14 July 2024

A Dialogue Prompted by Ken Wong’s Essay “On Losing ‘The Greatest Teacher Of Nonviolence In America’”; Comments on Biden's Plausibly Deniable Guarantee of Trump's Victory; Man Crippled by Political Corruption

 Father Bill Bixel 2014

 
 
Father Bix passionately addressing an outdoor rally for a $15 Tacoma minimum wage in 2014, the summer before he died. This was among the very last of my film photographs; (Leica M4, 90mm Elmar, Tri-X at 800 ASA in D-76). The upper three of the four images below exemplify  the ecogenocidal militarism and poverty Bix courageously opposed despite decades of relentless persecution;  the fourth image symbolizes the peace and justice activism to which he so fearlessly dedicated his life. TOP: the beginning of  the 1967 Memorial Day police riot in New York City's Tompkins Square Park; (VT Canon, 35mm Leica screw-mount Summicron, Tri-X at ASA 1000 in Diafine). SECOND:   the Memorial Day outrage began with a typical, unnecessarily  brutal  arrest of a non-violent protestor. Evidence ferreted out years later suggests this  atrocity -- triggered as it was by a deluge of anti-musician complaints from the large community of Ukrainian Nazi war criminals given official U.S. sanctuary on Manhattan's Lower East Side -- was among the first overt actions of the Central Intelligence Agency's  Operation CHAOS, its death-dealing war against the Counterculture. The agency viewed the Counterculture's increasingly anti-patriarchal artists and activists as  prime targets, not the least because some of them were deliberately resurrecting the Great Goddess -- our species' original,  longest-acknowledged, incalculably ancient deity --  as an ultimate  symbol of modern revolution; (Pentax H1A, Spiratone 135mm f2.8; Tri-X at ASA 1000 in Diafine).  THIRD: homeless in Tacoma, 2015; (Canon EOS-T7, 18mm-55mm Canon zoom,  desaturated ASA 400 Kodacolor). LAST: after a violently jeered demonstration in Bellingham, 1971; (Nikon F, 105mm f2.5 , Tri-X in D-76 at 800 ASA).   All photos by Loren Bliss © various years,  © renewed  2024. For more historically relevant photojournalism, scroll down to the portfolios on the left sidebar.)   
 
Tompkins Park  Memorial Day 1967 #1005-A
 
Tompkins Park Memorial Day 1967  #1005-B
 
IMG_0979 - Copy

Demonstrator 1971 better print
 
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THE BACK STORY on the "Greatest Teacher of Nonviolence" dialogue:  Reading Mr. Wong's moving tribute to the late Rev. James Lawson as it was reprinted by Popular Resistance on 7 July 2024, I was moved to write, on the reprint’s comment thread, the following tribute to another nationally known dead pacifist, Tacoma's Fr. William J. Bischel SJ. Thus evolved the subsequent dialogue and my confession of ideological nonconformity, relevant parts of which are republished here, albeit edited for improved accessibility and expanded as promised, its unprecedented frankness no doubt prompted by  the fact that – despite having received all available Moderna inoculations against Covid – I am terminally ill with Covid-inflicted complications, warned last September by my cardiologist I won't live beyond September 2028. I was no doubt equally motivated by the (unrelated) fact I -- the "man crippled by political corruption" -- had just been released from hospitalization for the only truly paralyzing agony I’ve ever suffered in all my 84 years, the legacy of my afternoon encounter on 23 September 1978 with a middle-aged, alcohol-fueled vehicular crime-wave named Charles John Hoover, one of Washington state's many defiantly habitual drunken drivers obscenely empowered by that era's  state and local politicians, prosecutors and judges,   with more of the incident's infuriating details reiterated in this post's penultimate paragraphs.

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MY INITIAL COMMENT (herein edited for clarity): While we are properly honoring the very few clergy who courageously defy Christianity's historically proven patriarchal hatefulness, let us be sure to thank them for their brave rebuttals of the ecogenocidal misogyny the Christians' infinitely sadistic deity mandates via the biblical Genesis, and which Jesus perpetuates by boastfully murdering a fig tree (Mark 11:12-25) and declaring eternal war against and between all humans (Matthew 10: 34-36). And let us never forget the Tacoma Jesuit who was viciously persecuted and often jailed1 by our clandestinely theocratic, hence definitively ecogenocidal federal government. (For the identity of the neo-Reichsführers who increasingly enforce the government's orthodoxy,  see The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, and subsequent works by Jeff Sharlet).2   About Fr. Bischel, I met him in 1978; admired him immediately; consulted him often in my coverage of Tacoma for United Press International c. 1978-1982; then  happily reconnected with him in Occupy Tacoma and  the city-council-betrayed fight for a minimum-wage increase led by Tacoma 15 Now.3  Nor do I feel serving avowedly nonviolent organizations in any way compromises my  oft-acknowledged admiration for Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Budyonny and Lyudmila Pavlichenko. Indeed I regard nonviolence as the preferable, non-escalating first response to most atrocities. 

If there is such a thing as Heaven, the man we activists fondly knew as Father Bix is already sainted therein, papal reticence not withstanding; and if there is truly reincarnation, Goddess grant he be reborn in realms of better times and genuine freedom. 

(By the way, I have an amusing story about Father Bix and me working together in Occupy, which I will tell as accompaniment to this comment in my next post on Dispatches from Dystopia [via TypePad] and on Outside Agitator's Notebook [same text via Blogger].) 

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Comment by Red Hornet:  I can't help but admire you and all the freedom efforts you have been part of. But I'm skeptical of memorials and testimonials set before an audience with little interest in history and minuscule interest in activist history. I think this site (Popular Resistance) and most others have abandoned their educational mission in order to lure clicks.

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My Reply to Red Hornet (also edited herein for clarity)...I wonder if you're familiar with the writing of H. L. Mencken, a decidedly politically incorrect Baltimore Sun journalist made famous by his caustic coverage of the theocratic spasm he labeled "the Scopes Monkey Trial."  Mencken defined puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." He denounced Arkansas as "the apex of moronia" in another kindred squabble  and was already damned as an elitist for an earlier editorial comment that has since been proven genuinely prophetic: "On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." Hence "the Moronic Majority," my deliberate play on Nixon's "Moral Majority," as is much less obviously my repeated use of "Moron Nation" to describe the Disunited States.

Though I remain Marxian at heart -- indeed it is my unshakeable conviction the apocalyptic consequences  of the slaying of the Soviet Union will prove to be not only the doom of all humanity but the reduction of our Mother Earth back to the bug planet she was 400 million years ago -- my faith in the U.S. working class was bludgeoned to death by the lynch-mob of construction-workers who viciously attacked post-Kent-State-Massacre peace demonstrators at New York's city hall on 8 May 1970.

Since then -- witnessing the  gleefully sadistic participation of the USian working class in the methodical reversal of literally every progressive advancement the U.S. ever achieved -- I am appalled beyond words by the extent to which the self-obsessed moral imbecility pimped by Ayn Rand has become this nation's core ethos. Though no recognized critic dares say it, what Rand actually did was fictionalize the Nazis' übermenschen ethos. The ruling class then made her tomes of  Mein Kampf values required reading for the nation's teens, who were already so theocratically oppressed, our masters correctly assumed they'd desperately seize any (apparent)  ideology of rebellion. The (intended) result legitimized both the run-amok egotism that destroyed Occupy from within and  the self-righteously ecogenocidal Christonazi misogyny, homophobia and racism that motivated the government violence against Occupy and will soon finish fulfilling Mencken's dire prophecy by electing Trump to turn this nation into the de facto Fourth Reich.

No doubt my militantly Loyalist ancestors -- deported to their ancestral realms in the British Empire by the U.S. founders' decrees in 1789 -- had reached analogous conclusions about the so-called "patriots," a "rabble-in-arms" that no doubt included the direct descendants of those who in the 1640s despised a uniquely successful Connecticut farmer named Mary Blisse (see correction below) so much, they twice persecuted her as a witch --  accusations that, Goddess be thanked, she managed to beat in court. In other words, I believe your dismal diagnosis is absolutely correct -- that writing anything sensible online is (mostly) casting pearls before swine. Though when it reaches persons as mindful as yourself, the effort is most surely redeemed, for which my deepest thanks.


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CORRECTION: the Bliss ancestor accused of witchcraft was Mary Bliss  (spelled "Blisse" in the 19th Century genealogy), for whom many more details are available on Google; Mary was one of Margaret's daughters. The mistake is entirely my fault; I was confused by the genealogy's archaic sentence-structure and discovered my error only by research tonight, 10 July 2024, hence my apology to all.

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And Here's the Promised Funny Story: During Occupy Tacoma's first after-dark outdoor mass meeting  -- a so-called General Assembly on a cold, sporadically drizzly  early-November night (sorry my original notes with the exact date were destroyed by the 2019 computer failure) -- the several hundred participants began an obviously supportive discussion about the need for nonviolence and more specifically for training in its strategy, tactics and methodology. Because I was already recognized as a contributing but avowedly Marxian elder, several of the folks in my immediate vicinity thus seemed a bit surprised when I noted we had a best-in-the-nation advocate of non-violence --which is always my strategic and tactical preference -- in the person of a local Jesuit, William Bischel of St. Leo Parish, whom I further identified as a fellow alumnus of the infamous Knox County, Tennessee jail.  But their surprise turned to chuckles  when a voice from behind me laughingly said, " I gotta thank Loren; he's my advance man." I turned, and there, maybe three persons deep in the crowd behind me, stood Father Bix himself, whom I had not seen in person since 1982. As I said to him at the time, "I shoulda known you'd already be here." 

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Added text:  The details of Mary Blisse's many successes and her vengefully envious persecution by a typically hateful Christian neighbor and by her ever-more-hostile husband (an abusive male-supremacist whose name surely seems to be a cosmic pun), are available as linked. I assume her agricultural success was due to heeding the allegedly "Satanic" advice of local First Nations folk. I likewise assume her own survival of 11 pregnancies, two  of then with twins, and the more indicative  survival at least into early childhood of all her children -- each phenomenon among the era's most astounding  statistical improbabilities -- strongly suggest she had somehow preserved much of the ancient, pre-patriarchal wisdom Christianity sought to destroy by its wars of extermination against witches, who were our originally matriarchal species' teachers, arbitrators, midwifes, healers and priestesses. Karen Vorbeck Williams wove the factual information about Mary Blisse into a 2016 novel, My Enemy's Tears: the Witch of Northampton. (Yes I will order it and read it ASAP, then if I am still alive, post a commentary on it here.)     Apropos the "loving" Christians'  continuation of such ecogenocidal intent into the present, note also their reader-board slogans during the late  1960s and early '70 --"Organic Is Satanic"; "Environmental Is Of The Devil"; and the more ubiquitous "God Hates Hippies." Obviously, the Christonazis' ever-escalating wars to expand prison slavery and revoke all female rights are merely resumptions of Christianity's historically proven intentions.  

Moreover -- as I can personally attest -- there is also the fact many  of Mary Blisse's present-day descendants (self and late father included), are unquestionably fey,  which implicitly adds that eerie quality to the list of Mary Blisse's characteristics her patriarchal assailants would have regarded as "Satanic." (Despite my family's definitively English name, we are genetically mostly Celt.) 

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Added text: The irrefutable proofs of Christianity's incurable malignancy -- its murderous European, Middle Eastern, Asian, Sub-Saharan, African and American "crusades" against alleged "heretics" or non-Christian and First Nations peoples; the Burning Times; and of course the Original Nazis' Holocaust – are all expressions of  the Abrahamic god's mandate to continue and expand his ecogenocidal agenda. And the standard Christian claim  the New Testament reverses that doctrinal obligation is proven to be an especially egregious Big Lie by the   moral imbecility Jesus models in the  scriptures, that is  -- to say again -- by his maliciously boastful destruction of a fig tree (Mark 11:12-25) and by his declaration of eternal war against and between all humans (Matthew 10: 34-36).

Thus it cannot be said too often the gospels are mandates for ecogenocide. Church history reveals any contradictory claims of “divine love” or advocacy for mercy  are all murderous deceptions. The duration of this serial-killer mentality dooms us to repeatedly suffer ambush by frenzies of fundamentalist fanaticism and/or prosperity-gospel zealotry,  in response to which, many of us are at long last awakening to what the Soviet Union always recognized (and what makes Marxism so "Better-Dead-Than-Red odious to Christianity): the fact such malignancy cannot be reversed save by total ejection of the Bible and all its doctrinal extensions).

What then, absent Soviet influence, might we do? However unlikely it remains, global embrace of the ever-more-credible Gaia Hypothesis could surely save us; in essence, this is the scientific rediscovery of the lost and forbidden wisdom that, beginning some 6,000 years ago, has been (and is again) violently suppressed by the patriarchal onslaught. One of Gaia's most important but unfortunately less recognized implications is that every atom of every extant substance  -- whether past, present or future -- contains an undetected quotient of inertial momentum thrusting it toward consciousness; that we who are literally the evolved substance of the stars could not exist were this not so.  Gaia  is thus probably our only means of escaping extinction and halting patriarchy's deliberate reduction of our Mother Earth to a bug planet. Combined with international socialism, it would give us a truly sustainable, comfortably livable world.  I doubt any lesser solidarity can save us from the apocalypse of thermonuclear war and/or self-induced terminal climate-change our patriarchal Masters – whomever or whatever they might be – are working overtime to  make inevitable.
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1Popular Resistance does not allow inclusion of links to outside source material, so I've added them wherever they seemed essential for clarity.  

2Related books that document Christianity's ecogenocidal history include American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America, by Chris Hedges (Free Press: 2007);  An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Beacon Press: 2014); and  Hitler's American Model: the United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, by James Q. Whitman (Princeton University Press: 2017). Only the need for brevity kept me from  citing these works in my original comment. 

3The Tacoma City Council, a reliable  puppet of the  plutocracy and thus active on several fronts to forcibly gentrify the city, defeated the Tacoma 15 Now minimum-wage campaign by  employing an especially nasty  variant of the "change-we-can-believe-in" treachery for which the post-JFK "Democratic" (sic) Party is deservedly infamous. The council put on the ballot its own competitive initiative for a significantly smaller wage increase, then designed the ballot to impose maximum confusion and utilized a tsunami of brazen  deceit and whispered bigotry to mobilize the city's Moronic Majority to resoundingly defeat the proposed $15 minimum, which would have been effective immediately. Instead, winning measure (gradually) raises wages to a $12.50 minimum and -- contrary to 15 Now's absurd claims of ideological victory -- has thus kept the issue off the ballot ever since. The loss of the $15 minimum wage was truly cataclysmic, with 23,536 votes against it and only a mere 9,437 votes for, a devastating 71.38-percent to 28.62 percent debacle. Apropos the nature of local electorate, my analyses  here and  here of its bigoted opposition to adequate public transport also explain the overwhelming vote against the $15 minimum wage.

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Three Comments from The New York Times'  (meticulously censored) threads, their surprising approval for publication  spawning my hope at least one of its editorial executives shares my hypothesis

"Democrats Are Drifting Toward the Worst Possible of All Worlds"

Thank you for your forthright reporting, Mr. Klein. That said, it seems to me only two possibilities can (rationally) explain the president's behavior. One, as I have long suspected, is that a cabal of "Third Way" Democrats have chosen the Biden candidacy as the most plausibly deniable strategy for throwing the election to Trump (and thereby preserving most of their own behind-the-scenes neoliberal power). Two is far more ominous: that the president's destructive defiance is itself symptomatic of how deep he already is into 25th Amendment territory. (3 Recommends)

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 "‘God Help Us’: 12 Writers Rate Biden’s Performance at the First Presidential Debate"

President Biden's worse-than-abysmal performance in last night’s debate is merely additional proof of what I've been hypothesizing for the past several months: that the Biden candidacy is merely the Democrats' most plausibly deniable way of throwing the election to Trump -- whom the Democratic Party's corporate donors vastly prefer over Sen. Bernie Sanders or any other New-Deal progressive who might win the party's presidential nomination should Biden withdraw. (13 recommends).

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"‘Is It Too Late?’ Four Writers on What Democrats Should Do About Biden"

As I said on an earlier NYT post-debate comment-thread, I strongly suspect (as I've been hypothesizing for several months), the Biden candidacy is the Democrats' most plausibly deniable way of throwing the election to Trump -- whom the party's corporate donors vastly prefer over Vice-President Harris or anyone else who might win the Democratic presidential nomination were Biden to withdraw. 

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My World Socialist Web Site comment-thread dialogue on "Supreme Court declares America a presidential dictatorship" is far too long to republish here in its entirety. It begins with our national obituary:

(14 July 2024: Sorry I forgot to include the link on this. My bad; was still zombified on hospital pain meds.)

In embittering and infinitely depressing truth, this is the end, forever, of any lingering elements of the charade USian democratic process became on 22 November 1963.

I'm not the least surprised,, as what we are witnessing here is how the '"Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party is masterfully employing Hitler's pack-the-judiciary strategy to complete the nazification of USia. As I have repeatedly predicted, Trump will never be punished for any of his crimes, past or future.

What no commentator has yet dared point out is that this Supreme Court decision literally makes presidential elections moot, as the dictatorial powers the president has been given combined with the financial aristocracy's control of the nominating process means the (so-called) electorate has no more control over the process than the Roman plebeians had over who was emperor.

Indeed, with the U.S. constitution now entirely in the Dumpster of history, I would assume Congress -- with the court's cooperation -- will soon abolish presidential elections and reserve the choice of presidents for itself.

Most readers of this website are probably too young to comprehend the long history of what just happened, so here's a quick summary. The nazification of the U.S. began with the Bankers Plot of 1933-34, which in all probability was the product of active collaboration between the financial aristocracy and Hitler. Congress gave it tacit approval in 1934 by refusing to prosecute the plotters, who with their descendants – no doubt with the assistance of the high-ranking Original Nazi war criminals they adopted as comrades-at-arms after Stalingrad proved the Third Reich could not win the war-- obviously continued plotting, albeit at a far-less-obvious boiled-frog pace. Subsequent milestones were the aristocracy’s capture of white Christianity beginning c. 1938; the adoption of war criminals beginning c. 1944; the purge of Communists, socialists and intellectuals beginning c. 1947; the destruction of organized labor by Taft-Hartley in 1948; the murder of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963 and the decade of political murders that followed; the initial imposition of so-called “neoliberal” (actually neonazi) economics begun in 1976 by Carter; the so-called Reagan Revolution of 1980; etc. ad nauseam.

Seems to me the only remaining question is whether Biden or someone younger will complete the “Democratic” (sic) Party’s post-JFK function as the nazifiers’ Fifth Column and finish what is obviously a plausible deniable scheme to ensure Trump’s emergence as the first USian Führer.

Not that it matters. This nation is done, conquered, subjugated, enslaved. And this time there is no Red Army to save us...or to save the world the Christonazi USian Reich is sure to destroy.

***

The most relevant part of this dialogue's concluding "Joint Reply"-- all four parts of it responses to antagonistic rejoinders prompted by the above post -- is the following:

To Leon: My motivation for activism begin when I was seven and my father was sacked in late 1947 as retaliation for his 1930s Communism, this by the War Assets Administration, formerly the War Production Board; his last WAA job was equivalent to what today would be a deputy regional directorship. Due the purge and its the associated blacklisting, we were permanently reduced from what might be termed "a new Lincoln family" to "a used Plymouth family." The date of his ouster marks the true, pre-McCarthy beginning of the (total) U.S. purge of Communists, socialists and all intellectuals save those of the pro-nazi right – never mind “pro-nazi intellectual” is an obvious oxymoron. My activism began at age 17 with advocacy of the Soviet approach to education in post-Sputnik debates organized by the Knox County, Tenn. school district c. 1957-‘58; these combined with my father's political history and my lesbian birthmother’s certified insanity after two attempts to murder my father and me c. 1944-‘45 to guarantee my loss of security clearance at the beginning of the last of my three years of active U.S. Regular Army duty. During my pre-military-period c. 1956 to late ‘59, I worked as a stringer for three dailies and two weeklies and as a motel night-clerk. My post-military activism c. late ‘62 through the early ‘90s1 included the Civil Rights Movement plus the Anti-Vietnam-War; Alternative Press; Back-to-the-Land; Environmentalist; and Labor movements, the last category through memberships in the American Newspaper Guild, the National Writers Union and the National Press Photographers Association. I was also part of two NYC photographic collectives, Impact Visuals and Marc Crawford's TransMundo. More recently I was part of Tacoma Clinic Defense; was amongst the earliest activists in Occupy Tacoma; and served as a cadre member and a petition-signature gatherer for Tacoma 15 Now, from which I had to drop out due to  ever-increasing crippling imposed by a spinal injury radically inflamed by osteoarthritis.2 Now hopelessly disabled by terminal post-Covid complications despite being current on all Moderna shots and boosters, I can no longer walk anywhere -- not even from one room to the next in my apartment -- without a walker, and my cardiologist told me last September these post-Covid complications will kill me within two years. Point being, your assumptions about me have no basis in fact.

My pessimism stems from realization during Occupy that Ayn Rand’s fictionalization of Mein Kampf’s self-obsessed moral imbecility – in which the younger generations of USian bourgeois whites are schooled literally from birth (never mind her writing is as wretched as Hitler’s) – is even more effective at nazification than the Better-Dead-Than-Red fear-mongering that co-opted feminism and environmentalism and otherwise seduced so many members of the Silent Generation and their Baby Boom successors.

When Occupy collapsed -- destroyed as much by zero-tolerance bourgeois self-obsession from within as by police-state violence from without -- I could no longer deny the validity of the leaked KGB analysis that damns most white USians as irremediably conditioned from birth to always betray genuine revolution. The analysts concluded the only USian populations possessed of the requisite pre-revolutionary consciousness are the most economically oppressed Blacks, Hispanics and First Nations peoples – which is why these groups are under constant surveillance and exterminated whenever they show signs of graduating to revolution – atrocities to which I as a near-lifelong journalist and activist can surely attest.3 Hence I’d urge you to remember history proves building revolution requires full acknowledgment of and evolution of countermeasures against all anti-revolutionary factors. That vital response now includes evolving an antidote to the infinite hopelessness (rationally) inflicted on us by USia’s methodical reversal of literally every progressive gain its peoples ever made.

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1These dates inadvertently misstate the years of my labor activism. My first Newspaper Guild membership was in 1956 and early 1957 at The Grand Rapids (Michigan) Herald.  My post-military union activism actually began with Taxi Weekly's tacit support of the successful Taxicab Drivers Organizing Committee (TDOC) campaign in New York City c. 1965-1967. I resumed actual Guild membership at The Jersey Journal, where I worked as an investigative reporter c. 1969-1970; I joined the National Press Photographers Association as the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun in the '70s, renewed it intermittently (depending on employment) after that,  and added membership in the National Writers Union as a freelancer probably in 2005. Over the years I have also served several unions as a volunteer picket, and I have never crossed a picket-line, nor will I ever do so. All this was  permanently ended by encroaching physical disability  late in the new century's second decade. My error -- its misstated chronology unintentional -- was the result of my too-hasty effort to summarize a complex history terminated by medical circumstances that, because they were permanently life-changing,  are profoundly unpleasant to remember. Nevertheless my sincere apology. 

2This too is an accidental misstatement. What necessitated my dropping-out was a kidney infection; what made my absence permanent was the worsening back problem. Again my apology.

3A 2013 blog post that describes the earliest (1963)  example of my overt victimization by Christonazi censorship and my retaliatory recovery by defiant reporting is entitled Censorship: Lessons from Nader and a Knoxville Atrocity is linked above in the Popular Resistance material and again here for readers' convenience.

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About that ruinous encounter with the defiantly habitual drunken driver..

THREE DAYS OF ever-more-devastating lower-back spasms  sent me to Tacoma General Hospital on Wednesday (3 July 2024), desperately seeking relief from most intense pain I've ever suffered. It had become so debilitating, I literally could not speak a word; merely trying to talk triggered cramps of hitherto unimaginable agony. Thus I could only scream; I muted my uncontrollable shrieks as much as possible by biting down hard on a rolled towel, this.to minimize their emotional impact on passers-by. But by about 3 a.m. Wednesday, the spasms had become nearly constant, striking me with unprecedented fury any time I moved at all. This meant I was 100-percernt dependent on the topmost-level verbal skills of Valerie Friedline to document my circumstances, to whom I am thus forever grateful. Valerie is an always helpful neighbor who is also my volunteer copy editor on the monthly senior-housing-community newsletter of which I am the volunteer founding editor, writer, photographer and creative director. 

To elaborate on what I said in "The Back Story" -- pun intended -- my literally unspeakable pain and its trip to the hospital was the most recent consequence of my 1978 Autumnal Equinox victimization by Charles John Hoover, a petty criminal who ran amok as a judicially protected, defiantly habitual  drunken driver. The injuries he wantonly inflicted on me  defined  not only my 38th year but became one of the three events -- the others the destruction of all my most significant work by arson on 1 September 1983 and the fatal post-illness complications of Covid resulting from a three-week, seemingly moderate bout with the obviously weaponized virus a year ago -- that now define my life as nothing more than a race against a literal deadline -- now another pun -- to organize my photography and writing into accessible form and perhaps -- should circumstances grant me the time --to at last fulfill the Tacoma public library's longstanding invitation to record my oral history as a local photographer, writer and Marxian activist.   

(Though it is a bit of an aside,  I find it very interesting that, as I have previously reported elsewhere,  Runemal, the I Ching and the Tarot -- the same three oracles that correctly defined the fire as the end of my dependably productive and influential life -- unanimously predicted  Covid would kill me. Nevertheless,  until the ever-more-obviously lab-leaked bug nailed me last summer in a seemingly inexplicable localized outbreak that sickened 12 of my 40 apartment-complex neighbors without any of the dire consequences that are killing me, I'd begun to assume I'd somehow misunderstood the oracles' responses to the pandemic-motivated questions I asked in 2020.   And as I said above, my fatal complications have arisen despite  full [Moderna] vaccination. Thus -- though I am by no means an anti-vaxer -- I cannot but wonder if the vaccine is intentionally less effective than the documentably ecogenocidal   USian government assured us it would be.  Nor -- considering the multiple expressions of government hostility already known to have vindictively diminished my life -- is it beyond the realm of possibility I was somehow deliberately given fatally ineffective shots.)    

That said, what the drunken Charles John Hoover inflicted on me in '78 was a classic Godzilla-versus-Bambi debacle; with his speeding 442 Oldsmobile, he utterly destroyed my five-month-new 1977 Honda Civic, and he did so  without any obvious damage to himself, to the (abused) wife who was  his only passenger, or even to his own vehicle. The investigating officer told me had I been accompanied by a passenger, that person would have undoubtedly been killed, as the impact of Hoover's 3,713-pound curb-weight projectile drove me in my seat a fatally crushing distance  atop the Civic's right-side seat,  far enough across the console I could exit the smouldering wreckage only because I always carried a Swiss Army Knife -- already the most useful tool I owned -- in a belt pouch. This enabled me to reach the knife and again prove its usefulness by cutting myself free of my safety harness and thus escaping the ruined hulk in time to squelch the fire hazard of leaking-gasoline by yanking the grounding-cable off the battery. Having de-electrified the rubble,  I then snatched a motor-driven Nikon with a fully loaded magazine from a camera bag in the back seat, walked a 360 around the scene to photographically document the collision's immediate aftermath, carefully replaced the camera in the bag and passed out.

Though I have no recollection of doing so, I had somehow retained enough consciousness to ask the paramedics to fetch the photographic gear and retrieve my loaded .45 ACP M1911 Colt government model from the glove box.  When I regained full consciousness maybe an hour later on a gurney in the Tacoma General Hospital emergency room, my first words asked the whereabouts of these items, and I was delighted to learn everything -- including the canvas G.I. pouch containing the Colt's two spare loaded magazines --had been given to the triage nurse,  who  would return it all to me when I was released a few hours later.  The ER doctor said I had obviously been "running on pure adrenaline" in my immediate post-impact activities, that I had passed out because I had probably "forgotten to breathe," and that while X-rays proved I had no broken bones or internal bleeding, I would need a follow-up exam for probable spinal injuries, because I had "massive soft-tissue bruising" and would probably soon be immobilized enough to need an at-home care-giver for a few days, as indeed I did. Though I was able to get home in a cab,  the next day I could barely move; I missed a full week of work, during which I was mercifully cared for by Kathryn Habbestad, a friend and colleague from Seattle who was kind enough to take time away from her own  job and stay with me as a helpmate until I was again ambulatory. 

When I realized Hoover had no intention of contacting me for the legally required post-accident exchange of information,  I hired a lawyer, from whom I would soon learn my 4:30 p.m. victimization  resulted in Hoover's 19th -- yes, that's nineteenth -- consecutive drunken-driving arrest, and that by some miracle -- or, more likely, some quirk of local corruption -- he still had (minimal) liability insurance.  I also learned multiple witnesses said Hoover pulled out a bulging roll of hundred-dollar bills with which he tried to bribe them into claiming I had pulled out onto Pearl Street in front of him. (I was actually trapped motionless in the Highland Hills Shopping Center exit onto Pearl, unable to move forward because of heavy Saturday afternoon traffic and prohibited from moving backward by the vehicles behind me, thus forced to watch motionless in horror as  north-bound Hoover skidded across the rain-slick street's four lanes, jumped the curb onto the concrete sidewalk, caromed in reversed direction off a concrete power-pole and careened southward toward me on the sidewalk perhaps 100 yards at what the police estimated was about 50 miles-per-hour to slam into the driver's side of my little Honda and destroy it with an impact energy of  approximately 310,054 (three-hundred-and-ten-thousand, fifty-four) foot pounds, this by the Newtonian formula of one-half the projectile's weight times its velocity squared,  E=1/2M(V2). For comparison, the identically calculated muzzle energy of the .50 caliber Browning M2 "Ma Deuce" machine gun round averages a mere 12,600 (twelve thousand, six hundred) foot pounds.

One of the same group of a half-dozen  witnesses said Hoover lost control of his gas-guzzler because he was beating his wife and trying to drive at the same time. Several witnesses said Hoover, who was scarcely more than five feet, four inches in height, called the notably taller investigating officer a "cunt," then attacked her with a flurry of  punches, which she quickly neutralized with a nightstick uppercut to Hoover's testicles. That dropped him. He went to jail in handcuffs, cursing all cops and vowing vengeance against me and the female officer who'd subdued him. He was charged with drunken driving, assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, attempted bribery and other crimes I have since forgotten. Hoover's violent tantrum had brought several more cops to the scene, and another one of the officers told my lawyer Hoover had managed to delay the breathalyzer test long enough to bring his score down from what was "probably at least a .32" to what I remember was a .28 or thereabouts.  When I learned a Tacoma District Court judge had reduced his 19th drunken-driving  charge to "physical control" and dismissed all the other charges,  convicting him only of being in (alleged) control of a speeding  projectile  nearly twice the weight of a standard high-explosive 16-inch naval artillery round.

Since Hoover never once tried to contact me, I sued him, and of course I won; his sort of hatred of the world and all within it is unforgivable. But he was obviously a premeditated  drunken driver, for he had maliciously structured  his finances so all anyone could get was the maximum payout of his liability insurance, which as I recall was $15,000, a third of which went to the lawyer. Not that it matters; no amount of money would ever be adequate compensation for the pain and physical limitation with which Hoover cursed me  -- the latter including eventual 100=percent loss of my formerly unlimited ability to backpack deep into the wilderness for trout fishing and/or archaeological research.   And I cannot but wonder  how many more people this infinitely malicious moral imbecile injured with his judicially protected drunken driving before his death in 2006.

********

In closing this anthology of horrors, I respectfully offer the following five songs as a suggested liturgy for compensatory contemplation and meditation: "The Burning Times"; "The Ballad of Thomas Rhymer"; "Song to Brighid";  "Phantasmagoria in Two" and "Mother Earth Song."  Blessed be!

(Yeah, I know there's a lot to read here, especially with the links-as-footnotes. But it will be a long while before I'm able to post again.  So you'll have plenty of time to read it all -- and it is my hope you find it both thought-provoking and educational. Meanwhile, thank you for your readership.)

LB/12 July 2024. 

-30-

 

 

22 June 2024

Was the Tarot an Ancient Astronomical Calculator? Also, Eight Comment-Thread Posts from Elsewhere

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.) 

=========

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.

=========

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.

=========

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.

=========

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.

=========

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.

=========

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.)

=========

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.")

===

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--

 

 

19 May 2024

Biden Is the Plutocrats' Most "Plausibly Deniable" Way to Ensure Trump Wins; Christonazi Victory'd Make 2nd Civil War Inevitable; 5 More Posts from Elsewhere

 STILL WORKING ON updating essays, a project that has morphed into preparation of an anthology for my post-mortem beneficiaries.  Nevertheless -- journalist to the end -- I spend the first hour or so of every day reading the (real) news, and when a report, analysis or disclosure moves me to do so, I post a comment on the associated thread. (Sometimes, as did the last three comments below, these get rejected, at which point the uplifted-social-finger portion of my alleged mind insists they too be published here.)

********* 

Major Trump trials delayed until after election

Biden is merely the most "plausibly deniable" of the ruling class options for throwing the election to Trump, thus guaranteeing the perpetuation of capitalism by permanently reducing the U.S. to a zero-tolerance Christonazi theocracy. But how many more times must this be said before the Moronic Majority awakens to its looming subjugation?

*********

Two Americas: the Slow Divide

Unfortunately, Mr, Reich, the Christonazis' core belief -- that they have a divine mandate to conquer the world and exterminate all of us who refuse to declare for their demon Jesus -- is bound to overcome the Neoconfederates' isolationism. This will make a second Civil War unavoidable. Which leaves three questions:

(1)-Will the so-called Blue States be able to overcome their anti-gunowner pacifism enough to train and mobilize an effective defense against Waffen-SS-minded Christonazi fanatics? 

(2)-Will the Blue States be able to react fast enough to seize and utilize the military assets within their boundaries?

(3)-Given that the destruction of the United States is in the interest of its  primary global opponents  -- these are Russia and China; probably India; depending on the time-frame, perhaps also a pan-African union -- where will the Blue States (which, thanks to outsourcing by capitalist profiteers, lack the manufacturing capabilities essential to winning even a small war) -- find the allies essential to their victory?

Apropos my use of the "so-called" adjectival prefix in question (1), as someone who's aware of psycho-linguistics, I am infuriated by the Orwellian, silence-dissenters-by-destroying-our-vocabulary methodology obvious in assigning red -- the color (as in the Red Army), of liberation from the Original Nazis, and the color (as in "yeah damn right I'm a Red") of socialism  in general  -- to the permanently Christonazified regions of the "United" (sic) States.

A more truthful color assignment would be derived from our (first?) Civil War: blue for the states remaining true to the best of our founding principles, gray -- or better yet the feldgrau  of Hitler's Wehrmacht -- for the states of the Christonazi Neoconfederacy.

By the way, the same psycho-linguistically malicious subversion of meaning is evident in Trump's theft of socialism's clenched-fist salute.

As to what will actually obtain, I'm sure I'll never get to find out, which admittedly vexes my journalistic curiosity. But there's no escaping the fact I am 84 years old and terminally ill, so I may not even get to find out who wins in November, though I cannot doubt it will be Trump and the final triumph of the permanent nazification that's been underway – mostly by the diabolical cunning of the boiled-frog method – since our plutocratic masters embraced those legions of Original Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-at-arms. 

Biden? He's merely the plutocrats' most plausibly deniable method of throwing the election to their new Führer.

A near-lifelong student of history -- also part of the working press c. 1956-1959, 1962-1986 and 2004-2009 --  I've always recognized the murder of President Kennedy as a coup. I recognized the murder of his brother as the end, forever,  of any possibility of a counter-coup; I saw the 1976 election as a final act of surrender; and I recognized the 1980 election as the beginning of the inevitable post-coup national "cleansing," prefaced as it was by the decade of additional political murders that began in 1964. Thus I have long argued that -- assuming our species has  enough future to produce historians (which I gravely doubt) --  22 November 1963 will by the U.S. Empire's equivalent of 4 September 476, the latter the date the Roman Empire died. 

As to which side will win our second Civil War, that  will undoubtedly be determined by who gets the nukes. Which will also determine whether the war stays within the boundaries of the original U.S. or morphs into the apocalypse that exterminates our species and reduces our Mother Earth back to the bug planet she was four million years ago.

*********      

Then and Now: 1968 and 2024
(Second paragraph slightly revised here to correct the error I made by too hastily editing the original.)

I must respectfully disagree with the definitive portion of Mr. Albert's attempt to define what killed the revolutionary potential of the 1960s. While his overview is (superficially) correct – what might be loosely termed "poor choices" did indeed help facilitate the Counterculture's extermination -- those (alleged) “choices” were not caused by any absence of self-sustaining "reason and evidence." Nor were they the sole factor in its destruction. As a near-lifelong professional journalist and an activist in the post-Sputnik Education-Reform, Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam-War, Alternative-Press, Back-to-the-Land, Environmentalist and Occupy movements, I know any (accurate) analysis of such failures must begin with the necessarily painful acknowledgment of how patriarchy combines two distinct  types of force to perpetuate its historically proven omnipotence.

One type is, as Mr. Albert implies, self-inflicted. But Marx’s Manifesto and FDR’s Four Freedoms are potentially as compelling now as they were in 1848 or 1941 respectively; once adopted, their principles are never abandoned by “choice” per se. Instead they are nullified by the methodically conditioned caste, racist, sexist and egotistical hatreds that have ever-more-irreparably fragmented human society since patriarchy’s imposition six or seven millennia ago. Today these hatreds are perpetuated by patriarchal religion and its capitalist derivatives, the latter including the Madison-Avenue-induced, morally imbecilic self-obsession that began as  USia's media-vectored terminal illness and is now fatally infecting all humanity. As intended, the resultant malaise prohibits the solidarity essential to overthrow or even ameliorate patriarchy’s ultimate function as the planet-poisoning, species-exterminating mechanism of a global Final Solution, its dynamic first evidenced by smallpox-envenomed blankets.

Though in 1970 I kept my ideology semi-closeted in an (ultimately doomed) effort to preserve my journalism career, I have been a Marxian since my teens. Thus in June of that year, exiled from my New-York-City birthplace and home, I was relieved to discover most of the women I met in the Pacific Northwest were as feminist as those I knew in Lower Manhattan. But in startling contrast to the males I knew in the City -- a vivid example of how NYC of that era truly was, as James Baldwin put it, Another Country -- most Pacific Northwest males remained stubbornly misogynistic. And it is only here I've repeatedly seen solidarity slain -- even in alternative-press collectives -- by bourgeois antagonism toward alleged socioeconomic inferiors. Nor are these reactionary attitudes much abated; now they are merely camouflaged by language proven false by behavior.

Patriarchy's other movement-destroying force is the escalating sadism of its military and police, their murderous brutality intensified by technological supremacy and psychological terror. These are mandates of what Jeff Sharlet reveals as the “fundamentalism” that dictates USian domestic and foreign policy. In the '70s, it was locally proclaimed on Christian reader-boards: "Organic Is Satanic"; "Environmental Means Of The Devil"; and the far more ubiquitous "God Hates Hippies." Now its proclamations are international news.

Honed to invincibility  by the legions of Nazi war criminals the empire adopted after WWII, the synergistic combination of these internal and external forces perpetuates the reduction of our planet to an ecogenocidal death-camp. As a near-lifelong student of history, I know any notion patriarchy includes  a “moral arc...toward justice” is a tyranny-protecting Big Lie. In a sane world, it would be symptomatic of clinical delusion if not outright dementia. Therefore I see no (logical) escape from the looming apocalypse. But I also know the Gaia Theory does not exclude the possibility of last-minute rescue. Apropos that, let us hope an '80s bumper-sticker -- "Goddess Is Coming and She Is Pissed" -- is more than mere fantasy.

*********

The Supreme Court Might Rescue Trump
(I wrote of "Trumpler" and his "smear-all-putsch" on a sarcastic whim, merely because it rhymes with Hitler and his beer-hall putsch. Nevertheless I believe the comparison is valid, particularly given how Trump has followed Hitler's example of packing the judiciary with puppet judges. It's also noteworthy that some psychics now claim Trump is Hitler's reincarnation, for which go here and here. ) 

As I have been pointing out since well before Trumpler's 6 January smear-all putsch, the USian Christonazis have followed their German Nazi forebears' strategy of packing the judiciary as the one sure means of permanently abolishing democracy without alarming a submissively complacent citizenry. This  nullified all the Weimar Republic's constitutional protections just as it has done likewise to those of the (equally doomed) U.S. republic.  Indeed I would argue that anyone who supposes Trumpler's judiciary would not  declare him  immune to prosecution  is clinically deluded.

We are thus left with three questions:

  • (1)-Will the "Democratic" (sic) Party continue the failing Biden candidacy, which -- despite his superficial, intentionally deceptive emulations of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- ever-more-obviously demonstrates the party's post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic)  Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party?

  • (2)-Assuming the Democrats  continue  Biden's plausibly deniable pro-Christonazi candidacy (because that is the only option their Wall Street owners allow), will enough voters recognize the infinite horror of the Trumpite threat to vote Biden a second term despite his many flaws?

  • (3)-Assuming Trumpler wins, will the so-called "blue states" have the courage necessary to resist the Christonazis' armed might -- but if they do, where will they find the necessary allies?            

Bear in mind too that in reality, it was the Red Army that saved the world from Hitler -- and that in today's world, there is no comparable force to save humanity from Trumpler. (Which is precisely why I'm thankful I'm terminally ill and will therefore most likely be spared Trumpler's concentration camps.)

*********

The following three comment-thread posts were rejected, the first two by the World Socialist Web Site, the third by The New York Times. Apropos the topmost WSWS-suppressed post,  I was initially surprised it did not appear. But on reconsideration,  I realized it was probably censored for two reasons: focused as its moderators are on class warfare, and locked as they are into a fundamentalist definition of dialectical materialism (yes, unfortunately there are Marxian fundamentalists too),  they seem loathe to recognize the Trumpite onslaught is as much a resumption of religious warfare -- specifically Christianity's two-millennia crusade to impose zero-tolerance global theocracy -- as it is a class war; they likewise refuse to acknowledge it is also resumption of the race warfare that has defined European colonialism in the Americas since its birth in 1492. Plus there is the fact the site's moderators are adamantly opposed to any sort of alliance with less-ideologically "pure" Marxians, New Deal advocates or any other sorts of socialists or social democrats, the potential solidarity of such a united front implicit in the best-seller status accorded the disclosures by Jeff Sharlet. About the suppression of my other attempted WSWS post, I can only guess it was killed because the moderators might have  considered it an elaboration on an exposé published earlier this year by Jacobin, which it most assuredly was not; I did not discover that report until tonight, 18 May.  But WSWS moderators harbor an especially intense hatred for Jacobin's semi-official parent organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, because they (correctly) condemn DSA as the "Democratic" (sic) Party's weapon to co-opt and thereby nullify the growing demand for a national alternative to the two (pro-nazi) capitalist parties.  Apropos the NYT-suppressed post,  I can only suppose the editors deemed it too brutally honest to be fit to print.   

***

Nearly 3,000 protesters arrested  in U.S. as crackdown on anti-genocide encampments continues internationally 

Disclosure of how the USian Empire is an ever-more-tyrannical theocracy governed by "secret fundamentalism" -- for which see Jeff Sharlet's The Family (Harper: 2008) and his subsequent works --  shows how all the diverse atrocities of capitalism are expressions of this fundamentalism's  ecogenocidal intent.

Sharlet's ongoing investigation reveals how the "Democratic" (sic) Party's national-prayer-breakfast, post-JFK treachery as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party ideologically enabled the Vietnam War; the destruction of the New Deal; the imposition of economic neoliberalism; the expansion of national and global theocracy; the re-conquest of much of the world by white-supremacist neo-colonialism; the wars for capitalist lebensraum in the Ukraine and Palestine; the Christonazi take-over of the U.S. Supreme Court to guarantee theocratic expansion and permanence; and the militarization of the USian police to suppress any domestic opposition to theocratic subjugation, much as the imperial war machine suppresses such resistance abroad. 

Recognition of how  these atrocities are theocratically connected brings into sharp focus how this "secret fundamentalism" not only justifies capitalism's ecogenocidal greed as divinely ordained, but mandates USian alliance with -- and military support of -- other fundamentalist  theocracies. Ruled as they are by zero-tolerance tyrannies -- Israel by genocidally fundamentalist Judaism and the Western Ukraine by de facto nazis -- the blank-check support given them by the empire is among USian fundamentalism's unapologetic public expressions. 

So is the skyrocketing militarized-police violence unleashed against Occupy, Black Lives Matter and now against pro-Palestine demonstrators. The message here is that in the eyes of the ruling class, we of the 99.9 Percent, regardless of race or ethnicity, are all defined by the N-word -- and will be savaged accordingly should we dare  protest. But once we Marxians begin making these connections obvious, it may also begin to be obvious that -- as an old labor-movement slogan puts it -- an injury to one of us is truly an (intentional) injury to us all.

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Fed says interest rates to stay higher longer

Given that the pro-Trump USian ruling class, like its pro-Hitler German ruling-class predecessor, has determined nazism is capitalism's only salvation; given also that resurgent inflation is one of several factors -- including the Biden candidacy itself -- that are ever-more-obviously scripted to ensure Trump's victory in November; it is entirely plausible to assume the Federal Reserve and Wall Street are collaborating to continue victimizing us with ruinous prices and prohibitive interest rates. We already know the price-hikes are expressions of run-amok corporate greed rather than problems of supply and demand, which in turn suggests the Fed's role is that of enabler rather than regulator.

Moreover there's the fact Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is living proof of the "Democratic" (sic) Party's post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party. Powell was appointed to the board by Obama, elevated to its chairmanship by Trump and reappointed to that post by Biden. As we should all know by now, Hitler-disciple Trump's appointees were at least Christonazi sympathizers, else they'd never have received the wanna-be Führer's endorsement. Thus Powell's re-appointment by Biden is a tacit endorsement of the Trumpite agenda -- further proof the unprecedentedly unpopular Biden candidacy is the "plausibly deniable" strategy developed by the thoroughly Christonazified spy-and- secret-police apparatus for throwing the election to Trump.

Where the Gaza War itself fits into this strategy remains to be seen, but there's no doubt the violence Biden has unleashed on pro-Palestine demonstrators is intended to goad the youth vote into boycotting the election, thereby further ensuring Trump's victory and the final, permanent reduction of USia to the modern, technologically omnipotent version of a slave-plantation state the financial aristocracy has sought to impose on us at least since the defeat of the Bankers' Plot in 1934.

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Biden Is Not Winning. His Campaign Should Stop Acting Like It Is.

Those who persist in proclaiming Biden a certain victor have their heads deep enough in the proverbial sand to blind themselves to two absolute realities. One of these is the fanaticism of the Trumpites, who will vote for him even if he is imprisoned, and some of whom have already pledged armed rebellion to free him should he be locked up. The other is the ultimate indifference of the nation's youth, whose core belief is they -- and ultimately the entire human species -- are doomed, regardless of who wins in November, and who will therefore be easily convinced to refrain from voting, thus to avenge the police brutality they believe Biden has unleashed against their pro-Hamas peers.

The one unknown that might reverse this growing probability for disaster -- the one factor that could save us from an increasingly certain Biden defeat -- is the women's vote. This is rightfully mobilized to near-revolutionary fervor by the theocratic misogyny imposed by the Trumpites' state regimes and perpetuated by the Trumpite seizure of the federal judiciary, the latter an application of the strategy pioneered by the German Nazis. But if the women are convinced their ballots will be nullified by Trumpite anti-voter schemes -- perhaps due to the refusal of Biden to rigorously enforce the few remnants of the Voting Rights Act -- they too may refrain from voting, guaranteeing the transformation of the nation into the de facto Fourth Reich.

LB/1-18 May 2024

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29 April 2024

"Persecution in the Lord's Name," Plus Another Six Pointedly Provocative Posts from Websites Elsewhere

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.

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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.)

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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. 

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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.    

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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.

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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.

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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

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