Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

MY RECENT BOUT with Covid, 21 June to 9 July – this despite vaccination and three boosters – has robbed me of any expectation of longevity beyond the immediate present. My illness – exemplary both of “long Covid” and of “herd immunity” fulfilling its genocidal intent – has radically worsened my (hitherto-stable) congestive heart failure; the doubled and quadrupled medications so necessitated have set me on an inescapable path to kidney failure and agonizingly reactivated my decades-dormant esophageal re-flux problems. Long Covid has also permanently inflamed my osteoarthritis severely enough I am now so painfully crippled, I am often effectively bedridden; and three months after the fact, it is obvious the virus has slain forever my senses of taste and smell. As many of you know, I am 83 years old; while my doctors refuse to estimate how much longer I might live, there is now no question my departure is looming. At the beginning of the pandemic, three oracles, I Ching, runes and tarot, predicted Covid would kill me, and though eventually I came to believe I had misread their messages, now I know I did not. These days when I dream, it is almost always either of conversations with dead people, usually my father, or of activities in which I am companioned by long-dead favorite dogs. Thus when I fall asleep, I am never sure I will awaken. But as dreadful as all this may sound, it is also a liberation, for now I am free to lift my social-fingers to the arsonist(s) who destroyed my life’s work and write without any concern my words will precipitate my disappearance or the more commonplace removal by alleged accident or suicide.

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HERE THEN, AS a prelude to all that follows, is a list of eight present-day horrors that views their known-to-be-deadly effects as cleverly disguised expressions of intent:

Covid-19 – a lethal virus most likely engineered for biological warfare. Regardless of the pandemic's origin, the fact it mutates too rapidly to be controlled by immunization makes “herd immunity” a clever euphemism for deliberately inflicted genocide. Statistically, most victims are members of the working class, aka the 99.9 Percent. Pivotal question: who (or what) is served by the resultant extermination of millions of humans?

Climate change – a modern apocalypse inflicted on our species and planet by patriarchal ignorance and now deliberately, continuously worsened, allegedly by political paralysis imposed by capitalist greed and associated bribery, but in terrifying truth by our masters’ definitively ecogenocidal choices. Pivotal questions: why are the owners of this planet destroying its ability to support life as we know it? Who (or what) benefits from Earth’s reduction to lifeless twinship with forever-barren Mars?

Abandonment of infrastructure – a modern crisis that seems to have begun in the USian Empire but has since metastasized throughout the globe. Typically dismissed as the unavoidable consequence of “neoliberal austerity,” it is the cause of soaring fatalities due to train wrecks, structural collapses and other such disasters. Pivotal question: why are the world’s governments –  the executive agencies that serve the de facto owners of these properties (i.e., the ruling class) – abandoning their investments? Hint: why are factories abandoned and left to rot?

Unprecedented escalation of warmongering – the risk of our species’ extinction by chemical, biological and thermonuclear warfare is at an all-time high; indeed, its terrifying magnitude may be taken as the ultimate declaration the global ruling class now considers itself well-enough bunkered to survive whatever ecogenocidal horrors it inflicts on the rest of us. Pivotal questions: why is this happening now? Apart from the smirkingly bunkered aristocracy, who (or what) benefits from such an ecogenocidal event? And how do the aristocrats benefit if there are no (enslaved) humans to serve them?

Replacement of humans with robots and artificial intelligence – the skyrocketing replacement of workers with machines is creating an ever-expanding “surplus” of unemployed workers who have no real possibility of ever again finding living-wage jobs. Pivotal question: why do our masters so despise humans they are literally sentencing millions of us to death by poverty, disease, homelessness and starvation?

De-educating the working class – aka “dumbing down” the citizenry. Astronomer Carl Sagan defines the problem, and Psychiatrist Niall McLaren analyzes its deliberately toxic economics. Pivotal questions: why do our masters rob us of the intellectual tools we need to thrive as humans? What do they gain from such atrocities?

Destruction of social services – aka “austerity,” in truth slow-motion genocide targeting women and the neediest members of the 99.9 Percent. Pivotal questions: who (or what) benefits from this policy? How is genocide on such scale beneficial to our masters?

Prohibition (or destruction) of health care as a human right – another process begun by USian malevolence – in this instance by its relentless insistence health care remain a privilege of wealth – but now, disguised as “austerity,”  metastasizing rapidly throughout Europe and the rest of the world. (The foregoing data is somewhat dated, though the deadly trends obviously continue both in the U.S. and Europe.) Pivotal question: who (or what) benefits from this growing tsunami of sickness and death?

Ultimate question: what do all these atrocities tell us? What singular purpose does the ruling-class-induced atrocity of global warming – that is, ecogenocidal climate change – have in common with the (other) ecogenocidal atrocities of ruling-class-induced austerity? What terrible truth does that purpose suggest?

Note that universal education and health care are investments in our species’ future, and that their methodical reduction – like the abandonment of infrastructure – is a message from our masters they believe we no longer have a future worthy of investment.

What we see in the above – though it is a truth too terrifyingly painful for most of us to acknowledge (one therefore rendered “plausibly deniable” by the boiled-frog pace of our terminal subjugation) – are eight aspects of a total war against our species and against our Mother Earth’s ability to support human life, the latter possibly aimed at reducing her to irremediably barren twinhood with Mars.

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I SHOULD PREFACE this next section by stressing I have no prior history as a devotee of the unidentified-flying-object cult. Moreover I remain profoundly antagonistic to the notion all of our species’ ancient achievements were fostered by extraterrestrial visitations, which I regard as an especially devious means of vilifying the matrifocal, probably matriarchal potlach-communism that characterized our collective history until the decidedly curious, unquestionably violent imposition of patriarchy some six-or-seven-thousand years ago. Though I have heard many credible UFO stories, especially during my years in the working press, I always ranked them among the many seemingly inexplicable anomalies of modern life, and never until now felt any compulsion to write about UFOs or even give them much more than momentary thought.

Also there’s the fact that in all the time outdoors (often in the back country and some of it at sea) that characterized the best of my 83 years, I myself witnessed only one genuinely UFO-ish phenomenon, this in 1959, as best I recall in May or June, just past sunset while sitting outside with friends quietly chatting as we routinely awaited the scattered pinpoints of gracefully floating green and amber light that are the opening movements of suburban  Knoxville’s  breathtakingly exquisite seasonal choreography of fireflies. Instead there was suddenly a bright orange fireball maybe a hand-span above the north-northeast horizon; it was astonishingly big, about a quarter the size of the full moon at its smallest mid-heaven zenith; it glided eastward for maybe 10 degrees almost parallel to the surface of the earth, wobbled violently, showered sparks, descended in a shallow curve, briefly ascended, again wobbled and spewed sparks, then plunged out-of-sight behind the silhouetted peaks of the Great Smokies. It left us startled and muttering exclamations. I immediately telephoned a friend, WKGN News Director Tom Combs, and reported what we had seen. He said he’d already received a half-dozen calls about it. He told me the next day it had been witnessed by at least a hundred persons; that because of its erratic flight, some had feared it was a crashing airplane. All a University of Tennessee astronomer would tell Combs – note the wording – is “we can say it was a meteorite,” and like so many other incidents of its kind, it was soon consigned to official oblivion. But it stuck in my mind because even then I had sufficient background in astronomy to know meteorites do not momentarily gain altitude in their descent from outer space.

Now, given the combination of newly acknowledged UFO incidents with the undeniably apocalyptic perpetuation of the eight atrocities I described above, I am compelled to suspect it is probable we’ve already been conquered by interstellar predators – and that the global ruling class, capitalist and communist alike, is merely functioning as the invaders’ own obscenely recompensed SS-Totenkopfverbände, its present task the reduction of our world to a planet-sized Auschwitz.

Indeed, per Occam’s Razor, this is the only hypothesis that explains all of today’s afflictions – most especially the self-imposed pseudo-paralysis by which the global ruling class, capitalist and communist alike, relentlessly attempts to excuse its ever-more-apocalyptic refusal to reduce the causative abuses, much less its refusal to ameliorate their disastrous results. Mind you, I’m not saying extraterrestrial conquest is the final, definitive truth of our species’ increasingly hopeless present-day circumstances. But the unprecedented solidarity of malevolent cunning the global ruling class exhibits in the success of its universal promotion of the originally USian ethos of self-obsessed moral imbecility and in the veritable omnipotence demonstrated by its diabolical skill at co-optation and/or suppression of any and all forms of organized humanitarianism most assuredly suggest an equal capability for beneficence -- the glaring absence of which is therefore both infinitely damning and all the more suggestive of purposeful choice.

There is also the fact the present-day plague of atrocities is entirely the function of patriarchy and is therefore arguably the final revelation of  its unspoken purpose. Note too how the imposition of patriarchy is biblically attributed to talking snakes, divine apparitions, flaming wheels in the sky and loquacious brush-fires underscored by the (thermonuclear?) destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. With its misogynistic war against our Mother Earth, against all femaleness and implicitly therefore against all being, patriarchy is increasingly recognized as a death cult. Dialectic-materialist efforts to define patriarchy as a logical outgrowth of the agricultural revolution not withstanding, it is not unthinkable to suppose it to be a  long-term interstellar expression of the same strategic scheming evident in smallpox-infected blankets.

At the very least, the body of evidence demands the probability of our terminal victimization by extraterrestrial conquerors ought to be given serious consideration and thorough investigation.

Investigated or not, the likelihood we are already the powerless subjects of some conquering alien species becomes obvious when we examine the undeniably anti-human, sometimes undeniably genocidal or ecogenocidal consequences of the afflictions in question. Though it is clear there is no longer any rational hope we might yet save ourselves, at least we would then be able to correctly identify our executioners and thus yet retain some minimal authority over the courses of our individual lives.  

In this context, let us now consider the likelihood the burgeoning official acknowledgment of unknown aerial and oceanic phenomenon is – in much the same way European acknowledgment of Nazi German technological superiority was the prelude to psychological acceptance of defeat, enslavement and extermination – the precursor to admission we are a conquered species. Note how we are being methodically robbed of all our former freedoms – and more importantly of even any expectation of freedom – literally everywhere on the planet. It is thus at least arguable our minds are being conditioned for enslavement. Is it then mere coincidence that, after denying the reality of UFOs and their underwater counterparts for at least 80 years – often ridiculing and even slandering as mentally ill anyone who dared admit encountering UFOs –  the world’s governments are now finally acknowledging such things are real? Or that the propaganda apparatus which serves the global ruling class now deluges us with documentaries that claim humans are routinely kidnapped and used as lab rats by extraterrestrials?

Typical of the aliens-as-conquerors documentaries is “Alien Endgame,” an hour and 25-minute film available on Max that claims a “massive military cover-up” of the fact “our very existence is at risk.” It includes testimony about incidents in which UFOS rendered nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) unlaunchable, notes that UFOs operate with speed and maneuverability far beyond human capabilities, that they can become invisible and are sometimes undetectable by radar. The film also describes naval encounters with unidentified submerged objects that demonstrate the same seemingly inexplicable characteristics. “If the aliens decide to attack,” the film concludes, “we don’t stand a chance.”

Significantly, the aliens’ oberführers – the terrifying medical-experiment sadism associated with their kidnappings prompts me to describe them with the terminology of nazism – are often said to look like bipeds descended from giant preying mantises. This brings to mind a 1974 or 1975 comment by a prominent astrophysicist that only exoskeletal creatures can survive the gravitational forces generated by right-angle turns at mach 10 and other such astounding maneuvers even then attributed to UFOs. I’m sorry I don’t remember the astrophysicist’s name, but I do remember his comment generated a lively, mostly apprehensive discussion midway through the astronomy course I was then taking as an overage undergraduate. Now, knowing how insect biology is a prime inspiration in robotics and artificial intelligence, I find the notion of insectoid conquerors horrifying beyond words. Is our obviously methodical reduction to moral imbecility the beginning of our replacement by dependably emotionless machines? And let us not forget that female mantises, like female spiders, eat their mates, nor that a large enough plague of locusts – or greedy patriarchs – could leave our Earth as barren as present-day Mars. Are we humans being bred to be our masters' Soylent Green? Might irremediably desolate Mars exemplify the ecogenocidal ruin Earth too is now fated to become?

Even so, a few documentaries present the invaders as benign. “Encounters,” a four-episode program on Netflix, describes the extraterrestrials as claiming “the environment is our first priority,” warning us our species is “actually making harm on the world,” that “technology is not going to do humans any good” and urging us to care for nature. It also quotes Japanese sources who describe the aliens as “kind and comforting,” which echo many First Nations accounts of encounters with beneficent “Star People.”

The notion of benevolent and malevolent extraterrestrials and their implicit competition for human allegiance is obviously the newest variant of the ancient traditions, common to all cultures, of cosmic warfare between the forces of good and evil. From any such perspective of universal dualism, the pivotal question becomes the one poised by the coal miners’ anthem, “Which Side Are You On?” But the oft-demonstrated omnipotence of the ruling class – specifically its uncanny genius at deception and co-optation (which history shows us is at least as old as patriarchy itself) – makes any such discernment impossible. Note the paradox of Christianity: is it, as the late and oft-persecuted Jesuit Fr. William Bischel believed and practiced, a benevolently revolutionary credo of peace, humanitarian love, social liberation and the harmonious healing of Nature? Or is its equally documented function as the credo of ecogenocidal hatred embraced by capitalists, Trumpists, prosperity-gospel fanatics, Ku Klux Klaners, Nazis, witch-burners and other misogynistic moral imbeciles the true expression of its essence? The same functional schizophrenia – and thus the same (unanswerable) question – seemingly applies to every religious or political movement our species has generated. Nor is it mooted by the growing suspicion many of our most iconic figures – Moses, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Our Lady of Fatima – may have themselves been extraterrestrials. Quoth St. Paul (2 Corinthians 11:14, New International Version): “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.” And despite its apparent absurdity, let us not overlook the claim Hitler's Nazis – and now their USian successors – achieved power as the willing puppets of extraterrestrial masters.

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MY ARSON-DESTROYED  and thus forever lost “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” hypothesized via approximately one hundred photographs and some  one-hundred-fifty-thousand words of extensively footnoted text that the 1960s Counterculture was simultaneously the resurrection of the Great Goddess,  our species first and oldest deity, and – as demonstrated by the aesthetic solidarity that underlay the dissonance of its politics – the first wave of a global revolution against patriarchy. Another writer's parallel work, The Return of the Goddess (Edward C. Whitmont, Crossroad Publishing: 1984), offered a kindred but less obviously revolutionary  hypothesis based on Jungian psycho-analytic analysis of dreams. But as proven by the flames that burned "Dancer" like a witch slain in obvious retaliation for her alleged heresies,  my bluntly expressed conclusions – which noted in passing the Goddess-worship origins of Marxism’s red star and hammer-and-sickle symbols – were obviously tabooed as too dangerous for public consumption. "Dancer"  was thus destroyed just as it seemingly approached mainstream publication. Nor is it insignificant its would-have-been editor, the late Cicely Nichols, regarded "Dancer" as potentially one of the "most influential books of the 20th Century";  indeed the arsonist(s) lit the fire at the very moment Cicely and I began the meeting intended to finalize our working agreement.     

“Dancer” defined  the '60s Counterculture in its broadest sense; it sidestepped the obvious self-indulgence of the white petite-bourgeois faddists who later proved their proto-nazi moral imbecility by their votes for Ronald Reagan; it focused specifically on the aesthetic solidarity of feminism, environmentalism and the back-to-the-land movement as demonstrated by its music, visual art, literature and science, including the folk renaissance, the Whole Earth Catalog and – perhaps most importantly – the Gaia Hypothesis, which in essence is the modern scientific restatement of the inconceivably ancient pagan core-belief our Mother Earth – the Great Goddess who was our species' first and longest-lasting deity – is a living being, conscious, self-regulating and thus at least arguably invocable.

What “Dancer” omitted – this in the admittedly selfish interest of preserving my journalistic credibility – was a pair of decidedly curious events that seemed to confirm not just the project's  relevance and validity but its cosmic/karmic necessity. These incidents – there were also a half-dozen lesser events easily dismissable as coincidence – are the childhood experience I describe in the essay “Abutments” (note the element of missing time, which today might be taken as indicative of a UFO encounter), and  the brief but profoundly moving vision I experienced during an absolutely intoxicant-free moment of reflection in 1970: this occurred in the Cascade foothills beneath the August full moon of 1970, almost exactly 18 years after the 1952 incident. As I described in an earlier essay:

I had walked alone and lonely into the Innis Creek water meadow, an unkempt span of lowland maybe thirty yards wide that was now dry but was annually drenched by the creek's vernal floods. It was at least four times that distance beyond the corn fields, buildings and gardens of the Wickersham, Washington agricultural commune where I was then a long-term guest who contentedly paid my way by contributing a full share of physical effort to the requisite daily labor, and now I stood amidst Nature's shadowy harbingers of early Autumn: blown thistles, bright clumps of pearly everlasting, iridescent cobwebs bejeweled with dew. The communards were meeting in their main building but were ensnared in psychodrama intensified by the unresolvable ideological disputes that invariably arise from caste differences, and I had left the session in disillusioned bitterness and disgust. Seeking to restore my inner peace, I sprawled face-upward on the weedy ground and gazed at the zenith-high improbably brilliant moon as if it were some mandala of last resort.

Then to my astonishment there was a decidedly strange kind of jolt, as if – albeit eerily without the physical reality –  I had heard and felt some unseen door burst open, and all in the same breathtaking instant the moon spiraled into a rainbow that expanded to fill the entire sky, contracted to a vortex of flowing bands of color, plunged tornado-like to earth and shaped a magnificently ageless woman pale and translucent as mist yet undeniably real. She was majestically naked but loosely wrapped in the lunar blonde infinity of her own hair; she smiled, reached out her hands as if to embrace me and then like some impossibly magical dancer swirled her endless mane into rainbow hues that swept her aloft, dissolving herself back into rivers of color that expanded once more from horizon to horizon and shrank into the moon again – a millisecond's vision, a mere glimpse so brief and so ephemeral I could scarcely believe I had seen it and yet so vivid it could not be denied.  But now as if nothing at all had occurred there was only the commonplace moon again, the midnight sky and its diamond constellations, the fragrant crush of wild chamomile beneath my head, the vast nocturnal stillness of Pacific Northwest woods so unlike the firefly-bright insect-rowdiness of the fields and forests in which I'd spent the summers of my boyhood and adolescence.  When the night's chill finally urged me to my feet, I remember there were faint tendrils of fog rising from the creek, and for a moment, just once, it seemed I heard the clear cold water chuckle.

There is also the matter of the carefully disguised remnants of pagan liturgy that scholars including Olaf Nygard and Robert Graves argued are preserved in much of traditional folk music, most assuredly including that which was re-popularized by the folk-music renaissance that immediately preceded and obviously helped mother the advent of the Counterculture.

Though it may seem something of an aside, the mechanics of such disguises – Graves calls it “riddling” – are obscure enough to exemplify here. The following is from an explanatory note I recently sent a dear friend:

All true pagans should know how to decode the liturgy of the Goddess that is hidden in so many traditional ballads, disguised to protect singers and celebrants from being burnt at the stake as witches.

Firstly we should remember most of these stories began as seasonal celebrations, the feasts that mark the turns of the year, specifically the Winter Solstice (Yule, Midwinter’s Day); 1 February (Imbolc or the feast of the Goddess as Brigit, originally the first day of spring); the Vernal Equinox (Ostara); 1 May (Beltane, originally the first day of summer); the Summer Solstice (Litha or Midsummer’s Day); 1 August (Lughnassadh or Bron Trograne, originally the first day of autumn); the Autumnal Equinox (Mabon); and Hallowe’en or Samhain (the night the year dies, originally the first day of winter).

Secondly we should remember the two primary seasons, winter and summer, were anciently personified as the domains of male twins, the king/god of summer and the king/god of winter, perpetual rivals for the love of the Goddess, their mother and the “mother of all being,” personification of earth and cosmos. The Summer King died on the Summer Solstice, slain by his winter twin; the ballad John Barleycorn describes his fate. But he was reborn on the Winter Solstice. Eventually this anthropomorphization became a single god – aka “the dying god” and “the once-and-future king” representing the entire year, hence Samhain as “the night the year dies” and Midwinter’s Day as his rebirth. Hence too the Christianization of this ancient story, with Jesus as the year god and Satan as his rival. (Note that in the Celtic Church, violently suppressed by the Roman Papacy, Jesus was the newest incarnation of the dying god, while his mother – “Mary mother of god” – was the newest incarnation of the Goddess.)

The following is a ballad entitled Willy o’ Winsbury as sung by Pentangle’s Jacqui McShee, with my apology for the extremely infuriating fact TypePad does not allow the normal, line-by-line formatting of poetry:

The king had been a prisoner/ And a prisoner long in Spain/ And Willy of the Winsbury/ Has lain long with his daughter at home

From earthly perspective in the northern hemisphere, the sun turns south at Summer Solstice, then turns north again at Winter Solstice. Spain is to the south of Scotland, the source of this ballad. In other words, the sun is again traveling northward. According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition,  “Willie” is not just a foreshortened version of William – the name means strong-willed protector – but is also an archaic euphemism for penis.

"What ails you, what ails you, my daughter Janet?/ Why you look so pale and wan?/  Oh, have you had any sore sickness/ Or yet been sleeping with a man?"

Janet means “gift of god”; it is the time of Ostara; the land is pregnant with spring,

"I have not had any sore sickness/ Nor yet been sleeping with a man/ It is for you, my father dear/ For biding so long in Spain"

"Cast off, cast off your berry-brown gown/ You stand naked upon the stone/ That I may know you by your shape/ If you be a maiden or none"

Such songs as these were originally danced amidst the standing stones that often encircled stone altars. “Berry-brown gown” symbolizes our Mother Earth's bare brown winter soil and its winter cloak of dead brown leaves.

And she cast off her berry-brown gown/ She stood naked upon the stone/ Her apron was low and her haunches were round/ Her face was pale and wan

"Oh, was it with a lord or a duke or a knight/ Or a man of birth and fame? Or was it with one of my serving men/ That's lately come out of Spain?"

"No, it wasn't with a lord or a duke or a knight/ Nor a man of birth and fame/ But it was with Willy of Winsbury/ I could bide no longer alone"

And the king has called on his merry men all/ By thirty and by three/ Says, "Fetch me this Willy of Winsbury/ For hanged he shall be"

Significant math here: 30 by 3 yields a digital root of nine, as in “the nine-fold Muse.” another name of the Goddess. And the Vernal Equinox is three months – approximately 90 days – after the sun turns north at Winter Solstice.

But when he came the king before/ He was clad all in the red silk/ His hair was like the strands of gold/ His skin was as white as the milk

"And it is no wonder," said the king/ "That my daughter's love you did win/ For if I was a woman as I am a man/ My bedfellow you would have been

And will you marry my daughter Janet/ By the truth of your right hand?/ Oh, will you marry my daughter Janet?/ I'll make you the lord of my land"

"Oh yes, I will marry your daughter Janet/ By the truth of my right hand/ Oh yes, I will marry your daughter Janet/ But I'll not be the lord of your land"

In other words, he’ll not be the lord of winter.

And he's mounted her on a milk-white steed/ And himself on a dapple gray/ He has made her the lady of as much land/ As she shall ride in a long summer's day

Thus the "long summer's day" proclaims the solar supremacy of Janet, and the rule of the Goddess as a cosmic deity rather than merely the Earth Mother is again affirmed, albeit in a manner that conceals her ritual invocation from the Christians, thereby protecting the pagans from the unimaginable agony of death at the stake.

Another key fact, one that “Dancer” repeatedly implied but carefully avoided stating outright, is  the hitherto-unacknowledged extent to which the folk-music renaissance was obviously among the primary cultural influences that psychologically mothered both second-wave feminism and the Counterculture in general.

The related conclusion I dared not even suggest is that what might be termed “Goddess-magic” remained powerful even in its most thoroughly disguised forms. Magical or not, the archetypal woman of the traditional ballad – examples here, here and here – is the diametrical opposite of the oppressive archetypes of empty-headed, athletic-hero-dependent prom queens and submissive housewives that USian females of the 1950s and postwar ‘40s were relentlessly conditioned to believe were their gender’s only acceptable norms. And we should never overlook the fact the private-schooled, Ivy-League-graduate aristocrats who serve the ruling class as its intelligence analysts were unquestionably well-educated enough to recognize the spontaneous and often unwitting resurrection of the Goddess by an entire generation as a burgeoning threat to patriarchy – no doubt the underlying reason for Operation CHAOS (caps as in original). If I could see it all with nothing more than journalistic curiosity shaped by a solidly proletarian education bolstered by supplemental reading, there's no doubt an aristocracy carefully spoon-fed a vastly superior quality and depth of learning could do likewise.

Not surprisingly, the girls and women of allegedly extra-terrestrially inspired Nazi Germany were subjected to misogynistic conditioning notably similar to that which was (temporarily) overthrown here in USia by feminists and elsewhere on the planet by Marxians and democratic socialists.

But that brain-warping oppressiveness is now being everywhere restored with such vengeful permanence it is obvious the Goddess-centered anti-patriarchal revolution I joyfully predicted in "Dancer" will never be allowed. Here in USia, it was in fact slain in its infancy by the government and its nazi-minded auxiliaries. And now, a half-century later, every humanitarian effort our species ever attempted anywhere on the planet is methodically targeted for suppression. 

Thus it should surprise no one the Christonazis and their Neoconfederate allies are re-imposing maximized misogyny as a key part of their MAGA scheme. Their overseas allies are doing likewise in their own domains. Prohibiting abortion, banning birth control and formal persecution of alleged violators are just the opening atrocities of USian encouragement in  what amounts to a globally expanding pogrom against women.  

Nor have the Counterculture’s once-promisingly beneficent legacies remained unbesmirched by the aforementioned good/evil dichotomy that sooner or later seems to contaminate all mass movements with venomously contradictory identities which ultimately kill or at least neutralize a movement simply because they are too impossibly confusing for most humans to resolve. Once-presumably species-saving environmentalism has thus evolved an academic sub-cult that claims our only salvation is genocide, specifically the extermination – probably by bio-weaponry – of 90 percent of the human population, a thoroughly documented conviction that nevertheless remains unspeakable outside the hard right, never mind it has simmered in USian environmental colleges at least since the early ‘80s. Feminism has meanwhile fallen prey to what might be termed the Valerie Solanas virus, to which I no doubt over-react because – just as Solanas would have murdered Andy Warhol and an associate – so would my birthmother have slain my father and me.

Both women were well educated and academically accomplished; in 1933 or ‘34 – I’ve forgotten which – my birthmother was one of the first three women to graduate from Michigan State with a BA degree in urban planning and landscape architecture. But while Solanas chose a day of no particular cosmic significance for her crimes – it was 3 June 1963 – my birthmother selected the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945 for her premeditated effort at post-partum abortion and her spontaneous attempt to murder my father when he intervened to save my life. The best evidence indicates she planned my slaying to pay the Satanic debt she believed she had acquired by bargaining with a demon to ensure the pregnancy by which she ensnared my father in marriage.

Alleged supernatural elements aside, my birthmother’s thwarted but always potentially murderous anti-male hatred clearly mirrors the ideology of the Valerie Solanas faction of feminists – which my birthmother would surely have publicly embraced had she been less fanatical in her vindictively hypocritical struggle to preserve her lifelong lies of psychological normalcy and socioeconomic superiority. A recognizably similar constancy of broad-spectrum hatred fuels the wanna-be mega-holocaust deadliness of the salvation-by-genocide cult of environmentalists and the mass murders that are becoming part of everyday human life. Its apocalyptic intensity, of a magnitude seemingly without peer in our species’ experience, parallels the cannibalistic behavior of over-stressed and underfed lab rats. I believe it is a symptom of the global pandemic of self-obsessed moral imbecility that increasingly infects our entire species, the same affliction that enables the entire global ruling class – literally every .01 Percenter no matter whether capitalist or socialist – to justify waging their war of ecogenocidal extermination against our entire species. I've no doubt its truth is to be found in how imperialism perpetuates the morally imbecilic dynamics of patriarchy: just as some tribal chieftains and their modern-day quisling counterparts guaranteed their own survival by serving as their conquerors’ slavemasters, so might our masters seek to perpetuate their survival by functioning as vassals of extraterrestrial insectoid or reptilian masters, thus volunteering as the commanders, overseers, executioners and guards of slave-plantation/death-camp earth.

When I consider the impending loss of all human achievement atop the nullification of untold millennia of evolutionary advancement, I am left with a grief so bottomless no language can describe it. Nor can any quantity of tears relieve it. The Goddess herself – that is, our Mother Earth – is obviously dying;  the atrocities and disasters that increasingly beset us are undeniably both her proclamations of our irreversibly  looming extinction and – as she twitches and spasms like any other victim of rape and murder – her own increasingly violent agonies of death.  

LB/25 September-13 October 2023

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Three Utterly Terrifying News Reports

Biden Shows His True (Christonazi) Colors on Abortion: This past winter, the Biden Regime appeased the far right by leveling severe charges against abortion rights defenders. Now, the activists targeted in the federal crackdown are also facing legal attacks from an anti-abortion group and Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. In addition to the federal criminal charges — which carry a sentence of 12 years in prison — Florida’s attorney general sued two of the activists for damages. Heartbeat of Miami, a “crisis pregnancy center,” is also absurdly alleging that all four activists were engaged in a conspiracy. The purported crime, the conspiracy, the federal charges? Spray painting.

COMMENT: once again – this time by disclosing the hatred of women it shares with its pretend opponents– the “Democratic” (sic) Party reveals its post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the “Republican” (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party. Note too how this story was completely suppressed by the mainstream media propaganda apparatus. Now we know why the Democrats refused to protect abortion rights when they had the congressional power to do so.

*****

Drone Attack on Moscow Aims to Escalate US-NATO War with Russia. On Tuesday, Ukraine launched its second drone strike on Moscow to date and the first targeting civilian homes. Eight fixed-wing drones were launched, of which at least one crashed into an apartment building. Tuesday’s attack on the capital city of Russia is a signal that, following last week’s G7 meeting—at which the US announced it would send F-16 fighters—the imperialist powers have decided to bring the war ever more directly into Russian territory. These attacks are aimed at provoking a retaliatory response by Russia, which could then be used to justify a further escalation by NATO, including the potential entry of NATO troops directly into the conflict.

COMMENT: I fear this thrusts the threat of thermonuclear apocalypse well beyond that posed by the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

*****

U.S. Wars Since 2001 Have Killed 4.5 Million People. The Cost of War Project at Brown University estimates that at least 4.5 million people have died as a result of the wars launched by the United States since the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

COMMENT: tyrannical empires are ultimately defined by their body counts, and with its genocidal campaigns against First Nations tribes and peoples of color, the USian Empire has already murdered multitudes more than Hitler;s Third Reich.

*****

In Tacoma as Everywhere Else in the Empire: No Escape 

Tacoma Art Museum board opts for more union-busting. WSLC vows continued solidarity with TAM Workers United: ‘We have defeated these tactics before, and we will defeat them again.’ It’s been seven months since the workers at Tacoma Art Museum (TAM) announced that they have formed a wall-to-wall union (TAM Workers United), as part of AFSCME Council 28. They are seeking livable wages, safe working conditions, transparency and accountability from management, and respect on the job. But despite support from all departments and 90 percent of union-eligible staff, the museum’s administrators have refused to recognize the union.

COMMENT: the aristocratic, anti-working-class vindictiveness of USian art patrons – something I know all too well from my years in New York City – should surprise no one. Hence my most heartfelt support for the TAM workers’ efforts to unionize.

*****

An Exceptionally Vital Report on the True Origin of Capitalism 

Origins of debt: Michael Hudson reveals how financial oligarchies in Greece & Rome shaped our world. Economist Hudson discusses the origin of Western debt-based societies and the research in his book, The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point (Islet: 2023).

COMMENT: based on this interview, the best explanation I’ve yet found of the origins of capitalism, and therefore a book I intend to buy.

*****

Nine Comment-Thread Posts from Other Websites:
(Some unavoidably repetitive due to the stubborn permanence of the crises that afflict us.)

We Are In for 19 Months of Relentless, Insultingly Transparent Spin

NOTE: Popular Resistance and Patrick Lawrence of Consortium News err gravely (and in Lawrence’s case perhaps deliberately try to deceive us) by equating Biden to the Soviet Union’s Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko; a far more politically accurate comparison of Biden is to the Weimar Republic’s senile president, Paul von Hindenburg, who appointed Hitler as chancellor and thereby enabled all the horrors that followed. I lead with this comment because – given that the USian Empire remains the global hegemon, by far the most ecogenocidally powerful tyrant in our species’ existence – it is pivotal in explaining all that obtains.

History -- the one subject we USians are methodically conditioned to avoid as if it were a no-antidote poison -- proves the "Democratic" (sic) Party's only (post-JFK} functions are preserving the Big Lie of USian democracy while serving the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party as its Fifth Column. Thus Biden the Beguiler's combination of bottomless corruption, geriatric senility and now-closeted racism make him the capitalist ruling-cabal's perfect choice to ensure the 2024 elections complete the Empire's nazification.

Those who dare examine the (ever-more-irrefutable) historical evidence will discover our final passage to that now-inescapable denouement began in 1934 when the Bankers' Plot perpe-traitors -- many of them fathers and grandfathers of the Empire's present owners -- were granted federal immunity for their treasonous conspiracy to make USian industry and natural resources the enabling elements for world conquest -- today's "full-spectrum dominance" -- by what would become the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo Axis.

Failing that -- and no doubt inspired by the infinitely evil genius of Hitler and Josef Goebbels -- our relentlessly misogynistic white-supremacist rulers seized Madison Avenue's mass-marketing techniques to fuel their retaliatory scheme of slow-motion, multi-generational nazification. In 1938 they began co-opting fundamentalist Christianity, reconditioning it into a reliably nazified auxiliary. By 1944 they were adopting upper-echelon Original (N.S.D.A.P.) Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-at arms. Then, "as the night the day," followed the 1963 coup and all that has come after, including the sparks of white Moronic Majority racism cunningly blown into unquenchable conflagration by the Obama presidency's innumerable "change-we-can-believe-in" betrayals and thus exploding into Trumpite Christonazism.

Yes, especially because of its implicit premeditation, this is an utterly terrifying hypothesis. But as Sun Tzu tells us, it is suicide to underestimate our enemy. Yes, most of the evidence is circumstantial. But USian juries routinely impose death sentences on far less. And this is the only  hypothesis that fully explains both the Republican conversion to unabashed nazism and the enabling Democrat paradox of progressive promises repeatedly asserted yet infuriatingly broken -- the ultimate form of the Big Lie weaponized to impose terminal nazification -- terminal not just to our nation, but to our entire species as well.

*****

US Announces Plans to Send F-16 Fighter Jets to Ukraine

Like the “Democratic” (sic) Party itself, Biden the Beguiler always lies to the citizenry.

The hopelessly gullible Moronic Majority reliably behaves as if the lies were truths, then does no more than whimper in craven submission when the falsehoods are overturned by obviously premeditated socioeconomic atrocities or apocalyptic escalations.

Indeed such lying is a pattern that -- with the post-JFK Democrats now functioning solely as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party -- has become as predictable as sunrise.

That's why -- just as we now know the Beguiler lied with his implicit promises not to escalate the Ukraine War into a greater conflict (and thus most likely into a thermonuclear apocalypse that will exterminate our species and reduce our Mother Earth back to a bug planet), we know he's also lying when he pledges the debt-limit fight won't be weaponized to further savage the working class.

***

Zelensky’s Wartime Visit to Berlin and Germany’s New “Drive to the East”

Apropos the defiant resurrection of German militarism, it is undoubtedly of great semiotic significance the Bundeswehr has already brought back the traditional jackboots -- albeit modified by a cynically labeled "democracy buckle" -- as their parade-uniform footwear. Hence the goose-step will no doubt soon follow. As my long-dead paternal grandmother, a Scot, so often said, "the Germans are a fine people -- as long as you don't allow them military uniforms."

Hence my clenched-fist salute to Comrade Stern, though he omits the historical fact the already nazified USian ruling class made its wholly owned U.S. government a de facto puppet of German foreign policy by its eager adoption of legions of Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-at-arms -- the premeditated post-World-War-II atrocity for which not only our entire species but our Mother Earth herself will soon pay Hitler's terminal, better-dead-than-defeated price.

Unless, of course, there is a truly global uprising by the working class…

*****

Inflation Drives US Household Debt to Record $17 Trillion

And our potentially deadly plight -- that is, the plight of the entire USian working class, 99.9 percent of the domestic population -- will become infinitely worse once Biden the Beguiler completes the "Democratic" (sic) Party's cunningly pre-scripted debt-limit betrayal, thereby  enabling the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party to complete the genocidal destruction of the socioeconomic "safety-net" remnants long targeted by the ruling-class.

But it's really nothing new; it's just another (terminal) example of "change we can believe in" -- the most malevolently destructive Big Lie ever pimped to the hopelessly gullible USian Moronic Majority.

*****

Manufactured Crisis over US Debt Ceiling Sets Stage for Bipartisan Assault on Social Security and Medicare 

NOTE: see updates at US Budget Deal Will Accelerate Savage Cuts to Public Education and Biden-McCarthy Austerity Debt Ceiling Bill Moves to Vote in Congress, also background at  White House Debt Limit Talks: a Manufactured, Bipartisan Conspiracy to Make Workers Pay for War

Given that the capitalist nations are now ruled by a cabal that amounts to a de facto nazi international, we dare not dismiss the possibility a carefully scripted USian default is intended as weapon of economic genocide -- that is, to deliberately inflict murderous  hardship of genocidal magnitude on the entire global working class. This would at least partly accomplish the stated ruling class goal of eliminating "surplus workers" even as  the inconceivably obscene wealth of the .01 Percent and their vassals would, precisely as intended, insulate the ruling class from any collateral damage. I dearly hope I am wrong -- that this is not the ruling-class plan --  but history is unequivocal in its proof there is absolutely no limit to the horrors the ruling class will inflict on us in its quest for eternal omnipotence.

***

Biden’s Debt Ceiling Betrayal Is a Democratic Party Tradition

This analysis by Margaret Kimberly exemplifies why Black Agenda Report should be regular reading for every real leftist in the USian Empire. It is, hands-down, the best (domestically written) political reporting on the Internet, its courageous accuracy and fearless truthfulness a powerful antidote to the Big Lie propaganda in which we would otherwise be drowning. Qualitatively, it is equal to the international reporting and analysis provided by the World Socialist Web Site -- thus my heartfelt gratitude to PR for regularly reprinting BAR's material.  

*****

Atlanta: We Do Not Need a School for Assassins

This is excellent, courageous reporting that is not available in USia's so-called "mainstream media," which -- let us not forget -- is actually the world's first privately owned, for-maximum-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, serving the de facto Fourth Reich of the USian Empire in exactly the same way the Goebbels group served Hitler's Third Reich.

As a near-lifelong professional journalist -- my sometimes award-winning career on newspapers and magazines began in my 16th year (and I remain somewhat active in the field even now at age 83) -- I recognize reportage of that quality and social-documentary photography produced with equal skill and fearlessness have become the defining qualities of the by-lined group's work.

Moreover, such top-notch journalism is desperately needed by the USian 99.9 Percent. That's why I dearly wish the news collective that radically demeans and discredits itself as a "Unicorn Riot" would dump its self-pitying, implicitly powerless,  Sesame-Streetish name and replace it with a label that would prompt a vastly larger number of people to take its vital work seriously.

*****

Myths and Reality: the Power of Nonviolence

Ms. Morrow speaks a truth, but history proves it is only partially true, entirely conditional on the ability of our foes to regard us as fellow humans.

The primary exception -- as relevant in today's USian Empire as it was in yesteryear's Weimar Germany -- is that non-violence is useless against nazis, whether Original N.S.D.A.P. Nazis,  their many Franco/Pinochet variants. or the USian Christonazis who disguise themselves as members of the "Republican" and "Democratic" parties. 

Let us not forget that nazism -- too often euphemized as "fascism" to downplay its horrors -- is the ultimate fulfillment of both the capitalist ethos of omnipotent greed and the patriarchal ethos of misogynistic omnipotence from which capitalism is directly descended.

All nazis are thus serial-killer-minded moral imbeciles who revel in the ecogenocidal embrace of infinite evil. As Neville Chamberlain learned at Munich, as the White Rose Society learned in the Third Reich, as the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement learned in the USian fatherland and as Harry Turtledove pointed out in the short story entitled "The Last Article" (for which google), nonviolence actually encourages the nazis to ever more deadly atrocities.

Thus too, the only historically proven antidote to nazism was the Red Army, the permanent absence of which most likely damns the 99.9 Percent to lifelong slavery, dooms our entire species to greedy self-extinction and condemns our Mother Earth to reduction back to a bug planet.

*****

SCOTUS Case May Slash Regulation of Everything

I am not certain which is more ecogenocidally terminal  to ourselves, our species and our Mother Earth -- the Christonazi  judicial cabal that is dutifully following the Mein Kampf blueprint in reducing the USian Empire to the de facto Fourth Reich (much as Hitler's N.S.D.A.P.- nazified judiciary reduced the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich), or the pseudo-left's cowardly pretense there remains any doubt at all about our morally imbecilic Masters' malevolent intent.  

Each -- Christonazi activism and the pseudo-left's cravenly pacifist fraudulent indecisiveness  --  is a pivotal factor in the terminally apocalyptic destruction of  USian democratic process the Empire's clandestinely nazified  owners have been slowly but methodically  imposing since they were given free reign by the coup of 22 November 1963.

The third factor in our nation's permanent reduction to an electronically policed open-air death camp, our own reduction to inescapable slavery and the ultimate, ultimately misogynistic reduction of our Mother Earth back to a bug planet by the USian reich's wars of global conquest is of course the U.S. Moronic Majority, which is already hopelessly subjugated to unquestioning submissiveness and thus is no more to be blamed than its 1930s German counterpart.

Nevertheless the circumstantial but infinitely damning evidence remains obvious to the dwindling few of us -- mostly the tiny remnant of USia's once-thriving Marxian community -- who yet dare look: first the immunity granted the nazification-minded perpe-traitors of the Bankers' Plot; then the .01 Percent's infiltration,  co-optation and conversion of white fundamentalist Christianity into a fanatically nazified auxiliary; next the recruitment of innumerable Original Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-at-arms;  finally the murder of our president and all that -- "as the night the day" -- relentlessly follows.

What dooms us is the absence of Lev Bronstein and Vladimir Ulyanov, without whom it is ever-more-obvious there can never again be a working-class awakening.

*****

Continued Fiction? Yes, But Not This Time. (Sorry)
I’ve been so overwhelmed by our ever-more-wretched political reality -- not to mention a passel of surprise medical bills -- I haven’t been able to get the next installment past the conceptual phase. But I promise it's taking shape.

LB/31 May 2023

-30-

Knoxville, August 1969, the last time I would see my father alive. Negative and print damaged in the 1983 arson fire but salvaged from the rubble a year later. (Tri-X at 800 ASA; 35mm Summicron on M4 Leica.) Photo by Loren Bliss © 2023.

*

THOUGH MY CHILDHOOD taught me to cherish solitude for its self-healing opportunities, it was not until the extended isolation imposed by the Covid quarantine had I time enough to sort the trauma of growing up in a savagely dysfunctional family -- wounds that had remained the psychological equivalents of open sores because I never earned enough money to pay the extortionist fees demanded by the few genuinely competent healers.

Nor is my plight in any way unique: history makes it clear the One Percenters who now and forever own all federal, state and local USian governments will never allow healthcare to be acknowledged as a human right; thus for as long as the USian Empire survives, its healthcare will remain what it is today, a privilege of wealth, its adequacy (or lack thereof) determined exclusively by one’s income.

But the extended hours of uninterrupted contemplation granted by the quarantine ironically exempted me from that intentionally genocidal tyranny. It also granted me a truly priceless gift of compassionate understanding, a series of realizations that leaves me no moral choice but to write the following eulogy to my father, a man I have come to sadly realize I spent most of my life profoundly misunderstanding.

Indeed I owe that man, the late Donald Read Bliss (4 July 1910-21 February 1971), both a deeply regretful apology and an equally heartfelt debt of gratitude.

I owe him the apology for misconstruing as rejection the stiff-upper-lip remoteness symptomatic of his own emotional anguish.

And at the very least I owe him thanks times eight:

• for rescuing me from my murder-minded mother’s attempts at post-partum abortion;

• for teaching me the observational skills and patience required for successful fresh-water fishing;

• for exemplifying and teaching the observant mindfulness by which I would discover how to become as one with my surroundings whether urban, rural or oceanic;

• for giving me a .22 target rifle, a Remington 521-T Junior Special, on my ninth Christmas and coaching me to share his expert-class skill with rifles and handguns;

• for protecting me from Southron viciousness by paying for parochial schooling, grades five thru eight, until I -- a typically lustful 14-year-old male -- foolishly opted to attend a public Southron high school merely because I believed the public-school girls would be easier to seduce;¹

• for giving me my first three cameras, a Kodak Brownie Reflex, a Polaroid and an Agfa Press Miniature on my twelfth, thirteenth and sixteenth birthdays respectively, thereby inspiring my near-lifelong commitment to journalism;

• for being the one and only family member courageous enough to back me in the violent aftermath of a scandalous false arrest, about which more below;

• and ultimately for being the most learned, most empowering teacher I have known in all my nearly 83 years.

Technically my father was the first-generation son of wealthy immigrants. Though my paternal ancestors arrived here in 1629 or 1630 and became prosperous farmers in what is now Connecticut, they were expelled as Royalists in 1789. My father’s father, my paternal grandfather, was the late Amos Read Bliss (1860-1922), a prominent Canadian engineer who migrated to the United States with his wife the late Wilena Marion Dewar (1889-1961) in 1900 or so. His patented automotive dynamo was a pivotal invention in the development of the modern automobile, and he subsequently headed the Ford Motor Company design team that invented the electric starter.

My father thus was raised in what to me is unimaginable privilege, its magnitude symbolized by his twelfth, fourteenth and sixteenth birthday presents, respectively a horse, a 20-foot sailboat and an automobile. He received a classic British education in U.S. boarding schools and anticipated continuing his education at Montreal’s exclusive McGill University. His desire, he told me once, was to become a history professor. 

By his own admission, he had no notion of the horrors of working-class existence; he was utterly unprepared for the emotional shock imposed by the Crash of 1929, which soon found him delivering 100-pound sacks of coal -- one bag per shoulder -- to fireplace-heated walk-ups in the working-class tenements of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Later he worked as a mechanic at a Standard Oil facility in Boston, next as a carpenter, then as a project foreman in residential construction on Long Island. Eventually his managerial skills would secure him high-ranking executive positions with American Houses Incorporated, a New-Deal-related pioneer in the development of prefabricated buildings, after which his ever-more-diverse talents and Mensa-caliber intelligence would earn him rapid promotions from the federal War Production Board.

I cannot doubt it was the painful lessons of the early Depression years that prompted his subsequent embrace of Marxism, to the extent the most memorable music of my childhood was the Red Army Chorus on an all-Cyrillic,78-RPM album that included the rousing “Song of the Machine-gun Carts,” a piece since omitted from the official Soviet repertoire but resurrected by You-Tube, the initial footage eerily approximate to what my childhood internal vision pictured each time my father played it on our Victrola. Likewise favored was Paul Robeson’s Songs of Free Men, and I vividly remember my father explaining, in terms readily understandable by my four-year-old self, the meaning of the album-cover’s semi-abstract symbolism. That same year, my introduction to classical music was the 1939 RCA Victor Red Seal recording of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Our family’s record collection also included the then-popular hit entitled “Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’,” the flip-side of which was entitled “Love Is Gonna Be Rationed,” each often part of my early childhood’s background music.

But when the U.S. began its slow-boiled-frog transition to the generic nazism of neoliberalism by its adoption of innumerable German Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-in-arms even before V-E Day, its earliest victims were those purged as prematurely anti-fascist, a condemnation-without-trial that cost my father the equivalent of a federal deputy regional directorship in 1947, ever after condemning him and all of us in his immediate family to marginal near-poverty even as it irremediably shaped my own closely parallel political thinking.

***

MY FATHER WAS among the most relentlessly honest persons I have ever known. Bound by a personal code based on the Shakespearean premise of “to thine own self be true...thou canst not be false to any man” and an almost medieval sense of honor inherited from his parents, his outspokenness often earned him naught but misunderstanding, my own included, an affliction for which I realized during quarantined contemplation I share no small measure of guilt.

In 1950 permanently exiled to the vindictively theocratic white-supremacist South -- and despite his quickly earned status there as a successful mortgage banker -- my father, my stepmother, my four younger half-sisters and I were often socially rejected as “white trash,” firstly because he was already twice divorced; secondly because he was considered a 1950s version of an intruding “Yankee carpetbagger”; thirdly because of my own sensationalized false arrest and night in the old Knox County Jail during an attempted ruling-class purge to rid the University of Tennessee and Knoxville in general of persons involved in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement or at least peripheral to it and thus all deemed “troublemakers” and/or “outside agitators.”

It was this incident and my immediate, defiantly public embrace of civil rights activism that forever bridged the gap of mutual misunderstanding that had separated us since the familial crisis of 1945. Before 1945, we had been as fondly and comfortably close as any father and son might be.

One of my earliest memories is our mutual trip to view the wounded ocean-liner Normandie only hours before she capsized at the French Line pier in Manhattan on 9 February 1942; this was nearly two months before my second birthday, yet I vividly remember the flare of a welding torch within her starboard anchor-port, how she listed away from the dock and how the waterfront smelled there in the late-winter darkness.

Two years later, when we had access to rural areas in Virginia, my father often took me on long walks with him in the woods, carrying me piggy-back when I grew too tired to keep up. It was on one of those walks I fired my first live round, a shot from his .22 Harrington and Richardson target revolver, with him holding the piece as I aligned its sights, squeezed its trigger in accordance with his instructions and hit the tin can he had placed as a target against a red-clay bank maybe 10 yards distant.

Among the few remnants of my childhood that escaped the arson fire of 1983 is the unique valentine he air-mailed me in 1944, an artifact I have cherished and kept close-at-hand for as long as I can remember: “Dear Loren -- Inside is a picture of something that is almost as big and strong as my wish that you would be my Valentine!” Neatly printed and signed “Love Dad,” the “big and strong” is a photograph of a Norfolk and Western streamlined-steam passenger locomotive, to which my four-year-old hand later added crayon-curls of black smoke.

But after that dreadful 1945 Summer Solstice Eve, his fondness seemed to wane, so that by my teenage years, I had concluded he had forever distanced himself, a belief my hateful birthmother maliciously fostered at every opportunity. Meanwhile my father did nothing to alleviate my dismay: throughout my post-1945 boyhood and until about the time I turned 12, his most wounding pejoratives were to call me “goon boy” or to damn me for being “just like (my) mother” any time I displeased him.

I long suspected he feared I had inherited my birthmother’s penchant for sociopathic dishonesty and morally imbecilic, self-obsessed criminality. Also I felt he doubted my courage: he had boxed competitively in boarding school, but despite his boxing lessons, I loathed schoolyard fist-fighting and never became the triumphant brawler he said he was as a teen and young adult, never mind the fact he had given me enough skill to win about half of those encounters, teaching the bullies they would be hurt even if I lost the fight and thereby eventually making myself formidable enough to terminate the sadistic torment that characterized most of my public school years -- yet another reason I realize now I owe him a debt of gratitude.

But it was my defiant, unrelenting response to false arrest that finally bridged our always troubling distance and swept all his doubts away, and we began meeting for intensely personal conversations over after-work dinners, typically once every week at the S&W Cafeteria as long as I remained in Knoxville, at least once a month after I moved to Oak Ridge for a job at the daily newspaper there.

Nor will I ever forget how we outraged the homophobic Southrons with our spontaneously mutual hug at McGhee-Tyson air base when I arrived there for my final visit to Knoxville in 1969, the last time I would see him alive, when an assignment to write and photograph a report on the Southern Counterculture coincidentally corresponded with the wedding of a younger half-sister, Deborah, the firstborn of my father and stepmother.

It was during that visit I discovered we were each reading Robert Graves’ White Goddess. Nor was I surprised; at some point after my arrest -- I don’t remember exactly when, though I suspect it was during one of the aforementioned dinners -- my father had told me of an experience in the Maine woods during his 12th year that immediately reminded me of my own 12th-year encounter with otherness in the northern Michigan woods. He had been following a creek to its source, he said, when he discovered a place “where the springs sprayed water up out of the ground like fountains,” but he could never find it again, though he searched for it long afterward, and the experience itself haunted him all his life.

Years later, researching mythology for what would become the arson-destroyed “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” I discovered such fountains were anciently believed to be characteristic of the (extra-dimensional) realms of the goddess, much as summons by the mythical Birds of Rhiannon were described as eerily similar to my own haunting experience in Michigan.

Obviously -- though I regret we never acknowledged it to one another -- he was as fey as I; though “Bliss” is a decidedly English name, genetic testing has shown we are far more Celt than all else combined. Perhaps Yeats’ “Song of the Wandering Aengus,” here sung by the late Judy Collins, applied as much to him as it does to me.

Equally unforgettable in its tacit endorsement of my own Marxism is a long telephone conversation with him when I was back in Manhattan later in ‘69, a discussion of police brutality in which he thought-provokingly cited an Italian communist party statement reminding all Marxians that cops are themselves members of the working class, admittedly misguided but nevertheless yet viable candidates for recruitment.

However much my arrest and subsequent activism healed my relationship with my father, it was also devastatingly painful for my younger sisters, intensifying the Southron jeers of “white-trash” that had plagued them since infancy, gravely deepening the wounds that -- despite my aristocratically-born stepmother’s comforting responses -- my father’s boarding-school-limited parenting skills were never able to help sooth, much less heal. Though my conscience left me no alternative but civil rights activism, I nevertheless must share some measure of guilty responsibility for the fact it caused my sisters considerable grief from the ever-vindictive Southrons.

***

WHILE EVERY DIVORCE is the product of unresolvable conflict, my father’s preference for intelligent, articulate, adventurous lovers in an age when such women were routinely victimized by the misogynistic sadism of patriarchy and traumatized -- sometimes to madness -- invariably complicated his relationships, which often in conversations with me during his latter years he characterized as a quest for a woman “with whom (he) could share (his) naked soul.”

Paradoxically, like most men of his generation, he also believed that, once married, he owed his wife and whatever offspring they produced the same faithful and protective duty a ship’s captain owes his crew. From the perspective of those values -- another painful truth that did not become apparent to me until the therapeutic contemplation granted by the quarantine -- the potential for conflict with an independent-minded woman is undeniable.

Apart from a few mostly laudatory accounts of her fiercely proto-feminist independence, I know little of my father’s first wife, the late Barbara Barker Bliss, mother of my half-siblings the late Donald Jr., Jock and Joanne.

Of my father’s third and final wife, my stepmother, the late Virginia Hodges Bliss, formerly his executive secretary, a woman so skilled that in his absence she routinely 

_______________________________________________________________

With my stepmother at the beach, Florida c. 1946. Photo by my father. ©Loren Bliss 2023.

_______________________________________________________________

supervised the war-effort factory of which he was manager, perhaps the most definitive statement I can make about her -- and thus indirectly about my father as well -- is that she was the absolute antithesis of the malicious stepmother we all know from children's tales and folklore. Indeed she was infinitely more motherly, loving and intellectually encouraging to me in the span of our first few months together than my birthmother had been during the first five and a quarter years of my existence, a powerful post-traumatic healing for which I remain more grateful than words can express. And her supportive fondness did not falter until she was tragically undone decades later by Huntington's Chorea, an unspeakably dreadful disease that turned her latter years into a nightmarish existence I would not wish on any living being. 

In stark contrast to my genuinely protective stepmother, my birthmother was always a fearsome creature. The late Marion Woodruff Fuller Bliss, she was artistically talented, brilliant, and in 1933 among Michigan State’s first three female graduates in urban planning and landscape architecture. But even in my infancy she had become, to me, what I now recognize as the living embodiment of abuse.

Her hatred became undeniable -- even to my toddler self -- after a Brooklyn butcher-shop incident midway in my second year.

Though I was a late talker -- I did not begin to speak until nearly the end of my first year -- but when at last I began to talk, it was almost always in complete, grammatically correct sentences, or so I’ve been told. If I did not know the proper name for something, I labeled it in accordance with its function; hence the exhaust pipe of my father’s black 1940 Ford became the “smoker”; likewise the beaks of the chickens New Yorkers raised in their rooftop Victory Gardens became their “peckers.”

In that era, shopping for meat and vegetables in the City was divided, as in Europe, between butcher shops and greengrocers. My birthmother, with me toddling along, had taken our monthly quota of ration stamps and gone to the butcher to purchase a chicken. My mother pointed to a beheaded, footless, plucked but otherwise intact chicken displayed in the shop’s refrigerated, glass-and-white-enamel counter-top; the butcher held the bird aloft for her approval, and my always-inquisitive self quietly asked “mother, where’s its pecker?”

She ignored me. Assuming she had not heard me over the background noise of conversations, elevated trains and street traffic, I repeated my question at slightly more volume.

Again she ignored me; other customers within hearing grinned and chuckled.

The third time -- still believing she had not heard me above the din -- I shouted: “MOTHER, WHERE’S ITS PECKER.”

Now all the shop’s customers roared with laughter. Abandoning the chicken, my mother yanked me painfully by my right arm, fled the store, smacked me several times around my head and shoulders and promised much harsher punishment when my father returned from his Manhattan office that evening.

But when she told him the story and demanded he spank me, he not only refused to do so, but laughed harder and longer than I had ever before known him to laugh. Even decades later he could not tell that story without laughing.

As I would learn as a young adult, he also ridiculed her for being morbidly terrified of the judgment of strangers -- a characteristic that, as we shall see, she no doubt inherited from her parents.

A deliberate wounding she subsequently inflicted on both of us exemplifies the magnitude of her vengeful hatred. Temporarily abandoning me in my crib in our Queens apartment, she stormed into an American Houses executive meeting in the upper chambers of Manhattan’s General Electric Building, scattering official papers, hurling a drinking-water-filled pitcher against a wall, ruining with its splatter many pen-and-ink documents as she shrieked knowingly false accusations my father was having an affair with his then-secretary, the wife of an Army colonel not yet dispatched overseas.

(In truth his extra-long, sometimes-16-hour workdays were mandated by the war effort, as the entire firm was working overtime on emergency construction of military barracks throughout the nation.)

By then my father was the corporation’s acting vice-president for operations, and one of the purposes of the disrupted meeting had been officially confirming his appointment as such; hence my mother’s explosive tantrum was maliciously timed to inflict maximum ruin, as indeed it did: it convinced my father’s bosses his choice of wives proved him unfit for top-level executive positions, got him demoted to manager of a building-fabrication plant in Jacksonville, Florida, and got us all exiled to the former Confederacy, literally within a matter of days.

Not long after that I had my first encounter with the murderous hatred the Southrons are -- to this day (and as re-legitimized by Donald Trump) -- taught from childhood to harbor against anyone from the North. We lived in the exclusive and therefore gated St. Johns-River-waterfront Catherine’s Court apartment complex; playing in the sandbox of its locked playground, I was assaulted by a trio of older Southron children who decided I “talked funny” and took my obvious Northeastern accent as an excuse to murder me by burying my head in the sand; I was three; they were six and seven.

Though I fought back with all my strength, they were much bigger and stronger; they quickly overcame me, held me upside-down, dug the requisite-sized hole in the sand and buried my head in it. I survived only because Mary Alice Shotwell, a five-year-old northern-born apartment-complex neighbor with whom I’d become friends, defended me by attacking my assailants with a child-sized garden hoe and sent them fleeing homeward, bleeding and crying for their mothers. As I recall, her father was a U.S. Navy officer; in any case, he was one of my father’s close colleagues in the war effort.

Sometime in the spring of 1944, my father was transferred out of Jacksonville to run an even smaller American Houses plant in Roanoke, Virginia – which I realize now was another demotion, additional corporate retribution for the violent tantrum my birthmother had thrown in the Manhattan board room.

I still remember a part of the drive northward; sitting in the back seat of our black 1940 Ford, watching out the windows as the land gradually changed from Floridian flatness to rolling Appalachian foothills, I asked if we were going to a place with mountains. My father answered that indeed we were and complimented me on my observational skill and reasoning ability – even as my birthmother belittled me for daring ask such a question.

That autumn -- obviously my father was still trying to save their marriage -- we went on vacation with our new dog, a trained English Setter named Cocoa, to my maternal grandparents’ cottage on the South Branch of the Au Sable River in Northern (Lower) Michigan for a week of late-season small-game hunting with my maternal relatives.

At age four, I was of course required to remain indoors with the women, but I remember vividly the partridge and rabbits piled nightly on the front porch floor before they were gutted, skinned or plucked and cooked, and the deliciousness of the wild meat on which we feasted set my taste-buds on a woodland path I would follow until old-age disability ended that aspect of my journey.

I also remember crying bitterly at our departure for Roanoke -- grief I assume now was prompted by my realization the temporary charade of dispensation from my birthmother’s malice that had accompanied our vacation was itself ending, as indeed it was -- permanently.

***

NOT LONG AFTERWARD, my birthmother literally hurled me across our Roanoke kitchen, slammed me into the far wall, repeatedly slapped me with both hands and, when my father intervened, shrieked I had accused her of using a “feces” brush to baste a fish she was cooking in the oven; watching her preparations, I had merely asked her if she was going to baste the fish, using the “fishy brush” -- my term -- she had previously stated was only for that purpose.

Early in 1945, attending a private kindergarten in which I now realize my father had enrolled me as a workday protection against my birthmother’s escalating violence, I brought home a block-printing project that required slicing a raw potato in half, drawing designs on the open ends, cutting out enough material to raise the designs in bas-relief, dipping it in finger paint and transferring the design to a sheet of paper. Visually skilled beyond my years, in my mind’s eye I saw silhouettes of dogs, though for some reason I no longer remember, I chose blue as the color of the finger paint.

My birthmother provided me everything I needed including water-color paper, a large raw potato cut in halves, a pencil to draw the silhouettes on the potato-ends, a small paring knife to turn the silhouettes into printing surfaces and ample work-space covered with newspapers on our breakfast nook’s polished oak floor.

I sat down on the papers, picked up a potato-half and began drawing a childish canine figure on its bare end.

Nearly 78 years after the fact, it still hurts me to remember what happened next: my mother suddenly damned me as a hopelessly clumsy oaf who had wasted a rationed potato, snatched the potato out of my hand, flung it somewhere I don’t remember, dragged me off the newspapers, slapped me several times, kicked the newspapers into a wad, spilled the blue finger paint onto the now-unprotected floor and -- when my father returned from his day’s work -- blamed me for the resultant mess.

The kindergarten meanwhile had decided to celebrate 1945’s May Day in a Roanoke park with a children’s performance of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night’s Dream; I was chosen to be Puck, and the teachers asked my mother to make me an appropriate costume. She did, sewing from chocolate-brown cotton cloth a scalloped-bottom knee-length dress, tights and tasseled cap I immediately hated because it made me look like a girl. My father agreed with me, but my mother insisted I wear it.

I think it might have been during one of their arguments about my costume she hammered her fist onto our mahogany coffee table with such force the blow shattered its quarter-inch-thick glass top.

Ultimately she prevailed; I vaguely remember my father comforting me, assuring me I would only have to wear the despised costume for a couple of hours, and that by so doing I would minimize my mother’s ever-more-frequent outbursts of terrifyingly hateful rage.

Nevertheless, by this time, her animosity had become so obvious, my father was taking me to work with him whenever he could, often leaving me in the comfortingly protective care of my future stepmother.

Just after New Year’s Day of 1945, my birthmother tried to poison us both with spoiled vegetables she herself would not eat, severely sickening each of us for a half-dozen days, our bedridden respites periodically interrupted by vomiting and diarrhea.

Then, on the eerily frigid Summer Solstice Eve of 1945 -- at 32º Fahrenheit the coldest 21-22 June night ever recorded in Roanoke, Virginia -- she wrapped herself in her fur coat, pocketed a paring knife and sought to carry my half-naked, summer-pajama-clad self from our residence in the last house at the end of the paved portion of  Rosiland Avenue to the top of Mill Mountain, there “to meet god.’’ (The house still stands, looking nearly exactly as it did then, albeit renumbered 2927 after Rosiland Avenue's pavement was extended much further to accommodate additional dwellings.)

But my father arrived home unexpectedly early due to a canceled meeting, and when he intervened, my birthmother assaulted us both, her frenzy so hatefully violent it took all my father’s military-trained skill to disarm her and all his strength to restrain her. My mind’s eye still sees them wrestling on the living room floor, my father atop a writhing, hissing, snarling, drooling caricature of a human female, a shape-shifting creature turned suddenly reptilian and unspeakably terrifying, a lethally squirming predator who now arched her neck in hideously serpentine replications  of venomous strikes,  her gaping mouth slinging great gouts of frothy saliva as she repeatedly lunged to bite my father's face; failing that she gnawed and snapped at his dangling green tie, slobbering it dark as she snagged it with her teeth, spasmodically twitching to yank it tight enough to strangle him. But even as my father strained to hold her down, he somehow managed to lean back just far enough to deny her the fatal leverage she relentlessly sought.

Their epic battle seemed to last forever, and I witnessed every dreadful minute of it;  effectively paralyzed by fear, I huddled in the far corner of our living-room sofa; in the end it required six burly cops to strap my birthmother to a litter for transport to jail. She was imprisoned for a week, jailed until her mother, my maternal grandmother, came by train to fetch her home to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Meanwhile I had shrunk into a psychological numbness that endured for years afterward; my recollections of some of the conversations I had with my father in 1969 leaves me with the sorrowful suspicion he was so terribly hurt by the magnitude of betrayal, malicious deception and vindictive cunning implicit in my birthmother's explosive revelation of her hitherto-concealed but ever-afterward undeniably bottomless hatred of the male gender, his wounds  may never have fully healed.     

Also memorably, my grandmother greeted me not with affection but with the painfully chilly you-are-now-nothing-but-an-unwelcome-reminder-of-a-bad-time rejection that would ever-after define my relationship with all of my maternal kin save my birthmother’s older sister, my Aunt Alecia.

***

I YET HARBOR mixed emotions about the fact my father felt it was his gentlemanly obligation not to have my birthmother charged with attempted murder.

Nor have I words adequate to describe the relief I felt when my father and stepmother each promised I would never have to see her again -- a promise that, through no fault of their own, would be broken in only two years.

At home in Michigan with her parents, my birthmother continued violently expressing her hatefulness, first against her father, later against a niece whom my birthmother twice hurled down flights of stars for daring to defy her irrational demands. That niece was my Aunt Alecia’s daughter Pamela -- Alecia was herself a divorcee -- and in 1948, as my courageously protective aunt, she would become another of my genuine saviors.²

Meanwhile, my maternal grandparents -- paralyzed by their craven fear the scandal of an institutionalized daughter would hurt their more-than-adequate income -- refused to act against my increasingly violent mother until my aunt threatened public disclosure via the police and the criminal court. Thus my birthmother was secretly institutionalized for a year in a posh private asylum.

But her cowardly parents remained so frightened by the prospect of socioeconomic odium, they defied the stern advice of her psychiatrists, who wanted her confined for life as a dangerous psychotic. Her father employed his influence and considerable wealth to secure her release, conceal her history of malevolent behavior, suppress the record of her arrest in Roanoke, thereby facilitate a divorce-court decree granting her summer custody of me and -- horror of horrors -- enable her to resume the career as a Registered Nurse her parents had bought for her after she failed to achieve employment in her chosen field.

I will always wonder how many persons she might have murdered, especially given how many times she was fired during her subsequent years as an RN.

Citing my divorce-court-mandated interrogation by a Virginia state social-worker as proof -- a still-memorable encounter with a woman whose infinite coldness was utterly terrifying to my already traumatized five-year-old-self -- my birthmother sought to convince me my father had tried to abandon me in an orphanage: a claim I am sad to admit I believed for many years was true.

Her last act of vengeance toward us both was to deny me the funds to attend my father’s funeral -- this after she had again broken an oft-repeated but never fulfilled promise to help me pay my college expenses. Two days before my father’s death, I had left myself temporarily penniless by paying out-of-pocket all my spring quarter 1971 tuition and fees at Western Washington State College. Hence, citing her broken promise, I begged her for the money to attend the funeral.

Her response? “If god wants you to go, he’ll provide.”

She was particularly hateful to any woman with whom I was close. In 1961 she physically attacked my first wife, slapping Carolyn's face and yanking her waist-length hair until I forcefully intervened to stop her unprovoked assault.   In 1975 -- this after she surreptitiously obtained the names of several of my friends and colleagues and viciously harassed them by phone to compel my then-fiance Ann and me to cancel our long-planned vacation trip to New York City and instead detour to Grand Rapids -- she attempted to poison us both with spoiled chicken retrieved from garbage.

In the '61 and '75 incidents we were protected from her sadistic malevolence only by the intervention of my influential older half-brother Jock. The ‘75 incident also ended my final quest for matrimony; having met my birthmonster, the woman I’d contentedly lived with for nearly two years and planned to marry understandably decided she wanted nothing more to do with me or my family.

My birthmother’s final institutionalization occurred in the mid-1980s -- this after she was repeatedly caught hiding naked in the clothes dryers of the Grand Rapids senior-housing complex where she had rented her last apartment. Reportedly, she claimed her nakedness was necessary to enable her to conceal herself from “the Devil’s soul-catchers,” whom she believed were hunting her because she had failed to fulfill her end of a satanic pact.

So informed, I could not but wonder if herein lay the explanation for her attempt to murder me in 1945. While I most assuredly do not believe in the Devil, I am painfully aware of the global presence of absolute evil, which seems ever more the dominant force in today’s apocalypse-threatened world.

Thus I cannot escape the likelihood my birthmother believed her pregnancy was facilitated by satanic favor; that she intended its payment to be my own sacrificial death atop Roanoke’s Mill Mountain; that she believed her family’s wealth and influence would immunize her to punishment just as it had protected her from prosecution for innumerable lesser crimes (mostly theft, forgery and shoplifting); and that here was the most likely explanation both for the berserker-caliber frenzy with which she assaulted my father when he intervened – a rage so violently enormous it required, as I said, six Roanoke cops to subdue her for the trip to jail – and for her later abject terror of the supposed “soul-catchers.”

Nevertheless -- and despite the fact I am decidedly agnostic about all such matters -- the eerily unprecedented temperature-drop of that night seems to add to the associated events an eldritch element I cannot deny.

Be that as it may, when my birthmother died on 8 June 1995, I felt as if a great burden had been lifted from my life, indeed as if I had at long last been liberated from some hitherto-inescapable curse.

Not long afterward it came to me the ultimate definition of our relationship lay in the fact my birthmother never once told me she loved me. Instead she spoke of maternal love only in the third person, “your mother loves you,” as if she were speaking of some entirely different person, someone far removed from either of our lives.

The best evidence indicates my birthmother was a maliciously sadistic sociopath who -- beneath a carefully maintained veneer of upper-bourgeois heterosexual sociability -- hated all men, deliberately got pregnant to ensnare my father in a marriage she hoped would provide her with a cover to pursue her subsequently revealed lesbianism, and probably despised me from the moment she discovered she had borne a male infant.

I now of course know the violent denouement of that marriage -- for which as a child despised by his birthmother I characteristically blamed myself for entirely too many years -- was inevitable.

***

THOUGH MY BIRTHMOTHER had learned to weaponize the irrational expressions of her madness -- switching them on only when she felt the need to employ them as psychological truncheons to enforce her will, otherwise keeping them switched off and carefully maintaining a deliberately deceptive facade  of intelligent-woman normalcy -- even at age 83 I remain amazed by the extent to which she maliciously conned both my father and his mother, the feisty, independent-minded grandmother my siblings and I knew as Nana. She likewise conned my second wife Adrienne, whom she never met in person and with whom geography insured she communicated only by telephone and mail.

I am also astounded by the forgiveness my father displayed toward my birthmother’s ever-intensifying violence and hatefulness. When I finally dared ask him why -- this in 1969 during the last face-to-face conversation we would ever have -- he replied that honor and matrimonial vows demanded no less.

That is the sort of man he was: someone a trusted friend, the late Conrad Payne, memorably described to my 23-year-old self -- then fresh-out-of-jail and still profoundly skeptical of my father’s regard for me -- as “probably the best friend (I’ll) ever have.” Conrad and his pregnant wife Mary had been among those arrested, and in the aftermath had themselves become acquainted with my father. And I now know Conrad was absolutely correct in his judgment: my father was indeed the best friend -- that is, the most understanding and accepting friend -- I ever had. 

Flawed? Of course he was -- as are all of us raised under the ecogenocidal moral imbecility of patriarchy and its incipiently nazi capitalist derivatives. Sometimes hurtful toward those to whom he should have been most protective? Unquestionably.

But the truth is I loved him nevertheless, and I no longer question his love for me: else why would he have bid me farewell by a fleeting appearance at the foot of my bed as he lay dying three thousand miles away -- his spectral presence actually seen more clearly by the woman of Irish descent who was my lover at the time, and as well by my dog, who howled at his passing. Thus, until I am no more, and no doubt longer if there be afterlife, I shall sorely miss the steadily deepening bonds of friendship and mutual understanding that characterized our post-1963 relationship.

_____________________________________

¹Given the wretched educational quality, white-supremacist bias and often-violent bullying that characterized that era’s Southron public schools, my decision to abandon the vastly superior quality of parochial education is one I will always deeply regret.

²I attended first and second grade at Jacksonville’s Norwood Elementary School, where reading was taught by the word-recognition method, and where I was socially promoted despite my seeming inability either to read or do basic arithmetic. But my Aunt Alecia -- by then a working artist with a growing reputation throughout the Middle West -- recognized my problem as dyslexia and in 1948 traded a piece of sculpture to a friend to buy me six weeks of summertime tutoring in phonics. The result was literally life-changing; by mid-third grade, I routinely tested as reading at a 12th-grade level. In other words, Alecia’s beneficence enabled my life as a journalist and lifelong scholar, for which I had the good sense to make a point of thanking her profusely many times in the late 1980s. Alecia DuRand (1908-1993) after her second marriage, she was the first woman in the U.S. to head a collegiate fine-arts department, and there is a two-year art scholarship in her name at the school that so employed her, Grand Rapids Community College.

LB/7 November 2022-25 March 2023; with minor revisions for clarity 10 August 2023.

-30-

Photographic 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.)

*****

(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.)

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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?

*****

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.

*****

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-- 

HERE ARE TODAY'S links  to what seem the most reliably informative and therefore (presumably) useful Internet reports on the rapidly spreading Coronavirus pandemic:

Most vital reports of the day:

The Truth About the United States' "Continuity of Government" Plans & The Coronavirus Perfect Storm
Scroll down to the 12th graf to learn how at least eight million U.S. citizens are on our Masters' enemies lists and will be disappeared.

Military, Trump administration ready plans for domestic crackdown as virus spreads across US
From the report: "'a senior military planner working on coronavirus but not authorized to speak on sensitive planning matters [...] says that deployment of federal troops in support roles is being prepared,' including to conduct traffic stops, home searches and seizures and arrests." Note that "home searches and seizures" could include not only confiscation of all real or potential weapons but -- given the ChristoNazi Regime's anti-marijuana fanaticism  -- confiscation of, and arrest for possession of, all the (still federally illegal) medical marijuana upon which such a huge number of opiate-denied chronic-pain victims are now forced to depend. Too -- given the Regime's even more fanatical hatred of women and female sexuality -- such raids might also be used to confiscate all birth-control devices and criminalize all unwed women who possess them, thereby fulfilling still more of our Masters' ChristoNazis objectives. Thus -- by such mass arrests -- could the Regime give its plutocratic owners the ultimate "gift" of permanently enslaving millions of U.S. citizens for brutally hard, typically deadly labor, thereby granting our Masters' wish of exterminating "surplus workers" while following the German Nazis' model of amassing unlimited profits from mass murder. 

From the Associated Press:

AP FACT CHECK: Trump claims rising suicides if US stays shut
Another courageous chapter in the epic Associated Press battle against the Big Lies spouted by those Nazis in the White House.

What you need to know today about the virus outbreak
AP's excellent daily update

Virus briefings are the new campaign rallies for Trump
More of the superb AP reporting most of the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine refuses to disseminate.

Out of vital medication, US woman among those stuck in Peru
Comprehensive report including global pandemic statistics.

From other sources:

Cuba's Coronavirus Response Is Putting Other Countries to Shame
In contrast to the sneering ecogenocidal sadism of Neoliberal Capitalism, Cuban socialism truly is our only demonstrably humane and humanitarian alternative. Which is precisely why our Masters are so hateful toward it. 

Arizona man dies after attempting to take Trump coronavirus 'cure'
When Big Lie demagoguery becomes murder.

FOCUS: Trump Won't Order Vital Coronavirus Supplies Because Corporate CEOs Asked Him Not To
No surprise here; once again we witness our Masters' ecogenocidal intent coming to fruition in this pandemic.

For Some People, Social Distancing Means Being Trapped Indoors With an Abuser
A potentially deadly horror to which Moron Nation's most brazenly misogynistic Regime ever has no response beyond  a shrug of its White Male Supremacist shoulders and maybe a whispered but triumphantly sneering "tough luck."

National parks have waived fees. But think twice about visiting.
Wilderness trails are often way too narrow for maintaining mandatory social distances. And the campgrounds -- even in normal times -- are no less petrie dishes than kindergarten playgrounds or the public areas of senior housing .

Colombian Death Squads Exploiting Coronavirus Lockdown to Kill Activists
The shock doctrine -- weaponization of the crisis -- in typically genocidal Neoliberal action.

What’s the penalty for breaking Oregon’s new ‘stay home’ order? Jail, $1,250 fine or both
Given how Moron Nation youth are defying the quarantine -- and cackling like Hillaries as they maliciously cough their "Boomer Remover" germs into nearby elders' faces  -- Martial law is probably inevitable.

Amazon delays shipments of 'nonessential items' in the US by up to a month
More forcible civilian disarmament by any other name, in this instance by Oberst-Gruppenführer Bezos; hence no more Amazonian resupply -- not for the foreseeable future -- for firearms owners, ammunition dealers and gunshops.

Coronavirus live updates: Trump says he wants ‘country opened’ by Easter; Terrence McNally dies from covid-19 complications
All the virus news Bezos deems fit for WaPo to print.

Also relevant:

China's Damning US Human Rights Report May Be Propaganda, but It's Not Wrong
Vital picture of the barbarian United States as viewed  from the perspective of a 5,000-year-old civilization. 

Punishing America's Enemies, by Philip Giraldi
How the United States rules by German Nazi methodology -- that is, by inflicting death, pain and terror.

Everything Accomplished During the Great Depression to Make Capitalism Workable Has Been Taken Away Resulting in Economic Crisis that Only Debt Forgiveness Can Mitigate
In the face of Trump/Pence tyranny, even lifelong conservatives become New Dealers.

Is “COVID-19” Donald's “Weapons of Mass Destruction?”
How the Regime is methodically destroying the federal government -- and therefore the United States itself --  on behalf the (neo-Confederate) Moronic Majority.

Covid-19 has exposed just how broken American economy & society are – a $2 trillion package alone won’t fix it
Fulfilling their murderous greed, our Neoliberal Masters outsourced U.S. manufacturing to lowest-wage and slave-labor nations; now We the (real) People are murdered by their obscene affluence -- slain by skyrocketing drug and medical-supply shortages that could end up murdering more of us than are killed by the virus itself. 

Useful references (selected for their absence of snake-oil deceptions):

How to wash your hands to prevent coronavirus — because you're probably doing it wrong

Loss of smell, taste, might signal pandemic virus infection

Tests show new virus lives on some surfaces for up to 3 days

How to clean the bundle of germs that is your phone

Food Safety and Coronavirus: A Comprehensive Guide 

How to Properly Make Sanitizers from Household Ingredients

(As always, headlines are reproduced in their original up-style and down-style formats.)

*****

WORKING HARD TOWARD restoring that 22:00 PDT (10 p.m.) deadline. Meanwhile the volume of news and the reading-time required to ferret out the most relevant stories -- especially those most likely to be censored by local media -- increases daily. Indeed it is becoming the equivalent of a full-time job -- without pay, of course. Today I started work at 16:30PDT; tomorrow I will start at 15:00PDT and maybe -- just maybe -- have everything posted seven hours later. In any case, thank you for your patience; despite my 55-plus years in journalism, doing this sort of reporting on a computer rather than on a typewriter is a new experience; it is indeed the most difficult, endlessly frustrating, often infuriating struggle I've ever experienced in this line of work. That's because -- for me at least -- computers are (and will forever remain) truly alien technology:  anti-Newtonian, anti-intuitive and eternally incomprehensible. 

May all of you stay healthy and stay alive.

LB/24 March 2020 23:51PDT

-30-

HERE ARE TODAY'S links  to what seem the most reliably informative and therefore (presumably) useful Internet reports on the rapidly spreading Coronavirus pandemic:

From the Associated Press:

Texas moves to ban most abortions due to virus outbreak
Absolutely predictable -- and the beginning of innumerable ChristoNazi atrocities to come. (See "American constitutional lawyer," below.)

Testing blunders crippled US response as coronavirus spread
Our Neoliberal masters in (premeditated) ) genocidal action.

Trump agencies push forward on rollbacks as pandemic rages
Obviously there's no stopping Neoliberal ecogenocide whether Republican or Democratic (sic).

Networks face decision: How long to stick with Trump?
Is the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM) finally enough embarrassed to follow the inspiring example of the Associated Press in identifying and acting against the Trump/Pence Regime's (Hitler-inspired) effluent of Big Lies?  

From other sources:

Dems block McConnell $2 trillion COVID-19 bill: ‘Slush fund for hotels, not hospitals’
At long last, (some) members of the Democratic (sic) Party begin acting as if they actually care about Working Families.

The four-star general who will command the US if coronavirus cripples the government
When, not if (and maybe already). Plus given the fact he's an Air Force Academy graduate,  he is most likely also a ChristoNazi fanatic, a probability I will research more thoroughly overnight. In any case be warned; be prepared.

Ohio Orders Halt to "Nonessential" Abortions in Preview of Battle That Could Go National
As goes ChristoNazi Texas, so -- beneath the ChristoNazi jackboot -- goes the entire (former) nation. 

Here are the six countries that will be most affected by coronavirus-induced economic chaos
The United States -- specifically because of Neoliberal de-industrialization, social-safety-net destruction and its vindictively genocidal policy of healthcare only as a privilege of wealth -- will be the hardest-hit realm on the planet. Let us all take heed accordingly.

Coronavirus live updates: United States surpasses 100 deaths in a day, and 500 total
WaPo: all the news Bezos believes we should be allowed to read.

Also relevant:

Coronavirus Halts Street Protests, but Climate Activists Have a Plan
At least until all anti-fascist activism (whether of the Right or the Left) is outlawed, as the indications increasingly suggest it is soon likely to be.

Traffic and Pollution Plummet as U.S. Cities Shut Down for Coronavirus
Revealing data from satellites: fighting terminal climate change -- just as our Masters intend -- by societal collapse, not to mention deaths to reduce the number of "surplus" Working Families. 

From the weekend (in case you missed any of these vital reports):

I am an American constitutional lawyer – and I see our government using Covid-19 to take away our fundamental rights
See also how our Masters intend to prohibit all non-governmental Internet and email encryption and are already methodically abolishing our Second Amendment rights. 

Plus: New Orleans mayor authorizes ability to ban gun sales during coronavirus emergency if city desires
See also the reports above, especially the abortion bans.  Hence assume the worst and prepare accordingly.

Banks Pressure Health Care Firms to Raise Prices Amid Coronavirus Crisis
An especially courageous AP report exposing the bottomless malignancy of our Masters.

In Sweeping Power Grab, DOJ Seeks Ability To Detain People Indefinitely Without Trial
Again, as our Masters intend.

How Trump Follows in Hitler's Footsteps
Almost as if der Führer were one of his secret advisors.

Virus rebels from France to Florida flout lockdown practices
Proof that Ayn Rand moral imbecility produces lemming-like (alleged) humans throughout the entire Neoliberal empire. 

Useful references (selected for their absence of snake-oil deceptions):

Loss of smell, taste, might signal pandemic virus infection

Tests show new virus lives on some surfaces for up to 3 days

How to clean the bundle of germs that is your phone

Food Safety and Coronavirus: A Comprehensive Guide 

How to Properly Make Sanitizers from Household Ingredients

(As always, headlines are reproduced in their original up-style and down-style formats.)

*****

MY APOLOGY FOR being (unavoidably) late again; my three co-morbidities -- congestive heart failure, high blood pressure, incipient kidney failure -- qualify me for Kaiser-Permanente home health care, for which my great thanks to the people and policies of the non-profit organization that bought the Group Health Cooperative to save it from bankruptcy and now operates the only top-rated  Medicare Advantage program in Washington state. (Five stars: the best score possible.) Alas, that good news is also bad news: I had to immediately restore my apartment to pre-inspection neatness and cleanliness and -- worse news -- now must keep it that way. Moreover it's a process that for me -- with my crippling spinal and knee injuries infinitely worsened by osteoarthritis -- is extremely painful. Therefore --  without the pain pills denied me by the government since December 2018 --  it is also extremely time consuming. And of course with the lockdown there's no way to get the help that had helped me cope with other such surprise  requirements. Thus today's preparation for tomorrow's  home-care visit took nearly 11 hours -- that was before I started working on today's belated report -- and unless my massage-machine, my heating-pad and lots of acetaminophen grant me a dispensation from such unpleasantness, the resultant back cramps will have me mostly bedridden for the next two or three days. 

May all of you stay healthy and stay alive.

LB/23 March 2020 23:44  PDT

-30-

HERE ARE TODAY'S links  to what seem the most reliably informative and therefore (presumably) useful Internet reports on the rapidly spreading Coronavirus pandemic  (a bit late, with apologies, due to the sheer volume of today's news): 

From the Associated Press:

Trump uses daily coronavirus briefing to attack reporter
Predictable. The real question we should be asking is whether the federal union can survive the Trump/Pence Regime's malicious destructiveness.

Trump vs Fauci: President and doctor spar over unproven drug
Donald the Dissembler versus scientific truth-telling. 

Trump contradicts Fauci, slams reporter over drug
Audiovisual report of the preceding story. More of AP's daily exposure of the Regime's innumerable lies. 

Parents, police struggle to herd the young in virus outbreak
Cheering the virus as "Boomer Remover," U.S. youth defiantly party-on in the face of global disaster. This is an especially infuriating demonstration of  the carefully-conditioned Ayn Rand moral imbecility and self-obsession imposed to guarantee our Neoliberal Masters that  most USian youth -- robbed from birth of the ability to think logically -- will remain hopelessly subjugated, never able to transcend Neoliberal anti-intellectualism even enough to become effective reformers, much less revolutionaries. (Yes, that's the same sort of propaganda-induced blindness that kept the Germans fanatically faithful to Hitler and the Nazis even as the Red Army overran Berlin.)

The drive-in, relic of yesterday, finds itself suited to now
One of the innumerable examples we are likely to witness in the coming months of the renewed relevance of old technologies.

Returning troops denied water, bathrooms under quarantine
The truth of our Masters' regard for those of us they regard as cannon-fodder.

US virus testing faces new headwind: Lab supply shortages
One of today's many examples of Neoliberalism as genocide. 

Imports of medical supplies plummet as demand in US soars
Another of today's many examples of Neoliberalism as genocide.

Europeans sing health workers' praises nightly from windows
A normal response from civilized people -- with a selflessness unlikely to be found anywhere in the vindictively self-obsessed United States. 

From other sources:

U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic
Though this report was censored by WaPo's paywall only minutes after it was posted as part of the publication's free daily virus report, it is re-posted here as more evidence our Neoliberal Masters knew of the coronavirus pandemic well before it happened -- further substantiation (though not conclusive proof) of both the Chinese claim the virus originated from the U.S. war machine and the more general suspicion our Masters are, in keeping with their shock doctrine,  weaponizing the pandemic to rid the empire of its "surplus" Working Families.

Senators use advance coronavirus knowledge to enrich selves; hospitals becoming desperate
Here are most of the damning truths hidden behind the paywalled WaPo report above.

Washington Post: Breaking News, World, US, DC News & Analysis
Whatever Oberst-Gruppenführer Bezos decrees should be disseminated to us, we the people of the Empire's peasantry and proletariat.

FBI: 300% spike in gun buy checks, huge backlogs, shutdown threatened
Forcible disarmament -- for everybody but our Masters -- by any means possible.

Homeless. Vulnerable. And no option for 'self isolation'
Homeless camps as preludes to our Neoliberal future.

Colleges offering dorms as hospital overflow for virus cases
Logical -- and most commendable.

Shoreline COVID-19 facility rapidly built on school soccer field
But officials say it may NOT serve virus-sufferers.

100 Million Masks to be Sewn by Volunteers
Betsy Ross lives!

Tell Congress: Put trains into airline relief package
A petition, posted (with apologies) because the Mainstream Media is suppressing this story and there is no other way to tell it: that -- again in keeping with our Masters' shock doctrine -- their bipartisan Congressional vassals are in fact weaponizing the pandemic to destroy what (little) remains of what was once the planet's finest passenger-rail and public transportation system.

Geopolitics in the Corona Era: A Global Challenge Needs a Global Response
From the civilized world.

‘We’re not a shipping clerk’: Trump tells governors they are on their own
Quoth Roman Emperor Honorius c. 407 CE: "the cantons must see to their own defense" -- this after the withdrawal of the Legions from Britannia, as the collapse of the western empire accelerated into free-fall. Note -- as at the beginning -- the implications for the (dissolving) federal union.

Also relevant:

How to Properly Make Sanitizers from Household Ingredients
Discovered after publication and -- because of its urgency -- added forthwith.

We Should All Be Seriously Re-Prioritizing Our Lives And Our Thinking Right Now – Caitlin Johnstone
Provocative and useful.

(As always, headlines are reproduced in their original up-style and down-style formats.)

*****

JUST FOR THE RECORD: I have never in my personal or professional life  witnessed anything even remotely comparable to the global coronavirus emergency; I'll be 80 years old on 30 March and have been in professional journalism since November 1956.

And -- yes --  I am old enough to remember World War II quite vividly: blackouts; food rationing; the green ration stamps and the books in which they were to be pasted; the envelopes of orange coloring used to make lard called "oleomargarine" look like butter; stomping tin cans flat (to keep the lids inside) for the ubiquitous paper-and-scrap-metal drives; German-torpedoed U.S. ships burning within sight of the New York, New Jersey and Florida beaches; beaches closed so the authorities could collect the corpses of sailors (some German, most U.S.) washed ashore from all the sunken ships; the huge hole in the dunes beyond the St. Augustine, Fla. beach where the squad of German saboteurs landed from a U-boat had buried their explosives and radio-transmitters; blackout paint on the headlamps of my father's 1940 Ford; boiling black smoke in the overhead sky and my birthmother's abject terror as she carried me bodily to a bomb shelter after an ammunition ship exploded at the Jacksonville piers, this in late 1943 or early 1944. 

Among the earliest and most vivid of these memories is the visit my father and I paid the fatally wounded Normandie as she listed badly at her French Line pier in Midtown Manhattan. This could only have happened shortly after dark on 9 February 1942, after the fire had been brought under control the night before she capsized; I was a mere toddler, seven weeks shy of my second birthday but -- despite dyslexia -- already had the memory that would later serve me so well as a journalist and historian. 

At the time we were told the Normandie had set sail, had been torpedoed by the Germans off Long Island and had limped, afire, back into port; later we were told she was torched by German saboteurs. The true story -- that this fine ship died as a result of  U.S. Navy stupidity, xenophobia and negligence -- did not emerge until after the war.

In other words, we see again that in times of crisis our most difficult task is finding the truths hidden in the government's tsunami of lies.

(Which I do as best I can with these updates even as I learn to cope the fact that deadline-reporting on a computer takes at least four times as long as doing it on a manual typewriter did back when I was considered one of the fastest, most accurate rewrite men in the NYC/North Jersey press corps, this c. 1968-1970.)  

Stay healthy; stay alive; have the best weekend possible under these steadily worsening circumstances inflicted on us by our for-profit Masters in a land where effective medicine remains a privilege of wealth and Neoliberalism reins supreme -- even in the face of deadly disaster.   

LB/20 March 2020 23:22 PDT

-30-

HERE ARE TODAY'S links  to what seem the most reliably informative and therefore (presumably) useful Internet reports on the rapidly spreading Coronavirus pandemic: 

From the Associated Press:

Most renters will not receive protections under WH proposal
The Trump/Pence Regime again expresses its hatred and contempt of lower-income peoples.

Governors raise alarm as coronavirus taxes health systems
As predicted.

Celebrities get virus tests, raising concerns of inequality
As always, Capitalism is murder.

California governor orders statewide stay-at-home order
The virus begins to shut down the entire nation.

California rushes to prevent virus spread among the homeless
Too little, too late.

$10 toilet paper? Coronavirus gouging complaints surge in US
See also "panicked Toilet Paper Hoarders," below.

From other sources:

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), head of powerful committee, sold large amount of stocks before sharp declines in market
Additional evidence our Masters knew about the virus pandemic before it happened, which in turn lends credence to China's claim the pandemic is the result of U.S. CBR warfare. (CBR = "Chemical, Biological, Radiological"; don't know if this report will remain part of WaPo's coronavirus coverage or will be quickly censored by a paywall.)

Coronavirus live updates: U.S. confirmed cases double
The usual daily report from WaPo.

Rikers Island inmate has contracted coronavirus: officials
Thus all jail and prison sentences become potential death sentences.

Trump response to pandemic a failing of unimaginable proportions
Note the sixth paragraph: that Trump's hospital-ship promise is but another of his lies. Quoth the U.S. Navy: "“The Comfort and Mercy will not deploy to treat COVID patients, but will be made available to assist with treatment of other patients in coastal locations where local health professionals are necessarily focused on a large number of COVID cases,” the statement says. “Both ships are currently working to complete scheduled maintenance cycles and identify necessary medical staffing to deploy as soon as possible.”

On the Front Lines of the Coronavirus Pandemic: A Doctor’s View
In the United States -- because of its murderous for-profit health care system -- the pandemic could become truly apocalyptic.  Elsewhere? The only good news is out of China.

An ‘Exceptional’ Nation Fails its People as CN’s Editor First Learned 20 Years Ago
The near-impossibility of getting timely responses from a for-profit system based on the moral imbecilic principle that healthcare must forever remain  a privilege of wealth. 

As world toll from COVID-19 pandemic passes 200,000, American hospitals at risk of being overrun
Capitalism and Neoliberalism as synonyms for genocide.

Vague emergency legislation gives UK police & ‘public health officers’ powers to DETAIN suspected Covid-19 sufferers
Will internment camps be next?

Watch: Panicked toilet paper hoarders get in physical fight with another customer who wants just one pack
Predictably, Moron Nation demonstrates the core of its "exceptional" ethos: moral imbecility of Ayn-Rand/Adolf-Hitler intensity.

Also relevant:

Silent streets: Life halts, but not for all workers
Working Families brace for the worst.

Slavoj Zizek: Biggest threat Covid-19 epidemic poses is not our regression to survivalist violence, but BARBARISM with human face
Are the murderous shortages inflicted on us by Capitalist profiteering the beginning of a new Dark Age?

(As always, headlines are reproduced in their original up-style and down-style formats.)

*****

Stay healthy; stay alive.

LB/19 March 2020 22:08PDT

-30-

HERE ARE TODAY'S links  to what seem the most reliably informative (and therefore presumably useful) Internet reports on the rapidly spreading Coronavirus pandemic: 

From the Associated Press:

The Latest: White House, media to coordinate on virus PSAs
Beware a new era of Josef-Goebbels-type censorship, now that Madison Avenue (the Advertising Council) will be supervising the production of propaganda. Remember: U.S. Mainstream Media is in fact the privately owned, for-profit successor to Goebbels' infamous Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. 

Sick staff fueled outbreak in Seattle-area care centers
Again we see how Neoliberalism is premeditated murder -- this time premeditated mass murder by the intentionally deadly denial of paid sick leave that is vectoring the coronavirus.

Hospitals fear shortage of ventilators for virus patients
Again, Neoliberalism as premeditated mass-murder -- in other words, deliberate genocide. Such is the infinite Evil of our morally imbecilic Masters.

US military's role in response to virus outbreak is growing
Be aware of the probability our Neoliberal Masters will, in keeping with their shock-doctrine opportunism, parlay this pandemic into permanent U.S. dictatorship, complete with forcible civilian disarmament to guarantee a population rendered eternally impotent by its reduction to the same mandatory pacifism (and thus compulsory victimhood) that effectively enslaved most of the peasantry and proletariat of post-Roman Europe for nearly 1400 years -- that is, until the revolutions of 1848. Best defense? Make certain -- whenever you are able -- to read every word of the virus-emergency legislation for just such fine-print horrors.

From other sources:

Negotiations intensify on Capitol Hill over massive stimulus legislation as coronavirus fallout worsens
Useful as always: latest info and propaganda from WaPo.

Novel Coronavirus Outbreak 2020 :: Washington State Department of Health
Posted because Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee is proving himself a national model for prompt and effective coronavirus response -- this despite his ongoing membership in Biden's murderously Neoliberal Democratic (sic) Party. (With additional kudos for anti-virus leadership to Rep. Laurie Jinkins, the Democrat who is deputy director of the Tacoma/Pierce Health Department and the Speaker of the House in the legislature at Olympia.)

Wuhan resident: China “nationalized” coronavirus crisis; the West isn’t doing enough
Community-ism  versus Ayn Rand's Neoliberal self-obsession, greed, profiteering and death.

London’s Imperial College predicts millions to die from coronavirus pandemic in UK and US
Self-explanatory -- and yet another indictment of  Neoliberalism as mass murder.

Late-Stage Imperial Omni-Crisis: Death by Virus and Internal Contradictions
Vital for its clear thinking -- maybe the clearest thinking in the entire U.S.today.

Freedom Rider: COVID-19 Covers Up War and Financial Collapse
Might this be the purpose behind its timing?

“Virus or No Virus, We Can't Lose Our Voice”
People of color speaking up for all of us in the 99 Percent.

The Socialist Specter in Present-Day US Politics
Why socialism is the only viable path to human survival.

China Locked in Hybrid War with US
Let us fervently hope this does not escalate into open warfare -- not the least because no nation that has outsourced its entire industrial capacity in the name of greed is capable of even minimal self-defense without resorting to thermonuclear weapons and the resultant destruction of the planet. 

Also relevant:

Five countries with the world’s biggest gold reserves
Relevant because the flight to gold (and thus its skyrocketing price) is one of the most reliable yardsticks by which to measure our Masters' estimate of the magnitude of the impending collapse. Gold and silver soar in value as global confidence in paper currency declines. Also: given persistent and notably credible rumors Russian biologists discovered the missing Tsarist gold while exploring the great depths of Lake Baikal, Russia may actually be atop the list.

Corona Chronicles: Telegrams from Gotham
A close-up portrait of why so many Sanders supporters switched their vote to Biden: less news than exceptionally relevant contemplative reading. 

Striking Truthdig Staff Respond To Allegations By Publisher
See my most-relevant discussion-thread comment.

Added after deadline Monday, retained because of its relevance:

Nine Thoughts On COVID-19 And What’s Coming
An Australian columnist whose views are in many ways similar to my own. 

(As always, headlines are reproduced in their original up-style and down-style formats.)

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I BELIEVE THE other obligations that could make Dispatches as tardy as it was last night are behind me. These are all for-my-beneficiaries tasks, with many yet to complete, but no more that could expand -- as yesterday's did -- from what I estimated would take maybe 30 minutes at the most to the more than seven hours it actually required.   

Stay healthy; stay alive.

LB/18 March 2020 22:08PDT

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HERE ARE TODAY'S links  to what seem the most reliably informative (and therefore presumably useful) Internet reports on the rapidly spreading Coronavirus pandemic (apologetically but unavoidably tardy due to other obligations): 

From the Associated Press:

Governments grapple with virus border closures, lockdowns
Regularly updated.

Death total from coronavirus in Washington state hits 54
Regularly updated national roundup.

One mask a day for doctors in virus epicenter of Washington
Yet another of the innumerable ways Neoliberalism kills -- and who facilitated that slaughter but the very politicians we the (foolish) people elected because we believed their promises to represent us?

Analysis: American attitudes make virus response a hard sell
A relevant example of AP's excellence at sociological reporting -- and a story most of today's U.S. papers will ignore.

From other sources:

Coronavirus Updates from The Washington Post
Useful info as usual.

Indian Country's COVID-19 syllabus
A vital perspective too often ignored.

FOCUS: Coronavirus Capitalism - and How to Beat It
Information our Masters are loathe to see us share.

Cuban Drug Could Save Thousands of Lives in Coronavirus Pandemic
But would our Masters allow global healing by one tiny island nation's socialist revolution and revolutionary socialist medicine?

Germany Confirms That Trump Tried to Buy Firm Working on Coronavirus Vaccine
U.S. governance as the lowest sort of political satire -- precisely the sort of thing one might have witnessed on a street corner in Rome during the reign of some emperor who failed to opiate the masses with sufficient breads and circuses. Indeed I am shocked by its impropriety as I have never been shocked before, yet I find I am no more surprised than I would be were I to be awakened not by the news Trump had lost the election but by the far more urgent story describing how he responded by mooning the world from the White House balcony.

Also relevant:

Covid-19: Islamic State warns members to stay out of Europe
No, this is not from satire central...nor even from the satirical sub-basement.

Added after deadline Monday, retained because of its relevance:

Nine Thoughts On COVID-19 And What’s Coming
An Australian columnist whose views are in many ways similar to my own. 

(As always, headlines are reproduced in their original up-style and down-style formats.)

*****

Stay healthy; stay alive.

LB/18 March 2020 01:52PDT

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