Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

Bruce Dixon: a Relentless Warrior for Socioeconomic Justice

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

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

(...)

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

(...)

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

(...)

Every time he and fellow organizers made electoral advances, he said, the Democratic Party changed the rules to undermine them.

 

(...)

 

I once asked him whether the Greens might be better off putting their energy and resources into, for one, creating community gardens in major cities all over the country, and he responded that most of the community gardens he knew of had been shut down by those with wealth and power. There is indeed no sign left of Los Angeles’s famous South Central Farm, the largest urban farm and perhaps the greatest community organizing success in the US from 1994 till 2006, when it was bulldozed by a real estate developer.

 

(To read the remainder of Ms. Garrison's informative piece, go here. Please also read  "Bruce Dixon, in His Own Words," here, and "For Brother Bruce," here.) 

 

If what CounterPunch now acknowledges is the USian Empire's methodical, Final-Solution-type scheme of weaponized ecocide and genocidal tyranny -- the likelihood of which you read about first on Dispatches -- is ever replaced by genuine liberty, Bruce Dixon will most assuredly be recognized as one of the truly heroic figures in U.S. alternative journalism. 

 

Meanwhile, thanks entirely to the great generosity of friends and comrades, I am gradually getting back on-line, about which more later.

 

LB/5 July 2019

 

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Shut Down by Total Computer Failure, Probably Permanently

My 25-Year Address Book, the Dispatches Mailing List Included,
Is Gone Forever. Government Malice? Undoubtedly. But Fuck the
One Percenters and Their Vassals, Fuck Their Blood-Drenched Flag
and Fuck the God of Genocide They Serve. I'll Be Back If I'm Able.

OBVIOUSLY THIS IS the climax of the attack that began last December with repetitive efforts to max out my credit cards by fraud (which destroyed forever -- literally, because I will not live another seven years -- the credit I had been meticulously rebuilding since my 2008-2009 loss of nearly 70 percent of my annual income).

As we all know, the only way to remedy such a problem is with lawyers and lawsuits, which of course since I am now reduced to inescapable peonage is forever beyond me.

Plus all my research  after June 2018 -- a full year's effort -- is also lost forever. This kills the novel -- in fact kills any possibility of a novel -- as there is no way, at age 79 and slowly dying of congestive heart failure, that I can ever reconstruct the lost research.

And without it -- because to make fiction work it requires every bit as much research as journalism -- there is no way I can write it. (Yes, this is the same thing that killed "Dancer," though what the arsonist[s] destroyed was 24 years of research, as well as my entire always-fragile sense of personal identity.)

But in bitter truth, disasters of this sort are in fact the sole defining quality of my life. In other words, I am undeniably accursed.

And you damn sure  can't call yourself a writer or photographer without text and pictures to back up the claim.

Despite nurdly reassurance the associated computer problems can be resolved, I have been mostly off-line for the past eight days -- had to go completely off-line to finish this month's senior-housing newsletter, which is printed and hand distributed rather than emailed.

Hence it is now obvious that whatever is wrong with this machine cannot be repaired.

While there is no way I will ever again be able to afford another computer, some people I know promise they will get me another. I am most grateful for their emotional support, but given the prohibitive sums involved, I am rationally skeptical. We shall see.

Those of you who would want to see Dispatches if I ever get reliably on line again, please email me accordingly. As I said, all your email addresses were eradicated by the computer failure, and I have no other way to get them back than by begging as I am doing now.

Meanwhile I thank you for your readership. I will leave you all with this, knowing it may in fact be my last-ever online political statement:

Wanna comprehend the ChristoNazi/Neoliberal reality of the Trump/Pence Regime? Wanna know why the Democratic (sic) Party will again in the 2020 elections function as the Republican Party's Fifth Column?

Dig it:

What Trump is actually doing is imposing -- with absolutely 100 percent success -- the Neoliberal Final Solution: he's destroying the remnants of civil government -- exactly as Neoliberalism demands -- to allow for the emergence of a planet ruled entirely by the corporations, their secret police and their military goon squads. In other words, he's our corporate masters' perfect puppet; behind the hurly-burly, he's giving them everything they ever wanted.

Welcome to the future: wherein the vast majority of human lives -- literally all human lives save those of the aristocrats -- will be too horrible to endure.

LB/19 June 2019

-30-

 

 

Why I'm Dropping Out (an Open Letter to the Few Who Care)

A TERRIFYING ASSAULT on my always-fragile finances by an ongoing plague of so-called "billing errors" combined with attempted thievery by alleged "fraudsters" tells me I am again a target of the extra-legal secret-police malevolence for which the United States is increasingly infamous.

My alleged sin? I suspect it is writing about what should be obvious:  that the only possible reason the One Percenters are not fighting climate change is they are weaponizing it as the plausibly deniable mechanism of their ultimate Final Solution: reshaping the remnants of human society into a global concentration camp with themselves as commandants, guards and executioners. 

Thus it would appear I am being told to shut the fuck up, lest everything on which I am dependent -- apartment,  telephone service, Internet connection, health insurance, food stamps, even my Social Security retirement pension --  be taken away from me without notice.

(Question: How do you fight a 76-percent overcharge accompanied by an immediate disconnect notice when [A], you've already paid your monthly bill; when [B] you're a 15-year customer who's never been late with a payment; and when [C], Century Link initially  claims to have no record of either the overcharge or the pending disconnection? Answer: You stay on the phone for nearly seven hours, shouting yourself hoarse and repeatedly threatening legal action until CL employees eventually dig deeply enough into their computers to find the "error" and correct it.)

How did the "error" happen? The employees insist there is no explanation.  

Such harassment is never "explainable"; that is often what identifies it as the product of malice rather than ineptitude. In any case the fact this  allegedly inexplicable Century Link "error" was immediately preceded by a  half-dozen bank-thwarted efforts at electronic "fraud" makes it obvious I am (again) under deliberate attack.

One or two such incidents might be coincidental, but eight -- the count so far (including a new, ongoing attack by Century Link similar to the first) -- is unquestionably enemy action, especially since I am meticulously protective of the relevant passwords and confirmation-of-identity information.

More to the point, the alleged "fraudsters" were able to access new, hitherto-unused replacement accounts, which means they had information only the credit-bureaus and the bankers -- or the secret police -- are able to obtain. And we already know each of the 17 U.S. secret police agencies are dominated top-to-bottom by the ChristoNazis and their fascist allies.

As in the Beatles' song, "I get by with a little help from my friends." But the friends and comrades whose caring and generosity sometimes sustain my survival have not the resources to save me from the death-sentence horrors that would result were my Social Security account to "inexplicably" vanish from the government's computers -- exactly as my Washington state unemployment compensation  account vanished in December 1982. 

This happened the height of the Reagan Recession -- here in Washington state a genuine depression with actual joblessness approaching 30 percent. The disaster inflicted by the surprise loss of my unemployment stipends thus reduced me to homelessness long before my repeated, increasingly forceful letters-of-appeal generated sufficient political pressure to compel notoriously recalcitrant bureaucrats to reconstruct and restore my disappeared  account. 

Significantly, inside sources I had developed during my years covering the legislature  (1977-1981), told me the clerk  who vindictively deleted my account was never punished. Supposedly she acted on her own initiative, in Nazi-minded revenge for my anti-Vietnam-War activities 11 years earlier. But the extent to which she was protected tells me she was obeying the orders of some higher authority or at the very least had been assured of such support.     

As would be the case again today were my Social Security pension to suddenly vanish, in December 1982 my lover, friends and acquaintances were all too impoverished to provide more than minimal help. The best these folks could do was offer occasional free meals and a few nights on a living-room couch or in a spare bed. My lover, herself a victim of Reagan-inflicted economic woes, ended our relationship by returning to California.      

By the time the state got around to paying my unemployment-insurance stipends,  the money was  nine months overdue. My increasingly desperate hunt for work and shelter had meanwhile forced me back to New York City, where my award-winning journalistic skills netted me immediate employment as a writer and  editor and brought me regular freelance work both as a creative director and a photographer. 

But I was compelled to leave behind in Washington state the photography and manuscripts that were already beginning to achieve recognition as my life's most important work. These filled a pair of four-drawer filing cabinets, their contents including a 150,000-word draft of "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer"  and the tens of thousands of photographs I had made since 1952, when my father honored my 12th birthday by giving me my first camera, a truly life-changing gift. Perhaps a thousand of these photos -- my intent was to edit them down to about 50 images -- provided  the visual backbone of "Dancer," which by then had generated 24 years of file-folders bulging with research notes, outlines, clippings and earlier drafts.  Also within the cabinets were notes, photos, maps and site drawings for a book on Washington state archaeological anomalies, and a comparable files for a third book about the people of the Pacific Northwest salmon fishery. 

Because there was no way I could fit even one of these cabinets into my 1976 Honda Civic for the 2,900-mile drive across the country to Manhattan, I stored both cabinets and all the work they contained with an especially dear friend and trusted colleague; I would send for them as soon as I had achieved permanent housing in the City. 

But my friend's house was destroyed by arson on  1 September 1983 -- a blaze ignited at the exact instant I began a meeting with the book editor who believed "Dancer" to be a  cultural turning-point and had therefore promised to mother it to mainstream publication. 

The timing -- literally to the minute -- makes it obvious the fire was no coincidence, that it was clearly an assault by the secret police or their Nazi allies.   

And my loss -- as I'm  certain was intended -- was ruinous. The destruction of my life's work was the destruction of my life. No matter how determinedly I tried, I was unable to recover either from the fire or from the preliminary blow dealt me by that vengeful clerk in the Bellingham office of the so-called (and laughably named) Washington Department of Employment Security.

I was never again able to afford a place of my own -- that is, an apartment or dwelling without room-mates -- until I returned to Washington state in October 1986. By the following year a stubborn bout of post-fire traumatic depression -- impossible to conceal from future employers after poverty forced me onto welfare and the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services vindictively shunted me onto Social Security Disability -- had ended forever my career as a newspaper and magazine staffer. And I would never again have a lover;  my poverty had become too hopeless to hide.   

What saved my life was my excellent physical health; I was in my 40s; my back and knee injuries had not been complicated by arthritis, and the onset of congestive heart failure was two decades in my future. I had  the stamina essential for survival when survival itself becomes -- as it has under Neoliberalism -- an act of revolutionary defiance.

Now, at age 79, severely crippled by arthritis and slowly dying of congestive heart failure, there is no possible way I could  successfully combat such a sudden loss of income. The magnitude of my poverty would again, exactly as it did in 1982-83,  prohibit amelioration by  friends or comrades. Again I would be homeless,  isolated, alone -- and this time soon dead. 

So endeth the lesson.  

***

BUT THIS THREAT of fatal retaliation  is only a small part of what pushed me over the proverbial edge into something that at first glance seems uncomfortably close to the scary intellectual death I fear actual retirement is bound to be.

Consider:

There is no question the One Percenters and their minions have achieved genuine omnipotence in their tyranny over this planet and its inhabitants. They do as they wish. Their technology has given them  abilities hitherto attributed to the gods alone -- including the power to heal the global wounds inflicted by our man-made socioeconomic and environmental emergencies.

Instead our overlords have allowed these crises to merge and expand into an approximation of the Apocalypse traditionally prophesied by the Abrahamic zealots.

Have no doubt; our masters could have ended austerity anytime they chose to do so.

They could also have begun amelioration of what should be called "terminal climate change" when  Soviet scientists -- freed of the anti-environmental fetters imposed by "the secret fundamentalism at the heart of American power" -- began in the 1950s to warn humanity of global warming and its consequences.

These warnings were of course rejected by the United States, the most earth-raping, atmosphere-poisoning, water-polluting empire ever. 

The misogynistic depth of anti-environmental sentiment in "Christian America" -- the magnitude of its metastasis confirmed when the patriarchy's  "one nation under God" gave the Trump/Pence Regime unfettered access to the doomsday button -- cannot be over-estimated. It is perhaps best exemplified by the startling  messages that began appearing on church reader-boards during the early 1970s. Examples include "Organic Is Satanic" and "Environmental Is Of The Devil."      

But since the death of the Soviet Union, no people on earth have demonstrated the leadership, organization and discipline necessary to slow the One Percenters' tyrannical momentum, much less to overthrow the ever-more-obvious One Percent agenda, a shock-doctrine of strategy and tactics cunningly camouflaged by political hurly-burly yet clearly based on the deliberate furtherance of ecocidal genocide and genocidal ecocide.   

That is why -- though in ever-deepening despair we press our masters ever more frantically to use their infinite power and wealth to at least reduce the death and destruction wrought by their weaponized Apocalypse -- they respond with naught but dithering, obstructionism, disinformation, outright lies and defiant intensification of all the trumped-up persecutions at the heart of their global assault on democratic process.  

Politics is never more than a euphemism for might-makes-right compulsion. But we the people are already so dis-empowered we cannot even compel our overlords to fling us lifejackets in an already raging sea of disaster.

At best our masters are sneeringly indifferent to our fate; at worst they want us dead. That's why our traditional democratic methods -- disclosure, dissent and non-violent demonstration -- no longer work. 

And so it shall remain so unless some miraculous cataclysm evens the odds by nullifying the unbeatable technologies of oppression that grant the One Percenters their ever-expanding omnipotence.  

Beyond that, we desperately need a new strategy and new tactics, all grounded on the elemental wisdom of Sun Tzu. 

Until such measures evolve -- and the unprecedented creative paralysis inflicted by our powerlessness evokes rational fear that might never happen --  why should I who have already suffered the total destruction of my life persist in wasting energy on a doomed struggle that is not only therefore pointless but which -- if I continue (and as  I have obviously now been warned) -- could result in my extra-legal (and therefore irreversible) condemnation to one of the most degrading fates imaginable.   

As the Ku Klux Klan learned 56 years ago, the prospect of sudden death does not scare me. That's why, to the sadly limited extent allowed by worsening physical disability, I will continue volunteering for picket lines and helping discourage the increasingly violent ChristoNazis who are waging war on women's health services.

But slowly starving to death huddled abandoned and alone beneath piss-reeking  blankets in some filthy urban doorway -- which is precisely what would happen to me were all my income to be disappeared as it was 36 years ago -- is more repugnant and frightening than I can describe.

*** 

SOME OF US -- especially those of us adept enough to transcend even the censorship imposed by price and paywall -- are discovering irrefutable evidence our overlords are indeed exploring how to manipulate the serial disasters inflicted by climate change and Neoliberal economics into plausibly deniable campaigns of ecocidal genocide.

In accordance with their shock-doctrine methodology, our masters are using the Apocalypse to impose the ultimate regime-change. They are reordering all human society into Neoliberal utopia: Ayn Rand opulence for our masters,  including those who would rule from far above us; serfdom and slavery for the few of us 99 Percenters they allow to survive their deliberate conversion of our planet into Deathcamp Earth.

The post-hurricane atrocities that now define both New Orleans and Puerto Rico are already recognizable as our  overlords' rat-lab experiments in proto-genocidal social-Darwinist engineering: that is, Nazism in action.

And at least some of the funding to weaponize global warming -- obviously our masters' response to the fact death camps remain unfashionable despite increasing efforts to the contrary -- is disguised as national-defense spending:    

Weaponizing the Climate: Geoengineering's Military Potential

Global Climate Engineering: Who Controls the Thermostat?
(Both these vital reports, in Wired, may be censored by paywalls.)

Thus the One Perenters hide their malignancy behind the charade of our long-dead "democracy" as they dither and delay and disseminate  all manner of deception in their malign intent to hasten and maximize our deaths. 

Meanwhile we the people -- we the "surplus workers," we the surplus people -- watch ourselves and our planet slain by merciless plutocrats we now realize are already deciding how many of us and our descendants are to be exterminated.

Death panels? How better to describe the for-profit health insurance monopolies that slay at least 44,000 U.S. residents each year by defining health care as a privilege of wealth, thereby denying  care to anyone too poor to pay the de facto tax on survival.  

And that 44,000 -- a figure ten years old -- has since under Trump/Pence austerity policies begun swelling to a sum censorship now guarantees will remain unknowable.

Genocide?  Name me one continent where mass murder not been melded into the everyday climate. 

Ecocide?

Bear witness:

The Race Towards Extinction: Climate Change Versus The 5G Microwave Technology Roll Out

The Blue Ocean Event and Collapsing Ecosystems

How Much Ice Has Greenland Lost to Climate Change?

'Exhausted' Polar Bear Found 700 Kilometers From Home in Russian Village

Air Pollution Is Killing More People Than Smoking - and Fossil Fuels Are Largely to Blame

UK life expectancy continues to fall

U.S. Life Expectancy Drops Amid 'Disturbing' Rise In Overdoses And Suicides

A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy

The World Is Burning and Those in Power Are Stoking the Flames

***

ESPECIALLY NOTE HOW -- instead of working to ameliorate the crisis -- the Empire's Neoliberal owners have reshaped the U.S.  into zero-tolerance ChristoNazi theocracy and are thrusting its puppet-states into ever-more-obvious fascism. 

Future historians -- if indeed there is to be a human future -- will tell us U.S. constitutional rights were rendered forever meaningless by the events of  22 November 1963. 

Peaceful protest and poverty or minority status,  already crimes in this conquered nation, are now being criminalized throughout the globe. 

First Julian Assange, Then Us

Chelsea Manning's Appeal Rejected By 4th Circuit Court Of Appeals

Smearing Assange: The US Government's Plan to Silence Its Critics and Criminalize Journalism

Thought Police: US, Israel Increasingly Banning & Deporting Ideological Enemies

More than 30K immigrants have been deported via Boeing Field
Again the Democrats prove themselves liars and reveal the Big Lie of "progressive" Washington state.

RSN: America's "Hole-in-the-Head" Nuke Suicide Pact Gets Court Approval

'We Are Treated Like Animals,' Say Amazon Flex Drivers

Dear Mister President: Your Abortion Spreadsheet Takes the Cake

Florida deputy’s assault on high school student caught on video

US Gulf Coast still devastated six months after Hurricane Michael

States Are Trying to Stop Cities From Raising Minimum Wage

Supreme Court Will Decide if It Is Legal to Fire Someone for Being LGBTQ

The FBI Appears to Be Engaged in a Modern-Day Version of COINTELPRO

Baltimore Police Tried to Kill Keith Davis Jr.; Prosecutors Have Been Trying to Convict Him of Murder Ever Since.

Arrests At London Climate-Change Protests Top 1,000 

***

NOR WILL THE rulers of Moron Nation ever again allow us sufficient education to recover from our deliberately dumbed-down denouement: 

An American Tragedy Is Unfolding in Our Classrooms

Officer Attack on Teen Reignites National Debate on Cops in Schools

Why Are There So Few Black Ph.D.s?

The Death of Education in America

The Price of Publishing Independent Thought

It is a bit of an aside, but if you have read the last of these linked reports, you surely understand the potentially terminal crisis facing Reader Supportive News,  which provides the most relevant English-language, daily summaries of news and commentary on the Internet.

Though all progressive-minded alternative media are under Neoliberal and/or ChristoNazi  attack, RSN is literally  struggling against journalistic extinction. Please -- if you can -- make a  contribution to help them survive.

Obviously our masters are inspired by the example of the Southron slave-owners we were fooled into believing our great-grandparents defeated in 1865. Our overlords are not only imprisoning us  They are also destroying public education to make certain a skyrocketing number of us can neither read or reason.

Their intention is to make us as illiterate -- and therefore as helplessly ignorant -- as antebellum slaves for whom ability to read or possession of a book was a capital crime typically punished by agonizing tortures including whipping, amputation and death from the resultant infections.   

And there is no question our masters are succeeding: note how, to bolster their charade of democracy, they maintain the Big Lie of a free press, all the while privately celebrating the damning fact we of the U.S. 99 Percent have already been brain-warped to such abject submissiveness, we cannot muster an effective response even to the looming threat of extinction.    

Yet methodical human disempowerment is hardly a new phenomenon. Its large-scale imposition began with the advent of patriarchy some 6,000 years ago. It skyrocketed to its present intensity after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476CE elevated the Christians into  all-powerful terrorists, setting the stage for the Capitalist tyranny that defines the  Neoliberal present and its probably inescapable future. 

Since then, every revolution by which we might have re-empowered ourselves has been crushed or co-opted.  That which began 6,000 years ago now continues forever; that's because patriarchy -- our species' sole unnatural act -- cannot be sustained except by force.

Which is precisely why our masters have always sought omnipotence and now kill to perpetuate its impregnability.  

All that remains is ever-intensifying  tyranny -- the absolute rule of unconquerable despots perpetuated by  eternally ineluctable technologies of mass surveillance that from conception were defined by same gleefully malevolent intent that defines weapons of mass destruction. 

Since then -- and this is but one of the many dark historical truths kept hidden by Capitalist censors -- our masters have also become unfathomably devious in how they disguise their always successful, hence ever-intensified efforts to maliciously reduce us to inescapable poverty and finally to subjugation in serfdom and slavery.

Today the banks are their overseers;  centuries from now it will be back to the mercilessly whip-wielding disciples of Simon Legree on struggling plantations from which neo-feudal barons rule the few remaining habitable regions of our devastated world as it dwindles to its final fate as a bug planet. 

*** 

ALREADY OUR SPECIES  has seemingly divided into two mutually hostile subspecies.

As a result -- as if in anticipation of one last apocalyptic battle --  a new clash is replacing class conflict.

It strongly suggests  H. sapiens sapiens has already split in twain, the ruling subspecies threatening  war-to-the-death between those of us who  retain, cherish and strive to expand our ability to empathize with life beyond ourselves.

Meanwhile our enemies are breeding themselves free of all moral or ethical restraint. Their offspring --  perchance to define fascism as morality for moral imbeciles -- embrace  the evils of tyranny as enthusiastically as they suck their mother's milk.     

I label these new subspecies in accordance with their documented behavior.

Our masters  are of the subspecies H. sapiens tyrannis -- the Neoliberal tyrants by whom we have been conquered and who now prey upon us without mercy. 

We ourselves, their victims,  are H. sapiens empathia, the 99 Percent, we the (dwindling) peoples who remain capable of humanitarian solidarity with our fellow humans and with life in general,  those of us our overlords are methodically reducing to chronic desperation, whether by imprisoning us in serfdom and slavery or by slowly exterminating us for replacement by robots.

The most definitive difference? H. sapiens tyrannis has forever lost the ability for humanitarian empathy. Its members are born sociopaths; it is their moral imbecility -- indistinguishable from that of a Ted Bundy or any other serial killer -- which gives them their grotesque, increasingly glaring aura of extraterrestrial conquerors or genetic mutants run amok.

It is psycholinguistically impossible for our masters to hear us. They speak only the death-camp language of Neoliberalism. They do not just ignore our cries for mercy; they are literally deaf to them,  unable to separate human voices from the other background noises of exploitation and profit.

That's why our charade of democracy is dead, never to be resurrected. We are ruled by creatures whose amorality has made them as relentlessly anti-humanitarian as the insectoid aliens of science fiction. In this way they are identical to their Nazi forebears, which means they can be removed from power only as the Original Nazis were overthrown in World War II.

But that can never happen. Our overlords' omnipotence -- the fact we the people are utterly defenseless against their surveillance technology,  their weaponry and their conspiratorial malevolence -- has made them the first tyrants in all human history who are truly immune to overthrow whether by overthrow or invasion.  They hold our entire planet hostage. They have more than enough thermonuclear bombs to nuke the world to cinders -- and there is no question they would do just that were they to feel genuinely threatened. 

In the White House as in der Füherbunker, it's gone from "better dead than Red" to "better extinct than defeated."

Anyone who believes otherwise is a fool, seduced by the imbecility of hope. 

Meanwhile H. sapiens empathia, ever more subjugated  despite innumerable alternative-media claims to the contrary, continues to prove our powerlessness truly has no bottom .

Some of us, some few H. sapiens empathia, will undoubtedly survive for a time amidst the torture-chamber horrors of our masters' slave pens and their plans for global gentrification.

But the pampered übermenschen misogyny and racism that sustains our overlords' murderous hatefulness long ago defined us as mere üntermenschen --  no more than bipedal beasts of burden whose right to life is measured exclusively by our individual profitability.

Our masters justify their atrocities by viewing us as a  separate (subhuman) species. Why then should we not regard them identically?

Of course I would like to believe they will eventually self-destruct in much the same way their German Nazi forebears did. 

But -- again because I know history -- I know better. Even given the Third Reich's unbelievably arrogant self-destructiveness,  it required the strength of the Red Army to prevent Hitler's Germany from becoming the absolute ruler of the Capitalist (i.e., already fascist) world.

And I know our masters will never again allow such proletarian strength to coalesce, much less to solidify. 

Nor -- as the events of the past half-century have proven beyond any possibility of dispute -- will the stubbornly closed-minded, breathtakingly suicidal political naivety of the USian Left ever allow it to acknowledge the magnitude of sociopathic Evil that fuels the capabilities and intentions of our oppressors. 

***

PROTECTED  AS THEY are by total surveillance -- with neutron bombs and a variety of other chemical, biological and radiological (CBR) weapons available to impose and augment their Final Solutions  -- it is obvious our overlords have already made themselves impregnable to any and all forms of revolutionary ferment including pacifism, the violent nullification of which foretold by Harry Turtledove has become a 21st Century commonplace. 

Were an entirely nonviolent revolution to somehow seize one of our masters' cities, I cannot doubt they would they would resort to neutron-bombing, thereby preserving most of the buildings and office equipment  -- the sacred "market value" that in their profit-besotted Neoliberal minds outranks all other values -- while simultaneously condemning all the rebels to unspeakably horrible deaths by radiation poisoning.

Indeed we should expect no better from a Nazi-worshipping global empire that claimed it had to destroy the Vietnamese city of Ben Tre  to save it from Communists and is since resurrecting concentration camps in the imperial homeland.   

That's why, at age 79, I am finally forced to admit I have been given sufficient perspective by a six-decade journalism career and a solid academic background in history and sociology to at last acknowledge what is undoubtedly our species most bitter, most embittering and most clandestine truth: that the so-called "moral arc of the universe" bends not toward justice, but toward an ultimate high-tech tyranny so unspeakably awful perhaps only an Edvard Munch could even approach portraying its horror.    

Let us therefore never forget how our present condition is the logical product of its ideological and financial foundations: 

"Dark Money" Funds Climate Change Denial Effort - Scientific American

Susan Collins Receives More Donations From Texas Fossil Fuel Industry Than From Maine Residents

Consensus Among GOP Candidates: Let The Planet Die

The return of the population bombers

Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability

How Thousands Of Nazis Were 'Rewarded' With Life In The U.S.
Most of these diabolically skilled war criminals and perpetrators of crimes against humanity worked with Teutonic diligence to help the equally criminal One Percenters meld the glaring fascism of United States history with  the incipient fascism of its Ayn Rand socioeconomic ethos and the reanimated fascism of its puppets throughout  the Capitalist world into a genuinely global Fourth Reich,  precisely as the final orders of their various Third Reich Führers had commanded.  

Which is precisely why I can no longer doubt our species and our planet are doomed -- that our masters will never allow us to evolve the socialist solidarity essential for our salvation, that now only the profoundly unlikely intervention of some genuine miracle can save us. 

Nevertheless -- as I trust I made clear in the penultimate paragraph of the second section -- this is not  a farewell letter.

It is instead the announcement of a refocusing of intellect, creativity and effort -- given my age, undoubtedly my last such transformation ever -- in the hope of finding some noun other than "failure" to define the life my politically innocent high-school peers honored 61 years ago with a comically ironic superlative: "boy most likely to succeed." 

Quoth the I Ching:

Thus the Superior Man at nightfall
Goes indoors for rest and recreation.

LB/28 April 2019

-30-

 

 

An Indefinite Pause for Contemplation and Reconsideration

I HAVE BEEN researching, writing and editing Dispatches from Dystopia and its predecessor Outside Agitator's Notebook since the first week in October 2009.

But the only lesson I am able to glean from that 108-month effort is,  "why bother?"

I had hoped my work would be -- as it sometimes was during the 30 years I worked as an award-winning member of the editorial staffs of various newspapers and magazines and as a longtime stringer for United Press International -- a progressive influence.

But I was  never able to come up with a format  fetching enough to empower either of this blog's incarnations.

Readership, which peaked at about 3,500 maybe five years ago, fell off to near zero after old age began  sidelining me with various geriatric illnesses, and it has never exceeded more than about 1,600 readers since then.  

Indeed the only discernible consequence of my work as a blogger is various forms of harassment, whether by government agents and/or their storm-trooper allies or merely by the inescapable wretchedness that has defined my life since its beginning, I will probably never know.

Nor does it really matter.

Hence, in this the fourth week after my 79th birthday, I am stopping -- I know not for how long.  I am retaining the Dispatches domain name and of course intend to continue writing, but I am not sure when this new work might start appearing nor even whether it will be journalism or fiction. 

Meanwhile I thank you all for your readership; I am truly sorry I have not been able to serve you and our socialist cause more effectively.

LB/23 April 2019

-30-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As disclosed by the Church Committee:

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Quoth  the 1971 Powell Memo:

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

A detailed analysis of the memo is here. 

***

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

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

Why the Assange Arrest Should Scare Reporters

The Assange Arrest is a Warning From History

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

RSN: The Railroad That Awaits Julian Assange

The Martyrdom of Julian Assange

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

Assange's Arrest Erases What America Suppposedly Stood For

Assange’s Indictment Treats Journalism as a Crime

Worldwide outrage over arrest of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange

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

*****         

This Week's Most Damning Juxtapositions of Evidence
The socioeconomic and environmental Apocalypse is undeniably upon us. But the lies, deceptions and betrayals promulgated by the One Percenters and their minions no longer hide how -- in accordance with their shock-doctrine -- they are using the Apocalypse to impose the ultimate regime-change: the reordering of human society into Neoliberal utopia: Ayn Rand opulence for our masters, serfdom and slavery for the few 99 Percenters they allow to survive.

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

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

In which context we should consider the implications of

The return of the population bombers

Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability , .

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

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

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

***

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

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

This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out

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

For some river towns, flood protection is simply too costly

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

Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth

***

Imperial War-Mongering for God, Profit and Sadistic Delight

Another African Convicted In Another Racist, Chauvinist Western Court 

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

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

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

Reckoning With Failure In The War On Terror 

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

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

Venezuela Prepared To Defend The Revolution Against US Imperialism 

 

***

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

US Denies Entry To BDS Cofounder Omar Barghouti

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

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

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

Trump officials discussed using troops to run migrant detention camps

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

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

Trump Reportedly Pushed to Drop Asylum Seekers in Democratic Sanctuary Cities

Trump's Transgender Military Ban Takes Effect Today

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

Wealth, Stealth, and Boeing

US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums

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

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

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

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

Police tower casts a shadow over South Seattle Safeway

Monsters Inc: They Treated Us Like We Were Animals

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

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

Scapegoating Unions For The Postal Service's Phony Crisis

Obama Pushes Neoliberal Myths on Health Care at Fundraiser

Homeland Security Purge Ushers in the Stephen Miller Administration

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

Right wing takes Wisconsin court seat in a strident hate campaign

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

Obama, Pelosi push Democrats further to the right

 

***

Religion and Spirituality

Trump Administration Lets Foster Agency Turn Away Catholic and Jewish Parents

Trump and the Global Rise of the Christian Right

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

 

***

Racism

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

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

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

 

***

Media and Censorship

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

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

On False Dichotomies, Real and Fake, at MSDNC

If You Have Alexa, Amazon Is Listening

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

Missouri Bill Banning Anonymity of Atheist Plaintiffs in Lawsuits Passes House

 

***

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

Turkey's Only Communist Mayor Scores Another Election Victory

Freedom Rider: Scoundrels and Reparations

AMNH Under Fire for Hosting Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro

Medicaid Work Requirements: Do They Actually Help?

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

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

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

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

Progressives hit attempt by Democratic Party establishment to crush primary challengers

A Reckoning for Al Sharpton and the Black Misleadership Class

Runaway Inequality Is a National Emergency, Billionaire Banker Warns

Tell Netflix: Speak Up for Women 

***

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

LB/16 April 2019

-30-

 

SitRep #4: Revelations of Our Masters' Relentless Malevolence

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

***

Sampling the Indications, 25-31 March 2019

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

 

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

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

Freedom Rider: Julian Assange and Robert Mueller

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

 

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

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

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

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

The Coldest Spot on Earth, Melting

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

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

 

As the Owners of Their God Command

Brunei Brings in Death by Stoning as Punishment for Gay Sex

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Montana Senate Betrays Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

In Seattle, school segregation is actually getting worse

US detaining immigrants under highway overpass in Texas amid renewed crackdown

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

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

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

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

The Real College Admissions Scandal

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

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

Even for the West Bank, This Is a Shocking Story

 

Betting on the Bomb whilst Diddling with Its Thermonuclear Trigger

Xi Jinping tours Europe amid growing divisions between America and EU

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

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

Israel's Influence In Washington – 2019 Edition

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

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

Trump Admin Gives OK to Sell Nuclear Tech to Saudis

 

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

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

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

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

Russiagate and the 1980s Crack Epidemic

The Growing Threat of Online-Bred Right-Wing Extremist

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

The Real Working Class Is Invisible to the Media

Republican Party Says It Will Personally Target Reporters Critical of Trump

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

 

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

After fascist afttack, New Zealand government enacts gun control measures

A Closer Look at New Zealand’s Recent Gun Ban

 

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

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

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

Building Movements Through a Black, Queer, Feminist Lens

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

 

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

LB/31 March 2019

-30-

 

 

 

Neoliberalism Kills the Planet to Kill the 99 Percent: SitRep #3

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

***

A Sampling of Indications,  21-25 March 2019:
More glimpses at the infinity of evidence the One Percent is weaponizing the climate crisis, a notion hitherto so taboo only one other English-language writer has dared even suggest it.

The Future of Climate Authoritarianism Is Now
Bad head: the report describes how ruinously the apocalypse has already permanently changed our world.

Farmers In Midwest Face Decades Of Recovery As Flooding Strips Away Crucial Soil

Major Oil & Gas Companies Spent $1 Billion Since 2015 Blocking Climate Action

Foreign-Owned Corporations Funnel Millions Into US Elections

The DCCC Sure as Hell Isn't Going to Let Another AOC Win
They already know most 99 Percenters are too ignorant -- or too cowardly -- to organize our  own party.

French Army Receives Authorization to Shoot “Yellow Vest” Protesters
Exactly as in Karl Marx's time, this is how the Ruling Class responds to Working Class grievance.

Dirty Water 20 Times Deadlier Than Bullets to Children in Conflict Zones
Badly written head edited to eliminate misplaced modifier while preserving its message.

White Nationalism’s Most Powerful Accelerant
How Electronic Media serves the One Percent by fulfilling the evil implicit in the computer's origin. See also here and  here  for why cell phones -- so perfect for metastasizing hate -- can never foment genuine revolution.

Why Far-Right Attackers Aren't Charged as Domestic Terrorists
Obviously because they're among the One Percenters'  favorite enforcers.

The Washington Post's Disgraceful Coverage of Medicare-for-All
One of the innumerable examples of why anyone who believes Medicare for All can ever be achieved by anything short of  revolution is a deluded ignoramus still imprisoned by the Big Lie of "American Democracy," our species' ultimate  (and most likely terminal) act of self-deception.  

16 Years Later, How the Press That Sold the Iraq War Got Away With It

Seasonal Complaint: 'Missionaries Are on Our Reservation!'
As always, the post-Theodosian Christians serve their One Percent masters and fulfill their Abrahamic legacy by waging permanent, often genocidal war on Earth-centered wisdom.

Appeals Court Hears Texas Case Challenging Indian Child Welfare Act
Possible good news the ChristoNazis' Robber Court will undoubtedly turn to bad news, another lesson in the necessity of revolution.

US and Israeli Police Are Sharing Violent and Repressive Tactics
In Gaza as in the United States.

Why Is Breast Cancer More Lethal For Black Women?
There's no better place to hide biological warfare than within an epidemic.

The FBI Is the Enemy of the Left
Pivotal truth the Democratic (sic) Party would have us forget.

America Is Exceptional—in All the Wrong Ways

Rep. Steve King Belittles Hurricane Katrina Victims for Needing Help

The Coddling of the American Mind
How Moron Nation serves our masters by diving ever deeper into maximum ignorance.

How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth
Why the environmental and economic crises will never be solved by anything short of global revolution. See also here, how the One Percenters and their vassals intend to survive in their accustomed luxury even as they murder us by genocidal impoverishment. Again the prophetic relevance of homeless camps and why instead of demonizing homeless people, we should honor them as involuntary prophets.

 

*****

Random Notes on This the Darkest Epoch in Our Species' History

Social Media Is Not the Panacea It Seems: a Brief Analysis

I KNOW WE ARE ALL infinitely weary of reading the horror stories that by necessity are the near totality of this worst-of-all-human-era's (Real) News.

Verily -- apart from the meticulously contrived or censored content regurgitated by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM, the world's first private, for-profit Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) -- present-day Real News is indeed an endless litany of wretchedness, a fast-track to hopelessness and seemingly inescapable despair.

I have been alive since the spring of 1940 and a working journalist since the winter of 1956, and never have I seen worse. Nor can I doubt the grief, fear and sometimes literal nausea evoked by current events is the ultimate reason for the decline of print and broadcast journalism and for the already pandemic growth of so-called “social media.”

Fools that we are, we never question why our One Percent masters -- even as they escalate their war on alternative media -- would provide us such a wondrous-seeming gift for interpersonal communication. We forget that function precedes form – and that social media's seductiveness was meticulously focus-group-refined for years before its public introduction. Now we willfully imprison ourselves in its rat-lab regimen of total surveillance, encouraging one another in the decidedly Ayn Randish self-obsession that shapes all social-media content save for that most minuscule fraction born of resistance and rebellion.

Once again, precisely as Marshall McLuhan tried to tell us, the medium itself is a key part of the message: how else are we to distract ourselves from the skyrocketing probability we have doomed ourselves to extinction? How else are we seduced to share our every thought and whim with the Gestapo-minded secret police our masters long ago realized are essential to the maintenance of Capitalist hegemony?

Lev Bronstein's 1905 dictum that in every gathering of three revolutionaries there is at least one agent of the Okhrana is thus diabolically expanded to secret-police listening devices not just in every revolutionary's purse or pocket but positioned to spy on every living human. Our overlords are ecstatic -- especially since repeat disclosures of the cell-phone's function as a weapon of total surveillance does nothing to diminish its skyrocketing popularity amongst our species' moronic majority.

And again, precisely as Audrey Lorde strove so desperately to warn us with what is also the one irrefutable argument for political nonviolence, “The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” See for example “Why Social Media Can’t Start Great Revolutions “ and “How Social Media Can Weaken a Revolution.” How else -- save by the now emphatically unfashionable reliance on torture chambers, death camps and mass murder -- might our overlords secure from us the voluntary cooperation that guarantees our perpetual defeat?

*****

Miscellany: Reportorial Reflections That Would Have Gotten Me Fired -- Or Worse

OBVIOUSLY the One Percenters' are now doing to our Mother Earth what they did to Ben Tre, the Vietnamese city the Empire's soldiers claimed they had to destroy (to save it from the Viet Cong). Now their mantra is “we have to destroy the planet to save it.” Thus the “one nation under God” enforces its ultimate mandate: “better dead than Red.”

*****

THE ONLY great and self-defeating contradiction in Marxism lies in the tragic fact all its major texts are written by academics whom -- in the definitive style of seemingly all post-Greco/Roman pedagogy -- write in language so impenetrably turgid it is tantamount to code, which renders it inaccessible to those vast numbers of proletarians, self included, who need its enlightenment the most. I wonder: is this not a perfect way to perpetuate hierarchy? Does it not immediately divide presumptive classlessness into dominate and subordinate classes? (An aside as I struggle through Marx's Ecology (John Bellamy Foster; Monthly Review Press: 2000.)

*****

ANOTHER OF our great follies is the arrogant belief we the people of today are vastly more intelligent than our ancestors. Thus we perpetually dismiss the literature of bygone ages as naught but ignorant speculation, folk tales and outright lies. Thus too -- even as I applaud the discovery that prompted this remark -- I  sadly wonder how many more times must such bigotry be proven wrong before it changes to acceptance?

          *****          

WHEN ZEALOUS ideologues denounce me because there is no academic philosophy on my transcript, I politely explain that since my introduction to science I have always regarded academic philosophy as nothing more than the modern extension of the medieval schoolmens' practice of debating how many angels might rest upon the head of a pin.

*****

THE ONLY way we'll end school shootings is by ending the Neoliberal tyranny that not only foments it but uses it as one of its innumerable mechanisms of social control and slow-motion genocide. Let us therefore never forget the forcible civilian disarmament movement by which so many of us are dutifully serving our overlords' intent to reduce us to mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood is a classic shock-doctrine operation. Hence it cannot be said too often: the only  way we'll end the causative alienation and hatred that has become the defining characteristic of Capitalist society is by giving everyone an equal stake in life. The only way we'll ever do that -- EVER -- is by socialist revolution.

LB/25 March 2019

-30-

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our masters have been quietly smuggling their traveling holocaust of horrors home, one private jetload at a time, since 22 November 1963.³  But now the triumph of the genuinely Nazified Donald Trump and his burn-all-witches running-mate Michael Pence has blown the One Percenters' cover and revealed -- over an entirely bogus storm of objections --  the hideous truth of what actually obtains in this "one nation under (their  sadistic) God."     

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obviously I would choose the latter were I able. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****          

(I). Our Mother Earth as an Abused Woman

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

In the Deepest Ocean Trenches, Animals Eat Plastic

Iconic Forests Reaching Climate Tipping Points in American West

Nothing resolved as Flint water crisis nears fifth anniversary

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

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

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

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

Flint water crisis claims its youngest Legionnaires’ victim to date

Measles outbreak in Ukraine claims eight lives

Popular Brands Of Beer And Wine Found To Contain Glyphosate Weedkiller

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

Game Over? Report Card on Our Planet’s Environment

 

(II). Dithering as Denial

The Environmental Implications Of A Trump Presidency

Dianne Feinstein Says No to the Green New Deal

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

Top Democrats Are Enabling Climate Catastrophe

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

Democrats Wasting Time While Our Climate Burns

 

(III). The Apocalypse Is Already Upon Us 

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

American Exceptionalism: The Naked Truth

The New York Times Won't Stop Pushing Crank Economics

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

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

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

Democrats Not Backing Medicare For All

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

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

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

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

The Most Harrowing Revelation of the Cohen Hearing

Corporate and “Progressive” Democrats Threaten Medicare Itself

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

Joe Biden Has a History of Racist Comments

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

Immigrants endure inhuman conditions at ICE prison in New Jersey

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

Torture Fans and War Criminals Determine US Foreign Policy

Pelosi dismisses efforts to impeach President Trump

Free dental clinic draws hundreds in Nashville, Tennessee

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

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

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

Nearly 200 Immigrants in Texas Detention Facilities Have Mumps

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

Pity the Nation: War Spending Is Bankrupting America

No charges for Sacramento police officers who murdered Stephon Clark

Fascism by Another Name

The Global Assault on Indigenous Peoples

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephon Clark Killed Twice by U.S. imperialism

President’s Budget Targets Key Health Care Programs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientist Who Resisted Censorship of Climate Report Lost Her Job

The criminalization of environmental protest in Trump’s America

 

(IV). Their God Demands They Rape Our Mother⁵

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

Giving The Bomb To Saudi Arabia's Dr. Strangelove

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

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

Southern Baptist Convention Grapples With Sexual Abuse Report

Cuba's Evangelical Alliance Leads Crusade Against Gay Marriage

With Trump, White Protestantism Hits Rock Bottom

United Methodists Fracture: LGBT Plan Rejected - The Atlantic

The Cult of the Good Christian Woman

Anti-Vaxx Mobs: Doctors Face Harassment Campaigns on Facebook

Revealed: AmazonSmile Helps Fund Anti-Vaccine Groups

Abortion Restrictions Sweep Through GOP-Held Legislatures

Saudi Women Activists Stand Trial in Criminal Court

Trump Administration Rolls Out Implementation Plan for Transgender Military Ban

The Kansas Bomb Plot: What Has the Media Missed?

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

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

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

The shadowy network shaping Trump’s anti-immigration policies

The EPA and Evangelical (Anti)Environmentalism

Trump: The most anti-science president ever?

 

(V). A Few Vernal Sprouts of Wishful Thinking

Climate Change Could End Washington’s Global Dominion

FOCUS: A Future Without Fossil Fuels?

How long can we keep dodging nuclear war? 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Rethink Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse

Researchers: Violence, War And Climate Change Are Linked

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

It’s the Green New Deal or Else

Extinction Rebellion: “Green” capitalism versus world socialism

The Youth Climate Strike and the fight against global warming

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

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

 

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

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

How Republicans came to embrace anti-environmentalism

Joining the dots: women, environmentalism and neoliberalism

What is Neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism's Dark Path to Fascism

How Neoliberalism Is Normalising Hostility

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

Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals

Neoliberalism is to blame for stalled climate action

The Secret Threat That Makes Corporations More Powerful Than Countries

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

Our Mania For Hope Is A Curse

In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves to Grieve

 

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

How to Spin Wool (with Pictures)

Enjoying Horseback Archery Adventures of the Year 2017

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

Finding Freedom in a Frontier Life 

Making a Blacksmith Shop with No Power Tools

Western Science Is Finally Catching Up To Traditional Knowledge

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/25 February-15 March 2019

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Truly Our Last Chance to Prove Ourselves Worthy of Survival

Climate Change Reveals the Patriarchal Gods as the Deadliest of Demons; the 1% Perpetuates the Crisis to Impose Shock-Doctrine Tyranny; Our Mother Earth Issues Her Ultimate Challenge

Apocalyptic Wonderland: late February in Tacoma. Photograph and posterization by Loren Bliss © 2019.

*

TO (MOMENTARILY) DUCK the shrapnel already ensuing from the issues implicit in the above typography, I feel obligated as a writer and editor to explain (or perhaps confess) that this is the first time I have ever written the headline before I knew exactly what the story might say. Magic? No, nothing so exotic; merely an exceptionally telling encounter with journalistic intuition -- precisely the kind of power-to-envision-outcomes that in darker times was damned as witchcraft and all-too-often got you burned at the stake.

Apropos which, the story I seined up after I wrote the head is now no doubt predictable: the ecocidal misogyny at the doctrinal core of Abrahamic religion and thus manifest in all societies so influenced or founded; how its adherents' belief in "End-Times" salvation obstructs even minimal environmental protections; how reading Chris Hedges' American Fascists (Free Press: 2006) and Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy (Viking: 2006) and most of all Jeff Sharlet's The Family (Harper: 2008), which by its subtitle tells the sordid understory of our national paralysis today: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. 

But presumably we -- the collective we of readership -- already know all that; and in any case,  does  repetitive disclosure of the same painful truth not eventually become a form of bludgeoning?  

As for the unapologetic paganism my headline acknowledges, those metaphors for our cosmos and our solar system and our planet and our place upon it and within its warp and weft are derived from visions at least as old as our species itself, so I most certainly cannot be blamed for citing their 200-thousand-year integrity. 

Though I would most assuredly be derelict in duty were I not to point out how the breathtaking magnitude of  such a vast expanse of time becomes mother macrocosm to microcosms of human consciousness and thence to visual representation. Picture a tranquil sea invaded by a contagion of predators;  picture a Mother Earth that even during her periodic storms and quakes and eruptions was embraced as the proper head of the household suddenly and now terminally invaded by a relentlessly militant hate-the-planet cult.

An alien species?

(Now that I am old and no longer have a career to protect I can ask such forbidden questions aloud.) 

A mutation?

Might then the introduction of patriarchy -- which is prerequisite to Earth-hating -- be an earlier, much more ambitious application of the same tactic employed in gifting First Nations peoples with smallpox-infested blankets? Or invading their lands with missionaries bearing bibles and touting paths to salvation by self-destruction? 

Preparing to transfer all I had written in response to letters of the Roman alphabet behaving as if they were runes, I began one last quick entirely routine pre-posting perusal of favored websites. That's  how I came  upon "Diane Feinstein Says No to the Green New Deal" -- an infinitely damning report that epitomizes our circumstances as well as any of the 61 bookmarks from which I chose the eight definitive reports linked below. 

Thus in response I posted the following:

If one studies Feinstein's record -- studies it analytically, as a (real/uncensored) investigative reporter might – it becomes obvious her one true cause is forcible civilian disarmament.

Though Feinstein's purposes are typically concealed by her deft manipulations of Democratic (sic) Party rhetoric, it's clear she is intent on ensuring our terminal defenselessness in the face of ever-escalating violence by the ChristoNazis and their allies. She is thereby aiding and abetting the Nazi takeover of the United States even as we the people she claims to represent increasingly embrace socialism as the only alternative to extinction.

Obviously Feinstein hopes her allies in the mainstream media will minimize disclosure of the near-100-percent alliance between the law enforcement and military machines and the Nazis themselves, particularly their burgeoning neo-Sturmabteilung units.

Which means that even as the cops, the secret police and the soldiers are making sure the Nazis are allowed to keep their firearms, Feinstein and her fellow Democrats are devoting maximum energy to reducing all the rest of us to mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood.

(Exactly as if she were a willing agent of some Ruling Class plot to use the looming environmental apocalypse to facilitate the ultimate shock-doctrine reconstruction of human society into a global concentration camp.)

Which led me to a couple of other realizations: that if, precisely as Hitler's Germany proved it to be, so-called "national socialism" is socialism only for the Ruling Class, the One Percent, and fuck-off-and-die abandonment (or extermination) for all the rest of us, then what we have in the United States is indeed not only socialism for the rich, it is indeed "national socialism" precisely as envisioned by der Führer himself.

Neoliberalism as national socialism. Or vice-versa. Hmm; explains a lot.

Which in turn inevitably brings me back to the Occam's-Razor answer to what has become the pivotal question of our species' existence: why is the global One Percent doing everything in its virtually godlike power to  retard and obstruct even the most mildly ameliorative anti-ecocide measures?

Obviously: they intend to continue using the entire crisis just as they are already using it now: as I said, to reconstruct human society into a perfect replica of their mentor's vision: that is, a concentration camp, with themselves in command and all the rest of us damned to unimaginable wretchedness.

*****                    

The Eight Promised Links:

'Terrifying': Rapid Loss of Biodiversity Placing Global Food Supplies at Risk of 'Irreversible Collapse'

Trump EPA OKs 'Emergency' to Dump Bee-Killing Pesticide on 16 Million Acres

What You Need to Know About Trump’s Attacks on the Federal Family Planning Program

Groundwater Contamination Devastates a New Mexico Dairy - and Threatens Public Health

Rare L.A. Mega-Storm Could Overwhelm Dam and Flood Dozens of Cities, Experts Say

Scientist Who Resisted Censorship of Climate Report Lost Her Job

Insisting on Resistance in an Age of Ignorance

Its Too Late. You've Lost Your Guns.

*****               

ANOTHER RECENT OFF-DISPATCHES post of mine is also relevant to the whys and wherefores of the environmental apocalypse: 

As far as I am concerned, what killed (Carbon Tax Initiative) I-1631 is Washington state's policy as defined by the fact it has the most viciously regressive tax structure in the nation (and probably in the world) combined with the nation's largest state-tax exemptions for Big Business.

Given this history, many decidedly pro-environment voters recognized the 99.9 percent probability our Neoliiberal, Capitalist-owned state government would do as it always does, scheme some sneaky way to exempt the Ruling Class from any I-1631 taxes and -- as with every other taxation measure in the state's history -- vindictively ensure the I-1631 burden was borne exclusively by those of us who can least afford it.

I did not vote against I-1631 -- I will not vote against any rational environmental-protection measure -- but I did not vote for it either. I simply did not vote on the I-1631 question at all. Why? Because having witnessed time and again the state's policy of deliberately burdening the lowest income people with the greatest percentage of the costs of governance, I saw no reason to allow the state to do what I cannot doubt it would have done: weaponize I-1631 as yet another tool for socioeconomic cleansing.

If Washington state wants voter approval of a carbon tax, it should first`impose fairness on the most deliberately unfair state tax system in U.S. history.

Let the demand for tax fairness -- that is, to tax the rich to recover at least some of what they have stolen from the rest of us -- be everywhere fulfilled. 

LB/24 February 2019

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Censorship by Facebook Forces Yet Another Format Change

PERVERSELY CURIOUS AS to how long Facebook's overtly Neoliberal, incipiently ChristoNazi censors might allow it to remain up, I posted the following to the Tacoma Communist Labor Party's FB site a few minutes ago:

THE END: Facebook's censors locked me out of this page for the past five days, thereby destroying the day-to-day connection and relationship between FB and my blog, Dispatches from Dystopia. Obviously I can no longer trust FB to carry any genuinely relevant news; the first report it suppressed last Wednesday (30 January 2019) was "If the Supreme Court Doesn't Stay a Louisiana Law Next Week, Roe v. Way Will Be All but Dead," and though FB censors finally allowed the story to appear a few moments ago, its old-news tardiness has reduced it to nothing more than a historical footnote. Because this is not the first time my reportorial efforts have been undone by FB censorship -- see today's Dispatches for details -- I will no longer attempt to post  on any FB site and am re-formatting Dispatches accordingly. My apology to those who may thusly be inconvenienced. 

Obviously FB's censors and their robotic slaves (whether human or electronic) have figured out "Loren Tacoma" is the Loren Bliss they permanently banished in 2010 for daring to suggest the so-called "Great Recession" was deliberately inflicted as a means of expediting Neoliberal/ChristoNazi destruction of governmental social services and indeed all other governmental services that do not serve our Capitalist overlords specifically as armies of conquest, death squads, domestic stormtroopers, secret police and any other tyranny or apocalypse-facilitating functions.  Not only was that 2010 post disappeared literally within minutes of its posting; FB also severed (and obstructed forever) the permalink between itself and my blog -- a definitively hostile act Typepad technical experts said they had never before encountered. Hence eight years later, when -- at the insistence of my CLP comrades -- I resumed my relationship with FB, it was of course not as Loren Bliss but as "Loren Tacoma." 

Vital reports from last week's alternative Internet news sources obstructed by this episode of FB censorship include the following:

European Colonizers' Genocide of 56 Million Native Americans So Devastating "It Literally Cooled the Planet"

The United States Is the Most Corrupt Country in the World

The U.S. is a Political Prison, Kamala Harris is a Prison Guard

Anthropologist Debunks Bill Gates' BS Narrative That Free-Market Capitalism Has Solved Crisis of Global Poverty

Joshua Tree National Park May Take 300 Years to Recover' From Shutdown
Without zero-tolerance policing by park rangers, nature-hating vandals ran amok.

Trump Supports “Bible Literacy” Classes in Public Schools

Here's How the Saudi Press Has Been Smearing the Teen Who Fled Her Family Abrahamic religion – in this instance Islam – in typically misogynistic action.

Revealed: FBI Investigated Civil Rights Group as 'Terrorism' Threat and Viewed KKK as Victims Yet most of Moron Nation still refuses to believe U.S. law enforcement – local cops and feds alike – is Nazified from top to bottom.

Measles Outbreak Sparks Concerns Over Anti-Vaccination Movement
Another of the innumerable ways Abrahamic religion – in this instance Christianity – works to bring on the apocalypse.

Democrats Killed the Green New Deal
And so collaborated with their more overtly ChristoNazi Congressional colleagues to ensure the extinction of our species and the reduction of our Mother Earth to a bug planet. 

(Heads from original texts are in boldface; my comments are in lightface italic.)

Obviously I knew FB's censors would eventually see through the "Loren Tacoma" deception, so I am not at all surprised by what obtained. Moreover because of my old age and the sort of traditional liberal-arts education we USians are now forever forbidden, I am wise enough and knowledgeable enough to resist the must-use brainwashing by which younger USians have been conditioned to believe they cannot survive without 100 percent dependence on electronic media -- a system that was from its earliest conceptual moments intended to function as the most effective surveillance apparatus our species has yet developed. Indeed I cheer the Russian countermeasures -- reversion to typewriters, mimeograph machines and non-electronic transmission -- as the only truly effective defense against the 100-percent surveillance to which all social-media users must submissively surrender each time we turn on a cellphone or a computer. 

As a result, it's back to the drawing board for Dispatches. Don't know when I will resume regular posting, but it will be as soon as possible, so  please stay tuned.

Meanwhile  a slightly belated Joyous Imbolg with an evocative blessing for us all and a heartfelt thank-you for your faithful readership. 

LB/3 February 2019.  

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