Government Lockout: Neoliberal Moral Imbecility Wins Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens...

(To read the rest, please go here.)

Yes, Virginia, the Government Is Committing Humpty-Dumpty

So Is Our Species. And Neither Santa Nor Jesus
Nor All the Wise Men Can
Glue Humpty's Fragments Together Again

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA Propaganda Machine dares not acknowledge the symptomatic meaning of the ongoing series of governmental shutdowns that began during the Clinton/Gingrich feud. 

To do otherwise -- to acknowledge the federal government is now turned off and on and off again with exactly the same fuck-you moral imbecility its Capitalist owners demonstrate in wage cuts and factory closures -- the Josef-Goebbels wanna-bees who disseminate our daily doses of disinformation would have to at least hint that such events are symptomatic not of minor "adjustments"  (as alleged by the Banksters), but rather of the crumbling foundation that precedes total structural failure.  

In Marxian retrospect, the Clinton/Gingrich shutdown was an early disclosure of the bitter fight within the ruling cabal -- actually the One Capitalist Party of Two Names (OCPOTN) -- over how rapidly and forcefully the United States Working Class was to be reduced to ChristoNazi theocracy and the modern equivalents of serfdom and slavery, the current euphemism for which is of course Neoliberalism. 

A far better term would be "Neroloberalism," an economic system in which the slavemasters fiddle and fondle and set the forests alight and we the people die accordingly.  

Here too -- if I may be forgiven the McLuhanism that became a prime cliche of the 1960s -- "the medium is the message." The "medium" is the shut-down itself; the "message" is the aforementioned fuck-you,  not just to the 800,000 federal employees who won't get their holiday paychecks, but to each and every one of us who have ever been dependent on a paycheck to survive. 

In other words, what our overlords are saying is "now that we are the sole (and soul) owners of the government,  we can treat it like any other Capitalist venture...and you workers can't do a damn thing."

Or won't, since in a realm in which the Working Class had...

(To read the rest, go here.)

U.S. Journalists Begin to Rediscover Their Moral Imperative

But Can They Overthrow the Monopolistic Tyranny and Post-Watergate Gentrification That Reduced Our Calling to Stenography?

JUST AS I PREDICTED -- often in the face of (entirely rational) skepticism -- a few present-day members of the working press, broadcasters included, are beginning to rediscover the moral imperative of our calling, which in my day defined not only the best reporters and editors but the best newspapers and magazines and broadcast journalism. 

It is however to our greatest national and professional shame this renaissance and resurrection did not obtain until it was goaded into being by the ChristoNazi conquest of the entire federal apparatus -- especially how

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

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the conquerors gloatingly perpetrate the deaths inflicted by the regime's overtly white-supremacist-Christian (and thereby covertly genocidal) immigration policy.

But the Trump/Pence border gestapo's murder-by-neglect of little Jakelin Ameí Rosmery Caal Maquin may have finally re-oiled and freed-up a few mainstream journalists' long-rusted moral hinges.

 
Two years ago the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine, the world's first privately owned, 

(To read the rest, go here.)

Just More Atrocities by Our Ever-More-Openly Nazi Overlords

With One Possibly Inspiring Environmental Report at the End

 

HAMSTRUNG BY CONVERGENCE of geriatric disability and the increasingly severe punishments the Neoliberal (NeoNazi) United States inflicts on those of us it wants to exterminate -- i.e., people of color, old folks like myself, LGBTQ people, allegedly "uppity" women, disabled people however young or elderly, non-Aryan whites, impoverished people (again like myself), anyone else deemed either undesirable or insufficiently profitable or both -- this week's Dispatches will be hastily assembled but cynically outspoken as always. 

Yes I am sick yet again -- this time it's cellulitis, a chronic infection in both lower legs that is one of the more debilitating consequences of congestive heart failure. Meanwhile my schedule is controlled by my permanently car-less dependence on volunteers for first-of-month chore-transport, a condition due not only to poverty but to the fact Pacific Northwest

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

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"transit-is-welfare" white racism  dooms Tacoma to forever-shitty mass transport. Plus now I'm coping with the annual interrogation the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services inflicts on recipients of its ever-shrinking stipends and services. Filling out the paperwork,  assembling the required documentation and annotating it by mechanical typewriter -- the only way my arthritic hands can do it legibly -- steals at least seven workdays from my life every year. And of course every year DSHS and its Neoliberal masters vindictively add new requirements to the already difficult (and bottomlessly nerve-wracking) process. 

 

Today's DSHS, of course, is nothing more than a meticulously malicious zero-tolerance gatekeeper, focused not on helping impoverished people but rather on finding ever-more-euphemistically creative ways to deny us help and thereby fund the untold, ever-increasing  billions in big-business tax breaks -- by far the greatest such giveways in the U.S. -- by which the Democratic (sic) Party state government rewards the party's Capitalist owners and bribemasters...

Even as Washington state's lower-income population, which now tops 50 percent -- suffers under the nation's most deliberately, vindictively, viciously regressive state tax structure. 

Such are the rules of existence -- and death -- under the Democratic (sic) Party's allegedly "progressive" (sic) governance. 

Which, in embittering truth  -- except of course for the Democrats' loudly proclaimed and moronically applauded agenda of suicidally aiding the ChristoNazi Sturmabteilung by imposing mandatory pacifism and therefore compulsory victimhood via near-total forcible civilian disarmament -- is yet another Big Lie, part of the Democrats' perpetual, ChristoNazi-enabling repetition of "change we can believe in": the most devastating, tyranny-enabling electoral deception in USian history.

That said -- preachment ended -- let us continue with some of the week's most allegedly "subversive" reports of allegedly "fake" news: 

(To read the rest, go here.)   

Bitter Bites: Reports on Capitalism's Happy Holiday Horrors

New Research Proves Most U.S. Whites Are Already Incurably Nazified

SOME READERS SCOFF at my oft-repeated assertion the Pew Foundation's post-Katrina polling is definitive proof fully 77 percent of the white Christian U.S. electorate is at least tacitly racist.

But now my 77-percent estimate is confirmed by a new study that defines the U.S. as probably the most viciously racist nation since Nazi Germany. 

Hence – because the white Christian hatred of Jews and people of color is the epicentral malevolence of Nazism – I believe it entirely accurate to refer

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NEWS REPORTS formerly published weekly in Dispatches are now published daily in the Tacoma (Harry Bridges Chapter) Facebook page of the Communist Labor Party. Most of these reports were suppressed or significantly downplayed by the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine (MMPM), the world's first privately owned, for-profit version of the Nazi German Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Please scroll down this (slow-loading) FB page at least once per day for vital new information. Thank you.

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to these homegrown (and probably home-schooled) bigots as “incipiently Nazi” though the vast majority of them conceal their malignancy save at critical moments.

Here is an excerpt from the study: 

Evil disguised as common sense is as American as Thanksgiving, and now we have research to back it up...(in) Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape. (Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Míriam Juan-Torres, Tim Dixon et al; More in Common: 2018). They asked...why is America so polarized?... the Hidden Tribes study clearly shows that this country is profoundly right-wing and segregated. Millions of Americans disguise their enabling of corrupt policies and our slide toward being an authoritarian society run by the rich by claiming...

(To read the rest, go here.)

Without a Revolutionary Agenda, Hope Is Only Another Opiate

Five New Examples Prove the Futility of Efforts to Reform Capitalism;
Before We Go There, Let Us First Embrace the Legacy of Alex Hyland 

THE DEATH OF Alex Hyland, the most instinctively skillful teacher I have ever met, leaves a painful gap in the lives of all of us who knew him.  

It also leaves a gaping tear in the fabric of life itself. 

I don't recall exactly when I was introduced to Alex save that it was during an episode of shared political activism...

(To read the rest and view the associated photograph, go here.)

 

Fear-Bred Religious Delusions Make Apocalypse Inevitable

How Belief in a Hereafter Fosters Suicidal Abandonment of the Now

THE SADDEST, MOST TRAGIC element within human consciousness is its uncanny and ultimately self-destructive penchant for seducing us into believing in what the god-peddlers and heaven-hucksters and Prosperity Gospel indulgence-pushers call “eternal life.” 

For it is that delusion -- that and none other -- that has doomed our species by convincing it of the ultimate Big-Lie rationalization for doing nothing whatsoever to improve human life on earth, merely because “there's a better land a-waiting in the sky.” 

Thus the monstrous falsehood of “eternal life” becomes the excuse for every one of the infinite horrors our species has ever perpetrated on itself and its environment; note how individual victims of violence or misfortune or disease are inevitably described as “gone to a better place.”

 

Less frequently spoken aloud but equally delusional is the notion the uncountable victims of our species' infinite numbers of genocides are similarly succored in compensation for their sufferings. 

It is all bullshit. 

And it is proven bullshit by the fact the vast majority of persons who live beyond so-called “near-death experiences” report that nothing -- absolutely nothing -- awaits us beyond death.

Of the perhaps two-dozen or so people I know who have at one time or another been clinically dead -- some goddess-focused Pagans, some Christians, some Jews, some avowed agnostics, a couple of atheists -- only one, an agnostic, ever reported anything apart from total sensory deprivation: absolute nothingness and utterly empty darkness, each of an intensity impossible to describe. 

Karl Marx, unquestionably the most daringly perceptive intellectual our species will ever produce, referred to religion as “the opiate of the masses.” 

I would argue Marx dared pursue his re-definition of religion no further than he did because in his brilliance he understood...

(To read the rest, go here.)

No Dispatches This Week; Am Severely Ill with Flu

THIS YEAR'S FLU vaccine is obviously useless -- I got the shot back in September  -- but it provided me no protection at all.

Given the nature of Evangelical Nazism, I cannot but wonder if weakened or useless vaccine is yet another of the Trump/Pence Regime's methods of back-door genocide. Or if it is just another typical rip-off by the Capitalists: minimum quality -- or more likely nonexistent quality -- for maximum price.  

Ain't it wonderful to live in a realm where nothing -- absolutely nothing -- is trustworthy anymore.

 

And -- yes -- I may yet have to be hospitalized, as I have pain at the bottoms of both lungs.

Which I dread more than anything because of the financial ruin it will inflict on me.

LB/5 November 2018

-0-

(For earlier posts, go here.)

Is It Class Struggle? Or Is It Two Subspecies in Mortal Combat?

Our Fight for Survival Goes Beyond Proletarians Versus Plutocrats; It Is Now a Doomsday War between Humanitarians and Moral Imbeciles

THE MARXIAN CONCEPT of class struggle was for many decades our most powerful tool of consciousness-raising and liberation. 

It was understandable enough -- and therefore compelling enough -- to encourage widespread rebellion in the 19th Century and to fuel successful revolutions in the 20th Century. It also terrified the Capitalists into allowing a number of social-democratic reform movements as well -- the New Deal most assuredly included.  

But now in the 21st Century -- ironically just as We the People are awakening to the fact our Mother Earth is challenging our entire species to either abandon its ecocidal misogyny or become extinct -- we may need to re-think what class struggle is telling us. 

That's because the enlightenment, solidarity and urgent call to action with which Marxism inspired the vast revolutionary and reformist majorities of yesteryear seem beyond the comprehension of all but a tiny minority today.  

An obvious and undeniably major part of our problem is the One Percenters' absolute mastery of propaganda and psychological warfare. Schooled by Josef Goebbels and his huckstering kindred, they have warped our minds with their profoundly seductive but ruinously divisive toxins of imposed ignorance, linguistic distortion and identity politics.

 

Now, brain-warped as we are by Capitalism's monstrous Big Lie of equal opportunity,  too many of us can scarcely fit class -- caste, actually -- into our notions of individual selfhood, much less into our collective expectations and demands.

In the past I have denounced these examples of our species' suicidal malfeasance as byproducts of how the Capitalists have dumbed down the formerly activist population of the United States into a hopelessly submissive Moron Nation -- the most apocalyptically ignorant realm of all the mentally enfeebled dunce-domains that rape our Mother Earth for fun and profit. 

Yet now I think maybe we should look beyond what the One Percenters are doing to us and our planetary Motherland. Maybe we should instead be asking why the patriarchy's 6,000-year campaign of genocide¹ -- the product of a tiny fraction² of our species' lifespan --  has evolved into a campaign of undeniably terminal ecocide. 

Marx, Engels and Lenin tell us the Capitalist Ruling Class behaves as it does because that is the present-day expression of the age-old self-protective momentum of tyrants -- an assessment with which it is surely difficult to disagree. 

Meanwhile our own history reveals the notion of a "moral universe" that "bends toward justice" is naught but another variant of "change we can believe in": yet another Big Lie. It is this deception that sustains the self-betraying emotion we call "hope." It suborns our impulse to confront those alleged humans who prey upon us; it numbs us to the fact their boiled-frog ecocide is ultimately as deadly as an attack by rabid grizzly bears -- and it must therefore be battled accordingly. 

       

But why -- seemingly for the first time in our species' 200-thousand to 250-thousand-year experience -- have its tyrants become bipedal doomsday machines? 

Might today's strife also be symptomatic of some hitherto unrecognized evolutionary division of our species into two warring subspecies -- humanitarians versus moral imbeciles? Homo sapiens humanitareansis versus Homo sapiens mala in sē.³  

The latter -- subspecies or not (and I am convinced they are a subspecies if not also a mutation) -- are now undeniably killing us all. 

They have tabooed and suppressed the empathy and cooperative instincts that enabled our species to survive four ice ages and no one knows how many other long-term disasters. And now they are methodically replacing those instincts with exactly the same murderously acquisitive moral imbecility that characterizes trophy-hunting serial killers. Think Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer -- slayers no less possessed of  legal personhood than Monsanto and IBM -- or so rules the United States Supreme Court.

In other words, the moral imbecility that defines Homo sapiens mala in sē repudiates everything that defines the rest of us as fully human. Which argues for their existence as a subspecies if not also as a mutation.   

 
Moreover they...

(To read the rest, go here.)

Open Secret: I-1639 Would Kill Preemption, Letting Seattle and Like-Minded Jurisdictions Ban Civilian Gun Ownership

But -- Probably Due to Political Considerations (See Below) -- Not Even NRA Dares Fight This Super-Sneaky Forcible-Disarmament Ploy

THE BAD NEWS is buried in the official Initiative 1639 text, Page 8, first paragraph:

"The purchaser shall be given a copy of the department of fish and wildlife pamphlet on the legal limits of the use of firearms and firearms safety and the fact that local laws and ordinances on firearms are preempted by state law and must be consistent with state law."

Washington state uses such strike-throughs to show which parts of present-day laws legislators or voters are targeting for repeal. That's also how the Voters' Pamphlet...General Election November 6 (Page 92; seventh paragraph) reveals that enactment of I-1639 would repeal preemption and terminates all the protections it provided. 

Though the voters' pamphlets are mailed to every household in the state, the initiative's impact becomes clear only when its discouragingly turgid, irritatingly repetitive prose is carefully studied. That means most voters -- obviously as intended -- will never know preemption is on the ballot. 

But what is preemption? It originated as a legal doctrine to protect citizens from prosecution for accidental violations of contradictory local variations in what's lawful and what's not. It prohibits cities, counties and other local government agencies from imposing laws that are more restrictive than state law. 

As it applies to firearms and ammunition in Washington, preemption requires that all relevant laws be consistent throughout the state. Enacted in the 1980s, it decrees that only the legislature can enact such measures. This avoids a confusing patchwork of rules and regulations that would make it difficult (if not impossible) for gun owners to ensure they are obeying the law when traveling from one part of the state to another. 

In Washington,  preemption has thus traditionally protected legal firearms owners from the fiercely anti-gunowner majorities who increasingly dominate the politics of the larger coastal cities -- not just Seattle, but also Bellingham, Olympia and Tacoma. 

Once preemption is gone -- and I-1639's language of revocation is unequivocal  -- any local jurisdiction could enact any anti-gun restriction it pleases. Indeed, Seattle's... 

(To read the rest, go here.)

As Intended, Capitalism Makes Government Our Deadliest Foe

U.S. Freedom Dies Forever as Republicans and Democrats Weaponize Reagan's Biggest Big Lie into Our One "Self-Evident" National Truth

 Meanwhile Reality Compels Another Dispatches Format Change

NO, GOOD PEOPLE, ELECTIONS cannot restore humanitarian governance to the United States. 

Not now. Not ever -- not as long as our candidates are all chosen by our Capitalist overlords. 

Yes, our most recent betrayal by the Democratic (sic) Party is obviously intended to help the Republicans by minimizing voter turnout next month. It's other purpose is tightening the already deadly ChristoNazi stranglehold on the national judiciary. 

Now the only truly motivated voters will be the zealots themselves, the ChristoNazis and their secret Democratic [sic] allies, especially the forcible disarmament fanatics who want to render us defenseless in the face of the wildly escalating ChristoNazi threat. 

In hideous truth, they're birds of a (proverbial) feather. The two groups are bound together by their hatreds.

The forcible disarmament cult is as much a hate group as any KuKluxKlavern -- and I have witnessed this firsthand. They despise all legal firearms owners with the same hurl-a-brick-through-your-window intensity the ChristoNazis aim at women and people of color. 

But we real Leftists are the only ones they're reducing to compulsory pacifism and mandatory victimhood. As it is already, no one in the state of Washington can purchase a firearm -- any firearm -- without government approval.  

And now -- with the ChristoNazi takeover already emerging as the  most apocalyptic horror our species has ever contrived -- the forcible disarmament fanatics see their greatest opportunity. Once they win -- and it is obvious they're winning everywhere -- government at every level will be able to thoroughly investigate anyone who so much as inquires about firearms ownership. 

Which means, in the ChristoNazi Fourth Reich as the Original Nazi Third Reich, soon it's only the Nazis who will be allowed guns.  

  

All of this is predictable -- especially by anyone who knows history well enough to know that if there is any "arc of the moral universe" it most assuredly bends not toward toward justice but to ever-intensifying tyranny. 

Obviously our ChristoNazi rulers want all of us except their own storm-troopers disarmed and thereby reduced to utter defenselessness, and just as obviously they are (again) using their Democratic (sic) puppets to make that happen.
 

Meanwhile most of the rest of the population -- terrified by the fast approach of the which-side-are-you-on reality that defines revolution and civil war -- is in full retreat. They are cravenly flinging away their arms in the desperate hope their pathetic defenselessness will magically move our merciless conquerors to show them mercy. 

Moron Nation multiplying mindlessness.

But these are mere symptoms of the malignancy that is destroying us.

The real reason our elections are meaningless is that President Reagan's most outrageous Big Lie -- that government is the source of all our problems -- has become the nation's sole defining "self-evident" truth.

Indeed it has suppressed and replaced all those other "self-evident" truths cited by Thomas Jefferson as he wrote the Declaration of Independence. 

Our final subjugation -- and there were many such episodes beforehand -- began with the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on 22 November 1963. It was then locked in place by an additional 11 years of governmemt-enabled murders.

 
In other words...

(To read the rest, go here.)

The Horrors of a ChristoNazi Theocracy Are Now Inescapable

Kavanaugh Finalizes the Boiled-Frog Coup Begun by JFK Murder;  Without the Court's Protection, We the People Are Naught but Slaves 

(The following is not how I had intended to resurrect Dispatches after its post-injury hiatus. But the end of the United States as we knew it is a pivotal story that demanded  immediate response.)

THE CHRISTONAZI CONQUEST of the United States Supreme Court means a vengefully white-supremacist, vindictively misogynistic  third of the homeland population now rules the Empire for its Capitalist masters. 

Like chain-gang guards or plantation overseers, these lavishly funded fanatics will try to lord it over all the rest of us for the foreseeable future.

And given the lifetime, multi-generational reign of SCOTUS appointees, their tyranny is effectively forever -- unless of course We the (determinedly humanitarian) People rise up and throw them out.  

But for now, we of the presumably non-Nazi two-thirds are naught but another entry on the Empire's long manifest of conquered subjects. The few remaining SCOTUS decisions that granted us minimal protections will soon be overturned. And then we'll be as vulnerable to our fanatically predatory conquerors as the peoples of Europe were to the Original Nazis c. 1938-1945. 

That's because the new makeup of the court frees the Capitalists to do with us as they have always wished -- to (literally) enslave us all and turn our nation into the planet's largest concentration camp.

And it encourages the Capitalists' Christian storm-troopers --  those raging white male evangelical zealots whose sadistic god demands misogyny, homophobia and genocide --  to persecute us with whatever tortures their Bible-twisted brains conceive.

Quoth Gary North, one of the ChristoNazis' most influential prophets:

“Why stoning? “There are many reasons. First, the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost. Second, no one blow can be traced to any person. Third, public stoning makes it clear to everyone that the whole community is responsible for the prevention of criminal behavior. Fourth, executions are to be personal, not impersonal. The condemned man has the right to confront his executioners face to face. Stoning is therefore integral to the commandment against murder. The fifth and by far the most important reason is that stoning is literally a means of crushing the murderer’s head by means of a rock, which is symbolic of God. This is analogous to the crushing of the head of the serpent in Genesis 3:15. This symbolism testifies to the final victory of God over all the hosts of Satan.”

Such are the horrors with which we must reckon in what is now -- barring genuine revolution -- our only possible future.

Meanwhile far too many of us -- politically crippled by the brainwash of disinformation and ignorance with which the Capitalists try to blind us to the bloodstains and human ash on Capitalism's serpentine underbelly -- still refuse to acknowledge the venomous intensity of the hatreds by which we are now openly assailed and oppressed.

But I have lived amongst our conquerors' parents and grandparents; indeed I survived 15 involuntary boyhood and young adult years amongst these Southrons, and I will attest to their perverse malignancy. White Christian male cocks harden at the mere thought of raping and otherwise torturing and finally murdering women and people of color and LGBTQ people and humanitarian men and non-Christians and even disobedient children.

Which now our conquerors believe they can do with presidential-pardon impunity -- or perhaps even official prior approval.

And if North has his way, these good white Christian men will soon be allowed to kill us by hurling stones to rend our flesh and break our bones until we die moaning and convulsing  in pools of our own blood and vomit and urine and feces. Such deaths, it is authoritatively reported, take as long as two hours.

Indeed it is as if the entire Confederacy has risen from its grave and -- 153 years after Appomattox -- won the Civil War.

Picture the white Christian choreography of every lynching you ever read about or viewed in photographs. Try to imagine the infinite horror of facing such a death. Try to imagine Jeanne d'Arc's thoughts -- or those of any other woman so accused -- as she was led toward the stake at which  she would be burned alive. 

Such atrocities are -- I say again -- now our only possible future. Egged on by the Trump/Pence Regime, USian hate-criminals are more brazen than ever.   

But won't the forthcoming elections give us a chance to change all that? 

Don't make me laugh. Now with total ChristoNazi control of the Supreme Court, the Trump/Pence regime can now do literally anything it chooses, including cancel the elections and arrest the four remaining so-called "leftist" Supreme Court justices and machine-gun  any of us who dare protest.

 

That is why UltraViolet's newest anti-theocracy petition, which I signed (and we should all sign) for its protest value, is probably of no more consequence than the proverbial fart in a windstorm.  

And let us never forget -- nor forgive -- the Democratic (sic) Party's treachery in the prelude to Kavanaugh's appointment and the approval vote itself, more "change-we-can-believe-in" proof the Democrats are nothing more than Republican-enabler puppets dancing as directed by the  Capitalist puppetmasters,  stage-propping the Big Lie of U.S.  democracy.

THE COUP THAT reduced us to a conquered people and left us with scarcely better prospects than antebellum slaves or modern concentration-camp prisoners was...

(to read the rest, go here.) 

It's Taken Our White Racist Overlords 243 Years, but They've Finally Slain the Last Remnants of U.S. Promise and Potential

JesuNazi Control of the Courts Condemns Us All -- Especially Women and Minorities -- to the Unimaginable Horrors of Christian Theocracy

Where Then Do We Go from Here? What Options Remain?

FUCK IT; DAMN me as a "defeatist" if you like, but I'll no longer hide my hopelessness or despair. 

 

Severely disabling injuries of the sort I have suffered twice this year  can sometimes clarify one's thinking, purging it of distractions that obscure the ultimate (and therefore ultimately damning) truths of this uniquely apocalyptic age of absolute human hopelessness: the undeniable and infinitely terrifying fact the extinction of our species and the reduction of our Mother Earth to a bug planet are now obviously unavoidable and the equally terrifying fact our doom is entirely self-inflicted.      

But it often seems we can reach this Zen-like clarity only if we are able to transcend the physical agony and emotional devastation inflicted by the injuries themselves, whether they are accidental, as they surely were in my case, or the result of the innumerable atrocities relentlessly inflicted on us by Capitalism -- deliberately genocidal atrocities intended to reduce us (the 99 Percent) -- to the bare minimum number of breeding pairs essential to maintain the One Percent's post-apocalyptic slave pens. 

Already our future is literally too awful to imagine. Thus most of us remain forever trapped in Moron Nation's miasma of Big Lies and disinformation.

We are additionally crippled by an alleged "healthcare" system that is in fact a key part of the genocidal mechanism by which the Ruling Rich are methodically exterminating all of us -- the nation's now-totally subjugated poor -- in the vain hope a tiny cabal of obscenely wealthy moral imbeciles might yet survive the looming end of everything we know.

That's today's terrible truth  -- and I have naught but a pair of uplifted social fingers for those who out of dementia or stupidity refuse to believe it.

Yes, Virginia, for centuries the One Percenters did indeed hide their bottomless malice behind Santa Claus and Jolly 'Ole Saint Nicholas. But Santa Claus and all the saints are dead, never to rise again. Our masters have flung away any pretense of kindness; in another 50 years -- if our species somehow lives that long -- they'll be canonizing Goebbels and Pinochet and Pol Pot. Meanwhile they have already begun murdering...

(To read the rest, go here.)

Our Past Is Far More Radical Than We Are Allowed to Know

On "The Famous Flower of Serving Men" and the Folk Revival That Birthed the '60s Counterculture and Called Back the Great Goddess

(Photographs referenced below are here and here.)

YES I HAVE BEEN GONE a long time, and yes there are more changes in Dispatches forthcoming, changes I will announce in another week or so, as soon as I have thought them to completion.

Meanwhile here at last with my apology for the unforeseen delay is the essay I promised Kate King in gratitude for her unusually knowledgeable You Tube comment about "The Famous Flower of Serving Men" -- an ancient but timeless epic of familial dysfunction, murder, Goddess-magic and revenge told by a very old and eerie traditional Scots ballad¹ hauntingly performed in the early 1970s by the incomparable Martin Carthy.

There is eeriness here as well. When I applauded Ms. King last June I was at the nadir of my disablement  by an excruciatingly painful leg and knee injury. In keeping with the theocratic sadism that is ever more obviously the core of U.S. medical policy, I was (of course) denied the prescription pain-killers that would have made my injuries bearable. In any nation under the Abrahamic god, such injuries are reckoned divine punishment for sin, and the associated suffering is minimized only enough to reinforce its Big Lie of caring.

When I recovered sufficiently to begin writing the promised addendum, I assumed the task would take no more than a couple of hours, and I welcomed how its need for concentration refocused my mind from the injury's by-then-diminished but nevertheless still intrusive throbbing. But then, much to my surprise, the writing became not the intellectually sociable fulfillment of a promise as I had intended but rather a relentless compulsion that would not let me stop until I had hammered out close to 30,000 words. It was my first encounter with the impassioned Zen of writing; it was an effective distraction from physical pain; it was at times as if I were possessed by the Muse, an intensity I had often experienced while working in photography but unlike anything I had ever before encountered at a keyboard, and it revoked with finality the profound self-doubt that prompted my oft-repeated statement that "photography is my passion while writing for me is never more than intellectual struggle."

I thus owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Martin Carthy and Katie King and several others I will name as this story unfolds. 

But now I had to edit my often stream-of-consciousness prose and somehow condense its text back to reasonable size. Hence I divided what follows into what I hope are intellectually palatable sections; hence too I apologize for the occasional repetitiveness thus rendered unavoidable and also for the typos and dropped articles I am bound to have overlooked. I probably be making minor  corrections and revisions in this piece for as long as it and I remain alive. Which -- at least for the foreseeable future -- defines it as a work-in-progress. 

***

THOSE OF US who are already familiar with  traditional British and European folk balladry --  especially those of us aware of the hypothesized origins of its form and much of its content in prehistoric liturgies of the Cosmic Mother (and the pivotal role that content seems to have played in the birth and growth of the 20th Century Counterculture) -- may of course scroll down directly to "Now About 'Famous Flower' and Its Patriarchy-Subverting Content" and start reading there. Despite  its 1972 recording date,  "Famous Flower"  exemplifies the traditional music popularized by the folk revival a decade and a half earlier -- music that based on its apparent role in shaping the Counterculture seems to possess an uncanny power to change both spiritual and political consciousness.

That's why I suspect even those of us who were part of the Counterculture and are thus presumably intimate with at least some of the eye-opening truths buried within its maliciously censored history will find the this entire essay affirming, supportive and thought provoking. These sections preceding its "Now About 'Famous Flower'" conclusion will provide vital perspective for those of us who weren't there, and they refresh the perspectives of  those of us who were. In either case they're essential background if we are to appreciate how the folk renaissance of the 1950s engendered the chronically overlooked (and no doubt deliberately ignored)  aesthetic solidarity that paradoxically lay beneath the Counterculture's obvious ideological fragmentation.

 
Fifty-nine years ago, seemingly by happenstance, I learned some of the oldest traditional European folk  music -- melodies and words powerful enough to repeatedly evoke...

(To read the rest, go here.)

It Was Barack the Betrayer -- Not George II or Trump/Pence -- Who Legalized the Landlords' ALEC-Backed Demand That Tenants Be Forced to Pay All Costs of Bedbug Fumigation

This Lucrative Obamanoid Gift to the Already Obscenely Wealthy Is Alone Sufficient Proof to Forever Damn the Democrats as Betrayers

YEAH, I'M BACK, but not -- as I shall explain in a subsequent posting -- as I had originally planned to be. 

I had promised readers on another website I'd complete an essay on the pagan, anti-patriarchal origins of the Scots ballad "The Famous Flower of Serving Men," which I will indeed do, and I will finish another recently begun essay addressing the unique psychological circumstances -- specifically the subjugated fatalism one might expect to find were our planet nothing more than a galactic death camp -- that increasingly beset us in this the darkest, most hopeless, most potentially apocalyptic of all human eras.
Meanwhile I am reacting to a far more mundane but immediate threat: that of inescapable financial ruin inflicted on every U.S. tenant by the viciously anti-tenant, pro-landlord Obama Administration and the equally vindictive Democratic (sic) Party when they reversed decades of tenant-protection regulations to allow the landlords to force tenants to pay all the costs of bedbug removal.

I scooped the world on this bedbug story on 23 March 2014; the full text of that report is reproduced below.

 

Though major media occasionally picks up stories from this website, the most recent example the beginning of voluble advocacy for children imprisoned by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) gestapo -- not one publication (not even those on the alleged Left to which I offered it) -- dared touch my 2014 story of Barack the Betrayer's lucrative gift to the landlords. 

Hence we have here -- in how the landlords are now routinely fucking us even more ruinously than they were four years ago -- yet another lesson in the Capitalist reality that has always ensured "American democracy" would never be more than our species' biggest, most dangerous (and therefore almost certainly terminal) Big Lie: USian landlords are so fucking powerful they now under Neoliberalism can pretty much do whatever the hell they want to anyone unfortunate enough to need the nation's ever-more-prohibitively expensive shelter.

As indeed the landlords are now doing to those of us who dwell in the Senior Housing Assistance Group (SHAG) Conservatory Place facility in Tacoma, Washington, deluging us with contradictory double-think: "no of course it's not your fault the bedbugs invaded your apartment -- but yes you still have to pay all the costs of having them exterminated."

 

Which -- depending on whether you live in an anti-tenant state like Washington or a pro-tenant state like New Jersey (and the magnitude of the infestation and the collective greed of the landlords and the bedbug exterminators they have commissioned) -- could run to thousands of dollars: 

"Some people have even been driven to suicide by bedbugs.

Thus this reprint of my story from 2014 -- again in the hope some media outlet with far more readership than I have will pick it up and at long last treat it as the Page One news it should have been from day one:

Exclusive: Obama Administration
Quietly Declares War on Tenant Rights

(Note: occasionally I still get a chance to do some original reporting, which in days of yore was my most award-winning skill. The following is a genuine scoop. I offered its first refusal rights to Marc Ash at Reader Supported News, but his response was to ignore my query. Hence I'm breaking the story here. Perhaps other media will pick it up and give it the widespread dissemination it deserves.)

IN A STARTLING reversal of public policy, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has sided with a national landlord lobby that seeks to add the expense of bed-bug extermination – and possibly of all pest control – to tenants' already-soaring housing costs. 

The move by HUD may be the first documented instance in which a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was able to reach directly into the Obama Administration to obtain a nearly immediate favor – a favor that is hugely beneficial to landlords and potentially so ruinous to clients it could result in a nationwide wave of evictions.

It may also be another blow against the Democrats' dwindling prospects for success  in the November congressional elections. That's because HUD's new anti-tenant stance is sure to further inflame President Obama's critics on the Left, who already accuse him of deliberately concealing Republican ideology beneath a Democratic disguise. 

HUD says its rental facilities shelter about 1.2 million households.  Based on the 2010, two-persons-per-apartment demographics of Manhattan,  where virtually everyone is an apartment dweller, the new HUD policy probably impacts at least 2.4 million people – approximately as many women, men and children as live in Chicago, Kiev or Rome. 

The agency's departure from its long-established pro-tenant policies was revealed during a recent Network for Public Health Law web-seminar entitled “Addressing Bed Bugs through Law: Challenges and Limitations.” The network's post-webinar report cites two official HUD documents that reveal the agency's new opposition to tenant rights – rights that, in many cases, have long been recognized by law. 

“In Notice H-2011-20,” says the Network report, “HUD provided guidance to owners, management agents, and tenants of HUD multifamily insured and assisted properties for bed bug infestations. HUD urged owners to develop an Integrated Pest Management Plan (IMP) and to actively engage residents in efforts to prevent bed bugs. The notice set out a timeframe for responding to a tenant’s bed bug complaint and prohibited the owner from charging a tenant to cover the cost of bed bug treatment. 

An owner was also prohibited from denying tenancy to a potential resident on the basis of the tenant having experienced a prior bed bug infestation.”

“Eight months later,” the report continues, “HUD issued Notice H-2012-5 to supersede H-2011-20, which eliminated the “tenants rights and responsibilities” section, including the timeframe for responding to a tenant’s complaint, the prohibition on charging tenants for bed bug treatment, and the prohibition on denying tenancy to a potential resident because of a prior bed bug problem.

“The National Multi Housing Council (NMHC), which represents owners, claims that HUD made these revisions at its urging and Congressional pressure, because the original guidance created confusion about best management practices, hamstrung the efforts of owners and property managers to prevent infestations and failed to meaningfully address the financial issues to the owner and resident related to repeat infestations. In contrast, the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) says the change eliminates important tenant protections and allows landlords to shift the cost of bed bug treatment to tenants.”

Such costs, the public health law network estimates, can run...

(To read the rest, go here.)

Severe Knee Injury Suspends Dispatches Indefinitely

Because I'm a  dyslexic -- severe dyslexia at that --  I have always had problems with balancing. 

I could not walk until I was nearly two, and even then, walking was invariably accompanied by a terrible fear of losing my balance, falling on my face and and thereby maximizing my unattractiveness, from mildly ugly  to genuinely grotesque. 

Of course  that fear went away -- the more I walked, the less  I felt it -- and  I was free of it well before my fifth year. 

But now in old age it has risen to terrify me again. I'm 78; I've had two severely injurious falls in the last six months, none in the prior decades.

The first fall, on 7 January, left me bedridden nearly three months due to a severely wrenched left hip. The more recent fall, on 20 June, has left me bedridden and in such intense right-knee pain I cannot continue Outside Agitator's Notebook or any other serious writing.

Hence let us join hands and sing the one all-truth version of the Christian Doxology:  

Curse God from whom all misery flows
Curse him ye victims here below
Curse him aloud ye suffering host
Curse Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

I will of course resume as soon as I am able. Meanwhile my apology to all; I am truly sorry for any inconvenience this may impose.

LB/24 June 2018

(I thought I posted this here on its given date -- 24 June -- but maybe I was in such pain I didn't. Or couldn't. Or maybe the infamous censors have finally got me zeroed in. In any case the original is here.)