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INTRODUCTION

  • HOW DO I CHOOSE STORIES
    for inclusion in the "Coronavirus Update"? Essentially -- and in keeping with today's (unequivocally apocalyptic) context -- it is a matter of relevance plus probability of censorship.  I ask myself three  questions: firstly, is a given story useful – a term in this context I use as synonymous with relevant. If the answer is yes, I than ask, secondly, how likely is it to be suppressed by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine. And here my rule is one of inverse returns: the less likely I think I am to see the story disseminated via the MMPM, the more likely I am to include it in these daily anthologies. Reports that pass the first two tests are each then subjected to the third and final test: do they include indications from which we might evolve estimates of our situations accurate enough to facilitate effective response? If the answer here is also affirmative, the report in question will always be included in the daily update. Meanwhile the first two criteria generate a lengthy list of possibles I winnow down to probables and thence to musts, a process that takes approximately seven or eight hours each day. (¶)-Beyond that, it's on the basis of my news judgment as it evolved during my 64 years as a writer, photographer and editor, three decades of which were in the working press. (Despite an on-and-off involvement with the alternative press that began in 1963, all but about three of those first 30 earning-years were primarily in the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine, at least half in jobs where much of my responsibility was deciding what stories we would publish and on what pages they would appear. My job titles ranged from sports editor and associate editor to city editor, news-and-picture editor and editor-in-chief. (¶)-For most of those years, it seemed a promising career. But as my colleagues moved stealthily Rightward, so did I move ever-more-openly Leftward, until eventually I was Left...outside.) (¶)-Meanwhile "Dispatches from Dystopia," dispatchesfromdystopia.net, which evolved from the less sharply focused "Outside Agitator's Notebook," has under the deadly pressure of the coronavirus pandemic become precisely what its title and domain name describes. It is an ongoing anthology of reports, analyses, commentaries, photographs and other anti-Capitalist testimony from the Dystopia that Neoliberal (neo-fascist) Capitalism has made of our world. It's epicenter is the post-humanitarian United States of America: our species' self-inflicted Moron Nation and its empire of global-conquest malevolence, the de facto Fourth Reich, the true birthdate of which will eventually be recognized – if indeed our species somehow miraculously survives the present era – as 22 November 1963. (¶)-Dispatches thus chronicles our relentless subjugation by Capitalism as it (inevitably) reverts to its traditional might-makes-right savagery and – just as Capitalism previously transformed itself into Italian Fascism and German Nazism – as it now matures into a Nazism of uniquely USian form and content. By examining the details of what is occurring, DfD shows how ours is a Dystopia characterized as much by the mindlessness of Moron Nation's Zieg-Heil-equivalent chanting of “USA! USA! USA!” as by the brutality such chanting invariably celebrates – the genocidal, ultimately ecocidal atrocities the Capitalist Ruling Class perpetrates in the name of “profit,” “growth” and USian “Exceptionalism.” (¶)-Why “USian” rather than American? Because to call this exceptionally fascist empire “America” is to slander as fascists or Nazis all humanitarian-minded peoples of North and South America who valiantly and often fatally resist USiaNazi enslavement. And, yes, “humanitarian” versus “anti-humanitarian” are the only terms that adequately differentiate the two now eternally hostile subspecies into which Capitalism has finally divided Homo sapiens sapiens. On one side are those of us who cling to the so-called Golden Rule and its variants, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the ultimate form of which is Marxism's “from each according to ability, too each according to need.” On the other side are the moral imbeciles – Nazis, fascists, Ayn Rand disciples and all the other psychological zombies that are Capitalism's unique and uniquely apocalyptic spawn. (¶)-But what then is Capitalism? Though traditionally defined as economics alone, it is in fact the quintessential patriarchal ethos, the diabolical methodology of building a global empire by conquest and genocide both obvious and clandestine, with post-conquest world governance originally patterned after the despotic management of antebellum slave plantations. Capitalism is thus the forefather of fascism and Nazism, its only possible offspring. Behind its seductive cloak of euphemisms and Big Lies (“manifest destiny,” “easy credit,” “economic freedom,” “self-made man,” “entrepreneur,” “no down payment,” “rugged individualist,” “you too can be rich,” “free will,” etc. ad nauseam), Capitalism is the stench of burning flesh and rotting corpses; the shrieks of napalmed children; the despair of families evicted into the permanent degradation, filth, deadly danger of untreated disease and constant fear of enslavement by arrest or kidnapping that defines USian homelessness; the final agonies of maliciously abandoned patients condemned to death by the deliberately genocidal costs of health care. (¶)-Ultimately Capitalism is the boundless Evil of global dictatorship by the Christian white male One Percent, a tiny, ruthless cabal of Capitalist aristocrats for whom infinite greed is ultimate virtue and for whom the snuff-film sadism of class warfare provides the ultimate entertainment. Under Capitalism's Fukushima-deadly, Ayn Rand credo of serial-killer moral imbecility – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us – these obscenely wealthy despots now impose on us their increasingly overt paradigm of Nazi governance. Not that We the (formerly exempt) People should be surprised; the merciless regimen that is now ours is how the Capitalists have always tyrannized our sisters and brothers in America's First Nations, in the USian ghettos and in all the Capitalist victim realms abroad. (¶)-Moreover much of our plight is of our own making. We the People long ago surrendered to our Capitalist overlords. We submit to denial of health care that is everywhere else on this planet deemed a human right; we submit to enslavement by debt; to the outsourcing of our jobs; to bankruptcy; to foreclosure; to eviction and homelessness; to imprisonment in numbers hitherto unequaled in human history; and most of all to the biggest Big Lie of all – the suicidal delusion we somehow remain free despite the Capitalists' no-longer-deniable theft of our liberty and their snickering revocation of the few prefaces to economic democracy our now-powerless unions had once managed to win. Our confinement is ensured, not just by our cowardice but by the invisible but inescapable cage of total surveillance: the electronic barbed wire that has reduced our entire planet to a monstrous concentration camp. (¶)-Cast off as “surplus human capital” when we are deemed no longer exploitable for profit, we are then methodically exterminated. We are slaughtered as cannon-fodder in the empire's endless wars of profit and conquest; we are murdered by the bullets and truncheons of the federalized and militarized local police; we are fatally poisoned by Capitalism's malignant toxification of our environment; we are slain by denials of health care and social services that are in fact deliberate, euphemism-cloaked policies of slow-motion genocide.   (¶)-Meanwhile our overlords pornographically multiply their own wealth by knowingly destroying the planetary conditions upon which all sentient life depends. More recently – as if to demonstrate the infinite magnitude of their Evil by provoking unsurvivable thermonuclear apocalypse (and not coincidentally in fulfillment of a malevolent scheme by Adolf Hitler himself) – they have imposed on the Ukraine the anti-Russian war-mongering and anti-Jewish violence of an avowedly Nazi puppet government. And now, in the person of Donald Trump and his appointees, the USian tyrannosaur has come home to gorge on its final and terminally ironic meal, the denizens of Moron Nation itself, the people who by their prideful ignorance and hatefulness loosed this demonically insatiable monster on the entire world. (¶)-But in these times our ability to effectively resist is obstructed not only by the USian regime of inescapable surveillance, but by the dreadful undertow of Moron Nation's intellectual and psychological paralysis: the deliberate deceptions and outright ignorance fostered by the Capitalist “education” system; by Capitalism's “mainstream media” propaganda machine (which is owned by the same smirking plutocrats whose vassal politicians so gleefully oppress us); and by the physical and psychic terrorism of Capitalism's manufactured crises. (¶)-Yet resist we must. As always, art – sometimes even unwittingly – depicts our present circumstances and so foretells our future. And as it says in a breathtakingly apt, wrenchingly poignant anthem grown increasingly popular far beyond its video-game origin, “shadows fall and hope is gone; steel your heart; the dawn will come.”

For More Information...

Links relevant to Introduction

Fire Survivors

  • After the Demonstration Failed
    These are some of the very few photographs that survived the 1983 fire that destroyed my life's work, not just most of my pictures but nearly all my writing including three books in progress and all the associated research. Some of these photos shown here escaped the flames because they were with me in my portfolio case; others were produced digitally from negatives dug out of the rubble a year later. The images of obvious print-quality were made on DuPont Varilure paper, which had the highest silver content of all commercial papers and thus produced such intense tonalities, they often seemed illuminated by their own internal light sources. But that sort of photographic quality is now forever beyond our common reach, either gone like Varilure or so prohibitively expensive it is available only to the obscenely pampered dilettantes who produce the aesthetic pabulum favored by the One Percent. Photography as I knew it is dead -- as dead as my career was after the fire and its ensuing clinical depression -- but this body of work provides a glimpse of what was lost and what might have been. All photos copyright Loren Bliss.

Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit

  • Goddess emergent (1), 1968 (blue variant c. 2009)
    In photography, a sandwich is a collage made by printing two or more negatives simultaneously. Collage is a medium that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember -- probably since I was a child experimenting with finger paints, glue and newspapers -- but I never took it seriously until, sometime in my early 20s and still thinking myself a painter-to-be, I discovered the works of Jasper Johns. Now it seems to me making sandwiches is to conventional photography what poetry is to prose: not just an intellectual exercise, but the opening of a doorway to the Mysterious Otherness I know as the Muse, from whom (sometimes in fulfilment of that McLuhanesque notion of art as prophecy) the currents of real creation invariably flow, whether swift and startling as a lightening strike or slow and soft as cottonwood seeds adrift on subtle summer air. (Collage and photographic sandwiches copyright Loren Bliss 2009-2012.)

Graffiti: a Sampler

  • Gun Graffiti
    When I returned to New York City in 1965 I was immediately impressed by the contrast between the graffiti I had encountered "out in America" -- the South and Middle West -- and what I saw in Manhattan. While the form and content of graffiti is sociologically important – possibly a semiotic indicator without peer -- I found the graffiti of Manhattan singularly appealing, the intellectual and aesthetic equivalents of a long-overdue breath of fresh air, and within a few days I had begun documenting it with 35mm and 120 film. (The opening photograph of this series was obviously made far from Manhattan, but I included it to establish an essential contrast.) Many more details about this particular body of work, which I briefly resumed when I went back to the City again in 1983, then abandoned after that year's career-terminating fire, are in my post of January 7, 2010. Yes I regard the best urban graffiti as genuine art, but too much of it, alas, is nothing more than a human variant on the mammalian practice of marking territory with spurts of urine: "I wuz here." All photos by Loren Bliss, copyright dates as noted.

Faces of the Fight

  • Health Care For All!
    Supporters of health care reform and a much smaller number of health care reform's opponents -- each faction identified by its picket-signs -- gathered for the "town hall" meeting called by U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) in Lakewood on August 25, 2009. Originally set for Lakewood City Hall, the event was rescheduled and moved to Lang Stadium to accommodate an unprecedented mobilization of pro-reform people. Cops estimated the crowd at about 2500. Photos by Loren Bliss copyright 2009.

RELEVANT WEBSITES

  • Americans United for Separation of Church and State
    A vital website that is often our only source of accurate information about the terrifying effort to impose zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the United States.
  • Best Site for Suppressed Assassination Facts
    The late Mae Brussell was our most relentless researcher into the murder of President John Kennedy and many other such outrages. Her legacy is a damning list of the USian Empire's darkest secrets.
  • Best, Most Thorough Documentation on the CIA's Destruction of the 1960s Counterculture
    Ms. Brussel outdid herself in her nobody-dares-publish-it investigative report exposing how the CIA's Operation Chaos destroyed the 1960s Counterculture. (My assumption is the Agency, with its Ivy-League analysts and their knowledge of pagan mythology, recognized the Counterculture's anti-patriarchal, resurrection-of-the-Goddess direction, understood it as a far greater threat to Capitalism than Marxism and responded with the murderous efficiency inherited from Gestapo predecessors.)
  • Communist Labor Party
    Communism as it is evolving in the United States after the murder of the American Dream and the slaying of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy.
  • Communist Labor Party's Harry Bridges Club (Facebook)
    Communism as it is evolving in Tacoma, Washington.
  • Consortium News
    Superb reporting and analysis. Founder/Editor Robert Parry exposed Reagan's Iran-Contra scheming and has been persecuted by the capitalists ever since.
  • der Spiegel
    Mainstream German newspaper that is often a valuable source of news about Western European politics.
  • Global Research
    A genuinely independent news site -- neither definitively Left nor Right -- that often covers stories suppressed by U.S. Mainstream Media, which (let us never forget), is owned by the same One Percenters who own the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties and thereby control all U.S. governance at every level.
  • Gun Owners of America
    Fanatically hard-Right (and often ChristoFascist as well), it is nevertheless the best source for information about the One Percent's efforts to forcibly disarm the U.S. 99 Percent.
  • International Marxist Archive
    All of Marxism's defining texts defiantly uploaded to the Internet by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as its final contribution to humanity's eternal struggle for economic democracy -- without which there is no democracy at all.
  • Popular Resistance
    A daily newsletter featuring essential tactical and strategic analysis plus vitally informative reports of news suppressed by the "mainstream media" propaganda machine.
  • Rewire
    Probably the most in-depth coverage of women's issues, LGBTQ issues and general human rights issues available on the U.S. Internet today, bolstered by decidedly professional reportage and editing.
  • RT
    Formerly "Russia Today," it accurately covers U.S. news the "mainstream media" propaganda machine routinely suppresses. Its notable work includes the nation's best coverage of the Occupy Movement (2011-2012), and the ongoing struggles of Black Lives Matter, Water Protectors and other such groups against the Empire's now-openly-fascist policies of homeland governance.
  • Second Amendment Foundation
    Unmistakably conservative, it is also the best source on legal action in defense of our right to keep and bear arms.
  • Socialist Worker
    An informative Marxist website in the United States, with news reporting and analysis that is usually far superior to anything fed us by capitalism's "mainstream media" propaganda machine.
  • Southern Poverty Law Center
    Best source of information on the burgeoning plague of Nazi, ChristoFascist and KuKluxKlan-type hate groups in the USian imperial homeland.
  • TASS, the Russian Wire Service
    Vital reading, especially now that the USian Empire's plans for global conquest have rekindled the so-called Cold War.
  • Theocracy Watch
    Cornell University's in-depth source on the escalating campaign to impose zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the USian Homeland. It is flawed only by its refusal to recognize the Democratic (sic) Party's mostly clandestine collaboration with the openly theocratic Republicans -- a collaboration revealed in frightening detail by Jeff Sharlet's "The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" (Harper: 2008).
  • TruthOut
    Generally reliable crowd-funded news site sometimes featuring cogent sociological analysis by Henry Giroux. Discussion thread's potential limited by Discus, which discourages posting of comments written off-site.
  • Ultra Violet
    Perhaps the most powerful racially integrated gender-equality organization in the United States.
  • World Socialist Web Site
    The day's news, typically with the most in-depth Marxist analysis available on the U.S. Internet -- this despite constant interference by the Empire's privatized, for-profit censorship apparatus.
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Poor People

16 February 2020

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

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Posted at 07:51 PM in Antifa, Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Environmental crisis, Feminism, Guns: Forcible Civilian Disarmament, Healthcare, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, Humanitarianism, Identity Politics, Immigration, LGBTQ , Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Television, Transportation, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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11 January 2020

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

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Posted at 09:59 PM in Antifa, Austerity as Genocide , Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Environmental crisis, Feminism, Guns: Forcible Civilian Disarmament, Healthcare, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, Immigration, LGBTQ , Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Music, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Spirituality, Transportation, Web/Tech, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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08 December 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/8 December 2019

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Posted at 11:25 AM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Environmental crisis, Guns: Forcible Civilian Disarmament, Healthcare, LGBTQ , Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Poor People, Religion, Seniors , Web/Tech | | Comments (0)

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15 November 2019

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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Posted at 11:44 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Environmental crisis, Feminism, Guns: Forcible Civilian Disarmament, Healthcare, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, Identity Politics, LGBTQ , Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Mother Earth, Photography, Poor People, Science, Seniors , Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (3)

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06 July 2019

Bruce Dixon: a Relentless Warrior for Socioeconomic Justice

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

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

(...)

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

(...)

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

(...)

Every time he and fellow organizers made electoral advances, he said, the Democratic Party changed the rules to undermine them.
 
(...)
 
I once asked him whether the Greens might be better off putting their energy and resources into, for one, creating community gardens in major cities all over the country, and he responded that most of the community gardens he knew of had been shut down by those with wealth and power. There is indeed no sign left of Los Angeles’s famous South Central Farm, the largest urban farm and perhaps the greatest community organizing success in the US from 1994 till 2006, when it was bulldozed by a real estate developer.
 
(To read the remainder of Ms. Garrison's informative piece, go here. Please also read  "Bruce Dixon, in His Own Words," here, and "For Brother Bruce," here.) 
 
If what CounterPunch now acknowledges is the USian Empire's methodical, Final-Solution-type scheme of weaponized ecocide and genocidal tyranny -- the likelihood of which you read about first on Dispatches -- is ever replaced by genuine liberty, Bruce Dixon will most assuredly be recognized as one of the truly heroic figures in U.S. alternative journalism. 
 
Meanwhile, thanks entirely to the great generosity of friends and comrades, I am gradually getting back on-line, about which more later.
 
LB/5 July 2019
 
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Posted at 06:16 PM in Antifa, Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, History, Humanitarianism, Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Mother Earth, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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21 May 2019

Here's Some Recommended Reading I Hope You Already Read

MY SELECTIONS OF the dozen most relevant essays on the Internet recently (with capitalization as in the originals):  

Beware Trump's Sneak Attack on Social Security

 

The US war drive against Iran and the conflict with Europe
and
The U.S. Has Been Eclipsed in Every Sphere But War
and
Freedom Rider: U.S. Wages War Against the World
(and anything else on Black Agenda Report).

The Great Scandal: Christianity's Role in the Rise of the Nazis
(A thank-you to tigerlille1 for sending me this link.)

 

State Department to LGBT Married Couples: Your ‘Out of Wedlock’ Kids Aren’t Citizens

 

America's Reproductive Slaves
and
What Does a Post-Roe America Look Like? Many Already Living in It
and
The GOP Is on the Road to Mass Lockups for Women Who Have Miscarriages

 

'We Don't Know a Planet Like This': CO2 Levels Hit 415 PPM for First Time in 3 Million+ Years
and
Exposing the Dirty Business Behind the Designer Label 
and
Plastics Threaten Global Climate at a Massive Scale During Each Point of Lifecycle, Report Finds

 

IF YOU READ only one of the above essays, please make it  America's Reproductive Slaves -- linked again  for emphasis -- which exposes a hitherto-unrecognized motive for the anti-abortion movement. 

Should you read but two, please make Beware Trump's Sneak Attack on Social Security your other choice.

And please don't be misled by the badly written, subtly classist Common Dreams head; what "Sneak Attack" exposes is a new, potentially deadly threat not just to Social Security and Medicare recipients, but another offensive in the Neoliberal attack on every lower income person in the United States. That means any of us who are eligible for Medicare subsidies; Medicaid; food stamps; the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program; veterans' programs;  housing subsidies or assistance; Supplemental Security Income; wintertime heating assistance; and every other federally funded social service for those of us -- now more than half the national population -- who are officially impoverished. 

Sound familiar? It should; in ugly truth this threat is the Trumpian reanimation of one of the many treacheries by which Obama -- after portraying himself as the candidate of "change we can believe in" -- revealed himself to be Barack the Betrayer instead. Just as the Democratic (sic) Party repeatedly reveals itself to be nothing more than a Republican Fifth Column.

(For those of us too young to remember, a Fifth Column -- so named by a fascist war criminal -- is an ultimate weapon of subversion, betrayal and conquest.)

Because the abolition of social services is demanded  by Neoliberal dogma, the attack is unanimously  bipartisan, with the Democrats hiding behind a smokescreen of lies and disinformation as they perform their customary Fifth Column functions for the Republicans.

The assault's renewal arises from the properly disturbing fact the Trump/Pence Regime  has (again) figured out -- in yet another demonstration of the diabolical cunning that empowers its burgeoning evil -- how to shred the Constitution. This time the intent is to impose the gradual but ultimately genocidal termination of all social services precisely as demanded by our Capitalist, Neoliberal and ever-more-defiantly ChristoNazi overlords.  Who amongst us -- child, woman, man -- is not therefore a target?

LB/20 May 2019
 

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Posted at 11:06 PM in Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, History, LGBTQ , Marxism, socialism, Minorities, Misogyny, Mother Earth, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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29 April 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So endeth the lesson.  

***

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

Consider:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*** 

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

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

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

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

Weaponizing the Climate: Geoengineering's Military Potential

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ecocide?

Bear witness:

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

The Blue Ocean Event and Collapsing Ecosystems

How Much Ice Has Greenland Lost to Climate Change?

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

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

UK life expectancy continues to fall

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

First Julian Assange, Then Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Mister President: Your Abortion Spreadsheet Takes the Cake

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

US Gulf Coast still devastated six months after Hurricane Michael

States Are Trying to Stop Cities From Raising Minimum Wage

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

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

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

Arrests At London Climate-Change Protests Top 1,000 

***

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

An American Tragedy Is Unfolding in Our Classrooms

Officer Attack on Teen Reignites National Debate on Cops in Schools

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

The Death of Education in America

The Price of Publishing Independent Thought

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*** 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consensus Among GOP Candidates: Let The Planet Die

The return of the population bombers

Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability

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

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

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

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

Quoth the I Ching:

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

LB/28 April 2019

-30-

 

 

Posted at 11:25 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Healthcare, History, Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Mother Earth, Poor People, Religion, Science, Spirituality, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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16 April 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As disclosed by the Church Committee:

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Quoth  the 1971 Powell Memo:

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

A detailed analysis of the memo is here. 

***

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

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

Why the Assange Arrest Should Scare Reporters

The Assange Arrest is a Warning From History

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

RSN: The Railroad That Awaits Julian Assange

The Martyrdom of Julian Assange

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

Assange's Arrest Erases What America Suppposedly Stood For

Assange’s Indictment Treats Journalism as a Crime

Worldwide outrage over arrest of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange

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

*****         

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

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

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

In which context we should consider the implications of

The return of the population bombers

Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability , .

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

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

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

***

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

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

This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out

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

For some river towns, flood protection is simply too costly

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

Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth

***

Imperial War-Mongering for God, Profit and Sadistic Delight

Another African Convicted In Another Racist, Chauvinist Western Court 

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

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

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

Reckoning With Failure In The War On Terror 

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

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

Venezuela Prepared To Defend The Revolution Against US Imperialism 

 

***

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

US Denies Entry To BDS Cofounder Omar Barghouti

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

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

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

Trump officials discussed using troops to run migrant detention camps

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

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

Trump Reportedly Pushed to Drop Asylum Seekers in Democratic Sanctuary Cities

Trump's Transgender Military Ban Takes Effect Today

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

Wealth, Stealth, and Boeing

US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums

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

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

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

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

Police tower casts a shadow over South Seattle Safeway

Monsters Inc: They Treated Us Like We Were Animals

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

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

Scapegoating Unions For The Postal Service's Phony Crisis

Obama Pushes Neoliberal Myths on Health Care at Fundraiser

Homeland Security Purge Ushers in the Stephen Miller Administration

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

Right wing takes Wisconsin court seat in a strident hate campaign

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

Obama, Pelosi push Democrats further to the right

 

***

Religion and Spirituality

Trump Administration Lets Foster Agency Turn Away Catholic and Jewish Parents

Trump and the Global Rise of the Christian Right

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

 

***

Racism

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

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

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

 

***

Media and Censorship

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

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

On False Dichotomies, Real and Fake, at MSDNC

If You Have Alexa, Amazon Is Listening

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

Missouri Bill Banning Anonymity of Atheist Plaintiffs in Lawsuits Passes House

 

***

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

Turkey's Only Communist Mayor Scores Another Election Victory

Freedom Rider: Scoundrels and Reparations

AMNH Under Fire for Hosting Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro

Medicaid Work Requirements: Do They Actually Help?

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

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

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

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

Progressives hit attempt by Democratic Party establishment to crush primary challengers

A Reckoning for Al Sharpton and the Black Misleadership Class

Runaway Inequality Is a National Emergency, Billionaire Banker Warns

Tell Netflix: Speak Up for Women 

***

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

LB/16 April 2019

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Posted at 08:27 AM in Antifa, Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Disabled People , Environmental crisis, Feminism, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, Humanitarianism, Immigration, LGBTQ , Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Poor People, Religion, Science, Spirituality, Web/Tech, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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08 April 2019

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

(Note: The socioeconomic and environmental Apocalypse is undeniably upon us. But the lies, deceptions and betrayals promulgated by the One Percenters and their minions no longer hide how -- in accordance with their shock-doctrine -- they are using the Apocalypse to impose the ultimate regime-change: the reordering of human society into Neoliberal utopia: Ayn Rand opulence for our masters, serfdom and slavery for the few selectively bred 99 Percenters they allow to survive. The following merely adds to the preponderance of  evidence.)

***

Please Read These Next 3 Reports (Even If You Read Nothing Else Herein)
My recommendations as the past week's most vital reports, chosen for how the events and trends define our overlords' intentions and therefore shape our world, the U.S. Empire and the probable doom both of our species and our planet.   

America the Barbaric
The gleeful USian embrace of barbarism is no accident. It is instead an unprecedented national orgy of prideful self-fulfillment, its present horrors mind-boggling, its potential horrors far in excess of those inflicted on our species  by Germany c. 1933-1945.     

How the South Won the Civil War
To understand this is to understand how and why the U.S. Empire is not just "America the Barbaric" but also the de facto Fourth Reich.

The Death Penalty is Getting Crueler
See also: Supreme Court's Death Penalty Ruling Leaves Legal Experts Aghast plus earlier stories, US Supreme Court ruling guts ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” and Supreme Court Delays Buddhist’s Execution, but Not Muslim’s, Over Faith Adviser   As the ChristoNazi ideology of the Robbers' Court becomes ever-more obvious, so does its ever-more-slippery slope toward theocratic fulfillment of the Bible's innumerable examples of religiously motivated rape and divinely mandated genocide and mass murder including that children be stoned to death for disobeying their parents.

 

Ecocide: the Relentless ChristoNazi/Capitalist Assault on Our Environment
Obviously our Capitalist overlords know Mother Nature always bats last. Just as obviously,  that's why they're obstructing any effective action against Climate Change. They're depending instead on their wealth and mastery of technology to enable them to establish their Neoliberal (Neo-Confederate) dream-world even as the deteriorating environment kills off as many as  7.2 billion women, children and men -- 95 percent of the 99 Percent. 

CO2 Levels Are Now at a 3 Million-Year High

The Privatization of Wildlife: How Ted Turner Scored Yellowstone Bison

Paradise Lost: Reflections on the Camp Fire

Logging Is the Leading Driver of Carbon Emissions From US Forests

Free Market Solutions to Climate Change Aren't 'Realistic'

The Madness Driving Climate Catastrophe

Chernobyl's Disastrous Cover-Up Is a Warning for the Next Nuclear Age

Critics of the Green New Deal Are in the Pocket of Big Oil

Why Recycling Is a ‘Pseudo-Solution’ to Reducing Plastic Waste

RSN: Three Mile Island's Murderous Legacy Still Threatens Us All

Mozambique Floods Cover More Ground Than NYC, Chicago, D.C. & Boston

In Middle East and North Africa, Environmentalism Is Espionage

 

Imperial Warmongering for God, Profit and Sadistic Pleasure

In Vietnam, the Empire's methodology of global conquest was aptly summarized by the infantry officer who tried to mansplain the necessity of destroying  Bên Tre to save it for Capitalism and Christianity. Now -- having extermimnated whole nations to grant them such salvation -- the Empire is destroying the entire planet to save it for Jesus and his Wall Street puppetmasters.

The Pentagon Wins Again

UNICEF: A Child Dies Violently in Honduras Every Day

The CIA: Surprise, Kill, Vanish

Trump Administration Revokes ICC Prosecutor's Visa Over War Crimes Probe'

Venezuela Won't Become 2nd Syria': Lavrov Sure S. America Won't Back Military Invasion v. Maduro

To Ramp Up Fear Of Russia In Africa, NYT Downplays Massive US Military Presence On Continent

Why There'll Be No US-Russia Reset Post-Mueller

 

Miscellaneous Atrocities and Outrages
Random examples of the sneering sadism, brazen moral imbecility and police-state omnipotence by which our overlords amass unfathomably pornographic profits as they  methodically reduce us to corporate serfdom and penal slavery.

Why aren’t Boeing executives being prosecuted for the 737 Max 8 crashes?

Boeing CEO praised “streamlined” oversight of 737 plane that crashed in Indonesia and Ethiopia 

The bizarre story of the L.A. dad who exposed the college admissions scandal

ICE Arrests More Than 280 in Texas in Largest Workplace Raid in a Decade

Chicago Suburban Cops Call for Kim Foxx's Resignation Over Jussie Smollett Case

Identity Rules: A Report from Reddening Chicago

WikiLeaks warns that Julian Assange faces imminent eviction from Ecuador’s London embassy

The Border Patrol's Reckless Use of High Speed Chases Has Killed and Injured Hundreds Since 2015

US Senate fails to restore sweeping cuts to food assistance for Puerto Rico

New U.S. attorney on safe injection sites in Seattle: 'Don't go there'
Bad head: what the story says is the feds -- determined to exterminate junkies by any means other than overt (and therefore unfashionable) death-camp facilities -- will not allow safe, medically monitored self-injection sites in Seattle or anywhere else.

The South Dakota Legislature Has Invented A New Legal Term To Target Pipeline Protesters

GM Squeezed $118 Million From Its Workers, Then Shut Their Factory 

Centrist Dems Are Trying to Block a Universal $15 Minimum Wage
The Democratic (sic) Party demonstrates its faithfulness to its Republican overlords.

Wendy’s Owner Gives Big to Trump While Refusing Farmworkers’ Demands

Kids in Cages: Donald Trump's Brilliant Re-Election Strategy. Will It Work?
Ever more unabashedly ChristoNazi, the Trump-Pence Regime has already assured its re-election merely by institutionalizing the bottomless hatred and bigotry that has always poisoned the hearts of the USian white-supremacist majority. 

DOJ Report Finds Widespread Rape, Murder, and Torture in Alabama Prisons

University of Arizona Students to Face Criminal Charges for Protesting Campus CBP Event

Democrats Promised to Go After Trump's Taxes. Why Are They Dragging Their Feet?
Another definitive betrayal by the Democratic (sic) Party. 

Collusion in Plain Sight
Uninformative  head from Counterpunch; the report exposes how Mueller and the Democratic (sic) Party
methodically ignore the evidence of Trump's brazenly ongoing collusion with ChristoNazis, also with corporate criminals, banksters, mobsters. 

A Neoliberal “Wall of Values”
Another uncommunicative head from Counterpunch. The nonsensically titled report reveals the strategy and tactics by which the Neoliberals are demonizing -- and thereby neutralizing -- the Left whether pseudo or real.

How Trump appointees helped the makers of BOB jogging strollers fight off a safety recall
Occasionally even the Josef-Goebbels-wannabees of the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine report unpleasant truths.What better way to boost their credibility? But never forget the propagandist's trick of sandwiching  lies amidst undeniable truths.

Nancy Pelosi Believes in Nothing
As of 2015 -- the last year for which Open Secrets has made the data available -- Pelosi is the sixth wealthiest member of the House and the seventh wealthiest member of Congress.  Thus like any other Capitalist,  she will do whatever she deems necessary to preserve and enhance her own $101 million  net worth.

Arizona Students' Free Speech Rights Challenged in Border Agent Visit Protest

Intelligence Report Appeared to Endorse View Leftwing Protesters Were 'Terrorists'

Sitting Pretty on a Sinking Ship: Neoliberal Feminism
How feminism is co-opted -- perverted, actually -- to serve our Capitalist masters.

That Kiss, and Other Daily Indignities

Why Don't Schools Teach Children Morality and Empathy?

 

Sometimes the Racist Malice Is Too Obvious to Hide
Whether in a nation founded to preserve slavery or a technology invented to facilitate maximum surveillance and genocide, the  evil intent of its founders prevails until the nation and its technology are no more.

Standardized Testing is a Tool of White Supremacy

Former Louisiana Officer Wayne Welsh, Who Shared Racist Facebook Meme, is Now the Chief of Police

Report: IRS More Likely to Audit Those Living in Poor, Mostly Black Counties

NAACP Shows How Fossil Fuel Industry Manipulates Communities of Color

'Reasserting White Power': Behind the Psychosis That Gave Rise to Blackface

 

Media and Censorship
The growing realm of state secrets and the shrinking realm of what our masters allow us to know measures our descent from a charade of democratic process to the enthusiastic embrace of tyranny.  

Weaponized Social Media Is Driving the Explosion of Fascism

YouTube has done too little, too late to fight misinformation

Media Blackout As Israel's Largest Banks Pay Over $1 Billion In Fines For US Tax Evasion Schemes

NewsGuild-CWA journalists ask tough questions on Equal Pay Day

Irritating Facts About Korea that Many in the West Would Rather Not Know

Economic Inequality Could Spell the End of American Democracy
A telling example of how allegedly "alternative" media -- in this instance Truthdig -- soft-pedals the present crisis, steadfastly denying the fact the pretense of U.S. "democracy" ended on 22 November 1963. Thus by pretending (the charade of) democracy continues, they avoid confronting the necessity of revolution -- that for us, we the people of the 99 Percent, it's either socialism or extinction.

An unprecedented leak from Saudi Arabia exposes torture of dissidents

Chicago Elects First Black Lesbian Mayor—But Not All Progressives See It As a Victory
The malevolent purposes of disinformation and co-optation -- the strategy and tactics at which the Democratic (sic) Party is the all-time master -- is always creation of the confusion and delusion that facilitates tyranny.  

 

Healthcare
 This is one of two lost causes the ultimate combined  result of which will be nothing beyond another explosive increase in the fuck-it-why-bother-to-vote faction of the increasingly alienated citizenry. (The other lost cause is the quest for the restoration of net neutrality.) They are lost causes because neither universal healthcare nor net neutrality can ever be achieved in the United States by anything less than (hopefully nonviolent) revolution. Meanwhile...

Pelosi Accused of Deploying 'Most Dishonest Argument' Against Medicare for All

Behind Bars, Co-Pays Are a Barrier to Basic Health Care

 

Sparks of Anger, Murmurs of Rebellion
But absolutely nothing to indicate the emergence of effectively organized and disciplined resistance. 

Union Locals Build Support for the Green New Deal’s “Just Transition”

Rep. Jared Huffman is (Officially) the Only Openly “Humanist” Member of Congress

Boeing’s Homicides Will Give Way to Safety Reforms if Flyers Organize

Flood of Comments Shows Public 'Utterly Repulsed' By Trump Plan to Take Food Stamps From 750,000 People

(Standing Up) For Venezuela
Genuinely sophomoronic head rewritten to summarize the report's encouraging disclosures. But the question remains: will the U.S. succeed in its scheme to use Venezuela to provoke World War III? 

Out Of Patience: NYC Nurses Take On Hospitals For Better Staffing

Haiti At The Crossroads
Another bad head. What the story says is Haitians are approaching revolution -- but no one can be sure what kind. 

Wolf pack living west of Cascade Mountains for first time in decades

All Of This, We Have To Defend
Again another  uncommunicative  headline. What the story is about is how Mexicans are resisting Capitalism's misogynistic hatred of our Mother Earth and our natural environment.

Seattle's queer community finds refuge in nature

Tulsi Gabbard Is A Sheepdog, Greens Howie Hawkins Is 2020's Only Real Peace Candidate

Ms. Cortez Goes to Washington

Florida Sex Workers Demand Decriminalization After Massive Raids

Commonwealth v. Mohamed
An amazing story that, though true, could mislead us into thinking more than a tiny few USian ChristoNazis might be won over by reason.

75% of Scotland's Electricity Now Green; and All Cars Electric by 2032
It is with no small amount of ethnic pride I note the metaphorical chasm-spanning bridge suggested by two facts: firstly,   how my Scots ancestors were amongst the last peoples in Europe to surrender their minds to the enemies of the Great Goddess; secondly, that it is the Scots who are amongst the first to begin officially re-embracing her environmental dictates.  

Federal Judge Strikes Down Girls-Only School Dress Code as Unconstitutional

Belt and Road Initiative in Full Swing in Europe
Alas, making the U.S. Empire economically irrelevant --  precisely what China, Russia and the European Union are attempting in their own defense -- will neither save our environment nor protect us from a Capitalist cabal that lives and dies by the ChristoNazi slogan "Better Dead Than Red," the One Percenters' unequivocal pledge they will destroy the planet rather than surrender their unprecedented dominance. 

 

Stuff to Think About
Essays I respectfully suggest you read and contemplate.

Gender, Class and Capitalism

Freedom Rider: Remembering April 4th

American Exceptionalism is at the root of the Fake News Epidemic Attempting to Overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution

If Only He Knew: First, Assume Women Aren’t People

Surveillance Capitalism Is Destroying Our Freedom and Our Intimacy

Socialist Principles Have Always Been Part of Black American Tradition

LB/7 April 2019

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Posted at 03:52 AM in Antifa, Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Feminism, Healthcare, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, Humanitarianism, LGBTQ , Marxism, socialism, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Poor People, Religion, Seniors , Spirituality, Web/Tech, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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01 April 2019

SitRep #4: Revelations of Our Masters' Relentless Malevolence

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

***

Sampling the Indications, 25-31 March 2019

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

 

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

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

Freedom Rider: Julian Assange and Robert Mueller

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

 

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

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

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

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

The Coldest Spot on Earth, Melting

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

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

 

As the Owners of Their God Command

Brunei Brings in Death by Stoning as Punishment for Gay Sex

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Montana Senate Betrays Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

In Seattle, school segregation is actually getting worse

US detaining immigrants under highway overpass in Texas amid renewed crackdown

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

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

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

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

The Real College Admissions Scandal

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

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

Even for the West Bank, This Is a Shocking Story

 

Betting on the Bomb whilst Diddling with Its Thermonuclear Trigger

Xi Jinping tours Europe amid growing divisions between America and EU

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

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

Israel's Influence In Washington – 2019 Edition

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

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

Trump Admin Gives OK to Sell Nuclear Tech to Saudis

 

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

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

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

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

Russiagate and the 1980s Crack Epidemic

The Growing Threat of Online-Bred Right-Wing Extremist

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

The Real Working Class Is Invisible to the Media

Republican Party Says It Will Personally Target Reporters Critical of Trump

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

 

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

After fascist afttack, New Zealand government enacts gun control measures

A Closer Look at New Zealand’s Recent Gun Ban

 

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

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

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

Building Movements Through a Black, Queer, Feminist Lens

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

 

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

LB/31 March 2019

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Posted at 04:31 AM in Antifa, Austerity as Genocide , Books, Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Environmental crisis, Feminism, Guns: Forcible Civilian Disarmament, Healthcare, Healthcare as a right not a privilege, History, LGBTQ , Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Moral imbecility, Mother Earth, Poor People, Religion, Science, Spirituality, Weblogs, White Supremacy | | Comments (0)

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