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.)

EPA Chief Pruitt Personifies Christian Hatred of Mother Earth

His Policies Express the Terminal Arrogance of Patriarchal Misogyny: That Our Planet Is Just Another Woman to Be Beaten into Submission

"...indications are that the more ardently Christian an American becomes, the less he or she cares about the environment...Then there is the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency is currently headed by an evangelical, the now-infamous Scott Pruitt...unscrupulous, hypocritical, and dishonest—a walking caricature of the Trump era...But outside of the mainstream media and the coastal cities, Pruitt has supporters who like him so much that they’re willing to ignore his petty scandals and Napoleon complex. They like him because he thinks like them: He puts people before the environment, just like God does” (emphasis as in original).

See also: "As of 2014, it's estimated that nearly half of Americans—49 percent—say natural disasters are a sign of "the end times," as described in the Bible. That's up from an estimated 44 percent in 2011."

And this: "Christianity (like Judaism and Islam) is an anticipatory religion; a sect almost wholly fixated on the expectations (and apprehension) of a single and supposedly inescapable future event: the apocalypse detailed in John’s Revelation where all but “saved” Christians (perhaps as few as 144,000) will be butchered by the Middle Eastern Christian god…. and it’s a bloodbath many Christian captains have been (and still are today) simply giddy about."

Plus this: "In June 2012, Beisner penned a letter to the EPA opposing the agency’s classification of carbon dioxide as a harmful pollutant as well as opposing any limits on carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants. He did so on behalf of the Cornwall Alliance, the evangelical anti-environmentalism network that Beisner founded in 2005 to promote a “biblical” view of the environment...More than 100 evangelical theologians, pastors, scientists and economists endorsed Beisner’s letter, which featured signatories such as talk-radio host Bryan Fischer, Southern Baptist ethicist Daniel Heimbach, Calvinist theologian Wayne Grudem, former presidential candidate Gary Bauer and Christian Reconstructionist writer Gary North.

Also this: "Pruitt's profound harm to Americans is more due to his policies than his personal errant behavior. Take for example two recent developments in his capitulation to the chemical industry"

This too: "Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday used a Bible verse to defend his department’s policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border from Mexico, suggesting that God supports the government in separating immigrant parents from their children...the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made.”

And lastly this: "The idea that racial or ethnic groups should be persecuted is popular in the Bible. God himself was keen on exterminating whole peoples, such as the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15:3). Believing that they had replaced the Jews as God's chosen people, Christians deduced that they were free to persecute and extirpate non-Christian peoples, and even that they were under a moral obligation to do so."

Comment: more than any other of the Trump/Pence Regime's appointees save perhaps the vice-president himself, Pruitt wears that utterly contemptuous, bottomlessly sadistic, oh-how-fun-it-is-to-watch-a-woman-burn-to-death smirk that so often identifies the white male Christian fanatic. It is our species' most malevolent smile, a triumphant, unmistakably ominous leer that -- as I learned during my boyhood years in Southern Appalachia and now witness again as an elder in the Pacific Northwest --  reveals the torture-chamber venom of fanatical Christianity's serial-rapist malice even before its adherents begin spewing their genocidal gospels of zero-tolerance tyranny, infinite misogyny and inescapable apocalypse.  

And now, finally, after a year and six months of watching the regime shove us ever more forcefully toward JesuNazi theocracy, Brian Palmer of Slate awakens to warn us of the neo-medieval mindset of those who serve our Capitalist overlords by tyrannizing us. 

Perhaps this time we the people will ourselves finally begin to awaken to the horrors of the abyss into which we are being herded. 

Exactly as Mr. Palmer concludes, Pruitt "isn't an anomaly. He's carrying forth a tradition" -- precisely as intended by those who rule in the name of "the secret fundamentalism  at the heart of  American power." 

Immediately below then is a foreshortened version of the response I posted on the comment-thread of Mr. Palmer's report, its relevance here is its recognition of Pruitt's war on the...

(To read the rest, go here.)

Yes, Damnit, It's Another Change in Format and Schedule

ADMITTEDLY I'M FLOUNDERING. I'm trying to find a format and a publication schedule that makes Dispatches useful to the greatest number of people, primarily as a one-stop source for the preceding week's most significant alternative-media stories. 

And I will continue toward that objective -- selecting Dispatches' content primarily for readers who are doing their best to stay genuinely informed in these frightful   times but are too busy struggling for survival to hunt down the separate stories themselves. 

Again asking myself the pivotal question -- who are you my readers -- I suspect some editions of Dispatches may have been intimidating merely because of their numbers of news items.  

The longest-ever Dispatches, for 31 May 2018,  contained 9,120 words, though a bit more than two thirds of that -- 6,276 words -- was the 26-link Memorial Day eulogy to the 10 men and three women slain by our Capitalist overlords as U.S. Capitalism began the boiled-frog-slow exposure of its terminal malevolence. 

All the rest of that unusually long edition's content was Dispatches' usual anthology of news and commentary, 35 such links on 31 May. As always these were links to what I reckoned the week's most important news stories -- their importance often measured not just by their historical context but also by the extent to which they were downplayed or suppressed completely by the Mainstream Media propaganda machine. (Which -- let us not forget -- is the de facto Fourth Reich's privately owned, for-maximum-profit facsimile of Josef Goebbels'  Third Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.)

In the future I will try to stay within a 35-URL limit for links to breaking news and relevant analysis or documentation, and effective immediately I will go back to a once-per-week publication schedule, with postings late Saturday night or early Sunday morning. I may also experiment with publishing my lengthier commentaries in a Dispatches supplement produced at random intervals and therefore obviously separate from the news summaries that are Dispatches' defining characteristic.   

 

Perhaps too I should explain I edit Dispatches from one perspective  -- two if you count my 55-plus years of experience as an editor and writer and nearly 66 years experience as a photographer. The other perspective is my impassioned belief we the people cannot triumph until we fully (intellectually and emotionally) acknowledge our enemies'  bottomless malevolence -- and by so acknowledging, finally evolve from within ourselves the vision and methodology essential to bring about their defeat and our survival as a species and a planet.  

This second perspective has two subsets: firstly, that our species' abject surrender to the near certainty of environmental and thermonuclear apocalypses is the byproduct of a deliberately conditioned, ultimately suicidal (and therefore genuinely eerie) reflex of denial that has uniquely deprived us of the ability to acknowledge (and thereby overcome) the horrors that threaten us and our Mother Earth with extinction in what is thus the darkest epoch ever in our species' 200,000-year history; secondly, that our recent outbursts of rebelliousness -- Occupy, $15 Now, Black Lives Matter, increasing Working Class militance as manifest in the growing number of strikes, Me Too etc. -- are in reality the tremors of an irritably awakening giant; and that they therefore prove we are at least capable of awakening, which tells me as a journalist I should focus editorially on incidents and analyses that acknowledge either implicitly or explicitly the depths of the darkness that assails us; that these final days weeks months and perhaps years of my life should express, with abandon and without abandonment, my heartfelt conviction such reportage can only help us break more conclusively away from our malevolently conditioned paralytic numbness.

Apropos which, I welcome reader input whether negative or positive. Indeed I regard Dispatches almost as if it were your property, not mine, and I were here only to refine it into an ever-more-appropriate response to your own individual and collective consciousness. 

My apology for any inconvenience these changes might impose.

And as always, I thank you for your readership.

Loren Bliss
14 June 2018    

(To read more, go here.)       

Democratic (sic) Party Kills All Hope of Progressive Recapture

New Hillaryite Rule Locks Out Sanders, Any Others the DNC Won't Ok as Real Democrats, Thus Formalizing the Party's Hatred of Reformers 

'"We just came off a devastating presidential loss in 2016. It would seem to me the actual impetus would be to expand the Democratic Party. I just for the life of me don’t see any motivation for this beyond personal spite,' Mark Longabaugh, a senior adviser to Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, told Yahoo News.'I scratch my head and ask why they would want to make the party more narrow and more exclusive.' Other progressives echoed Longabaugh’s critique of the new rule on social media, with many noting that such restrictions could demobilize large constituencies that are disaffected with both major political parties...'Democrats don't want Bernie-Most-Popular-Politician-In-America-Sanders running for President, but they're perfectly fine with Mark-Raise-The-Social-Security-Retirement-Age-Warner, because although he commonly votes with Republicans, he IDs as a Democrat...'''

See also: "The Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws committee adopted a new rule on Friday that would prevent outsiders like Bernie Sanders from seeking the party’s nomination in the 2020 presidential race. The move seems to be the latest salvo in the ongoing jockeying over the party’s future that emerged following the...bitter primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Sanders in 2016... the move could only have been motivated by lingering animus from the primary race between Clinton and Sanders."

Comment: despite the false pseudo-Left optimism by which these reports attempt to soften the Democratic (sic) National Committee's terminal blow to any rational hope for a progressive takeover of the party, by this new rule the DNC awards itself the absolute power to determine who is and is not a real Democrat. The rule therefore locks in ideological cement overshoes the party's suicidal, already thoroughly documented malice toward Sanders. It also radically expands the party's hateful efforts to exclude all would-be reformers, a brazenly pro-Republican purge exemplified by its maliciously triumphant slandering of Laura Moser. Thus once again we are taught our only possible exit from JesuNazi theocracy is the formation of a genuinely socialist -- and genuinely revolutionary -- party of the Working Class. Indeed the Democrats' fuck-you message to all of us in the 99 Percent was never clearer -- so unmistakable (and such an unmistakable endorsement of Capitalist malevolence) -- even those in the deepest depths of denial can no longer reject it.

And Here is Always Insightful Paul Street to Tell Us Why the Democrats So Ruled...

(To read the rest, go here.) 

See How They Robbed Us When They Murdered the Kennedys

(So Began Their Boiled-Frog Reduction of Our Lives to Wretchedness)

 

“TV commentator Chris Matthews’ book, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit, has been a best seller since it was released last October, but there’s a lot of important material that Matthews (deliberately) left out (to cover up Kennedy's progressive politics)...Martin Luther King was relying on Bobby to enter the race, and when he did, was overjoyed, saying he would make an outstanding president. RFK had King, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta on his side...Why does Matthews continually ignore these points? If one thinks, as his employers at MSNBC do, that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are the liberal ideal, then what Bobby Kennedy represented in 1968 was (genuinely) radical...(and must therefore be suppressed).”

 

The following comment is a revised and expanded version of the thank-you note I posted on the comment-thread of James DiEugenio's above-linked "Distorting the Life of Bobby Kennedy," courageously published by Consortium News to refute Matthews' lies of omission:

We should all be grateful to Mr. DiEugenio for his fine work, which accurately describes the real Robert Francis Kennedy: the U.S. attorney general who repeatedly intervened on behalf the Civil Rights Movement, whose mostly unpublicized interventions I learned of as a civil rights activist in East Tennessee; the refreshingly enlightened senator from my home state of New York, whose unprecedented activism I would have endorsed with my vote had I not, in 1964, still been registered to cast my ballots in Tennessee; the RFK whose policies I sometimes (triumphantly) covered as a confident young reporter and editor in New York City and adjacent urban New Jersey; the "Bobby" whose presidential candidacy reached across racial lines to mobilize a larger and more solidarity-minded majority of the 99 Percent than ever before or since; the martyr whose assassination ended forever any rational hope the United States might someday forcibly reform predatory Capitalism at least enough to enable what was allegedly "our" nation to live up to its claims of egalitarian and humanitarian ideals.
  

That is one of the many reasons I have such scorn and contempt for the Hillaryite Democratic (sic) Party; I have long been outraged by the Democrats' sneaky efforts to hide the  magnitude of their treachery by maliciously portraying Senator Kennedy as far less progressive than he actually was.

 

Indeed this alone is perhaps the most effective tactic employed by the Democrats to disguise their morally imbecilic Neoliberal savagery; they rewrite the past to portray the Kennedys as oppression-tolerant masqueraders, lending credence to breathtaking Big Lies  of "change we can believe in" while obscuring the ever-deepening  wretchedness to which they are actually betraying us. 

But even these examples of oppression by deception do not excuse our appalling ignorance of history: our willfully embraced Moron Nation anti-intellectualism as demonstrated yet again by how even the  U.S. Left -- Pseudo-left and Real Left alike -- accepts these Hillaryite slanders as unquestionable truth, as if our national slogan were "self-deception is self-protection" or some other equally damning variant of 1984's "ignorance is strength."

Though Robert Kennedy was certainly no Marxist, he was nevertheless -- as Mr. DiEugenio so aptly reminds us -- our last hope of retaining the partial Working Class empowerment we had achieved via the (contextually) revolutionary socialism of New Deal economics...

(To read the rest, go here.)

Radically Revised to Include This Weekend's Updates: How the Always Brutal, Often Murderous Past of Capitalist U.S. Governance Enables Its Ever-More-Evil JesuNazi Present

If We Are to Understand How We Became Our Planet's Apocalypse Nation, We Must All Fearlessly Admit Our Blood-Drenched History 

(Editor's Note: Never before have I rewritten a published blog post as thoroughly as I have rewritten this one, a challenging process that reveals by the delays it imposed on publication the extreme, mostly emotional difficulty I had in verbally focusing on my chosen material. I have therefore, in embarrassment so acute it borders on mortification,  deleted the original version,  an act of revisionism unprecedented in all my years of blogging. I have also expanded the text to include this weekend's updates, thereby avoiding back-to-back publication of two separate posts. While this version is unquestionably better than its predecessor -- attentive readers will recognize its improvements as motivated entirely by sharpened focus rather than correction or retraction --  such re-evaluation is probably never truly complete. That's why I have no doubt I will many times more revisit the subject -- how we (and myself in particular) reflexively wrapped our experiences of ever-intensifying USian malevolence in shrouds of complacency -- a sin of which we are all to some extent guilty regardless of how raised any one of us might have imagined our consciousness to be. Meanwhile I offer my heartfelt apology for the original text's premature expostulation./LB)

"Robert Kennedy’s death, like the President's, was mourned as an extension of senseless violence; events moved on, and the profound alterations that these deaths…brought in the equation of power in America was perceived as random…. What is odd is not that some people thought it was all random, but that so many intelligent people refused to believe that it might be anything else. Nothing can measure more graphically how limited was the general understanding of what is possible in America."

Comment: again, as in my two preceding posts, we begin with never-avenged atrocities that define "what is possible" in the homeland of the U.S. Empire; again, as before, I take this approach because I am convinced we cannot truly comprehend the terminal magnitude of the horrors the United States is inflicting on ourselves, our species and our planet without first acknowledging at least some of the preceding outrages that regardless of the vehemence and constancy of our opposition nevertheless define us as citizens of the most wantonly murderous empire in all human history.

But this time I also confess my own guilt in acts of self-censorship that make me a telling example of how for years we the people reflexively adjusted, like the proverbial frog, to the stealthily imposed JesuNazism and fascism in general that is now bursting terribly into boil as demonstrated by our suddenly accelerated reduction to credit-card serfdom and for-profit prison slavery.  
    
Here too is my own belated Memorial Day eulogy for some of our more politically revealing dead and wounded -- belated because (given how the warmongers have perverted Decoration Day's original post-Civil-War "memory and tears" into a grotesque celebration of the Empire's conquer-the-world agenda) -- I had originally planned to ignore the holiday entirely.

(To read the rest, go here.)

Official Protection of Violently Racist, Often Murderous Cops Shows the World the True Magnitude of U.S. Nazi-Mindedness

Federally Militarized Police Add Middle-Class Minorities to Target List

“Another day, another black man violently assaulted by five rogue police officers for the ever-increasing crime of BWB (breathing while black). This time it was NBA player Sterling Brown...It’s hardly news that people of color are continually harassed, but what’s been making the news lately is the frequency with which upwardly mobile, middle-class people of color are being targeted. From the two black men waiting for a friend at a Philadelphia Starbucks, to a black Yale graduate student napping in her dorm’s common room, to three black women facing down seven cop cars and a helicopter as they checked out out of an Airbnb house they were renting...there is an overlooked long-lasting collateral damage to the black community’s faith in the promise of the American dream and the sinister effect on their children that is much worse than that single assault.”

See also: "I am speaking for Dontre Hamilton of Milwaukee, Laquan McDonald of Chicago, Stephon Clark of Sacramento, Eric Garner of New York and the list goes on...The common denominator in all of these (killings) has been racism towards the minority community...The lack of repercussions for the police officers involved in so many of these cases is...a slap in the face to the victims’ families and communities."

And this: "American police shoot and kill far more people than their peers in other countries...(but) are almost never prosecuted and convicted for use of force."

Plus this: "The technology giant Amazon is providing police agencies and private intelligence contractors in the United States with facial recognition and video tracking algorithms to (intensify) mass surveillance on the population."

Comment: I posted the above material as this weekend-update's lead story because, once again, we cannot comprehend the true horror of the Empire's domestic and foreign agendas without first examining the capabilities and intentions demonstrated by its ever-expanding catalogue of atrocities.  

These newest outrages -- clearly another expansion of the Empire's lifelong, 242-year history of hate-motivated, often genocidal persecution of non-whites -- are precisely what prove "American Democracy" to have never been more than a Big Lie. 

 

What further condemns the United States -- what defines it as a nation ever-more-dictatorially ruled by a multi-generation cabal of  Nazi-minded Capitalist overlords -- was first revealed...

(To read the rest, go here.)