Loren Bliss: Dispatches from Dystopia

(Note: given the outcome of Tuesday's election, I consider it a blessing I am terminally ill, according to my cardiologist doomed by post-Covid complications of heart and kidney failure to die before next September -- this despite the fact I was fully inoculated.  Though the I Ching, Runemal  and  the Marseille  Tarot all predicted in January 2020 the pandemic would kill me, I began to believe by 2023 I had misread these ancient  oracles,  which for me have always been uncannily accurate.  But in June and July of that year I was felled by Covid, abed 10 days with scorching fever and 12 days more for recovery, then learned it had fried my heart and irreparably damaged my kidneys. Thus I will most likely escape the horrors of Trump's promised New American Holocaust.)

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As I was allowed to suggest via a New York Times comment thread this morning (8 November 2024), 'I think if we want a truly accurate picture of our domestic future -- financial, political, sociological -- we need look at the Pinochet Regime in Chile. (I say this not only because Elon Musk's pledge of "economic hardship" echoes the neoliberal "shock treatment" Pinochet imposed on Chile, but because of the incoming regime's promises of ideological transformation and vengeance.)'  (Links added for DfD readers.) Needless to say, this puts a powerful imprimatur on the following analysis.  

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WHILE THIS REPORT'S  headline may strike some readers as a bit over the top, it will do so only because so much of the capitalists' Mainstream Media Machine, the world's first privately owned, for-profit re-creation of Josef Goebbels' Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda), has already been intimidated into radically downplaying the ecogenocidal counter-revolution President-Elect Donald Trump has promised his violently hateful, lynch-mob-minded legions of supplicants  and storm-troopers.  In terrible truth, the campaign oratory of Trump, his Vice-President-Elect JD Vance and their fanatical henchmen justifies every word within this rightfully terrifying text. That's why it's so copiously footnoted by links.  Trump's republic-killing pledges, including his promise to sic the military on "enemies within" -- presumably anyone who dares even the slightest criticism of his policies and edicts -- is documented here. Other campaign promises are detailed here and here. Even without the unabashed Christonazification proposed by Project 2025,  the implications of these promises rationally evoke unprecedented anxiety.

Try as I might, I cannot banish my fear that Trump is the end, forever, not only of the American experiment in democracy, but of any realistic hope for saving our species from extinction or preserving our Mother Earth from permanent reduction to Precambrian lifelessness.

To The New York Times editors' attempt to reassure the world all is well because "the long-term fate of American democracy...remains in the hands of the American people,"¹  I can only reply  it was those very hands that have imposed the apocalyptic cancer of Trump on the nation and the world, not once but twice. These editors, normally far more usefully insightful, have somehow chosen to echo the misguided optimists who maintained the Germans had surely tasted sufficient democracy in the Weimar Republic to prompt them to eventually oust Hitler.  But the Original Nazism proved so compelling that stopping its reign of unspeakable atrocities would never have been accomplished without the indescribable heroism of the Red Army. As Ernest Hemingway is alleged to have said: "Anyone who loves freedom owes such a debt to the Red Army that it can never be repaid.”² The Soviet Union's  monumental sacrifice -- a death-toll present research is pushing toward 40 million --  is as vital a lesson in the requirements of humanitarian survival as any in our species' approximately 300-million years of experience. Yet now it is obvious the U.S. electorate has either tragically forgotten its message or -- more likely in the case of the Trumpite zealots -- rejected its validity.  The defiant re-election of Trump despite his inflammatory bigotry,  multiple felony convictions and relentlessly repeated vows of ecogenocidal tyranny prove today's Christonazism is no less seductively binding -- and blinding -- than Hitler's original. But this time there is no Red Army to rescue us from the resultant horrors.

Seemingly as much in denial as the Times honchos, Kamala Harris likewise seeks to reassure us, telling us "it's going to be ok." She tries to soothe us as if we were injured children fearfully awaiting medical intervention.  Never mind the overwhelming  evidence "ok" is the very quality Trump will steal from the collective future of the entire 99.9 Percent and violently rip from the individual futures of any of us who dare rise up to oppose him; Kamala says "it's going to be ok."    Never mind his co-conspirators' plans to outlaw unions,  rob women of their right to vote and repeal or diminish every other progressive  achievement that has defined  our 248-year history; Kamala assures us "it's going to be ok." And never mind an entire  universe of rival critics -- fiercely unapologetic Marxians and conciliatory united-front communists and democratic socialists and conventional progressives and radical pacifists -- all agree it was the Democrats' craven submission to the demands of  their capitalist puppet-masters  that passed the termination switch back to Trump and returned the doomsday keys to the Christonazi fanatics;  Kamala insists "the light of America's promise will always burn bright...it's going to be ok." Such is the Democratic (sic) Party's  post-election strategy.

Are we then so gullible  we'll continue believing  what we are repeatedly told, that Trump's terrifying triumph is merely the unfortunate result of the Democrats' mistaken judgement, that we are suffering nothing more than the temporary consequences of a series of well-intentioned strategic and tactical errors? Don't we comprehend what is being done to us? Can't  we sense the nation-wrecking malice in Biden's extended refusal to   resign his candidacy?  Why aren't we outraged by the infinite contemptuousness  so blatantly evident in the Democrats' carefully scripted effort to conceal the apparent feeble-mindedness that now --  with Josef Goebbels cunning -- does double duty to excuse the president's unprecedented malfeasance?  Why do we ignore  the overwhelming evidence the slaying of our 248-year-old republic is the  intended outcome of a predatory, multi-generation plutocratic operations plan that dates back to the 1930s and the scheme hatched by Hitler, Mussolini and our  capitalist overlords to enslave us all by nazification? Are we too numbed by trauma to recognize  the Trumpite triumph as tantamount to invasion and conquest?  Are we already too sickened  by neoliberalism's metastasizing moral imbecility to resurrect  the  empathy that fosters solidarity? Have we thus become too self-indulgent to embrace the discipline that forges solidarity into effectiveness? Are we too intimidated to organize sustained resistance? Are we indeed the permanently subjugated  rabble our predatory masters believe us to be? Have we truly surrendered to enslavement? Have we forgotten we're  the working class, the 99.9 Percent without whom human society can neither function nor survive? Will we ever  dare  rise up again to take back what is rightfully ours?

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(Note: the following is a substantially improved version of the comment I posted on the  World Socialist Web Site immediately after Trump's victory became overwhelmingly obvious.)

WHILE I AM not at all surprised by the Christonazi triumph, I am both surprised and terrified by the approval of a new American Holocaust implicit in the fact Trump is gaining reelection not just by Electoral College fiat but by winning the popular vote as well.

I can no longer doubt what I've hypothesized for several weeks on several comment threads, those of  NYT and the World Socialist Web Site included, that  the Biden/Harris candidacy was never more than the Democratic (sic) Party's most plausibly deniable way to throw the election to Trump, thereby fulfilling the Democrats' historically proven post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the Republican (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party and simultaneously completing the bipartisan, slow-motion nazification process tacitly approved by the Congressional grant of de facto immunity to the Bankers' Plot perpe-traitors in 1934. I hardly need say both are essential aspects of the capitalists’ scheme to expand and perpetuate what today we know as neoliberal tyranny.³

My hypothesis will be confirmed if Trump rewards Biden and Harris by exempting them from the mass arrests by which he promises to punish all his opponents. (Perhaps he will also exempt Obama, whom I long ago dubbed Barack the Betrayer, and whom I have long suspected the Democrats put in the White House for the clandestine, plausibly deniable purpose of resurrecting the fanatical racism that brought us to the present denouement.)

As to the toxic magnitude of that racism, and as to how Trump is winning the popular vote even in states where substantial majorities are approving pro-abortion measures, I believe the answer is implicit in the Pew-Poll data that shows 77 percent of the white adult citizenry⁴ in denial of the genocidal racism that was so overwhelmingly  obvious in Bush II's response to Katrina. I take this data as an accurate measurement of U.S. white-supremacist sentiment.  Thus there is a theoretical 77-percent majority of white women who are both pro-choice and enough vengefully racist to vote for a convicted felon who is also an admitted disciple of Adolf Hitler. The election results indicate they are voting away their bodily autonomy to enable Trump’s promised restoration of official white supremacy and simultaneously voting to regain and perpetuate their bodily autonomy via their home states' restorations of abortion rights. Obviously they fail to understand all Trump need do to impose a national abortion ban is yield -- as is his obvious intent -- to the  Christonazi demand to reactivate the Comstock Act,  which could easily be expanded into a national ban on all forms of contraception. It's former use as a weapon against the LGBTQ community -- which Trump considers part of "the enemy within" -- could also be resurrected.  And with Christonazi control of the Senate, there is no longer any possibility Comstock can be repealed. 

Significantly, regardless of the odds against its passage, the most recent Comstock-repeal effort was quietly sandbagged by the Biden/Harris Administration -- yet another proof of the Democrats'  clandestine function as the Christonazi Fifth Column, which I cite here as a lesser example of the penchant for treachery necessary to throw an election.   

And now -- 8 November 2024 -- it appears only a miracle can stop the Trump and his Christonazis from taking the House as well. This final viuctory -- terminal in every sense -- would not only give them absolute control of the federal government; it would end forever any hope the 20 remaining so-called blue states might be allowed to maintain sanctuaries that sustain women's autonomy and preserve the lives of those of us Trump and his lynch-mob followers target for deportation or extermination. Trump has already told us  he'll impose martial law to subjugate any cities or states that dare resist. To avoid demoralizing the national military by employing it for the mass  murder of fellow Americans, Trump will almost certainly order the long-term occupations policed by one or more of his his militia organizations, much as Hitler did with his infamous Death's Head SS.  These extended intrusions will undoubtedly replicate the horrors of unrestrained genocide that characterized the German presence in Poland, the western Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

Because the populations of most of the blue states are to varying extents  forcibly disarmed and often denied the ability to learn and practice marksmanship, they will never be able to organize effective partisan resistance of the sort that was mounted by the Russians, Poles and Yugoslavs. Nor is civil war possible.  Federalization of blue-state national guard units to round up immigrants, arrest dissenters and suppress protest demonstrations would place them under defense department command, subjecting all officers and enlisted personnel  to the Uniform Code of Military Justice,  with death-penalty offenses including mutiny and sedition. The defection of a guard unit to defend a state against federal invasion is not only outlawed by the UCMJ but prohibited by the surveillance that  inescapably monitors us all. The blue-state secession about which so many progressives have fantasized is thus also rendered impossible.  And it seems there is no hope whatsoever for aid from outside the country. Research indicates the U.S. is so feared and despised, no nation on earth  would be willing to provide the assistance necessary to restore its peoples' freedom  -- that even the remaining communist nations would rather see the U.S. destroyed than resurrected as a Marxian ally.

We have been voted  into the abyss; the apocalypse -- whether by world war, environmental rape or both -- is upon us all.  

Confronted as we shall soon be by a violently hostile domestic regime rendered technologically omnipotent by unimaginably advanced weaponry, forever robbed of our privacy by total surveillance, threatened by the regime's promise to criminalize even the most superficial expressions of opposition and severely fragmented by identity-politics divisiveness,  the only possible way we might yet preserve our humanity -- and perhaps also eventually arise to help save our species and preserve our Mother Earth -- is by defiantly building the solidarity necessary to collectively embrace Leon Trotsky's ideologically disciplined, no-compromise brand of world-wide socialist activism.

Let us read, re-read and commit to memory the solidarity-building lesson of John Paul Sartre's "Republic of Silence" -- that he and his comrades

...were never more free than during the German occupation...The circumstances, atrocious as they often were, finally made it possible for us to live, without pretense or false shame, the hectic and impossible existence that is known as the lot of man. Exile, captivity, and especially death (which we usually shrink from facing at all in happier times) became for us the habitual objects of our concern. We learned that they were neither inevitable accidents, nor even constant and exterior dangers, but that they must be considered as our lot itself, our destiny, the profound source of our reality as humans...

Let us not forget Comrade Trotsky's cautionary adage that "in every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana."

Let us nevertheless wholeheartedly organize our minds and bodies  for maximum resistance.

This time around, we have nothing to lose but our  hopelessness.

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¹America Makes a Perilous Choice," The New York Times, 6 Nov. 2024. (Linked here but not above because non-subscribers may be unable to access it without emailed invitations from subscribers .) 
²Though I cannot find an authoritative source for this quote -- hence  "alleged" -- I have heard it repeated since my teens and know enough about Hemingway (a distant maternal cousin) to find the attribution entirely credible, particularly as something he might have said as a war correspondent  covering  (and clandestinely participating in) World War II. 
³I long ago began correctly describing neoliberalism as "socioeconomic nazism" because I recognized its intent to use genocide by austerity (rather than by  death camps) to create an übermenschen of the Hitler/Ayn-Rand breed and eventually transform all humanity into a master race capable of achieving whatever it might imagine. See Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism  (George Monbiot & Peter Hutchinson, Crown: 2024), especially pgs. 16-24 and 155-158. 
⁴CORRECTION: I somehow misremembered this number as "73 percent." Shame on me; I should have checked it.

LB/6-9 November 2024

"...Far and away the road goes winding..."

-30-

AS BEFORE, I am still at work on a (very) lengthy and emotionally difficult anthology of essays and photographs, this in preparation for my death, the approach of which is radically accelerated by severe post-Covid complications that have already reduced me to an invalid, and which -- since I was fully vaccinated -- strongly suggest at least some of the vaccines given us old folks were useless pacifiers, a probability most assuredly in keeping with the genocidal intent of  patriarchy and ever-more-nazified capitalism.  Assuming I live so long, when I am able, I will resume "normal" blogging (and yes, I trust the quotation-marks will excuse the malapropism).  Beyond that, for those who might be interested in speculative archaeology and anthropology, here  -- slightly modified -- is an excerpt from a note I sent to a fellow pagan just before the Summer Solstice:  

Apropos the probable original function of the Fool and the Tarot in general, what follows is an analysis in keeping with what -- if memory serves -- is one of Colin Wilson's hypotheses in his epic work The Occult -- specifically his supposition that many of the items used by present-day psychics originated anciently as practical tools the original functions of which are suppressed by patriarchal theocracy as "heretical" knowledge. (My apology for the lack of  a more precise bibliographical reference; my copy of Wilson's  book and several pages of associated notes were destroyed by the 1983 arson fire.) Nevertheless, if I remember Wilson's theory correctly, and if it does indeed apply to the Tarot deck, its present-day role as a popular tool of clarification and accurate prophecy may well have evolved from a Cargo-Cult-like folk-memory of its ancient use as a mathematically precise predictor of solar and lunar eclipses.   

The card known as the Empress signifies feminine power of such magnitude it resoundingly refutes the pseudo-scholarship that strives to associate the deck with the Hebrew alphabet, which would enhance its marketability by binding it to the ecogenocidal misogyny that defines the scriptural cores of the Abrahamic religions and is the doctrinal anchor that invariably -- and despite courageous efforts at reform -- drags Judaism, Christianity and Islam  back to modern repetitions of their murderous histories of patriarchal fanaticism.¹  Thus after a dream focused my mind on the riddle posed by Wilson's hypothesis, I began questioning how the Tarot might have originated  as a portable tool for answering two riddles posed by the breathtakingly ancient “Song of Amergin”:  

Who (but I) can tell the ages of the moon?
Who (but I) can tell the place where the sun rests?

That was in September 1972; the subsequent essay of maybe a dozen typewritten pages -- a relatively brief chapter in the arson-destroyed “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” – focused on the abundant but then mostly ignored evidence indicating the Tarot is a carefully disguised relic of the age of the Goddess. Thus, like much of the traditional balladry rediscovered by the folk renaissance of the 1940s and ‘50s, the cards were a then mostly unrecognized but nevertheless still powerful invocation of her return. That chapter was  therefore part of the extensively footnoted material I cited in “Dancer,” which was a 150,000-word redefinition of the 1960s Counterculture as the first wave of the resurrection of the Goddess and the beginning of global revolution against patriarchy. Illustrated by about 100 photographs, "Dancer" was burned just it was on the brink of major publication. The fire also destroyed all my other significant work. Nevertheless, I remember enough of the Tarot piece to summarize it here, for whatever paths of contemplation it might suggest .

Because the Fool is the one unnumbered card in the 22-card Major Arcana, I took it as one of four marker-cards in what I believe was originally a late Neolithic or early Bronze Age pocket calculator a traveling priestess or priest might have used to keep track of the astronomical calculations done at Stonehenge. (Irish tradition dates “The Song of Amergin” to 1268 BCE²)  Eighteen of the remaining 21 cards through which the Fool journeys I took as representatives of an Ogham calendar-alphabet (rather than the Hebrew alphabet to which they were then typically assigned), and I sorted them into the appropriate 13 consonant/months and five vowel/seasons. (Alas, I no longer remember which cards I assigned to what months, and I do not have the spare time it originally took -- about a month of evenings and weekends --  to restore the destroyed work.)  I assigned the five obviously female cards – Priestess, Empress, Strength, Justice and Death – to the seasons; the fifth season of these ancient calendar-alphabets was the season of the new year, which added five days to the 360-day lunar year to make it approximately synchronous with the 365¼-day solar year.³    And I took the Star, Moon and Sun as additional markers, these to be used in conjunction with the Minor Arcana’s 56 cards because – thanks to research at Stonehenge – we had learned from its prehistoric builders that 56 is the lowest common denominator of eclipse cycles, and three the minimum required number of its movable indicators.⁴
__________________

¹Despite their propagandists' claims to the contrary, the history of Old Testament Judaism -- like histories of Christianity and Islam -- are defined primarily by expression of the misogyny and ecogenocide mandated by their core scriptures.  See for example  Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother, Harper San Francisco: 1987;  pgs. 230-234.

²Robert Graves, The White Goddess, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (amended and enlarged edition):1966; pgs. 205-206.  

³Ibid., pg. 274 ff.

⁴Gerald S. Hawkins and John B. White, Stonehenge Decoded, Barnes and Nobel Books: 1993; pgs. 140-146. (My original source, part of the personal library destroyed by arson,  was the Doubleday edition published in 1968.) 

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Agitation Via Other Websites' Comment-Threads: 

Trump or Biden on Israel? I am daily more astonished so few of us see what history should have long ago made obvious to anyone with the proverbial lick-of-sense: that the Biden candidacy is merely the "Democratic" (sic) Party's most "plausibly deniable" way of throwing the election to Trump, thereby completing its post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party.

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Biden Should Blame Corporate Monopolies for Higher Prices. Love your anti-inflation video, Mr. Reich; it's a superbly explosive and properly saturating piece of work, puns obviously intended. But when oh when will you acknowledge the ever-more-excruciatingly obvious truth the Biden candidacy is the "Democratic" (sic) Party's "plausibly deniable" means of completing its post-JFK role as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party and throwing the election to Trump.

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Trump Will Not Accept Election Results. I salute Mr. Reich's courage and admire his persistence, but it is increasingly obvious Trump's victory -- and with it a new Holocaust -- is unavoidable.  Anyone with the proverbial lick-of-sense has already awakened to the terrifying truth there's no stopping  the  "Democratic" (sic) Party's "plausibly deniable" scheme to use the Biden candidacy to throw the election to Trump. .

Meanwhile, The New York Times'  latest disclosure of the Democrats' innumerable  treacheries reveals the obviously premeditated pro-Trump shenanigans of Biden's appointee at the Federal Election Commission. (Though most of the mainstream-media propaganda machine is suppressing this story, there are a couple of exceptions.  If you're not an NYT subscriber, google "federal election commission deregulation" without the quotation marks.)

Thus the Democrats move ever closer to fulfilling the final obligations of their  post-JFK, 100-percent-compromised function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party.

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California YIMBY Joins Corporate Landlords to Kill Rent Control. I had not known of the YIMBY movement until I read Mr. McDonald's report,  for which many thanks. But I have long been aware of the aggressive, self-obsessed, Ayn-Rand-spawned moral imbecility -- actually a variant of nazism (white supremacy and misogyny included) -- that seems to be the required ethos of high-tech professionals. I encountered it years ago, as a member of the working press, when the technofascists -- and that is precisely what they are -- began gleefully destroying newspaper editorial and mechanical departments with computerization.  I realized at the time they are all Josef-Goebbels-caliber liars, peddling their inventions as a great benefit to humanity when in fact their wholesale elimination of jobs proves them to be the most socioeconomically destructive force on the planet. I witnessed their vindictive self-obsession again in Occupy; though few in number, they functioned quite successfully as anti-solidarity agents, a Fifth Column that subverted us from within as we were being assaulted from without, and I could not but wonder if this was their clandestinely assigned role. Then a couple of years later came GamerGate, within which they shamelessly revealed their infinite malevolence. Thus YIMBY is no surprise. When combined with all the other evidence, it suggests the technofascists might be a new subspecies, genetically sociopathic, utterly devoid of empathy, and that the manifest cruelty of YIMBY is, like the boundless misery inflicted by their technology, the deliberate expression of their contempt and hatred for us all.

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TikTok Bans Video Demanding Bogdan Syrotiuk's Freedom. While I initially agreed with Comrade Zaremba apropos China's arguably pro-Russian, anti- UkraiNazi interest, on second thought I see the censorship of Tic-Tok as predictable for two reasons. It is (A), exemplary of the magnitude of China's concern over the looming (and obviously unstoppable) USian Empire ban of Tic-Tok. And it is therefore (B), irrefutable proof China's state capitalism is as neoloberal -- that is, as incipiently nazified -- as any other form of capitalism. In which context note also the unmistakable echoes of the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

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Electric Trains Are the Powerhouse Electric Vehicles. Unfortunately we'll never get adequate national rail transport -- no matter how it is powered -- for the same reason USia ranks last in the developed world for local mass transit: the bottomless hatred of socioeconomic benefits that is unquestionably the deadliest venom of white-supremacist racism. (Doubt this? Google "racism vs. mass transit," without the quotation marks. And it isn't conjecture or refutable as "conspiracy theory"; it is long-proven, eternally unchanging fact.)

Indeed it is at least arguable we on the (real) left should be thanking Trump for revealing the extent to which The New York Times' breathtakingly courageous 1619 Project is unequivocal truth: that the infinite malice of race hatred is not only the definitive characteristic of U.S. history, but that it remains the sole unifying ethos of about 73 percent of the Caucasian population. It is an apocalyptic malignancy so uniquely potent in the U.S., that here -- unlike in any other nation -- race-hatred long ago replaced class-hatred as the core dynamic of socioeconomic strife.

(Additional educational references for those who still have their heads in the proverbial sand are, Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law; James Q. Whitman, Princeton University Press: 2017; and An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Beacon Press: 2014.)

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And two from The New York Times:

New Report Underscores the Seriousness of Long Covid. Long Covid is literally killing me. Fully vaccinated, I was nevertheless felled by the virus a year ago. I will never again have any sense of taste or smell; it has intensified my osteoarthritis to the extent I am naught but a cripple; and it has worsened a hitherto-medication-stabilized atrial-valve deficiency of 10 percent to a deteriorating and therefore fatal failure last cardiogramed at 90 percent. Merely hobbling on my arthritis-mandated walker the 10 feet from my living room to my kitchen now leaves me breathless. An incurable fungus infection I brought back from extended military service in Korea c. 1961-1962 denies me valve-replacement surgery. My cardiologist told me last September that, thanks to Long Covid, I have at the most two years to live, probably somewhat less.

Apropos the virus itself, its rapid mutation makes it uncontrollable, an apocalyptic threat that fills me with a difficult to describe mixture of anger and the most profound sadness I have ever known. At age 84, I have no fear of death; I have lived long enough to be exempt from the rightful fury of the younger people whose lives it has stolen and destroyed. But the shameful lack of easily accessible treatment as a classic example of how we the people are so often victimized. Nor can I overlook how the characteristics of the virus make it perfect for socioeconomic and military purposes, which suggests why the facts of its origin remain so difficult to ascertain. (My comment got 80 "Recommends.")

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Men Fear Me, Society Shames Me, and I Love My Life. Ms. MacNicol...as an 84-year-old, anti-patriarchal, Marxian, Gaian-pagan male photographer and writer who ultimately refused submission to the soul-killing, spirit-obliterating, mind-destroying oppression of capitalism and its theocratic facilitators, I most wholeheartedly salute you and applaud your assertions. (My comment got 22 "Recommends.")

LB/22 June 2024

--30--

Three of the estimated 6,500 homeless persons who eke out meager livings in Tacoma and Pierce County, WA,  using an outdoor faucet for bath water, 30 May 2023; the owners of the  property have since gated and fenced it, specifically to deny such people access. As noted in "Christonazi Supreme Court Majority,"  below, the tyrannical judges will probably approve the mass arrest of all unhoused victims of capitalism, thereby providing the de facto plantations of the prison-industrial complex with an antebellum-sized supply of slaves. (Photo by Loren Bliss © 2024). 

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I AM UPDATING a 12-year-old essay so extensively, the process -- associated research included -- is scarcely different from producing new work. Hence I am not certain when it will be finished, though I am giving it at least six hours of intensely focused effort every day. Because as a near-lifelong journalist I cannot divorce myself from current events,  I will continue publishing comments I've made elsewhere -- just  as I have done below -- whenever I feel it's warranted.

For those unaware of my circumstances, this is part of the proverbial clearing-of-the-decks mandated by the death-sentence Covid imposed on me last summer, which indeed makes me wonder if the vaccination and boosters I dutifully got were nothing more than pacifiers. Yes, I had a pre-existing, potentially fatal condition, specifically congestive heart failure, with a 10-percent loss of atrial valve function. But the CHS had long been stabilized by medication, and the best estimate was I'd  most likely live another ten years. Nor was my osteoarthritis-inflamed spinal injury -- the 1978 gift of one of  Washington state's obscenely graft-protected, judge-coddled, defiantly habitual drunken drivers -- anything more than occasionally crippling. Now, thanks to Covid, my atrial valve loss is 90 percent. Because an incurable jungle-rot fungus I brought home from Korea in 1962 denies me  valve-replacement surgery,  my cardiologist informed me last September I had, at the most,  two years to live -- probably far less  due to looming kidney failure precipitated by the massive doses of diuretics now necessary to compensate for my radically diminished blood circulation. Meanwhile my arthritic pain has become so devastating, I am ambulatory only with a walker, which means I have to do all my shopping online, depend on delivery services to bring me my groceries,  and rely on kind-hearted neighbors to carry my garbage and recycling to the outdoor bins. Even with the walker, there are days I can barely go from one end of my apartment to another.

But as a near-lifelong photographer and writer, there remains a substantial amount of work I hope to complete before this incarnation ends. After I finish the aforementioned revision and perhaps a half-dozen more editing tasks,  there remains the dreadful clerical odium of sorting, filing and cataloging thousands of post-fire pictures and the far more repugnant tedium of keyboarding  type-written or printed texts into electronically accessible formats. Nevertheless, thanks to the Goddess, I am already at peace with my life and circumstances -- more profoundly at peace than ever I imagined I could be -- no matter  what I am able to accomplish in my remaining time.

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Persecution in the Lord’s Name: a remarkably courageous, properly infuriating expose´ of how the federal government’s theocratic interpretation of “religious freedom” as the right of Christians to express their doctrinal, implicitly ecogenocidal sadism within their organizational realms -- never mind that beyond those boundaries, their biblically mandated viciousness would not only be criminally unconstitutional, but in most cases feloniously so.

Despite my applause for Ms. Lee's courageous exposure of Christianity's intrinsic hatefulness and LAP's bravery in publishing it, history compels me to reject her underlying assumptions:

(1)-Regardless of claims to the contrary, the three core principles of Christianity -- likewise of the other two Abrahamic religions (Judaism and Islam) -- are inescapably hateful. These are: (A)-the claim its deity is "the (only) true god; (B)-the claim its followers are "the (only) divinely-chosen people"; and (C)-the ecogenocidal misogyny by which these claims are enforced. Claims (A) and (B) establish each of the three Abrahamic religions as rival, master-race cults of ubermenschen. They are at war with one another, and with all the rest of us -- pagans, Buddhists, Hindus, Baha'i, First Nations traditionalists, agnostics, atheists, etc. -- simply because, by definition, you can have only one master race per planet. Thus the religious wars that characterize the entire history of patriarchy will not end until the present (alleged) civilization has destroyed itself, probably by exterminating our entire species and reducing our Mother Earth to the bug planet she was 400 million years ago. Which brings us to (C), the relentless misogyny demanded by each of these credos. This hatred of all femaleness originates from the patriarchal fear of the re-emergence of the Great Goddess, the Divine Mother who was our species' primary deity until the patriarchal revolution began its rape-and-murder conquest six or seven millennia ago. While the Goddess was its initial target, the patriarchs quickly recognized femaleness itself was a doorway through which she could re-emerge. Thus the sadistic Abrahamic god's vengeance against Eve, cursing us all for her "original sin," damning all females and non-hetero-normative persons as her potentially demonic collaborators. Thus too these religions' ecogenocidal histories, most especially the rape of the planet that, barring a genuine miracle, has already doomed us to extinction. And since these atrocities are the products of scriptural mandates, to claim any Abrahamic religion can be reshaped into anything less murderously hateful is no less deluded than claiming that Nazism, which is based on the biblical-caliber hatefulness of its messiah as expressed in Mein Kampf, can be converted to humanitarianism.

(2)-Like it or not, the 13 colonies were founded as Christian theocracies; the anti-First-Nations ecogenocide was mandated by the invaders' theology (see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States); and despite the Founders' courageous efforts to make the fledgling U.S a genuinely secular state, the Machiavellian-minded financial aristocracy -- recognizing the historically proven effectiveness of Christianity as an ultimate weapon of oppression -- has always worked to subvert the founders' intent and ensure the USian empire is forever tyrannized by what Jeff Sharlet has courageously exposed as "the secret fundamentalism" of its governance. Our Masters' most recent weapon of forcible Christianization is The Family, the group whose nazified methodology and terrifyingly global influence is documented by Sharlet. Its successes include the permanently Christonazi U.S. Supreme Court and -- in all probability -- the looming re-election of Trump, which will mark the beginning of a new Holocaust, the death-toll of which will shrink its (equally Christianity-enabled) German Nazi prelude to a mere footnote. What began as zero-tolerance theocracy shall ever remain so.

(3)-For these reasons, the lawsuits encouraged by Ms. Lee are absurd. Given the permanence of Christonazi control of the judiciary, the plaintiffs have absolutely no -- say again, no -- possibility of success. Our liberation -- if we truly seek it -- must therefore be achieved by other strategies and tactics.

=====

Revolt in the Universities: protesting students across the U.S. face mass arrests, suspension, eviction and expulsion. Those who live on campus are summarily evicted, thereby condemned to homelessness just as the Christonazi-dominated U.S.  Supreme Court seems posed to make homelessness a crime, thereby providing the prison-industrial complex with a potentially unlimited supply of slaves.   

My contribution was in response to an otherwise accurate comment-thread post that erroneously stated Nixon had begun the war against student activism:

Actually, Mr. Weir  -- with no disagreement with your overall assertions implied or intended --  the punitive use of USian universities  was established well before the Nixonazi regime. Google "Censorship: Lessons from Ralph Nader and a Knoxville Atrocity," without the quotation marks.

("Censorship" is not linked in the original because the site does not allow URLs.)

===

A Long Way Down: an elderly upper-middle-class male describes how -- once an older person is flung into unemployment by the reigning economic savagery -- capitalist viciousness nullifies a lifetime history of significant professional success. Includes supportive statistics.

This -- Mr. Suarez’s self-portrait as an unimpeachable, absolutely blameless  victim of the ecogenocidal sadism of capitalism (which our Masters will intensify beyond even the German-Nazi magnitude of Evil once the U.S. Supreme Court, the "Republican" [sic] Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party and their "Democratic Party" [sic]  Fifth Column finish handing Trump the presidency and turning the USian Empire into the de facto Fourth Reich, all to ensure capitalism's permanence with a New Holocaust and guarantee its [intended] outcomes) -- is by far the most relevant essay I've yet seen in LAP.

Hence my most heartfelt thanks to Mr. Suarez for having the defiant, revolutionary-caliber bravery to write it and to LAP for having the courage to publish it -- though it should have been given lead-story status.

(And what is this "[intended] outcome"  of capitalism? Think of it -- and the toxins of patriarchy from which its own venom is derived -- as the ideological equivalents of smallpox-contaminated blankets. Their collective purpose is revealed by the apocalyptic consequences they irremediably inflict:  extermination of our species, extinction of all other advanced life-forms, and reduction of our Mother Earth to the overheated bug planet she was four million years ago.)   

As implied in my comment, I believe the story portrays the doom that awaits any of us who are not part of the Ruling Class -- that is,  any of us whose survival depends on our ability to earn adequate salaries or wages. 

===

In Supreme Court arguments, Biden administration demands unrestricted power to separate families "without judicial oversight."

This case provides another (particularly vivid)  example of how, beneath the camouflage nets of capitalist propaganda, the only (real) difference between the "Democratic" (sic) Party and the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party is their relative speeds of intended subjugation. The Christonazis and their allies want zero-tolerance white-supremacist Christian theocratic tyranny imposed immediately, while the Democrats -- still trying to hide their tyrannical malevolence behind a screen of  "plausible deniability" -- want to impose it more by stealth,  no doubt in the belief a more gradual enslavement will condition us to be more accepting of our  powerlessness and thus far less likely to revolt.    

===

Ten Times More Toxic Pesticide will poison our foods if EPA approves agro-monopoly demand.   

A vital story the imperial mainstream media is ignoring -- again proving its function as the world's first privately owned, for-maximum-profit model of Josef Goebbel's Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. 

I always wash my celery and tomatoes before eating. I use warm water and dish detergent, then rinse well. Old and on a fixed income, too physically disabled to hunt, fish and organically subsistence garden as I did for so many years, I cannot afford the 30 to 60 percent higher costs of allegedly "organic" vegetables. However, washing store-bought vegetables is merely an intuitive solution;  though I am a skilled researcher, I have never found any information about how to cleanse fruits and vegetables of the (genocidal) toxins inflicted on us by the imperial agricultural cabal. Does  anyone know if this cleaning is sufficient?  Please respond...

The following was my response to another comment on the same thread:

Apropos the pending EPA decision -- and given that the permanently Christonazified U.S. Supreme Court is obviously doing everything with in its power to guarantee Trump a second term,  we know what it will be -- perhaps now the USian left will finally stop its suicidal rejection of our Masters' (repeatedly demonstrated) intent to exterminate most of the 99.9 Percent as  mere "right-wing conspiracy theory."

An adjunct-faculty college instructor  in the late '70s and early '80s, I know genocidal reduction of the working class was even then favored by many  environmental science majors. Therefore I find it entirely credible University of Texas Professor Erik Pianka (for whom google) would urge the methodical extermination of 90 percent of the human species -- never mind the story was broken by a publication infamous for its Ayn Rand rebranding of Hitler's ubermenschen ethos. Ideology should not blind us to truth, particularly when it is already proven beyond dispute by our Masters' weaponization of Covid, for which see the World Socialist Web Site, hardly a "right wing"  outlet.

Links in italicized text excluded from original because the site does not allow URLs.

===

Christonazi Supreme Court Majority seems ready to approve mass arrest of homeless people.

This should surprise no one who acknowledges four irrefutable truths about capitalism: firstly, that the U.S. Supreme Court is doing everything within its power to guarantee Trump a second term (and thereby convert the USian Empire to the de facto Fourth Reich); secondly, that criminalizing homelessness  will clear the way for the Trumpite-promised mass arrest and lifetime concentration-camp enslavement of anyone too poor to afford housing. Which -- thirdly and as intended -- will  provide our Christonazi/Neoconfederate Masters with the antebellum-magnitude slavery they deem necessary to restore their profiteering to the unlimited maximums defended by the old Confederacy. Fourthly, let us never forget that while U.S.  capitalism -- shaped as it was by the legions of Original Nazi war criminals our Masters adopted as advisors after WWII -- is capitalism's most unapologetically sadistic global form, its ecogenocidal intent is shared by all capitalists everywhere.

Self-explanatory; no further comment necessary.

===

Inside the Crisis at NPR: Listeners are tuning out. Sponsorship revenue has dipped. A diversity push has generated internal turmoil. Can America’s public radio network turn things around?

The New York Times included my response on this report's comment thread:

At least some of the decline in the NPR audience -- like the declines in other media usage (and no doubt like the decline in younger people's interest in elections) -- is fueled by their increasing conviction we are a doomed species on a dying planet. For those who hold such views, all other events, elections included, are reduced to irrelevance. And every younger person I know -- "younger" defined as folks in their 30s and 40s (about a dozen people, all professionals or skilled workers of one sort or another) -- is not only resigned to the inevitability of our species' extinction, but in that context of bottomless hopelessness increasingly regards the news (and current events in general) as nothing more than a best-avoided intensifier of depression.

LB/28 April 2024

-30-

PRESENT-DAY POLITICS make it obvious neither of the two major parties give a flying rat-fuck about majority opinion. The "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party is fanatically waging ever-escalating warfare against a burgeoning coalition of ever-more-legitimately infuriated women, people of color, sexual minorities, social democrats and socialists.  Meanwhile the so-called Republicans' post-JFK Fifth Column, the so-called "Democratic" (sic) Party,  is meanwhile dead set on re-sodomizing the electorate with the most rightfully unpopular president in modern memory -- thus enabling the final slaughter of the (very) few remnants of our former pretense of "liberty and justice for all."  But -- at least to my knowledge -- not even Thom Hartmann has dared so much as speculate how this actually came about. 

My own belief, based entirely on the body of circumstantial evidence provided by our own political history -- evidence that in any other circumstance would prove more than sufficient for conviction -- is that both the major parties were ruinously compromised by their collaboration in covering up the anti-New-Deal conspiracy that prompted the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963. In all probability,  this meticulously camouflaged coup was the lynch-pin -- pun intended -- of a multi-generation project that began with the overtly fascist Bankers' Plot of 1933-34. Its tyrannical purpose was unquestionably furthered by the gradual conversion of Christianity to the plutocrats' original Fifth Column (now effectively their sturmabteilung), a process of subversion that began in the 1930s, quite possibly -- given the thorough nazification of Seattle -- with guidance from Nazi Germany. It was almost certainly bolstered to omnipotence by the plutocrats' gleeful embrace of the unprecedented  capability for infinite evil obtained by the government's post-Stalingrad adoption of legions of Original Nazi war-criminals as advisors and comrades-at-arms in a seductively propagandized, cleverly disguised and infinitely financed sequel to Hitler's campaign for world conquest. That something very much like this hypothesized scheming took place is  proven by the relentless reversal of every progressive gain we of the USian 99.9 Percent ever achieved. Significantly, the multi-decade campaign of nazification is as demonstrably bipartisan as the Banksters' original scheme:  note  the Democrats' collaboration with the Republican Nixon in what should be termed "the Powell-Memo affair" (scroll down for the "smoking gun"). Note too the patient, diabolical cunning of the campaign's revised  Mein Kampf methodology, the  subversion that destroyed the Weimar Republic in less than a decade slowed to a multi-generation regimen of psychological conditioning -- the one sure guarantee of nazification's unassailable permanence.  Only now -- and far too late -- is there a general awakening to  its irremediable destruction of our liberty, a process ever-more-obviously scripted to culminate in the ultimate Final Solution, the election of another Hitler. The intended result is obviously the conversion of the USian Empire to the de facto Fourth Reich, complete with global re-commencement of the German Nazis' Holocaust,¹ thus to ensure the eternal planetary supremacy of the Aryan (non-Semitic/non-Hispanic) Caucasian race and its sadistically misogynistic Christian theocracy.  

Though Hartmann deceptively ignores the Democrats' pivotal role in putting Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court, he does touch upon how the plutocratic conquest of the two parties begun by Powell and completed by Citizens United has transmogrified both parties (and thus all USian governance at every level)² into the capitalists' one-hundred-percent-reliable weapons of socioeconomic oppression. But Hartmann -- and as far as I know every other widely published USian journalist -- repeatedly refuses to scoop the world on what might well be the most telling expression of realpolitik in our national history: the (now undeniable) fact the two parties have themselves each become predatory capitalist corporations. Both are bastions of moral imbecility, their defiant betrayals of popular will proving them as indifferent to our well-being as the executives of the Tokyo Electric Power Company are to global ecology and human survival or Union Carbide's executives were to the health of Bhopal residents.  Republicans and Democrats no longer compete to serve their constituents; they battle only to monopolize the spoils of governance, the wealth to be amassed through the full spectrum of unchecked individual and collaborative corruption,  an inconceivably obscene span of incalculable profiteering ranging from the clandestine malfeasance that tolerates Boeing's murderous abandonment of safety principles to the defiantly public bribery of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his Christonazi/Neoconfederate ilk.  In which context note the fact -- often repeated by Hartmann -- that Congress could readily outlaw all these outrages. Though here Hartmann also fails us all; he does so  by his refusal to report that Congress is now too incurably addicted to bribery to ever again prohibit the outrages by which our enslavement -- I say again enslavement -- is financed. 

__________________
¹That this carefully choreographed mass murder has already begun is irrefutably proven by the USian Empire's Post-World-War-II military history, specifically its ongoing series of wars and proxy-wars -- Iran, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lybia etc. (and no doubt eventually Israel/Palestine and the Ukraine too). These conflicts methodically destabilize the targeted realms, purposefully  reducing their populations to the eternally inescapable victimhood of perpetually fragmented,  irremediably deadly socioeconomic chaos -- the most plausibly deniable form of induced ecogenocide. The constant imposition of this ultimate form of  divide et imperā by our species' most cunning, most indomitably powerful imperial military reveals its clandestine intent. It also proves the USian ruling class -- especially since its post-Stalingrad reinforcement by war criminals who had been the direct disciples of Hitler -- was never the fumbling band of morons the rigidly conformist, self-defeatingly arrogant USian  left would have us suicidally believe. Contrary to the resultant misconceptions, we are ruled by the most evil-minded, diabolically skilled, technologically omnipotent, ecogenocidally ruthless cabal of tyrants in all human experience -- those who dare wage knowingly apocalyptic war against our Mother Earth herself and thereby jeopardize our species' very existence.

²Local, state and federal examples of methodical tyrannization include, respectively, the following: 
♦how the Tacoma city government does everything in its power to ensure occupants of rental dwellings remain ignorant of dramatically expanded tenants' rights;
♦how Chicago is prohibiting protest at this year's "Democratic" (sic) National Convention;
♦how Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Oklahoma -- each gerrymandered to permanent  Christonazi theocracy -- are combining drug-war laws with "fetal personhood" to radically expand the reproductive re-enslavement of women;
♦how the Texas war against immigrants has escalated to de facto secession;
♦how federal officials routinely dupe the voters by promising politically impossible humanitarian and environmental reforms;
♦how Obama's campaign slogan, "change we can believe in," was later proven the most brazen deception in U.S. presidential history, the reasons here, here and here I long ago dubbed him "Barack the Betrayer";
♦how the feds out-source their biological-warfare experiments, with U.S.-funded labs in both the Ukraine and the People's Republic of China now credibly exposed, the latter the primary focus of the increasingly bitter, ever-more-politicized dispute over the origin of the ongoing but ever-more-officially denied pandemic inflicted by the inexplicably fast mutation of the Covid virus. (See also "Lessons from the Great Covid Cover-Up," which the rigidly conformist USian left damns as rabid conspiracy theory, but which -- despite my infinite contempt for Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul in response to his fanatical embrace of Ayn Rand's disguised nazism -- I nevertheless regard as worthy of consideration.)     

*********

Relevant Contributions to Other Websites
AS I'VE SAID before, I am limiting re-publication of my comment-thread remarks to those I believe add new perspectives to the unprecedented horrors of our apocalyptic era. 

***

Kentucky Bill Aims to Criminalize Homelessness
These sorts of laws are increasingly popular everywhere in the U.S. Given the ecogenocidal bias of the Christonazi/Neoconfederate cabal that tyrannizes the U.S. via the Supreme Court, even the most murderous such measures are sure to be ruled constitutional. And once Trump is führer-for-life, there's no doubt the extermination of unsheltered people will become national policy. Socialist revolution is thus ever-more-obviously humanity's most essential survival measure.  

***

A Trumpite Triumph in 2024?*
Apparently Mr. Englehardt is having an exceptionally difficult time adjusting to the three irremediable realities of 2024: that we humanitarians have by our submissiveness allowed ourselves to be robbed -- permanently (that is, with no possibility of humanitarian restoration) -- of literally everything we ever managed to achieve; that by submission to patriarchy, we humans have doomed our species to extinction and our Mother Earth to reduction to a bug planet; and that by these two now-irreversibly apocalyptic failures, we humans have proven the notion of history exhibiting a "moral arc...that bends toward justice" to be the most ruinously deceptive Big Lie of all time. I empathize, of course. Hence I respectfully remind Mr. Englehardt the Kubler-Ross stages of dying are as applicable to human societies as they are to individual humans, which means he too will eventually reach the final stage of the process, which is often defined as "peaceful acceptance," but which in fact is the benumbed resignation to the inevitable that allows us to make productive use of whatever time we might have left.
__________________
*Yes I changed the original headline; “Trumpite” is more properly predatory than “Trumpian,” and Bacchus -- one of my favorite gods -- is most assuredly among the innumerable non-Abrahamic deities the fanatically Trumpite Christonazis ignorantly damn as incarnations of Satan.

***

Five Years Prison for Revealing How the Rich Avoid Taxation
That an official of the Biden Regime, Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicole Argentieri, applauds the conviction and (probably deadly) five year prison sentence imposed on whistle-blower Charles Littlejohn for revealing that our Masters are exempt from taxation is a "smoking gun" laying bare the terrible truth there is absolutely no economic difference between the "Democratic" (sic) Party and the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party it serves as a Fifth Column.

And this lack of economic difference -- this relentlessly support for the de facto restoration of slavery variously euphemized as "Reagonomics" or "neoliberalism" -- tells us there is ultimately no difference in the two parties' predatory intent. The apparent difference is therefore merely an illusion created by the parties' competing schedules: the Christonazi/Neoconfederats want immediate, shock-doctrine imposition of nazification, while the Democrats want to continue imposing it by the stealth of boiled-frog conditioning.

The ultimate smoking-gun of the Democrats' post-JFK transition to the Christonazi/Neoconfederate Fifth Column is of course the Powell Memo: Powell was a Democrat -- do the research -- and his appointment to SCOTUS by a Nixon-backing Democrat majority was the first post-JFK collaboration-for-nazification between the two parties.

Since then, the fact homelessness is skyrocketing far beyond its all-time high is merely the latest proof we the people of the 99.9 percent have been permanently reduced to absolute powerlessness.

***

Special Counsel Slams Biden’s “Limited” Memory
Let us not forget that Robert K. Hur is Trumpite, appointed by a "Democratic" (sic) Party that is in fact nothing more than the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party. 

Thus it should surprise no one that Hur's report (intentionally) dooms Biden to certain defeat. 

Meanwhile the Democrats -- exactly like any other cabal of capitalists under attack for toxic products and environmental ruin -- have  of course already made it clear they will not replace their CEO (Biden) under any circumstances. Instead they will merely change their advertising. 

The Democrats'  destructive determination thus underscores the two most apocalyptic truths of present-day  USian political and socioeconomic reality. 

One of these fatal truths -- the looming climax of the slow extermination of any USian pretense of democracy -- is the ever-more-obvious extent to which the post-JFK Democrats serve as the Christonazi/Neocionfederate Fifth Column.  

The other fatal truth -- less obvious but ultimately far more deadly --  is the extent to which mainstream USian "politics" (sic) has been reduced to  a war between two corporate-owned de facto corporations  fighting over the spoils --i.e., the profits -- of governance; the well-being of the public be damned. Were it otherwise, the Sanders campaign would not have been methodically crushed (thus to enable Trump's 2016 victory), and Biden would have been replaced long ago.

Recognition of such colossal malfeasance makes our de facto enslavement undeniable. Too bad the combined seductions of trinket materialism, racism and the hatreds implicit in prosperity-gospel theocracy blind so many USians to the fact  socialism is obviously our only route to manumission. 

*********

Personal Deathwatch Update
THE MOST RECENT diagnostic tests inform me it is now a race between kidney failure and congestive heart failure to determine which will kill me first. As previously reported, my bout with Covid last summer radically worsened my hitherto-medication-stablized CHF,  intensifying a 10 percent loss of atrial-valve function to a 90 percent loss, so that now a mere walk of about 15 feet leaves me as short of breath as running 50 yards to catch a bus would have left me pre-Covid. And now -- ironically -- the massive increase in doses of diuretics necessitated by the Covid damage is destroying my kidneys. Thus it no longer matters I am denied the option of heart surgery by a mostly dormant but nevertheless incurable fungus  I brought home from Korea in 1962; even were there no fungus, my failing kidneys render any sort of cardiac repair pointless. In September my cardiologist told me I had at the most two years to live. The onset of kidney failure no doubt radically shortens that estimate, though thanks to our Masters' deliberately genocidal profiteering from reduction of   the national health-care staff, I will not know the magnitude of the revision until 5 June, which is the soonest I can see a nephrologist.

As I've said before, I find it metaphysically significant the three oracles I consulted at the beginning of the pandemic -- the I Ching, the Tarot and the Viking Runes -- all predicted Covid would kill me. Though by last year I was convinced the oracles had erred (or I had read them incorrectly), the aftermath of the disease proves they spoke the truth. Meanwhile my circumstances prove beyond dispute that vaccination against Covid -- I am vaccinated and four times boosted -- is ultimately no defense for elderly persons with other afflictions, a quality of the vaccines I cannot doubt is deliberate, in which context note the rapidly accumulating evidence of our Masters'  weaponization of Covid to exterminate a substantial portion of the 99.9 Percent.  Thus  Covid is added to all the other weapons in capitalism's arsenal for intentional but plausibly deniable genocide: homelessness, joblessness, health-care denials, welfare cutbacks, food-stamp reductions, environmental toxins, death-dealing flaws in products ranging from toys to aircraft, and let us not forget the potentially deadly anxiety inflicted by the ever-more-terrifying threat to Social Security and Medicare. In response to which,  the ever-deluded Moronic Majority predictably re-affirms its eternal subjugation by (again) cravenly submitting to our Masters' sadistic greed.  Fortunately though, an increasing number of activist-minded folks are at long last recognizing what we Marxians have always known:  that under capitalism -- particularly under its fanatically zero-tolerance Christonazi variant -- survival itself is revolutionary defiance.

Be assured I will  continue writing as long as  I can set fingers to keyboard.

LB/15 February 2024

--30--

REGULAR READERS  KNOW I am slowly dying from the aftermath of Covid, which has so intensified my geriatric medical problems, my doctors told me last September I have no more than two years to live, and I suspect it will be far less than that, as I am already reduced to  breathlessness merely by walking through my ground-floor apartment.  But the real-world blessing implicit in such circumstances seems to far outweigh its imagined accursedness, for -- at least in my case -- it compels a self-honesty and clarity of vision more inescapably imperative  (and often more unabashedly brutal) than anything I have ever experienced, no doubt as the final evaluation before my lifetime's experience is, as my dialectal-materialist left brain believes, reduced to nothingness (and therefore to meaninglessness), or, as my unabashedly superstitious right brain contends, is launched to bear its karmic seasoning into yet another reincarnation,  though admittedly I cannot but wonder what form that incarnation might take in a world climate change is reducing to a bug planet.   

Whatever,  I began learning in 1943, my third year,  how beyond the urban Northeast and its tiny sanctuaries of relative enlightenment, the  violently bigoted underbelly of U.S. politics irresistibly dictates all the decisive circumstances of our lives, and 13 years later I began focusing my life accordingly. My intent was adult application of the Boy Scout mandate to always leave the campsite in better condition than we found it, which  is why at age 16 I began building a career in journalism. But then the events of 22 November 1963 revealed our national masters as the actual source  of what I had hitherto supposed was a merely regional malevolence. Now, having been schooled both as a journalist and an activist by the subsequent six decades of murders and betrayals -- the forcible suppression of literally every potential I had ever seen in this now-obviously disintegrating realm -- I have no doubt the United States as I once imagined it and fiercely loved it is in fact as inescapably doomed as I myself am post-Covid. 

Neither can I forget the fact our nation dies on  a doomed planet fatally wounded by our own national excesses, and that the death of the United States is therefore most likely to be  preview -- a pre-hearse'l (if I may be permitted a morbid pun) -- of the fate to which its global command of patriarchy's misogynistic war against our Mother Earth has condemned our entire species. Though on that dismal topic, I have no (present) inclination to say much more than what I've said already. 

Our masters fanatically insist "a healthy society requires patriarchy." But we of the 99 Percent increasingly recognize patriarchy as the cultural and socioeconomic equivalent of smallpox-contaminated blankets. We are awakening to the fact it has robbed our species (and probably all non-insectoid life) of any long-term legacy beyond extinction. Patriarchy has  nullified our 200,000-plus years of collective experience, squandering all human creation, reducing all our exquisite  arts and breathtaking science to the meaninglessness of wind-blown debris amidst abandoned ruins.  We cannot un-know this. Consciously or not, it burdens us more heavily than many of us can bear -- the obvious but relentlessly downplayed reason for our increasingly suicidal hopelessness and its murderously hateful expression in our skyrocketing plagues of mass shootings and traffic deaths.¹

Of course we will never be granted widespread public acknowledgement the  horror that understandably overwhelms so many younger folk  when they contemplate the fact they have no rationally conceivable  future is probably the ultimate human trauma, a realization akin to an 18-year-old's last thoughts while dying in combat, a uniquely terrible truth perhaps even more toxic in subconscious form.  While alcohol or drugs may temporarily minimize its anguish, it is like any other psychological trauma in that it's only lasting amelioration is therapeutic acknowledgement.  But the so-called "mainstream media" -- the collaboration of a half-dozen of our billionaire masters' corporations in the world's first privately owned, for-(maximum)-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda  (Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) -- will never allow such a  bandaging to take place. To do so would be to admit that patriarchy and its theocratic and capitalist derivatives are precisely what I said above: the cultural and socioeconomic equivalent of smallpox-contaminated blankets.  

Nor are we told the real reason for  the stock market's all-time highs -- the vindictively triumphant glee with which our masters anticipate the now-unstoppable ascent of Donald Trump as lifelong führer, the final death-spasm of the murdered U.S. republic,  the birth of  the de facto Fourth Reich.² 

Just as I've no doubt the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the murder of our republic, so am I now painfully convinced Trump, who is Adolf Hitler's chief 21st Century disciple,  will be the republic's tombstone. History's circumstantial evidence tells us Trump is the fulfillment of a bipartisan, multi-generation plutocratic conspiracy that surfaced in 1933 as the Bankers' Plot³ and became invincible in 1944 when its unprosecuted  perpe-traitors unabashedly embraced absolute Evil by compelling the federal government's adoption of thousands of Nazi war criminals as their advisors and comrades-at-arms. As proven by the irresistibly total Nazification of fiercely progressive Weimar Germany in a mere six years and the fact only the Red Army had the might to stop the Third Reich's unprecedentedly genocidal military, these morally imbecilic monsters were the most diabolically cunning plotters our species ever spawned.  Nevertheless, despite our masters' methodical reversal of every progressive measure ever enacted,  and despite their  de facto reversal of the (first?) Civil War's triumphant conclusion,  the USian Empire will never be the thousand-year reich the Nazi war criminals intended to make of the United States. Terminal climate change guarantees the empire's demise by the end of  this century and our species' extinction no later than the end of the next. But with the deadliest, most powerful military in human history to enforce the empire's  absolute control over global finance,  it will most assuredly be the final befouler of our planetary nest. 

Given the lifetime-appointed and therefore effectively permanent dual roles of the Supreme Court's majority as oberst-gruppenführers in the capitalists' restoration of de facto slavery and zero-tolerance ayatollahs in Christianity's relentless jihad against sexual freedom, the fact that this time there is no Red Army to rescue  us means our sociopathic masters'  hateful regime of gleefully sadistic theocratic ecogenocide is literally forever -- the concluding chapter of humanity's permanent record.  And the evidence of the Supreme Court's intent is irrefutable: note its obvious endorsement of matricide, its eagerness to terminate the federal government's ability to protect us against predatory masters and its reluctance to block the nation's most notorious criminal from his inevitable ascendance to dictatorship.

Note too how the court's endless betrayals of our nation's (former) progressive intent are enabled by the "Democratic" (sic) Party's post-JFK function as the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party's Fifth Column. Let us not forget the infamous Powell Memo, the USian plutocracy's equivalent of Mein Kampf, was authored by a Democrat, Lewis F. Powell Jr., who was then -- in obvious collaboration with wanna-be führer Richard Nixon -- voted onto the U.S. Supreme Court by the Senate's "Democratic" (sic) majority. Cunningly disguising the Christonazi/Neoconfederate purpose of his economic rulings behind a socially progressive facade,  Powell began the court's slow-motion transformation to the pluto/theocratic cabal of sadistic despots it is today, a judiciary whose rulings are but stepping-stones to Trump's imposition of terminal tyranny.     

I have spoken with enough younger folk to know that what I describe above  -- the absolute certainty of early doom inflicted on millennial and post-millennial generations by the  incurably metastasized, inescapably apocalyptic cancer of patriarchy and its capitalist and theocratic progeny -- is the sole reason for the skyrocketing rates of suicide and mental illness. But as I said, our masters will never allow its therapeutic acknowledgement, for that would be tantamount to admission they are in fact our murderers. While I will die knowing everything for which I lived and struggled has been abolished forever, at least I was born in a time of universal hopefulness,  and it is undoubtedly my recollection of that too-brief era -- my angry knowledge of all that has been stolen from us -- that will keep me doing what (little) I can to vex our thieving conquerors  until I am no more.  But the younger folk are denied the poignant memory that fuels such anger; they know only that they have been born to a doomed species that is murdering its planetary mother, and whether that terrible knowledge is conscious or not, they know with absolute certainty they are inescapably cursed with permanent imprisonment in irreversible futility and utter hopelessness, which is why they increasingly ask themselves, "why bother to live at all?"

Yes, thanks to our masters' malfeasance,  it truly is as Churchill said on the eve of the Battle of Britain: "Only a miracle can save us now."

 __________________
¹See also  "Reckless Driving as Possible Suicidal Ideation," a courageous analysis that comes very close to breaking the capitalist taboo against acknowledging motor vehicles are deadly weapons, statistically as dangerous as firearms. 
²My pessimism is shared by both  the World Socialist Web Site and The New York Times. (The latter analysis is pay-walled but theoretically accessible by any non-subscriber who has not exceeded the limit of 10 reports per month.)
³See also "The Plot to Overthrow FDR," particularly my comment, for which scroll down.

 LB/22 January 2024

-30- 

Solstice Greetings:  May Our Mother Earth Prevail 

Photo by KD ©2023

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

MY APOLOGY FOR for my long absence. As I stated in my 14 October post, Covid fatally intensified my congestive heart failure. My atrial valve's loss of function was formerly medication-stabilized at about 10 percent but has now, thanks to Covid,  skyrocketed to an 85 or 90 percent loss, which leaves me short of breath after merely walking the approximately 20 feet from one end of my apartment to the other,  and which my cardiologist tells me shortens my life expectancy to no more than two years at most, probably a lot less due to looming kidney failure ironically induced by massive doses of allegedly "life-sustaining" diuretics. Thus it took me a while to decide whether to terminate this blog with 14 October as my final word or continue posting as I voyage toward the final lesson that is death.

And what might I learn thereby? It seems to me death is either the irrevocable reduction to nonexistence my agnostic, dialectical-materialist left brain suspects proves consciousness to be no more than a meaningless electro-chemical coincidence, or, alternatively,  death is the passage to reincarnation my right brain suspects might prove consciousness to be the product of an ongoing process of electro-chemical evolution, with an unrecognized but nevertheless implicit evolutionary dynamic of inertial momentum  toward consciousness  the  defining characteristic of any and all forms of material existence.    

Obviously I've decided to continue writing as I await whatever lesson the terminable teachable moment provides, though it surely grieves my journalistic soul I won't be able to file a last report. Meanwhile I'll  post both here and on sundry comment-threads.

I've also vowed to never again indulge in the pseudo-politeness of pretending a personal optimism about our nation's  potential. To my mind, whatever positive potential  we might have possessed was rendered gravely doubtful  by the unredressed assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963 and eradicated forever by the subsequent, still more outrageously unredressed murder of his brother, U.S. Senator Robert Francis Kennedy on 5 June 1968. Indeed I now argue the former date will eventually be chosen by the more competent historians -- if indeed any such exalted occupations survive our undoubtedly apocalyptic future -- as the USian Empire's equivalent of 4 September 476, the day the Western Roman Empire died.

*********

A BROOKLYN-BORN, Manhattanite-by-choice, gentrification-exiled son of a Boston-accented, British-Canadian-parented, first-generation father, I was, as many of you know,  condemned by familial dysfunction to spend most of my boyhood years in the South. I have also written in detail about the mass-arrest perpetrated by the University of Tennessee and Knoxville's daily newspapers in a racially motivated, existentially nazi effort to ideologically "cleanse" the campus and the city in general.  What I have not fully acknowledged in print is the magnitude of violent hatefulness I endured  in the South and Middle West during  my K-12 years and later as an adult in the Pacific Northwest,  targeted in each locale because I "talked funny" -- that is, spoke grammatically proper English with an unmistakably Northeastern accent which (in combination with my greenish-brown eyes, curly dark-brown hair,  ebony eyebrows and the equally coal-black whiskers I sprouted after puberty) -- all convinced my detractors I was a sneaky Jew trying to pass myself off as an Aryan. 

I should note here that by the year of my birth, 1940, male circumcision in the United States had lost its religious significance and become a routine medical procedure  rationalized by concerns for cleanliness and health in general. Nevertheless I -- and as I would later learn, many members of my generation -- were left with intact penises specifically because our parents feared we might otherwise be mistakenly identified as Jewish and thus exterminated once the German Nazis completed their conquest of the world, an outcome that was then rationally feared by a global majority.  Obviously I need not add that, though the German military effort failed, global capitalism is on the brink of omnipotently achieving a comparable result mostly by stealth, thereby dooming not just the traditionally targeted minorities but our entire human species. 

My memorably traumatic encounters with an existential nazism I once naively  dismissed as "Southern Hospitality" but long ago came to recognize as our one true national ethos began during my first weeks on the protectively fenced playground of an exclusive St. Johns River apartment complex, where three older kids tried to kill me by holding me upside-down and burying my head in a sandbox, an incident I describe in the third section of "The Long-Promised Eulogy for My Father."  To reiterate, thanks to my birthmother's malicious disruption of my father's career, he had been demoted from an acting corporate vice-presidency, and we had been exiled from New York City to Jacksonville, Florida,  where during the latter part of 1943 and the first half of 1944, he was  tasked with  solving various manufacturing problems  related to the war effort. Similar responsibilities transferred him to Roanoke, Virginia, where  we lived during the remainder of 1944 and into the late summer of 1945; there the hostility I had encountered in Florida as a "yankee" and suspected Jew  continued, albeit mercifully diminished by private-school discipline, at a kindergarten on Rosiland Avenue. My father's appointment to the War Production Board brought us back to  Jacksonville,  where we dwelt in a neighborhood called Lake Forest Park until 1948. My murder-minded birthmother was by then out of our lives. My father had wed the woman who had been his executive secretary in Roanoke, and in a few short months she had shown me more love than my  birthmother would express for me in all her 84 years. 

Beginning in September 1946, I attended first and second grades at Jacksonville's Norwood Elementary School, where  at recess I was repeatedly assaulted and once knocked unconscious by bigoted students, always those from my own grade, often those from a grade or two above me. But Norwood's public-school teachers, notably unlike their private- kindergarten counterparts, always refused to intervene.  (In retrospect, I've no doubt the Jacksonville teachers knew they were encouraging my foes' brutality; obviously these so-called "educators" shared their students' incipiently nazi bigotry.) My plight had become so dire, my  father, who had boxed for sport in boarding school, had begun teaching me  the rudimentary skills of pugilism, though at Norwood I was never able to successfully employ his lessons, as I was always overwhelmed by multiple assailants.

But eventually my tormentors undid themselves by the intensity of their own collective hatefulness. Their self-inflicted denouement occurred on a cloudy, uncomfortably humid summer-shirt afternoon probably halfway through the second semester of the 1948 school year.  It had started a month or so earlier when a half-dozen slightly older Norwood kids began threatening to  ambush me and beat me to death if I dared to continue getting off the school bus at its  John Paul Jones stop, which was named for the residential street that ended at  nearby  Saratoga Street, present-day Saratoga Boulevard.     

At this point I should explain that in  1948, the Lake Forest area was far less developed than it is now.  Despite its name, the school-bus stop was actually on the north side of Saratoga  Street.  Beyond that was a substantial  tract of deciduous forest, a jungle that, if I remember correctly,  stretched all the way to  the Trout River,  ending there at a beach or city park.  The site of the school-bus stop also remained in a quasi-natural state, accidentally marked by a small, seemingly mysterious  and therefore always fascinating pool of clear water. Vaguely amber-hued with what my stepmother said was proof of stagnancy, this roughly oval-shaped  miniature pond extended its perpendicular reach eight or nine feet into the forest's tropically tangled trees and underbrush. Whatever its water's  source, it was roughly three feet wide and probably half that measure deep. As I recall, we students were always perplexed by its seemingly permanent size and never-changing absence of aquatic life,  and -- as if in childish anticipation of some transformation or emergence we lacked the words to verbalize -- we were always peering into it as  we waited  for our morning transport to school. Probably 100 feet west of the pool and its bus stop,  John Paul Jones Street,  today's Paul Jones Drive,  terminated in its T-shaped intersection with Saratoga. From there it was an easy walk to my address,  a one-story, two-bedroom structure with a red-brick-veneer front; though I don't recall its number, it was on the eastern side of John Paul Jones,  I'm guessing maybe 600 or 700 yards south of the Saratoga intersection. 

The aforementioned relentless deluge of ambush threats soon poisoned my homeward bus trips with bottomless dread. There was no alternative school-bus stop within rational walking distance of  my dwelling;  I knew it would be impossible to successfully defend myself against so many simultaneous attackers, and I had found the bus drivers to be as indifferent to my safety as were the teachers. Attempting to spot ambushers in the hope of giving myself enough advance warning to flee,    I always rode on the forest-side of the afternoon bus and was always the last student to debark at the requisite stop.    Fearfully scanning the surroundings for lurking foes,  I'd scurry to John Paul Jones Street. Peering apprehensively over my shoulder, I'd then turn southward on its concrete sidewalk and start homeward at a near trot.  I'd let myself begin to relax only after I'd briskly walked  maybe 100 yards without incident. 

Despite the continuing verbal abuse,  the attacks hadn't  materialized after more than a month of threats, and I began suspect they were naught but bluff. But just about the time I had convinced myself I was safe,  the six wanna-be stormtroopers attacked. Earlier in the day, they'd hidden themselves in the dense underbrush beyond the little pond, and now they boiled toward me in a triumphant frenzy. I will never forget the machine-gun clatter  their shoes hammered from  the Saratoga Street pavement. The boy who had persistently proven himself my most sadistic adversary, a way-too-big-for-his-age third-grader, led their assault; he clutched to his chest a  jagged-edged chunk of  gravel-reinforced concrete so large and heavy it required  both his arms to keep it in place,  his snarls of  homicidal invective underscoring his deadly purpose.   Though the others were visibly unarmed, their savage yowling made it clear they were equally eager to participate in my demise.   Terrified, I snatched up a fallen tree-branch, realizing the best I could do was try to fend them off as they closed in,  but the leader two-handedly catapulted his missile directly into my face. The impact knocked me senseless and dropped me face-first on the sidewalk.

Schoolyard scuttlebutt eventually told me they briefly circled my fallen form, jeering, cackling at the blood pooling around my head, gleefully congratulating themselves because they thought the bloodshed proved they'd killed me. Then they fled back into the woods.

My memories of what happened next  have always been muddled, no doubt because I was moderately concussed.  I lay sprawled  on  the walkway,  bleeding profusely from a gaping wound in my right eyebrow, unconscious for what I later learned I was close to five minutes. But the only two friends I ever made at Norwood School, fellow second-graders who were typically the first kids off the bus at the John Paul Jones stop,  had witnessed the attack, and though they'd been afraid to intervene, they hastened to my aid afterward. At this distance -- 78 years --  I find  to my dismay I  am unsure of their names, an uncertainty  I sorely regret, because  I would love to be able to thank them in print.  One, a boy whose last name may have been Townsend, dashed to my family's house to fetch  my stepmother; the other, a girl whose first name may have been Bunny,  seems to have bandaged my wound with her handkerchief and thereby significantly slowed my loss of blood; I am certain she helped me to my feet after I regained consciousness and no doubt ensured I remained upright as I staggered toward my stepmother, who had run to meet me and was so shocked and horrified by my blood-drenched clothing -- this I remember clearly -- she turned white as the proverbial ghost. I don't know how I got the rest of the way home, whether I walked or my stepmother carried me. I remember hearing her telephone my father,  telling him she needed him forthwith because I'd been badly injured in a brawl.  (In those pre-dial days, extended telephone conversations were tabooed by the technology;  you lifted the receiver; waited for an operator to say "number please"; told her what that number  was; waited while she plugged in the wires that connected you to the intended recipient's phone; waited still more to hear the connection  ring; and then -- if and when someone answered -- you spoke your message as quickly as possible; you were allowed a limited amount of conversational time each month, and if you exceeded that limit, your bill skyrocketed accordingly.)   Responding immediately to my stepmother's plea,  my father sped from work to drive me to the St. Luke's Hospital emergency room. I don't remember if my two friends remained with us to await his arrival or if they departed for their own homes; the girl's house was directly across the street from ours, and the boy's was in our immediate neighborhood.  I seem to remember my stepmother accompanying us to the hospital, but I have no recollection of her there after our arrival, so I may be confusing elements of my 1945 trip to that same hospital for a tonsillectomy with the 1948  post-assault ER visit. In any case, at the time of the attack,   my stepmother was focused on caring for my infant half-sister Deborah, born the previous December, and she undoubtedly would have remained at home had she been unable to find an emergency baby-sitter. As  I said, these memories have always been fuzzy.  But I vividly recall I was nearly as frightened by the certainty of a tetanus shot and the probability of stitches as I had been by the onslaught itself, though to my enormous relief, the ER doctor concluded the wound was shallow enough for bandaging alone to prompt its healing. My father told me later the doctor chose to avoid stitches because they'd enlarge the inevitable scar.  For that I am thankful; though I will bear the scar until I am no more, it is mostly hidden beneath the hairs of my right eyebrow. 

Also, as best I recall, I never learned what punishments -- if any -- the Norwood Elementary School principal imposed on my assailants. But my father was a fairly powerful federal official then, a War Assets Administration executive equivalent to what today would be a deputy regional director.   To whatever extent he and my stepmother intervened -- and I know they met several times with the principal -- it sufficed to stop the overt bigotry for the remainder of my time in second grade. After that -- because my father had been purged from the government in retaliation for his Marxian politics -- we moved to Michigan.  Though the same nazified venom would confront me there, its expression  was far more limited, and the two times it escalated into violence, in early 1949 and the spring of 1957, I won the resultant fights, in the first instance by breaking my adversary's nose, in the second by brandishing a .58-caliber Bridesburg-manufactured 1861 Springfield rifled musket -- at the time my only adequate-for-the-purpose  firearm within reach -- to discourage a pair of  burly teens who had shifted the focus of their nazi-minded violence from me to my  physically enfeebled 78-year-old  maternal grandfather.¹ 

Decades later, I found two Washington state cities to be veritable cesspools of such bigotry, first Bellingham (c. 1971-72) then  Seattle (c. 1972-1978). Seattle is by far the most existentially nazified realm I have ever encountered, though the business community in Bellingham was no better. Daily-newspaper managing editors in both cities mistook me for Jewish and rejected my job-applications with identical warnings:  "you don't belong here; go back where you came from."  In Seattle, quite possibly the most xenophobic, self-righteously hateful city in the United States,  that same nasty "down-with-Jew-York"  vindictiveness  was the unifying ethos of the local art scene, expressed by the malicious and probably fatal theft of a beloved dog, frequent acts of vandalism including slashed tires accompanied by explanatory notes  ("We Don't Want You Here")  and the ultimate insult of being physically attacked during a gallery-opening party at which I was one of the honorees. That fight was a draw, though only because a quartet of pacifists managed to restrain me.  By contrast, Tacoma -- strongly unionized and bolstered by a defiantly working-class ethos --  ranks a close second amongst the two most welcoming cities I've encountered anywhere, in that manner almost sociologically equal to Lower Manhattan.²  That's why I embraced it after I moved there in 1978, and why in 2004 I happily returned there in what has since involuntarily become total, permanent and obviously terminal retirement from paid employment as an editor, writer, photographer or creative director. The other most-welcoming city was of course Manhattan, not the oppressively gentrified plutocracy it is today, but as I knew it in the '60s, the aesthetically revolutionary realm James Baldwin celebrated as Another Country.         

It was nevertheless during my third through eighth years was I most unforgettably schooled in the darker truth of our "sweet land of liberty," a course of instruction that -- whenever I was beyond Manhattan or urban New Jersey -- would continue until my 48th year. In that context, I cannot overlook the portents of doom  implicit in how the U.S. Government  condemned an entire shipload of Jewish children, women and men to death in the German Holocaust or  how it refused to prosecute IBM for   organizing and managing the industrialized German mass-murder apparatus;  and I cannot ignore how the national transformation that followed the assassination of President Kennedy reveals his murder to have been a coup.  I cannot un-learn the lessons that  convince me this nation's ruling ethos is (and probably always has been) a self-obsessed, morally imbecilic, terminally toxic amalgam of racial, ethnic, sexual, religious, political and socioeconomic hatreds.   I am terrified by how that  ethos is now omnipotently manifest in Donald Trump and the irrevocable Republican conversion to  Christonazi  theocracy and   Neoconfederate tyranny.  I can no longer doubt it will be this nation's doom.    

Nor will I politely pretend any further optimism about the future of our species; the "catastrophic" failure  of COP28 proves beyond dispute our impregnably bunkered, technologically omnipotent, vindictively patriarchal Masters whether capitalist or communist and (maybe) extraterrestrial have all secretly agreed to maximize terminal climate change as the  final solution in their clandestine program of  ecogenocide -- its intended extermination of the global 99 Percent already evident in the deadliness of austerity and the "herd immunity"  response to the ongoing Covid pandemic. In this context -- just as silence is sociopathic submission not only to the atrocities against our species but to the unnatural and therefore suicidal misogyny of total war against our Mother Earth -- so has empathy replaced ideology as the wellspring of revolutionary defiance. 

And I can no longer doubt what Winston Churchill said in private on the eve of the Battle of Britain -- "only a miracle can save us now" -- has become the one irrefutable truth of our entire species, the sole remaining determinant of the human condition.
________________

¹By way of clarification, the 1949 incident occurred while I was attending East Grand Rapids Elementary School and living with my father, stepmother and younger half-sisters; the 1956 incident marred the year, summer '56 through summer 1957, I lived with my birthmother and her parents while starting my journalism career and working toward a potential Naval ROTC scholarship at  the University of Michigan, an effort terminated by my grandparents' decision in August of '57 to evict me from their household, which forced me to return to my father's infinitely  more intellectually productive, psychologically comfortable household in academically backward, economically oppressive, professionally restrictive Tennessee.

²Tacoma's defiance is typified by its immediate response to the 1978 Seattle sweatshirt/t-shirt combo hatefully emblazoned with "If God is on our side, why is there a Tacoma?" My second-most-favorite-city's deliciously  sneering,  fuck-you-in-the-ass response  was an implicitly upraised social finger via its own sweatshirt/t-shirt combo, the huge, notorious, prominently visible-from-Interstate-5 landmark neon  logo of its Pink Elephant Car Wash reproduced on black fabric printed in the brightest day-glo pink available,  the  logo chest-wide below "Tacoma:" and above "150,000 alcoholics can't be wrong." (Alas, the Pink Elephant's logo has since been forcibly removed by the vastly unpopular decree of Tacoma's vindictively intolerant  gentrifiers, the implacably tyrannical cabal of corporate landlords and their wholly owned politicians whose infamous greed was triumphantly counteracted -- albeit by a mere 370 votes -- on 7 November 2023. )

*********

THOUGH I HAVEN'T indulged in the tragicomic self-deception of new year's resolutions since I  successfully completed eighth grade and purposefully traded the forcibly chaste academic superiority of parochial education for the academically inferior but more sexually promising realm of public high school   -- this in 1954, an age-14 act of lustfully self-inflicted intellectual damage I would later profoundly regret -- I will make exception for 2024, repeating as my one new year's resolution  my above pledge to never again soften my admittedly harsh opinions with lies of optimism. In fact, what follows is the  comment I posted on a recent Popular Resistance comment thread and afterwards realized was my initial declaration of intent, here slightly amended for clarity: 

Recognizing our Masters' ecogenocidal intent -- too bad for us their intended, often academically expressed, ever-more-obvious 90-percent reduction of the global human working-class population (aka the "99 Percent") is dismissed as right-wing "conspiracy theory" -- I long ago began (occasionally) daring to label the mechanism of our doom "terminal climate change." I do this now because "terminal" is precisely its purpose -- proven so not only by our (infinitely evil)  Masters' deception-camouflaged refusal to abate it, but by their employment of the corollary mass-extermination weapons of mandated "herd immunity," the slower-motion deaths inflicted by denial of health care and social services, and now also by their skyrocketing quest to replace us with "artificial intelligence" robots.

Nor is there any escape for those of us excluded from the impregnable bunkers of the technologically omnipotent ruling class and thus abandoned to a planet they are deliberately reducing to an open-air death camp; by their diabolical cunning, our Masters  -- whomever (or whatever) they might be -- have ensured we will never again either evolve the solidarity or acquire the technology necessary to overthrow their ever-intensifying tyranny. Nevertheless I suspect our Mother Earth will have the last word -- that our present-day Masters will find they have underestimated her much as the Weimar ruling class underestimated Hitler -- and that if any of our species survives, it will be only by reverting to the Gaian-centered ethos that sustained our pre-patriarchal ancestors through the first  approximately 194,000 years of our species's existence. 

To do so, we of course first must learn to despise Gaia's chief usurper, the ecogenocidally misogynistic, sadistically patriarchal god of the Abrahamic religions, the monstrously perverted divinity that despite all efforts at reform and/or liberalization forever lurks beneath even the most benign forms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The blood-drenched, torture-mangled histories of these theologies and the irresistible undertow of apocalyptic death-cult  fanaticism they exert even now prove them and the patriarchal ethos they  sustain to be our species' most elemental  Evil. The repetitive proofs of their malignancy span sat least five millennia and are therefore irrefutable. Whether implicitly or explicitly, their creeds are forever poisoned by our species' only genuinely unnatural act -- that is, the eternally irrevocable tripartite condemnation of femaleness from which patriarchy originates and from which its theologies are fabricated, propagated and sustained:

• the hateful, clitoris-envying process exemplified by the scriptural reduction of Eve -- originally the Great Goddess, the Mother of All Being (and therefore the Mother of our Mother Earth) -- to an infinitely despised and therefore monstrous caricature of the first human woman;
• the vindictively pornographic redefinition of femaleness -- the gender originally honored as the source of life and the wellspring of empathy -- to naught but the embodiment of  insatiable lust  exemplified by the scriptural tale of an Eve who defies a self-proclaimed Lord God of the Universe, eats of a "forbidden fruit," implicitly sates herself on  the alleged god's alleged adversary's loquaciously serpentine penis and so seduces her mate Adam to join her in alleged sinfulness;
• the vengeful legitimization and encouragement of rape. femicide and collective punishment implicit in the scriptural tale's conclusion, the alleged god's alleged double-pronged curse in eternal retribution for "Original Sin,"  all females including the Great Goddess and our Mother Earth forever damned for their alleged lustfulness, all males forever damned for their alleged weakness thereunto, with our species' only salvation thus allegedly the unconditional embrace of the credos mandated by the paramount patriarchal propagandists, Moses, Jesus or Muhammad.   

Surely one need not hold a doctorate in psychology to recognize the allegedly "insatiable lust" for which the patriarchy relentlessly denounces females as a clinically classic projection of the murderously sadistic egotism and insatiably self-obsessed avarice that defines the ever-more-apocalyptic morally imbecility of our  Masters. Originally documented as the psychopathic fuel of serial killers, it is increasingly recognized as the ecogenocidally terminal ethos by which the .01 Percenters desecrate our planetary womb, methodically reducing it to the mechanism of our species' doom and thus to our evolutionary tomb. (A pair of informatively thought-provoking  essays on the toxins of patriarchy are here and here.) 

Quoth the Apostle Paul, a patriarchal con-man sufficiently cunning to portray himself as a paragon of honesty:

And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.  So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds.  (2 Corinthians 11: 14-15; English Standard Version)             

Let us therefore acknowledge the death-camp patriarchy is making of the world and recognize the Christian doxology as an ultimate summation of the Abrahamic Big Lie, that were it truthful would:        

  Curse god from whom all misery flows
  Curse him ye victims here below
  Curse him above ye suffering host
  Curse father, son and holy ghost.

*********

SEVERAL FRIENDS AND comrades have asked me how I foresee the forthcoming presidential election. The following LA Progressive  comment-thread post, slightly expanded for inclusion here, says it best:

With all due respect, Messers. Solomon and Cohen need to stop ignoring the pivotal horrors of our national history. The Bidencrats' de facto surrender to Trump and his seemingly inevitable inauguration-day declaration of the U.S. as the de facto Fourth Reich is the conclusion of a bipartisan multi-generation plutocratic coup first approved and enabled by the immunity Congress granted the nazified Bankers' Plot conspirators in 1934. The plotters immediately began enabling Germany's campaign of Aryan global conquest by forcefully promoting U.S. neutrality, and in 1938 they initiated their methodical conversion of Christian fundamentalism into the formidable sturmabteilung it has since become. When the battle of Stalingrad proved the Red Army would strike German Nazism its death-blow, they sought to guarantee the invincibility of nazism's USian variant by recruiting the evil genius of the German Nazi war criminals they embraced as comrades-at-arms c. 1944-1947. They demonstrated their omnipotence on 22 November 1963, in the aftermath permanently reducing the "Democratic" (sic) Party to the "Republican" (sic) Fifth Column. Meanwhile, with Nazi-guided, Goebbels-caliber cunning, they had already begun the stealthy reconditioning of the entire electorate to accept the Christonazi/Neoconfederate ethos that is the modern variant of the original, pre-New-Deal "Democratic" (sic) ideology and which had secretly become the core "Republican" (sic) ideology during the powerfully Ku-Klux-Klan-influenced years of the Harding/Coolidge/Hoover era. Its pivotal postwar metastases include the union-busting Taft-Hartley Act; Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunts; the declaration of Christian theocracy implicit in Eisenhower’s addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance; the subsequent betrayals implicit in LBJ’s Vietnam War, Nixon's Watergate crimes, Carter's Hyde-Amendment misogyny, Reagan's innumerable socioeconomic atrocities and their brazenly relentless continuation by Clinton and every president thereafter. Biden is merely the last comma – or coma – before the victorious Trumpite exclamation point that concludes the apocalyptic imposition of the ecogenocidal agenda originally formalized by our Masters' one true Messiah, Adolf Hitler himself. Such are the circumstances from which only a miraculous national awakening (might) yet save us.

And yes, I find it grievously astounding such an historically obvious sequence of cause and effect is yet belittled as  "conspiracy theory."  

*********

THOUGH I SEE no reason to continue reminding us of how our dire our circumstances have become, I am nevertheless linking the following three reports as both significant warnings of what is to come and accurate examples of the logical reasons for our entirely rational, inevitably depressing sense of collective hopelessness. These are  all from the World Socialist Web Site,  one exposing a Pinochet-type  trial run of the genocidal austerity by which  our Masters at the International Monetary Fund intend to further subjugate us all, the next documenting  the deliberate U.S. reduction of its younger female population's health, the last revealing how an 86-year-old (not a typo) Fed Ex employee was crushed to death in the sort of workplace "accident" that increasingly defines our economic circumstances.

                                                *********                                                

May the waxing light and dwindling darkness of the Sun's Winter-Solstice turn onto its northward path be a comfort us all. Blessed be.

LB/13-20 December 2023

                                                      -30-                                                     

(Even so, let us preface our reading by contemplating the blessings given us by our Mother Earth, whom survival commands us to defend; thus may Her radiance empower us to forever dispel the patriarchal darkness.)  

(Photo by KD ©2023)

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

ORIGINALLY I HAD intended to lead this edition of Dispatches by exposing an outrageous example of the moral imbecility that fuels gentrification --  specifically a report on how the vindictively capitalist Tacoma mayor and city council back-stabbed the municipality's lowest-income renters, with the proverbial knife a provision  deliberately hidden in the deceptive wording of an alleged “tenant rights” ordinance.

But then the World Socialist Web Site led its 1 September edition with an analytical report that – citing Dr. Anthony Fauci’s endorsement of “herd immunity” – noted how his statement included implicit praise of letting Covid run amok to exterminate those of us deemed economically burdensome, which in turn reveals the weaponized virus as "a form of homicidal eugenics, reminiscent of the Nazi regime's policy of murdering handicapped people.”

Thus I moved the Tacoma story to second place, below. At first I mistakenly  regarded it as a separate issue, an especially outrageous demonstration of the lengths to which capitalist politicians will go in their efforts to further multiply the  wealth they and their bribe-masters forcibly extract from the rest of us.

Now, in the context of Fauci's statement, I recognize the Tacoma episode as a legitimate part of the pandemic story -- that reducing people to homelessness is merely another way the ruling class ensures our vulnerability to extermination by Covid.    

Quoth WSWS: ‘...Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases...declared that older people, the ill and disabled “will fall by the wayside” in the current surge of COVID-19. Fauci was not warning about what would happen unless urgent action was taken. Rather, he was seeking to justify the Biden administration’s policy of inaction and cover-up in the face of a new surge of the disease.’

‘Fauci’s comments reiterate the declaration in January 2022 by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky that the fact that COVID-19 predominantly kills people who are “unwell to begin with” is “encouraging news.”’

The global death-toll inflicted by the virus now exceeds 22 million persons. Though WSWS has steadfastly refuted as anti-Chinese propaganda any hypotheses that attempt to define the still-raging but relentlessly downplayed Covid pandemic as anything other than an evolutionary  product of Nature, a report by the internationally prestigious New England Journal of Medicine analyzes all the competing hypotheses. It notes the evidence for laboratory origin, though limited,  nevertheless remains compelling; it also includes, in its fifth paragraph, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs accusation that U.S.  scientists designed the virus as a biological warfare weapon -- that it was vectored to Wuhan during an official visit by U.S. Army personnel. And we all know that just as the USian Empire is the global oberkommando  of world capitalism's ecogenocidal game of thrones, so is the U.S.  military capitalism's global goon squad. 

While both NEJM and WSWS note how politicization of the question has gravely hampered the search for the pandemic’s origin, contextual elements suggest its deliberate employment as an USian bioweapon is by no means an unthinkable possibility:

• Firstly there is the fact the capitalist ruling class has long lamented a surplus of workers as its primary 21st Century problem. But the New-Deal-sized public-infrastructure project the linked article proposes as a solution is prohibited by the global triumph of  neoliberal austerity. Thus  the proposal was  never more than "change we can believe in," yet another colossal deception intended to convince us the present-day ruling class is anything other than infinitely evil. Moreover, though the plutocrats seldom acknowledge it in public, their greatest common fear is of a 99.9 Percent united in revolutionary purposefulness,  and the working-class solidarity potentially growing from  any such  mega-project -- note how the New Deal's public works invariably bolstered organized labor -- is thus anathema to their long-range intent. And what is that? It is the ecogenocidal agenda ever more obvious in their radical escalation of the struggle they formerly sloganized as "better dead than Red," which they have shaped into  an all-out war for ruling-class  omnipotence structured to end only one of two ways: either with their victorious imposition of everlasting zero-tolerance tyranny, or with the extinction of our entire species and the reduction of our Mother Earth back to a bug planet. 

• Secondly there is the fact plutocrats and environmentalists are again joining hands in proclaiming the 21st Century’s greatest problem is not just too many workers but too many people. The more radical environmentalists argue the only (final) solution is the forcible extermination of 90 percent of the human population. Unfortunately the Mainstream Media propaganda machine belittles this appalling truth by treating it as right-wing conspiracy theory – note the politics of the linked source – but I know from interpersonal contacts it was favored by the vindictively petite-bourgeois majorities of students at Western Washington State University’s Huxley College of Environmental studies in the ‘70s, ‘80s and early ‘90s. In other words, the targeted victims would surely all be members of the working class – which in post-Marxian terms is each and every one of us in the global 99.9 Percent.

• Thirdly there is the oft-proven fact the USian Empire has never hesitated to reduce us to involuntary lab-rats for biological warfare experiments. These atrocities include testing known pathogens on urban populations in New York and San Francisco – the choice of targets surely not coincidental given these cities’ histories as epicenters of anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal rebellion, likewise the obviously white-supremacist targeting of Blacks described in the same linked report.

The problem with such disclosures is that a fatal majority of propaganda-zombified USians refuse to believe them. Any time I dare mention anywhere outside Manhattan that the army conducted germ-warfare tests in the New York City subway system, the vast majority of those with whom I am conversing – never mind how presumably well educated they might otherwise be – damn me as a liar.

And I have some regretful personal knowledge of this atrocity too. In late 1968 or early 1969, when I was the news editor of Morristown, New Jersey’s Daily Record, I was approached by relatives of an elderly man killed by pneumonia in late June 1966; they claimed his doctor said he was a victim of the subway tests and begged our journalistic investigation. To my eternal shame I refused their request, answering that without more evidence than a lone doctor’s say-so, I could not assign a reporter to pursue the story. Fortunately the editors at Newsday took the opposite position and ferreted out confirmation the tests had occurred. Then in 1995, Newsday reporter Dennis Duggan, a fellow Lion’s Head regular I knew from my own NYC working-press years, resurrected the story as noted in the "testing known pathogens" link.

Nor was airborne dispersal the only method the USian Empire used for testing bacteriological warfare on its unsuspecting citizenry. The government also employed the experimental use of insects as disease vectors. 

And let us not forget the governmental use of smallpox-infected blanks as but one of the many weapons, tactics and strategies in the (ongoing) 600-year campaign to exterminate the First Nations peoples.

All of which combine to bolster the hitherto-unspeakable possibility implicit in my “Dr. Anthony Fauci says” comment-thread assertion: that regardless of how it was vectored into an ever-more-obviously unstoppable pandemic, Covid-19 is designed as a modern, publicly acceptable substitute for Zyklon B, engineered both for maximum deadliness and maximized plausible deniability.

*****

Capitalist Viciousness Exemplified: Tacoma City Council's 'Tenant Rights' Bill Secretly Shafts Lowest-Income Renters

AS TOM WAITS sings in “Step Right Up,” a basic truth of capitalism is “the large print giveth and the small print taketh away” -- which is precisely how the less-than-impeccable Tacoma City Council sought to back-stab lowest-income renters by hiding its dagger in an alleged tenants’-rights ordinance. The large print of the measure, Substitute Ordinance 28894, imposes a 120-day-notice requirement on rent hikes, but the small print denies it to tenants in any sort of subsidized housing – impoverished persons who often need such notice more than anyone else.

Quoth Page 11 of the ordinance: “A landlord is required to provide at least 120 days’ the minimum written notice, as outlined in Chapter 59.18.140 RCW, as it currently exists or is hereinafter amended, whenever the periodic or monthly housing costs to be charged a tenant will increase by any amount charged the same tenant for the same housing unit, except as provided by RCW 59.18.140(3)(b) as it exists or is hereinafter amended for subsidized tenancies and for deed-restricted affordable housing.”

But note the take-away  in the cited chapter of the Revised Code of Washington: “If the rental agreement governs a subsidized tenancy where the amount of rent is based on the income of the tenant or circumstances specific to the subsidized household, a landlord shall provide a minimum of thirty days' prior written notice of an increase in the amount of rent to each affected tenant.”

The city’s website continued the deception perpetrated by the wording of the ordnance, omitting any mention of its retention of the 30-day notice for Tacoma’s neediest tenants. Local media did likewise, yet another troubling example of how today’s so-called “journalists” – the very antithesis of the working-class-minded reporters of my generation – are too smug in their petite-bourgeois arrogance to trouble themselves with the less-than-five-minutes of online research necessary to  discover the betrayal lurking within “except as provided.”

Such elitist negligence demonstrates the utter contempt for impoverished people and paycheck-dependent folks in general that defines bourgeois moral imbecility. It is all the more glaring given Tacoma’s demographics. A (formerly) working-class-affordable city of about 220,000 persons, its population is still defined by a (shrinking) majority of 99.9 Percenters, about half of whom, myself included, are definitively lower income, with approximately 13 percent of us officially poor. By freight volume, it is the third largest seaport on the nation's west coast, which contributes to the city’s relatively muscular union presence. (Disclosure: I have lived here twice, 1978 to 1982, and now since 2004, each time by choice; Tacoma's friendliness marks it as the sociological antithesis of maliciously elitist, vindictively xenophobic Seattle, and I am admittedly fond of it, as I have been since I moved here during 1978's Labor Day Weekend. In many ways -- diversity, solidarity and an ability to laugh at itself  included -- I find Tacoma reminiscent of the Lower East Side I knew in the '60s and more generically of Brooklyn, where I was born.)  

The city council’s deception came to light in an ongoing, fiercely fought local example of the class-war battles triggered by the nation’s runaway housing prices. Soaring housing costs elsewhere began metastasizing into Tacoma during the second decade of the new century, and by 2019 the city was declared the nation’s “hottest real estate market.” Though anti-inflationary interest hikes have hiked mortgage rates enough to exclude all but the more wealthy buyers, this has actually worsened the victimization inflicted by gentrification. Tacoma real estate values are in the stratosphere, forever beyond working-class reach; rents and homelessness have skyrocketed, the former by 43 percent in the past five years, the latter by 54 percent during the same period in Pierce County, with about 74 percent of these victims of capitalism inside the Tacoma city limits.

As a manifestation of the city’s working-class consciousness, the housing crisis and how it is literally flinging people into the street sparked a successful initiative campaign to put a strong tenants-rights measure on the November ballot. The city council – officially nonpartisan but dominated by the so-called “moderate” (i.e., closet-Republican) wing of the “Democratic” (sic) Party – attempted to sandbag the initiative by enacting Ordinance 28894 and then placing it as a competitive measure on the same ballot.

This bewilder-the-voters ploy was pioneered locally in 2015 by Marilyn Strickland to kill a $15-minimum-wage initiative when she was Tacoma’s mayor. Strickland was also, of course, a key perpetrator in the city's gentrification. When she left the mayor's office in 2018, her success was rewarded by appointment as president and chief executive officer of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, allegedly with a seven-digit salary package the actual amount of which has remained a closely guarded secret. But this time the scheme failed; the tenants’-rights group sued, and the court ordered the city’s measure deleted from the ballot.

Meanwhile about 15 percent of Tacoma’s homeless persons – approximately 1,046 human beings – remain unsheltered, prime targets of the Zyklon-B variant known as “herd immunity.”

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

From the Comment Threads of Other Websites

On Dr. Anthony Fauci Says Many Will “Fall by the Wayside” in New Covid-19 Surge (also linked above; what follows is the complete text of my original comment)

Given the context of Dr. Fauci's statement -- that is, the relentless claims by the ruling class the world has too many workers and too many people in general -- it becomes entirely logical to assume the Covid virus is  a modern substitute for Zyklon B, designed  (of course) for both maximum deadliness and maximum plausible deniability.

Hence the unprecedented relevance of Comrade Damon's  breathtakingly courageous  analysis that capitalism's decision to let the virus run amok is indeed "a form of homicidal eugenics, reminiscent of the Nazi regime's policy of murdering handicapped people.” 

Hence too the bravery demonstrated by the World Socialist Web Site in publishing Comrade Damon's work irrefutably proves   the Fourth International is the only  remaining defender of the working class -- the 99.9 Percent -- on this gravely afflicted planet. 

Those of us who have the requisite skill and technological access should therefore disseminate this report as widely as is humanly possible. 

*****

On Vox’s Student Loan ‘Expert’ Is Paid By Debt Collectors

While it is good to see Vox and Carey exposed for what they are, I  am quite frankly appalled to see Biden's student-loan proposal treated as anything more than another "change we can believe in" -- that is. another of the innumerable bait-and-switch betrayals by which the "Democratic" (sic) Party serves the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party as its Fifth Column. 

Authoritative analyses of the original form of Biden's loan-relief promise made it obvious it was purposed to seduce younger voters even as it was designed to fail.

Old enough to know the overwhelming proof the Democrats were forever nullified as anything more than a Republican Fifth Column by their complicity in the coup  of  22 November 1963 -- note their treachery ranging from Vietnam to  their refusal to protect abortion rights -- I cannot doubt they will continue their betrayals of student debtors. And every other member of the 99.9 Percent as well.   

*****

On 21st Century Socialism: What It Will Become and Why?

My thanks to Ms. Fraad and Mr. Wolff for what I suspect will prove to be one of the most thought-provoking essays ever published on the Internet. This is because -- implicit in its focus on human relationships within families and enterprises (and its pivotal analysis of how socialism undermines itself by tolerating their patriarchal structure and thereby perpetuating the anti-socialist/pro-capitalist/ultimately pro-nazi conditioning that is the essence of patriarchy) -- is the dire necessity to at long last acknowledge the true magnitude of the gender warfare patriarchy has inflicted on our entire species.  As the ultimate expression of misogyny -- fear, hatred and contempt   of femaleness beginning with our Mother Earth (the real reason for the climate crisis) and reaching outward to include not only any creature or object defined as female, but also any creature or object lacking definitively male identity -- patriarchy gives modern males the same theoretical workplace and household omnipotence it gave to the emperors, kings, nobility and slave owners of earlier ages. And just as innumerable wars and atrocities measure the refusal of these older categories of oppressors to relinquish the governmental versions of their privilege without bloodshed, so is the refusal of  modern males to give up its household,  workplace and on-the-street versions measured by the skyrocketing incidence of domestic violence, sexual harassment and rape. Men of this ilk, rabid with a condition that should be recognized as "clitoris envy" -- the reaction to multi-orgasmic female consciousness with the limitless fear, hatred and contempt at present euphemized as "toxic masculinity"-- are probably incurable.  And it is their in-curability that is violently, often murderously obstructing the very transformation Ms. Fraad and Mr. Wolff recognize is essential if socialism is to fulfill its potential as our species' (only) means of surviving the present, otherwise inescapably terminal crisis. (Footnote: I doubt it a coincidence that Weimar Germany, the scientists of which led the world in re-discovering the orgasmic superiority of women, was also the birthplace of nazism, the U.S. manifestations of which are ever-more-obviously fanatical expressions of male refusal to accept scientific truth.)            

*****

On “Left-wing Vitriol is Unwarranted”: Jacobin Defends Ocasio-Cortez and Denounces Socialist Criticism of DSA

Let us not forget that to be assailed by the forces of capitalism with such undisguised venom is a most encouraging measure of our burgeoning success. It proves  the growing effectiveness of the World Socialist Web Site in fostering widespread recognition of the "change-we-can-believe-in" deceptions promulgated by the "Democratic" (sic) Party and its allegedly "socialist" (sic) puppets as they serve the "Republican" (sic)  Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party as its Fifth Column. Let us hope this awakening is but the precursor to the far more pivotal understanding that the treachery of the Democrats and their DSA assets is every bit as deadly a weapon of national nazification as  the outspoken campaign for zero-tolerance Christian white male supremacy led by Trump and his ideological kindred.    

*****

On The Origins of Pabloite Revisionism, the Split Within the Fourth International and the Founding of the International Committee

Listening to Comrade Kishore, I realize the  entire capitalist world, the "People's Republic" (sic) of China included, has – by its deliberately ecogenocidal combination of de facto enslavement, zero-tolerance sociopolitical oppression and defiantly continuing environmental destruction – weaponized the originally USian slogan "Better Dead Than Red"  into a globalized mechanism of intentional apocalypse. Thus our choice is not "socialism or barbarism"; it is instead quite literally socialism or extinction. And I cannot thank you enough for this vital insight.

*****

On The Trump Indictments Are an Indictment of America (this comment rejected by The New York Times; the story and its thread may be pay-walled)

Given the evidence a substantial number of Trump supporters are also admirers of Hitler -- himself a notorious liar -- it seems obvious they regard lying as a vital weapon in achieving for Trump what Leni Riefenstahl zieg-heil'd as Triumph of the Will.

As for why the Trumpites and the Original Nazis share this particularly venomous brand of moral imbecility, I have no doubt it is because of their common recognition that lying -- the more sensationally the better -- is the only 100-percent-certain method for inflaming bigotry to genocidal intensity.

*****

On The Last Time A Foreign Military Threat Was Placed Near The US Border, The World Almost Ended

One of the little-known details of the Cuban Missile Crisis is the international magnitude of the Soviet preparations for war. As I was returning from Korea in August 1962 via the USNS Sultan, we were shadowed by a Soviet submarine from the moment we left Pearl Harbor – I don't recall the date -- until we entered San Francisco Bay early in the morning on 4 September 1962. Initially we saw only the Soviet sub’s periscope, but as we drew closer to the U.S., it would surface to charge its batteries and run along our port side maybe 1000 yards distant. Eventually we were waving to one another, the sub's crew on deck for a breath of fresh air and those of us going home aboard the Sultan behaving as if we were on a sea cruise. Years later, when the entire timeline of the crisis was declassified – when it became clear the Soviets were installing the missiles in August -- I realized why that sub was there. Had the proverbial balloon gone up, they'd have torpedoed us -- somewhat more than 4,000 trained and service-seasoned officers and enlisted personnel aboard an unarmed (and therefore utterly defenseless) WWII troop transport -- which would no doubt have killed us all and given them a pivotal (and utterly demoralizing) naval victory.

Timmy Taes: Given the classified Military Occupational Specialties of many aboard the Sultan, had she surrendered, the United States would have no doubt blown us out of the water, blamed the Soviets and turned the incident into a propaganda coup. In those days, it wasn't just infantry and artillery traveled by troop transport. It was every enlisted MOS and officers from captain down (though the commissioned officers and warrant officers were of course spared the tides of vomit that defined the troop bays). However it obtained, it would have been a substantial victory for the Soviets, because in 1962, all our senior NCOs were WWII and/or Korean War combat veterans, and even amongst troops who have never been tested by live fire, there is a vast difference in combat-readiness between raw recruits and those of us who have already completed most if not all of our active service (two years for draftees and; three years for Regular Army enlistees, as I was; I don't remember the active-duty requirements for warrant officers or Reserve Officers Training Corps [ROTC] and Officer Candidate School [OCS] graduates with reserve commissions, but I think it was three years). Plus in '62, those of us on the Sultan homebound from Korea, nominally a 13-month tour of duty, had been extended there in place at least three months (in some instances, depending on MOS, as much as twice that) due to the Berlin Crisis. So none of us were FNGs, i.e., greeenies. In other words, the loss of those aboard the Sultan would have been comparable in impact to the losses of seasoned personnel at Pearl on 7 December 1941.

*****

On Why America Deserves Donald Trump

Firstly, apropos Mr. Fancher's love-the-enemy-to-(our)-death nonsense, World War II proved decisively the only real antidote to nazism -- and the Trumpites are most assuredly nazis even if they are too cunning (or too ignorant) to lay claim to the name  -- is the Red Army antidote. Secondly, that's precisely why Adameran's quotation from Thomas Greene is last-word, terminal-election, apocalyptically  accurate: "Trump will not be defeated by educating voters...Workers now sense that economic justice...is permanently out of reach."  Apropos which, note that when workers in the Weimar Republic reached the same conclusion, they turned to Hitler and the Original (N.S.D.A.P.) Nazis.  Thirdly, in response to jdt7385, I voted Green in 2016, when I realized the "choice" between Hillary and Trump was a choice between World War III (triggered by the former's Goldwater-Girl apocalyptic hatred of Russia) or a new Holocaust (triggered by the latter's ecogenocidal hatred of everything female [our Mother Earth included], all Jews, all people of bolor and all sexual minorities. Now of course it is obvious the Greens, like the DSA, have been co-opted by the "Democratic" (sic) Party, which in post-JFK truth is -- and forever shall remain -- naught but the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party.  Because I suspect jdt7385 and I both recognize the importance of voting to preserve the franchise, I urge jdt to find a suitable alternative other than Trump, even if it is but to write in "None of the Above" merely to -- as I said --  sustain the franchise; I say that because for a person of conscience to vote for Trump will surely inflict the lifelong guilt that plagues many Germans who joined the NSDAP only because they felt they had no other alternative -- a guilt I know from German-born friends many of their children bear as well.   

LB/1-5 September 2023

-30-

 (But let us first contemplate the Mother our survival commands us to defend; may Her radiance empower us to forever dispel the patriarchal darkness.)   

Photograph by KD ©2023: from a work-in-progress, an unabashedly worshipful embrace of our Mother Earth.

******************

I CANNOT REMEMBER, in all the decades I've followed such matters, a more relentlessly disturbing -- and not infrequently terrifying -- outpouring of news reports, whether from within the USian imperial homeland and its European colonies or from an oft-provoked Russian Federation that appears increasingly on the brink of precisely the sort of internal chaos that could make a world-ending, human-species-exterminating thermonuclear apocalypse unavoidable.

Meanwhile political conditions here in the Disunited States have deteriorated to such a depth of vindictively inflicted hopelessness that Hitler Wannabe Donald Trump's infamous characterization of non-white nations as "shithole countries" unquestionably now applies at least as accurately to the alleged "land of the free," wherein working-class existence is ever-more-obviously defined by a methodically engineered and maliciously imposed regime of  steadily intensifying socioeconomic and political oppression. Thus our tragically afflicted nation becomes a toxic variant of  the "rough beast, its hour come round at last" foretold by William Butler Yeats in "The Second Coming," revealing itself to be a relentlessly sadistic remake of Caligula’s Rome, Marie Antoinette’s France and Nicholas II’s Russia in which bottomless moral imbecility and irremediable corruption grant an infinitely evil aristocracy the absolute freedom to do whatever it goddamn well pleases to any and all of the rest of us.

Here – each of these reports chosen specifically for the fact it has seemingly managed to escape the ever-more-oppressive USian censorship apparatus – are 13 examples of the atrocities we now accept as the defining aspects of our daily routine, the most recent afflictions in an ever-metastasizing plague of horrors that in a just and mindful world would have long ago provoked revolution:

• Skyrocketing State Terror in the Age of Counterterrorism. Biden the Beguiler and a growing cabal of state attorneys general are radically escalating the Trumpite/Christonazi war against Marxians, other genuine socialists, environmentalists, anarchists, feminists and activists of the Black Lives Matter, pro-choice, LGBTQ and Antifa communities. See also my comment-thread remarks, below.

• Nazis dominate US law enforcement, secret-police and intelligence agencies. Yup; eactly as in Weimar Germany before the Original Nazis were given free reign.

• Does the lifetime-appointed cabal of Christonazi fanatics who tyrannize us via the Supreme Court mean white-supremacist Christians can again refuse to serve people of color? Sure looks that way.

• Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s partial student loan forgiveness plan, 43 million borrowers denied debt relief. See also my comment-thread remarks, below.

• US Supreme Court majority abolishes racial preferences in university admission. What better way to re-whiten the USian imperial ruling class?

• The privatization of public education in the US, backed by billionaires including Betsy DeVos, is accelerating. From the ruling-class perspective, the great advantage of private schools is their absolute freedom from constitutional interference, specifically the fact they can teach anything they choose and exclude whomever they wish.

• Justice Department report fails to substantiate the suicide narrative of Jeffrey Epstein’s death in federal custody.In other words, nothing in our maximally mobsterized milieu challenges the overwhelming probability he was clipped to keep him from publicly naming his perverted peers.

• Bathyscaphe billionaires get massive global rescue effort; refugees left to drown. Conditioned to self-obsessed vacuousness, our species’ aristocrat-worshiping Moronic Multitude emulates the moral imbeciles they adore.

• Witnesses say Greek navy sank refugee ship.Plausibly undeniable given the Greek government’s already proven history of anti-refugee genocide.

• Florida Governor Ron DeSantis campaigns on “shoot on sight” anti-immigrant policy. When in USia, do with guns as the Greeks do with naval vessels.

• Trump (Finally) Labeled the Nazi He Is.At last, a truth-telling for which I have long argued.

• Details on the Russian coup attempt we won’t find in mainstream media. A vital analysis if we’re to understand the apocalyptic hazard.  

• The French working class battles murderous police and ever-more-relentless state tyranny. France, a presumptive USian Empire puppet. boils over in furious rebellion: includes details we’re denied by imperial censors.

Though the case is admittedly mostly circumstantial, it cannot be said too often that 90 years of evidence proves far beyond judicially required certainty our plight dates from the 1933 Bankers' Plot, the collaborative effort in which the Wall Street aristocrats conspired with Hitler and Mussolini to nazify the nation into what their genetic and/or ideological descendants have made it today, the de facto Fourth Reich, the ultimate model of patriarchy as a theocratically brain-policed slave state, the global arsenal for terminal apocalypse and the ecogenocidally misogynistic reduction of our Mother Earth back to a bug planet.

*****

From the Comment Threads of Other Websites:

As cited above, on Skyrocketing State Terror in the Age of Counterterrorism.

Thank you, Mr. Gould-Wartofsky and LA Progressive, for this superbly analytical report. Meanwhile those who claim there is anything genuinely "leftist" about the present-day "Democratic" (sic) Party -- which in post-JFK operational truth has repeatedly proven itself to be nothing more than the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party -- are either tragically ignorant of genuinely leftist ideologies or are obediently parroting a Trumpite Big Lie.

***

As cited above, on   Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s partial student loan forgiveness plan, 43 million borrowers denied debt relief.

Predictably, Biden the Beguiler's intentionally fraudulent pledge of student-loan debt relief has proven itself yet another classic example of "change we can believe in" -- the most malevolent Big Lie ever fed the terrifyingly gullible USian electorate.

The pivotal, ultimately damning fact in this ongoing charade -- in which the "Democratic" (sic) Party desperately seeks to maintain its ever-more-transparent disguise as something other than the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party's Fifth Column -- is there is no possible way even the most delusional of the Beguiler's advisors could have imagined the Christonazi cabal that now tyrannizes the nation via the Supreme Court would let any student-debt-relief plan stand. 

Precisely as Comrade Grey points out, the Beguiler ensured  the Christonazis had -- and have -- "the best conditions for them to block the program," which they will obviously continue to exploit to maximum ruling class advantage.

At least as important as the financial considerations cited by Sebouh80 is the political fact any truly effective debt relief would be tantamount to manumission from the lifetime wage slavery that effectively prohibits any and all meaningful anti-capitalist resistance by the debtors. It does so by the constant threat of retaliatory job loss underscored by the fact student loans cannot be discharged via bankruptcy.

This method of prohibiting any such activism, which dates to the Johnson and Nixon regimes' efforts to suppress opposition to the Southeast Asian War, is in fact the original, underlying purpose of runaway higher education costs.

***

Wisconsin’s “Democratic” (sic) Governor Signed Largest Private School Voucher Boost in 30 Years

This is merely additional (irrefutable) proof the post-JFK "Democratic" (sic) Party is nothing more than the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party.

(Don't forget it was Wisconsin also spawned Sen. Joseph McCarthy, purgemaster of the c. '50s-'60s persecution not only of Communists but -- in truth -- anyone whose politics were to the left of fascism, all intellectuals especially included.)

***

“Twitter Files” Journalist Matt Taibbi Claims IRS and FBI Retaliation

How many times must it be said? The USian "mainstream media" propaganda machine -- social media included -- is the world's first privately owned, for-maximum-profit version of Josef Goebbels' Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

And exactly like the Third Reich's Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (RMVP), its present-day descendant in the Nazi-war-criminal abetted de facto Fourth Reich is ultimately under the command-and-control of the respective nation's secret police, in each instance weaponized to serve the infinite evil of the ruling tyrants.

***

Of Course Greta Met with Zelinsky

I wonder if Ms. Thunberg realizes the tragic extent to which she has been co-opted by the USian imperial brain-police apparatus -- or if she does not, how she will respond when she awakens to the bitter truth of our now-eternal powerlessness. (Because I have enormous respect for her passion, I see her as an innocent in the same way we of the old '60s Counterculture were innocents, smug [and therefore utterly vulnerable] in the foolish belief our righteousness protected us from contamination by the Infinite Evil that has threatened the world since the advent of patriarchy and which -- with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- achieved the terminally misogynistic ecogenocidal omnipotence over our Mother Earth and all her children that was always the patriarchs' ultimately apocalyptic purpose.)

***

5 Elements of Fascism and Their Exact Expression in Trump, the White Christian Nationalist Movement He Leads and the “Republican” (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party He Rules

With respect to Mr. Reich -- he is definitely cognizant of the threat implicit in today's "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party -- I believe he errs in labeling its ecogenocidal toxicity "fascism." Instead -- especially given the admiration today's so-called "Republicans" express for Hitler -- it is clearly an USian variety of nazism (lower-case "n") -- particularly given its notion of Western-European ancestry/non-Jewish whites as the planet's master-race. There is also the fact it has been credibly reported Trump's favorite book is Mein Kampf -- reports surely confirmed by how the strategies and tactics employed not only by Trump but also by his rivals within the party's dominant like-minded faction are obviously so derived. In this context, it seems to me a grave downplaying of the threat to call our adversaries and their lethal intent as anything other than nazis and nazification.

***

Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023): Chronicler of American carnage

I knew McCarthy in East Tennessee at the University of Tennessee c. 1959 and c. 1962-1964 while he was living in the Sevier County back country and writing The Orchard Keeper.

Though nominally he denounced any and all intellectually focused  conversation as mere "holding forth," in what I recall as our one genuinely "serious" chat, he repeatedly and emphatically cited Rachel Carson's Silent Spring as the most important (and most infinitely damning) text  our species would ever publish. When I replied that Carson's disclosures might be for what was then called the conservation movement what Uncle Tom's Cabin had been to abolitionism,  he  said that could never happen because our species was too pridefully ignorant and too sociopathically self-obsessed.

Point being, if we are to understand his extreme negativity -- which most assuredly is not to justify it -- I believe we have to look at Carson's influence (which has since morphed into the ruling-class-environmentalists' academic  demand for exterminating 90 percent of the working class population), and the fact that concurrent with the publication of Silent Spring, the Tennessee Valley Authority, his father's pride and joy (and my own father's favorite, sometimes tears-in-his-eyes example of beneficent socialism), TVA was already under relentlessly savage attack from the Neoconfederate and proto-Christonazi right. Meanwhile the "Democratic" (sic) Party's alleged efforts to defend and preserve TVA -- especially after the coup of 22 November 1963 -- were ever-more-obviously nothing but charades.

Utterly deprived of humanitarian resources by Nazi-war-criminal-abetted capitalist   censorship, terrorism and weaponization of religion, McCarthy's work thus exemplifies the only aesthetic tolerable to the USian ruling class. 

Afterthoughts: (1)-I should have added that McCarthy’s apocalyptic negativity – albeit far more lyrically expressed than the prideful ignorance and methodically shrunken vocabulary of the Moronic Majority nominally permit– is precisely the helplessly subjugated, ever-more-forcibly conditioned hopelessness by which our self-anointed divine-right masters seek to guarantee no one will ever again dare rise up to challenge their ecogenocidal patriarchal omnipotence; (2)-While the bourgeois environmentalists demand for extermination of 90 percent of the global working class has since been trivialized as a right-wing conspiracy theory, it is in fact anything but. See for example the full text of one of Eric Pianka's speeches and the accompanying commentary as cited by Wikipedia, here. There is also the fact a few of the wealthier students at Huxley College, Western Washington State University's  environmental-science school, were already openly advocating such a final solution c. 1982-83, when I was living in Bellingham. (3)-I err in attributing the call for genocidal reduction of the 99.9 Percent exclusively to the influence of Silent Spring; Carson’s work is actually one of two such goads. The other is The Population Bomb, by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, which was published in 1968. A third factor is of course the sneering, Marie-Antoinette-caliber contempt with which the USian aristocracy – the academic elite most assuredly included – regards the 99.9 Percent, particularly our caste-sisters and caste-brothers who lack college degrees and/or work in fields wherein higher education is not required.

LB/30 June-2 July 2023

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FIRST, MY APOLOGY FOR AN UNAPOLOGETIC CONCLUSION: As regular readers know, I have struggled for some time – years, actually – with my desire to move this blog “beyond” politics, with the explanation for my sarcasm quotes in this passage's concluding paragraph. I was motivated by the psychological nausea inflicted by the fact today’s politics are overwhelmingly those of the relentless capitalism-inflicted apocalypse, utterly hopeless and therefore infinitely depressing, a condition for which I had hoped to evolve textual and photographic antidotes for myself that would also serve those of you who regularly read this blog.

But now at long last I realize there are three reasons I cannot – indeed could never – do as I wanted. Each is existential. One is that a political journalist – no more, no less – is what I am. As a member of the working press, politics was what I thought about and wrote about most often. Two is that in the privacy of my own thoughts, and sometimes in revealing conversations with lovers or closest friends, I admitted I conceived of politics in the broadest possible socioeconomic sense, as for viewing crime as the consequences both of our national ethos of self-obsessed of moral imbecility and of the desperate poverty resulting from the deliberately murderous systemic malfeasance that ultimately defines capitalism as a form of nazism. By my late 20s I had come to recognize capitalism as the direct offspring of patriarchy, which in turn I had come to recognize as our species’ methodically ecogenocidal war against our Mother Earth, thus a suicide pact – and thus too an ultimately unnatural act, the one truly mortal sin that not only dooms us all but seeks to exterminate all other life (and even the possibility of life) as well. Three – of course (and with heartfelt thanks both to my Marxian father and the maternal aunt who was mindful both spiritually and intellectually) – is that I was long ago awakened to the necessity of not just socioeconomic revolution but metaphysical and aesthetic revolution as well. Though as a member of the working press what I most often wrote about was not the disease of patriarchy but immediate examples of its diverse symptoms, I realize now I have somehow been granted the freedom to do both simultaneously -- that is, to put the symptoms in their proper context (which was the ultimate purpose of the photographic and textual revelations of anti-patriarchal rebellion that were the conceptual backbone of the burned and forever-lost “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer”) -- and that I have been working toward an analogous clarification-of-post-fire-purpose throughout a retirement that at age 83 has already extended, seemingly as if by magick, far longer than ever I expected to live.

While the thinking outlined above began in my childhood, its present form owes a great deal to the Gaia Hypothesis, which restates in scientific terms the core belief of our pre-patriarchal ancestors and cousins, amongst them the First Nations peoples, that our planet is herself a living being, “conscious and self-regulating.” Thus I have come to recognize patriarchy as total war against all being and the present USian plague of mass shootings not only as a microcosm of the Empire’s definitively nazi policy of massive retaliation, but – exactly as in Islamic suicide bombings – a microcosmic fulfillment of patriarchy’s terminal misogyny, its intent to assert its alleged supremacy of male over female by literally destroying anything and everything born of Nature. Indeed, the patriarchal intent of destroying the planet to “save” it is ever-more-evident in our Masters’ refusal to act against self-induced terminal climate change.

Which brings us to my promised explanation of the sarcasm quotes around “beyond”: in this darkest of all human ages, there is literally nothing for us, whether as individuals or as a species, “beyond” the mandate for responding to the apocalyptic threat posed by patriarchy. Since politics is either the mechanism by which we rescue ourselves and ensure our species’ survival or the weapon by which we destroy all that is within reach – the notion of anything “beyond” politics is as absurd as the medieval notion of transforming lead into gold. More to the point, now that mere survival has thus become a form of revolutionary defiance, politics is the pivot upon which we live or die, about which I shall henceforth write without apology for anything save the limitations of my own vision.

**********

FORMAT NOTE: I have used Typepad’s catalogue of formats to redesign Dispatches to accommodate reception by cell-phone users. This will transform previously published headlines into text that sometimes either overflows its original spacing or leaves great voids in it and does likewise with previously published photographs, flaws that are anathema to me as a former (award-winning) news-and-picture editor, though after a long delay I have come to accept the resultant graphic ugliness as an unavoidable surrender to present-day technology essential for increased readership.

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THREE COMMENT-THREAD POSTS FROM OTHER WEBSITES:

On the debt-limit crisis (and why I am so utterly terrified of its looming consequences): We should fear a “compromise” that sells out seniors, kids, and the disabled.

I am 83 years old, a mostly retired, sometimes award-winning print journalist whose newspaper career began at age 16 in 1956. Since the economic debacle of 2008-2009, which cost me nearly 70 percent of my annual income and forced me into bankruptcy, my sole source of pay has been Social Security.

The most telling lesson of my career is therefore the certain knowledge all USian politicians -- whether members of the "Democratic" (sic) Party or of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party -- are slavishly obedient puppets of the plutocracy, wholly owned and controlled by that tiny cabal of obscenely wealthy, fanatically neoliberal aristocrats who rule the United States and its global Empire with the same morally imbecilic omnipotence that hitherto defined only history's most notorious tyrants.

Their core principle -- here stated in the English translation of its original assertion in Hitler's Mein Kampf -- is that anyone too impoverished or disabled to thrive under capitalism is "life unworthy of life." Thus the only real distinction between the Democrats and the Republicans is the extent to which the former are infinitely more skilled at deceiving the Moronic Majority that functions as the national electorate. Thus too neoliberal "austerity," the slow-motion genocide by which our Masters have replaced death camps.

In fact the present crisis is but a repetition of recent history. Barack the Betrayer -- who campaigned successfully on "change we can believe in," the most ruinously brazen lie ever fed the Moronic Majority -- conspired with the Republicans to savage food stamps in 2011, using a carefully choreographed debt-limit fight to disguise the treachery of the "Democratic" (sic) Party, afterward lying to the public he had "saved" food stamps even as he radically cut food stamps for singles and elderly people, slashing my monthly allocation from $130 to $16.

Today's bitterly damning truth is the Democrats refused to raise the debt limit when they had the votes to do so. In other words. they deliberately engineered the present crisis by handing the Christonazis and Neoconfederates the tools to compel whatever socioeconomic savagery our Masters mandate. Despite his lies, Biden the Beguiler is obviously using the same strategy and tactics his predecessor the Betrayer employed.

Thus the political harlots who cater to our Masters' every plutocratic whim cunningly facilitate ever-worsening tyranny even as they dupe the Moronic Majority by preserving the Big Lie -- and that is precisely what it is -- of a troubled but nevertheless still functional democratic republic.

While I have no idea how deliberately murderous the looming socioeconomic savagery will be, experience tells me it will indeed be another step in the .01 Percent's effort to reduce the numbers of the 99.9 Percent, which means it will be as genocidal as our Masters believe they can achieve without sparking actual revolution.

Meanwhile my gratitude to Mr. Eskow for daring tell the truth, and my thanks to LAP for daring publish it.

*****

Ukrainian attack on Kremlin is a criminal provocation

Whether the drone-bombing of the Kremlin is as claimed by the Ukrainians or the Russians, its ultimate message is, again, that the global ruling class believes itself well-enough bunkered to survive not only a chemical, biological and thermonuclear apocalypse but the decade or so of nuclear winter that's bound to follow it.

And given the ongoing ruling-class refusal to take meaningful action against global warming, it is entirely possible our Masters see nuclear winter as the final solution to that problem too.

Meanwhile turncoat Putin's restoration of Russian Orthodoxy is methodically returning the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to Tsarist tyranny, even as the USian Empire -- no doubt following the advice of the legions of Original (N.S.D.A.P.) Nazi war criminals it embraced as comrades-at-arms during and after the final year of World War II -- employs a Jewish puppet to re-nazify the Ukraine.

Exactly as Comrade Zaremba says in her comment, "This attack could get us all killed" -- as in the extermination of the entire global working class and the destruction of Earth as a habitable planet.

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Forest Defenders Appear For Preliminary Hearings

Actually -- this in supportive response to mwildfire -- Atlanta is infinitely more malevolent (and therefore infinitely more terrifying) than "an outpost of the Third Reich"; it is instead an embryo of the de facto Fourth Reich, the USian Empire, advised into being c. 1944-1968 by the legions of Nazi war criminals gleefully adopted from the defeated Third Reich and secretly resurrected to far greater ecogenocidal murderousness by the United States government and its capitalist owners.

So advised, the Empire's owners and their governmental vassals have since granted themselves irreversible omnipotence by fully weaponizing technology to fulfill their intent of "full-spectrum dominance" -- conquest of the entire world followed by universal zero-tolerance tyranny enforced by inescapable total surveillance. Their ethos is bottomless sadism and smirking moral imbecility. They will co-opt and exploit all human knowledge, either to fulfill Hitler's dream of subjugating all the peoples of the world or to fulfill the global version of Hitler's final stated wish, for which google Hitler's Nero decree and last will. Thus -- proclaiming of our world as they did of a village in Vietnam, "we had to destroy it to save it" -- they will exterminate our species and reduce our Mother Earth back to a bug planet rather than suffer genuine defeat.

That, my comrades, is the true unmitigated horror of our present circumstances, and that is what the "full-spectrum dominance" of the oppression that is ever-more-appallingly evident in Atlanta should be telling us. But -- alas and to our eventual doom -- far too many of us yet have our heads up that dark and smelly place I dast not mention lest this entire comment be censored.

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SURPRISE, SURPRISE: The New York Times Publishes My Correction:

For those who’ve already spent their non-subscriber limit of 10 stories per month or otherwise cannot get past the NYT paywall:

All the four questions are from multiple-choice eighth-grade history tests. The question I addressed is, “Which of the following changes took place in Southern states immediately after the Civil War?”

The choices are:

(1)-Access to education became more available to African American people.

(2)-Most African Americans quickly switched from agricultural work to employment in manufacturing.

(3)-African American women were given the right to vote.

(4)-State governments were required to have African American people in legislative and executive offices.

Though I recognized options 1 and 4 were each correct, I answered option 4 as the more important – and my answer was marked wrong. According to The Times, the only correct answer was option 1.

Hence my comment and the comment in response:

Given my background in history -- a near-lifelong interest and a major part of my interdisciplinary BA -- I would debate the stated correct answer on the history question about the results of the Civil War. While it is indeed true the end of slavery enabled African-Americans legal access to education, it is also true the presence of federal troops throughout the secessionist states compelled the acceptance of African-Americans elected to local, state and federal government. (And of course it is equally true that by withdrawing federal troops in 1877, the U.S. government tacitly endorsed the re-emergence of the genocidal white supremacy that methodically purged African-Americans from the political system and radically curtailed their access to education.)

Loren Bliss (Tacoma, May 3)

(42 recommended)

In response:

@Loren Bliss my first thought was where were these black children going to school in 1866. My own state of Florida had no constitutional requirement for providing education until 1868 and we didn’t fully integrate until 1970. We did have black representation in congress during reconstruction though.

Alexander (Sunshine State, May 3)

(5 recommended)

As one of my Tacoma comrades said in response, “Good show! No wonder most USians are so ignorant about history. The media continues to peddle fables.”

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FICTION, MAYBE AS PROPHECY, working-titled “A Thing So Simple and So Huge,” a first draft of something, of course subject to constant revision:

Source of title:

And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived
And in attempts to understand a thing so simple and so huge
Believed that they were meant to live after the deluge

– Jackson Browne, “Before the Deluge”

***

THE STORY-KEEPER was awakened by a frighteningly improbable clamor of ravens. His name was Matthew Drusillason; he was a black-bearded, brown-skinned, olive-eyed  schoolteacher, a student of theocracy-forbidden subjects, a refugee from  the religious wars that yet raged beyond the Dead Lands. Three years ago he had been the sole survivor of a badly crewed sailing vessel fatally overcrowded with desperately hopeful emigrant escapees, a leaky, rot-weakened coaster storm-sunk amidst the always-treacherous rip-tides  of the  Sailish Sea. The Potlatch People had found him dying on Sanamo Island's Eastward Beach, and when he confessed to them his bewildered astonishment at having been borne  to the shallows by a pod of dolphins, they had nursed him back to health with their native medicines and afterward, relishing his unapologetically truthful stories of the tyrannies that characterized Before, they had adopted him both as a tribal member and as the keeper of the newest episodes of their struggle for survival in the relentlessly deadly wake of the Before's attempted murder of the formerly vengeful but now-gradually recovering  Mother Earth. His adoption was 14 moons ago; since then, guided by Potlatch  teachers, he had learned much of the locale's plants and animals,  and for a moment or two, knowing ravens do not ordinarily transform the late-night skies with cacophonies of rage, he thought he was dreaming.  But now he realized he was fully awake and the avian uproar he first believed imaginary was in fact happening in reality, and it was occurring at such uncanny loudness it seemed each of the thousand or so ravens he knew dwelt in the island's coniferous forest had taken wing in gratingly loquacious protest. Perhaps he had slept through an earthquake. Perhaps a quake was looming. Perhaps the volcano they called KomaKulsh was again erupting or was about to explode as she was said to have done three decades past. Perhaps a giant tsunami had flooded past the Sailish Sea's mountainous barriers and  was coming to drown Sanamo and obliterate all traces of its residents’ already unlikely survival. Ravens, he had learned, are magickal; they are also among the Earth Mother's chosen messengers; they would know of such events long before humans awakened to the dangers. Troubled by an ever-more-compelling sense of incipient disaster, a seasoned veteran of many post-Before horrors and thus haunted by a looming sense of more potentially terminal possibilities than he could envision, Matthew rolled out of his bed, silently cursed the surprising coldness of the early-autumn air, rebuked himself for not having fed an overnight-sized log into the stone fireplace, seized one of the three cherished red wool Before blankets that had warmed his slumber, wrapped his naked flesh against the now-presumed chill of the Fifth Hinge, stepped barefoot onto the  stones of the cabin porch and thence into the yet chillier dew-damp grass as the corvid clamor continued and yes grew louder, more insistent, more alarmed and therefore more alarming. The swooping, soaring birds had risen in such numbers they reduced the overhead starlight to fast flickers and darted ominously eerie black silhouettes across the round yellow face of the Three Sisters Moon seasonably low and already sinking beyond her eighth-lunation zenith in the southern sky. He had never seen its like, not even in the vast regional musterings of carrion birds that cleansed the post-apocalyptic battlefields of their reeking gore and stripped to bare-bone heaps of weathering skulls the mounds of severed heads that marked the territorial borders of the warring states beyond the Dead Lands. 

Fifty yards from the closely adzed and gray-mud-chinked cedar-log walls of Matthew’s cabin and the clustered, nearly identical dwellings of his immediate neighbors, his fellow Sanamo dwellers were hastily gathering in the village Round, children, adolescents and adults alike, most of the adolescents and adults already visibly armed, all gazing skyward in fearful bewilderment, their upturned faces dimly silhouetted against the slowly waning flicker of the Thanksfire they had kindled to greet the rising moon seven sand-glasses earlier. The Three-Sisters Harvest would begin at dawn today; that’s why the celebration had not continued until sunrise. But why these outraged ravens? What was so dreadfully amiss? No doubt gray-haired Wanda Wolfwise, the Potlatch People’s eldest teacher and the leader of this small band of racially indistinct human survivors, would soon arrive to interpret the ravens' message and – or so Matthew and his gathered neighbors dearly hoped – help them all discern their best options. Now knowing his presence both as story-keeper and warrior was essential, he hastened back inside, exchanged blanket for early-autumn buckskins and elk-hide moccasins, belted on pistols and throwing axe, shrugged into his boomer’s bag, grasped the ancient but meticulously cared-for Before rifle he had been given by the elders as an adoption gift, lifted it off its wooden bedside pegs,  donned his woven-reed hat and strode to join his neighbors at the Round. By now nearly everyone of fighting age who dwelt on the island, 203 adults and adolescents, had mustered, bringing their younger children to the safety of the cedar-log parenting hall as the caw, caw, caw continued  to fill the night sky, seeming even louder and more grating than before, its alarm so intrusive Wanda had brought a hastily improvised birch-bark megaphone to make herself heard above the din.

“It’s an invasion by rats,” she shouted. "Legions of rats swimming up from the south. Rats riding clusters of flotsam at least as wide as three adult armspans. The rats aboard the debris pushed toward us by as many more rats swimming. And when these rats exhaust themselves in the water, only a few drown; the rest change places with the riding rats. The South Shore Kayak Patrol spotted them, sent a lantern signal to the Shore Watchers, who sent a rider to me. Then the ravens started up. But the rats are still a glass away, which means thanks to our warriors and the ravens, we’ve just enough time to organize a defense. Everybody and all our dogs to the Southward Beach. Get ready to ignite the fire boats. Goddess knows what sickness these rats carry. Goddess help us keep them off our island.”

The ravens continued their enraged denunciations; the Potlatchers did as Wanda directed. Eleven family groups of five or six boomers and as many as 12 archers jogged along the packed-earth trail out past the seasonably red-leafed vine maples that grew like natural hedges around the village with its familial clusters of log cabins and its broad surrounding span of black-soil communal gardens bountifully pregnant with harvest-ready corn, beans and pumpkins. Moccasined feet padded a soft rhythm not unlike that of the previous evening's ceremonial drums. Then the joggers slowed to a quieter, more erratic pace, hiking with carefully placed feet down the trail's abruptly steep and hazardously rocky slope through an agedly high-branched stand of Douglas Fir to the Southward Beach, the boomers laden with spare ammunition for flintlock rifles already primed and loaded with trade-powder and bear-greased projectiles of scavenged lead home-cast from cherished Before molds and dependably deadly out to 300 yards, the archers laden with bundles of goose-feather-fletched, salvaged-iron-bladed arrows for their recurve bows, which were effective to only half the rifles' range but able to loose as many as 10 arrows to every boomer’s one painstakingly loaded round of powder and conical ball. The tide was in; small waves lapped softly on wetly gleaming moonlit pebbles; above the incessantly ranting riot of ravens the night sky suddenly flared with serpentine bands of bright green light; the Spirit Dance was reaching way further south than usual; another omen; the Dancers' message yet to be determined. Matthew was momentarily entranced, already thinking how he might describe what he was hearing and seeing and feeling, how he might later record the details of the astounding strangeness that had already occurred, how he might document it with his newly learned expertise in the Potlatchers' traditional mnemonic shorthand, blackberry ink on tanned buckskin...

(To [maybe] be continued, Muse inspiring. )

**********

LB/12 May 2023

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Biden's Promised "Compromise" Is a Death Sentence for Millions

FIRSTLY, BIDEN'S CONCILIATORY  speech  proves once again the "Democratic" (sic) Party's only true post-JFK function is slavishly serving our Masters as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party.

Why else would Biden the Beguiler voice the de facto unconditional surrender of pledging "compromise" with the sworn enemies of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and any other program that might benefit the 99 Percent?

Secondly, note how the Mainstream  Media Propaganda Machine -- the world's first privately-owned, for-profit version of Josef Goebbel's Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda -- is radically soft-peddling the magnitude of the Democrats' loss. 

Just as Patrick Martin reports in his excellent World Socialist Web Site analysis, "As of Wednesday evening, Republicans had made a net gain of 11 seats in the House, giving them a six-seat majority." Note too that  LA Progressive, by no means a Marxian website, also truthfully labels the election a devastating loss for the Democrats.

But the MMPM -- as much our Masters' voice here in USia as its predecessor was Hitler's voice in the Third Reich -- will not even entrust us with that much truth.

And my analysis -- bear in mind I covered my first election in 1958 -- says the Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party, already with 49 seats, will take the Senate too. 

Here are the reported numbers in the so-called "undecided" states:

Georgia: in the present tally -- this according to The New York Times at 10:30 a.m. -- the Democrat has 49.4 percent of the vote, while the Christonazi/Neoconfederate has 48.5 percent. The Libertarians -- social-Darwinist nazis who believe Ayn Rand's fictionalizations of Mein Kampf are the ultimate guideposts to morally imbecilic glory -- have 2.1 percent. In the runoff, that 2.1 percent is bound to go Christonazi/Neoconfederate. Do the math: 48.5 plus 2.1 is 50.6 -- sure Republican victory.

Nevada -- again according to NYT -- the Republican has 49.4 percent, the Democrat has 47.6. With 83 percent of the votes counted, an almost certain Christonazi/Neoconfederate victory. 

Arizona -- NYT figures again -- give the Democrat 51 percent, the Republican 46 percent, with 70 percent of the ballots counted.  But don't forget Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, one of the Senate's two most notorious "Democratic" (sic) collaborators with the Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party. Given that, who's to say this year's apparent "Democratic" (sic) victor will be any different?

My best guess? The Christonazi/Neoconfederate party will control the Senate by a one-vote majority on paper and -- counting Christonazi/Neoconfederate collaborators Sinema and West Virginia Senator Joseph Manchin III -- by at least a three-vote de facto majority.

In other words, the intentionally genocidal termination of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and probably food stamps aka SNAP is now a certainty. Likewise that there will be neither restoration of the Child Tax Credit nor any federal right-to-abortion bill, not ever.

As for me? Age 82 and with congestive heart failure, I'll probably be dead before the mass murder begins. If not, there's no doubt I'll be amongst the murdered.

LB/10 November 2022 

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