SitRep: Biden/Harris? Just More "Change We Can Believe In"

MY APOLOGY FOR Dispatches' long silence.

Convinced there is no way to defeat our Neoliberal (Neonazi) Masters save by doing whataver may be necessary to survive their ongoing campaigns of exterminate-the-Working-Class ecogenocide -- the murderously weaponized profiteering by which they are replacing us with slaves and robots -- I have been trying since last November to find some new pathway for this blog. At that I may have succeeded; my new approach might be termed "speculative futurism" -- that is, if by some miracle we have any future at all. But its launch -- at present a collection of handwritten notes that fill two legal pads -- has been repeatedly delayed by the need to complete several more mundane projects I trust will be infinitely more useful to those who inherit my few possessions.

And now our relentlessly Neoliberal (Neonazi) politics, in the form of six exceptionally disturbing reports in the daily horror show of local, state, federal and global news, has added its own depressing taint: 

The Republican Party has Turned Fascist and is Now the Most Dangerous Threat in the World
So triumphs the (mostly clandestine) termination of USian democratic process our Masters began with the Wall Street Bankers' (quickly forgiven and forgotten) Plot c. 1929-1934 to turn the U.S. into an ally -- and more likely a colony -- of Nazi Germany.  

Supreme Court Rules Against Union Recruiting on California Farms
This completes the methodical murder of the USian labor movement begun by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1974.

With support of Biden, federal court backs Trump’s police-state assault on peaceful protests in Lafayette Square
A horror story accurately summarized by its headline.

Time to Say "You're Fired" to Merrick Garland?
See obvious reasons above.

Military Document Puts (All) Socialists in League With Neo-Nazis
In other words, any form of socialist organizing is to be made illegal.

Appearance Versus Essence: Biden is Stabilizing, Not Ending, Neoliberalism
As predicted, the "Democratic" (sic) Party is again functioning as the Republican Fifth Column.

Indeed the news has become so incessantly horrific, I -- a near-lifelong journalist -- radically reduced my reading of it after by some miracle (thank you Goddess!) we managed to get the Hitler-wannabe Trump and the WitchFinder-General-wannabe Pence at least temporarily out of the federal executive branch.

But since that deceptive "victory," it has become painfully obvious nothing of substance will change under the new regime -- that in hideous truth the only "change we can believe in" (exactly as under Barack the Betrayer) -- is that our Masters will continue to worsen our lives. 

And now we know the Democrats will do as they did before 2018 -- that is, everything possible to ensure the overt Nazis take full power in 2024.

*****

BECAUSE I AM fervently committed to de-politicizing Dispatches, I am also publishing here today a commentary from earlier this month, originally intended as the beginning of a preface to an introduction of the new Dispatches, but now revised for presentation here as what I hope will by my last purely political commentary ever. For when truth is shrunken to pearls before swine, when our Masters' Moronic Majority has been permanently conditioned to such moral imbecility it reflexively applauds atrocities as victories, then journalism is reduced to utter pointlessness, to naught but (another) exercise in skull-versus-boulder futility.  

Initially what I wrote was in favorable response to "A Kinder, Gentler US Empire Is Not Possible"; I sought to employ this exceptionally thought-provoking column by Caitlin Johnstone as the peg upon which to hang my withdrawal from political journalism. 

While I wholeheartedly agree with Ms. Johnstone’s hypothesis and salute her courage for daring express it,  I soon realized I must also respectfully suggest she has not taken it to it’s ultimately unavoidable conclusion, to wit: whether our Neoliberal (Neonazi) Masters have revealed themselves to be the sadistic moral imbeciles they truly are or remain closeted as Democrats and other pseudo-humanitarians, the ultimate lesson of human history is that all genuinely progressive movements -- that is, any truly humanitarian movement -- will be methodically destroyed at birth or as soon as possible afterward.

Note I am 81 years old, a near-lifelong Marxian formerly self-disguised by sometimes award-winning journalistic necessity, first as a "liberal Democrat" (until arson, almost certainly by federal agents, destroyed all my life's work in 1983); next as a "democratic socialist" (until the forcible retirement imposed by the ecogenocidal profiteering of '08-'09 cost me everything save a miserly Social Security pension and damned me to ever-deadlier poverty).  I am also a seasoned veteran of defeat: the (failed) post-Sputnik campaign to make USian K-12 brainwashing more like Euro/Soviet education and thus far less hostile to science, mathematics, the humanities and original thinking in general; the (failed) Civil Rights Movement; the (failed) Anti-Southeast Asian War Movement, which despite its innumerable lies to the contrary was pathetically immaterial to Vietnamese victory, won solely by the infinite courage of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese People's Liberation Army;  the (failed) Back-to-the-Land Movement; the (failed) Alternative Press Movement; and the (repeatedly failed) Labor Movement.

Though I voted for Obama twice -- votes I considered meaningless apart from their function in preserving the franchise -- by  2011 I had dubbed him "Barack the Betrayer" and had recognized his “change we can believe in” as the greatest Big Lie of political betrayal in USian presidential history; during that same period of enlightenment I was repeatedly booted in the metaphorical gonads by the irrefutable and therefore terrifying technological truth our ever-worsening circumstances are now so universal they have become inescapable save by death -- precisely as our Masters intend.

Thus, recognizing I truly had nothing left to lose, I joined the earliest Tacoma-activist ranks of the (failed) Occupy uprising, at the same time publicly acknowledging the Communist-at-heart I had secretly been at least since the murderous aftermath of the coup of 22 November 1963 proved to me our species' one and only genuinely humanitarian alternative was a definitively transitional Dictatorship by the Proletariat -- a true reformation now rendered forever impossible by the defeat of the Soviet Union.  

I was also an early activist in the (failed) Tacoma $15 Now Movement, though worsening health forced me to drop out several months before its defeat by the already reliably subjugated voters.

Yet even then I moronically retained just a bit of hopefulness.

But now after living through the cunningly disguised but effectively genocidal Neoliberal weaponization of the first 18 or so months of the Covid-19 pandemic, I can no longer doubt all is lost, certainly for modern society. In which context the entire global space-race becomes nothing more than an all-time epic of colossal propaganda and obscenely costly psychological warfare intended to maintain the cult of compulsory optimism. How? By distracting us from the ever-more-undeniable reality of an apocalypse already well underway – and most likely fatal to our entire species.

Why – or perhaps how – have I at last achieved some semblance of intellectual realism?

More appropriately, what enabled me to escape what Chris Hedges aptly terms the "curse" of optimism?

I escaped because anyone who recognizes the terminal magnitude of patriarchal technology also understands there is no power on this planet capable of overcoming our Masters' wealth-sustained (and therefore eternally unbreakable) monopolies on the technologies of universal surveillance and thermonuclear terror.

In societal reaction to which – or so I strongly suspect – our burgeoning belief in “space aliens” is most likely nothing more than the military-technology-fostered 21st Century reinforcement of our self-destructive dependence on adult versions of the Santa-Claus myth, specifically the variously named patriarchal god of both the socioeconomically suicidal belief in the biological absurdity called “eternal life” and the maximized ecogenocidal malevolence of a misogyny that in its apocalyptic ejaculations of clitoris-envy damns all femaleness from our Mother Earth’s to that of our planet’s smallest distinctively gendered creatures.

It is a bit of an aside, but in psychological truth the Christmas Santa is our starter-god; he introduces us to the same terror that defines not only the globally dominant patriarchal god Yahweh/Jesu/Allah, but also all the planet’s governments assembled – whether knowingly or not – using the YJA biblical Erector-set: “he sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake; he knows if you’ve been bad or good; obey or burn at the stake.” In other words, it’s the same enslave-the-Working-Class scam whether invoked as Santa or Jesus or any other allegedly “divine” (and therefore “infallible”) would-be “savior.”

If space aliens exist, our own species' history should tell us they are undoubtedly here as conquerors – which perhaps in our species’ final moments will end forever the greatest deception of all human history, the ultimate Big Lie “the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.” To those of us who actually know history, the truth is of course the diametrical opposite: if there is any moral arc at all, what it bends toward is ever-more-technologically enhanced – and therefore ever more inescapable – ecogenocidal tyranny.

Proof? Look how our capitalist Masters warred against the Soviet Union until it was finally destroyed by the dark undertow of the very Russian history it had sought so fervently to transform. Yet even now 64 percent of the former Soviet population tells pollsters their lives were far better when they were governed by Marxism. Ditto for the former East Germans. (Note that Foreign Policy is a Ruling Class publication, hence -- because our Masters require accurate intelligence if they are to maintain their methods of oppression at peak efficiency -- it is allowed to be a  bit more truthful in its [still-obviously biased] reporting.)

In any case, what our Masters did to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its Warsaw Pact allies proves that if any genuine (i.e. truly ecohumanitarian) revolution were to occur anywhere, it will be crushed. Remember not just the murdered Karen Silkwood but the murdered Kennedy brothers and the government-murdered victims at Chicago (Fred Hampton and Mark Clark); at Kent State University (Allison Beth Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, William Knox Schroeder and let us not forget Dean Kahler, whose life was destroyed by the  permanent paralysis inflicted by a single round of .30-caliber M2 Ball through the spine); and at Jackson State College (Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green).

But those atrocities only hint at the horrors of our now inevitable future. For had the Soviet revolutionaries been long-term disciplined enough to perpetuate their ideology not only by successfully resisting invasion, infiltration and  disinformation, but by defeating co-optation and its backup SOPs (standing operating procedures) of arrest, torture, murder and political assassination of all true progressives -- our Masters’ new Final Solution was already in their arsenals. This is the Neutron Bomb, designed specifically to exterminate hostile or rebellious populations without damaging infrastructure (gold teeth included) or reducing its post-holocaust value as loot – ever the material wealth of capitalism and its euphemism-cloaked empires.

As to the too-rapidly mutating Covid-19, I must confess it increasingly seems to me its three most plausibly deniable alternatives are (1)--the Jackson Browne/Gaia Hypothesis alternative, the punitive anger of our Mother Earth, let us hope not (yet) in terminal fulfillment of JB’s ever-more-obviously prophetic vision of “the magnitude of her fury in the final hour”; (2)--the Biblical alternative, i.e., self-imposed apocalypse by deliberate or (allegedly) accidental release and/or by any and all of the (other) diabolical forms divinely imaginable; or (3)--the space-alien bio-weapon hypothesis many humans sense but too few of us dare speak aloud, certainly not as fact but just as certainly, given UFOs, as another intuitively obvious possibility we must therefore publicly consider.

Whatever obtains, it is scarcely more than a distraction now that our downward momentum has become irreversible. Whether in service to their own moral imbecility, as puppets of extraterrestrial conquerors or in some unspeakably repugnant combination of both evils, our Neoliberal Masters have already created the intentionally addictive technologies of tyranny that doom us all, exactly as prophesied by the darkest science fiction. Worse, they have weaponized their technology into the instrument of our ultimate self-betrayal, the now-inescapable shackles of limitless surveillance falsely peddled and gullibly embraced as a technology of human bonding. With the flawed but nevertheless Working-Class-exemplary Soviet Union gone forever and China permanently reduced to a slave-state capitalism indistinguishable in its ecogenocidal sadism from that of the avowed Neoliberalism that rules the rest of this planet, I cannot doubt all is truly lost.

Yet resistance remains vital to ourselves and to our offspring and to theirs and thus to the sustenance of human spirit, yes even and most especially now when any hope for betterment or promise of rescue is banished by our ever-more-obvious subjugation, and the sci-fi prophecy of "resistance is futile” has in fearsome fact become the one pivotal truth of all our lives -- which means survival itself may soon be our sole remaining possibility for revolutionary defiance.

LB/14-23 June 2021

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Backstabber Biden Denying At Least 30 Million Desperately Poor Pensioners Our Promised $1400 Stipends, Confirming Democrats' Continued Function as Republican Fifth Column

In Yet Another Epic Betrayal, Forcible-Disarmament-Fanatic Joe Has Sneakily Renewed His Opposition to Legalized Marijuana -- Probably to Radically Intensify Prosecutions of Otherwise Lawful Gun Owners 

THANKS TO A pair of sources --  The Stand, Washington State Labor Council's excellent on-line daily, plus a much-appreciated news tip from fellow journalist William Boardman -- we now have our clearest-yet sense of the hatred and contempt that unites the "Democratic" (sic) and Republican parties in the ecogenocidal solidarity of their Neoliberal (Neonazi) war against U.S. Working Families and the global Working Class in general:  

• The Stand tells us President Joseph Biden's ongoing "bipartisan" collaboration with the Trumpists who have sabotaged the Social Security Administration and the VA is the reason at least 40 million of us may not get our $1400 "stimulus" checks until 31 December -- if even then.  
• And Mr. Boardman's tip -- for which again my gratitude --  tells us the Biden Regime is already betraying the huge majorities of the imperial homeland's adult citizens who stupidly believed the Democrats' Big Lie a Biden/Harris victory would legalize marijuana.

These are among the most damning proofs yet the "Democratic" (sic) Party has reverted to its post-JFK function as  the Republican Party's Neoliberal (Neonazi) Fifth Column.

And, of course,  the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine, the world's first privately owned, for-profit version of Josef Goebbels' infamous Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, is protecting the Democrats by suppressing the story --  or at the very least, sugar-coating it with the nauseatingly fecal propaganda routinely excreted in service to the Moronic Majority's cult of mandatory optimism.

Again demonstrating our fatal lack of a genuine Left, nearly all the so-called "alternative" media is doing likewise.

Hence our two courageous sources have provided genuinely revealing information:

Firstly. as you probably know, many Republicans and at least a few of their "Democratic" (sic) Fifth Column co-conspirators sadistically wanted to  deny -- say again DENY-- stimulus checks to any of us whose sole sources of income are the murderously miserly welfare, Social Security or veterans' stipends that define us as unexploitable for profit, too impoverished to be liable for income taxes and therefore -- in the merciless Ayn Randified eyes of our Neoliberal Masters -- as "life unworthy of life."¹

Why withhold the money? Obviously, it's another aspect of our Masters' Final Solution to the problem of overpopulation by those of us who are hopelessly poor: the longer we are denied our $1400, the more acute our anxiety. More of us will therefore sicken and die -- which of course leaves more money for the Empire's  Neoliberal (Neonazi)  owners and their political marionettes. 

Moreover the Democrats and their Republican co-conspirators have sneakily given the SS and VA bureaucracies until 31 December 2021 to make the payments² -- obviously to further  maximize the Covid19 death toll.³

Secondly, apropos  the "Democratic" (sic) Party's resumption of opposition to legalized marijuana, as an analytically minded  member of the Second Amendment community's hard-Left faction, I saw this coming years ago. The fact marijuana is legal prescription medicine in a growing number of states is federally meaningless -- and as Biden now demonstrates, so it shall remain.

Why? Because any firearms owner who merely draws a breath of air containing marijuana smoke will urine-test positive for drug use and is therefore subject not only to confiscatory forcible disarmament, but to ten years' slave labor on the for-profit prisoner plantations that despite Biden's deceptions continue to expand, amassing profits comparable to those extracted by antebellum slave owners.

Hence anyone who believed Biden/Harris would legalize pot or end for-profit prison slavery was either hopelessly naive or more typically a member of the Moronic Majority, a useful idiot brainwarped by the Ruling Class and thus totally oblivious to the fact our Masters intend to completely disarm us -- to reduce us literally to mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood -- the latest expression of their fear our hopelessly dumbed-down brains might someday figure out how to foment a (real) revolution.

Doubt me? Note that some forcible-disarmament fanatics are already calling for mandatory monthly drug tests and annual psych evaluations for all firearms owners -- millions more dollars for the for-profit medical predators, with firearms ownership by us poor folk permanently prohibited by these proposed additional costs.

Thirdly, behind his cloak of Big Lies, disinformation and euphemisms,  Biden is obviously just another example of "change we can believe in,"  different from the Trumpite version mainly in the extent to which Biden hides Neoliberalism's Neonazi agenda -- Trump's premature disclosures of which separated our Masters into at least two mutually hostile factions and ensured Trump's loss in last November's election.⁵

How then did the "Democratic" (sic) Party become the Republican Fifth Column it is today? My journalistic guess is the Democrats were terminally compromised by their collaboration with the Republicans in the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the still furiously controversial deceptions necessary to hide the Ruling Class coup of 22 November 1963 -- its reality since proven by the now-irremediable (boiled-frog) imposition of Neoliberal Neonazism.⁴

Perhaps the most pivotal lesson I've been taught by Moron Nation is that investigative journalism is utterly pointless -- that too many of whatever small percentage of the population has retained the ability to read with comprehension has also been reduced to such submissive moral imbecility they are genetically incapable of feeling the empathy or concerns essential to humanitarian action.

In other words, in the psychological sense -- regardless of race or gender -- they are already naught but slaves.

All of which thrusts me ever closer to concluding there truly is no hope for us -- not for ourselves, our nation, our species, our Mother Earth.
___________________________

¹"Life Unworthy of Life" is the English translation of the phrase by which the German Nazis condemned elderly or disabled people to death for being unprofitable -- an ultimate example of the criminalization of poverty that has become so popular amongst U.S. politicians.

²HR1319, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, is among the most infuriatingly censored legislative packages ever enacted by Congress, which is why most of us remain unaware its Ayn-Rand-minded authors gave the federal bureaucracy nearly a year -- specifically until 31 December 2021 -- to send us our $1400 relief payments. Scroll to Page 137, "Timing and Manner of Payments...No refund or credit shall be made or allowed under this subsection after December 31, 2021." This is the most outrageously tolerant approval of bureaucratic obstructionism I have ever encountered.  

³Apropos the viciously extended disbursement deadline, I turn 81 on 30 March; even fully vaccinated -- I go off quarantine at midnight --  my comorbidities may not let me live long enough to see the now indefinitely delayed $1400 -- and the same applies to anyone like me. Obviously, this is no accident; its potentially deadly anxieties are precisely what our Masters intend -- another atrocity in their ever-more-lethal criminalization of poverty.

⁴Though it is seldom recognized as such, neoliberalism is the most toxic variant of Nazism to emerge thus far. Note the identical, might-makes-right ethos of absolute moral imbecility promulgated both by Hitler in Mein Kampf and by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged. Indeed, Neoliberalism's submit-to-capitalism-or-die mandate expresses the same submit-to-the-übermenschen-or-die ruthlessness of Nazism's German founders; the differences between the two are thus more illusory than real. Rather than requiring an individual tyrant, Neoliberalism crowns the corporate aristocracy  as our species' divinely ordained, absolute-power ruler; building on Josef Goebbels' methodological foundation, it achieves its intended tyrannies by the most compelling psychological warfare ever unleashed against our species and  -- cunningly exploiting the induced ignorance of Moron Nation -- by other methods far more readily concealable than the German Nazi agenda of military conquests, death camps and Zyklon B. It does so by glorifying Ayn Rand's sociopathy and by weaponizing disaster, pollution and disease to eradicate the few remnants of democratic process and reduce the Working Class to inescapable forms of modern slavery. Given the many variants of fascism that have reduced what was originally a proper noun to a lower-case generic, I propose doing likewise with Nazism. This gives us neonazism (or nazism) as more emotionally accurate description of what we now label "fascism," its lower-case forms the correct spelling for all "nazi" references save to the Third Reich's N.S.D.A.P., the original Nazi Party, which should of course still be capitalized accordingly.

⁵Is Trump down for the proverbial count? I fear not. I have no doubt whatever non-nazified historians might abide in the future -- that is, if we somehow manage to seize ourselves a future -- will define the nazis' 6 January 2021 uprising as eerily equivalent to Hitler's 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch. Obviously I cannot predict what measures the U.S. nazis will next attempt. But I am absolutely certain we the people of these helplessly (dis)United States no longer collectively possess the empathy, integrity, knowledge, skill, determination, solidarity-- and most of all the titanium-ovaried, brass-testicled courage -- necessary to defeat (any) nazi onslaught. We saw these requisites demonstrated by the Soviet people, as many as 43 million of whom died saving us all from Hitler and his allies, but alas I cannot imagine such capability in the present-day United States. Goddess grant this time my usually accurate pessimism is flat out wrong.  

LB/27 March 2021

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Lerro on the Need for Ritual: a Pivotal Work, Dare We Heed It

(First published in Dispatches from Dystopia)

FAR MORE SUCCINCTLY than I have ever seen it explained elsewhere¹, Bruce Lerro has described in an exceptionally thought-provoking, unusually well-crafted² essay just how it is we might recapture and wield -- this time for the preservation of our species and the protection of our Mother Earth -- the psychologically transformative  power inherent in ritual. 

His point is that if we are to transcend our self-inflicted apocalypse, we must rediscover and reclaim that power for ourselves, thus giving ourselves psychological-warfare weaponry at least as potent as the psywar weapons our enemies now routinely wield against us. 

The piece in question is entitled "The Power of Magick: Why Materialists, Atheists and Marxists Need It." It was originally published Thursday (28 January 2021) on Mr. Lerro's website, Beyond Capitalism, then republished Sunday (31 January) by LA Progressive here, which is where I first read it.

I am embarrassed to say I had not explored Beyond Capitalism until now.

While the title of Mr. Lerro's  newest essay  is self-explanatory, the text also clearly describes -- in patently secular terms -- how and why what he labels "magick" actually works, its real-world psycho-dynamics perhaps best summarized in what seems to me his most telling paragraph:

"Magick is the art and science of altering states of consciousness at will through the use of imagination, the senses, the emotions through the arts. The techniques can be used for good or for bad purposes. The entire field of advertising is an industry in the use of black magick. Often the association with changing states of consciousness is that it is some kind of secular, recreational escape from reality. Of course, some of that is true, but my reasons for arguing for altered states of consciousness are dead serious. People alter their states of consciousness primarily for social and personal needs, not just for fun." (Italics as in original; boldface added for emphasis.)

Thus I cite Mr. Lerro's essay here both for its thought-provoking nature and for the vital support it provides those of us who clamor for broadening the accessibility of Marxian source-documents as well as techniques of socialist propagation and consciousness-raising in general, all of which suffer  unprecedented obscurity thanks to deliberately paralytic isolation in the academic prisons maintained by Neoliberal fundamentalism.

__________________
¹My arson-doomed "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" addressed this topic at length, mostly with examples from  the re-popularization of  traditional balladry c. 1930s-1950s.. The backbone of my entire manuscript, these examples  illustrated  how the behavioral dynamic Bruce Lerro defines as "magick" was evident in the Folk Renaissance, which boosted a long-simmering, profoundly iconoclastic but hitherto relatively obscure art movement into unprecedented popularity and so birthed the 1960s Counterculture.  Despite its seemingly irremediable  political, racial and socioeconomic divisions, the Counterculture was potentially unified by a unique aesthetic solidarity -- the mostly  unexplored  bond evident in the music and art shared by feminists, environmentalists, back-to-the-landers, anti-war activists and urban communards alike. (Its unity was momentarily evident even amongst the hopelessly Ayn Randified legions of bourgeois faddists who later became the postwar generation's New-Deal-destroying Moronic Majority -- i.e.,  the  class-and/or-race-privileged moral imbeciles whose craven embrace of the Neoliberal brand of Nazism now gets them rightfully damned as "Boomers," a subconsciously apt pejorative implicitly expressing the thermonuclear-caliber devastation inflicted on human society by their self-obsessed ).  Indeed it was probably my photographically illustrated examples of the Counterculture's potentially revolutionary aesthetic  solidarity that provoked the destruction of "Dancer" and all the rest of my life's work, the main thrust of which was to resurrect the Counterculture from  the conceptual tomb in which our Oppressors hope to bury forever its significance as the first undeniably popular wave of consciously anti-apocalyptic (and therefore implicitly anti-patriarchal) revolution.  Even so, Mr. Lerro has stated in a relatively few paragraphs what over 24 years (1959-1983)  I wrote and discarded probably a half-dozen 150,000-word drafts to explain, with my extensively footnoted analysis derived mostly from Jungian sources and the works of Marshall McLuhan. Thus I cannot but hail the succinctness of Mr. Lerro's thinking, particularly in transforming the illusive notion of "sacred mysteries" into operational examples of secular psycho-dynamics. Obviously, both of us reason from mutual  recognition of paganism as perhaps our most effective tool for rediscovery and recovery of the self-empowerment prerequisite to community empowerment. In this context, Colin Wilson's disclosure in The Occult (Random House: 1971) -- that British Intelligence contacted the  Britannic witch covens and asked then to hex Hitler and especially his Luftwaffe  -- becomes a telling revelation of Ruling Class comprehension of magick's reality and power. 

²The only truly glaring error I as a member of the working press  -- a former editor-in-chief whose 30-year newspaper and magazine career climbed the proverbial ladder from copyboy to reporter/photographer and thence thru sports, city, news and picture editorships --  have found in Mr. Lerro's "The Power of Magick" is in the section entitled "The Catholic Church as closeted black magickians."The mistake is not in Mr. Lerro's conclusions, which I know from my own parochial school years to be true, but in his faulty grammar: he wrote, "When I was a boy my grandmother would go with my parents and I," demonstrating the ever-more-commonplace confusion of  the nominative (subjective) case with the objective case. It is an error  for which the blame goes neither to the writer  nor to the editor who failed to snag this particular foul ball, but (as with so much else that afflicts us), to the Oppressors who are methodically dumbing us down to functional illiteracy as part of their much broader psychological-warfare effort to render us unable to even conceptualize liberation.  For the multitudes who've been denied proper education in English grammar -- that is,  in the vital physics and chemistry of our language -- the proper form is "with my parents and me"; "I" is the subjective personal pronoun, in other words the actor; "me" is its objective form, here specifically among the objects of the preposition "with" and therefore denoting that which is acted upon. To observe the increasing frequency of such vexatious errors invariably saddens me,  particularly since  they cannot bur distract from both the credibility and the long-term accessibility of the texts in question.

LB/31 January-1 February 2021.

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How Our Neoliberal Masters Are Killing (Real) 'Stimulus'...

and Why Ryokan's Haiku Typifies Our Only (Real) Source of Salvation:

First some Bad news:

• https://www.mintpressnews.com/average-u-s-citizens-little-influence-government-policy/189520/
  
• https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/20/bidens-american-rescue-plan-and-its-opponents/
• https://www.laprogressive.com/dupes-of-our-hopes/?utm_source=LA+Progressive+NEW&utm_campaign=2a03409578-LAP+News+-+20+April+17+PC_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_61288e16ef-2a03409578-286953617&mc_cid=2a03409578&mc_eid=f9033578e0
• https://popularresistance.org/single-payer-which-way-forward/
• https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/15/why-there-was-no-peoples-rebellion-against-a-fascist-u-s-president-nine-reasons/
• https://www.blackagendareport.com/return-source-democracy-dead

Then some Good news:

• https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/gaia/esp_gaia01.htm
• https://www.encyclopedia.com/earth-and-environment/ecology-and-environmentalism/environmental-studies/gaia-hypothesis
• https://www.gaia.com/article/goddess-gaia

Obviously if we humans are to save ourselves, we must mobilize not as Americans or Russians or Nooksacks or Koreans or Masai, but as Gaians -- as lovingly fierce defenders of our Mother Earth  -- and we must do so no matter our nationality or race or ethnicity or gender or ideology or whether we view Gaia as metaphor or matriarch. 

Thus our most immediate need is clearly some sort of Gaian International, organized to speed our evolution into a globally cooperative, Nature-embracing humanity. As we've been repeatedly warned, perhaps most accessibly by Edvard Munch (1893); William Butler Yeats (1919); Jackson Browne (1974); and now by Greta Thunberg -- we must do so immediately, with unprecedented speed, before the Neoliberal legacy of murderous greed becomes our own inescapable torture-chamber of knowingly self-inflicted extinction.

My own brief summary-analysis of this good news -- that yes, we as a species may still have one (last) chance for healing the demonstrably fatal wound inflicted on us by the patriarchy's forcible, usually violent suppression of biological truth we were all born knowing -- ends, not ironically, with its beginnings: those glimmers of human perception and intent evident in our revolutionary (re-evolutionary) re-acknowledgement of the biblically despised biological reality -- the fact we like the wolves and bears and cockroaches are all children of our Mother Earth --  that unites us inseparably with all of Nature. 

And thus we forever remain -- in this era, challenged to re-learn how to embrace such  kinship, how to nurture it and help it thrive,  as I have done my very best to do throughout my post-news-staff years -- and yes thanks to the north-looking window beyond my desk do even now in quarantine. I likewise mourn the many who delude themselves into believing Christianity's  adult-Santa-fable some false divine will "save" them from the deadly consequences of denying their irrevocable kinship with the rest of Nature.

Or maybe they really are genetically different.

But as a favorite astronomy professor often said, "we humans are literally made of the substance of stars." (I apologize that I do not identify him; it is  because I cannot remember the correct spelling of his name. All my personal copies of academic transcripts were destroyed by the same arsonist[s] who destroyed all my life's significant work, and obtaining the information by telephone or email under pandemic conditions would take days if not weeks.) 

In any case, I feel that before we go on, we should perhaps quickly reflect on just how patriarchy assails us. However it might have been propagated -- more on this in the footnotes -- there is no doubt it wrenched human society out of the egalitarian, cooperative, proto-communist mode that enabled our ancestors to survive 194,000 years, four ice ages included. Then, beginning some 6,000 years ago, patriarchy overthrew that demonstrably superior ethos and eventually brutalized us into the murderously hierarchical, violently acquisitive, ecogenocidally imperialistic mode that begat the Abrahamic death-cults (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), which with Christian leadership eventually cloned themselves into the secular death-cult of Capitalism, which in turn divided into the apocalyptic death-cults we know as fascism, Nazism and Neoliberalism. 

In other words, our would-be exterminators today are the direct ideological descendants of those who sought to exterminate our pagan ancestors.

Given our present-day peril -- and factoring in Jungian discoveries about our ability to recognize and describe risks to our species well before they become obvious¹ (note again the prophetic elements in works by Munch, Yeats and Browne) -- I believe we can define as functionally anti-patriarchal any human expression that can be shown to foster our conceptual reunification with Nature. This most assuredly includes Marxism, which at least in Frederich Engels' view was an effort to restore humanity to a modern equivalent of its relatively harmonious pre-patriarchal cooperativeness; it also includes ecosocialism and ecofeminism, the healing intent of each made obvious by its name.  But our most effectively anti-patriarchal accomplishments are too often the most obscure. These are the scientific resurrections of ancient wisdom via the Gaia Hypothesis and the burgeoning growth of environmental science documented here, all of which are faulting the patriarchal bedrock.  

Anyone who doubts the revolutionary nature of such advances need only reflect on the extent to which  they infuriate the Christianists. Note how their early-'70s assertions of Christian anti-environmentalism -- "Organic Is Satanic"; "Environmental Means Of The Devil" -- have  since metastasized into open warfare against science itself.  Our counterattack -- more evidence of that prophetic function identified by Carl Jung -- is exemplified  here, here, here, here and perhaps more evocatively here.

Meanwhile, though the folk renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s was methodically suppressed in the United States, it has elsewhere continued its growth into an ever-more-wildly popular brand of multi-generational Neopaganism that powerfully nurtures our quest for reawakened awareness of our biologically indivisible  oneness with Nature.

Greta Thunberg's assertion we must now radically accelerate and condense into less than a decade a  learning process that hitherto took centuries if not millennia should thus be welcomed. I am frankly surprised it took so long for someone to name our species' plight in a voice heard round the world. Ignore her -- or ignore the Earthly foundation upon which she stands -- we'll soon have no more than a hell-bound snowball's chance of survival, much less of toppling six thousand years of patriarchy's (deliberate?)² planet-killing misogyny.  I'll have reverted to nonexistence by then, I'm sure, but I've seen enough -- and read enough history -- to know I wouldn't wish the horrors of a dying planet on my worst enemy. 

And now amidst this gotterdammerung what might we have that's valuable enough to bribe us to undertake the struggle of biological self-salvation?

In response I offer the following, reprinted here as it was given us by Ryokan via Alan Watts in The Way of Zen (Pantheon Books: 1957)³ -- for me the gateway,  62 years ago, to what through quarantine-enabled contemplation and meditation I have come to (gratefully) recognize as a lifelong path toward learning Earth-centered consciousness: 

The thief left it behind:
                  the moon
                  at my window.

-- Ryokan (1758-1831)

___________________
¹Influenced as I am by the Jungian understanding of how art can function as prophecy -- presumably because our subconscious minds perform the function  Marshall McLuhan described as analogous to early warning radar -- I take all such expressions as indicative of the yet-unplumbed magnitude of our survival instincts. Moreover I believe the fact such perception shows no evidence of yielding to the bottomless despair that is increasingly the sole defining ethos of modern life tells us at least some of our species will survive our present self-inflicted apocalypse.

²Patriarchy with its implicitly mandatory ecogenocide is not only ever-more-obviously our species' one ultimately deadly "unnatural" act. It is also -- at least if we dare consider the possibility our Earth is a target of  extraterrestrial invaders -- perhaps the interstellar equivalent of smallpox-contaminated blankets, its anti-Nature terraforming spawned by "unnatural" inseminators such as talking serpents, fiery wheels in the sky and shrubs inflamed to loquaciousness. If these origin tales are true -- that is, if they are based on indigenous perception of real-time events -- patriarchy's lethally invasive "unnaturalness" is all the more evident in the fact "unnatural" ranks among the patriarchs' favorite pejoratives of projection.

³The best Watts anthology is entitled Three  and includes complete texts of The Way of Zen (1957); Nature, Man, and Woman (1958); and Psychotherapy East and West (1961); it was published by Pantheon Books in 1977. Eerily, it was also one of my half-dozen bound volumes that survived not just the utterly life-changing arson of 1 September 1983, but which -- far more eerily -- were salvaged in readable form after spending a year beneath the sodden ashes of my friend Helen Farias' house. She returned them to me immediately, sole remnants of a boxed-up personal library that had exceeded a thousand volumes, and they have accompanied me ever since;  (Helen died in 1994. Writing this, I realize I can no longer deny the guilt I feel because  I do not doubt her house -- indeed her ancestral home -- was torched solely because she dared harbor within its upstairs rooms, as a favor to me whilst I sought a permanent Manhattan address, my  books, phonograph records, photography dating from my 12th birthday; clip-files, awards and journals dating from my 16th birthday; and most importantly,  the 24 years of  writing, photography and supportive research that had evolved into  "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" -- all that plus the potential of at least two other photographically illustrated books, one an exploration of academically ignored archaeological anomalies in the Pacific Northwest, the other a pictures-and-text portrait of commercial salmon fishers on the Sailish Sea.)  (Yes, that was a spontaneous digression, one necessarily followed by an apologetic excuse: but where else might I get way with such a stylistic outrage save in the footnotes?) Returning now to our discussion of Watts' Three,  unfortunately but predictably, the book is long out of print -- with extant copies effectively censored by prohibitive prices.

LB/20-22 January 2021

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UPDATE II: News Reports Refute the Mandatory Optimism Cult's Claim the Nazis Lack Effective Leaders and Organization

THE RATHER FORCEFUL assertion by disciples of the cult of mandatory optimism there is no proof of nationally effective ChristoNazi/Trumpite leadership, organization and solidarity – and that we should therefore stop fearing it and its armed rabble -- is refuted by local and national news reports.

Below we have 22 states in which local media reported Nazi demonstrations obviously coordinated with the assault on the U.S. capitol, plus five more states in which local media suppressed stories of coordinated Nazi violence nevertheless reported by Associated Press.

That’s 27 states total or 27/50, which is 54 percent.

Plus based on these findings and my own 60-odd years’ professional knowledge of such matters, I’d guess local media in at least a dozen more states suppressed reports of Nazi violence due to the protective censorship imposed by chambers of commerce and/or other Ruling Class organizations as is typical in most less-urbanized states.

So 39/50 – 78 percent – is almost certainly a more accurate estimate.

Which, curiously enough, equals the percentage of the total U.S. Caucasian population proven to be incurably white-supremacist by their responses to post-Katrina polls.

As to the proof itself, firstly there is this from Associated Press: Protesters swarm Statehouses across US; some evacuated .

Next I checked the websites of local newspapers in eight cities, but found all news of the Nazi assaults – local or national – to be censored by paywalls.

Finally I settled on the following, which I assembled by reviewing the websites of at least one major local (non-FOX) TV outlet in every U.S. state capital, a tedious process that took four hours and 52 minutes  to complete:

Alabama – https://www.wsfa.com/2021/01/06/trump-supporters-rally-outside-alabama-capitol/

Alaska – none locally reported

Arizona – https://www.abc15.com/news/region-phoenix-metro/central-phoenix/arizonans-rally-at-the-state-capitol-as-chaos-unfolds-in-d-c

Arkansas – https://katv.com/news/local/trump-supporters-rally-at-the-arkansas-state-capitol

California -- https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2021/01/06/sacramento-trump-capitol-sacramento-arrests/

https://ktla.com/news/local-news/unlawful-assembly-declared-as-angry-trump-supporters-clash-with-police-in-downtown-l-a/

Also relevant: https://ktla.com/news/california/republican-leader-of-california-senate-tweets-then-deletes-false-claim-of-antifa-leading-u-s-capitol-mob/

Colorado – none locally reported.

Connecticutt – none locally reported.

Delaware – none locally reported.

Florida –https://www.wctv.tv/2021/01/07/presidential-election-result-protestors-counter-protestors-peacefully-protest-at-florida-state-capitol/

Georgia – locally suppressed; reported by AP.

Hawaii – locally suppressed; reported by AP.

Idaho – https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/trump-rally-boise-capitol-building-dozens/277-527d9d56-6264-4e64-b5aa-ce3969352b4c

Illinois – none locally reported.

Indiana – none locally reported.

Iowa – https://www.kcci.com/article/dozens-of-stop-the-steal-protesters-gathered-at-statehouse/35142662

Kansas –https://www.wibw.com/2021/01/07/demonstrators-rally-at-kansas-statehouse-in-support-of-president-donald-trump/

Kentucky – none locally reported. This Kentucky story from a West Virginia tv news channel:
https://wchstv.com/news/local/member-of-an-eastern-ky-church-in-washington-as-violence-erupts

Louisiana – none locally reported.

Maine – none locally reported.

Maryland – none locally reported.

Massachusetts – none locally reported.

Michigan – https://www.fox47news.com/news/political/protesters-gather-in-lansing-as-lawmakers-certify-election

Minnesota – none locally reported.

Mississippi – none locally reported.

Missouri – none locally reported.

Montana – none locally reported.

Nebraska – none locally reported.

Nevada – locally suppressed; reported by AP .

New Hampshire – none locally reported.

New Jersey – none locally reportedly

New Mexico – https://www.kob.com/new-mexico-news/armed-trump-supporters-rally-outside-roundhouse-in-santa-fe/5970329/

New York – none locally reported.

North Carolina – https://www.wral.com/a-couple-dozen-for-and-against-president-trump-exchange-words-at-nc-capitol/19460061/

North Dakota – none locally reported.

Ohio – locally suppressed; reported by AP.

Oklahoma – locally suppressed; reported by AP.

Oregon – https://www.newsbreak.com/oregon/salem/news/2140150053974/state-police-declare-unlawful-assembly-at-oregons-capitol-2-arrested

Pennsylvania – none locally reported.

Rhode Island – none locally reported.

South Carolina – https://www.wistv.com/2021/01/06/protestors-gather-sc-statehouse-support-stop-steal-movement/

South Dakota – none locally reported.

Tennessee – https://fox17.com/news/local/tennessee-lawmakers-hold-prayer-rally-in-support-of-trump
(Complete with Nazi salutes; see photo.)

Texas – https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/protest-supporting-trumps-attempt-to-overturn-election-results-planned-for-texas-capitol

Utah – https://fox17.com/news/local/tennessee-lawmakers-hold-prayer-rally-in-support-of-trump;
Also relevant: https://kutv.com/news/local/protestors-gather-at-utah-state-capitol-building

Vermont – https://www.wcax.com/2021/01/06/stop-the-steal-protesters-in-montpelier-call-for-accountability/

Virginia – none locally reported.

Washington – https://www.newsbreak.com/washington/olympia/news/2140060994666/protesters-break-through-gate-of-gov-inslees-home

West Virginia – none locally reported.

Wisconsin – none locally reported.

Wyoming – https://www.wyomingnewsnow.tv/2021/01/06/hundreds-gather-at-state-capitol-building-to-protest-election-results/

I also apologize for the use of full URLs rather than highlighted links; for a non-Nurd such as I to convert them would have added more than an hour to the preparation of this report, and in this instance I felt speed took precedence.

LB/02:32PST 7 Jan 21

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UPDATE: The Ultimate Question Is the Extent to Which the Ruling Class Intends to Exploit This Rebellion as It Did 9/11

...Thus to Complete the Coup They Began 22 November 1963.  

I RAISE THIS as the ultimate question because history proves such purposeful atrocities are many -- among the most notable are the Reichstag Fire (which the Nazis manipulated into seizure of absolute power in Weimar Germany), plus of course the original Bloody Sunday -- the massacre organized by a Russian Orthodox Priest named Georgi Gapon.

This "Father Gapon" -- an agent-provocateur for the Okhrana (the Tsar's secret police) -- organized the incident precisely to provide Tsar Nicholas II the excuse for the relentless genocide by which he then exterminated hundreds of thousands of Russian progressives. 

Might Trump thus be another Gapon?    

LB/18:40 PST6 Jan 21

 

Though I Have Long Foreseen the Nazi Lynch Mob That's Captured D.C., It Is Not My Preferred Return to Blogging; but the Federal Response Will Damn Sure Tell Us Who We Are

From: https://www.dispatchesfromdystopia.net/2021/01/though-i-have-long-foreseen-the-nazi-lynch-mob-thats-captured-dc-it-is-not-my-preferred-return-to-bl.html

FOR THE PAST several weeks I have been working on a new, definitively apolitical Dispatches format essentially based on the Royokan haiku I regard as our species' best-ever expression of gratitude in the wake of hopelessly ruinous loss:  

The thief
left it behind:
    the moon at my window.

But the seizure of our national capital by a Trump-spawned Nazi lynch mob has interrupted that quarantine-enabled growth process, and my own resurgent journalistic ethics demand the following response:

Because I (involuntarily) lived in the South for most of my first 24 years, I know entirely too well the bottomless, irremediable Evil of our national Southron/Neoconfederate mix of reactionary Christian misogyny, racism and general hatefulness.

Hence despite the constant disinformation from the "Democratic" [sic] Party's cult of mandatory positivism,  I have been warning for years of the danger of a ChristoNazi revolution. 

Now we are at the inevitable pivot-point wherein the government's response to this (armed?) rabble that has captured D.C. will answer three pivotal questions:

(1) -- the extent to which Trump's ChristoNazis have subverted the military and the police;

(2) -- the extent to which Trump's modern-day Sturmabteilung is organized for actual warfare (commanders, chain of command, training, armament etc.);

(3) -- the extent to which the Ruling Class opposes or supports the continuation of  at least a charade of constitutional governance in the imperial United States.

The answers to these three questions determine our future.

But the answer to the first question is already obvious in the alleged "unpreparedness" by which the Capitol Police (and D.C. law enforcement in general) compromised the defense of the Capitol Building.

It is even more outrageously obvious in how the militarized cops are treating these traitorous ChristoNazi insurrectionists with a respectful gentility so notably absent in the murderous violence of their everyday responses to people of color or any of the rest of us on the (real) Left.  

The international response to this Nazi insurrection will also be most revealing -- and could indeed be the ultimate factor in determining in its outcome. 

LB/16:16 PST 6 Jan 2021

(Auto-complete's  misspelling of "capitol" -- weirdly appropriate, given the givens --  corrected at 20:54 PST.)

 

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