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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(To read the rest, go here.)

As Intended, Capitalism Makes Government Our Deadliest Foe

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

 Meanwhile Reality Compels Another Dispatches Format Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

Moron Nation multiplying mindlessness.

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

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

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

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

 
In other words...

(To read the rest, go here.)

The Horrors of a ChristoNazi Theocracy Are Now Inescapable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

(to read the rest, go here.) 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

(To read the rest, go here.)

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

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

(Photographs referenced below are here and here.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

(To read the rest, go here.)

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Exclusive: Obama Administration
Quietly Declares War on Tenant Rights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(To read the rest, go here.)

Severe Knee Injury Suspends Dispatches Indefinitely

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB/24 June 2018

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