Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

Lerro on the Need for Ritual: a Pivotal Work, Dare We Heed It

FAR MORE SUCCINCTLY than I have ever seen it explained elsewhere¹, Bruce Lerro has described in an exceptionally thought-provoking, unusually well-crafted² essay just how it is we might recapture and wield -- this time for the preservation of our species and the protection of our Mother Earth -- the psychologically transformative  power inherent in ritual. 

His point is that if we are to transcend our self-inflicted apocalypse, we must rediscover and reclaim that power for ourselves, thus giving ourselves psychological-warfare weaponry at least as potent as the psywar weapons our enemies now routinely wield against us. 

The piece in question is entitled "The Power of Magick: Why Materialists, Atheists and Marxists Need It." It was originally published Thursday (28 January 2021) on Mr. Lerro's website, Beyond Capitalism, then republished Sunday (31 January) by LA Progressive here, which is where I first read it.

I am embarrassed to say I had not explored Beyond Capitalism until now.

While the title of Mr. Lerro's  newest essay  is self-explanatory, the text also clearly describes -- in patently secular terms -- how and why what he labels "magick" actually works, its real-world psycho-dynamics perhaps best summarized in what seems to me his most telling paragraph:

"Magick is the art and science of altering states of consciousness at will through the use of imagination, the senses, the emotions through the arts. The techniques can be used for good or for bad purposes. The entire field of advertising is an industry in the use of black magick. Often the association with changing states of consciousness is that it is some kind of secular, recreational escape from reality. Of course, some of that is true, but my reasons for arguing for altered states of consciousness are dead serious. People alter their states of consciousness primarily for social and personal needs, not just for fun." (Italics as in original; boldface added for emphasis.)

Thus I cite Mr. Lerro's essay here both for its thought-provoking nature and for the vital support it provides those of us who clamor for broadening the accessibility of Marxian source-documents as well as techniques of socialist propagation and consciousness-raising in general, all of which suffer  unprecedented obscurity thanks to deliberately paralytic isolation in the academic prisons maintained by Neoliberal fundamentalism.

__________________
¹My arson-doomed "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" addressed this topic at length, mostly with examples from  the re-popularization of  traditional balladry c. 1930s-1950s.. The backbone of my entire manuscript, these examples  illustrated  how the behavioral dynamic Bruce Lerro defines as "magick" was evident in the Folk Renaissance, which boosted a long-simmering, profoundly iconoclastic but hitherto relatively obscure art movement into unprecedented popularity and so birthed the 1960s Counterculture.  Despite its seemingly irremediable  political, racial and socioeconomic divisions, the Counterculture was potentially unified by a unique aesthetic solidarity -- the mostly  unexplored  bond evident in the music and art shared by feminists, environmentalists, back-to-the-landers, anti-war activists and urban communards alike. (Its unity was momentarily evident even amongst the hopelessly Ayn Randified legions of bourgeois faddists who later became the postwar generation's New-Deal-destroying Moronic Majority -- i.e.,  the  class-and/or-race-privileged moral imbeciles whose craven embrace of the Neoliberal brand of Nazism now gets them rightfully damned as "Boomers," a subconsciously apt pejorative implicitly expressing the thermonuclear-caliber devastation inflicted on human society by their self-obsessed submissiveness.).  Indeed it was probably my photographically illustrated examples of the Counterculture's potentially revolutionary aesthetic  solidarity that provoked the destruction of "Dancer" and all the rest of my life's work, the main thrust of which was to resurrect the Counterculture from  the conceptual tomb in which our Oppressors hope to bury forever its significance as the first undeniably popular wave of consciously anti-apocalyptic (and therefore implicitly anti-patriarchal) revolution.  Even so, Mr. Lerro has stated in a relatively few paragraphs what over 24 years (1959-1983)  I wrote and discarded probably a half-dozen 150,000-word drafts to explain, with my extensively footnoted analyses derived mostly from Jungian sources and the works of Marshall McLuhan. Thus I cannot but hail the succinctness of Mr. Lerro's thinking, particularly in transforming the illusive notion of "sacred mysteries" into operational examples of secular psycho-dynamics. Obviously, both of us reason from mutual  recognition of paganism as perhaps our most effective tool for rediscovery and recovery of the self-empowerment prerequisite to community empowerment. In this context, Colin Wilson's disclosure in The Occult (Random House: 1971) -- that British Intelligence contacted the  Britannic witch covens and asked then to hex Hitler and especially his Luftwaffe  -- becomes a telling revelation of Ruling Class comprehension of magick's reality and power. 

²The only truly glaring error I as a member of the working press  -- a former editor-in-chief whose 30-year newspaper and magazine career climbed the proverbial ladder from copyboy to reporter/photographer and thence thru sports, city, news and picture editorships --  have found in Mr. Lerro's "The Power of Magick" is in the section entitled "The Catholic Church as closeted black magickians."The mistake is not in Mr. Lerro's conclusions, which I know from my own parochial school years to be true, but in his faulty grammar: he wrote, "When I was a boy my grandmother would go with my parents and I," demonstrating the ever-more-commonplace confusion of  the nominative (subjective) case with the objective case. It is an error  for which the blame goes neither to the writer  nor to the editor who failed to snag this particular foul ball, but (as with so much else that afflicts us), to the Oppressors who are methodically dumbing us down to functional illiteracy as part of their much broader psychological-warfare effort to render us unable to even conceptualize liberation.  For the multitudes who've been denied proper education in English grammar -- that is,  in the vital physics and chemistry of our language -- the proper form is "with my parents and me"; "I" is the subjective personal pronoun, in other words the actor; "me" is its objective form, here specifically among the objects of the preposition "with" and therefore denoting that which is acted upon. To observe the increasing frequency of such vexatious errors invariably saddens me,  particularly since  they cannot bur distract from both the credibility and the long-term accessibility of the texts in question.

LB/31 January-1 February 2021.

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SitRep: Biden/Harris? Just More "Change We Can Believe In"

MY APOLOGY FOR Dispatches' long silence.

Convinced there is no way to defeat our Neoliberal (Neonazi) Masters save by doing whataver may be necessary to survive their ongoing campaigns of exterminate-the-Working-Class ecogenocide -- the murderously weaponized profiteering by which they are replacing us with slaves and robots -- I have been trying since last November to find some new pathway for this blog. At that I may have succeeded; my new approach might be termed "speculative futurism" -- that is, if by some miracle we have any future at all. But its launch -- at present a collection of handwritten notes that fill two legal pads -- has been repeatedly delayed by the need to complete several more mundane projects I trust will be infinitely more useful to those who inherit my few possessions.

And now our relentlessly Neoliberal (Neonazi) politics, in the form of six exceptionally disturbing reports in the daily horror show of local, state, federal and global news, has added its own depressing taint: 

The Republican Party has Turned Fascist and is Now the Most Dangerous Threat in the World
So triumphs the (mostly clandestine) termination of USian democratic process our Masters began with the Wall Street Bankers' (quickly forgiven and forgotten) Plot c. 1929-1934 to turn the U.S. into an ally -- and more likely a colony -- of Nazi Germany.  

Supreme Court Rules Against Union Recruiting on California Farms
This completes the methodical murder of the USian labor movement begun by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1974.

With support of Biden, federal court backs Trump’s police-state assault on peaceful protests in Lafayette Square
A horror story accurately summarized by its headline.

Time to Say "You're Fired" to Merrick Garland?
See obvious reasons above.

Military Document Puts (All) Socialists in League With Neo-Nazis
In other words, any form of socialist organizing is to be made illegal.

Appearance Versus Essence: Biden is Stabilizing, Not Ending, Neoliberalism
As predicted, the "Democratic" (sic) Party is again functioning as the Republican Fifth Column.

Indeed the news has become so incessantly horrific, I -- a near-lifelong journalist -- radically reduced my reading of it after by some miracle (thank you Goddess!) we managed to get the Hitler-wannabe Trump and the WitchFinder-General-wannabe Pence at least temporarily out of the federal executive branch.

But since that deceptive "victory," it has become painfully obvious nothing of substance will change under the new regime -- that in hideous truth the only "change we can believe in" (exactly as under Barack the Betrayer) -- is that our Masters will continue to worsen our lives. 

And now we know the Democrats will do as they did before 2018 -- that is, everything possible to ensure the overt Nazis take full power in 2024.

*****

BECAUSE I AM fervently committed to de-politicizing Dispatches, I am also publishing here today a commentary from earlier this month, originally intended as the beginning of a preface to an introduction of the new Dispatches, but now revised for presentation here as what I hope will by my last purely political commentary ever. For when truth is shrunken to pearls before swine, when our Masters' Moronic Majority has been permanently conditioned to such moral imbecility it reflexively applauds atrocities as victories, then journalism is reduced to utter pointlessness, to naught but (another) exercise in skull-versus-boulder futility.  

Initially what I wrote was in favorable response to "A Kinder, Gentler US Empire Is Not Possible"; I sought to employ this exceptionally thought-provoking column by Caitlin Johnstone as the peg upon which to hang my withdrawal from political journalism. 

While I wholeheartedly agree with Ms. Johnstone’s hypothesis and salute her courage for daring express it,  I soon realized I must also respectfully suggest she has not taken it to it’s ultimately unavoidable conclusion, to wit: whether our Neoliberal (Neonazi) Masters have revealed themselves to be the sadistic moral imbeciles they truly are or remain closeted as Democrats and other pseudo-humanitarians, the ultimate lesson of human history is that all genuinely progressive movements -- that is, any truly humanitarian movement -- will be methodically destroyed at birth or as soon as possible afterward.

Note I am 81 years old, a near-lifelong Marxian formerly self-disguised by sometimes award-winning journalistic necessity, first as a "liberal Democrat" (until arson, almost certainly by federal agents, destroyed all my life's work in 1983); next as a "democratic socialist" (until the forcible retirement imposed by the ecogenocidal profiteering of '08-'09 cost me everything save a miserly Social Security pension and damned me to ever-deadlier poverty).  I am also a seasoned veteran of defeat: the (failed) post-Sputnik campaign to make USian K-12 brainwashing more like Euro/Soviet education and thus far less hostile to science, mathematics, the humanities and original thinking in general; the (failed) Civil Rights Movement; the (failed) Anti-Southeast Asian War Movement, which despite its innumerable lies to the contrary was pathetically immaterial to Vietnamese victory, won solely by the infinite courage of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese People's Liberation Army;  the (failed) Back-to-the-Land Movement; the (failed) Alternative Press Movement; and the (repeatedly failed) Labor Movement.

Though I voted for Obama twice -- votes I considered meaningless apart from their function in preserving the franchise -- by  2011 I had dubbed him "Barack the Betrayer" and had recognized his “change we can believe in” as the greatest Big Lie of political betrayal in USian presidential history; during that same period of enlightenment I was repeatedly booted in the metaphorical gonads by the irrefutable and therefore terrifying technological truth our ever-worsening circumstances are now so universal they have become inescapable save by death -- precisely as our Masters intend.

Thus, recognizing I truly had nothing left to lose, I joined the earliest Tacoma-activist ranks of the (failed) Occupy uprising, at the same time publicly acknowledging the Communist-at-heart I had secretly been at least since the murderous aftermath of the coup of 22 November 1963 proved to me our species' one and only genuinely humanitarian alternative was a definitively transitional Dictatorship by the Proletariat -- a true reformation now rendered forever impossible by the defeat of the Soviet Union.  

I was also an early activist in the (failed) Tacoma $15 Now Movement, though worsening health forced me to drop out several months before its defeat by the already reliably subjugated voters.

Yet even then I moronically retained just a bit of hopefulness.

But now after living through the cunningly disguised but effectively genocidal Neoliberal weaponization of the first 18 or so months of the Covid-19 pandemic, I can no longer doubt all is lost, certainly for modern society. In which context the entire global space-race becomes nothing more than an all-time epic of colossal propaganda and obscenely costly psychological warfare intended to maintain the cult of compulsory optimism. How? By distracting us from the ever-more-undeniable reality of an apocalypse already well underway – and most likely fatal to our entire species.

Why – or perhaps how – have I at last achieved some semblance of intellectual realism?

More appropriately, what enabled me to escape what Chris Hedges aptly terms the "curse" of optimism?

I escaped because anyone who recognizes the terminal magnitude of patriarchal technology also understands there is no power on this planet capable of overcoming our Masters' wealth-sustained (and therefore eternally unbreakable) monopolies on the technologies of universal surveillance and thermonuclear terror.

In societal reaction to which – or so I strongly suspect – our burgeoning belief in “space aliens” is most likely nothing more than the military-technology-fostered 21st Century reinforcement of our self-destructive dependence on adult versions of the Santa-Claus myth, specifically the variously named patriarchal god of both the socioeconomically suicidal belief in the biological absurdity called “eternal life” and the maximized ecogenocidal malevolence of a misogyny that in its apocalyptic ejaculations of clitoris-envy damns all femaleness from our Mother Earth’s to that of our planet’s smallest distinctively gendered creatures.

It is a bit of an aside, but in psychological truth the Christmas Santa is our starter-god; he introduces us to the same terror that defines not only the globally dominant patriarchal god Yahweh/Jesu/Allah, but also all the planet’s governments assembled – whether knowingly or not – using the YJA biblical Erector-set: “he sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake; he knows if you’ve been bad or good; obey or burn at the stake.” In other words, it’s the same enslave-the-Working-Class scam whether invoked as Santa or Jesus or any other allegedly “divine” (and therefore “infallible”) would-be “savior.”

If space aliens exist, our own species' history should tell us they are undoubtedly here as conquerors – which perhaps in our species’ final moments will end forever the greatest deception of all human history, the ultimate Big Lie “the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.” To those of us who actually know history, the truth is of course the diametrical opposite: if there is any moral arc at all, what it bends toward is ever-more-technologically enhanced – and therefore ever more inescapable – ecogenocidal tyranny.

Proof? Look how our capitalist Masters warred against the Soviet Union until it was finally destroyed by the dark undertow of the very Russian history it had sought so fervently to transform. Yet even now 64 percent of the former Soviet population tells pollsters their lives were far better when they were governed by Marxism. Ditto for the former East Germans. (Note that Foreign Policy is a Ruling Class publication, hence -- because our Masters require accurate intelligence if they are to maintain their methods of oppression at peak efficiency -- it is allowed to be a  bit more truthful in its [still-obviously biased] reporting.)

In any case, what our Masters did to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its Warsaw Pact allies proves that if any genuine (i.e. truly ecohumanitarian) revolution were to occur anywhere, it will be crushed. Remember not just the murdered Karen Silkwood but the murdered Kennedy brothers and the government-murdered victims at Chicago (Fred Hampton and Mark Clark); at Kent State University (Allison Beth Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, William Knox Schroeder and let us not forget Dean Kahler, whose life was destroyed by the  permanent paralysis inflicted by a single round of .30-caliber M2 Ball through the spine); and at Jackson State College (Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green).

But those atrocities only hint at the horrors of our now inevitable future. For had the Soviet revolutionaries been long-term disciplined enough to perpetuate their ideology not only by successfully resisting invasion, infiltration and  disinformation, but by defeating co-optation and its backup SOPs (standing operating procedures) of arrest, torture, murder and political assassination of all true progressives -- our Masters’ new Final Solution was already in their arsenals. This is the Neutron Bomb, designed specifically to exterminate hostile or rebellious populations without damaging infrastructure (gold teeth included) or reducing its post-holocaust value as loot – ever the material wealth of capitalism and its euphemism-cloaked empires.

As to the too-rapidly mutating Covid-19, I must confess it increasingly seems to me its three most plausibly deniable alternatives are (1)--the Jackson Browne/Gaia Hypothesis alternative, the punitive anger of our Mother Earth, let us hope not (yet) in terminal fulfillment of JB’s ever-more-obviously prophetic vision of “the magnitude of her fury in the final hour”; (2)--the Biblical alternative, i.e., self-imposed apocalypse by deliberate or (allegedly) accidental release and/or by any and all of the (other) diabolical forms divinely imaginable; or (3)--the space-alien bio-weapon hypothesis many humans sense but too few of us dare speak aloud, certainly not as fact but just as certainly, given UFOs, as another intuitively obvious possibility we must therefore publicly consider.

Whatever obtains, it is scarcely more than a distraction now that our downward momentum has become irreversible. Whether in service to their own moral imbecility, as puppets of extraterrestrial conquerors or in some unspeakably repugnant combination of both evils, our Neoliberal Masters have already created the intentionally addictive technologies of tyranny that doom us all, exactly as prophesied by the darkest science fiction. Worse, they have weaponized their technology into the instrument of our ultimate self-betrayal, the now-inescapable shackles of limitless surveillance falsely peddled and gullibly embraced as a technology of human bonding. With the flawed but nevertheless Working-Class-exemplary Soviet Union gone forever and China permanently reduced to a slave-state capitalism indistinguishable in its ecogenocidal sadism from that of the avowed Neoliberalism that rules the rest of this planet, I cannot doubt all is truly lost.

Yet resistance remains vital to ourselves and to our offspring and to theirs and thus to the sustenance of human spirit, yes even and most especially now when any hope for betterment or promise of rescue is banished by our ever-more-obvious subjugation, and the sci-fi prophecy of "resistance is futile” has in fearsome fact become the one pivotal truth of all our lives -- which means survival itself may soon be our sole remaining possibility for revolutionary defiance.

LB/14-23 June 2021

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Backstabber Biden Denying At Least 30 Million Desperately Poor Pensioners Our Promised $1400 Stipends, Confirming Democrats' Continued Function as Republican Fifth Column

In Yet Another Epic Betrayal, Forcible-Disarmament-Fanatic Joe Has Sneakily Renewed His Opposition to Legalized Marijuana -- Probably to Radically Intensify Prosecutions of Otherwise Lawful Gun Owners 

THANKS TO A pair of sources --  The Stand, Washington State Labor Council's excellent on-line daily, plus a much-appreciated news tip from fellow journalist William Boardman -- we now have our clearest-yet sense of the hatred and contempt that unites the "Democratic" (sic) and Republican parties in the ecogenocidal solidarity of their Neoliberal (Neonazi) war against U.S. Working Families and the global Working Class in general:  

• The Stand tells us President Joseph Biden's ongoing "bipartisan" collaboration with the Trumpists who have sabotaged the Social Security Administration and the VA is the reason at least 40 million of us may not get our $1400 "stimulus" checks until 31 December -- if even then.  
• And Mr. Boardman's tip -- for which again my gratitude --  tells us the Biden Regime is already betraying the huge majorities of the imperial homeland's adult citizens who stupidly believed the Democrats' Big Lie a Biden/Harris victory would legalize marijuana.

These are among the most damning proofs yet the "Democratic" (sic) Party has reverted to its post-JFK function as  the Republican Party's Neoliberal (Neonazi) Fifth Column.

And, of course,  the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine, the world's first privately owned, for-profit version of Josef Goebbels' infamous Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, is protecting the Democrats by suppressing the story --  or at the very least, sugar-coating it with the nauseatingly fecal propaganda routinely excreted in service to the Moronic Majority's cult of mandatory optimism.

Again demonstrating our fatal lack of a genuine Left, nearly all the so-called "alternative" media is doing likewise.

Hence our two courageous sources have provided genuinely revealing information:

Firstly. as you probably know, many Republicans and at least a few of their "Democratic" (sic) Fifth Column co-conspirators sadistically wanted to  deny -- say again DENY-- stimulus checks to any of us whose sole sources of income are the murderously miserly welfare, Social Security or veterans' stipends that define us as unexploitable for profit, too impoverished to be liable for income taxes and therefore -- in the merciless Ayn Randified eyes of our Neoliberal Masters -- as "life unworthy of life."¹

Why withhold the money? Obviously, it's another aspect of our Masters' Final Solution to the problem of overpopulation by those of us who are hopelessly poor: the longer we are denied our $1400, the more acute our anxiety. More of us will therefore sicken and die -- which of course leaves more money for the Empire's  Neoliberal (Neonazi)  owners and their political marionettes. 

Moreover the Democrats and their Republican co-conspirators have sneakily given the SS and VA bureaucracies until 31 December 2021 to make the payments² -- obviously to further  maximize the Covid19 death toll.³

Secondly, apropos  the "Democratic" (sic) Party's resumption of opposition to legalized marijuana, as an analytically minded  member of the Second Amendment community's hard-Left faction, I saw this coming years ago. The fact marijuana is legal prescription medicine in a growing number of states is federally meaningless -- and as Biden now demonstrates, so it shall remain.

Why? Because any firearms owner who merely draws a breath of air containing marijuana smoke will urine-test positive for drug use and is therefore subject not only to confiscatory forcible disarmament, but to ten years' slave labor on the for-profit prisoner plantations that despite Biden's deceptions continue to expand, amassing profits comparable to those extracted by antebellum slave owners.

Hence anyone who believed Biden/Harris would legalize pot or end for-profit prison slavery was either hopelessly naive or more typically a member of the Moronic Majority, a useful idiot brainwarped by the Ruling Class and thus totally oblivious to the fact our Masters intend to completely disarm us -- to reduce us literally to mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood -- the latest expression of their fear our hopelessly dumbed-down brains might someday figure out how to foment a (real) revolution.

Doubt me? Note that some forcible-disarmament fanatics are already calling for mandatory monthly drug tests and annual psych evaluations for all firearms owners -- millions more dollars for the for-profit medical predators, with firearms ownership by us poor folk permanently prohibited by these proposed additional costs.

Thirdly, behind his cloak of Big Lies, disinformation and euphemisms,  Biden is obviously just another example of "change we can believe in,"  different from the Trumpite version mainly in the extent to which Biden hides Neoliberalism's Neonazi agenda -- Trump's premature disclosures of which separated our Masters into at least two mutually hostile factions and ensured Trump's loss in last November's election.⁵

How then did the "Democratic" (sic) Party become the Republican Fifth Column it is today? My journalistic guess is the Democrats were terminally compromised by their collaboration with the Republicans in the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the still furiously controversial deceptions necessary to hide the Ruling Class coup of 22 November 1963 -- its reality since proven by the now-irremediable (boiled-frog) imposition of Neoliberal Neonazism.⁴

Perhaps the most pivotal lesson I've been taught by Moron Nation is that investigative journalism is utterly pointless -- that too many of whatever small percentage of the population has retained the ability to read with comprehension has also been reduced to such submissive moral imbecility they are genetically incapable of feeling the empathy or concerns essential to humanitarian action.

In other words, in the psychological sense -- regardless of race or gender -- they are already naught but slaves.

All of which thrusts me ever closer to concluding there truly is no hope for us -- not for ourselves, our nation, our species, our Mother Earth.
___________________________

¹"Life Unworthy of Life" is the English translation of the phrase by which the German Nazis condemned elderly or disabled people to death for being unprofitable -- an ultimate example of the criminalization of poverty that has become so popular amongst U.S. politicians.

²HR1319, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, is among the most infuriatingly censored legislative packages ever enacted by Congress, which is why most of us remain unaware its Ayn-Rand-minded authors gave the federal bureaucracy nearly a year -- specifically until 31 December 2021 -- to send us our $1400 relief payments. Scroll to Page 137, "Timing and Manner of Payments...No refund or credit shall be made or allowed under this subsection after December 31, 2021." This is the most outrageously tolerant approval of bureaucratic obstructionism I have ever encountered.  

³Apropos the viciously extended disbursement deadline, I turn 81 on 30 March; even fully vaccinated -- I go off quarantine at midnight --  my comorbidities may not let me live long enough to see the now indefinitely delayed $1400 -- and the same applies to anyone like me. Obviously, this is no accident; its potentially deadly anxieties are precisely what our Masters intend -- another atrocity in their ever-more-lethal criminalization of poverty.

⁴Though it is seldom recognized as such, neoliberalism is the most toxic variant of Nazism to emerge thus far. Note the identical, might-makes-right ethos of absolute moral imbecility promulgated both by Hitler in Mein Kampf and by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged. Indeed, Neoliberalism's submit-to-capitalism-or-die mandate expresses the same submit-to-the-übermenschen-or-die ruthlessness of Nazism's German founders; the differences between the two are thus more illusory than real. Rather than requiring an individual tyrant, Neoliberalism crowns the corporate aristocracy  as our species' divinely ordained, absolute-power ruler; building on Josef Goebbels' methodological foundation, it achieves its intended tyrannies by the most compelling psychological warfare ever unleashed against our species and  -- cunningly exploiting the induced ignorance of Moron Nation -- by other methods far more readily concealable than the German Nazi agenda of military conquests, death camps and Zyklon B. It does so by glorifying Ayn Rand's sociopathy and by weaponizing disaster, pollution and disease to eradicate the few remnants of democratic process and reduce the Working Class to inescapable forms of modern slavery. Given the many variants of fascism that have reduced what was originally a proper noun to a lower-case generic, I propose doing likewise with Nazism. This gives us neonazism (or nazism) as more emotionally accurate description of what we now label "fascism," its lower-case forms the correct spelling for all "nazi" references save to the Third Reich's N.S.D.A.P., the original Nazi Party, which should of course still be capitalized accordingly.

⁵Is Trump down for the proverbial count? I fear not. I have no doubt whatever non-nazified historians might abide in the future -- that is, if we somehow manage to seize ourselves a future -- will define the nazis' 6 January 2021 uprising as eerily equivalent to Hitler's 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch. Obviously I cannot predict what measures the U.S. nazis will next attempt. But I am absolutely certain we the people of these helplessly (dis)United States no longer collectively possess the empathy, integrity, knowledge, skill, determination, solidarity-- and most of all the titanium-ovaried, brass-testicled courage -- necessary to defeat (any) nazi onslaught. We saw these requisites demonstrated by the Soviet people, as many as 43 million of whom died saving us all from Hitler and his allies, but alas I cannot imagine such capability in the present-day United States. Goddess grant this time my usually accurate pessimism is flat out wrong.  

LB/27 March 2021

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How Our Neoliberal Masters Are Killing (Real) 'Stimulus'...

and Why Ryokan's Haiku Typifies Our Only (Real) Source of Salvation:

First some Bad news:

• https://www.mintpressnews.com/average-u-s-citizens-little-influence-government-policy/189520/
  
• https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/20/bidens-american-rescue-plan-and-its-opponents/
• https://www.laprogressive.com/dupes-of-our-hopes/?utm_source=LA+Progressive+NEW&utm_campaign=2a03409578-LAP+News+-+20+April+17+PC_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_61288e16ef-2a03409578-286953617&mc_cid=2a03409578&mc_eid=f9033578e0
• https://popularresistance.org/single-payer-which-way-forward/
• https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/15/why-there-was-no-peoples-rebellion-against-a-fascist-u-s-president-nine-reasons/
• https://www.blackagendareport.com/return-source-democracy-dead

Then some Good news:

• https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/gaia/esp_gaia01.htm
• https://www.encyclopedia.com/earth-and-environment/ecology-and-environmentalism/environmental-studies/gaia-hypothesis
• https://www.gaia.com/article/goddess-gaia

Obviously if we humans are to save ourselves, we must mobilize not as Americans or Russians or Nooksacks or Koreans or Masai, but as Gaians -- as lovingly fierce defenders of our Mother Earth  -- and we must do so no matter our nationality or race or ethnicity or gender or ideology or whether we view Gaia as metaphor or matriarch. 

Thus our most immediate need is clearly some sort of Gaian International, organized to speed our evolution into a globally cooperative, Nature-embracing humanity. As we've been repeatedly warned, perhaps most accessibly by Edvard Munch (1893); William Butler Yeats (1919); Jackson Browne (1974); and now by Greta Thunberg -- we must do so immediately, with unprecedented speed, before the Neoliberal legacy of murderous greed becomes our own inescapable torture-chamber of knowingly self-inflicted extinction.

My own brief summary-analysis of this good news -- that yes, we as a species may still have one (last) chance for healing the demonstrably fatal wound inflicted on us by the patriarchy's forcible, usually violent suppression of biological truth we were all born knowing -- ends, not ironically, with its beginnings: those glimmers of human perception and intent evident in our revolutionary (re-evolutionary) re-acknowledgement of the biblically despised biological reality -- the fact we like the wolves and bears and cockroaches are all children of our Mother Earth --  that unites us inseparably with all of Nature. 

And thus we forever remain -- in this era, challenged to re-learn how to embrace such  kinship, how to nurture it and help it thrive,  as I have done my very best to do throughout my post-news-staff years -- and yes thanks to the north-looking window beyond my desk do even now in quarantine. I likewise mourn the many who delude themselves into believing Christianity's  adult-Santa-fable some false divine will "save" them from the deadly consequences of denying their irrevocable kinship with the rest of Nature.

Or maybe they really are genetically different.

But as a favorite astronomy professor often said, "we humans are literally made of the substance of stars." (I apologize that I do not identify him; it is  because I cannot remember the correct spelling of his name. All my personal copies of academic transcripts were destroyed by the same arsonist[s] who destroyed all my life's significant work, and obtaining the information by telephone or email under pandemic conditions would take days if not weeks.) 

In any case, I feel that before we go on, we should perhaps quickly reflect on just how patriarchy assails us. However it might have been propagated -- more on this in the footnotes -- there is no doubt it wrenched human society out of the egalitarian, cooperative, proto-communist mode that enabled our ancestors to survive 194,000 years, four ice ages included. Then, beginning some 6,000 years ago, patriarchy overthrew that demonstrably superior ethos and eventually brutalized us into the murderously hierarchical, violently acquisitive, ecogenocidally imperialistic mode that begat the Abrahamic death-cults (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), which with Christian leadership eventually cloned themselves into the secular death-cult of Capitalism, which in turn divided into the apocalyptic death-cults we know as fascism, Nazism and Neoliberalism. 

In other words, our would-be exterminators today are the direct ideological descendants of those who sought to exterminate our pagan ancestors.

Given our present-day peril -- and factoring in Jungian discoveries about our ability to recognize and describe risks to our species well before they become obvious¹ (note again the prophetic elements in works by Munch, Yeats and Browne) -- I believe we can define as functionally anti-patriarchal any human expression that can be shown to foster our conceptual reunification with Nature. This most assuredly includes Marxism, which at least in Frederich Engels' view was an effort to restore humanity to a modern equivalent of its relatively harmonious pre-patriarchal cooperativeness; it also includes ecosocialism and ecofeminism, the healing intent of each made obvious by its name.  But our most effectively anti-patriarchal accomplishments are too often the most obscure. These are the scientific resurrections of ancient wisdom via the Gaia Hypothesis and the burgeoning growth of environmental science documented here, all of which are faulting the patriarchal bedrock.  

Anyone who doubts the revolutionary nature of such advances need only reflect on the extent to which  they infuriate the Christianists. Note how their early-'70s assertions of Christian anti-environmentalism -- "Organic Is Satanic"; "Environmental Means Of The Devil" -- have  since metastasized into open warfare against science itself.  Our counterattack -- more evidence of that prophetic function identified by Carl Jung -- is exemplified  here, here, here, here and perhaps more evocatively here.

Meanwhile, though the folk renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s was methodically suppressed in the United States, it has elsewhere continued its growth into an ever-more-wildly popular brand of multi-generational Neopaganism that powerfully nurtures our quest for reawakened awareness of our biologically indivisible  oneness with Nature.

Greta Thunberg's assertion we must now radically accelerate and condense into less than a decade a  learning process that hitherto took centuries if not millennia should thus be welcomed. I am frankly surprised it took so long for someone to name our species' plight in a voice heard round the world. Ignore her -- or ignore the Earthly foundation upon which she stands -- we'll soon have no more than a hell-bound snowball's chance of survival, much less of toppling six thousand years of patriarchy's (deliberate?)² planet-killing misogyny.  I'll have reverted to nonexistence by then, I'm sure, but I've seen enough -- and read enough history -- to know I wouldn't wish the horrors of a dying planet on my worst enemy. 

And now amidst this gotterdammerung what might we have that's valuable enough to bribe us to undertake the struggle of biological self-salvation?

In response I offer the following, reprinted here as it was given us by Ryokan via Alan Watts in The Way of Zen (Pantheon Books: 1957)³ -- for me the gateway,  62 years ago, to what through quarantine-enabled contemplation and meditation I have come to (gratefully) recognize as a lifelong path toward learning Earth-centered consciousness: 

The thief left it behind:
                  the moon
                  at my window.

-- Ryokan (1758-1831)

___________________
¹Influenced as I am by the Jungian understanding of how art can function as prophecy -- presumably because our subconscious minds perform the function  Marshall McLuhan described as analogous to early warning radar -- I take all such expressions as indicative of the yet-unplumbed magnitude of our survival instincts. Moreover I believe the fact such perception shows no evidence of yielding to the bottomless despair that is increasingly the sole defining ethos of modern life tells us at least some of our species will survive our present self-inflicted apocalypse.

²Patriarchy with its implicitly mandatory ecogenocide is not only ever-more-obviously our species' one ultimately deadly "unnatural" act. It is also -- at least if we dare consider the possibility our Earth is a target of  extraterrestrial invaders -- perhaps the interstellar equivalent of smallpox-contaminated blankets, its anti-Nature terraforming spawned by "unnatural" inseminators such as talking serpents, fiery wheels in the sky and shrubs inflamed to loquaciousness. If these origin tales are true -- that is, if they are based on indigenous perception of real-time events -- patriarchy's lethally invasive "unnaturalness" is all the more evident in the fact "unnatural" ranks among the patriarchs' favorite pejoratives of projection.

³The best Watts anthology is entitled Three  and includes complete texts of The Way of Zen (1957); Nature, Man, and Woman (1958); and Psychotherapy East and West (1961); it was published by Pantheon Books in 1977. Eerily, it was also one of my half-dozen bound volumes that survived not just the utterly life-changing arson of 1 September 1983, but which -- far more eerily -- were salvaged in readable form after spending a year beneath the sodden ashes of my friend Helen Farias' house. She returned them to me immediately, sole remnants of a boxed-up personal library that had exceeded a thousand volumes, and they have accompanied me ever since;  (Helen died in 1994. Writing this, I realize I can no longer deny the guilt I feel because  I do not doubt her house -- indeed her ancestral home -- was torched solely because she dared harbor within its upstairs rooms, as a favor to me whilst I sought a permanent Manhattan address, my  books, phonograph records, photography dating from my 12th birthday; clip-files, awards and journals dating from my 16th birthday; and most importantly,  the 24 years of  writing, photography and supportive research that had evolved into  "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" -- all that plus the potential of at least two other photographically illustrated books, one an exploration of academically ignored archaeological anomalies in the Pacific Northwest, the other a pictures-and-text portrait of commercial salmon fishers on the Sailish Sea.)  (Yes, that was a spontaneous digression, one necessarily followed by an apologetic excuse: but where else might I get way with such a stylistic outrage save in the footnotes?) Returning now to our discussion of Watts' Three,  unfortunately but predictably, the book is long out of print -- with extant copies effectively censored by prohibitive prices.

LB/20-22 January 2021

-30-

 

Though I Have Long Foreseen the Nazi Lynch Mob That's Captured D.C., It Is Not My Preferred Return to Blogging; but the Federal Response Will Damn Sure Tell Us Who We Are

FOR THE PAST several weeks I have been working on a new, definitively apolitical Dispatches format essentially based on the Royokan haiku I regard as our species' best-ever expression of gratitude in the wake of hopelessly ruinous loss:  

The thief
left it behind:
    the moon at my window.

But the seizure of our national capitol by a Trump-spawned Nazi lynch mob has interrupted that quarantine-enabled growth process, and my own resurgent journalistic ethics demand response:

Because I (involuntarily) lived in the South for most of my first 24 years, I know entirely too well the bottomless, irremediable Evil of our national Southron/Neoconfederate mix of reactionary Christian misogyny, racism and general hatefulness.

Hence despite the constant disinformation from the "Democratic" [sic] Party's cult of mandatory positivism,  I have been warning for years of the danger of a ChristoNazi revolution. 

Now we are at the inevitable pivot-point wherein the government's response to this (armed?) rabble that has captured D.C. will answer three pivotal questions:

(1) -- the extent to which Trump's ChristoNazis have subverted the military and the police;

(2) -- the extent to which Trump's modern-day Sturmabteilung is organized for actual warfare (commanders, chain of command, training, armament etc.);

(3) -- the extent to which the Ruling Class opposes or supports the continuation of  at least a charade of constitutional governance in the imperial United States.

The answers to these three questions determine our future.

But the answer to the first question is already obvious in the alleged "unpreparedness" by which the Capital Police (and D.C. law enforcement in general) compromised the defense of the Capitol Building.

It is even more outrageously obvious in how the militarized cops are treating these traitorous ChristoNazi insurrectionists with a respectful gentility so notably absent in the murderous violence of their everyday responses to people of color or any of the rest of us on the (real) Left.  

The international response to this Nazi insurrection will also be most revealing -- and could indeed be the ultimate factor in determining in its outcome.

LB/16:16 PST 6 Jan 2021

(Auto-complete's  misspelling of "capitol" -- weirdly appropriate, given the givens --  corrected at 20:54 PST.)

-30-

 

Update: Yes, I'll Soon Rejoin Our Quest for Human Survival

THE FORM AND CONTENT apparent below typifies the form and content of future Dispatches, which will also include -- though not today -- some (clearly labeled) short fiction.  Meanwhile, my profound gratitude to those readers who remain faithful enough to periodically revisit. Thank you so very very very much!

*****

Posted on CaitlinJohnstone.com in response to:
Tens of Millions Displaced by 'War On Terror'
-- the Greatest Scam Ever Invented

ACTUALLY, MS. JOHNSTONE, the so-called "war on terror" was only one part of "the greatest scam ever invented."

The ultimate "greatest scam" is the endless tsunami of Big Lies that hide the fact "American democracy" is naught but a clever euphemism for zero-tolerance white-supremacist Capitalist dictatorship intent on world conquest perpetuated by unabashed German-Nazi-style ecogenocide.

Anyone with a lick of sense should know -- indeed should have known from the beginning -- that the conquest of 13 British colonies by slavemasters and banksters leading an armed rabble of lynch-mob anarchists would either soon be crushed by more civilized peoples or be allowed to fester into precisely what it has become: Global Public Enemy Number One. (To read more of Australian Journalist Johnstone's boldly outspoken international column and the responses to it, go here.)

*****

Newly Enlarged:
"Censorship: Lessons from Nader and a Knoxville Atrocity"

...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 extensively censored, not by Blacks but by two white civil rights activists, Congress of Racial Equality¹ members Steve Wagner² and Phillip Bacon, each of whom inadvertently revealed their own white-supremacist beliefs by insisting accurate description of the incident's more telling moments would be too much truth for Black readers and would therefore discredit the narrative as “sensationalism.”

In other words -- bottom line --  Moron Nation's meticulously conditioned hatred of the First Amendment had suddenly become as evident on the USian Left as it had always been on the USian Right.

Thus to my eternal regret I allowed the two CORE activists to cut several key passages from my original text. One of the most important disclosures Wagner and Bacon whited-out  -- pun intended -- was the word-for-word report on my confrontation with Smith, in which the Nazi-sympathizing publisher/editor had made it clear I would either obey his command and fabricate a dangerously provocative Big Lie describing an interracial sex orgy that never took place, or I would suffer grave but unspecified afflictions in retaliation for my disobedience. Similarly, the two Caucasian CORE activists also suppressed my eyewitness account of the police assault on the Latin American diplomat who was among the party's invited guests.  And their anti-First-Amendment fervor exceeded even that of Smith in their near-hysterical insistence no public mention (ever) be made of the post-party attempt on my life -- the incident that arguably confirmed attorney Southern's hypothesis of a Rightist conspiracy far broader than a mere police raid. 

Barry allowed these white bourgeois tyrannies only because I suspect he believed -- probably correctly -- such compromise was vital to retain the Caucasian support implicit in the slogan, "Black and White Together."  The following, under my own byline, is all that remained after Bacon and Wagner finished censoring it...

(To read the rest, go here.)

*****

The Courage of Our Revolutionary Forebears:
 Songs of Human Survival (Spanish Variants)

THAT'S LA PASIONARIA with soldiers at 1:12; Ernest Hemingway at 1:36, clearing the jam of a panic-stricken soldier's Moisna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpYlIdYXIxQ  You can tell they're under fire by the obvious tension on Hemingway's face. Look closely; it appears the soldier next to him, fumble-fingered under the terrors of combat, had  jammed his clip into the Soviet service-rifle's magazine at the wrong angle, and now Hemingway has snatched it away from him, most likely  -- given how in '44 he nearly lost his press credentials for joining a French Resistance take-no-prisoners Nazi-hunt immediately after he went ashore at Normandy --to return fire himself.)

And here is how the same song is sung by those who were there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WubToRFKcdY

The above lyrics are a bit different from the version I knew, which the Weavers sang in earlier years:

If you want to drop a line
You must know where you can find me
At the battle of Gandessa
Where the fire tries to blind me...

The second verse, which I seem to have forgotten, describes a restaurant run by fascists:

The third and fourth verses I remember as follows:

At the entrance to the place
Stands a waiter who's a Moor;
He will murmur "enter, enter"
And recite the carte de jour.

For the first course of the meal,
They'll serve exploding hand grenades
With a burst of rifle fire
That could send you to your grave...

Alas I have also forgotten the rest. (Save that the Moors -- then as fanatically Islamic as Pius XII was fanatically Nazi -- were commanded by their mullahs to side with Franco, an order most fervently obeyed, just as the Pope commanded all Catholics to support Franco, an order too few dared disobey.)  

Here's another song from that war, a poem by the fascist-slain Lorca;  scroll (way) down to poster Suat Can Ozcan for English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td6lN_U7Ecs   The accompanying photos include at least one image (at 0:35) from the recently recovered work by Gerda Taro, aka "the Little Redhead," Robert Capa's lover who was killed -- run over by a tank in a disordered retreat -- a loss by which Capa is said to have been so devastated, he ever-afterward deliberately courted his own death, which came when he stepped on a landmine while photographing the fighting in Vietnam.

And this, same tune, different words,  an anthem adopted by the badass Quinta Brigada (15th Brigade) and later by other units, with more relevant photographs, including Capa's portrait of an obviously war-weary Taro taking a momentary break at 00:39: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgHNjKgJ5QM&list=RDZMH_9ODvU2M&index=16

Plus another variant on the same song -- again valuable for its visuals -- celebrating the brigade's unusually large contingent of anarchist women:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQgSyUK08Rs&list=RDZMH_9ODvU2M&index=18

And for those of us who'd appreciate a made-in-post-fascist-Spain collection of these songs and many more in the same defiant spirit, there is most assuredly this entire album.  

*****

(Disclosures: Paul Robeson's variant of "Los Quatros Generales" was part of the music of my infancy and childhood; my late father had  of course been a fierce supporter of the Spanish Republic -- another of the activities for which he was forever damned by our Masters as "prematurely anti-fascist." Even so, I do not understand the curious intensity of my emotional connection to this event. First time I heard "Battle at Gandessa" -- probably at age 16 -- it not only raised my hair and gave me a powerful chill; it also brought instant tears. For whatever reason, whenever I hear any of this music after a long absence from it, I am wrenched again by the deadly weight of all our Masters have stolen from us, and again my eyes uncontrollably fill with momentary tears. Though as an agnostic I have dismissed most of my [apparent] recollections of places I've never been and events in which I never participated as nothing more than genetic memory, this -- like my words-as-mental-pictures comprehension of Russian when I was a toddling infant -- I cannot so dismiss.)

LB/9 September 2020

-30-

 

Republicans Join Democrats to Forcibly Disarm U.S. Civilians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Capitalization and punctuation as in originals)

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

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

(Capitalization and punctuation as in originals)

 

Our Mother/Our Selves

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

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

Earth Just Had Hottest January Since Records Began, Data Shows

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

UN warns of major shock as Africa locust outbreak spreads

Ozone Layer Recovery Is Being Undermined by Pollution From US Companies

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

Bumblebees Face Extinction From the Climate Crisis

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

 

Calamity by Contagion

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

The coronavirus pandemic: A global disaster

World Health Organization warns of global risk from coronavirus outbreak

Top 10 Myths About Bedbugs

Climate Change May Release Ancient Viruses From Melting Tibetan Glacier

Viruses, Epidemics and Experiments: The History of Biowarfare

 

Theocracy Triumphant

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

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

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

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

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

Writer Calls Egalitarian Marriages “Functionally Homosexual”

Christian School Expels Girl for Wearing Rainbow Sweater on Her Birthday 

Tampon tax break faces resistance in Tennessee

The FBI Makes a Bizarre Claim About Pro-Choice Terrorism

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

 

Josef Goebbels Prevails

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

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

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

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

The FBI Has Been Lying About Seth Rich

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

 

World’s Highest Standard of Living

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

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

The Trump administration’s surveillance dragnet

Black Lives Matter Excluded from Los Angeles Women’s March

“The Cops & the Klan Go Hand in Hand!”

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

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

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

Keeping Homeless Families Homeless, by Force

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

The Shame of Child Poverty in the Age of Trump

Seattle bureaucrats aid Amazon charge Sawant with ethics violations

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

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

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

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

 

Enslavement as Convenience

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

The Joys of the Digital Revolution Bring the End of Privacy

Freedom Rider: The Internet Does Washington’s Dirty Work

 

Lest We Forget

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

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

How American Racism Influenced Hitler

Wall Street's Fascist Plot to Seize the White House

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

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

Poverty Is the New Draft

Why the Left-wing Needs a Gun Culture

 

But Is It Really Ecogenocide?

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

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

Environmental Protesters Are Being Criminalized Around the World

US Listed Climate Activist Group as Extremists Alongside Mass Killers

Wall Street Invading Wet’suwet’en Territory

Puerto Rico's Disasters After the Earthquakes

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

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

How Economic Despair Drives Workers to Their Deaths

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

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

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

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

The Environmental Burden of Generation Z

 

Sparks Against Despair

Though history proves the “arc of the universe” bends toward tyranny rather than justice, we should also cherish a certain truth powerfully evoked by Peter Gabriel: “You can blow out a candle/ But you can’t blow out a fire/ Once the flames begin to catch/ The wind will blow it higher.”

Global Poll Finds Majority Believe Capitalism More Harmful Than Good

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

Making Rebellion Attractive: Why the Establishment Still Hates John Reed

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

Just Get On And Go! Olympia Transit System Goes Fareless

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

Dog sleuths sniff out crop disease hitting citrus trees

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

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

Thunberg: Indigenous Peoples Lead the Fight Against Crisis;

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

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

 

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

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

_____________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

LB/15 February 2020

-30-

The ChristoNazis Want Greta Thunberg Burned as a "Witch"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

^{___________________________}

¹For the record, these are Reader Supported News,  Truthdig,  CounterPunch,  Popular Resistance,  LA Progressive, World Socialist Web Site, Patheos, Truthout, and of  course the Associated Press, each hyperlinked here for easy access.

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

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

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

 

*****

Recommended Reading

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

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

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

 

History Our Masters Desperately Want Us to Forget

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

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

How Kshama Sawant Defeated Amazon

 

Rightists, Leftists Twisting Education into Ideological ‘Correctness’

Bill targets school riflery teams, citing gun culture;

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

 

Realpolitik: Goebbels, Bismarck and Machiavelli Forever Proven Right

Democrats combine impeachment and collaboration with Trump

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

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

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

Israeli snipers target Gaza protesters in the eyes

Royal Canadian Mounted Police advocated live ammo against pipeline protesters

Why So Many People Who Need the Government Hate It

 

Ecogenocidal Matricide: the Patriarchal War Against Our Mother Earth

Biosphere Collapse?

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

Regulators halt attempt to hit solar customers with big fees

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

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

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

The Collapse Of Civilization May Have Already Begun

 

From the Top 25 Censored Stories of 2018-2019:

Ukrainian Fascists Trained US White Supremacists

US Women Face Prison Sentences for Miscarriages

 

'Twas the Season to Be Jolly

Christmas 2019: More than half a million homeless in America

A Grim New Definition of Generation X

Trump Tells Evangelical Rally He Will Put Prayer in Schools

Another Kentucky coal company refuses to pay miners

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

US alcohol-related deaths doubled between 1999 and 2017

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

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

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

Onward, Christian Fascists

 

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

LB/11 January 2020

-30-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/8 December 2019

-30-

 

 

 

 

   

Bloomberg: Hoplophobic Juggernaut as Presidential Tsunami

(For those unfamiliar with the Classical Greek-based term, a hoplophobe is what the late Jeff Cooper, a world-renown firearms and self-defense expert, came up with as an apt, more easily headlined synonym for "forcible-disarmament fanatic" -- a creature so hateful s/he is leaving us utterly defenseless in face of the accelerating apocalypse.) 

*****

I SUBMITTED THE following analysis to the comment threads of two Reader Supported News reports,  never mind its conclusions should be slap-ourselves-on-the-forehead obvious to any USian in whom random chance has retained the abilities to unplug brain from cellphone  and see beyond the serial mind-warping perpetrated by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM). 

Alas, in this instance it seems we've also got to transcend the conflicting-obligations silence of so-called "progressive" media as well -- a silence as understandable as it is intolerable once we focus on the seemingly unbridgeable gap that (again seemingly) separates the forcible-disarmament fanatics from the white-supremacist goons, never mind each are willing servants of the most diabolically cunning Ruling Class in all human experience. 

Even so, merging the two groups is impossible,  no?

But wait! What if Bloomberg loudly promises the FDFs he'll disarm the WSGs with prohibitively expensive fees and taxes -- exactly the mechanism Bloomberg-seduced voters imposed on Tacoma and Seattle -- even as he whispers and dog-whistles to the WSGs the licenses will be issued by Homeland Security, thereby not only guaranteeing the WSGs will remain armed but -- dog whistle again -- guaranteeing only the "right people" get licensed.  Thus -- an absolute certainty given the never-equaled skill of his private Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda -- he gets the votes of both groups,  just as Trump (like Hitler before him), did with other seemingly opposed factions of voters. 

Likewise with women: the overwhelming female support for forcible civilian disarmament bridges the hitherto impassable gap between advocates of legal abortion and their (soon-to-be-100-percent-victorious) anti-abortion adversaries. Plus there's the fact that once abortion is federally outlawed --  as the Robber Court apparently intends to rule well before the election -- that issue will be moot, thus allowing even the hardest-core anti-abortionists to happily vote for a forcible-disarmament Neoliberal (fascist) Democrat.

Thus I urge those who doubt this sort of thing could happen to familiarize themselves with the landslide votes Bloomberg's ban-the-gun propaganda machine  agitates into action everywhere he turns it loose. 

And it would certainly be interesting to know what percentage of Virginia's vengefully anti-gunowner Democrats are also members of one or both branches of the Bloomberg machine, Everytown (for forcible disarmament) and Moms Demand (a nationwide ban on civilian firearms ownership).    

In any case these are the considerations that prompted me to forward the first section of this analysis to selected Dispatches readers; they are also why I am re-publishing it and its subsequent elaborations here. 

I do so  because I who have correctly called every U.S. presidential election  since 1952 --  including Trump's victory  as probable -- am terribly afraid  Bloomberg cannot be beaten: that the literally unstoppable forcible-disarmament machine he's built with his obscenely bottomless wealth is also a proving ground for his presidential campaign, each a scoop-the-world example of the malevolence and cunning by which our Masters are hell-bent on  reducing us to inescapable serfdom and slavery,

Indeed it seems to me only an ignoramus would not recognize the terrifying revelation implicit in the endless triumphs of Bloomberg's already relentlessly successful campaign to eventually outlaw firearms ownership by any civilian not not wealthy enough to be licensed by the federal government.

What Bloomberg proves beyond question -- most importantly to his Ruling Class peers (including those who will never relinquish ownership of the so-called "Democratic" [sic] Party) -- is that he can do the hitherto impossible: seducing a people legendary for our skill-at arms into giving up the very tools we will need most desperately if we are to have even the most microscopic  chance of surviving our Overlords' ecogenocidal agenda.

That hitherto-inconceivable victory also proves Bloomberg has already assembled a psychological-warfare-minded propaganda team that literally has no equal in our national experience and therefore cannot ever be beaten --  an asset so formidably toxic in its venomous hybrid of Neoliberal moral imbecility and Machiavellian despotism, I cannot doubt it's the real reason Bloomberg has been so anointed by the Democrats' leadership, the perfect Obama/Clinton/Schumer/(McConnell)/Pelosi tyrant-to-be.

My apology for the seeming repetitiveness in parts of the following, unavoidable because each of these four entries were published as separate successive posts, the first three in response to "Bloomberg's Right-Wing Views on Foreign Policy Make Him a Perfect Candidate for the Republican Nomination" (exactly as Hillary's identical views made her the only possible candidate for the Democratic [sic] nomination in 2016): 

The Democrats despise firearms owners with the same venomous contempt the Republicans reserve for women who favor birth control and legal abortion.

Hence from our Overlords' perspective, Bloomberg's candidacy is perfect. It not only stops Sanders and Warren but robs us forever of our ability to defend ourselves against criminals. It also avoids the ignominy of assassination and electoral theft. And it enthrones a Machiavellian tyrant who – employing a variant of the “flying-club” deception Hitler used to build his Luftwaffe – has built an unstoppable presidential campaign from his endlessly victorious war against legal firearms owners.

Bloomberg’s victory is thus assured. He's got the unconditional support of Moron Nation’s forcible-disarmament fanatics, a huge majority that -- thanks to the same submissive ignorance and aggressive malice that fuels their anti-abortion counterparts – regard him as their savior. He’ll likewise take the youth vote.

In fact his psy-war experts have already done the allegedly impossible: they’ve seduced us into self-disarmament even as we face both a ChristoNazi uprising and the deadliest apocalypse ever. Very soon we’ll be denied all weapons; in Bloomberg’s NYC, even archery is prohibited.

Thus he is our Masters’ choice to finish the Neoliberal project of reducing us all to mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood, the last step to serfdom and slavery.

***

And Moron Nation's moronic majority will embrace every one of Bloomberg's malicious deceptions, thereby propelling him into the White House by a landslide.

Moreover he can (and no doubt will) – with flip-of-a-switch ease – turn his unstoppable anti-gunowner machines "Everytown" and "Moms Demand" into an equally unstoppable presidential steamroller.

His irresistible wealth has already made each group politically omnipotent; they always win and – as every legal firearms owner now knows with dreadful certainty – cannot ever be defeated.

The two groups together are thus the most vindictively powerful political organization in the United States, certainly in the present era, probably since its beginning.

Merely Bloomberg’s ability to have transformed formerly firearms-owner-friendly Washington state into the most vengefully anti-gunowner state in the nation -- this in a span of less than three years -- proves his wealth and its mastery of propaganda is unbeatable.

***

Nor do I believe the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine's claim Bloomberg’s is a new or recent decision.

Look at it analytically -- something We the People have obviously been robbed of the ability to do -- and it becomes clear Bloomberg's entire forcible disarmament campaign thus far was at least partially intended to perfect his presidential campaign.

Which -- given the unprecedented mastery of propaganda that grants him 100-percent success at the former -- means he'll be equally successful at the latter.

Indeed his forcible disarmament campaign has already mobilized (and stolen) the youth vote on which the Sanders and Warren campaigns were depending.

History proves that in a nation methodically stripped of learning and logic, there is no defense against the closed-mindedness of induced ignorance, whether amongst youth, seniors or anyone in between. Hence Moron Nation's infinite malleability.

Hence too -- given Bloomberg's effectively limitless wealth -- his ability to exploit that malleability however he chooses.

Wake up, people. An electorate so easily hypnotized into self-imposed forcible disarmament -- which in the face of ongoing ChristoNazi attacks and the looming ecogenocidal apocalypse is a stunningly suicidal act of surrender -- has already proven itself fanatically submissive to whatever Bloomberg serves us in his test-perfected propaganda.

Note also  Bloomberg's demonstrably  worse-than-Trump's racism -- the quality that (despite his hatefully aggressive hoplophobia) -- insures he'll get the white male majority vote (just as his endlessly victorious war on legal firearms owners insures he'll get the vast majority of the female vote, people of color included).

*****

I posted this last entry to "Michael Bloomberg, Presidential Candidate, Just Killed the Bloomberg News Agency." I hardly need note this is precisely the behavior one would expect from the Goebbels-class propagandist Bloomberg has proven himself to be:

Now that Bloomberg has joined his news-mongers to the Democratic (sic) Party propaganda team, what is to keep him from doing as I predict: transforming the unstoppable steamroller of his forcible-disarm ament machine into an unbeatable presidential campaign?

Strategically and tactically it is his next logical move; his unbroken string of “impossible” victories already proves there is nothing capable of thwarting the combined might of Everytown and Moms Demand.

There is literally no defense against them; together they are the most powerful Ruling-Class political machine in U.S. history.

Hence we-the-people suicidally embrace mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood just as we face the greatest-threat -ever to our species’ survival.

Obviously Bloomberg with his bottomless wealth has Powell-Memo’d us to unsurvivable stupidity.

Moreover, as dozens of polls confirm, forcible civilian disarmament is now the “progressive” Holy-of-Hollies -- infinitely more compelling than universal healthcare – and thus utterly sacrosanct as well.

That’s why no "progressive" or MSM news outlet will ever acknowledge Bloomberg’s psy-war hegemony – much less the Machiavellian cunning by which he has co-opted the “progressives” and positioned the moronic-majority vote for easy capture,

“Vote Bloomberg Ban ALL Guns”: undoubtedly his focus-groups are already refining it to Everytown/Moms omnipotence.

  *****

AND AS I WOULD have explained had I not already used up RSN's 1500-character-per-post limit (a restriction I endorse because it compels me to write a post with the same verbal economy I necessarily employed as an editor and reporter), my variegated career in writing and photography included enough Madison Avenue madness I recognize (1) -- that Bloomberg has truly done the hitherto un-do-able; (2) -- the breathtakingly rare and almost inconceivably expensive mustering and managing of talent such a victory requires; and (3) -- the infinitely bitter fact there is no possible way we on the Left, even real and pseudo combined, could raise sufficient funds to beat him. 

Then there is the far more personally and acutely bitter fact a Bloomberg presidency and the prohibitively expensive confiscatory federal gun-license fees and taxes he and his supporters intend to impose would not only disarm me -- a former competitive shooter, schooled in firearms since infancy, a gun owner myself since my ninth Christmas (and now as I approach my 80th birthday still practiced and reasonably skillful with firearms long and short) -- but it would condemn me to a far greater probability of being murdered by some robber, burglar or ChristoNazi thug than of being killed by the congestive heart failure that is easing me ever-so-slowly toward some as-yet-unspecified graveyard run by environmentally mindful cemetarians, those who'd extend my mortal usefulness by reducing my remains to fertilizer, presumably as encouraging to the growth of plants as once I encouraged the expansion of human consciousness. 

(The above is not, by the way, the new direction I had intended to take Dispatches. But when a big story breaks, and I think I've got a scoop-the-world angle on it, I guess I'm as much a journalist now as I was 63 years ago, a high-school stringer writing sports for a daily newspaper and nailing down my first Exclusive.)    

LB/29 November 2019

-30-

A People So Fanatically Self-Centered, Solidarity Is for Never

(Thus the Powell-Memo/Ayn-Rand Moral Imbecility That Perpetuates
'American Exceptionalism' Dooms Us All to Ecogenocidal Extinction)  

CRADLE-TO-GRAVE AYN RANDIFUCATION -- maliciously seductive conditioning in the principles of Mein Kampf¹ and the Powell Memo that make tyranny fun and profitable for the plutocrats and inescapably deadly for all the rest of us -- has become the sole determinant of the quality of life in today's United States. 

This remains the one pivotal  truth of our existence no matter how frantically we might try to ignore or deny the skyrocketing horrors of its obvious results, a frog-boiled compound of deliberately ruinous afflictions that make it excruciatingly obvious we are never again to be granted even the tiniest mercy of an antidote, much less an actual cure. 

These ultimately non-survivable assaults include:

• The death-blows -- whether physical or mental -- endlessly dealt us by the fascists, ChristoNazis, Original Nazis and all the other antihumans vengefully massing on the global Right:
• The socioeconomic fragmentation the equally ego-driven USian Left imposes on us with the innumerable fads of identity-politics and zero-tolerance "political correctness" it employs to blind us to the urgent reality of ecogenocidal class war;
• The me-first recidivism by which We the People of the 99 Percent are endlessly conditioned to perpetuate our own socioeconomic powerlessness;
• The murderous coup of 22 November 1963, to which -- with the terror and terrorism of at least a dozen more political murders -- our Overlords have since added the police-state guarantee of their own ever-more-obviously irreversible omnipotence;
• The nearly two million children, women and men our Masters slew in Southeast Asia to begin transforming the global-enslavement agenda of Neoliberalism into the ecogenocidal agenda of the terminally White Christian USian Empire;
• And -- last but by no means of lesser significance -- the apocalyptic revelation implicit in the defeat of the Soviet Union: specifically that there will never again be a people or nation on this planet allowed to develop the capability of overthrowing our conquerors by any means less  suicidal than thermonuclear war.

Thus we are infinitely more paralyzed by subjugation than our officially enslaved ancestors could have ever imagined -- so subjugated, in lethal fact, that even the most far-fetched possibility of liberation is now eternally beyond our reach -- "eternally" used here in the sense our species' self- destruction-by-patriarchy will be literally everlasting. 

This is because our Masters, employing their unprecedentedly diabolical cunningly, have gradually but methodically reconstructed human society to deliberately rob all the rest of us -- forever -- of any instincts, skills or possessions that might facilitate our escape from the invisible dungeons of this new mode of solitary self-confinement.

(Indeed I cannot doubt the glaringly anti-intuitive operations of our dominant electronic devices is intended to drill us in the abandonment of intuition -- a paramount step in our forcible reduction to the subhuman consciousness essential to our permanent enslavement that would be a picture-perfect example of the ever-expanding thoroughness of our Masters' malevolence.)     

Precisely as mapped out by the psychological warfare gurus whose weaponized market research makes Madison Avenue the one true ruler of the world, the grotesquely anti-social  self-centeredness within which we are all so relentlessly conditioned -- literally from our first breaths outside our mothers' wombs -- guarantees the vast majority of us will forever remain self-subjugated and therefore eternally imprisoned in our Masters' slave-pens. 

Meanwhile the very few of us who manage to escape -- an already minuscule number that further dwindles every year -- are ever-more-vehemently denounced as failures, often with a slanderous hatefulness of such foul intensity, the temptation to forsake our defining iconoclasms becomes irresistible, never mind the sometimes-fatal, always-devastating cost such abandonment imposes on our own mental and physical health.

Forgive the apparent digression -- as you'll see, it is actually not -- but here for clarity and context I must explain that in all my decades of paying close attention to such matters, I have met only two sorts of iconoclasts, something that until this writing I had never given much thought beyond idly wondering to what extent a psychologist or psychiatrist might recognize each of these sorts as separate personality types.  But along comes the Apocalypse, and here we are again discussing Relevant Things, so I need to preface what follows by explaining that the sole criterion by which I the (iconoclastic) journalist determine in what lot any given iconoclast might belong is that of apparent trustworthiness, which tonight I shall designate accordingly: NT = Not Trustworthy; PT = Potentially Trustworthy.

In the NT category of iconoclasts go all those I think of as "volunteer iconoclasts," persons moved to iconoclasm by specific grievances and vexations or sometimes even fads and therefore prone to abandon their iconoclasm as soon as they can rationalize so doing, hence, for example, the death of the Counterculture -- and the nearly identical physics of the Ayn-Randified anti-solidarity epidemic that slew Occupy five decades hence. In the PT category I include all of us whose us whose quest for salvation-by-iconoclasm is of the involuntary and therefore permanent sort born of trauma. And -- yes (I am working this out as I go) -- an NT could certainly become an PT; though I doubt a PT -- save by betrayal --  could ever become anything else.  

Which brings us back to the less-than-comfortable topic of our individual and collective vulnerability to the omnipresent pressure of temptation to abandon our iconoclasm,   a vulnerability to which I myself will most assuredly attest. Emotionally orphaned at age five (and quite properly ever afterward a skeptic who -- try as I might -- will never unlearn the lesson that "trust" is but an invitation to betrayal),  I nevertheless did my best to evolve a working balance between (real/spirit-healing) iconoclasm and the (apparent) conformity by which for many years I was able to keep my iconoclasm fed. 

But of course in the end our unforgiving Masters won -- as the proper study of history makes it obvious they always have and always will -- a lesson taught me in my elder years  by the ever-worsening poverty that makes me ever more dependent on (and always infinitely grateful for) the beneficence of friends and comrades. Without them I'd be dead -- precisely as are others I have known who grew old without friends or families or died young because their poverty denied them healthcare.  Such is Neoliberalism in action, lethal as serpent-venom to its innumerable victims, fatal even in the realms of imagination.     

Beyond that, note too how the Neoliberal Final Solution to the growing rage resulting from our Masters' destruction of the last vestiges of the mostly illusory "American Dream" is leveraging the economy so brutally, all humans -- that is, everybody but the plutocrats and those former humans who have embraced moral imbecility to serve the ecogenicidal plutocrats' agenda -- are hurled into inescapable poverty and abandoned to the struggles-to-the-death it so often necessitates.  Such is our fate: We the (Surplus) People of the (hmmm; what do we call it now?) used-to-be (but-never-really)  United States  of America.

Meanwhile, in methodical furtherance of our disempowerment -- one of the lessons our Masters' grandfathers learned in Tsarist Russia is what happens when workers are allowed guns --  local rulers in both  Seattle and Tacoma have pioneered an entirely constitutional means of prohibiting civilian firearms ownership and funding compulsory buybacks. Thus the Ruling Class terror of revolution is being expressed -- just as I had repeatedly warned it would be -- by a notably Orwellian campaign of imposing forcible disarmament, mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood on every civilian who is not officially certified as a ChristoNazi or other sort of fascist, whether by obscene wealth or sturmabteilung membership. Borrowing from the poll-tax era, out masters have imposed taxation intended to make gun ownership so prohibitively expensive it is transformed -- first in the Ruling Class rat-lab of Washington state,² ultimately throughout the entire imperial homeland --  into a rare privilege only the wealthiest, most fanatically reactionary aristocrats can afford.

Exactly as in the antebellum South.
___________________________

¹See particularly pages 100-104, Mein Kampf (the Ford Translation, Elite Minds Inc.:2009), for a summary of some of the Nazi attitudes later embraced by Ayn Rand. For EMI's other titles -- and evidence indicative of its overall political and socioeconomic bias -- go here and here.

²As testified by Watergate Felon John Ehrlichman, the Seattle plutocrat who played a leading role in helping President Richard Milhous Nixon nullify the Constitution. See especially this Harper's piece exposing the misogyny, racism and generalized hatefulness that spawned the so-called "War on Drugs" as a notably bipartisan war against racial, biological and ideological minorities. Also I must apologize for the lack of a citation to Ehrlichman's testimony about our Masters' use of  Washington state as a favorite psychological-warfare laboratory to test and perfect their methodologies of oppression. Though the story was covered briefly but extensively by local media including The Seattle Post-Intelligencer at the time, my Ehrlichman file was destroyed on 1 September 1983 by the same arsonist(s) who destroyed all the rest of my life's significant work. With the death of The P-I as a newspaper combined with the deaths of any relevant alternative journals, there is no way (now that Ehrlichman's admission has again become relevant) I can recover any of these bibliographical references; I have squandered I-know-not-how-many hours of  Internet time in failed searches for a usable reference, and now four-and-one-half months short of my 80th birthday, I am too damn old (and therefore too poor and too crippled) for the many requisite journeys to and from the microfiche machines of several Seattle libraries. But if someone is inclined to help me with this search, please do.

 

*****

I HAD FOOLISHLY imagined the recent election might give me some small reason to applaud, as indeed it did in Seattle. But alas that fleeting moment of uniquely localized joy was quickly reduced to anger and vexation:  

Pierce County sends a message to Sound Transit with vote on the I-976 car-tab measure

Washington State Voters Reject Affirmative Action, Again

Kansas City votes to remove King's name from historic street

Tucson voters overwhelmingly reject sanctuary city measure

Las Vegas law makes sleeping on downtown streets illegal

(These are heads exactly as linked from the Internet, with up-style capitalization or down-style lack thereof as in the originals.)   

Once again I am reminded of what has been the ultimate truth of human life on this planet for the past approximately six thousand years -- that under patriarchy, any and all alleged inferiors are ultimately naught but prey. That includes our Mother Earth, all females, anyone or anything else our male-supremacist  (or male-supremacist-minded)  overlords choose to target for exploitation, enslavement or death.

Nevertheless I wonder if it is wrong to equate Nazis and Neoliberals. The big difference is even the Nazis sought better lives for those they considered their own Aryan kind, while Neoliberals seek better lives only for themselves and make no secret of the fact they intend to savage all rest of us to ensure their obscenely undeserved comforts: Nazism shrunken to its most black-holishly in-sucking microcosm, as it were.

But thanks to the obsession-with-self  now so thoroughly ingrained in so huge an USian majority by allegedly "educational" or "religious" celebration of Ayn Rand's predatory individuality, it has become the Empire's sole defining ethos. Thus have our Masters transmogrified every one of our potentially revolutionary solidarities -- those of class and race and gender -- into insurmountable barriers the prevailing cult of Identity-Politics selfishness guarantees cannot ever be toppled or even ameliorated.

*****

FIVE RELATIVELY RECENT news reports and features  the comment-threads of which contain responses I am especially proud to share:

Abortion After the Clinic

FOCUS: 'Not Our Mission': Private Fire Crews Protect the Insured, Not the Public

FOCUS: A Future Without Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is a Chilling Prospect

Did Kavanaugh's Replacement, Neomi Rao, Show the Supreme Court a Path to Justify Trump's Defiance of Congress?

While Supreme Court Waffles, Cities Stand Up for LGBT Workers’ Rights

My apologies if I've linked to any of these reports in other contexts. 

*****

I WONDER IF anyone with greater readership than I has noted the existential similarities between the Republican assault-by-invasion against the Democratic (sic) participants in a classified (and therefore closed) impeachment hearing and the Democratic (sic) slaveholder-family Southron congressman's attempt to beat Republican Sen. Charles Sumner to death with a wooden cudgel.

No, this did not happen last week in Trumpland; it was one of the incidents that presaged the Civil War.

(And yes there are ironies here aplenty,  chief among them the 180-degree, century-long turnabout by which the Republican Party eventually betrayed the very peoples of color whose vigor had energized its youth, even as the Democratic (sic) Party would betray them again as, three decades later, our implacably white-supremacist nation became ever-more-open about resurrecting its white supremacy to its good-ole-Ku-Klux-Klavern max.)

But let us not forget how the Republicans first employed their modern adaption of  this slave-masterly tactic to deny Albert Gore Jr. the presidency in 2000. Nor this, which begins with how a Republican candidate assaulted a mainstream journalist and (thereby?) won an election victory and in its turn brings us back to this and therefore to this, all of which together I submit as irrefutable proof the Republicans are not only methodically encouraging violence but deliberately getting more brazenly violent themselves.

Plus given the growing weight of evidence there is indeed (again) some super-secret organization behind the global fascist conspiracy, it must certainly be asked what clandestine operations might have been served by this most recent act of treasonous brutality.

*****

RALPH NADER HAS written a new essay entitled "The World Is Waiting for America to Rise Up"; like most of his work it is informative and compelling. When it was published last week (8 November 2019) by the website Truthdig, I read it carefully, then took some time to pen a thoughtfully critical comment-thread response -- only to see my work slain by censors literally seconds after I posted it.  Here -- with an ink-stained social finger uplifted in contemptuous salute to Truthdig's picayune proctors of punitive propriety -- is the text they hoped they had suppressed:

I know and often applaud Mr. Nader -- I was the first daily-newspaper reporter in the United States to take seriously the findings he would later reveal in Unsafe at Any Speed (and of course the story was killed by my editor, Richard Smyser, ironically then chairman of the Associated Press Managing Editors Freedom of Information Committee) -- so I post the following with a combination of respectfulness and regret:

In the inescapably abject and steadily worsening poverty of old age, I am closer in the everyday sense to this nation's now-genuinely wretched "grassroots" than I ever was before, even during the 30-plus award-winning years I served a dozen newspapers and magazines in staff positions ranging from reporter to editor-in-chief.

Hence from innumerable conversations with socioeconomic peers of all ages I know something the pollsters dare not ask and Mr. Nader most assuredly does not want to hear: that most USians regardless of age, ethnicity or gender ignore calls to action because we -- like so many Germans under Nazism -- have learned from bitter experience we are already a hopelessly conquered people.

Which is the only conclusion possible from the data Mr. Nader cites in the above essay -- data that is further confirmed by the painfully low voter turnouts that reveal the (correct) belief we-the-people have been reduced to such irremediable powerlessness, a growing majority now acknowledges our elections are naught but meaningless charades.

Precisely as proven by Barack the Betrayer, any vote for a self-proclaimed progressive is likely to be a vote that merely sets us up for yet more betrayal.

That's how I know homeless camps are, in mostly denied truth, the only accurate archetype of our future: we the people now eternally damned by our Neoliberal masters to serfdom, slavery and whatever other forms of torture, exploitation and victimization they impose -- invariably with their signature gloating sadism.

Yes there is a flurry of bright spots, such as Kshama Sawant's victory in Seattle, but any progressive victory can be (and will be) nullified by the ChristoNazi cabal that now and forever rules the Empire via the Robbers' Court.

Under those irremediable conditions, resistance truly is futile -- just as it has always been, and just as it is sure to remain as long as the Capitalists are allowed to retain their omnipotence.

Doubt this?

Look at how every progressive gain we-the-people forced on the United States (mostly via the labor movement) during the New Deal and again c. 1961-1968 has either been repealed or – like the right of women to control their own bodies – it is under such relentlessly well-funded ChristoNazi attack its repeal is inevitable.

Moreover we are increasingly schooled in the corollary fact resistance has again become deadly dangerous.

And it will soon -- as soon as the ChristoNazis complete their consolidation of power in the boiled-frog aftermath of the coup of 22 November 1963 -- be infinitely deadlier.

In fact (based on new technologies of oppression and Rightist promises to maximize their use), it will be far more deadly dangerous than it was in Germany under Hitler.

But above all else we know this time the Nazi onslaught is literally forever because there will never again be a people or nation allowed to develop, as the Soviet Union was able to do, a force capable of defeating it -- "forever" in this context defined as however many years remain until we have rendered our own species extinct and reduced our Mother Earth back to a bug planet.

All that said, the only lesson I can discern in the rapidity with which Truthdig killed this piece is that the terminal truths of our ecogenoicidal era are increasingly tabooed -- including by allegedly "progressive"  publishers. To learn about of my two most telling encounters with our "nonexistent" press censorship, go here.

*****

AN ECLECTIC ANTHOLOGY of suggested reading from websites Left, Right and center, the following reports and essays sample the circumstances of our lives and the condition of our planet as we squirm beneath the crushing weight of Neoliberalism. Most of these are current works -- that is, published since mid-October.  The one exception, "How Democrats Keep Guns in the Hands of the Rich" (and are working overtime to confiscate them from all the rest of us), is a 2017 Chicago Tribune report that despite its age remains relevant today, especially in light of what is being done to us here in Washington state. (Yes, you already may have read one or more of these stories,  but in case their headlines pique your interest, here they are, in no particular order):

Missouri officials tracked women’s menstrual periods in effort to shut down state’s last abortion provider

Senate Democrats Join GOP to Back 'Automatic Austerity' Bill That Would Gut Social Programs, Hamstring Bold Policies

Humanity Has Already Destroyed Half the Animal and Plant Life on Earth

Crow Nation Is a Place Where One Could Vanish - and Many Have

After This Fungus Turns Ants Into Zombies, Their Bodies Explode 

Colorado Student Suspended for Holding Gun in Picture on Social Media

Best Gun Friendly States for Firearm Owners (2019)

David Lynch's Chillingly Prescient Vision of Modern America

How Democrats keep guns in the hands of the rich

The Boeing crashes and the criminalization of American capitalism

What in the world is Adam Schiff thinking with his domestic terrorism bill?

A New Study Confirms (Again) That Race, Not Economics, Drove Former Democrats to Trump

Restaurant Owner Enslaved Intellectually Disabled Black Man

Class War Violence: Centralia 1919 - CounterPunch.org

For the Eleventh Straight Year, United States Votes “No” to UN Anti-Nazi Resolution

The U.S. Drops to 32nd in Global Ranking of Nations Promoting Freedom of Thought

Trump Reveals Plans for Nationwide Crackdown, More Militarized Police

Muddying The Waters On Firearms Research & Suicides

Why Aren't People in the US Rising Up Like Those Elsewhere in the World?

AP Photos: Hong Kong protesters resort to medieval weapons

The Associated Press photo essay immediately above -- which includes some excellent photographs made under difficult wartime conditions -- brings to mind unpublished fiction I wrote in the late 1950s and early-to-mid 1960s, including a short-story about modern-day revolutionaries who responded to confiscatory disarmament by equipping and organizing regiments of archers;  its plot came to me as I watched the NYPD tactical police massing like medieval infantry to clear Central Park's Sheep Meadow of the many-thousand participants in the 1967 Easter Be-In, a Countercultural event I had already covered for maybe nine hours as a freelancer -- never mind it was also my 27th birthday. But all my fictional manuscripts were destroyed by the arsonist(s) of 1 September 1983, the same person or persons who also incinerated, as I note in the sidebar, a 24-year investigative project that had seemed solidly destined for mainstream publication, two other non-fiction works-in-progress and thousands of thematically related photographs, a loss so devastating it insured -- as I am certain was intended -- that no matter how much longer I might live, I would never again dare seek significant outlets for my work. Hence I have no clue what Dispatches might yet become, though perhaps a beneficent Muse will reveal to me its proper direction.

LB/15 November 2019

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