OAN: Some Thoughts on Content and Direction

I'VE RECOVERED FROM the frantic and painful preparation for last week's surprise apartment inspection – one of the punishments inflicted on seniors and disabled people impoverished enough to qualify for publicly funded housing. Nor was I amongst the unfortunate 20 percent whose dwellings were chosen at random for de facto warrantless searches by state bureaucrats. But the aftermath of the mandatory house-cleaning left me abed for a couple of days while the grade-6-to-7 arthritis pain in my back, shoulders and right knee dwindled to its omnipresent norm, typically a grade 2 on the 1-to-10 medical-discomfort scale.

Because my gender exempts me from the agony of childbirth, I have two grade-10 pain significators. One is the legacy of a tooth that in 1969 became simultaneously impacted and abscessed at the beginning of what turned into the longest four-day holiday-weekend in human history. The other is the (literally) bite-a-hole-in-my-pillow-to-keep-from-screaming interlude that followed a radical meniscectomy in 1978 – the removal of all the cartilage from my right knee. The anesthesia wore off quite suddenly, and all at once I hurt so badly, it took me several eternities to focus enough to invoke the Nurse-Angel of Narcotic Salvation, though once I found the magic buzzer, she immediately blessed me with a syringe full of morphine.

But all that is something of an aside. The point here is my two post-inspection-recovery days of what-do-I-wanna-be-when-I-grow-up contemplation was mostly spent pondering whether to take OAN daily or continue it as as a weekly. Given my age, in either case it will undoubtedly remain my final expression of a truth I have known since The Grand Rapids Herald hired me as a copyboy and sports stringer shortly before my 16th Christmas – that real journalism is a 24/7 way of life rather than a 35-hour-per-week job.

If I were to take OAN daily, it would mean posting material as events warrant and as frequently as my schedule permits. The idea was (and remains) powerfully attractive. But finally – with a bit of help from the I Ching (Wilhelm/Baynes translation, Princeton University Press: 1967) – I realized, somewhat bitterly I admit, I lack sufficient time, which is the prime requirement for daily blogging. Too many hours of my life are stolen by geriatric medical appointments and household-errands turned to day-long bus-odysseys because I can no longer afford an automobile but live in the most anti-mass-transit seaport in the entire anti-mass-transit United States.

Thus OAN will continue as before, its contents posted both here (thanks again to my benefactors at Typepad) and on my secondary website at Blogger.  Save for the fact I am going to spend more time covering local events – albeit always in a global context – its contents will be mostly unchanged. “In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere” will present its anthologies of recommended reading, including my often-sarcastic comments of course. And OAN's weekly single-topic columns, written by myself or by an occasional guest author, will focus as always on personal perspectives about major issues:   

• USian warmongering and the One Percent's escalating efforts at global conquest;
• The intensifying class war and the increasing savagery of capitalism;
• The stealthy but relentless imposition of Christian theocracy on the USian homeland;
• The bipartisan Big Lies that protect the Obamacare profiteers and victimize the rest of us;
• The unprecedented surveillance that sustains Ayn Rand plutocracy – the newest form of fascism – by clamping high-tech slave-collars around all our necks;
• The shock-doctrine schemes of the One Percenters, who are leveraging terminal climate change into a neo-Nazi restructuring of human society, ensuring their survival by enslaving or exterminating everyone else;
• Other such topics as they arise.

As before, these columns will include examples of how, in an economy and political system based on exploitation and oppression, the personal is always political, just as, for the same reasons, the political is always personal. Here though I hope to make a subtle change in approach, focusing less on the reality of our abject powerlessness – which I think we are at last beginning to acknowledge – and more on overcoming the challenges we face merely to survive.

 

Such is life and death amongst the 99 Percent in the United States of America, the former “sweet land of liberty” that capitalist governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent; total subjugation for all the rest of us – has transformed into the most unapologetically vicious nation in the industrial world.

******

In Case You Missed It: Outside Agitation Elsewhere

I seldom write about 9/11 simply because in my view there is nothing worthwhile to be said about this great atrocity unless one starts by acknowledging how it marks the end, forever, of constitutional governance in the United States. But I was intrigued by William Boardman's Reader Supported News piece, “Museum World Trade Center Evidence: No Plane Hit Pentagon?” And eventually I added my own remarks to its predictably contentious comment-thread:

What matters most about 9/11 is the use to which it has been put.

Just as the Reichstag Fire enabled Hitler to nullify the Weimar constitution and turn Germany into a Nazi dictatorship, so did 9/11 enable the One Percent and their political servants to nullify the U.S. Constitution and turn the United States into a plutocratic dictatorship.

In other words, just as the Reichstag Fire was the birth of the Third Reich, so was 9/11 the birth of the de facto Fourth Reich, the zero-tolerance global empire of the USian plutocracy.

Moreover, just as the truth of the Reichstag Fire is lost due to Nazi secrecy, so is the truth of 9/11 lost by USian secrecy. In either case, public knowledge of what truly happened will never be allowed.

But the debate is allowed because it serves two purposes. It distracts us from the use of 9/11 – the permanent nullification of our constitution (and our reduction to powerlessness thereby) – and it helps preserve the Big Lie of USian democracy.

Indeed, the fact the debate is tolerated tells us it can never unearth the truth. Were it otherwise, it would be suppressed as quickly and violently as the Occupy Movement was suppressed.

Given the influence of Nazi war criminals on the U.S. government after World War II, the Reichstag-Fire pattern is itself suggestive. So is the fact the Department of Homeland Security structurally duplicates the dread SS Reichssicherheitshauptamt.

***

My next comment on the thread was a response to a poster who seems to regard the quest for “9/11 truth” as the most important endeavor in human history:

While I surely agree “a great deal...has already come out,” the same can be said of the assassinations – JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK – that were the gateway to the road that ended at 9/11.

Again taking the Reichstag Fire example, Soviet intelligence (and the worldwide Communist Party) knew the truth within hours – that the Nazis set the fire and framed the halfwitted Marinus van der Lubbe and the Communists for the crime – but the official German version was never refuted, even after the war.

Much the same is true of 9/11: no matter how much contrary evidence is ferreted out, the official version will remain unchanged until the USian Empire is no more – which, given the givens – will probably not occur until our species itself is extinct.

To believe otherwise is to be in denial about not only about our own powerlessness but about the absolute determination of those who oppress us.

 

***

Later I elaborated:

To paraphrase Thomas Paine, these are indeed times that try our souls, infinitely more so than in 1776, when we had a seemingly endless future, while today the core truth of our lives is that we live on a dying planet.

 

In this context I see my own duty as mandated by the genocidal malevolence of the One Percent, which is transforming the survival of the 99 Percent into revolutionary defiance. My obligation is to aid that survival as best I can -- never mind I'm a crippled, impoverished old man.

That's why I give several hours each week to 15 Now Tacoma, the purpose of which is to make workers' lives a bit less wretched. It's why I edit and produce two journals, a local tenants' newsletter and (this) internationally read blog.

 

For the record, since early 2005 I have assumed 9/11 was either a Reichstag-Fire re-run or was deliberately allowed to happen.

After all, Nazi war criminals were the primary tactical and strategic influence in the postwar USian Empire, and false-flag aggression – Google “Operation Himmler” (no quotes) – was a standard Nazi tactic.

Given the morally imbecilic nature of capitalism, such atrocities are inevitable – and the tyranny of capitalist governance leaves us powerless to avenge them.

Hence I do not waste my time on causes – like the hunt for 9/11 truth – that offer no hope of easing the fear and misery in which we 99 Percenters increasingly live.

******

Cynic though I am, I was nevertheless taken aback when Reuters reported the notoriously brutal Seattle Police were filing a federal lawsuit to uphold their alleged right to maximum brutality.   Thus my contribution to the comment thread of “Seattle Police File Federal Lawsuit Over 'Use of Force' Policy”:

The fact the Seattle cops would file such a lawsuit – in essence demanding the right to inflict unlimited police brutality and generally behave as an army of occupation in a conquered land – tends to confirm what I have long suspected:

That the national epidemic of police brutality is the product of of very explicit post-9/11 federal policy and directives.

 

The (obviously intentional) result is a homeland in which the sole function of the police is to serve and protect the One Percent by savaging all the rest of us, just as the (imperial) military serves and protects the One Percent in exactly the same murderous manner abroad.

More specifically, because all local police units have been federalized and federally militarized, the Seattle lawsuit is essentially an appeal up the chain of command for judicial support – rather like the president obtaining judicial support for his alleged right to issue imperial death warrants.

 

Indeed, to understand this lawsuit any other way is to be in denial about what the United States has become, no longer the "sweet land of liberty" but rather the de facto Fourth Reich.

******

Another of Robert Parry's superb reports on the Ukraine blaming “neocons” for President Obama's warmongering  provoked me to reluctantly criticize a journalist whose bravery is beyond reproach and whose reporting is flawless save for his apparent inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the unprecedented magnitude of the chief executive's self-protective deceptiveness.

 

Hence on the comment-thread of “How Neocons Constrain Obama's Message,” I penned the following rejoinder:

The only flaw in Mr. Parry's courageous reporting is his assumption President Obama is himself a victim of neocon conspiracies.

The truth, made obvious by the president's shape-shift from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer, is that Barack Obama is ideologically a white Republican. His African/American heritage was never more than a prop by which the One Percent sought to bolster the Big Lie of U.S. “democracy.”

Indeed, apart from the color of his skin, Obama's implicitly fascist politics are indistinguishable from those of any other U.S. president, Republican or Democrat, for whom the One Percent has purchased the office since the coup of 22 November 1963.

But like President Johnson, whose clandestine purpose was obviously to provoke the Vietnam-related class-war that destroyed the New Deal Coalition and thereby thrust the nation permanently to the right, Obama too is obviously a dual-purpose president. That purpose is revealed by how domestic racists are parlaying his betrayals into re-segregationist bigotry that says minorities are untrustworthy.

Because minorities were the nation's only source of genuine radicalism, the suppression of their voices is another rightward thrust – this time all the way to a Fourth Reich of unabashed Ayn Rand fascism.

Thus do the One Percenters achieve the goal their fathers and grandfathers sought via the Bankers' Plot, which would have made the U.S. the leading partner in the Rome/Berlin/Tokyo axis.

 

***

As to (Mr. Parry's) often subtle but nevertheless implicitly apologetic portrayal of Barack the Betrayer as a victim of neocon manipulation, that unfortunate meme – probably the result of an understandable reluctance to admit the unprecedented magnitude of the president's deceptions – is evident throughout Mr. Parry's otherwise superb reporting.

 

Because I voted for Obama twice – the first time because I believed his Big Lie of “change we can believe in,” the second time because I was (just as the One Percent intended), terrified by the Romney-Ryan assault gun – I can surely understand the reluctance to acknowledge we are now ruled by a president who is truly more ill-intentioned, and infinitely more authoritarian, than Richard Milhous Nixon.

Indeed, Obama is undoubtedly the most brazenly dishonest and effectively tyrannical politician ever to inhabit the White House. Think “change we can believe in,” total surveillance, the war against undocumented immigrants and the relentless persecution of whistle-blowers.

And until we acknowledge Obama is indeed an obedient servant of the One Percent (and therefore a white Republican in disguise) – until we admit how he conned us and how it facilitates the permanent end of USian democracy – we will remain imprisoned in the very darkness Mr. Parry is otherwise working so diligently and courageously to overcome.

******

Carl Gibson, reporting for Reader Supported News, wrote a scathing denunciation of how capitalism has perverted the USian justice system – zero-tolerance prosecution of minorities, lifetime imprisonment for nonviolent offenders, perpetual above-the-law immunity and billion-dollar bonuses for the most malevolently greedy robber barons in human history. But in the end, “Our Fraudulent Two-Tiered Justice System” was just another call for reforms we now know will never be allowed, and I responded accordingly:

I was applauding Mr. Gibson's reportage, especially his description of the USian criminal injustice system as "two-tiered," which is absolutely correct.

 

But then I read his concluding paragraph and realized he is just another reformer – that his outrage is rendered meaningless by his deluded belief in the integrity of the USian electoral process and in the Big Lie of USian "democracy" in general.

Which, when you analyze his rhetoric, means he's blaming us – we the people – for oppression that was maliciously imposed on us by the One Percent and that under present conditions is hopelessly beyond our capability to abolish or even ameliorate.

That's because the oppression Mr. Gibson so rightfully deplores – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – is endemic to capitalism. Indeed it is the quintessence of capitalism's inevitable transition to fascism. 

And until we recognize the true extent of our powerlessness – until we acknowledge that capitalism by its predatory nature deliberately and methodically renders the 99 Percent as powerless as the masses of Tsarist Russia were before the revolutions of 1917 – we will remain enslaved.

******

Another of Robert Parry's superb reports on the Ukraine Crisis describes how its outcome is seemingly a huge loss for U.S. interests. But on second thought, it seems to me “The State Department's Ukraine Fiasco” was written from the (clearly obsolete) perspective the U.S. wants world peace and socioeconomic stability – this opposed to the chaos that furthers the USian Empire's goals of maximum profiteering, shock-doctrine global conquest and endless war to kill off the 99 Percent and justify ever-more-tyrannical oppression in the homeland. Therefore:

Mr. Parry's closing statement is indisputably true – there is no way the Ukraine Crisis has served U.S. national interests – but only if "national interests" are defined as what we the people need for our wellbeing.

More to the point, the interests of the neocons are always antithetical to our own. That's because the neocons' interests are those of their One Percent masters, whose goals are maximum short-term profits rather than long-term political stability.

From this perspective it is apparent the Ukraine Crisis is serving the One Percent's interests exactly as intended. The increasing military tensions are already boosting profits for military industries, while the socioeconomic chaos in Ukraine itself provides yet another opportunity for the imposition of shock-doctrine capitalism, which – as under Pinochet in Chile – means absolute power and unlimited profit for the rulers, total subjugation for everyone else.

 

Moreover, the manufactured need for vastly increased U.S. military expenditures provides the One Percent and their servants in both parties with a perfect rationale for further slashing social services including Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Psychological preparation for these genocidal cutbacks is undoubtedly the purpose behind the otherwise inexplicable hate-Russia media campaign.

Such is the realpolitik of plutocracy – actually sociopathocracy (rule by moral imbeciles) – that defines today's United States.

***

In response to another poster's question, I wrote:

The “problem with Obama” is he is a white Republican in disguise, and now that he does not have to scam us into voting for him again, he is ever-more-defiantly revealing his true self.

(Yeah, I'm one of those useful idiots who voted for him twice. First time because I stupidly let myself be conned by his Big Lie of "change we can believe in," second time because the One Percent's Romney-Ryan assault-gun did just what it was intended to do and terrified me into voting for him again.)

***

And as I said to an anti-Parry poster on the same thread:

(For you to) liken the National Endowment for Democracy to Amnesty International is rather akin to likening Reinhard Heydrich to Albert Schweitzer. And that calls into question (your) entire analysis, particularly since the only Ukrianian "human rights" NED cares about are those of the One Percenters and their anointed oligarchs.

******

As if in follow-up to my own ongoing coverage of the war against mass transit in Pugetopolis,  the Olympia-Tacoma-Seattle-Bellingham metropolis on the eastern shore of Washington state's Puget Sound, Seattle's on-line daily Crosscut published a disheartening update of the worsening transit crisis.

 

For me, the usefulness of Bill Lucia's report, “No silver bullets among last ditch efforts to stave off bus service cuts,” extended beyond its factual content, which gave me a rare opportunity to contrast the (seemingly) humanitarian concerns of Seattle politicians with the Ayn-Rand/Marie-Antoinette attitudes of the politicians who rule Tacoma and Pierce County:

From the perspective of Tacoma – specifically its local politicians' chilly indifference to the ruinous impact of Pierce Transit's wrenching cutbacks on the transit-dependent urban population – the role of Seattle and King County politicians in the fight to preserve Metro Transit bus service is laudable and exemplary.

Indeed, until now, and with the notable exception of Kshama Sawant and her election to office, I never imagined I would find myself admiring anything about Seattle or any of its residents. That's because, to me, Seattlites will always be the most relentlessly vicious xenophobes I have ever encountered anywhere at any time. That includes my years in the South as an involuntary court-decreed school-year dependent of my father and stepmother, 1950-1956 and 1957-1958, then later, after three years of military service, as an outspokenly pro-civil-rights journalist, 1962-1965, including the summer of 1963 as a civil-rights activist.

Yes, the Ku Klux Klan tried to kill me – three times in fact – but other Southerners were faithful friends, and two Southerners were long-term lovers. By contrast, my four years in Seattle were the loneliest of my life; Seattleites were without exception relentlessly hostile, constantly damning me as “a fucking New York intellectual,” repeatedly telling me I should “go back where (I) belong,” and their vindictive Seattle-Freeze tactics, which included nasty notes, slashed tires, physical assault, the kidnapping of a dog and even defiant thefts of published and unpublished works, eventually ran me out of town.

 

I left Seattle in 1976, and I will never return. But I remained in the Pacific Northwest – the back-country trout fishing was too good to abandon – and now I must confess I have at last encountered one thing (apart from the election of Ms. Sawant) that is compellingly positive about Seattle. At least some of its politicians actually represent – or at least pretend to represent – the people like myself who can no longer afford automobiles and who are therefore utterly dependent on mass transit.

The irony, of course, is that fully half the population of Tacoma – where the politicians have never lifted so much as the proverbial finger to preserve Pierce Transit service – is officially lower income, and a substantial percentage, as I remember about 25 percent of the city's approximately 100,000 lower-income residents, have no other means of transportation. (The no-option-save-buses figure is deftly concealed by the local bureaucracy, but it is available via a bit of research, and I apologize for the fact I do not have time to ferret it out today.)

More to the point, the refusal of the local politicians to protect the bus service vital to our survival proves that, in Tacoma and Pierce County, we lower-income people have no political representation at all. Not only is there the politicians' total indifference to the consequences of PT downsizing. Now – as if to clear up any misunderstanding about whose side the politicians are on – these same politicos, Democrats and Republicans alike, have approved PT's shift to a new policy of penalizing pro-transit Tacomans by withholding intra-city service even as service to the (notably wealthier) anti-transit suburbs is radically expanded. The contempt and hatefulness in the message this new policy sends the urban poor is unmistakable.

Hence – much as it grieves me to admit it – for purposes of transit, and more generally for politicians who will at least publicly acknowledge the existence of lower-income people and the pressing reality of our needs, anyone who like myself is now a member of the urban underclass is probably better off living in Seattle.

Such was the output of a week in which – theoretically speaking – I had no time to write. I guess it's true: journalism is like organized crime – you never get to retire. And never want to, either...

LB/1 June 2014

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Quit Smoking to Get Healthy, Get Fat and Sick Instead

THE ORDEAL OF preparing my apartment for its quarterly premises inspection while I am afflicted by plantar fasciitis  in my left foot – which means I'm much more crippled than usual – has stolen my writing time. This week's OAN is thus limited to material I've posted on other sites.

Coincidentally – or perhaps not (because excess weight is among the chief causes of plantar fasciitis) – one of those posts was about the methodically suppressed connection between quitting smoking and inexplicable, uncontrollable and frighteningly fast weight-gain. It is a condition with which my post-smoking self is intimately, bitterly, god-cursingly familiar. But the facts about it – especially the hideousness it inescapably imposes on about 35 percent of former smokers, especially males – are carefully concealed by USian doctors, lest the dreadful knowledge encourage nicotine addicts to keep smoking.

Hence the following, an expanded version of the reply I posted two days ago on the comment thread of “5 Reasons Americans Are Getting Fatter: It's Not Just the Food,” an AlterNet report reprinted by Reader Supported News. 

While reporter Martha Rosenberg did an excellent job of rounding up the usual obesity-epidemic suspects – the long litany of for-profit additives and artificial sweeteners by which the capitalists poison our food – she wrote not a single word about the plague of post-smoking weight-gain. 

In this context it is important to understand the national quit-smoking campaign did not originate from any real public health concern. What began it is a condition unique to the USian Homeland: the fact the Ayn Rand doctrine that is the basis of USian economic policy defines health care as a privilege of wealth rather than a human right. The anti-smoking drive was therefore launched in response to for-profit insurors' anger over how tobacco-related deaths were reducing their obscene profits. In other words, the USian war on tobacco smoking started as a manifestation of capitalist greed – which is precisely why it has been conducted so relentlessly and therefore with such success. Contrast the totality of the USian anti-smoking effort with the USian effort to eradicate communicable childhood diseases. The latter is a program increasingly abandoned, with predictably catastrophic results, due to deliberately genocidal neglect of the poor combined with the ailments spread by Christian fanatics who are now granted theocratic exemptions that allow them to legally ignore formerly mandatory inoculation requirements. The difference between the anti-smoking and childhood-health programs undoubtedly lies in the bottom-line: apparently payouts for smoking deaths reduce insurors' profits far more than payouts for the deaths of children.

Though I intended my response to Rosenberg to be corrective rather than confessional, my fury at the cosmic unfairness and sadism of my post-smoking circumstances – the fact I quit smoking to get healthy but instead got grotesquely fat – made parts of my contribution uncomfortably Oprah-ish. Normally I would have deleted such lapses as inappropriate emotionalism. But on second thought, it seemed the disclosures might help others who, like myself, are now after quitting smoking forever entrapped in the mortification inflicted by balloon-sized flesh. Besides, I have nothing to lose: I am who I am, and in this instance what I am – that is, horrendously obese – combines with abject poverty, physical disability and age to ensure the female gender will never again look at me with anything other than indifference, if not outright disgust. 

The associated negative emotions – which slap me in the face whenever I look in a mirror – are intensified by the fact USian doctors generally insist you're cheating anytime you gain weight on post-smoking diets. Whether calling you a liar is prompted by ignorance or is mandatory protocol, the psychological devastation is the same. The only exception I ever encountered amongst USian medical personnel was the nutritionist I consulted through Washington state's Group Health Cooperative. She said the stress of nicotine withdrawal – which is now recognized as the longest and most wrenching drug withdrawal  known to humans – throws the body into what she called “concentration-camp mode.” Thus the body begins turning all food into the fat essential to protect muscles and bones from absorption during starvation. If this is indeed what happens – and the explanation seems as good as any I've heard – the implication is that nicotine withdrawal truly ends only at death, especially for those of us who suffer the lifelong post-smoking tendency to become circus obese. 

Unfortunately, my case is typical. I weighed 158 pounds in 1985, when, at age 45, rising blood pressure and occasional bouts of cardiac arrhythmia prompted me to begin what became a ten-year fight to quit smoking. I was in good shape, an attractive and reasonably successful middle-aged journalist, the editor-in-chief of Art Direction, an international advertising-industry trade journal. As a Manhattanite I routinely walked five miles a day – Gotham-dwellers average more miles afoot than any other USians – and my 158 pounds with its 31-inch waistline was only 10 pounds and two inches more than my best condition ever, this in the Regular Army c. 1962. But my first week off cigarettes I gained 12 pounds, my first month a total of 24.5 pounds – gains I would have dismissed as impossible but for the irrefutable testimony of my trousers, which I could no longer button, and the corroborative witness borne by my belt, which was soon extended to its maximum length. 

Within weeks I went back to smoking – mainly because I knew the fast-encroaching ugliness would end my romantic and sexual prospects forever. Then my blood pressure again soared, and I again tried quitting. Once more I tried cold turkey; then I tried Smokers Anonymous (which is where I first heard of the British studies linking nicotine withdrawal to radical obesity). I tried hypnosis; I tried gradual reduction of my daily cigarette-count; I tried various over-the-counter medications that promised to help me quit. But it seemed nothing could get the nicotine monkey off my back. 

Meanwhile I had discovered a new and even more formidable complex of barriers to quitting: without nicotine, I could not function as a journalist. I could still edit copy, but I could not converse intelligently, think clearly or write a coherent sentence. I am dyslexic; soon I came to realize it was nicotine's function as a neurotransmitter – and not any innate talent – that had enabled all my intellectual acumen and indeed my entire reporting career. 

Of my communication skills, only my photographic ability was enhanced by not smoking – this because of the vast improvement in peripheral vision and tonal sense that results from the absence of vaso-constricting nicotine in one's bloodstream.

There was no triumph in my gradually-winning battle against nicotine addiction because it was equally a forever-losing battle against becoming monstrously obese. I grew fat and fatter – ever uglier, ever more embarrassed to be seen in public, ever more inescapably lonely. I had gained weight even on the unspeakable misery of a two-week, 1000-calorie-per-day diet. Tests proved the gain was not related to metabolic deficiencies. And the failure of that diet proved the weight gain was so uncontrollable not even starvation would stop it. 

When I finally managed to quit smoking permanently – this via a combination of nicotine patches and prescription medication – I was 55 years old. I weighed 195 pounds. By then, I had learned to accept my post-smoking obesity – repugnant though it was – with the same bitter resignation with which one accepts other physical handicaps. Moreover, being grossly fat was no longer the pivotal disaster of my life. My career had been destroyed by the odium of the post-traumatic clinical depression that eventually befell me after all my life's works were obliterated in a 1983 fire, and that alone left me too impoverished to ever again be attractive to any woman. Thus my physical appearance no longer mattered – precisely the realization that finally enabled me to swear off tobacco permanently. My first day without cigarettes forever was 23 September 1995. I used my last nicotine patch sometime in January 1996. Since then I have never had nicotine in any form. Within a year I had blubbered up to 235 pounds.

It would take me nearly a decade to teach myself to write again; I will never be the fast, self-assured writer I was as a smoker. And it would be a dozen years before I could again comfortably socialize. 

But even without the obesity, quitting smoking would have destroyed my physical condition. For most of my adult life I worked out regularly: jogging, walking, the long-distance hiking associated with back-country trout fishing, the day-long exertion of upland bird hunting, various self-administered physical training programs including nearly a decade with the Royal Canadian Air Force Basic Exercise Program. Then after my spine was permanently injured by one of Washington state's defiantly habitual drunken drivers, I was prescribed a combination of physical therapy and yoga that gave me enough flexibility to work a season as engineer/deckhand on a commercial fishing vessel and kept me ambulatory until – you guessed it – I began my quit-smoking effort. 

Another of the deliberately downplayed effects of nicotine withdrawal is total disruption of sleep patterns, the result of which is a profound state of exhaustion – precisely the condition that discourages exercise of any kind. And in my case – as in many such cases (or so I am repeatedly told) – the sleep disruption has never gone away. I used to sleep like the proverbial log, but I have not gotten an uninterrupted night's sleep since I smoked my last cigarette, and now after 18 years and six months, it is obvious I will never know the comfort of a full night's sleep again in this lifetime. Exhaustion – sometimes mild, more often severe – is now my normal condition. With it comes a loathing of unnecessary exertion so intense no amount of will power – at least none I am able to muster – will overcome it enough to foster regular exercise.

I know now that without cigarettes, I will always be fat – which is to say I will always be ugly. In my years off nicotine, I've weighed as much as 275 pounds. As a result I've come to regard food as my enemy, to fear and despise it and hate myself for how it obsesses my mind and deforms my body. By constant struggle, I (mostly) manage to keep my weight in the vicinity of an (only) (moderately) repulsive 225. Like the vampires of legend, I avoid mirrors; I go out in public only when I have no choice, and never for pleasure. Such is my lot as a former smoker.

***

The documentation on the weight-gain/post-smoking connection, which I first heard of through a British acquaintance in 1986, took me years to ferret out. It surfaced, albeit in much later forms, via two papers unearthed in 2010 by the skills of a talented reference librarian at the Tacoma (Wash.) Public Library, a woman I knew only as Sarah and that only by telephone. In this instance she outdid even her colleagues at the main (Fifth Avenue) branch of the New York City Public Library, who repeatedly told me there was no such material, never mind NYPL is ostensibly the finest such institution in the nation.

Here are the two references Sarah found for me:

“Smoke-Free and Fat: the Health Hazards of Kicking the Habit”; Kent Sepkowitz, Slate: 2008. Conclusion: quitting smoking makes you fat. 

“Smoking as a Modifable Risk Factor for Type 2 Diabetes in Middle-Aged Men”; S. Goya Wannamethee, A. Gerald Shaper, Ivan J. Perry, Diabetes Care, Sept. 2001 v24 i9 p1590. (No link available.) Conclusion: quitting smoking makes you fat, thereby increasing your diabetes risk.

*****

Outside Agitation Elsewhere: It's All About the Ukrainian Crisis

Most of this material is focused on the Ukrainian Crisis because of its terrifying threat of a thermonuclear World War III. As I have said before, to me it is scarier than the Cuban Missile Crisis because in 1962 I trusted President John F. Kennedy. But now in 2014 I have learned the hard way – that is, by voting for him twice – not to trust President Barack Obama at all.

However, thanks largely to an astute journalist named Robert Parry, the debate is beginning to focus on whether Obama has been betrayed by his own advisors or whether he is (once again) demonstrating his formidable skills at deception and manipulation by minimizing his culpability in provoking the crisis.

Predictably, I argue for the latter – that Obama the Orator is merely showing another aspect of his true Barack the Betrayer self, most likely to improve the Democratic Party's abominable prospects in the November elections. The relevant links – those on which I contributed to discussion threads – are here  and here. 

Medea Benjamin's disturbing account of how she was savaged by the Egyptian secret police – obviously on orders of someone in the USian government if not in the White House itself – is also relevant. It, like the atrocities committed against the Occupy Movement, shows us the true nature of the imperial mind: all the more reason to fear the U.S. will escalate the Ukraine Crisis into World War III. 

LB/16 March 2014 

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