring the Trump administration’s defiance of the impeachment inquiry, the president and his attorneys are elaborating a theory of unchecked executive authority, a presidential dictatorship in all but name.  Comment: But most USians will cravenly ignore this warning just as -- methodically stupefied cowards they are -- they have ignored an infinity of equally urgent warnings dating all the way back to 22 November 1963.

Trump’s Spiritual Adviser: ‘to Say No to Trump Would Be Saying No to God’
Pastor White (also) says she was ordered by God to serve President Trump. See also: Ralph Reed: Christians Have a “Moral Obligation” to Support Donald Trump in 2020  Relevance: Each of these reports exemplify the theocratic horrors our Neoliberal slavemasters are methodically imposing.

US Supreme Court Term Begins with New Threats to Democratic Rights
Last Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States began its 2019-2020 term. The court is slated to hear cases involving a number of democratic and civil rights issues, including the separation of church and state, the right to abortion, equal employment for homosexual and transgender persons, the rights of immigrants and those defending them from state repression, and the rights of criminal defendants. Comment: Thus the Robbers' Court begins its long-planned effort to murder the final remnants of USia's pseudo-democracy. The only remaining question is how long it will be before the Regime begins its Gestapo-type mass arrest and extermination of all us in the 99 Percent, we the people of color, we the people of anti-patriarchal sexuality and all the rest of us including the few Caucasians whose values are anywhere to the Left of the ChristoNazis' saint, martyr and hero Adolf Hitler. 

*****

But Don't Be Deluded by a Tiny Taste of Seemingly Uplifting Stories:

MORE SPECIFICALLY, please don't forget the fact there can be no victory -- not in this winner-take-all fight to save our Mother Earth and our species -- until those Capitalists and Abrahamic fanatics who are now obviously the sworn enemies of all known forms of Earthly life are permanently removed from power and stripped of all influence.  Nevertheless:

Native Protectors at Wash. State Capitol Square Off with Riot Police and Stay Put
Members of the group Protectors of the Salish Sea, founded and led by Paul Chiyokten Wagner of the Saanich Nation, have kept a 24-hour vigil on the steps of the capitol building since September 24. They say they’ll stay until Gov. Jay Inslee meets their four demands, which include issuing an executive order terminating all fossil fuel expansion projects in the state. Observation: After unsuccessfully presenting himself as the Democratic (sic) Party's "environmental" presidential candidate, Inslee shows his true Neoliberal malevolence.  

Sara Nelson Is the Face of America's Resurgent Labor Movement
“Almost a million workers are locked out or being forced to work without pay. Others are going to work when our workspace is increasingly unsafe,” Nelson said. “What is the Labor Movement waiting for?” Comment: Hear, hear!

Crimeans Tell The Real Story Of The 2014 Referendum And Their Lives Since
In the case of Crimea, joining Russia (or actually rejoining, as most I spoke to in Crimea phrased it) was something people overwhelmingly supported. In the case of the Donbass region, the turmoil of Ukraine’s Maidan coup in 2014 set things in motion for the people in the region to declare independence and form the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Description: A factual antidote to ChristoNazi, Nazi and fascist Big Lies.

California City Gave People $500 A Month, No Strings; Here’s What Happened
Since February, the city has given $500 a month, no strings attached, to 125 residents, all of whom live at or below the city’s median income level of about $46,000. It’s a form of universal basic income (UBI): the idea that people receive regular payments, which they are free to spend however they wish. Encouraging: hence please read in full.. 

*****

And Let Us Never Forget the (Swiftly Vanished) Truths of Our History:

HERE IS ANOTHER brief compendium of vital facts maliciously suppressed in the name of the Ayn Rand moral imbecility that is the heart of Neoliberalism and its relentless war against all things human:

“Intersectional Before It Was Cool”: The Women’s Movement Under State Socialism
The erasure of East European women’s activism—together with that of the activism of their socialist allies in the Global South—happened both because the East collapsed and because the West declared victory and could subsequently control and direct the historical narrative.

Repercussions of Child Kidnapping in Argentina’s Dirty War
“If you have doubts about your identity, contact Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.” So read billboards across today’s Argentina, where thousands of people were “disappeared” between 1976 and 1983 during the brutal military dictatorship’s Dirty War.

*****

AS I HAVE done every year since I became aware of changing seasons, I embrace the advent of cooler autumn weather -- of which (if indeed it presents the anticipated seasonal display of Mother Nature's painterly expertise at deciduous color), I will surely share a photographic glimpse or two via this website. 

Meanwhile may all of us stay as healthy as we are able. 

LB/16 October 2019

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Bruce Dixon: a Relentless Warrior for Socioeconomic Justice

BRUCE DIXON, managing editor and co-founder of Black Agenda Report, the only Leftist publication on this planet I regularly applaud and salute in near-total agreement, was slain by cancer 28 June 2019 -- another devastating loss of the sort that (as always) makes me wonder at this disease's apparent penchant for targeting effectively radical activists throughout the United States. 

The italicized passages below are from Ann Garrison's eulogy for him in CounterPunch, an informative piece I urge you to read in full. Likewise the two selections from Black Agenda Report itself:  

(...)

A year ago, after the Left Forum, he wrote “What Would an Authentic 21st Century US Left Look Like?

(...)

An authentic left, he concluded, must be independent of the Republican and Democratic Parties, independent of corporate and church philanthropy, unconditionally opposed to empire and white supremacy, and class conscious in its opposition to capitalism. He also wrote that it must give birth to a revolutionary working class party and create “economic and social organizations which prefigure the world we want to build.”

(...)

Every time he and fellow organizers made electoral advances, he said, the Democratic Party changed the rules to undermine them.
 
(...)
 
I once asked him whether the Greens might be better off putting their energy and resources into, for one, creating community gardens in major cities all over the country, and he responded that most of the community gardens he knew of had been shut down by those with wealth and power. There is indeed no sign left of Los Angeles’s famous South Central Farm, the largest urban farm and perhaps the greatest community organizing success in the US from 1994 till 2006, when it was bulldozed by a real estate developer.
 
(To read the remainder of Ms. Garrison's informative piece, go here. Please also read  "Bruce Dixon, in His Own Words," here, and "For Brother Bruce," here.) 
 
If what CounterPunch now acknowledges is the USian Empire's methodical, Final-Solution-type scheme of weaponized ecocide and genocidal tyranny -- the likelihood of which you read about first on Dispatches -- is ever replaced by genuine liberty, Bruce Dixon will most assuredly be recognized as one of the truly heroic figures in U.S. alternative journalism. 
 
Meanwhile, thanks entirely to the great generosity of friends and comrades, I am gradually getting back on-line, about which more later.
 
LB/5 July 2019
 
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Let’s Not Leave the Soviet Union Out of Our D-Day History

(The following, by People's World Editor-in-Chief John Wojcik and reprinted in full therefrom, would be a vital goading of our increasingly censored historians under any circumstances, but now -- with the ChristoNazis and their fascist allies openly tyrannizing the entire planet -- the oft-suppressed truth the Red Army saved the world from Hitler and the Original Nazis is more relevant than ever. The historical photographs that illustrate Comrade Wojcik's superb essay are viewable here.  ~ LB/6 June 2019)

*

ON THE 75th Anniversary of D-Day today, there are ceremonies honoring the American heroes who landed on the beaches of Normandy and defeated the Nazis. This is as it should be. What is not right, however, is that rarely are we honoring in our ceremonies the Soviet heroes who bore the brunt of the battles to defeat fascism in World War II.

Americans are not surprised when they hear that historians distort the truth, but most of us believe it is foreign historians, not ours, who are in the business of distortion.

The truth about World War II is that the war against the Nazis was essentially already won a year or more before D-Day when American and British soldiers fought their heroic battle on the beaches of northern France. When General Dwight D. Eisenhower and the troops under his command landed at Normandy, however, the Soviet Union had already fought and won the decisive battles of the war.

The “second front” opened by our side came, in fact, much later than the Soviet Union had hoped. Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had been pressuring U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill for almost two years for the opening of a second front in Europe, arguing it would have spared many of the millions who eventually died on the continent.

President Trump, British Prime Minister Theresa May, and French President Emmanuel Macron made absolutely no mention this week in their commemorations of D-Day of the central and key role the Soviet Union played in the defeat of Nazism. (Trump commemorating the defeat of fascism is already an insult anyway, considering his support for fascistic leaders and movements in various places around the world, including his support for the extreme right in his own country.)

Trump is not alone to blame for ignoring the role of the USSR in winning the war. High on the list of those to blame are American history books themselves. Then, there is the U.S. media too, including supposedly progressive media, that rarely gives the Soviet Union credit for the victory over fascism.

In a recent article for CALmatters, Glenn Sacks, a California history teacher, shares a multiple choice question from the official California Subject Examinations for Teachers for Social Studies:

Which of the following events best marks the turning point of World War II?

  1. A.) The Rape of Nanking by the Japanese
  2. B.) Operation Barbarossa by the Nazis
  3. C.) The D-Day invasion by the Allies
  4. D.) The signing of the Rome-Berlin Axis

All four of the choices are incorrect. The makers of the test, however, want you to select “c.”

There is no arguing with the fact that D-Day was important and that American and British troops fought and died bravely, but D-Day was not a turning point when compared to major battles between Hitler’s troops and Soviet forces on the Eastern Front.

By the time D-Day happened, news broadcasts around the world had, for more than a year, already been describing how the war had turned into one of defeat after defeat and retreat after retreat for the Germans. The turning point or points then had already happened before D-Day.

Everyone, including President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, saw the Battle of Stalingrad, which raged for 162 days from August of 1942 until February of 1943, as the true turning point.

The German army, air force, and navy were running out of fuel. Stalingrad stood between the fascist troops and the massive Soviet oil fields of the Caucasus region, so the Germans had to take it if they ever were going to win the war.

Some two million people were killed or wounded in Stalingrad before the Nazis surrendered. Shipload after shipload of Soviet soldiers kept arriving and disembarking at the docks on the Volga River. They were strafed and bombed and killed by Nazi planes even before they reached shore. Thousands were shot to death in the waters into which they had jumped as their boats were sunk by the fascist pilots who sprayed them with bullets as they desperately tried to make it to shore.

Once in Stalingrad, a Soviet soldier was lucky if he lived an entire day. Supplies were short; two soldiers would share one rifle. The instructions were that when the first one dies the other one picks up the rifle and continues the fight. Yet they kept coming and they kept fighting, house to house and door to door, and then room to room until every last Nazi was cleared out of the city.

While some U.S. history books give slight or cursory mention to the epic battle, there are other Soviet battles too that were more significant militarily and politically than D-Day. These additional battles are almost never mentioned in our history books. One is the Battle of Kursk, the biggest tank battle in human history, that took place in July 1943. The Soviets defeated an army of over one million German soldiers.

Here, it is worth mentioning that not all of the problems with American history books are problems of omission. Some of them, in addition to leaving out important Soviet battles, inject falsehoods into their narratives. One of the most familiar of these is the notion that it was the cold Russian winter, rather than Soviet resolve or fighting ability, that really defeated the Nazis.

The Battle of Kursk, for instance, occurred during pleasant summer conditions and entirely on terms chosen by the Nazis, but they were still beaten.

Still another Soviet battle that surpassed D-Day happened after D-Day itself: Operation Bagration. At this battle, the Soviet Union inflicted on Germany the biggest defeat any nation had ever inflicted upon any other nation in the history of human warfare. The Soviets destroyed 60 German divisions, and yet again, more than a million more German soldiers.

Churchill rose up before the British parliament after this battle and declared: “The obvious essential fact to this point is that it is the Russian armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German army.”

Bagration was truly a turning point, too, because it led to a series of events that brought the Red Army all the way to the doorstep of Berlin.

First, in Byelorussia (modern-day Belarus) the Soviets destroyed 28 of 34 Divisions the Nazis sent there, effectively destroying, just a day after D-Day, the entire German front lines in the East. By June 24, they finished off the rest of the German armies and Panzer tank divisions in Byelorussia and liberated Minsk. That gave them a clear path to liberate Lithuania, Romania, and Poland, positioning themselves for the final offensive on the German capital.

There is much heroism to remember this “D-Day.” Some 400,000 U.S. soldiers heroically gave their lives fighting Hitler in the Second World War. In the east, the Soviet Union lost 27 million people; roughly every fifth person in that huge multi-national country gave their lives.

No Western leaders argued at that time with the figures, figures which showed 80 percent of German casualties were caused by the Soviet Union and its people. General Eisenhower himself testified to the destruction by the Nazis of one-third of the wealth of the Soviet Union and how, after the war, they had to find homes for 25 million homeless people. Eisenhower is quoted as having said, “When we flew into Russia, in 1945, I did not see a house standing between the western borders of the country and the area around Moscow.”

So on this D-Day, let’s remember the Americans in the “greatest generation” who died fighting the menace of fascism. But let’s also remember our Soviet brothers and sisters who died fighting that battle. We owe them and, just as important, ourselves no less.

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

Jailing of Journalist for Exposing Poisonous Depth of U.S. Corruption Forever Nullifies the Pivotal 1734 Peter Zenger Case, Again Revealing "American Democracy" as Our Species' Most Self-Destructive Big Lie 

THE PERSECUTION OF JULIAN ASSANGE reduces to used toilet paper the Peter Zenger verdict, the pivotal 1734 finding by a British colonial jury that truth is always the ultimate defense against prosecution for seditious libel.

And that's just one of the many ways Assange's arrest lays bare the Big Lie of  "American democracy."

It also adds yet another chapter of atrocities to four centuries of damning evidence that would have long ago reduced the U.S. pretense of "democracy" to a bitter joke in any polity even slightly less dishonest or hypocritical than than pridefully ignorant, habitually hateful Moron Nation. It demonstrates just how thoroughly the  First Amendment and indeed the entire Bill of Rights have been reduced to be nothing more than stage-props.

Ultimately what Assange's illegal arrest shows us is the extent to which the tyranny implicit in "American exceptionalism" -- an older more euphemistically disguised variant of the bigotry that launched German Nazism -- has again been elevated to the dominant doctrine of U.S. governance.

Given the reality of the Roberts Court -- which I dub "the Robber Court" because I cannot doubt its intent to rob us of the last few remnants of New Deal humanitarianism -- the Assange case is merely another tombstone in the graveyard of U.S. democratic process.

But -- as my Tory ancestors might have told themselves after they were raped and beaten and tarred-and-feathered and harried into exile -- one could hardly expect  better from a nation founded by Southron slave-owners and their New England bankers to protect slavery and  preserve the enormous profits generated by unpaid captive laborers.

"American democracy" is thus revealed -- at least to the remaining few of us not already brain-warped either to stupefied babbling or submissive silence -- as naught but the most flagrantly dishonest of white Christian Europe's serf-and-slave realms.

Nor are the horrors   implicit in this damning truth any way diminished by the fact the Imperial U.S. is ruled not by a single dictator, but by a mostly anonymous,  ever-more-omnipotent cabal of plutocrats -- the unapologetically evil upper echilon of the One Percent aristocracy. 

Thus with its malignancy disguised by intricately woven deceptions, the United States has become the most deadly  threat to survival in the history of Planet Earth.

***

HERE IS a brief review of Zenger's significance. The Printer's Trial: the Case of John Peter Zenger and the Fight for a Free Press (Gail Jarrow; Calkins Creek: 2006) tells us that after Zenger's acquittal on a charge of criminal libel,  "British governors were reluctant to charge American printers with seditious libel. They realized that colonial juries would likely refuse to convict anyone for publishing criticisms of royal officials. Because of this, the colonial press became more open and free. During the years leading up to the American Revolution, printers published attacks on British authority as well as calls for independence.”

Assange, of course, is denied any such opportunity for judicial relief. His will be a show trial performed by a kangaroo court. Given the (additional) Big Lie of "American justice," Assange's conviction -- and in all probability his death sentence (whether by lethal injection or by the slower more agonizing torture of solitary confinement) -- is already assured. Thus do U.S. puppet-states like the United Kingdom obey the dictates of their Wall Street overlords.

***

U.S. CENSORSHIP IS seemingly unofficial -- another example of the founders' long-range cunning in their efforts  to protect  plutocracy and slavery. Hence the First Amendment's prefatory stipulation "Congress shall make no law..."

But that prohibition does nothing to limit the power of publishers, editors, educators and religious authorities to suppress whatever information they choose -- including information that today might challenge the absolutism of the Neoliberal/ChristoNazi plutocracy and its ever-more-undeniable embrace of the antebellum slave plantation as its ultimate model for human society. Nor does it prevent their clandestine collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency or any other malign elements of the ruling Neoliberal plutocracy. 

What that tells us is our founders were so sure of themselves -- and so certain of the ideological faithfulness of their descendants -- they felt no need to impose the formal censorship characteristic of Europe.    

As a result, by deliberate design, U.S. censorship is far sneakier than any of its official counterparts elsewhere. 

And that sneakiness is why, as proven by the oppressive reality of Moron Nation --  the most pridefully ignorant, hateful, morally imbecilic population in the developed world -- U.S. censorship is demonstrably the most diabolically effective methodology of thought control ever devised. 

Note for example -- and I promise this is not a non sequitur -- how the coup-protecting  Warren Report was rammed down our collective throats: 

In October 1964 -- when the Associated Press first released its 366-page, one-volume summary of the  evidence presented to support the Big Lie President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered not by a seasoned death squad but by a deranged lone gunman -- the hardbound book was distributed free to members of the working press.

If memory serves,  the nation's AP-member papers  gave away innumerable copies of the book as promotional gifts to new subscribers, though ostensibly it was to be peddled for $1 per copy.

It is also my recollection the AP claimed at the time its effort to publicize and disseminate the Warren Commission's assertions had no precedent in U.S. history. In any case it provides a telling example of an allegedly "democratic" method of imposing national conformity and the irresistible momentum behind it

As disclosed by the Church Committee:

The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.

In this context, the enormous  importance our overlords gave to squelching anti-Warren Commission debate becomes  evidence in its own right.

***

HENCE THE RELEVANCE of my own encounters with assassination-related censorship:

From August 1963 until just after Christmas 1964, I was the sports editor, crime reporter and general-assignment photographer for The Oak Ridger, a tiny afternoon daily that -- because Oak Ridge, Tennessee is the global birthplace of thermonuclear apocalypse -- was in Cold War retrospect undoubtedly no less a critical CIA station than The New York Times or The Washington Post is today.

Which probably explains  how and why Richard Smyser -- the diminutive, socially awkward, whiny-voiced managing editor of a paper with only about 10,000 paid subscribers -- quickly and somewhat mysteriously rose to chair the internationally prominent Associated Press Managing Editors'  Freedom of Information Committee.

It also suggests why -- as we buttoned down the newsroom after the 17-hour workday occasioned by the murder of President Kennedy -- Smyser meticulously collected every single scrap of assassination-related wire-service copy. Not only that: he also --  very uncharacteristically, I thought -- threatened each of us on the five-member news staff with instant firing should we be caught withholding even a single paragraph of the reams of post-assassination dispatches that had reached us via the AP's teletype machines.

At the time, Smyser acted as if his edict of confiscation was motivated by nothing more than editorial privilege, just as, nearly a year later, he acted as if it were mere curiosity that prompted him to interrogate all of us in detail  as to our views of the Warren Commission's verdict and the AP summary thereof. 

I remember that interrogation vividly because it was one of only two occasions in which Smyser  belittled me mercilessly and at the top of his voice in the presence of all my newsroom colleagues.

When he asked me for my opinion of the AP summary, I replied truthfully. I said I could not accept the report's ballistic conclusions because -- as a former Regular Army soldier, a firearms collector, the son of a national match competitor and a competitive shooter myself -- I found them improbable if not downright absurd.

At the time I was a bit more than halfway between my 24th and 25th birthdays. Smyser's response was to seize upon my age and poverty-inflicted lack of a college degree and then -- shouting as loudly as I ever heard him shout -- to denounce me as an arrogantly disruptive, grotesquely disobedient child who refused to accept the truth and wisdom of those who were not only my socioeconomic, educational and intellectual "betters," but were so far above my station in life, I had no right to question their findings at all.

It was indeed an interesting revelation of Ruling Class bigotry -- especially since it was voiced by the editor presumably charged with national responsibility for maintaining our (alleged) freedom of the press.  

Twenty years later, in a conversation with a half-dozen equally seasoned members of the working press during an evening in the late, lamented and now-legendary Lion's Head -- in essence the unofficial New York City Press Club -- I learned that identical confiscations-of-copy and post-Warren-Commission interrogations had occurred at most U.S. daily newspapers.

Why the confiscations? That too is obvious in retrospect. The AP dispatches included several reports that might have later revealed the Warren Report as fiction. One described the Dallas cops' discovery, in the parking lot behind the infamous grassy knoll, of a pair of Lee-Enfields -- British service-rifles that, as the fastest bolt-action rifles ever made, could in trained hands easily have produced the illusion of "three bursts of automatic gunfire" to which combat-veteran reporters and many other witnesses testified. Another report, less than an hour after the shooting, told of a light aircraft ignoring vehement protests by Dallas air traffic controllers,  taking off without authorization and fleeing toward Mexico; I remarked at the time, "there go the killers." 

As far as I am able to determine, all of this contrary evidence -- and there was a great deal of it on the wires that day -- has vanished down the Orwell hole. Thus is deniability made plausible.           

***

HERE FROM A slightly revised version of my 2013 essay entitled,  "Censorship: Lessons from Nader and a Knoxville Atrocity" are two additional examples of how U.S. the censorship apparatus functions. Each demonstrates how -- thanks to the founders' plutocratic foresight -- what today we recognize  as the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine is the world's first privately-owned, for-profit equivalent of  the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda: 

In 1964 Ralph Nader entrusted me with the revelations that, a year later, would be published in Unsafe at Any Speed, his exposé of capitalism in action, specifically of how the U.S. automobile manufacturers were maximizing profits by minimizing vehicular safety.

But this piece never saw the proverbial light of day. It was killed by Smyser, my second bitter schooling in the harsh realities of censorship that are cleverly hidden beneath the claim the United States has “freedom of the press,” and it was memorably painful because I had expected better -- much better -- from The Oak Ridger. Why? Because its top executives, Publisher Don McKay, Business Manager Tom Hill and Smyser himself had been courageous enough to hire me despite The Knoxville Journal's continuing effort to slander me into professional and personal oblivion.

That episode is a story unto itself. I had worked for The Journal since September 1957, first as a part-time sports stringer through the fall of 1959, when finances forced me to drop out of college and enlist in the U.S. Army. In September 1962, having served 18 months in Korea and finished my required three-year term of active duty, I was immediately rehired by The Journal as a full-time staff sportswriter. Obviously the paper liked me and my reporting; Assistant Sports Editor Ben Byrd once told me he believed I was destined for The New York Times or some equally prestigious publication.

But on 2 June 1963, a raid by a combined force of Knoxville cops and Knox County sheriff's deputies jailed a racially mixed group of 40 men and women on charges I knew to be utterly without basis in fact. I was one of those  arrested, but on the strength of my press card I was immediately released, and now – naive idiot that I was – I believed I could convince Journal Editor/Publisher Guy L. Smith and City Editor Dick Evans the arrests were at the very least a terrible mistake and more probably a deliberate atrocity. Instead Smith and Evans rejected everything I said, concluding I was what in the parlance of the Jim Crow South was called a “nigger-lover” – probably a Communist as well – and Smith had me re-arrested in his newsroom, then publicly fired me on Page One of his newspaper.

My termination notice was a maliciously slanderous story by Ron McMahan, who knowingly wrote a deliberate Big Lie that would have been equally at home in Adolf Hitler's Völkischer Beobachter: “Forty Negroes and whites, most of them students at the University of Tennessee, were arrested early Sunday morning during what police described as 'a drunken sex orgy' at a South Knoxville residence...Booked at county jail on a charge of disorderly conduct was Loren Bliss, 23, of 1537 Laurel Avenue, a former Journal sportswriter.”

There was of course neither orgy nor drunkenness; the gathering was nothing more than a quiet garden party, attended by nearly as many UT faculty members, civil rights activists, young local professionals and business executives as older students. It celebrated the graduation of a woman named Maline Robinson, who had just earned a master-of-fine-arts degree from UT and who would later teach art history at the University of Wisconsin. Despite The Journal's lurid prose (“partly-clad couples were lying all over the front lawn...on tables, in closets and on the floor...Lewdness charges were not placed against anyone because during the melee everyone scattered”), the sexual allegations were nothing more than typical fabrications of the forever undiminished, never-to-be-quenched hatefulness that rules the vindictively pornographic Southron mind. Such is the racist fear, blood-lust and never-to-be-acknowledged envy implicit in the old joke that asks, “what is ten inches and white,” then answers, “nothing.”

That the police raid occurred just as the local Ku Klux Klan and its many affiliated churches were pulpit-pounding against “interracial love feasts” was hardly coincidental. Martin Southern, the ironically named American Civil Liberties Union lawyer in Knoxville, said he believed the raid had been carefully planned by a cabal of high ranking officials at UT, the sheriff's office and the police department plus top executives of The Journal and The Knoxville News-Sentinel to facilitate purging the university of anyone the local Ruling Class deemed “trouble-makers” and/or “outside agitators.”

Southern warned me that because I was the one genuinely credible witness to everything that had actually occurred -- he said I was “the fly, as it were, in the segregationist ointment” -- my own life was in danger. Not many days later, a would-be killer tried to invade my ground-floor apartment via its kitchen window, but the attempted hit was thwarted by my vigilant German shepherd Brunhilda and my own expert-class skill with a handgun – a story for another time. 

Meanwhile Marion Barry, then Tennessee field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, later the mayor of Washington D.C., had arranged for me to cover the mass-arrest story for a local African-American weekly. But that report too was intrusively censored, not by blacks but by two white civil rights activists, Congress of Racial Equality members Steve Wagner and Phillip Bacon, who claimed they feared accurate description of the incident's more telling moments would discredit the narrative as “sensationalism.” Thus to my eternal regret I allowed them to cut several key passages from my original draft. These included a word-for-word account of my confrontation with Smith, in which he made it clear my alternatives were either to fabricate a lie describing an imaginary sex orgy or suffer the consequences; details of the police assault on a Latin American diplomat who was a guest at the party; and a brief description of the attempt on my life that arguably confirmed Southern's hypothesis of a Rightist conspiracy far broader than a mere police raid. The following, under my own byline, is what remained after Bacon and Wagner finished censoring it. It's from the 3 August 1963 edition of The Knoxville Flashlight-Herald:

Although The Knoxville Journal had opportunity to publish a staff member's eye-witness account of the now-famed graduation party held for some University of Tennessee students by Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Ottaway, it declined to utilize that source and relied instead upon police and sheriff's reports.

That those reports were something less than reliable has since been proven in Knox County Sessions Court.

This writer, at the time a sports reporter for The Journal, attended the party with friends and was subsequently arrested, then freed after deputies learned he was a Journal staff member. He was re-arrested and booked some 14 hours later after unsuccessfully attempting to interest Journal City Editor Dick Evans in a factual account of events before and during the arrests...

Included in this writer's report would have been a statement that the party was quiet and proper despite the number of persons present and information that police and deputies had acted without grounds.

Those taken to city jail, where there is a drunkometer (a Breathalyzer by which suspects can challenge a drunkenness charge), were not charged with drunkenness, but those taken to county jail, where there is no drunkometer, were charged with drunkenness in addition to disorderly conduct...

Cases against those charged by Knox County, including this writer, were dismissed July 1. City Court cases were continued by order of Journal-supported Judge Charles Kelly and will be heard in October.

Included on the city docket is Milton Vargas, the Panamanian Vice-Consul here. Mr. Vargas, who has filed a full report with the Panamanian government, has charged he was slapped by police officers...

The only uncensored coverage of the arrests was provided by TASS – Tyelyegrafnoye agyentstvo Sovyetskogo Soyuza or Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union. The story appeared on page one of Pravda, as I recall in the 5 June edition. It was also -- or so I was told by several UT students -- broadcast in English by Radio Moscow.

Given the prurient hatefulness that so often defines southern racism, The Oak Ridger's bravery in hiring me in mid-August, even before all the court cases had been decided, was beyond exceptional. Indeed, since The Journal's vindictively aggressive slanders were blacklisting me even amongst Northern employers, until The Oak Ridger came to my rescue I had feared my journalism career was over.

Which brings us back to Ralph Nader. Maybe a year after the Knoxville incident, he was in Oak Ridge visiting his sister, a scientist with some big-league connection to what today would be called the nuclear energy cartel.  Smyser arranged for me to interview Nader,  exactly where I no longer remember. What I do recall is that I questioned Nader for hours, that eventually we adjourned to continue the interview at his sister's apartment, and that after I photographed him with the paper's Polaroid-back Speed Graphic, we talked literally until dawn.

Nader doubted the story would run. Citing the paper's bold defiance of the region's characteristic racism, I assured him it would.

Then I drove from his sister's place directly to the The Oak Ridger building on Tyrone Road, put the sports page to bed as quickly as I could and hammered out the Nader story on my issue Royal Standard typewriter. My lead said something like “'Unsafe at any speed' -- that's how Ralph Nader describes many of Detroit's best-selling automobiles.” The second graf laid out Nader's credentials -- a Harvard-educated lawyer, he had been campaigning for safer cars since the late 1950s -- and the remainder detailed his complaints against Chevrolet's Corvair. The text ran to at least six takes – six double-spaced typewritten pages of about 300 words apiece.

Despite the befogged mind that even at age 24 is the penance we pay for a sleepless all-nighter, I thought I'd done a damn fine job of reporting. But -- perhaps because Smyser himself drove a sherbet-green Corvair -- the story evoked not the anticipated thank you for the warning but instead provoked him to rage at me, startling the entire five-person staff as he shouted his denunciations the length of the newsroom.

My memory still flinches at how he grimaced as he dropped the Nader copy into the circular gray waist-high trash bin that stood guard beside his desk. His expression suggested he was disposing of something grossly distasteful, at least as repugnant as a cat turd.

When I phoned Nader and apologetically told him there would be no story, he nevertheless thanked me for my effort. Years after that I realized I was the one who should have thanked him – not just for all the time he spent telling me about the built-in hazards of those Detroit cars, but for the lesson in journalistic reality.

Such is the USian variant of a “free press,” its invisible restrictions so effective, no official censorship is necessary, the result uncomfortably reminiscent of a slogan in George Orwell's 1984: “ignorance is strength.”

***

AS TO WHY ASSANGE is being targeted, I suspect -- despite suggestions to the contrary -- it has little or nothing to do with the sadistic vindictiveness of Hillary Clinton and her Democratic (sic) Party apparatus. 

More likely the effort against Assange -- which by its bipartisanship bares the despotic Neoliberal unity the Democrats and Republicans normally work so diligently to conceal --  is in reaction to such findings as this Harvard study that documents substantial public response to alternative media. Or, perhaps more pointedly, to how Assange and his colleagues are  nullifying even the carefully disguised censorship that defines the United States.

In any case it is yet more irrefutable evidence of our Neoliberal overlords' increasingly frantic efforts to silence dissent by any means possible -- thereby ending forever their pretense this "one nation under God" stands for anything remotely akin to "liberty and justice for all."  

Quoth  the 1971 Powell Memo:

There should be no hesitation to attack the Naders, the Marcuses and others who openly seek destruction of the system. There should not be the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.

A detailed analysis of the memo is here

***

ALL OF WHICH should alleviate -- or so I hope -- any need for explain further why I think the Assange story is so important it demands the most thorough coverage I am able to provide:  

UK Judge Calls Assange "A Narcissist," Sets Extradition Court Date

Why the Assange Arrest Should Scare Reporters

The Assange Arrest is a Warning From History

FOCUS: Julian Assange's Legal Proceedings Will Do Profound Damage to the Institutions of the Free Press

RSN: The Railroad That Awaits Julian Assange

The Martyrdom of Julian Assange

After 7 Years of Deceptions About Assange, the US Readies for Its First Media Rendition

Assange's Arrest Erases What America Suppposedly Stood For

Assange’s Indictment Treats Journalism as a Crime

Worldwide outrage over arrest of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange

While Much of US Media Plays Along, Critics Warn Assange Indictment an 'Obvious' Ploy With Deeper Dangers

*****         

This Week's Most Damning Juxtapositions of Evidence
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 99 Percenters they allow to survive.

Democrats 'Wasting Time While Our Climate Burns' With Insufficient Resolution
Another of the woefully uninformative, glaringly illiterate heads that so frequently define Common Dreams as one of our shoddier examples of nonprofessional alternative journalism. What the head should say -- corrected both for its misplaced modifier and its sloppy misstatement of fact -- is Friends of Earth Denounce Democrats for "Wasting Time" on Climate Crisis.
Unfortunately the story fails to ask why the Democratic (sic) Party is diddling and dallying rather than moving to help sustain our species in the face of what is already the gravest-ever threat to human survival. But two other stories combine to reveal "over-population" as dog-whistle code for genocide and the trillion-dollar momentum that -- unless we are rescued by socialist revolution -- defines  the Neoliberal (neo-Nazi) "Final Solution" to the environmental crisis. Then we have

Republicans Push Anti-Wind Bills in Several States as Renewables Grow Increasingly Popular

In which context we should consider the implications of

The return of the population bombers

Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability , .

While never forgetting the post-World-War-II, build-a-new-Nazi-Reich inputs to the present-day governance of the U.S. Empire:

How Thousands Of Nazis Were 'Rewarded' With Life In The U.S.

As I trust we are learning, the conclusion fostered by viewing the evidence as expressions of capabilities and intent are entirely different from what one concludes when it is viewed as  manifestations of chaos and coincidence.  It is also useful to remember an axiom of analysis that is undoubtedly older than Rome: "once is happenstance; twice is questionable; three times is enemy action."

***

Our Mother Earth: the Patriarchy's Ultimate Rape Victim
The Abrahamic religions' fear and hatred of femaleness expressed as the ultimate misogyny of ecocide.

Arctic Is Warmest It's Been in 10,000 Years, Study Suggests

This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out

Researchers Warn Arctic Has Entered 'Unprecedented State' That Threatens Global Climate Stability

For some river towns, flood protection is simply too costly

FOCUS: A Lawyer Set Himself on Fire to Protest Climate Change. Did Anyone Care?

Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth

***

Imperial War-Mongering for God, Profit and Sadistic Delight

Another African Convicted In Another Racist, Chauvinist Western Court 

US Military Attack On Venezuela Mulled By Top Trump Advisors And Latin American Officials At Private DC Meeting 

US Military Threatens Syria-Like War In Venezuela, Awaits Trump's Order

The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process Is Dead. An Expert Explains Why.

Reckoning With Failure In The War On Terror 

Labeling The Iranian Revolutionary Guard 'Terrorists' Is A Step Toward War 

ISIS/Al Qaeda in the Middle East and Ukraine's "Neo-Nazis": Two Sides of the Imperial Coin

Venezuela Prepared To Defend The Revolution Against US Imperialism 

 

***

Atrocities and Outrages 
Events and patterns -- including slow-motion genocide disguised as "austerity" -- that define the U.S. as the (de facto) Fourth Reich

US Denies Entry To BDS Cofounder Omar Barghouti

Katie Bouman and the Black Hole That Made Her Famous
Badly misleading head: the story is about the Gamergating of a woman who dares to be great.

What Gentrification and the New NFL Stadium Mean for Longterm Black Residents of Inglewood, California

Breastfeeding Mother Hit with $115 Ticket for Breastfeeding in Midtown NYC Traffic

Trump officials discussed using troops to run migrant detention camps

What Gentrification and the New NFL Stadium Mean for Longterm Black Residents of Inglewood, California

Eleven-Year-Old Ordered to Be Deported to El Salvador Without Her Family

Trump Reportedly Pushed to Drop Asylum Seekers in Democratic Sanctuary Cities

Trump's Transgender Military Ban Takes Effect Today

West Virginia college axes liberal arts; Pennsylvania Historical Society slashes workforce

Wealth, Stealth, and Boeing

US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums

The Trump Administration Is Abandoning the Dakota Tribes as They Face a Second Catastrophic Storm

Republicans Are Taking Ilhan Omar's Comments on 9/11 Out of Context to Smear Her

Why Has Congress Stalled on Investigating Money Laundering Allegations at Trump Properties?

A 3-year-old had to go potty, so he went in a gas station parking lot. That's when a deputy cited his mom for disorderly conduct.

Police tower casts a shadow over South Seattle Safeway

Monsters Inc: They Treated Us Like We Were Animals

On Toddler Torturers: There Are Some Lines That Simply Can't Be Crossed

Congress Is About to Ban the Government From Offering Free Online Tax Filing. Thank TurboTax.

Scapegoating Unions For The Postal Service's Phony Crisis

Obama Pushes Neoliberal Myths on Health Care at Fundraiser

Homeland Security Purge Ushers in the Stephen Miller Administration

Kings Bay Plowshares: Peace Activists Face 25 Years for Action at US Nuclear Submarine Base

Right wing takes Wisconsin court seat in a strident hate campaign

Rising number of Michigan and US households unable to afford basic necessities

Obama, Pelosi push Democrats further to the right

 

***

Religion and Spirituality

Trump Administration Lets Foster Agency Turn Away Catholic and Jewish Parents

Trump and the Global Rise of the Christian Right

Clarence Thomas: Atheists Can’t Be Trusted Since Oaths Mean Nothing to Them

 

***

Racism

Trump's Attack on Ilhan Omar Is a Trap for Democrats

Let Freedom Ring
I had forgotten -- until I read this paradoxically triumphant yet damning report (which we should therefore all read) -- the Ku-Klux intensity of the racism manifest by the Daughters of the American Revolution. 

FOCUS: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Receives So Many Death Threats Her Staff Performs Visitor Risk Assessments  

 

***

Media and Censorship

The International Struggle Against the Fake News of the U.S. Empire: Remarks at the National Writers Union

US Government's Refusal to Confirm or Deny It Put American Journalist on Drone Kill List Called 'Chilling'

On False Dichotomies, Real and Fake, at MSDNC

If You Have Alexa, Amazon Is Listening

The International Struggle Against the Fake News of the U.S. Empire: Remarks at the National Writers Union

Missouri Bill Banning Anonymity of Atheist Plaintiffs in Lawsuits Passes House

 

***

Sparks of Anger, Murmurs of Rebellion
But absolutely nothing to indicate the emergence of effectively organized and disciplined resistance in the United States and its Empire. 

Turkey's Only Communist Mayor Scores Another Election Victory

Freedom Rider: Scoundrels and Reparations

AMNH Under Fire for Hosting Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro

Medicaid Work Requirements: Do They Actually Help?

Illinois Billboard Welcomes Missouri Women Who Want a “Safe, Legal Abortion”

Indian Country Today video news report for April 11, 2019, with Vincent Schilling - IndianCountryToday.com
Almost always some relevant stories here, but they are impossible to link separately because of the way the site is designed.

Will you Rise up for Climate Justice Next Week? Don’t Let Fatalism and Cynicism Hold you Back
Read my comment and its correction to see why environmentalism without anti-Capitalist revolution is doomed -- and why such pseudo-environmentalism is therefore in apocalyptic reality yet another form of anti-environmentalism.

'Huge Victory': French Court Finds Monsanto Guilty of Poisoning Farmer

Progressives hit attempt by Democratic Party establishment to crush primary challengers

A Reckoning for Al Sharpton and the Black Misleadership Class

Runaway Inequality Is a National Emergency, Billionaire Banker Warns

Tell Netflix: Speak Up for Women 

***

In Closing
Please, please, please heed the distress call by Reader Supported News for funding. The fact its founder and I have sometimes had our differences has nothing to do with the overall superb quality of the website's anthologies  of the day's most important stories.

LB/16 April 2019

-30-

 


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

(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

-30-


SitRep #4: Revelations of Our Masters' Relentless Malevolence

(With socioeconomic and environmental Apocalypse undeniably upon us, there is only one possible reason the One Percenters and their minions sabotage our every effort to cope with the crisis: they are exploiting it to maximize their wealth and power. Already they've reshaped human society to perpetuate their omnipotence, with serfdom and slavery for the few who survive their Final Solutions.  Such is shock-doctrine Neoliberalism – the ideology designed to serve  them even better in a post-apocalyptic future. To view their plans for the 99 Percent, visit a camp of homeless people -- and honor the dwellers therein as involuntary prophets of our probable  fate -- if indeed there is any human future at all. ) 

***

Sampling the Indications, 25-31 March 2019

Our weekly dystopian digest of indisputable proof the One Percent is weaponizing both the economic crisis and the climate crisis to restructure all human society into Neoliberal utopia -- absolute power for the One Percenters, extermination of all "surplus" 99 Percenters, hereditary (inescapable) serfdom and slavery for the survivors --  a conclusion hitherto so taboo only one other English-language writer has dared suggest it. (Note: capitalization in the following is as in the original texts.)

 

Lead Stories: My Top Three Picks for the Most Revealing Works of the Week

Russiagate Implodes, Pleasing Trump But Leaving the Left in the Cold 

Freedom Rider: Julian Assange and Robert Mueller

Drown Sanders and Strangle Self-determination: What the Rich Will Do to Stay in Power

 

Environment as the Final Macrocosm of Selfhood
In an ultimate, literally suicidal spasm of misogyny, the Capitalists abuse our Mother Earth as if she were just another of their battered women or perhaps merely a stray female dog they like to kick and pelt with stones. But abused dogs eventually bite, and Mother Earth always bites last.  

Trump's Pick to Head Interior Blocked Report Warning of Pesticide Risk to 1,000+ Endangered Species

EarthRx: The Irish Potato Famine Was Caused By Capitalism, Not A Fungus

Bengal Famine Caused by Winston Churchill's Policies, Not Drought, Study Confirms

The Coldest Spot on Earth, Melting

Climate Change Could Push Tropical Diseases to Alaska, According to a New Study

The Worst Disease Ever Recorded
What terrifies me about this one is its CBR potential (which for the uninitiated is the military acronym for Chemical, Biological and Radiological Warfare). To see what's so scary, focus for a moment on a broader socioeconomic picture: reflect on the genocidal threat implicit in damning chronically unemployed people as  "surplus workers"; note the fact all U.S. academia is now a vassalage of the One Percent; then refocus  on the fact a One Percenter academic is urging a 90 percent reduction in our species' global population, which tells us the the One Percenters' scientists are already contemplating how to achieve that Final Solution in a way that leaves their benefactors not only blameless but possessed of truly unprecedented power over the mass of survivors. Now return to  what might be done with hybridizing this fungus and the unspeakable depth of horror lurking therein. Immunization? Absolutely -- with the shot so deliberately expensive only the One Percenters and their minions could afford it. Why else are we being stripped of our healthcare just as we are entering an era in which we will undoubtedly need it more than ever?  

 

As the Owners of Their God Command

Brunei Brings in Death by Stoning as Punishment for Gay Sex

Brunei to Punish Gay Sex with Death by Stoning, Even for Kids | David Gee | Friendly Atheist | Patheos

Comprehensive Sex Ed Bill Still up in the Air - Slog - The Stranger
Again what Jeff Sharlet  describes as "the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power"  -- this fight was raging in Washington state when I covered the legislature (1977-1980) and is another issue that thanks to Christian fanaticism will not be settled save by revolution. Why are Christians taught to reject sexual pleasure as sinful? Because the realm of such pleasure is a realm in which female biology is undeniably supreme -- a revolutionary truth the patriarchy will do literally anything to suppress.  .

Women's Rights: Trial Casts Light on Hardline Approach in Saudi Arabia

New TN Schools Leasing Space from Catholic Church Agreed to a Morality Clause 

Damascus High School officials waited to tell police about hazing and sexual assault allegations
At first I could not decide whether to post this report under "As Their God" or "As They Do," but finally chose the former because the sexist guilt, homophobic hatefulness and the particularly vindictive self-protective instinct so demonstrated originates with Abrahamic religion and is therefore demonstrably the same in every Ruling Class institution whether corporate, governmental, educational or religious.

 

And As They Therefore Do unto Us All
Miscellaneous examples of purposeful oppression and methodically inflicted wretchedness.

The Strange Tale of the FBI’s Fictional “Black Identity Extremism” Movement

The Rise of Tent Encampments Is Changing the Face of American Homelessness

Trans Migrant Women in ICE Detention Allegedly Asked to Perform Sexual Favors in Exchange for Food

Chicago Police Are Notorious Liars, So Why Trust Them on Smollett?

Montana Senate Betrays Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

In Seattle, school segregation is actually getting worse

US detaining immigrants under highway overpass in Texas amid renewed crackdown

The US Is Holding Hundreds of Shivering Immigrants in a Pen Underneath a Texas Bridge

Alleged New Zealand Mosque Gunman Linked to Far-Right Group Backed by Steve King

7-Year-Old Jakelin Caal Maquin Died from Sepsis, Medical Examiners Say

19-Year-Old Omarian Banks Shot After Knocking on Wrong Door

The Real College Admissions Scandal

Trump-Appointed Board Proposes Major Blow to Air and Rail Unions

There's Plenty Of Wealth To Go Around — It Just Doesn't

Even for the West Bank, This Is a Shocking Story

 

Betting on the Bomb whilst Diddling with Its Thermonuclear Trigger

Xi Jinping tours Europe amid growing divisions between America and EU

Russia Throws Down The Gauntlet To US On Venezuela
Once again, our Capitalist overlords' plans for global conquests -- once again their "we-have-to-destroy-it-to-save-it" mentality -- threaten human survival.

On NATO’s 70th Anniversary Important to Remember Its Anti-democratic Roots

Israel's Influence In Washington – 2019 Edition

Trump's Support Of Israel's Annexation Of The Golan

Venezuela Deploys Advanced S-300VM Missile Systems To Protect Capital Amid Growing U.S. Threats

Trump Admin Gives OK to Sell Nuclear Tech to Saudis

 

On Media and Its Messages  
As I myself can surely attest, all reporters accidentally make factual errors, which most of us correct as soon as possible.   But the factual errors of the wealthiest few -- those reporters most faithful to our socioeconomic masters -- are seldom corrected because they are seldom accidents. 

Here’s What Was Happening While Everyone Was Talking About Mueller
Scandal is always the most seductive distraction.

Outrage grows over leaked government database targeting journalists, activists at US-Mexico border

Consortium News’ Record on Russia-gate—How CN Covered the ‘Scandal’: No. 3—‘The Tangled Threads of Russia-gate’

Russiagate and the 1980s Crack Epidemic

The Growing Threat of Online-Bred Right-Wing Extremist

Pathological Deceit: The NYT Inverts Reality On Venezuela's Cuban Doctors

The Real Working Class Is Invisible to the Media

Republican Party Says It Will Personally Target Reporters Critical of Trump

Man used as proof that ‘Seattle Is Dying’ tells his story

 

Forcible Civilian Disarmament Is the Shock Doctrine in Action How the One Percent is achieving its long-intended disarmament of the 99 Percent by convincing us the only response to the skyrocketing threat of ChristoNazi violence is to throw down our firearms and run -- that is, to embrace a tyrant's dose of mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood.   

After fascist afttack, New Zealand government enacts gun control measures

A Closer Look at New Zealand’s Recent Gun Ban

 

Firefly Glimmers at the Edge of Night
Reassuring evidence genuine resistance is not (yet) entirely futile.

The Day the Dinosaurs Died
An encounter with the twin truths -- scientific and emotional -- of mass extinction.

Ocasio-Cortez Tells Small Donors to Give Directly to Candidates Instead of DCCC

Building Movements Through a Black, Queer, Feminist Lens

After Catholic Mom’s (Anti-) Leggings Rant, Notre Dame Students Wear Them in Protest
Parenthetical added to emphasize the "Mom's" Christian misogyny and anti-sex hatefulness.

 

Parting Thought
To destroy a movement, just order the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine to popularize it -- exactly as was done to kill the Countercultural Rebellion of the 1960s and  early 1970s. 

LB/31 March 2019

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Ecocidal Genocide and Enslavement of All Surviving Workers: That's the Shock-Doctrine "Final Solution" Ever More Evident in the Neoliberals' Stubborn Refusal to Fight Climate Change

Imagine a Concentration-Camp Planet Ruled by a Hillary or a Trump. Unthinkable, Yes?  But What Other Future Could They Be Planning?  

WHEN WE ANALYZE the indications  as investigative reporters and intelligence analysts are taught to do, there is only one possible  explanation for the denial, dithering and maliciously scripted paralysis by which our overlords sabotage every effort to counter the already-apocalyptic and soon-to-be-terminal climate crisis.1

No matter how I evaluate the evidence, I find it impossible to escape the conclusion our Capitalist masters long ago decided their "Final Solution" to all the world's problems is to allow the looming disasters to exterminate as many of us as possible. And then impose a zero-tolerance global tyranny more savage than anything our species has ever known, condemning the few Working Class survivors and their descendants to inescapable slavery. 

Thanks to Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism; Metropolitan Books: 2007), the Neoliberal methodology is obvious. Thanks to Chris Hedges (American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America; Free Press: 2006); to Kevin Phillips (American Theocracy: the Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century; Viking: 2006); and most of all to Jeff Sharlet (The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power; Harper: 2008); we already know our oppressors' capabilities and intentions.

We therefore also know our masters are methodically weaponizing the murderously self-righteous patriarchal misogyny, the hateful Christian white-supremacy and the sadistic theocratic malevolence of their increasingly fanatical supporters into a new, terrifyingly global Sturmabteilung to serve as  guards,  torturers and executioners.         

A few of us even recognize the Shock-Doctrine dynamics evident in the epidemic of mass murder2 that fuels the now-probably unstoppable Forcible Civilian Disarmament Movement, which is manipulating our fear, horror and ignorance into the frightened helplessness of mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood. 

Given how the ChristoNazis and their fascist collaborators are already embraced as allies by the cops and by the imperial war machine,  it is obvious these new Storm Troopers will remain armed -- legally or otherwise -- even after the last firearm has been confiscated from the last non-fascist U.S. household.

Meanwhile the entire murder-minded rabble is officially encouraged to  prey upon us at will.  

But -- until now -- only one other journalist, the admirably courageous Sarah Kendzior, has dared publicly suggest the Occam's-Razor-obvious answer of why our rulers are behaving as they do. Clearly they intend to profit both from the apocalyptic disasters and from the Shock-Doctrine opportunities for genocidal reconstruction of human society -- think  Puerto Rico and New Orleans -- such  events provide.  

Our masters have been quietly smuggling their traveling holocaust of horrors home, one private jetload at a time, since 22 November 1963. But now the triumph of the genuinely Nazified Donald Trump and his burn-all-witches running-mate Michael Pence has blown the One Percenters' cover and revealed -- over an entirely bogus storm of objections --  the hideous truth of what actually obtains in this "one nation under (their  sadistic) God."     

We can (and typically do) spare ourselves the guilt and horror evoked by these near-daily atrocities if we reduce them to the emotionless abstractions of statistics -- for example the approximately 45,000 USian children, women and men the Neoliberals exterminate each year by deliberate denial of medical care.  Such sanitized information does absolutely nothing to alleviate our overwhelming sense of powerlessness or goad us to action.  But its near-universal availability most assuredly helps maintain the Exceptionally Big Lie of U.S. press freedom.

Of course if we are mindful enough to see without flinching -- and far too few of us are --  we can look directly at the hopelessly distraught faces of the growing legions of homeless children and adults and acknowledge that what is already sculpted by wretchedness on their faces is also an accurate vision of our own more-than-probable future.  Housed or not, we struggle to survive even as we are criminalized for the poverty inflicted on us by our masters. So impoverished, we are  endlessly tormented -- indeed not infrequently slain -- whether by the edicts of their insurance executives and welfare bureaucrats  or the hollow-point antipersonnel rounds fired by their  uniquely murderous federally militarized local police.  Survival itself thus becomes a (potentially fatal) assertion of revolutionary defiance. 

It is therefore utterly delusional to suppose the Apocalypse -- here deliberately capitalized as a proper noun -- is not already well underway. Never mind the environmental projections; to see the future intended for all of us in  the  99 Percent, just visit the nearest homeless encampment.   Meanwhile the One Percenters and their trusted henchmen -- the lawyers, politicians and executives who transmogrify their masters' moral imbecility into real-world atrocities -- are fully cognizant of our intensifying anger. That's why they are building strongholds and raising private armies to defend them.

Welcome to the new post-imperial Dark Age, complete with moated castles. 

Knowing history as I do -- including military history and the history of weapons -- I have a reasonably accurate notion of what is taking shape. Forget nations and governments; it will instead be a world of corporate manorialism enforced by the de facto tribalism of ultra-high-tech feudalism. Its population will be forever divided into two classes: the all-powerful and the abjectly powerless -- that is, the masters and the slaves.

Also knowing anthropology and mythology and life on rural agricultural communes, I can  accurately imagine the post-apocalyptic socialist alternative: a contentious but nevertheless fully functional amalgum of family and community that despite its emotional dysfunction is bound by a diligent solidarity evident in  proven skill, whether at subsistance  agriculture or self-defense.   

Obviously I would choose the latter were I able. 

My own sense of what our  probable future might look like -- mental imagery  based on scholarship and personal experience including not only the tragedies and disasters I covered as a journalist but also the postwar horrors I witnessed in South Korea c. 1961-1962 -- is something I intend to write about in considerable detail during the weeks ahead. 

For now though suffice it to say life in a postapocalyptic world -- that is, assuming there is any human survival at all -- would be nothing like most of us seem to imagine. The eventual collapse of the electrical grid would eliminate nearly all post-19th Century technology including the associated industrial capabilities essential to its restoration. Meanwhile the post-Roman history of Britain vividly demonstrates civilization's fragility. Save for its stone-and-concrete structures -- chiefly aqueducts, roads, bridges and buildings -- it was gone in less than a century. By the time these  structures began crumbling, there was no one left alive who was knowledgeable or skilled enough to repair them.    

What follows then is list of 115 present-day headlines arbitrarily divided into eight categories of evidence. Each head is hyperlinked to its text. I lifted 96 of these from the approximately 760 news stories and analytical commentaries I received in my electronic in-box between 25 February 2019 and 15 March 2019 inclusive. The remaining 19 -- 13 slightly older analytical and historical essays listed under "However Banal, Evil May Also Prove Bottomless" as background reading and six reassuring entries under the concluding section, "Unrecognized Resistance to Extinction"  -- are from the bookmarks of my electronic library. 

Were we to envision a genuinely accurate metaphor for our circumstances and begin to focus on these 115  examples as accurate microcosms of our real circumstances, we might soon realize it is rather as if we of the 99 Percent are  passengers aboard a ship at sea. But the officers -- the One Percenters and their lawyers, politicians and executives -- have knowingly overbooked it to maximize their profit and have thus overloaded it nearly to the point of sinking. As we sail toward heavy weather the officers have realized the danger they are in and have begun to lighten the load by flinging groups of us overboard in circumstances designed to rebrand murders as unavoidable tragedy -- exactly as is done, for example,  to hide the murders of the approximately 45,000 of us who are slain every year by deliberate denial of health care.

(I am compelled to ask: when someone is killed by deliberate perpetuation of a policy known to be deadly, how can it not be murder? Note in this context the deliberate embrace of genocide inherent in the U.S. One Percenters' knowingly deadly edicts to perpetuate healthcare as a privilege of wealth rather than the universal human right it is considered by every other government  in the developed world.)   

The officers who command our metaphorical ship meanwhile tells us they are doing everything they can to save our lives. They continue repeating this lie even after we discover they  are actually opening the scuttlecocks; the truth is we passengers are all doomed. By sinking us the officers not only silence our complaints and pocket our fares but also collect on the insurance, profiting obscenely.

Now -- as passengers who have not yet been flung overboard -- let us look both at the unprecedented real-world malevolence  of our overlords, at the growing rebelliousness it is evoking and also at a few of  the many oft-unrecognized assertions of our own boundless determination to survive. It's that very combination -- the serial-killer moral imbecility of our rulers versus our own humanitarian mindfulness -- that make this hypothesis so obviously true once we have brought the evidence into sharp focus.

Having contemplated our circumstances for nearly a decade  -- see for example "Economic Collapse: Capitalist Death-Stroke To Hated Public Services?" (my post of 27 April 2010, for which I was immediately and permanently ousted from Facebook) --   I can no longer doubt  the rulers of the world have no intention whatsoever of ameliorating climate change; that instead they are deliberately using the apocalypse -- and quite possibly engineering it --  the ever-more-obvious goal of which is to reorganize all human society into the hierarchical structure of the slave plantation or the concentration-camp.4

Thus the following, a portrait of the deepening gloom in which we dwell, the hues of its darkness softened -- because I'm sure you are as tired as I of reading atrocity reports  -- into lists of hyperlinked heads and titles from which you may choose at will. You'll see more of these easy-choice lists as I continue to re-format Dispatches after Facebook terminated my access to the Tacoma Communists page, where until last January links to my work were routinely posted.    

*****          

(I). Our Mother Earth as an Abused Woman

The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy

In the Deepest Ocean Trenches, Animals Eat Plastic

Iconic Forests Reaching Climate Tipping Points in American West

Nothing resolved as Flint water crisis nears fifth anniversary

Insecticide Linked to Increased Breast Cancer Risk -- 40 Years After Exposure

Moment of Reckoning: US Cities Burn Recyclables After China Bans Imports

A World Without Clouds. Think About That a Minute: New Study Details Possibility of Devastating Climate Feedback Loop

Like a nightmare’: Amtrak train, trapped by snow for 36 hours, arrives back in Seattle

Flint water crisis claims its youngest Legionnaires’ victim to date

Measles outbreak in Ukraine claims eight lives

Popular Brands Of Beer And Wine Found To Contain Glyphosate Weedkiller

RSN: How Fukushima Nukes Kill Our Climate, Our Planet, Ourselves

Game Over? Report Card on Our Planet’s Environment

 

(II). Dithering as Denial

The Environmental Implications Of A Trump Presidency

Dianne Feinstein Says No to the Green New Deal

Legislature, Inslee struggle to fix roads that block salmon, help starve orcas

Top Democrats Are Enabling Climate Catastrophe

The 2020 Democrats of the "Anti-Green New Deal Coalition"

Democrats Wasting Time While Our Climate Burns

 

(III). The Apocalypse Is Already Upon Us 

Survival of the Richest, All Are Equal, Except Those Who Aren't

American Exceptionalism: The Naked Truth

The New York Times Won't Stop Pushing Crank Economics

Amazon federal taxes: how the company’s corporate tax bill was $0

The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes

Dakota Access Pipeline Company Is Abusing The Judicial System To Silence Dissent

Democrats Not Backing Medicare For All

Trump's 2020 Budget Proposes $1 Trillion Cut to Medicare, Medicaid

FOCUS: Will 2020 Democrats Help Trump by Destroying Each Other?

Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the US, ADL Finds

Pack City Hall to Stop Mayor Durkan’s attacks on Homeless Services

The Most Harrowing Revelation of the Cohen Hearing

Corporate and “Progressive” Democrats Threaten Medicare Itself

Trump Reportedly Wants to Steal From the Troops to Pay for His Wall

Joe Biden Has a History of Racist Comments

Pharma & Insurance Gave $43M To 130 House Democrats Not Backing Medicare For All

Immigrants endure inhuman conditions at ICE prison in New Jersey

Poverty in the UK: 100 “baby banks” spring up to assist parents with basic supplies 

Torture Fans and War Criminals Determine US Foreign Policy

Pelosi dismisses efforts to impeach President Trump

Free dental clinic draws hundreds in Nashville, Tennessee

Closure of Brazil Ford plant to destroy up to 27,000 jobs

The Trump presidency: From the Manhattan underworld to the White House

Latest collision on Long Island Rail Road shows fatal consequences of system-wide neglect

Nearly 200 Immigrants in Texas Detention Facilities Have Mumps

Trump May Want to Be President Forever. Take the Threat Seriously.

Pity the Nation: War Spending Is Bankrupting America

No charges for Sacramento police officers who murdered Stephon Clark

Fascism by Another Name

The Global Assault on Indigenous Peoples

Mitch Nuclear Option McConnell Poised to Turn Steady Stream of Trump's Right-Wing Judges Into a Flood

Cuts to hours for Whole Foods workers exposes fraud of Amazon pay increase

Big Capital, the Working Class, and US Imperialism: a Brief Look at Recent History

Nearly 1.4 Million Puerto Ricans Facing Dangerous Food Stamp Cuts as Trump and Congress Fail to Act

Trump to Divert Up to $385 Million From Crucial Health Programs To Pay for Government-Sanctioned Child Abuse

Big Pharma, Insurers and Hospitals Team Up to Kill Medicare for All

Trump's Legacy: Conservative Judges Who Will Interpret US Law for Decades

Chelsea Manning Defies Secret Grand Jury, Julian Assange Scoops Michael Cohen

Stephon Clark Killed Twice by U.S. imperialism

President’s Budget Targets Key Health Care Programs

The VA Is Privatizing Veterans Health Care While Launching A Campaign To Deny It

Union Busting on Campus: Jackson Lewis and Higher Education Anti-Unionism

College admissions scandal: what it reveals about wealth in America - Vox

NY School Holds Mock Slave Auction Selling Black Students to White Kids

FOCUS: Colony of Hell: 911 Calls From Inside Amazon Warehouses

Joint US-South Korean war games amid rising tensions with North Korea

Federal Aviation Administration accused of colluding with Boeing in wake of 737 crashes

Of Course College Admissions Rigged for the Rich. The Whole Economic System Is

Report Card Shows Majority of Senate Democrats Aiding Trump's Right-Wing Court Takeover

Scientist Who Resisted Censorship of Climate Report Lost Her Job

The criminalization of environmental protest in Trump’s America

 

(IV). Their God Demands They Rape Our Mother5

The Supreme Court Is Quietly Changing the Status of Religion in American Life

Giving The Bomb To Saudi Arabia's Dr. Strangelove

What You Need to Know About Trump’s Latest Attack on Reproductive Health

United Methodist Church votes to maintain its opposition to same-sex marriage, gay clergy

Southern Baptist Convention Grapples With Sexual Abuse Report

Cuba's Evangelical Alliance Leads Crusade Against Gay Marriage

With Trump, White Protestantism Hits Rock Bottom

United Methodists Fracture: LGBT Plan Rejected - The Atlantic

The Cult of the Good Christian Woman

Anti-Vaxx Mobs: Doctors Face Harassment Campaigns on Facebook

Revealed: AmazonSmile Helps Fund Anti-Vaccine Groups

Abortion Restrictions Sweep Through GOP-Held Legislatures

Saudi Women Activists Stand Trial in Criminal Court

Trump Administration Rolls Out Implementation Plan for Transgender Military Ban

The Kansas Bomb Plot: What Has the Media Missed?

New Zealand mosque shooting: what we know so far about the mass shooting in Christchurch

Trump's Pick of Wealthy Climate Denier for UN Ambassador Decried as Slap in the Face to Planet and Humanity

New Zealand mosque shooting: the shooter’s manifesto shows how white nationalist rhetoric spreads

The shadowy network shaping Trump’s anti-immigration policies

The EPA and Evangelical (Anti)Environmentalism

Trump: The most anti-science president ever?

 

(V). A Few Vernal Sprouts of Wishful Thinking

Climate Change Could End Washington’s Global Dominion

FOCUS: A Future Without Fossil Fuels?

How long can we keep dodging nuclear war? 

The climate crisis and the insidious idea that things must get worse before they get better

 

(VI). The Earth Mother's Spring Sunshine Grows Flowers of Defiance  

The Keys To The Sunrise Movement's Momentum? A Bold Idea, A Visionary Narrative, And Organising Best Practices

The Black Stake in the Green New Deal | Black Agenda Report

Female Leaders Warn Against Global Rise of Autocratic Strongmen and Attack on Womens Rights

Youth Climate Activists Arrested for Sit-In at Mitch McConnell's Office

Rethink Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse

Researchers: Violence, War And Climate Change Are Linked

Vandana Shiva: We Must Fight Back Against the 1 Percent to Stop the Sixth Mass Extinction

It’s the Green New Deal or Else

Extinction Rebellion: “Green” capitalism versus world socialism

The Youth Climate Strike and the fight against global warming

Global Climate Strike in Pictures: Millions of Students Walk Out to Demand Planetary Transformation

A Tribal Camp in South Texas Is Vowing to Resist Trump’s Wall

 

(VII). However Banal, Evil May Also Prove Bottomless

Donald Trump Is Anti-Environment, But So Was Barack Obama

How Republicans came to embrace anti-environmentalism

Joining the dots: women, environmentalism and neoliberalism

What is Neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism's Dark Path to Fascism

How Neoliberalism Is Normalising Hostility

A shock to the ecosystem: Neoliberalism and the environment | well sharp

Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals

Neoliberalism is to blame for stalled climate action

The Secret Threat That Makes Corporations More Powerful Than Countries

Average U.S. Citizens Have “Little Or No” Influence On Government Policy

Our Mania For Hope Is A Curse

In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves to Grieve

 

(VIII.) Unrecognized Resistance to Extinction
A much-expanded version6 of the Jung/McLuhan hypothesis all art includes elements of prophecy.

How to Spin Wool (with Pictures)

Enjoying Horseback Archery Adventures of the Year 2017

Ricky Roberts Ferguson Rifle Timed Fire at King's Mountain National Military Park

Finding Freedom in a Frontier Life 

Making a Blacksmith Shop with No Power Tools

Western Science Is Finally Catching Up To Traditional Knowledge

 

===========================

1Key passage of the cited essay: "climate-induced societal collapse is now inevitable in the near term." How near? About a decade.

2The U.S. epidemic of mass murder is the byproduct of a culture that decrees humans worthless save as consumers, declares greed the only human motivator and honors hatefulness as the apex of emotion. Thus -- without any need for possibly embarrassing conspiracies -- do our rulers guarantee themselves a constant flow of tragedies by which to rationalize their imposition of Shock-Doctrine tyranny. See for example "School Shootings and Drone Wars: America's Invisible Ways of Violence,"   

3As I suspect all truthful historians will do if our species escapes extinction, I take the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy as the death-date of the United States as a pretend-democracy. See James W. Douglass. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books: 2008), pgs. 375-376. See also: After Kennedy's assassination, new President Lyndon B. Johnson immediately reversed his predecessor's order to withdraw 1,000 military personnel from Vietnam by the end of 1963.

4I built a half-dozen population projections based on the assumption some humans will survive, my reasoning elaborated in Footnote 6, below.  One projections was based on reduction of the human population by 95 percent -- approximately the percentage of earthly species taken by the Permian-Triassic Extinction 250 million years ago. Significantly, using the One Percent/99 Percent model, a 95 percent human extinction rate would would result in the same ratio of masters to slaves, 8.75 million to 350 million or 1:40, that is  typical of today's U.S. chain gangs. By comparison, the ratio of Nazis to victims in the German concentration  camps was 1:18, for which see Bucheim, Broszat, Jacobsen and Krausnick, Anatomy of the SS State (English translation William Collins Sons: 1968); pg. 504. Given the One Percenters' now obvious adoration of Nazi Germany and the white-supremacist South, these are almost certainly the population parameters they are employing as they try to leverage the Apocalypse into their New World Order.

5Patriarchy and its Abrahamic religious offspring, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are the ideological vectors of the misogynistic war on the environment.  As defined by Thomas Sancton and cited by Naomi Klein in "Neoliberalism is to blame for stalled climate action," The ultimate source of Neoliberalism (and Capitalism itself) is ...the misuse of the Judeo-Christian concept of "dominion" over nature and the fact that it supplanted the pre-Christian idea that "the earth was seen as a mother, a fertile giver of life. Nature -- the soil, forest, sea -- was endowed with divinity, and mortals were subordinate to it."

6Carl Jung (All art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness) and Marshall McLuhan (Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it)  each defined art as prophecy. A paramount example is the series of paintings entitled The Scream, each of which clearly anticipate the apocalyptic horrors of the 20th and 21st centuries. But the definitions of art employed by Jung and McLuhan are elitist, which caused them to exclude entirely the  vast body of evidence that is to be found outside of museums, galleries and theaters. Hence this section's focus on recovery of primitive skills such as fire-making, blacksmithing, spinning and weaving or the use of antique tools and weapons. All such activities -- and there are a great many more than are sampled here -- preserve the means to survive the death of the technologies  upon which we are now dependent.  Popular music likewise: in "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" -- the photographically illustrated manuscript that was destroyed, probably by government arsonists,  just as it was on the brink of major publication -- I presented an enormity of evidence the folk-music renaissance of the 1950s provided the aesthetic momentum of the 1960s Counterculture, especially the revolution against patriarchy implicit in the earliest aspects of Second-Wave Feminism, Environmentalism and the Back-to-the-Land Movement. Indeed the poet/musician Lisa Thiel has since composed what could be construed as an entire post-apocalyptic liturgy in celebration of the resurrected Goddess. Nor do I think it mere coincidence Robert Graves wrote the first draft of his revolutionary recovery of our species' long suppressed  pre-patriarchal mythology, The White Goddess, in 1944 -- literally just as the Atomic Age was dawning.  The survival instinct apparent in  such examples -- as if (often without conscious intent) we are already preparing for a world without today's technology -- convinces me some humans will survive, no matter what madness our masters inflict on Nature and ourselves.  

(With thanks to Tigerlille1 for some of the above links.)

LB/25 February-15 March 2019

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