EPA Chief Pruitt Personifies Christian Hatred of Mother Earth

His Policies Express the Terminal Arrogance of Patriarchal Misogyny: That Our Planet Is Just Another Woman to Be Beaten into Submission

"...indications are that the more ardently Christian an American becomes, the less he or she cares about the environment...Then there is the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency is currently headed by an evangelical, the now-infamous Scott Pruitt...unscrupulous, hypocritical, and dishonest—a walking caricature of the Trump era...But outside of the mainstream media and the coastal cities, Pruitt has supporters who like him so much that they’re willing to ignore his petty scandals and Napoleon complex. They like him because he thinks like them: He puts people before the environment, just like God does” (emphasis as in original).

See also: "As of 2014, it's estimated that nearly half of Americans—49 percent—say natural disasters are a sign of "the end times," as described in the Bible. That's up from an estimated 44 percent in 2011."

And this: "Christianity (like Judaism and Islam) is an anticipatory religion; a sect almost wholly fixated on the expectations (and apprehension) of a single and supposedly inescapable future event: the apocalypse detailed in John’s Revelation where all but “saved” Christians (perhaps as few as 144,000) will be butchered by the Middle Eastern Christian god…. and it’s a bloodbath many Christian captains have been (and still are today) simply giddy about."

Plus this: "In June 2012, Beisner penned a letter to the EPA opposing the agency’s classification of carbon dioxide as a harmful pollutant as well as opposing any limits on carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants. He did so on behalf of the Cornwall Alliance, the evangelical anti-environmentalism network that Beisner founded in 2005 to promote a “biblical” view of the environment...More than 100 evangelical theologians, pastors, scientists and economists endorsed Beisner’s letter, which featured signatories such as talk-radio host Bryan Fischer, Southern Baptist ethicist Daniel Heimbach, Calvinist theologian Wayne Grudem, former presidential candidate Gary Bauer and Christian Reconstructionist writer Gary North.

Also this: "Pruitt's profound harm to Americans is more due to his policies than his personal errant behavior. Take for example two recent developments in his capitulation to the chemical industry"

This too: "Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday used a Bible verse to defend his department’s policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border from Mexico, suggesting that God supports the government in separating immigrant parents from their children...the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made.”

And lastly this: "The idea that racial or ethnic groups should be persecuted is popular in the Bible. God himself was keen on exterminating whole peoples, such as the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15:3). Believing that they had replaced the Jews as God's chosen people, Christians deduced that they were free to persecute and extirpate non-Christian peoples, and even that they were under a moral obligation to do so."

Comment: more than any other of the Trump/Pence Regime's appointees save perhaps the vice-president himself, Pruitt wears that utterly contemptuous, bottomlessly sadistic, oh-how-fun-it-is-to-watch-a-woman-burn-to-death smirk that so often identifies the white male Christian fanatic. It is our species' most malevolent smile, a triumphant, unmistakably ominous leer that -- as I learned during my boyhood years in Southern Appalachia and now witness again as an elder in the Pacific Northwest --  reveals the torture-chamber venom of fanatical Christianity's serial-rapist malice even before its adherents begin spewing their genocidal gospels of zero-tolerance tyranny, infinite misogyny and inescapable apocalypse.  

And now, finally, after a year and six months of watching the regime shove us ever more forcefully toward JesuNazi theocracy, Brian Palmer of Slate awakens to warn us of the neo-medieval mindset of those who serve our Capitalist overlords by tyrannizing us. 

Perhaps this time we the people will ourselves finally begin to awaken to the horrors of the abyss into which we are being herded. 

Exactly as Mr. Palmer concludes, Pruitt "isn't an anomaly. He's carrying forth a tradition" -- precisely as intended by those who rule in the name of "the secret fundamentalism  at the heart of  American power." 

Immediately below then is a foreshortened version of the response I posted on the comment-thread of Mr. Palmer's report, its relevance here is its recognition of Pruitt's war on the...

(To read the rest, go here.)

Yes, Damnit, It's Another Change in Format and Schedule

ADMITTEDLY I'M FLOUNDERING. I'm trying to find a format and a publication schedule that makes Dispatches useful to the greatest number of people, primarily as a one-stop source for the preceding week's most significant alternative-media stories. 

And I will continue toward that objective -- selecting Dispatches' content primarily for readers who are doing their best to stay genuinely informed in these frightful   times but are too busy struggling for survival to hunt down the separate stories themselves. 

Again asking myself the pivotal question -- who are you my readers -- I suspect some editions of Dispatches may have been intimidating merely because of their numbers of news items.  

The longest-ever Dispatches, for 31 May 2018,  contained 9,120 words, though a bit more than two thirds of that -- 6,276 words -- was the 26-link Memorial Day eulogy to the 10 men and three women slain by our Capitalist overlords as U.S. Capitalism began the boiled-frog-slow exposure of its terminal malevolence. 

All the rest of that unusually long edition's content was Dispatches' usual anthology of news and commentary, 35 such links on 31 May. As always these were links to what I reckoned the week's most important news stories -- their importance often measured not just by their historical context but also by the extent to which they were downplayed or suppressed completely by the Mainstream Media propaganda machine. (Which -- let us not forget -- is the de facto Fourth Reich's privately owned, for-maximum-profit facsimile of Josef Goebbels'  Third Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.)

In the future I will try to stay within a 35-URL limit for links to breaking news and relevant analysis or documentation, and effective immediately I will go back to a once-per-week publication schedule, with postings late Saturday night or early Sunday morning. I may also experiment with publishing my lengthier commentaries in a Dispatches supplement produced at random intervals and therefore obviously separate from the news summaries that are Dispatches' defining characteristic.   

 

Perhaps too I should explain I edit Dispatches from one perspective  -- two if you count my 55-plus years of experience as an editor and writer and nearly 66 years experience as a photographer. The other perspective is my impassioned belief we the people cannot triumph until we fully (intellectually and emotionally) acknowledge our enemies'  bottomless malevolence -- and by so acknowledging, finally evolve from within ourselves the vision and methodology essential to bring about their defeat and our survival as a species and a planet.  

This second perspective has two subsets: firstly, that our species' abject surrender to the near certainty of environmental and thermonuclear apocalypses is the byproduct of a deliberately conditioned, ultimately suicidal (and therefore genuinely eerie) reflex of denial that has uniquely deprived us of the ability to acknowledge (and thereby overcome) the horrors that threaten us and our Mother Earth with extinction in what is thus the darkest epoch ever in our species' 200,000-year history; secondly, that our recent outbursts of rebelliousness -- Occupy, $15 Now, Black Lives Matter, increasing Working Class militance as manifest in the growing number of strikes, Me Too etc. -- are in reality the tremors of an irritably awakening giant; and that they therefore prove we are at least capable of awakening, which tells me as a journalist I should focus editorially on incidents and analyses that acknowledge either implicitly or explicitly the depths of the darkness that assails us; that these final days weeks months and perhaps years of my life should express, with abandon and without abandonment, my heartfelt conviction such reportage can only help us break more conclusively away from our malevolently conditioned paralytic numbness.

Apropos which, I welcome reader input whether negative or positive. Indeed I regard Dispatches almost as if it were your property, not mine, and I were here only to refine it into an ever-more-appropriate response to your own individual and collective consciousness. 

My apology for any inconvenience these changes might impose.

And as always, I thank you for your readership.

Loren Bliss
14 June 2018    

(To read more, go here.)       

Democratic (sic) Party Kills All Hope of Progressive Recapture

New Hillaryite Rule Locks Out Sanders, Any Others the DNC Won't Ok as Real Democrats, Thus Formalizing the Party's Hatred of Reformers 

'"We just came off a devastating presidential loss in 2016. It would seem to me the actual impetus would be to expand the Democratic Party. I just for the life of me don’t see any motivation for this beyond personal spite,' Mark Longabaugh, a senior adviser to Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, told Yahoo News.'I scratch my head and ask why they would want to make the party more narrow and more exclusive.' Other progressives echoed Longabaugh’s critique of the new rule on social media, with many noting that such restrictions could demobilize large constituencies that are disaffected with both major political parties...'Democrats don't want Bernie-Most-Popular-Politician-In-America-Sanders running for President, but they're perfectly fine with Mark-Raise-The-Social-Security-Retirement-Age-Warner, because although he commonly votes with Republicans, he IDs as a Democrat...'''

See also: "The Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws committee adopted a new rule on Friday that would prevent outsiders like Bernie Sanders from seeking the party’s nomination in the 2020 presidential race. The move seems to be the latest salvo in the ongoing jockeying over the party’s future that emerged following the...bitter primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Sanders in 2016... the move could only have been motivated by lingering animus from the primary race between Clinton and Sanders."

Comment: despite the false pseudo-Left optimism by which these reports attempt to soften the Democratic (sic) National Committee's terminal blow to any rational hope for a progressive takeover of the party, by this new rule the DNC awards itself the absolute power to determine who is and is not a real Democrat. The rule therefore locks in ideological cement overshoes the party's suicidal, already thoroughly documented malice toward Sanders. It also radically expands the party's hateful efforts to exclude all would-be reformers, a brazenly pro-Republican purge exemplified by its maliciously triumphant slandering of Laura Moser. Thus once again we are taught our only possible exit from JesuNazi theocracy is the formation of a genuinely socialist -- and genuinely revolutionary -- party of the Working Class. Indeed the Democrats' fuck-you message to all of us in the 99 Percent was never clearer -- so unmistakable (and such an unmistakable endorsement of Capitalist malevolence) -- even those in the deepest depths of denial can no longer reject it.

And Here is Always Insightful Paul Street to Tell Us Why the Democrats So Ruled...

(To read the rest, go here.)