Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

Bruce Dixon: a Relentless Warrior for Socioeconomic Justice

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

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

(...)

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

(...)

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

(...)

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

 

(...)

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

LB/5 July 2019

 

-30-

 

 

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
 

-0-

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-

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As disclosed by the Church Committee:

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Quoth  the 1971 Powell Memo:

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

A detailed analysis of the memo is here. 

***

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

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

Why the Assange Arrest Should Scare Reporters

The Assange Arrest is a Warning From History

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

RSN: The Railroad That Awaits Julian Assange

The Martyrdom of Julian Assange

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

Assange's Arrest Erases What America Suppposedly Stood For

Assange’s Indictment Treats Journalism as a Crime

Worldwide outrage over arrest of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange

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

*****         

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

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

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

In which context we should consider the implications of

The return of the population bombers

Neoliberalism and the Machinery of Disposability , .

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

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

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

***

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

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

This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out

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

For some river towns, flood protection is simply too costly

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

Saying Goodbye to Planet Earth

***

Imperial War-Mongering for God, Profit and Sadistic Delight

Another African Convicted In Another Racist, Chauvinist Western Court 

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

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

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

Reckoning With Failure In The War On Terror 

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

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

Venezuela Prepared To Defend The Revolution Against US Imperialism 

 

***

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

US Denies Entry To BDS Cofounder Omar Barghouti

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

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

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

Trump officials discussed using troops to run migrant detention camps

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

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

Trump Reportedly Pushed to Drop Asylum Seekers in Democratic Sanctuary Cities

Trump's Transgender Military Ban Takes Effect Today

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

Wealth, Stealth, and Boeing

US Workers Are Highly Taxed If You Count Premiums

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

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

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

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

Police tower casts a shadow over South Seattle Safeway

Monsters Inc: They Treated Us Like We Were Animals

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

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

Scapegoating Unions For The Postal Service's Phony Crisis

Obama Pushes Neoliberal Myths on Health Care at Fundraiser

Homeland Security Purge Ushers in the Stephen Miller Administration

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

Right wing takes Wisconsin court seat in a strident hate campaign

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

Obama, Pelosi push Democrats further to the right

 

***

Religion and Spirituality

Trump Administration Lets Foster Agency Turn Away Catholic and Jewish Parents

Trump and the Global Rise of the Christian Right

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

 

***

Racism

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

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

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

 

***

Media and Censorship

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

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

On False Dichotomies, Real and Fake, at MSDNC

If You Have Alexa, Amazon Is Listening

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

Missouri Bill Banning Anonymity of Atheist Plaintiffs in Lawsuits Passes House

 

***

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

Turkey's Only Communist Mayor Scores Another Election Victory

Freedom Rider: Scoundrels and Reparations

AMNH Under Fire for Hosting Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro

Medicaid Work Requirements: Do They Actually Help?

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

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

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

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

Progressives hit attempt by Democratic Party establishment to crush primary challengers

A Reckoning for Al Sharpton and the Black Misleadership Class

Runaway Inequality Is a National Emergency, Billionaire Banker Warns

Tell Netflix: Speak Up for Women 

***

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

LB/16 April 2019

-30-

 

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

 

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

CO2 Levels Are Now at a 3 Million-Year High

The Privatization of Wildlife: How Ted Turner Scored Yellowstone Bison

Paradise Lost: Reflections on the Camp Fire

Logging Is the Leading Driver of Carbon Emissions From US Forests

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

The Madness Driving Climate Catastrophe

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

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

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

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

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

In Middle East and North Africa, Environmentalism Is Espionage

 

Imperial Warmongering for God, Profit and Sadistic Pleasure

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

The Pentagon Wins Again

UNICEF: A Child Dies Violently in Honduras Every Day

The CIA: Surprise, Kill, Vanish

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Identity Rules: A Report from Reddening Chicago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That Kiss, and Other Daily Indignities

Why Don't Schools Teach Children Morality and Empathy?

 

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

Standardized Testing is a Tool of White Supremacy

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

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

NAACP Shows How Fossil Fuel Industry Manipulates Communities of Color

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

 

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

Weaponized Social Media Is Driving the Explosion of Fascism

YouTube has done too little, too late to fight misinformation

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

NewsGuild-CWA journalists ask tough questions on Equal Pay Day

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

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

An unprecedented leak from Saudi Arabia exposes torture of dissidents

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seattle's queer community finds refuge in nature

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

Ms. Cortez Goes to Washington

Florida Sex Workers Demand Decriminalization After Massive Raids

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

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

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

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

 

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

Gender, Class and Capitalism

Freedom Rider: Remembering April 4th

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

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

Surveillance Capitalism Is Destroying Our Freedom and Our Intimacy

Socialist Principles Have Always Been Part of Black American Tradition

LB/7 April 2019

-30-

SitRep #4: Revelations of Our Masters' Relentless Malevolence

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

***

Sampling the Indications, 25-31 March 2019

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

 

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

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

Freedom Rider: Julian Assange and Robert Mueller

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

 

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

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

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

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

The Coldest Spot on Earth, Melting

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

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

 

As the Owners of Their God Command

Brunei Brings in Death by Stoning as Punishment for Gay Sex

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Montana Senate Betrays Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

In Seattle, school segregation is actually getting worse

US detaining immigrants under highway overpass in Texas amid renewed crackdown

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

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

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

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

The Real College Admissions Scandal

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

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

Even for the West Bank, This Is a Shocking Story

 

Betting on the Bomb whilst Diddling with Its Thermonuclear Trigger

Xi Jinping tours Europe amid growing divisions between America and EU

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

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

Israel's Influence In Washington – 2019 Edition

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

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

Trump Admin Gives OK to Sell Nuclear Tech to Saudis

 

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

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

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

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

Russiagate and the 1980s Crack Epidemic

The Growing Threat of Online-Bred Right-Wing Extremist

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

The Real Working Class Is Invisible to the Media

Republican Party Says It Will Personally Target Reporters Critical of Trump

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

 

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

After fascist afttack, New Zealand government enacts gun control measures

A Closer Look at New Zealand’s Recent Gun Ban

 

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

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

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

Building Movements Through a Black, Queer, Feminist Lens

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

 

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

LB/31 March 2019

-30-

 

 

 

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Foreign-Owned Corporations Funnel Millions Into US Elections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America Is Exceptional—in All the Wrong Ways

Rep. Steve King Belittles Hurricane Katrina Victims for Needing Help

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

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

 

*****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****

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

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

*****

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

*****

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

          *****          

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

*****

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

LB/25 March 2019

-30-

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obviously I would choose the latter were I able. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*****          

(I). Our Mother Earth as an Abused Woman

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

In the Deepest Ocean Trenches, Animals Eat Plastic

Iconic Forests Reaching Climate Tipping Points in American West

Nothing resolved as Flint water crisis nears fifth anniversary

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

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

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

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

Flint water crisis claims its youngest Legionnaires’ victim to date

Measles outbreak in Ukraine claims eight lives

Popular Brands Of Beer And Wine Found To Contain Glyphosate Weedkiller

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

Game Over? Report Card on Our Planet’s Environment

 

(II). Dithering as Denial

The Environmental Implications Of A Trump Presidency

Dianne Feinstein Says No to the Green New Deal

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

Top Democrats Are Enabling Climate Catastrophe

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

Democrats Wasting Time While Our Climate Burns

 

(III). The Apocalypse Is Already Upon Us 

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

American Exceptionalism: The Naked Truth

The New York Times Won't Stop Pushing Crank Economics

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

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

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

Democrats Not Backing Medicare For All

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

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

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

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

The Most Harrowing Revelation of the Cohen Hearing

Corporate and “Progressive” Democrats Threaten Medicare Itself

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

Joe Biden Has a History of Racist Comments

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

Immigrants endure inhuman conditions at ICE prison in New Jersey

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

Torture Fans and War Criminals Determine US Foreign Policy

Pelosi dismisses efforts to impeach President Trump

Free dental clinic draws hundreds in Nashville, Tennessee

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

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

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

Nearly 200 Immigrants in Texas Detention Facilities Have Mumps

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

Pity the Nation: War Spending Is Bankrupting America

No charges for Sacramento police officers who murdered Stephon Clark

Fascism by Another Name

The Global Assault on Indigenous Peoples

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephon Clark Killed Twice by U.S. imperialism

President’s Budget Targets Key Health Care Programs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientist Who Resisted Censorship of Climate Report Lost Her Job

The criminalization of environmental protest in Trump’s America

 

(IV). Their God Demands They Rape Our Mother⁵

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

Giving The Bomb To Saudi Arabia's Dr. Strangelove

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

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

Southern Baptist Convention Grapples With Sexual Abuse Report

Cuba's Evangelical Alliance Leads Crusade Against Gay Marriage

With Trump, White Protestantism Hits Rock Bottom

United Methodists Fracture: LGBT Plan Rejected - The Atlantic

The Cult of the Good Christian Woman

Anti-Vaxx Mobs: Doctors Face Harassment Campaigns on Facebook

Revealed: AmazonSmile Helps Fund Anti-Vaccine Groups

Abortion Restrictions Sweep Through GOP-Held Legislatures

Saudi Women Activists Stand Trial in Criminal Court

Trump Administration Rolls Out Implementation Plan for Transgender Military Ban

The Kansas Bomb Plot: What Has the Media Missed?

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

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

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

The shadowy network shaping Trump’s anti-immigration policies

The EPA and Evangelical (Anti)Environmentalism

Trump: The most anti-science president ever?

 

(V). A Few Vernal Sprouts of Wishful Thinking

Climate Change Could End Washington’s Global Dominion

FOCUS: A Future Without Fossil Fuels?

How long can we keep dodging nuclear war? 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Rethink Activism in the Face of Catastrophic Biological Collapse

Researchers: Violence, War And Climate Change Are Linked

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

It’s the Green New Deal or Else

Extinction Rebellion: “Green” capitalism versus world socialism

The Youth Climate Strike and the fight against global warming

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

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

 

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

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

How Republicans came to embrace anti-environmentalism

Joining the dots: women, environmentalism and neoliberalism

What is Neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism's Dark Path to Fascism

How Neoliberalism Is Normalising Hostility

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

Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals

Neoliberalism is to blame for stalled climate action

The Secret Threat That Makes Corporations More Powerful Than Countries

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

Our Mania For Hope Is A Curse

In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves to Grieve

 

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

How to Spin Wool (with Pictures)

Enjoying Horseback Archery Adventures of the Year 2017

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

Finding Freedom in a Frontier Life 

Making a Blacksmith Shop with No Power Tools

Western Science Is Finally Catching Up To Traditional Knowledge

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/25 February-15 March 2019

-30-

The New Year Births a Hefty Anthology of Provocative Reports

I DO NOT RECALL any week in recent years with as many vital news reports and analytical essays as have appeared in our national media – Mainstream as well as Alternative – since 6 January 2019.

Hence I will (again) set aside the story upon which I have been working – assembling documentation that a very few notably courageous Christians and Christian organizations are most assuredly not Nazis.

Nor are they members of the vast legions of (mostly white Protestant) believers who support

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Important note: news reports formerly published weekly in Dispatches are now published daily on the Facebook page of the Tacoma (Harry Bridges) Chapter of the Communist Labor Party. Most are stories suppressed or downplayed by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM), the world's first private, for-profit version of Nazi Germany's Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Therefore please check this page at least once per day for vital information. Thank you.

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the Nazi coup by remaining silent (and thereby functioning as silent partners) in the face of the Nazis' ever-more-brazen tyrannies and ever-more-ruinous atrocities.

Instead the heroic Christians about whom I am writing generally regard their Jesus as a humanitarian revolutionary. Hence they are -- albeit in their own ways -- as much a part of the anti-Capitalist, anti-ChristoNazi resistance as any socialist, Marxian or otherwise.

Because the core contents of this repeatedly delayed salute to Christian dissenters were assembled with major assistance from from a uniquely knowledgeable longtime Christian friend without whose informed guidance I could not have pursued the story, my obligation to complete it as soon as possible is as much personal as it is professional.

But now the press of real-time events (once more) demands I focus instead on some of the many developments that suggest the U.S. 99 Percent may at last be on the brink of evolving a genuinely revolutionary consciousness even as the last lingering pretenses of USian civil liberties are terminated forever.

At this point in our discussion it is therefore time we familiarize ourselves with Theodore Parker's oft-misquoted speculation that shrank into a shibboleth claiming “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

Our brief but revealing focus on Parker is essential if we are to recognize how his speculative error of historical interpretation has been manipulated into what may well be our species' most ultimately apocalyptic Big Lie.

For the bitterly defining historical truth of H. sapiens sapiens is the diametrical opposite of what Parker imagined: “the arc of the moral universe” – if indeed there is any such thing – bends not toward “justice” but toward Manifest Evil.

Especially since the talking-snake/fiery-wheel/burning-bush advent of patriarchy approximately 6,000 years ago, any alleged “moral arc” has bent overwhelmingly toward the ecocidal (and therefore genocidal) moral imbecility that fosters and defines the inescapably apocalyptic miasma in which we are all being suffocated today.

Our species' exceedingly rare attempts to change its apocalyptic destiny – a long litany of revolutions most of which have been methodically disappeared down the Orwell Hole and its precursors or at the very least ideologically neutralized – have all either been crushed, have failed of their own internal contradictions or are threatened by hegemonic forces of such omnipotence their defeat appears certain.

If any of our former pretenses of “democracy” are ever to be resurrected as genuine civil liberties, the physics of history suggest it can only happen as a result of socialist revolution, most likely in some post-apocalyptic cultural reordering of the Imperial Homeland into as many as 13 separate nations. (For additional details go here, here, here and here; also google, without quotation marks, “cultural regions of the United States” and “Raymond Gastil cultural regions of the United States.”)

Meanwhile, the most obvious of the aforementioned Nazi atrocities is the Trump/Pence Regime's ongoing (and uniquely malicious) government shutdown/lockout, which I have believed from the beginning is intended not to force construction of a border-wall but instead to legitimize the “national emergency” essential to suppressing the last remnants of the Empire's epic 244-year Big Lie of “American Democracy." (See also here and here.)

To present this collection of informative material in the most concise and quickly accessible form, I am (to the extent space allows) relying on original headlines rather than my own paraphrasing to bolster my routine selections of definitive text. These original headlines are set off by quotation marks; those without quotation marks are my own revised titles, in every instances abbreviated to fit Dispatches' style of limiting the heads on individual reports to a single line of boldface type.

I am also – again in the interest of brevity – eliminating all but the most essential comments.

*****

Please-Read Background Material Essential for Perspective

“The Roots of Fascism and the Seeds for Its Defeat”

With the rise of the right internationally, there has never been a more pressing need for clarity about the roots of fascism, its history, and why and how it can be defeated.

Among the clearest thinkers on this subject is German socialist Clara Zetkin, whose writing on the topic has been republished thanks to the work of Mike Taber, John Riddell and Haymarket Books.

(snip)

Zetkin is well-known...for her Marxist analysis of women’s oppression and helping to found International Women’s Day in 1910.

(snip)

Alongside (Rosa) Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Zetkin was part of many of the key debates within the SPD, including those with another leading member, Eduard Bernstein, which pitted the socialist vision of a revolutionary transformation of society against Bernstein’s idea that socialism could be achieved by a series of reforms.

Zetkin’s struggle against reformism within her party continued in the lead-up to the First World War, as she argued along with a revolutionary minority for the SPD to take a strong anti-imperialist position, including opposition to colonialism and the arms race, and a call for mass action to block the coming war...

***

“Two Populisms, Not One”

Two very different “populisms"... have arisen in response to neoliberal capitalism in the West.

A left-leaning social-democratic “progressive populism” targets the Capitalist concentration of wealth and power and the unbridled pursuit of private profit as enemies of the people and the common good.  This populism is egalitarian and radically democratic.  It tends towards socialism.  Its attractive policy agenda, supported by working-class majorities, includes the downward distribution of wealth, the expansion of the social safety net, university quality health care, increased minimum wages and union power, public jobs programs, and the protection of livable ecology (a Green New Deal).

(snip)

Then there’s the reactionary anti-cosmopolitan nationalist “populism” of the right...

***

“The Working Class and the Environmental Crisis”

Perhaps the stupidest slander among the many hurled at the Yellow Vest movement in France by the corporate media is the claim that the workers involved in militant protests over social inequality, poverty and low-wage jobs are opposed to environmental concerns because they balked at the gas tax imposed by President Emmanuel Macron.

The New York Times, which has regularly circulated such smears, carried an op-ed column...under the headline, “Is Environmentalism Just for Rich People?” Written by Dr. Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at Colby College in Maine, the column claims that the Yellow Vest protests “are making environmentalists nervous”...

(snip)

Gross directly compares the Yellow Vests to workers in the United States: “As with working class support for the faltering coal industry in the United States, the question arises: Is environmentalism a boutique issue, a cause only the well-off can afford to worry about?” He cites a supposedly “landmark” 1995 sociological study showing that support for environmentalism is strongest in the higher income brackets, because “citizens were apt to prioritize environmental concerns only if they were rich enough not to have to fret about more basic things like food and shelter.”

***

"The Political Economy of Fascism”

For all of the millions of words written about the fascist danger posed by Donald Trump, there are very few devoted to an actual analysis of fascist economics both as ideology and state policy. Instead there is a fixation on marchers in Charlottesville chanting “blood and soil” or other Nazi era memes. Before considering whether people like Donald Trump or Steve Mnuchin seek to impose a fascist dictatorship on the USA, it might be useful to take a look at some of the demands found in the Manifesto of the Fascist party founded by Benito Mussolini in 1919 that was co-written by labor syndicalist Alceste De Ambris and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the author of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto that had a powerful impact on Russian art in the 1920s.

***

“Undemocratic by Design”

Despite his reputation as a scourge of religion and a herald of its death under capitalism, Marx saw traces of its cunning persistence in the secular dynamics of the market. Religion, he declared in the Communist Manifesto, would succumb to the pecuniary logic indispensable to the success of capitalist enterprise. The rage to accumulate ensured that all “heavenly ecstasies” would be “drowned in the icy waters of egotistical calculation.” Yet Marx marveled elsewhere at the “divine power of money”—its power to perform (and induce us to accept) the most perverse acts of moral and metaphysical sorcery. In our business civilization, money not only mediated access to life’s necessities but also determined the parameters of reality itself. From the mercenary standpoint of the market, “if I have the vocation for study, but no money for it, I have no vocation. Thus money, Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, “is the god among commodities.” Divinity had not expired, but relocated. Capitalism promoted what the theologian William Cavanaugh might call a “migration of the holy.”

***

“The Networks Blew the Call on Trump's Planned Speech”

There would have been crystal-clear precedent for their turning him down: In 2014, when Barack Obama gave a speech on his immigration-policy plans, neither CBS nor NBC nor ABC aired it live, on the argument that circumstances made the message “too political.” A closer parallel would be hard to find.

There was also a clearly unprecedented reason not to carry the speech: namely, that nearly everything Trump says on this topic is intentionally inflammatory and either carelessly or deliberately untrue. Politics always involves spin and selective emphasis, but the networks would know for sure ahead of time that they were using their resources to advance untruths.

But the networks said yes, they’ll presumably air the speech, and the question now is what else they can do to cope with the reality of an office holder who doesn’t care that he lies.

Comment: The significance of this report – and the reason it is included not only in Dispatches but here in this vital-background section – is that the One Percenters own all the networks. Which makes their morally imbecilic pandering to Trump's demagoguery incontrovertible proof he is our Capitalist overlords' hired gun – the socioeconomic hit man chosen to drown all the federal government's humanitarian functions in Grover Norquist's proverbial bathtub.

*****

And Now On to the Week's More Indicative News Reports

“The Election Circus Begins”

It is January 2019. This signals the start of the 2020 election circus. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the first big-name Democrat on stage. But we will soon be deluged with candidates, bizarre antics and endless commentary by fatuous TV and radio pundits. The hyperventilating, the constant polling, the updates on who has the largest campaign war chest, the hypothetical matches between this hopeful and that hopeful, the mocking tweets by Donald Trump, will, as we saw in the 2016 election campaign, have as much relevance to our lives and political future as the speculation on cable sports channels about next year’s football season. This farce takes the place of genuine political life.

It costs a lot of money to mount this spectacle. Our corporate masters, like the oligarchic rulers of ancient Rome who poured money into the arena as they stripped the empire and its citizens of their assets, are happy to oblige. The campaign sustains the fiction of a democracy and gives legitimacy to the corporate state...

*****

“Don’t Speak, Memory: Resistance Apes Trump in Weaponizing Amnesia”

...Trump (Tweeted) the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in order to fight Islamic terrorism. But (Rachel) Maddow assures us, in great detail, that no one, anywhere...has ever advanced the notion that the Soviet incursion had anything to do with terrorism. In fact, (she claims) the only place in the history of the world in which this notion has ever been bruited is — of course — Putin’s Kremlin, which is planning an official “reassessment” of the Afghan invasion. (Which, rest assured, is not all like the “reassessment” being done by our stalwart Resisters today of the murderously criminal regime of George W. Bush.)

(snip)

Yet if I may paraphrase the great Ronald Reagan — whom that fightin’ progressive Nancy Pelosi favourably cited in her first speech as Speaker this week — facts are stubborn things...

When the Soviets went in, their claim that the US was backing Islamic terrorists was widely dismissed as empty propaganda. But it was later confirmed, cheerfully, by the very architect of that policy, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who told Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998 that he persuaded Jimmy Carter to secretly arm and support the jihadis precisely in hopes of provoking a Soviet incursion.

*****

“Trump Can Relate … and So Can MSNBC’s Stephanie Rhule”

It’s always interesting when members of the ruling-class reveal their cluelessness about the lives of ordinary working people. Sometimes it can cost them dearly in the political realm.

*****

“Court Uses Law's Absurdity to Allow Unfit Kavanaugh to Remain...”

It took the eight judges of the Tenth Circuit Judicial Council just over two months to decide to do nothing about any of the 83 misconduct complaints against Judge Kavanaugh. Worse, the court’s order asserted in a strained legal argument that there was nothing that could be done legally about the 83 misconduct complaints against Judge Kavanaugh for one reason, and one reason only – because he had become Justice Kavanaugh. That’s the whole argument: that Kavanaugh gets to escape judicial accountability, and his getaway car is his seat on the Supreme Court...

*****

“Trump Considers Stealing Money From PR Disaster Relief to Fund Wall”

As the shutdown drags on, President Trump’s ideas about how to secure funding for his absurd border wall are becoming more and more villainous. His newest strategy? Using $13.9 billion in Army Corps to build a segment of the wall, according to NBC. That money would otherwise go to fund projects in Puerto Rico and other disaster areas.

*****

“Banksters Get Shutdown Relief after Appeal to Trump Regime Officials”

After an intense lobbying campaign by the mortgage industry, the Treasury Department this week restarted a program that had been sidelined by the partial government shutdown, allowing hundreds of Internal Revenue Service clerks to collect paychecks as they process forms vital to the lending industry.

Comments: (1)-No quotation marks on this head because I had to rewrite it to fit the Dispatches format. (2)-From The Washington Post, a major player in the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine, linked here only because Amazonfǖhrer Jeff Bezos and his wholly owned reportorial steno-bots momentarily switched off their Josef Goebbels news values and scooped the world on this story.

*****

Four Vital Essays from Black Agenda Report

(To which I link so often because it is among the very few truly Leftist websites here in the United States. Hence – unlike Reader Supported News – it is methodically targeted by the forces of oppression.)

“Raising the Bar on a Green New Deal”

Our place as Greens, as leftists generally...is not to whine about how the Democrats stole our Green New Deal slogan and slapped it onto their half-assed efforts to appear responsive to the looming crises around us. What we did is we managed to raise the bar.

***

“Ocasio-Cortez, Socialism, War and Austerity”

It’s good that there are now plenty of young people that like the idea of socialism. But if they don’t really know what socialism is, they also don’t know what capitalists will do to resist it...(they) have no idea what kind of capitalist enemy they are up against, but if they keep pricking it, they will soon find out. The Lords of Capital are in their end-game. The next moves are for keeps.

***

“Freedom Rider: Phony Resistance Can’t Beat Trump”

The Democrats are making news after being sworn into the 116thCongress as the majority party in the House of Representatives. The media give great attention to the increase in the numbers of women, Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and Muslim members, and of course Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The first ever Palestinian-American member made news by calling president Trump a “mother fucker.” But as a character on an old television commercial asked, “Where’s the beef?”

***

“The Diversity Hustle”

Identity politics is nothing but a diversity hustle. For the record, it’s not only Democrats who use this scam to get elected, Republicans deploy the same game of grievance and feigned concern to wield power and dupe their constituents. After all, Trump got elected President by treading on the hopes and frustrations of his supporters the same way that Barack Obama hoodwinked his believers...

Comment: Though I am not African-American, Black Agenda Report nevertheless articulates my own viewpoint more often and more bluntly than any other publication I have yet encountered, whether in print or on the Internet. The four BAR essays linked above are therefore as exemplary personally as they are professionally. Thank you, BAR, for being; more to the point, thank you for being whom and what you are.

*****

Plus Even More Relevant News and Analysis

“Marching Towards a Fighting Women’s Movement”

From the beginning, the Trump administration has waged a ruthless assault on women — from our right to workplaces free of sexual harassment to the ability to make our own decisions about reproductive rights.

It was hardly a surprise that, once in office, the candidate who was exposed on tape bragging about sexual assault would also be the president who denied the claims of survivors and nominated Brett Kavanaugh, an opponent of abortion also accused of sexual violence, for the Supreme Court.

Since the 2016 election, Trump and the conservatives who emboldened by him have acted like they have a mandate, running roughshod over abortion rights...

(snip)

But at the same time, Trump and the right wing that loves him haven’t gone unopposed.

*****

“The Limits of Social Democracy Will Test the US Left”

There is an inherent paradox in social democracy: It exposes social programs to the power of private capital, even as it tries to protect them from it.

*****

“Five Forces Driving the Rise of Fascism in 2019”

We start out 2019 with neo-fascists and assorted other “populists” and ethnonationalists holding office in 11 European nations and scoring recent double-digit vote tallies in Finland, Sweden, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands. Marine Le Pen’s French ethnonationalist National Front garnered one-third of that country’s 2017 vote for president. Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s governing PiS Party, described migrants arriving in Europe as being physically different than Poles, with an ability to carry “various parasites and protozoa, which don’t affect their organisms, but which could be dangerous here.” Duterte celebrated New Year’s Eve boasting of his childhood molestation of his family’s maid. Bolsonaro praised genocide against Native Americans and, on his first day in office, issued an executive order putting agribusiness interests in charge of Indigenous reserves. He also told a fellow member of Brazil’s congress, on the floor of that house, that she wasn’t good enough for him to rape and promised to jail his opposition. 2019 is promising to be ugly.

*****

“The Age of Technology Requires Us All to Re-Imagine Politics”

In this interview, (Jamie) Susskind discusses some of the factors contributing to the exponential integration of tech in our daily lives and how we can take control away from market-driven tech firms by achieving a greater understanding of the technology that surrounds us.

Comment: Bad head! What it actually says is the age of technology – that is, the fact human technology is at least 200,000 years old – “requires us all to re-imagine politics.” Indeed it does, though that is most assuredly another discussion for another time. What the head-writer should have written was “Today's Technology Requires Us All to Re-Imagine Politics.”

*****

“The Real Story Behind the L.A. Teachers Strike”

If Los Angeles teachers walk off the job January 14, as widely expected, it will be a meta-strike with extremely high stakes not only for teachers, students and parents in L.A., but for public education across the U.S. The stalemated negotiations over wages, class size, staffing and other issues matter – but they are proxies for an epic fight that has been playing out in American school districts for more than a decade.

On one side of this divide are those who believe that public education as an institution should be preserved more or less in its current form, with a greater infusion of money to address chronic underfunding and understaffing. On the other side is an array of forces that want to radically restructure public schools, and who have made it clear they do not believe that the L.A. Unified School District in its current incarnation is worth investing in – or even preserving.

*****

“In The Eye of the Beholder: USA History of Imprisoning Women Politicals”

The United States has imprisoned women dissidents from the beginning, even as a colony. The intolerance of dissent, of questioning the established order, began then and it has continued.

*****

“Bordering on Fascism: Scholars Reflect on Dangerous Times”

One of the president’s nicknames ought to be Orange Truth-Crush (OTC). Trump has been lying...on a scale that is simply off the historical charts from the beginning of his presidency and before. That’s because he is at heart a totalitarian. And totalitarians don’t just lie about a one or a few things on occasion. They lie about almost everything they can pretty much all the time. They do this to advance their own political agenda and – most dangerously of all – to undermine and exhaust the public’s ability to separate fact from fiction and truth from deception.

Think Big Brother in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: he informs the masses over and over that 2+2=5, that Love is Hate, and the War is Peace. Because he says so.

*****

“Who or What Brought Down Dag Hammarskjöld?”

Hammarskjöld believed that the Congo ought to remain one country, and toward that end he was flying to Ndola (just over the border of Northern Rhodesia from Katanga) to have ceasefire talks with Tshombe, in the hope of mediating a settlement to the conflict. Instead, his plane crashed in the darkness, killing fifteen of the sixteen passengers and crew aboard the DC-6. One security officer for Hammarskjöld survived for about eight days.

*****

“News Outlets Reveal Their Utter Contempt for the Incarcerated”

News outlets including NBC News, The Washington Post and USA Today drew criticism for stories that echoed frustrated workers and shamed the incarcerated for being served holiday meals. The articles quoted prison guards who were “bitter” that, as the government shutdown left them working without pay, incarcerated people were allowed to eat a decent meal or celebrate a holiday.

*****

“The Shutdown Is a Middle Finger to Our Civil Servants and National Parks”

This week, as the government’s partial shutdown drags toward what will soon be the longest in history, we’ve started hearing harrowing stories about those who are suffering because of President Donald Trump’s decision to close the government over funding of a new border wall. Federal workers cannot afford to pay their rent, food will go uninspected, battered women may not be able to access services, and everyone faces long lines at airports as federal workers call in sick or quit rather than work without pay. With a stormy weekend ahead, it’s clear that the real victims of the protracted shutdown are largely innocent people just trying to go about their daily lives in a country that once provided certain services in the name of democracy.

*****

And Now We Close With Maybe the Biggest Story Ever

“Repeated Radio Signals Coming from Galaxy 1.5 Billion Light Years Away”

The breakthrough is only the second time scientists have seen such a repeating radio burst. It both deepens the mystery and offers a potential opportunity to finally understand what might be throwing out the burst from a galaxy billions of light years away.

Fast radio bursts have been speculated to be the result of everything from exploding stars to transmissions from aliens. But they have remained entirely mysterious, with little evidence at all of where they might be coming from.

LB/13 January 2019

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Government Lockout: Neoliberal Moral Imbecility Wins Again

Putin Regime Reanimates Tsarist Russia's Theocratic Hatred of Jews;
Anti-Semitic Film Trotsky Encourages New Pogroms Much as T/P
Regime Encourages New Plague of Racist, Sexist Violence (See Below)

TO UNDERSTAND WHY the Neoliberals are murdering us and raping our Mother Earth to death -- and why the present government shut-down could become their deadliest short-term victory yet -- it is necessary to first acknowledge just how bottomlessly evil Neoliberalism truly is.

And to do that it is necessary to actually read a few treatises on Capitalist economics.

However I must confess this is a chore which for me is most often tantamount to suffocating myself in a bottomless miasma of boredom. Economics in the United States -- and probably

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Important note: news reports formerly published weekly in Dispatches are now published daily on the Facebook page of the Tacoma (Harry Bridges) Chapter of the Communist Labor Party. Most are stories suppressed or downplayed by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM), the world's first private, for-profit version of Nazi Germany's Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Therefore please check this page at least once per day for vital information. Thank you.

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everywhere else in the Capitalist domain -- is taught like old-time parochial school catechism, a no-discussion/no-questions/rote-recitation-of-greed-worshiping-shibboleths. And it was that way decades  before the triumph of Neoliberalism.

But because journalistic intuition recognizes the present, seemingly irreversible government shutdown as the newest and potentially most vicious fulfillment of the Neoliberals' determination to “shrink (government) down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub” -- I spent all of Saturday struggling through the numbing turgidity of economic papers until at last I found five essays on Neoliberalism sufficiently definitive to help us understand just how ruinously our overlords are fucking us and how they intend to profit by our suffering.

The first essay, of British origin, defines Neoliberalism by its consequences:

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions, that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counter-productive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve...

In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

The second essay rather thought-provokingly  tells us what Neoliberalism is not:

What we are confronted by now is not the threat of fascism but the long march of neoliberalism that began in the 1970s with the overthrow of Salvador Allende. Chile became a testing ground for the economic ideas of Milton Friedman, which soon became enshrined in both the USA under Reagan and Great Britain under Margaret Thatcher. After them, they continued to be carried aloft by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The goal of neoliberal economics is to extirpate all of the gains made in the 20^th century under social democratic or liberal governments such as social security or unemployment insurance...It has nothing to do with fascism and until we get that figured out, we will be next to useless careening from one antifa adventure to another.

The third defines Neoliberalism by its ever-more-murderous moral imbecility:

Neoliberalism is a vicious but cunning form of capitalism. And like all varieties of capitalism, it rests on a foundation of white supremacy. Neoliberalism’s goals are not merely privatization and the decimation of unions and the social safety net. It also seeks to manage the social order and ensure the continued political dominance of the ruling class by absorbing social threats. Sisters and brothers, your opposition to racist state terror is a major threat to the normal functioning (and thus the hegemony) of the neoliberal regime. To neutralize this threat and destabilize the most rebellious segments of the population, the corporate power structure aggressively propagates certain false assumptions among the public.

The fourth defines Neoliberalism by its methodical destruction of U.S. public education:

(N)eoliberalism... (replaces) the state with the market as a way to coordinate the economy...human relationships are forced to conform to an ideal of economic competition. The individual is transformed from a citizen into an independent economic actor... (by) massive tax cuts for the rich, the destruction of trade unions, a growing inequality of wealth, deregulation, privatization, unemployment and the decline of public services — with the exception of prisons and the military-industrial complex.

One aspect of...neoliberalism was to reshape the population’s understanding of the purpose of public institutions, such as schools and universities, to fit the corporate model...

The Powell memo’s plan was to: a) defund public higher education; b) then “save” the universities with ideologically focused corporate funding friendly to “free enterprise;” c) turn universities into corporations; and d) turn the students into consumers who became educated labor products. See also the update here.

The fifth and last essay tells us why the Neoliberals moved so swiftly to destroy Occupy:

Beneath the officially stated reasons for the often vicious and over-the-top, military-style municipal assaults on and break ups of Occupy’s camps lay a cold reality: city officials and police are beholden to overlapping metropolitan financial, corporate, and real estate elites, that is, to members, allies, and servants of the upper 1 percent that Occupy has with no small reason identified as the primary threat to public health, safety and democracy in the U.S. and the world. The masters and their metropolitan servants do not like...high profile symbols of how much their system has failed the American people (modern day “Obamavilles” that hark back to the ignominious “Hoovervilles” of the early Great Depression) or vibrant gatherings of energized people who seem to threaten to develop a life and culture beyond the wage- and salary- (and debt- and time-) slavery that is expected of the populace under the rule of capital...and...the longstanding corporate neoliberal agenda that serves and protects “the One Percent” -- the top hundredth of disproportionately Caucasian corporate and financial masters who own more than a third of the nation’s wealth and a larger share of its elected officials...

Note particularly the second of the above-linked essays. Please study it carefully and thoughtfully. Neoliberalism is not the same as fascism or Nazism; let us not be so blinded by fascist and Nazi atrocities to overlook the fact each dramatically improved their national infrastructures and by so doing provided millions of jobs to formerly unemployed workers.

In stark contrast, Neoliberalism does just the opposite. It unabashedly robs us and otherwise exploits us for no purpose beyond the fulfillment of our masters' unprecedentedly obscene and most likely terminal greed.

Neoliberalism, therefore, is best understood as a universal, government-enforced ethos of moral imbecility: Ayn Rand economics imposed on us with Ted Bundy savagery, obviously with the intent of reducing us all, via the Stockholm Syndrome, to the same serial-killer, snake-eat-crocodile sociopathy that defines our overlords.

(Yes, I am well aware the vast majority of my Marxian comrades regard the atrocities of Neoliberalism as “structural” and thus rebuke me for focusing on moral imbecility as Neoliberalism's ultimate origin. But in this instance I am compelled to reject their assertions as yet another variant of the always absurd chicken-or-egg argument. The fact remains -- proven beyond debate by the apocalyptic state of our world -- that just as one cannot become a Jeffrey Dahmer without first embracing moral imbecility, neither can one become a Neoliberal without first possessing the same anti-humanitarian mindset that defines serial killers.)

For two more recently exposed examples of Neoliberalism's atrocities -- these reported by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine in its sudden effort to regain a bit of its whored-away credibility and perhaps thereby reinforce the dwindling delusion of “American democracy” -- go here and here.

***

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING THE government shutdown is actually two Neoliberal coups simultaneously.

It is a lockout -- which is what happens when the boss shuts us out and denies us our paychecks in the hope the resultant devastation will make us more submissive to ever-intensifying tyrannies.

But for those of us who are required to work without pay lest we be punished for withholding our labor, it is unapologetic enslavement.

And our masters' defiantly bipartisan refusal to end the shutdown or even ameliorate its steadily worsening consequences proves they applaud the psychological havoc they are already inflicting. No doubt they believe it will “put us in our places” and shrink our growing rebelliousness into yet another episode of craven submission.

***

OBVIOUSLY THERE ARE at least three reasons reason the Neoliberals want to drown government in a bathtub.

One is that our overlords recognize the U.S. government -- for all its innumerable failings and deliberately genocidal atrocities -- has sometimes in the past, as in the Supreme Court's decisions on Brown v. Board of Education or Roe v. Wade,  managed to be the court of last resort for us, We the People, members of the Empire's ever-more-savagely oppressed 99 Percent.

And that protective function -- defending any of us against Capitalist atrocities -- could not be allowed in a genuinely Neoliberal nation. Hence the present-day Robber Court, which will never again allow the Constitution to obstruct white supremacy or misogyny or unlimited profiteering. Hence too the ongoing, eventually total destruction of the remnants of the socioeconomic safety net -- a long-range project given a huge boost by the lockout and its attendant subjugation and enslavement.

The second reason is that the government's function as the empire's primary denier of necessities for survival engenders precisely the heartfelt intensity of hatred, contempt and distrust of government and its bureaucrats that forever kills any widespread possibility of socialist revolution. Socialism is government -- and Neoliberalism's eternal uglification of government ensures its popular repugnance.

Reason three is the seldom-publicly expressed but nevertheless obvious Capitalist belief that corporate cabals are far more efficient than governments at reducing targeted populations to the modern forms of serfdom and slavery and -- when we are declared surplus -- to exterminating us without the embarrassment of death camps.

The consensus in every Capitalist boardroom on this planet is that government's only “legitimate” function is that of a goon squad, violently crushing resistance whenever it threatens to boil over into outright rebellion.

Let us therefore hope -- and if we are so inclined, fervently pray -- that the fully privatized, corporate-owned, for-profit Neoliberal future foreseen by so many of today's science fiction writers is a product of their loyalty to their corporate benefactors rather than of the prophetic function of art.

***

I THOUGHT THIS piece was finished until journalistic intuition again reared its oft-oracular head  and asked if the known victims of our 11 years of political murder -- President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Senator Robert Francis Kennedy, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder, Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, James Earl Green and Karen Silkwood -- were each slain to ensure Neoliberalism never again has any effective opposition.

Following this hunch with a 12-hour exploration of the Internet -- thank you, Muse -- I found many hints others were reaching similar conclusions. Here is but one example:

(N)eoliberalism helped foreign bodies gain access to these resources and sell them abroad without reinvesting in the country where they were extracted. Understanding this chain of events that started with the JFK assassination helps us answer an important question about today’s world order.

But no one dared say it so bluntly as I say it now: that in the imperial homeland, as later in U.S. Puppet Pinochet's Chile, murder was the primary tool used to to clear the way for the imposition of Neoliberal tyranny.

Actually -- something I know both as a historian and as a former U.S. soldier -- such atrocities are nothing more than standard post-conquest military tactics: kill any potential leaders of resistance who cannot be co-opted or bought off and publicly gun down at least some of their followers to underscore the message that resistance is not only futile but suicidal.

To paraphrase Malcolm X, thus the predators of Operation Paperclip and the Gehlen Organization come home from Lidice to roost -- and feed.

Which at least circumstantially links all these seemingly unconnected deaths -- the victims ranging from a president who was presumably the most powerful and therefore well-protected man in the world to a high-school student slain on his way home from a part-time job or a union member murdered in retaliation for her activism -- by at long last assembling them into a familiar pattern that now in retrospect seems both Occam's-Razor obvious and therefore undeniable.

Such is the utterly conscience-less Evil by which We the People are confronted.

*****

Meanwhile Post-Soviet Russia Re-Embraces Its Own Brand of Violent Bigotry

RUSSIAN TELEVISION MARKED the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution with the broadcast of an eight-part television serial titled Trotsky. Quoth its most harshy outspoken reviewers:

The series is an exhibition of the political, intellectual and cultural depravity of all those involved...No excuses can be made for anyone...who participated in this mixture of lies, pornography, anti-communism and blatant anti-Semitism.

(T)he Putin regime...openly promoted this film and welcomed its broadcast on Kanal Pervyi (the most prominent TV channel) as an official event...

Joshua Rubenstein, author of the 2011 biography Leon Trotsky, said...“I wonder what their intention is by putting an explicitly Jewish figure like Trotsky at the center of the story...If they’re saying that Trotsky was behind the execution of the Tsar [as the film suggests], that’s simply not true. Lenin and Sverdlov executed the Tsar… If they’re saying it was Trotsky, then I really question their motives because this is a very sensitive point. … Trotsky always wanted to bring the Tsar to trial and serve as a prosecutor...The Tsar is an honored figure by the Russian Orthodox Church—to say that a Jew was behind his execution is a very incendiary accusation.” (Emphasis added.)

Comment: A notable U.S. scientist for whom I did a bit of journalistic work during his final years -- he was a PhD biologist whose mother had escaped from Tsarist Russia in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1905 -- told me she had repeatedly frightened him and his brother by describing in detail the pogroms she had witnessed.  

The word is Russian; it means "to wreak havoc."

But his mother's most horrifying disclosure, he said, was that the Cossacks' favorite method of killing Jewish infants and toddlers was to anally impale them on picket fences and then bet amongst themselves on how long the tiny victims might remain conscious in writhing, shrieking, convulsing agony.

Significantly, the woman's two sons were each born in the U.S. after she herself had become a naturalized citizen and married an also-naturalized immigrant from Switzerland.

But while the boys were preschoolers, she often dressed them as Cossacks -- I have seen the photographs -- presumably to acquaint them with their Russian heritage.

Astounding.

*****

How Democrats Intend to Suppress the Sanders Campaign

National polling shows that the U.S. public strongly favors bold policy proposals that Sanders has been championing for a long time. On issues ranging from climate change to Medicare for All to tuition-free public college to Wall Street power, the party’s base has been moving leftward, largely propelled by an upsurge of engagement from progressive young people. This momentum is a threat to the forces accustomed to dominating the Democratic Party. Additional reportage here.

Comment: I doubt the Democratic (sic) Party and its Neoliberal owners will ever let Sanders be anything more than yet another Barack the Betrayer (and probably never more than a political decoy). But such reports are nevertheless significant for what they tell us about the terminal oppressiveness of the United States and its masters.

*****

Vengeful Republicans Kill Minimum Wage Hikes, Voter-Rights Expansions

Lame duck sessions of Republican-controlled state legislatures in Michigan and Wisconsin have passed dozens of bills overturning voter decisions in the November 6 election. In both states, Republican state administrations were swept out of office—narrowly in Wisconsin, by a wide margin in Michigan—but the state legislatures remain under Republican control.

While the most publicized actions have been politically motivated slaps at incoming Democratic governors in the two states, the most substantive and reactionary actions have been to effectively reverse efforts to raise the minimum wage and expand voting rights in the two states.

*****

NYC Steam Plant Explosion Looks Like Imagined Onset of Alien Invasion

Though it immediately evoked images of "an alien invasion" or the eerie opening scene of a "monster movie," the explosion that briefly turned New York City's skyline bright blue late Thursday night was actually something rather more conventional, but still cause for serious alarm and action: an electrical blast at one of New York's dirtiest power plants. (With scary photograph of the startling light show).

*****

Texas Persecutes Teacher-of-the-Year for Lesbianism

A former Texas teacher of the year, who has been on paid administrative leave since September after parents complained she was pushing a “homosexual agenda,” is suing the school district for discrimination.

According to the federal lawsuit, Stacy Bailey believes the Mansfield Independent School District put her on paid administrative leave, then offered to transfer her to a secondary school, because she is gay.

*****

Was Friday's South Sound 911 Outage Part of Much Larger Cyber Attack?

South Sound 911, the emergency service provider for Tacoma, was nonfunctional for a time Friday (28 December) as a result of circumstances that remain undisclosed.

Nevertheless, maximum kudos to the 911 operators, who notified by telephone the literally tens of thousands of us affected by the outage, provided us an alternative phone number to access emergency services and then, a few hours later, phoned us to announce the service was restored and asked us to please confirm receipt of the restoration message by pressing the number "1" on our telephonic keypads.

I can't imagine a larger city being so considerate of its population, so once again I am grateful for where I live and for the social services we Tacomans have thus far managed to save from Neoliberal theft and cancellation.

Other simultaneous computer failures -- including online access to the bank that holds my account -- leave me wondering if the South Sound 911 outage was yet another aspect of the much larger cyber-attack that shut down 11 major U.S. newspapers.

*****

Ralph Nader on Why We Desperately Need Canadian-Style Healthcare

Costly complexity is baked into Obamacare. No health insurance system is without problems but Canadian-style single-payer— full Medicare for all— is simple, affordable, comprehensive and universal...

Below (in the linked report) please find 25 ways the Canadian health care system is better than the chaotic U.S. system.

Replace it with the much more efficient Medicare-for-all: everybody in, nobody out, free choice of doctor and hospital. It will produce far less anxiety, dread, and fear.

*****

Eight LGBTQ Struggles the Mainstream Media Refused to Cover

If anything, 2018 showed that LGBTQ liberation is a long, drawn-out process that’s going to take much more than policy change and a narrow focus on one particular identity. The many queer and trans people who organized around LGBTQ issues over the past year also worked to curb capitalism, end deportations and challenge police violence — issues that affect marginalized people everywhere. Here are (the) eight battles...

*****

How New Jersey's Bergen County Ends Chronic Homelessness

In order to receive emergency assistance an applicant must provide proof that no one in their family is declaring them a dependent on their tax forms. Many young homeless are homeless because they are estranged from their families and not on speaking  terms. Applicants for emergency housing assistance must also prove that they are not eligible for unemployment benefits. If you are, and even if those benefits don’t amount to enough to pay rent and live on, you are nevertheless turned down for emergency assistance.

Social services personnel too often act as though their job is to find obstacles to providing housing rather than trying to make their services readily available...

If you are thinking that perhaps Bergan County can achieve this because of its small size, monotone demographics and remote location you could not be more wrong. Bergan County is located directly across the Hudson River from Manhattan, it is the most populous county in New Jersey (948,406); and its population is as diverse economically and racially as any similar American urban center...

Julia Orlando is willing and eager to assist others in ending homelessness in the communities where they live. She is available for consultations, conference calls and one-on-one meetings. Reach out to her at the Bergen County, Housing, Health and Human Services Center, 120 S. River Street, Hackensack, NJ 07601. 201-336-6476 (w).

*****

And in Closing, a Delightful Story about the Crickets Who Came for Christmas

Besides my wife, Briana, and I, our house is home to 5-year-old twins, a 1-year-old, three large cats, one beagle-basset mix and one lizard. There was only one place where I thought I could put the cricket box without it getting overturned or split open by a child or an animal: the bathroom adjacent to our kitchen. I put the crickets in the cabinet above the toilet and went back to work. For about 20 minutes, everything was quiet.

Just as I was about to file my story, I heard Briana, in the kitchen, utter the following words: “Where do these crickets keep coming from?”

In the name of the Goddess and all benevolent gods whether real or symbolic, a better 2019 to everyone!

LB/30 December 2018

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