Clarke Appointment May Truly Mark the End of the U.S.

YES I HAVE substantially revised and re-titled this essay.  In retrospect, its original form (which began with a rant about how Microshaft had nullified all my blood pressure meds with the rage and frustration evoked by Windows 10 updates), was absurdly selfish in the context of the news of Trump's appointment of David Clarke to the Department of Homeland Security as what is essentially the reichsführer over all U.S. local police departments.

Indeed Clarke's appointment may literally mark the historical end of the U.S. as we have known it and signal the beginning of its (necessarily murderous) deconstruction into an openly proclaimed  JesuNazi empire as malevolently theocratic as Saudi Arabia or the so-called  Islamic State (ISL). 

Think George Orwell's 1984 combined with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Read the rest of the revised report here.

 

 

 

Hope as the New Paralytic Dope-iate of the Masses

A COUNTERPUNCH WRITER named Gregory Barrett – someone whose work I had not hitherto read – thrice prodded my alleged mind to heightened wakefulness Wednesday morning. The first prod was his title: “Hope is Our Enemy: Fighting Boiling Frog Syndrome.” The second prod was his reference to East Tennessee street preachers, a sidewalk spectacle I had neither witnessed nor consciously thought about since my boyhood years in Knoxville, but nevertheless an image painfully relevant to our present circumstances. The final prod was his bold assertion “hope...makes things hopeless,” which for a vastly larger audience succinctly summarizes a point I have been making in this space for at least seven years.

My original argument, dating from 2010,  was essentially that We the People are being drowned in “the Politics of Hopelessness” even as our overlords are elevating hope to a synonym for patriotism and attempting to damn as traitors any of us savvy enough to reject their latest Orwellian language-warp.

Given the Democratic (sic) Party's ever-intensifying efforts to co-opt the Left-leaning reawakening provoked by Trump, whom Seattle Crosscut's frequent comment-contributor DBreneman aptly calls L'il Duce,  (for which scroll down), it is significant to note 2010's “politics of hopelessness” also gives us a slap-in-the-face reminder of the breathtaking Neoliberal treachery of U.S. Sen. Patty Murray...

(To read the rest, go here.) 

Beware Co-optation by Democratic (sic) Deceptiveness

(Readers please note the new Dispatches format.)

OUR MOST IMPORTANT but most likely overlooked reading last week is a vitally provocative analysis by Shamus Cooke that warns against the Democratic (sic) Party's already frighteningly successful campaign to co-opt the Leftward shift provoked by Trump's ever-more-unabashed Nazism.

Alas, Cooke's vital work was obscured both by “mainstream media” censorship and the ever-more-deliberately blinding fog of Trumpwar. The report's undeserved obscurity was further facilitated by a woefully non-descriptive title, “The Trump 'Resistance' Is Slipping Through Our Fingers.”

To read more, including a summaries of  the past five days' most important news stories, go here.