And though your very flesh and blood be what the Eagle eats and drinks, you'll praise him for the best of birds, not knowing what the Eagle thinks.

from Cassandra, by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Step into the MoosePoop!

(A cranky collection of grumblings about the way things are. Entries are reverse chronological, undated, and sporadic. It all goes in here to marinate while the sociopaths in power run amock, filching anything of value and dooming the rest of us.)

"I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." -- Jay Gould (1836-1892) financier & tycoon.

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, in other words, the reality of experience, and the distinction between true and false ... people for whom those distinctions no longer exist." --Hannah Arendt

"Fascism is a counter-revolution to a revolution that never took place."

Don't buy their bullshit. Look at your W2.

According to a bill written by Rep. Jodey Arrington, who will be the chairman of a congressional death panel for Social Security, "The drivers of US debt include entitlement spending such as Social Security and Medicare".

Look at your W2. Social Security is withheld separately from federal taxes, shown in a separate box. It is a separate system. It is in fact solvent and pays for itself. It cannot affect the US debt because it's not part of the general system, although past presidents beginning with Reagan have filched money from it, using it as an ATM to shore up the debt-ridden federal system.

Know what really does increase the US debt? Tax cuts for the wealthy. A runaway military/industrial complex that we were warned about by a Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, many decades ago.

Calling Social Security a driver of debt is a brazen diversion that never seems to lose popularity with the right wing. And why not? They're seldom called on it and people remain hopelessly bamboozled.

Under Cover of Phobias

If one candidate has his way, the November presidential election will be decided on the issue of immigrants coming over the border. Locally, much of the attention of the legislature in my state, Georgia, has been focused on transgender issues like banning transition treatment and controlling bathroom usage. To my south, Florida is in an all out war on Wokeness. What do these things have to do with the real problems Americans face? There is record inequality, which negatively affects all of us who are not rich, and there is so much political power in the hands of the wealthy that democracy is in a deep coma. But somehow we seem to be transfixed by xenophobia and values.

An actual problem is that large numbers of working people still don't have healthcare, a situation that does not exist in any other advanced country. Even those with insurance can wind up in bankruptcy. We pay twice as much on average for medical care as everyone else, and our outcomes are half as good. We also pay two to tens times more for the same prescription drugs as people do in other countries. How can anyone think immigrants are the cause of this?

In the post Reagan era, worker productivity has doubled. Worker pay has not. The rewards have gone to the top instead of being shared by all. As a direct result, young adults have had to watch their American Dream evaporate. Why is it that in what is still touted as the richest country in the world, in a single generation parents have lost the ability to provide a backyard for kids to play in? To make things worse, rents keep going up because the one percent is gobbling up the housing stock, and they can charge whatever they want. This is the very definition of a rentier society. Government could step in and build more housing, but as St. Reagan told us, government is the problem, not the solution. Do you think some LGBT group is behind of all this?

And when those young parents of today get old, they face a potential reduced payout in Social Security because the system was structured on the assumption that workers' pay would rise with productivity, which of course it has not. The one percent will not rightfully be blamed for any of this. It's the gays' fault, apparently, working hand-in-hand with the "illegals".

We are being duped. Fleeced. The owners of society (to use George Carlin's phrase) find scapegoats like immigrants and gays to keep our eye off the ball. That way they can keep their grift rolling. People are dumb to let others control the narrative so completely that it crowds out reality. However, we have been groomed to accept dogma in place of logic and critical thinking has become an impossibility.

Congressional Neros

The US wildland firefighting force is in crisis. Experienced people are leaving because they face a $20K pay cut unless congress acts. But congress just doesn't seem to have the time for anything other than its usual preoccupations: slashing benefits, cutting taxes for the rich, turning women back into subservient breeders, terrorizing trans people, banning books, etc. It rejects the job of actually running the country, which congressmen believe is the sole province of the free market.

So, when individuals see the corona of flames on top of the hills surrounding their houses they can take solace in the fact that although there will be no salvation from the advancing fire, our in vogue ideological priorities are being faithfully upheld in Washington, DC. And don't even dream about congress doing anything about global warming, which is ramping up the frequency and intensity of wildfires.

A Blanket Party for Demmocracy

Democracy might be in for it. There are a few groups who are lined up to take it out. The foremost is the wealthy, who want to keep every dime they get, and avoid regulation that either protects consumers, workers, or the environment. They want to continue playing the game of buying politicians who design the laws (or, as in the case of ALEC, just carry them into work pre-written in a briefcase) to steer all present and future profit their way.

Then there are the ultra religious who cannot abide others living their lives the way they want to and not conforming to narrow religions tenets. These fanatics cannot cope with democracy because their numbers are not large enough to dictate morality to others through a vote, so the sooner democracy is iced, the better for these extremists.

Finally, there are the good old racists who loathe letting people of color have an equal vote. They are doing everything in their power to provide "election integrity", which is code for disenfranchising minorities, but doing away with democracy entirely would make things much easier for them.

Both of these latter groups also want to repress women and punish homosexuals, just as a matter of principle.

So, come November we just might be crossing the Rubicon. If the confused public can't focus in time to see on what's on the line, Donald Caesar might be sending congress home after the election and then we can find out what it's really like to live in an authoritarian oligarchy/theocracy. And if you think things are rough now for the working person, just wait until there's a fully in control oligarcy with an army of religoius zealots as their enforcers.

"Bring back confidence in the elections"? I'd feel a lot more confident if gremlins in the Georgia statehouse and those of other red states stopped tinkering with the election process. There's zero evidence that the process was broken in the first place, so just what are they pretending to fix? Accept the loss and move on for crying out loud. Meanwhile, keep prominent Georgia state politicians with IT experts in tow from stealing the software out of voting machines in rural counties and our elections would be a lot better off.

Compund Inequality

The biggest threat to democracy in the USA is inequality. It puts all power in the hands of a few. As it stands, the mega wealthy own one of the two major political parties in totality and most of the other. This gives the rich the power to write laws in their own favor, ensuring they will always be on top.

Surprisingly, given his long history as a servant of the credit card industry, Joe Biden as President has done much to reduce the power of the monied elite and restore balance. He gets little attention for this in the press because the press is owned by the monied elite and they are horrified and angry about what he's doing.

Biden's opponent will never speak of inequality for the obvious reason he's wealthy himself. Instead, he beats on endlessly about The Border, which is a red herring compared to inequality. Republicans are virtuosos at getting people to forget they're feeding leftovers to their family and concentrate instead on hyped-up "values" issues. Meanwhile they give more tax breaks to the rich. Then disengenuously,Republicans turn around and say there's no money for benefits for those who've been immiserated by inequality, like it was a big surprise.

Stop Chasing Squirrels and Focus on Bread and Butter Issues

Young working people can't afford groceries, can't afford childcare, can't afford a car repairs, can't afford the always rising rent, can't pay off their student loans, can't ever go on a vacation, and in general, are on the financial torture rack. So, what are politicians chanting about? Wokeness, book banning, LGBT encroachment on straights, critical race theory, bad hombres at the border, and ceaselessly, in a deep low voice: reducing taxes for the rich.

It's been said that people get the government they deserve. It's time we stopped reacting to whatever faux issue the right tosses out like golden retrievers chasing after a tennis ball. It's time to focus on the bread-and-butter issues and demand representation that will make reality better for ordinary people, not for the rich and religious extremists. All that values stuff is just a cover for making the rich richer.

SCOTUS running defense for Donald

The Supreme Cohort is running defense for Donald. Understandably, he does not want to be convicted of any of the many crimes he's accused of before election day, so he's intent on delaying all prosecution against him. Fair enough. However, he is getting a huge leg up from SCOTUS now, which has decided to hear his ridiculous "walks on water" argument that he has immunity by virtue of having been president. Even if the Supreme Cohort eventually correctly decides that the argument is absurd, they are doing Trump a massive favor by putting his many prosecutions on ice while they dally on the decision. Farewell democracy. Hello banana republic. Thanks SCOTUS!

Loser Rich Kids

There are true elites and then there are loser elites, those who despite the immense advantage of having been born into very wealthy families are themselves just schlubs. Trump and Tucker Carlson are in the latter category. They have the will, but not the wherewithal. Inevitably, their trajectory must end in a crash to earth. But they will ensnare a multitude in their desperate effort to rise and stay aloft, bringing millions down hard with them in the end. Historically, they have been the usurpers of thrones who destabilize states.

Shame on all in D.C.

Despite Republicans' pronouncement to the contrary, the rebuffed border legislation represented a painful capitulation by Democrats. It was not a stunt. They were willing to forsake immigrants to please the Republicans because of the importance of supporting Ukraine and shipping more bullets to Bibi so he can kill more kids. But Republicans wouldn't have it. They will not cede their precious ability to capitalize on the border issue by solving it. Repuyblicans' statements are the inverse of the facts, but who cares about facts in 2024?

House Republicans are programmed to conquer, not solve problems through compromise. Been that way since Gingrich. Furthermore, Captain Chaos told them to stand down, to rev up his base while simultaneously disheartening non-MAGAs in the hope they'll stay away from the polls in November.

Nero congress

The US wildfire fighting force is in crisis. Experienced people are leaving because they face a $20K pay cut unless congress acts. But congress just doesn't seem to have the time for anything other than its preoccupations: slashing benefits, cutting taxes for the rich, turning women back into subservient breeders. It rejects the job of actually running the country, which congressmen believe is the province of the free market, by which they mean the wealthy and corporations.

So, when individual Americans see the corona of flames on top of the hills surrounding their houses they can take solace in the fact that although there will be no salvation from the advancing fire, our currently in vogue ideological priorities are being faithfully upheld in Washington, DC. And don't even dream about congress doing anything about global warming, which is ramping up the frequency and intensity of wildfires. That is, unless and until Charles Koch, Jeff Bezos, and Elon take an interest.

Back to Medievalism

So, the religious right in tandem with the oligarchs wants to do the following for/to us: end abortion and drastically reduce access to contraception; repeal child labor laws; shrink, hamstring, and privatize Social Security; put the kibosh on universal healthcare; sabotage public schools with the goal of eliminating universal education altogether; reduce and eliminate government food assistance to the poor; avoid any discussion of student loan debt reduction; ignore the all-too-real things that drag you down daily like sky high rents, lack of childcare, and insufficient wages; eliminate taxes on the rich and subsequently plead there's nothing left in the coffers for entitlements; form a federal task force to fight anti-Christian bias -because Christians are so severely persecuted in this country; ban books with sexual content or that tell embarrassing truths about people like them; jail librarians who don't toe the line; harass and persecute gays, reverting to the bad old days; place Christian nationalism at the center of government policy; declare war on non-believers; ignore and deny the earth's rampant warming; drill, baby, drill.

In short, they want to install a disastrous theocracy backed by the oligarchs, and you the good citizens of the US of A appear ready to hand them absolute power in November. Well, enjoy the leap back in time to before the Enlightenment, that trip back to the Middle Ages, you dunderheaded weaklings (aka, uncommitted Independents).

School vouchers are a Trojan horse, a sop to the wealthy and other special interests that comes out of the hides of the less fortunate and the working class. They are the ultimate in elitism, classism, racism, and snobbery. Any politician who endorses vouchers is a panderer to the very selfish wealthy who despise paying to educate other people's kids, segregationists who despise sending their kids to school with kids who don't look like them, and religious extremists who despise having their kids exposed to any unorthodox ideas. Finally, it is imperative to understood that the true purpose of vouchers is not just to destroy public education, but to obliterate the very concept of universal education, which they also all despise.

Accusation of election rigging is really a confession of rigging the next election.

I lost an election. I din't lose by much, but I definitely lost. The one before that, I won, but not by much. If I had lost that first one, I was coached to say that I won and claim that the election had been stolen. But I didn't need to go through that exercise because I won. After this last one, on the other hand, I put those original plans for denial and false accusation to work. Everyone knew it was baloney, but we pretended. We never proved any of our allegations, never came even close to proving anything, but we kept saying the election was rigged over and over. It has become our mantra, and we don't actually listen to the words anymore, which is good because they don't make any sense.

The sliest thing we've done though is to say that future elections need protection in order to restore people's confidence in our system. Asinine, because there never has been a reason to doubt it, but effective in that it has allowed my side to pass voting restriction laws that we claim with a straight face will make the system more secure. Secure? Sure, secure against letting the wrong people vote! "Election integrity" translates to "stopping Black, young, and poor people from voting because they tend to vote for my opponent". And that's how I'm rigging the next election right now. Ain't I a stinker?

Trump's Atlanta Trial Drowned out in Noise

In her editorial in the Atalnta Journal Constitution, former appointed interim US Senator from Georgia (she lost in the subsequent election) Kelly Loeffler argued for the removal of District Attorney Fani Willis and the dropping of all charges against defendants in the January 6 case because Willis "profited off her indictment of Trump by appointing her underqualified and overpaid lover to lead the prosecution."

Analyzing that statement, it can be broken into two parts. First, it says that D.A. Willis was in it solely for the romantic perks, so by inference, the case has no merit. Even if you were to believe the ridiculous idea that the prosecution was merely a grift, that still would not invalidate the indictment (or, as US Congresswoman from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene would say, "indicKtment"). The outcome of the trial would though. You can indict a ham sandwich, but the sandwich would be exonerated at trial, assuming the trial judge didn't throw the case out at the start, then eat the sandwich.

The second part is highly salacious and absolutely illogical. If you were a defendant, wouldn't your rather face a lead prosecutor who was "underqualified and overpaid" rather than someone who was good at the job?

This is all just chaff, or to put it another way, chimpanzees throwing their feces. But it still might work for them in then end. We'll see. Anything is possible in a state so backward that it requires Medicare applicants to satisfy work requirements in order to receive coverage.

Hear MTG is bucking for that prestigious Madame Defarge position (head of Homeland Security) once Trump wins?

Election Integrity is another name for disfranchisement

Can we cut the charade? "Election integrity" is a a euphemism for "intentionally impeding poor and minority people's' ability to vote." Red states' Republicans offer up a host of solutions to non-problems that are meant to put hurdles in the way of voters who lean Democratic. As MTG mistakenly admitted (and no one in the press picked up on) in her tirade against "Curb Your Enthusiasm", the Georgia law they were lampooning was "good law" meant to "block the pandering of Stacy Abrams (former candidte for governor", that is to say, to thwart a Democratic opponent.

The front of my truck is so tall that you could put a cow in front of my bumper and I'd never even know it was there. When I drive my greatest blind spot is right in front of me, just like in my life generally. If we get into an accident and you're in a sedan, my front grill will look like a tsunami coming at you. Whether the accident is your fault or mine, you'll be flattened. That goes for your passengers too: your spouse, your kids, grand kids, whatever.

Don't get down on me about it either. They sell this behemoth, and since I can afford the mastodon it would be a denial of my freedom to tell me I can't or shouldn't be driving it. That'd be communism. I am rich, I am a patriot, and neither your safety nor a sense of fairness means a thing to me. I'm just another asshole with money. What are you goin' to do about it?

Lies, Injustice, and the Republican Way

Republicans are interested solely in power, not in governing, not in making things right or improving the lives of people. They just want to seize control so that their rich benefactors can avoid taxes and their crazy faction can impose its draconian family values fever dreams on the rest of us. (Republicans are currently a coalition of the greedy and seething nut jobs.) Other than that, they have no interest in maintaining anything other than police and the military, the former to keep the multitude in line and the latter to keep the outside world open to ongoing plunder. They only want to win and nothing they say should be taken at face value because it's just subterfuge. Their intent is to advance their cause by creating chaos and confusion (just as the Nazis did during their time of ascendance). This started when Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House, and it's about to culminate in fascism, with the concomitant death of democracy. And decency.

Killing Universal Education One Voucher at a Time

Vouchers are a sop to the wealthy and the fortunate that comes out of the hides of the less fortunate. They are the ultimate in elitism, classism, and snobbery. Any politician who endorses vouchers is a panderer to the very selfish wealthy who despise paying to educate other people's kids, segregationists who despise sending their kids to school with kids who don't look like them, and religious extremists who despise having their kids exposed to any unorthodox ideas. Finally, it is imperative to understood that the true purpose of vouchers is not just to destroy public education, but to obliterate the very concept of universal education, which they also all despise.

GOP uber alles

After returning from a playdate with Texas Governor Greg Abbott, which was held at the US-Mexico border, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp (aka Elmer Fudd 2.0) proclaimed that the Senate's border legislation that the House rebuffed out of hand was a political stunt on the part of Democrats. It was not a stunt. Sadly, the legislation represented a painful capitulation by Democrats. They were willing to throw immigrants under the bus to placate Republicans to get their support for critical assistance to Ukraine and also more bullets for Bibi. But Republicans wouldn't have it. They will not cede their precious advantage on the border issue by solving it. Kemp's statement was the inverse of the facts, but who cares about facts nowadays?

House Republicans are programmed to attack and conquer, to put the GOP uber alles, not solve problems through compromise. Been that way since Gingrich. Furthermore, Captain Chaos told Republican representatives to stand down so as to rev up his base while simultaneously disheartening non-MAGA voters in the hope they'll stay away from the polls in November.

Paraphrasing Reagan: Government intervention isn't the problem, the lack of governement intervention is the problem.

There was the Great Depression. In response to it, FDR formulated the New Deal, a socialist wish list that redistributed wealth, fostered unions, protected the 40 work week, established a minimum wage, etc. The result was astounding growth of what we imprecisely call the middle class, but is more accurately described as a strong and healthy working class. All this good fortune was because of government policy, absolutely and unequivocally.

Then in the 1960's, Lyndon Johnson did the morally right thing and signed the Civil Rights Act. This and the following race riots scared and angered white voters, priming them for the message of Ronald Reagan that government was no help but instead a dangerous impediment. It was a golden piece of propaganda that has held sway ever since. People forgot about all the good government had done and have subsequently elected wave after wave of politicians who profess to be against the very government they control.

The result has been burgeoning inequality, the immiseration of working people, and a slide into the same conditions that kindled the Great Depression. Still though, the propaganda that "government is not the solution" persists, so people believe government can't help them even when it decidedly demonstrates that it can! Irrationally, they are now looking to an authoritarian strongman to remake their world into something that they are not even sure of the shape of.

Every accusation is a confession.

Tal Mitnick for president!

To my dear friend Bibi:

Here's hoping you will come to visit me very soon and stay forever! You can come here earlier than planned, if you want. It's close to the predetermined time anyway, so what's a few months one way or the other? To be candid, I'm bored to death and I need nefarious company. Hank Kissinger was a nice diversion for awhile, but he's already begun to repeat himself. Won't you please consider coming now rather than later? I have every confidence in you to do the wrong thing, as always!

Warmest regards,
Beelzebub

P.S. What's up with that Gantz fellow? Such a goody two-shoes! He won't be coming down here, that's for sure!

Three quarters of MAGA people are NOT working class, they are petite bourgeoisie. They are the "I've got mine" crowd, money-chasers who are in it to garner an even bigger slice of the pie, and they are working very hard to see that working people and minorities don't vote.

Will no one acknowledge the obvious, that the effort to slash Social Security and Medicare is not based on fiscal responsibility, but is instead a massive attack on working people and an overt act of class warfare?

The official tally of the kids who have been poisoned by snacks adulterated with lead and chromium stands at 287. This is obviously an under count by orders of magnitude, as this poison was sold everywhere. Little kids tend to prefer one type of food, and parents naturally are happy to give it to them, thinking they are helping their child thrive. The harm already done is incalculable. Remember that it wasn't long ago that baby formula was killing infants. Why is it that our food supply is a game of Russian Roulette, especially as it concerns the safety of children?

Write My Name on My Leg, Mama.
By Zeina Azzam

Write my name on my leg, Mama
Use the black permanent marker
with the ink that doesn't bleed
if it gets wet...
Write my name on my leg, Mama
and on the legs of my sisters and brothers.
This way we will belong together
This way we will be known
as your children.
Write my name on my leg, Mama
When the bomb hits our house
When the walls crush our skulls and bones
our legs will tell our story, how
there was nowhere for us to run.

"If you see bags of crap coming into the voting areas, you gotta stop it"--D. J. Trump, 1/5/24

Dear Values Voters,

We do not need prayer in schools. We need to NOT have AR-15s in schools.

We do not need additional laws to defend our "right" to be bigoted toward anyone. We DO need affordable childcare.

We do not need to require people to have jobs before they can receive Medicaid. We DO need universal healthcare.

We do not need to make anymore billionaires. We DO need economic equality and a living wage for all.

We do not need to underfund the IRS. We DO need to start making the wealthy pay their fair share again.

Please consider getting your heads out of your asses at your earliest possible convenience and focus on the really important shit for once.

Thank you

We should consider renaming the amygdala, that crown of the reptilian brain that's responsible for perceiving threats and producing the fear response, to a something more timely: the a-MAGA-dala.

Triumph of the Oligarchs in 2024

Fascism might be inevitable now. After all, we have gross inequality and increasing precarity of the working class. Who benefits from this condition? Why the wealthy elite, of course, and they want to continue riding high, naturally. However, they could face a backlash at any time. But there won't be one because fascism is the perfect antidote to any revolt: get people to accept authoritarian hierarchy and that precludes any reaction to inequality. And the wealthy are ON this! They are giving the Mussolini of Manhattan all the help he needs to win and take over, through massive PAC contributions and by studiously ignoring Biden's accomplishments in their news media.

The real reason why we can't have universal healthcare

It has less to do with the insurance industry's massive lobbying than it does with businesses' need to control wages. If workers weren't compelled to work full time to have medical coverage, many would choose to work less. This in turn would crate a relative shortage of labor, which would drive up wages. Eventually, people would be working 30 hours per week and bringing home nearly the same pay they did when they worked 40. Can't have that, ergo, no universal healthcare! Oh, and you can have the afternoon off, but only if you use it to go home and make us another worker.

Starfish.

I think I understand why people are homeless.

Because of unsuitability or just bad luck, they have failed at navigating the straight world.
And even though their plight is terrible, they have accepted homelessness.
Why? Because they are rational.
Trying ceaselessly to "make it" when that has proven impossible would be pointless.
So, they have given up the obsession of trying to climb a vertical glass cliff.

There is relief in this, and they will hereafter dwell in this very inhospitable comfort zone.
That's the mindset that allows them to sleep in doorways on freezing nights or be bitten by insects outside in the summer.

They are doing the best that they can. They have stopped wasting effort trying to succeed, but they persist in surviving, and that in itself is noble.

Manpulation based on mood (a reflection)

"He's in a good mood, ask him now." We've heard this a million times, and it's good advice because people are more open and generous when they are feeling happy. Conversely, if we approach someone and they are obviously vexed or grumpy, we know not to ask them for a favor just then.

This makes sense relative to survival. If an individual has plenty of food and anticipates a continuation of that fortuitous situation, they're much more likely to graciously hand some food to a supplicant. It's a good time to give and a good time to ask. Conversely, if the individual is bordering on starvation, they would be less inclined to share from their meager cache, so there's no point even approaching them.

In parallel, psychological experiments have confirmed that a subject's responses to questions depends on their emotional state. Exposing a subject to pleasant information prior to quizzing results in more liberal responses, whereas distressing them results in more conservative responses to the same questions. So, it is conceivable that prior an election, bombarding people with disturbing news would skew their pick of candidates and choices on referenda rightward, whereas prepping them with good news would nudge them to the left. There are real life examples of this aplenty. (Invoking Willie Horton during the Bush-Dukakis election, e.g.)

This makes me wonder if the fundamental difference between a diehard liberal and a dyed-in-the wool conservative lies in their divergent perception of personal security. Under identical circumstances, one is devil-may-care and the other is overwhelmed with foreboding because their perception of the threat level is vastly different. Their algorithms regarding how to deal with threat might be the same, but the incoming threat's volume is muted to the liberal, while to the conservative it's blaring.

Supposedly, you can pick out future liberals and conservative among in a children in a playground. The daredevils will turn out to be liberals, and the cautious ones conservatives. It's also been claimed that the conservative possesses a larger amygdala, the brain's air raid siren. Since the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala are in opposition, it might follow that intelligent people with a normally sized amygdala would tend to be liberal, while a dominant amygdala would push a less intelligent person in the direction of conservatism. Hence the saying, "Not all conservatives are stupid people, but all stupid people are conservatives."

Anyway, if you want a liberal and a conservative to agree, prime the liberal with bad news and say something nice to the conservative. Then they'll get on fine for a half an hour or so. But the thing to remember is that emotion will affect outcome, and that everyone can be manipulated to produce an immediate result that might not be characteristic of them. It's not really news that people can be manipulated by fear, often to devastating effect. Or, as a conservative might point out, that shielding them from bad news might be used to lead them down a primrose path.

Reasons for the average person to vote Republican

refusal to raise the minimum wage
denial of healthcare to countless working people
protecting rich tax cheats by hamstringing the IRS
giving tax breaks to the rich, resulting in less money coming in, then using that as an excuse to reduce benefits
rigging the economic system for the wealthy
anti-union to the core
architects of inequality
banning books they don't agree with or that make them look bad
changing educational curriculum to cover up their past sins and promote myths
going back to the bad old days of harassing minorities
denial of a woman's right to control her own body
intransigent defenders of assault weapons, thus enabling school massacres
rigging voting to achieve a one party system
100% owned by billionaires
champions of an unequal, winner-take-all society
friends of theocrats who will dictate your everyday life
boosters of authoritarian fascism, meant to keep you in your place
psychopathic climate denial

So, if you want to receive less and less and have your life controlled by others, pull that "Republican" lever.

Whether Trump is convicted or not, he undeniably incited a mob to block the certification of the 2020 election so that it would be decided subsequently by the states rather than the popular vote. It was a workable plan because the majority of the states were Republican. He tried hard to get Pence to do it, but Pence's son and Dan Quayle advised him against it. He is on tape strong-arming state officials to "find" votes for him.

Still, there are people who will vote for Trump no matter what. Too many people are willing to install a self-described dictator because they're afraid of losing their privilege.

If this were a more egalitarian society and the wealth were more equally shared there wouldn't be this desperation. But instead we are fighting for scraps like junkyard dogs.

Seventy years ago, if the authorities decided a woman was unfit to have a child, they would have that woman sterilized without her permission, even without her knowing. Today, those same authorities will force a woman in the same circumstances to have her child. That's quite a turnaround, but there is one thing that's remained constant: the will of the woman is of no consideration.

I've got mine
nationalism
us and them
racism
greed
domination of others

in my youth, these were thought to be repellent.

now they are virtues.

a few decades of shared prosperity, and we got bored.

now it's time to Make the Amygdala Great Again.

Surprisingly, the antidote to these poisons is contained in the tenets of religion.
parse out the superstition
and the medicine is there.

religion pushers are among the biggest drivers of the resurgence of the amygdala.
they know their market
they know the world must become a cesspool before people will return

"And when He knew for certain
only drowning men could see Him,
He said "All men will be sailors then
until the sea shall free them."
--from Suzanne, by Leonard Cohen

for a short time, people functioned in a world of relative equality,
acting ethically.

thank God that's over with!

Trump's place in the toolbox

Private equity is buying up all the residential real estate, all the hospitals, and all the medical practices. Eventually, they will spread out and own everything. Meanwhile, Trump keeps the rubes bamboozled by inveighing against shoplifters. Even he doesn't get that he is just a tool of the .001%. Perhaps the Democrats will save us from the privaty equity tsunami. Ha-ha-ha-ha....

"Entitlement" Reduction Horseshit

It is disingenuous to demand a reduction in entitlements for these reasons: continual tax cuts for the rich are responsible for reduced tax receipts and contribute to the growing debt; in the 1970's corporations paid the largest share of taxes, but that has been reversed so that individuals now pay most of the income taxes; of rich nations, ours has the most porous and skimpy safety net; life is becoming more precarious for working people, so telling them that there will be no backstop at all will be even further disheartening; 886 billion this year will go to the military/congressional/industrial complex. Don't tell me we can't afford to feed and clothe kids.

The turning point for the United States of America came almost 60 years ago when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Right Act. It was an effort to compel the people of the US to live up to our stated ideals of equality. It required a universal commitment to fair play and assumed empathy from all of us, for all of us. Of course, it could also go the other way, leading to reactionary White Nationalism. Which way did we go? Meet Donald J.Trump. What comes next can be inferred from the history of the Third Reich, the major difference being that while the Third Reich could only hurl V2 rockets, we, courtesy of the very same scientists, can now lob ICBMs.

Beyond the lesser of two evils

Quoting the line from Yeats' poem, The Second Coming,: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

That's the way we have it at this moment, when the majority are so disheartened from years of neglect and dismissal by government that they are unlikely to vote, while the hierarchy-loving, authoritarian 20% who have always seethed on the sidelines prepares to impose its fever dream on all of us.

The next federal election will not be a choice between the lesser of two evils. Rather, it will be either a last minute rescue of democracy or else the annihilation of it.

I think we're in for some shit. I see Trump, an absolute cartoon of a man who reminds me of the character Eric Cartman from South Park, declaiming against communist vermin and anyone who doesn't roll over for his shtick as enemies of the people who must be liquidated. Astoundingly, more than half of people polled agree with his assessment! Forget that there are no communists anymore and that anybody who disagrees with an idiot is not necessarily a threat to the well being of all. The asshole's whole strategy is to identify an enemy and channel the fear and loathing of his mentally and ethically stunted base against it. Doesn't matter if there's no actual enemy, the fear and loathing is already there and it just needs to be directed in a way that will make the Trumpster fuhrer of the Fourth Reich

I also see Protestant ministers, ironically called "pastors", who are telling their flock it's time to kill en masse. These pseudo holy men, the avowed representatives of the Prince of Peace, are playing the same game as Trump, using their mentally and ethically stunted flock's anger to advance their own brand.

Well, fuck all of them.

However, they are probably going to win. Why? Because the mass of people are dejected, having been screwed over by the by-the-elite-and-for-the-elite system for decades, and they just won't show up to vote, and even if they did, they would not be allowed to. In addition to that, the fat cats and their corporate media have a vested interest in presenting Biden in the worst possible light because he sometimes, dangerously, acts like an old time Democrat and does something for the average person. Heresy! So, we're in for some shit.

Where does that leave those of us who are not White Christian Nationalists? Probably in need of either a gun or a cyanide capsule.

School vouchers and a caste system

For some, vouchers were seized upon as a means to circumvent racially integrated schools. For others who have a strong aversion to paying taxes, vouchers are a way to destroy the public educational system. Rest assured, if we convert to vouchers then only the poorest will attend decimated public schools, only the richest will have the privilege of an adequate education, and all others will strain just to provide their children with a private education that is far inferior to what they once received for free at public schools. Why? Because over time the value of a voucher will dwindle to the equivalent of a 25% off coupon. And that's intentional.

This is a recipe for a caste system. By the time people realize this it will be too late because an educational system that was 288 years in the making will have been shattered and dispersed.

How we lose everything

I learned of the Holocaust when I was pretty young. I was about seven, back in the 1950's. I asked then and have always wondered since, how did it happen? The answer was usually, "because Hitler was a madman", and I've always thought that was too easy an answer. After all, how could one off-kilter jerk cause a global inflagration that resulted in the deaths of over 2 million Jews, 20 million Russians, millions of Poles, and perhaps 50 million people overall? There had to be more to the answer. I thought it imperative to explore, because without a valid analysis, couldn't it happen again elsewhere without our being aware of its coming?

Hannah Arendt shed some light. She spoke of the "banality of evil", the tendency for careerists and sycophants to go along with anything so long as it improved their personal lot and advanced their social standing. Of course, it was rich industrialists who were the real key to installing Hitler. He was good for business in that he channeled the people's anger away from them while disposing of the communists and socialists. Without the backing of the rich, he'd have died sputtering in beer halls.

What it took to create the Holocaust was a disaffected citizenry of a once privileged society to turn against democracy and opt instead for a strongman, combined with an upper class that just wanted to keep on eating.

Arendt:
"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, in other words, the reality of experience, and the distinction between true and false ... people for whom those distinctions no longer exist."

Sound like anywhere you know? It can happen here. It is happening! and because we have nukes aplenty, 50 million could be just the opening salvo.

* Capitalists put their knee on the neck of democracy for 45 years. Now it's a zombie and its new name is fascism.

* There are no slavery states anymore; however, there are right-to-work states.

* Visit Trumpland Thrill Park and ride the Wild Amygdala!

* Fascism is very much a masculine thing; however, it is puerile, in the vein of a ten year old trying to push around his playmates. If it survives into adulthood it's because it was either not knocked out of him or that he was put in his place so rudely that once an adult he needed resurrect it to mask his feelings of shame and inferiority.

GOP Parasites scam the gullible on Social Security

Social Security is a separate system from the rest of government and does not affect the federal deficit. Saying it does is like saying pine trees cause tooth decay. In addition, Social Security has a surplus that previous administrations have tapped (stolen from) to cover past federal shortfalls, so it's actually been misused as a money tree by the rest of government. Therefore, can we please stop saying Social Security is contributing to the debt, because that's a stupid thing to keep repeating?

Of course, the people who repeat it the most are not stupid themselves. Far from it, but they do have an agenda. They want to privatize and then parasitize Social Security.

In a sense, it's hilarious that most Americans believe Republicans are better on the economy than Democrats. After all, Republicans have been the vanguard in rigging the system against working people. Of course, post-Clinton Democrats have stood by and watched, so they don't deserve any respect either, but the truth is that Republicans, at the behest of the wealthy, have systematically deconstructed every lingering aspect of the New Deal, which was solely responsible for the rise of the middle class. So, what people seem to be saying is that living in a deepening state of precarity is a prerequisite to being in the money, and they're all for it. OK.

In light of the US financial rating being downgraded, it is imperative to belt-tighten. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP, all must be hewn back drastically. Simultaneously, additional tax relief must be afforded to the long suffering and discriminated against rich. Further, it is critical that we purchase more defense items like the F-35 fighter. Working families must be willing to sacrifice in order to preserve and protect corporations and the rich!

It's a Class War After All

Cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to relieve the debt that resulted from the rich not paying taxes. This is yet another salvo in the class war the wealthy have been perpetrating against working people for four decades, using their army of Republicans and neoliberal Democrats. By crushing unions and offshoring jobs they managed to corral all the wealth. Now they want to be sure they aren't separated from it via taxation, so whatever relief average working people have must end, whatever security they have must be erased. Too bad the media never calls this what it is, a blatant class war, because pretending it doesn't exist is already paving the way for demagogues and fascism.

"Man is a Wolf To Man"

There have been three times in my life when I have been gobsmacked while witnessing the world's cruel indifference.

The first time was when I was twenty, stationed in the Philippines. I was walking alone through Manila in late evening as the street vendors we packing up for the day. They were going through their carts, picking out the fruit that was going bad and tossing it into the gutter. Almost before the fruit could hit the ground, hungry small children swooped in and snatched it. Most people there were profoundly poor. They probably are still. When Reagan started boasting about creating an "ownership society" the first thing that came to my mind was those children.

Forty years later, I was walking to work on North Ave. at the edge of the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta. Across from the alumni building there was a small man, apparently homeless, prone on the sidewalk and writhing. I couldn't walk away but I didn't know what to do, so I just stood over him. I saw that the top front of his scull was missing, and beneath the skin I could see the convolutions of his brain. Fortunately, another person came along, seemingly an administrator from the school. She leaned close to the man and talked calmly to him, asking him how he was and reassuring him. Soon his seizure abated. He became lucid and said something about being wounded in Vietnam. Maybe, he was the right age.

That woman's ability to deal with the situation with such competence and kindness astounded me. I was humbled.

Now yet another ten years on, about a week ago, I was in a popular restaurant in Tuscon. It's retro, not by design, but authentically old. It was inhabited by Caucasian patrons, some of them giants and the rest ancients. In the blue-green hue of the dimly lit dining room they all looked like cadavers. The waiters and the rest of the staff all wore black. It had a Tim Burton flair.

At a point near the end of our meal a boy of Mexican descent, about seven years old, came into the main dining room holding several bouquets of flowers wrapped in clear plastic cones, like the flowers they sell in grocery stores. The child had a broad face, horizontal hairline, and wore a very clean mustard colored T-shirt that stood out against the gloom of the place.

To be honest, I was surprised they let him in there to sell his flowers and a little annoyed that I was going to have to shell out for something that I had no use for, but perhaps this was the way things were done in Tuscon. Perhaps this was the Mexican influence on the culture. Anyway, I was resigned to buying a bunch when he reached our table.

But he never made it to our table. Evidently, he had slipped in and now the black clothed, cocaine-enhanced waiter was pushing him -not roughly, but firmly- toward the door. As he did the little guy hunched his shoulders to protect himself and his flowers.

My mind screamed. The small child, alone among all these hulking grey Caucasian burghers, being forcibly ejected. No angel from Georgia Tech to protect him either, and I was useless.

Government is bad, m-kay?

Have people been so brainwashed by decades of propaganda from the right that government can do no good that they can't recognize when government is actually doing something positive for them? It would seem so because Joe Biden has done more for average working people than all the other presidents have done cumulatively over the last four decades, but polls indicate that people still aren't impressed at all. Want to stick with the hackneyed meme that government is bad, regardless of the facts? Great, then ignore the truth and brace for the authoritarian fascism that awaits us. Pray at your shrine to Rush Limbaugh while you wait for the knock on the door.

High Infant Mortality Rates in Stingy Places

All of Europe has infant mortality rates below 4 per 1000 births, with Ireland and Portugal having fewer than 3 per 1000. The US, because of its lack of universal healthcare and higher incidence of child poverty and hunger, has an infant mortality rate of over 5.4 per 1000. And of course, the state of Georgia, because it affords only sporadic healthcare to prospective mothers and has a high poverty rate, has a infant mortality rate of twice the European average. Why would this surprise anyone? What we need in this regard is thoughts and prayers, but for heaven's sake, don't suggest anything radical like raising taxes on the wealthy to provide healthcare to the poor. Besides, now that the states are forcing women to have children, there will be an overall increase in survivors despite the escalating death rate.

Hawking Fear for Fun and Profit

I rarely listen to him. I haven't since I saw him in an interview with Barbara Walters decades ago and thought he was a jerk, someone no one ever told to STFU only because he was the boss's son. A fatuous, narcissist, rich kid.

Now millions listen to him as he directs them to hate others. This is his one talent. Like Hitler, he portrays himself as having suffered and convinces them that he alone can save them from their mutual enemies. His speeches (I've read parts of them, I still can't bare to listen) sound like the "Two Minutes Hate" from George Orwell's 1984.

I'm not even sure what he and his subjects are wailing about and I don't think they know either. They're just aggrieved. They'll find an enemy. Last I heard he was railing against the communists, as if there were any still in existence apart from some ancient Trotskyites fading away in retirement homes.

But that doesn't matter, they can still fear and hate. Further, it doesn't detract from the right's larger mission which is to enlist morons to fight on the wrong side, on the side of the oligarchs, in the full-on class war being waged against average working people.

And the assholes might succeed.

Anger is pain seeking relief.

Make the Amygdala Great Again

I remember my wife waking me up one Wednesday morning in November and asking, "Guess who our new president is?" The answer was obvious from her here-we-go-now tone, Donald J. Trump. I was disappointed but not surprised. Hilary, whom we both had voted for, was a relic of the passe Democratic smarty-pants crowd who disastrously embraced neoliberalism in the hallways of the now defunct DLC, and her spot on the ballot was testimony to the degradation and decrepitude of the Democratic Party. So as a result, we had a giant buffoon queued up to become leader of the free [market] world.

This was very soon after Britain had voted to exit the EU, so this seemed consistent with some deep rooted Anglo Saxon desire for political self-abasement that surfaced like a cicada every few decades. We would survive.

Or so I thought until I heard part of his inaugural speech. He seemed like a deeply paranoid mental patient who was grossly under-medicated. He drew a picture of dark forces and desperate danger. It was the least upbeat speech ever given by a president, including during wartime. What was he talking about? Sure there were problems, but to listen to him then, you'd think were were being overrun by the Visigoths!

I hadn't been listening to either candidate leading up to the election. I hadn't listened to him because he was disgustingly foolish and stupid, strutting like the Mussolini of Manhattan. Nor had I listened to her because she was nauseatingly smug and completely estranged from working class people. But now I realized that while she was just a gas bag, he had been tapping into people's fears.

As it turns out, he is very, very good at that. I don't think he fakes it either, I believe he is paranoid. However, I think he knows when he's over-hyping threats to the rubes and that he's not really that fearful of the bogeymen he holds up to them. But he does have a primal fear within him, and that gives him his talent for arousing fear in others.

Like Hitler, he mines people's discontents, but that is not to say that he isn't afflicted himself. Perhaps if he can marshal the masses through use of fear he can become invulnerable to whatever it is that's scaring him to the bone.

If he does regain power next year, prepare for this: he will select subordinates with the same motives and survival mechanism he has. They will trade in fear. Think of his handpicked Speaker of the House who viciously rails against homosexuality, joined by his wife. (We see in others that which we fear in ourselves.)

Supposedly, the man who once had dirt on everyone in the government and throughout the country, J. Edgar Hoover, had a very big secret himself, which he protected by collecting the secrets of others and letting them know he knew. A lot of the world is focused through the fear center of the brain, the amygdala. Trump can definitely make the amygdala great again.

Without power, we are beggars.

I'm almost 72, a boomer. I was born in Cambridge, Mass. in an era of "We're all in this together." Now I live in Atlanta at a time when the ethos can be summed up in three words, "I've got mine." That's true even though only a few actually have wealth and the rest live in dread of illness, poverty, and homelessness.

We boomers were beneficiaries of the New Deal. I'm afraid that era was the exception, and that the precarious condition we've returned to is the true historical norm. We blew it. Further, both parties are paid for by their big donors, not working people anymore, so I fail to see how we have any political leverage to change things for the better.

I'd like to believe that educating people to the inequities in our current system would enable them to push the country back toward democracy. However, this ignores the stubborn fact that only power can dislodge an oligarchy, and while knowledge can amplify power, it is not itself power. Since neither party works for the people, as documented by Gilens and Page in the Princeton Report, how is voting for one party or the other going to save us? I agree with the reasonableness of voting for the Lesser of Two Evils, but that's merely a tactic for slowing our descent into the abyss, not a strategy for lifting us out of it.

To make things worse, the oligarchs are deputizing White Christian Nationalists to bully (they'd say "own") the masses, forcing us to accept theocratic policies. The wealthy bestow them with this power because they need their votes to get elected, since voter suppression and gerrymandering by themselves won't do it. Eventually, when our sham democracy is abandoned completely and the votes of these thuggish clowns aren't necessary anymore, they'll be jettisoned. Until that time they will terrorize the rest of us, unchecked and with impunity.

I apologize for my cynicism, but WTF.

Who's debt is it anyway?

Republicans and corporate Democrats have lavished huge tax breaks on the wealthy. The upshot is that tax revenues are down, leading to increased federal debt. Reagan learned this would happen way back in the eighties, but federal politicians keep doing it because their wealthy donors demand it. Their disingenuous response to the towering debt they create is to call for cuts in "entitlements" to ordinary people. This even though inequality is as high or higher than it has ever been, and the majority are struggling, losing ground, and rightfully fearful of the future.

All this makes fertile soil for demagogues. This happened before in the 1920's, and now as then we are drifting toward the black hole of fascism. FDR saved the day then, but the Democratic Party has already sabotaged Bernie Sanders, the people's champion, and turned him out in the cold. "People don't want change." --Nancy Pelosi.

Blame it on the Stones

A potential future GOP candidate for governor in Georgia has proposed paying teachers to carry guns in schools as protection against masss murderers with AR-15s. That's brilliant! Who else could we arm?

Here's a comprehensive list of who or what could be armed to protect children from being slaughtered at school by narcissistic nihilists bent on committing atrocity: arm teachers, of course; arm the school custodians; arm the lunch ladies; arm the upperclassmen; arm the hamsters in the biology classroom; arm the stray cats that feed at the dumpster; arm the field mice and squirrels in the playground.

None of these will work, but they do provide cover for allowing individuals to continue to possess assault rifles. Because after all, children's freedom from terror at school, or even their freedom to not be killed in a blitz by a jerk, is of far less importance than a rugged individual's freedom to have the backup ability to kill en masse, with ferocity, using an AR-15.

When things do go sour, you can always blame liberals, drag queens, feminists, immigrants and minorities, as the new Speaker of the US House does.

Go back to sleep and wait for the knock on the door.

I'm old enough to remember when the Democratic Party was the party of the workingman and average people knew enough to vote Democratic, not Republican, which was the party of business. Well, those days are gone, both because post-Clinton Democrats now largely work on behalf of private equity firms and because the general public doesn't do reason anymore, they just follow the directions of their respective cults.

The single thing that could save America now is a miracle of overnight mass unionization. Ain't gonna happen though because the oligarchs can coexist with fascism much more easily than they can with unions. So say hello to the new Era of Christo-Fascism in these United States. It will devour its own tail within a decade, but where we land after that is anyone's guess. It won't matter to a lot of us because we'll be dead, having been annihilated by Jesus Avengers like Speaker Mike Johnson.

And don't kid yourself, these people want blood. Actual blood. That's not metaphorical.

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." --Charles Darwin

Don't you kind of love it when Kevin McCarthy gaetz what he deserves?

Did you hear? RFKkk is running as an independent.

The fundamental problem isn't the Drugstore Fuhrer or his High Testosterone Eva Braun from Georgia. They're just opportunistic grifters. The real problem is unregulated capitalism and the profound disfunction it has caused. The actual bad actors are Koch and his ilk, the big time sociopathic thieves, liars, and cheaters who have always been behind every major social evil.

A lot of right wing death squads have used the word "Freedom" in their names.

There are three words to describe the US House Republican budget proposal: more class warfare.

"The earth isn't dying. It's being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses." -Utah Phillips

"Uniquely American"

The American working class, which is to say the majority of Americans, are the least supported and most disposable workers in the first world. They are propagandized from childhood to believe that having a paltry social safety net is the justifiable price of being free and potentially prosperous. Thus they are tricked into accepting their low status and allow themselves to be exploited, forgoing a full life to be hapless subordinates instead.

"You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that." -George W. Bush

Whenever American workers come within a mile of realizing how badly they're being used, the powers that be trot out that trusty blunderbuss of class warfare, racism, to divide workers. Through this diversion they keep the people docile and powerless. The political parties, the corporate media, and the clergy all play their part in the subterfuge because they all work for the one percent. Always have, always will.

America's one percent loves it when there's widespread worker precarity. Of course it makes it easier to push workers around, but it also has the very much appreciated side benefit of making workers more amenable to kissing the owners' asses. Being treated like a god... priceless.

"And tell that bitch in Receiving she has two weeks after she has her baby to get her swollen, bleeding body back to work!"

French Canadian, Ma'am.

"Get that little frog out of here." That's what Patty Ryan's father said to her that afternoon as she was proudly showing me the morning glory plant in her backyard when he came home. We were in kindergarten or first grade at the time, but even though I was little and this was the first encounter I'd had with thick headed prejudice, I understood it immediately.

I rejected it. I thought "You moron, if all you have to do with your life is attack some little kid for not being Irish, go fuck yourself. Up yours." But I did feel bad for Patty. She disappeared quickly, either out of shame or out of fear of her belligerent father. He didn't look flushed, so you couldn't blame it on booze, unless he was a professional drinker who didn't show it.

What really did shock me though was that Patty's father was wearing a Cambridge City firefighter's uniform, the same one my father wore. A fireman attacking a brother! Well, maybe they had a beef. Anyway, I was not going to tell my father. He would be offended and angry, and since I thought this guy was just a pissy, angry shithead, telling him would serve no purpose and had the potential for further regret.

Ironically, what had already immunized me to Mr. Ryan's shameful insult was my Irish maternal grandfather's telling me emphatically and often: "You're as good as anybody else. Nobody's any better than you." And I accepted that without question, although I didn't know if he was hinting at my Irish side or my French side as being my social vulnerability. (Guessing the latter.)

Do I believe prejudice still exists, over 65 years later? As surely as I believed my grandfather's dictum then. There's as much racism now as there was in 1956. For years it had to go underground, but now it's back out of the sewer. It's in vogue again to hate someone who' not exactly the same as you. Your privilege to be a moronic, rabid hater is guaranteed by the Constitution, and man, are people cashing in on it!

So when I hear about performance politicians changing laws and school curriculum because there's no longer racism and hence no need to open old wounds, I understand that these low-lifes are pandering to bigots like Mr. R., riding prejudice into higher office, or at least using it to keep their present place at the trough.

Don't think systemic racism has had lasting effects? Well, ever wonder why there are lower standards for protection of child labor in the agricultural field? Or why servers in restaurants make a minimum wage of 2.13, when everyone else is enjoying a lavish 7.50?

Simple, during the New Deal, when protections were put in place for children and workers, these areas were the province of Black workers, so racist white supremists in government made absolutely sure Blacks would not reap the benefits accorded to most in the New Deal. Field hands, porters, and domestic workers were excluded for spite as well as to get their labor for less.

Unions have never taken root in the South because industrialists perennially resorted to scaring white workers with the spectre of blacks being treated as equals in integrated unions. It didn't matter that the factory owners lived in NYC, it was an effective ploy to stave off unionization.

Pitting whites against blacks, getting them to go at other's throats, Sun Tzu's trick of divide and conquer, is still employed in subtle ways to keep working class people fighting among themselves for table scraps dropped by the 1 percent rather than demanding a living wage.

Anybody who claims there's no such thing as enduring systematic racism is gaslighting, or as we used to say in more primitive times, blowing smoke up your ass.

Do you know where your voting machine software is?

Apparently, there is no federal investigation into where the software that was stolen (by Trump loyalists) in Georgia from Coffee County voting machines has been disseminated. Certainly, it has been widely distributed to hackers, and that means state and federal elections are vulnerable to unlimited tampering. Hey, it's just democracy that's at stake, so why worry?

Austerity, exploitation, inequality? Yes, please!

The first item listed in Harper's Index last month was "Percentage by which US adults are more likely to agree with the Republicans' economic platform than the Democrats': 40". Let's tick off a few things that this Republican economic agenda, which US adults so overwhelmingly agree with, includes: more tax breaks for the rich (a la trickle-down); cuts to Social Security and Medicaid; privatization of Social Security, Medicare, and the US Post Office; maintaining the cruelly low minimum wage; elimination and prevention of unions; enforcing repayment in full of crushing student debt, the astronomical cost of higher education in the the US; reductions to the already stingy safety net, thereby increasing the shameful percentage of US children living in poverty; repealing child labor laws; no further discussion of reducing the bloated cost of pharmaceuticals. These are some of the very things that have immiserated the working class over the past four decades, yet apparently, over two thirds of US adults can't get enough of it.

Was the New Deal a hallucination? Was FDR a fictitious character? Was Charles Dickens pushed down the memory hole by Ayn Rand?

If you're going to have a winner-take-all economy, if you're going to entertain racism and discrimination, if you're going to denigrate the very idea of things held in trust for all in the commons, if you're going to value property rights above all others, then you fucking well better have a vicious, well financed police force and an extensive prision system to stave off liberty for the masses and sustain an unnatural state of power and wealth for the few. Just sayin'.

Pedestrian Risk

Prior to the establishment of uniform national traffic laws around 1980, some states turned on red and yellow lights simultaneously to permit pedestrian crossing. The intersection belonged to pedestrians when this configuration was showing and they could cross diagonally as well as perpendicularly. Since no car at the intersection could turn a wheel during the red-yellow, pedestrians were much safer. As it is now, even if you are crossing with the green light, you have to watch for cars coming from behind that are taking a right as well as those coming toward you that are taking a left. (Ironically, crossing in the middle of a block is easier because it only requires looking left, then right.) Most suburbanites are not aware of how precarious crossing at an intersection is because they rarely cross a street on foot.

Authoritarians are making childbirth compulsory, but not paid parental leave, affordable childcare, family medical care, or a living wage for parents. This is the kind of world authoritarians want. They'll tell you it's Valhalla and demand that you agree with them. Or else.

Biden sees the event horizon

No. Hell no. If something in the surreal political world is working, leave it alone! Biden, most of the time, surprises us with the iconic Democratic stances he takes. You'd think he hadn't been paying any attention at all during the eight years he worked at the Obama-Hoover White House!

Of course the guy has been a lifelong corporate tool, but sticking with him is a dam site better than picking another Obama-Hoover. He obviously senses that we are nearing the event horizon of a fascist black hole, and he's doing the minimum required to keep us from being sucked in. Unfortunately, no one else in the Demoflatic hierarchy even gets that we're on the brink of anything. Pelosi didn't. Schumer doesn't, or doesn't care.

So, if the horse you're riding still seems spry enough, don't lose the lead by switching mounts. Could that be a mistake? Sure, but momentum trumps contingencies. If the Democratic Party, and hence the country, does manage to survive, it needs to start trusting some of its few remaining juniors with the reins, but that's for after the 2024 race.

Of course, much depends on how effective the corporate media is at dragging Biden down because he won't fuck working people hard enough.

Medicare DisAdvantage

If you don't already realize that insurers have us on the hook like trout, take in this headline from Common Dreams: "Medicare Advantage Overbills Taxpayers by $140 Billion a Year -Enough to Wipe Out Medicare Premiums"

Or... keep watching TV/chasing internet memes and let yourself be perpetually misdirected so that rich investors can continue to have you for lunch, and your children for a tasty dessert too. And don't forget to sign up for Medicare ADVANTAGE!

Moms for Liberty: smug, self-satisfied church ladies feverishly aroused by the aphrodisiac of power. The 21st century equivalent of the Ladies Brown Shirt Auxiliary.

Generally speaking, the more someone touts their personal faith, the more perfidious they are.

It irks me that some people don't see through the Republican Snowjob. Repubs appeal to unsophisticated people on the false grounds that to their detriment, too much is being transferred to minorities. However, the fact is that the goodies are almost all going to fat cats, the Ritchie Rich oligarchs.

Georgia state politicians gainsaying and threatening locally elected DAs like Fani Willis is incompatible with democracy. High handedly changing the rules to their liking is in line with what the Nazi Party did while taking power in Germany in the 1930's. Expanding authoritarian regimes change the structure of the existing government in order to take absolute control "legally".

Neoliberal Enlightenment: Gateway to Fascism

Since the 1980's, we have been admonished to accept the concept of the Virtue of Selfishness. We have been told that everyone should look after their own interests exclusively and not worry about how others are faring because that's the widest path to prosperity for all. We have been informed that there's no such thing as society, that there are only individuals, each competing for survival. By these rules a lie is as good as the truth, or even better if it serves one's own interests more. Trust is outmoded and has been replaced by transactions between wary adversaries. Isolation has become endemic.

In keeping with these rules we've abandoned empathy, charity, community, and any interest in the common good. We've replaced them with greed, vindictiveness, and thirst for retribution. "There but for the grace of God go I" has been supplanted by the neoliberal mantra, "I've got mine."

In short, we have attained neoliberal enlightenment. Now we are suitably angry, fearful, and nihilistic. Next phase? Authoritarian fascism, in which we subsume ourselves in the state and/or submit to a supreme leader. Why? Because as any idiot knows, no man is an island and neoliberalism has brought us to a place of such loneliness and despair that we long to be a part of something bigger than ourselves again.

Think of it as a rebound relationship: after estrangement from liberal democracy we're now contemplating a date with fascism.

Some People

Some people didn't want to believe the obvious, that smoking was very bad for your lungs. Some people, despite the evidence and the science, refused to believe in global warming. Some people, despite the gruesome statistics, won't admit that the wanton proliferation of guns  has led to ongoing mayhem and changed idyllic grade schools into wary fortresses. Some people, based on zero supporting facts and even massive evidence to the contrary, choose to repeat the foolishness that the 2020 election was stolen. Some people, despite what's in the news every single day, insist that because Barack Herbert Obama-Hoover was elected in 2008, systemic racism no longer exists, if it ever did.

It's the same people. The same narcissistic shit sticks playing the contrarian to push their self-aggrandizing personal narratives, no matter what the facts are, not matter what the price.

The Treacherous Road Ahead

Unobtainable, unaffordable childcare. Crushing credit card debt (from borrowing in lieu of adequate wages). Housing costs that have risen so steep the American Dream has evaporated for many, even those whose parents owned their own houses. Medical care that is a luxury, not a certainty. Hundreds of thousands of children and many adults recently abandoned to hunger. And all the rest of the bread-and-butter stuff that is becoming out of reach for ordinary people and average families.

Capitalism, or "crony capitalism", or financialization, or trickle down economics, or neo-liberalism, or whatever else under the sun you want to call it is failing most Americans and their families. Corporations pay no taxes and politicians are either maddeningly ineffectual or else strident demagogues trying to turn us against one another using race, religion, and imbecilic conspiracies.

The last advanced society to be under this kind of stress was Germany in the 1930's. Is that where we're headed?

Get ready for the Two Minutes Hate

On August 5th, the Times went after a multimillionaire who openly disagrees with the current US policy toward China. The paper expended 3000 words implying that he was a foreign agent, which they didn't actually prove.

Maybe the guy just doesn't buy the official line that we're at war with Eurasia and we've always been at war with Eurasia.

Maybe this whole article was done at the behest of the State Department or the intelligence community. Remember how Times writers worked with the Bush Administration to convince the country that Saddam Hussein was behind 911 so that invading Iraq was not only  justified, but imperative?

The Times had yellow cake on its face then, and it very well could now too. The establishment in government seems intent on overlooking how corporate America force-fed China with manufacturing business for decades to take advantage of cheap labor and increase their profits. Predictably, this has strengthened and grown China's economy over time, even as it has decimated the American middle class.

Now we're at a point where those US corporations are being bypassed. Foreign manufactures are reaching US consumers directly. Now all of a sudden China is evil. Then too, formerly middle class people who have been reduced in station are angry and showing a willingness to toss off the political system that long ago abandoned them. This obviously is alarming to the establishment, which might like to provide a common enemy to unify the people and reclaim the alienated. If you don't have Emmanuel Goldstein handy, Xi Jinping will do.

Tool of the 1% says what?

Earlier this week my local paper presented a reprint of an article regarding the current unexpected increase in the federal debt, which is occurring despite the growing economy, which should result in higher tax revenues. The article seemed to hover over several possibilities, but never really came to a definitive conclusion.

At no point did it consider the huge tax reductions that were instituted during the previous administration as a possible cause of anemic tax revenues. This is strange because we have the example of Greece, which chose to borrow rather than tax its wealthiest citizens, eventually leading to a debt crisis. If there, why not here?

Worse, at the end of the article it cited the recent increase in Social Security benefits, an adjustment for inflation, as a partial cause of the increased debt. This is insipid because Social Security is a completely separate system and therefore cannot affect the federal debt in any way, good or bad. This fact has been stated publicly hundreds if not thousands of times, yet the article disingenuously tossed it out there once again. Overall, the article was not helpful. Or trustworthy.

Behind the Conservative Mask

Quoting from a recent article on masking: The new mandates are "abject madness," Noah Rothman wrote at the National Review. During the height of the pandemic emergency, masking became a "signifier of tribal identity and cultural tastes." Now? The reappearance of a few mandates smacks of a "public-relations campaign designed to convince America's institutional stewards to force a full-scale return to the bad old days." Mask mandates should be a "quaint artifact" of the emergency. Instead, it seems little has changed "among those who pine for the restrictions on social and economic life that pertained during the pandemic."

My response: He decries masking as evil and stupid because it became "a signifier of tribal identity and cultural tastes." And how did this happen? Because he and his ilk made it that way using bluster, bullying, and obfuscation -just as he is doing in his article now. People died as a result of his misinformation and misdirection, and not just the ones who drank his poison kool aid. The US and Britain had the highest per capita Covid death rate among our peer nation, mostly because conservatives like him made it a tribal identity/values issue for narcissistic boobs to not get vaccinated or wear masks.

Then he condemns " ...those who pine for the restrictions on social and economic life that pertained during the pandemic."-ah, the ad hominem attack, an essential tactic of those who wish to avoid any honest discussion based on facts. Here's the real scoop: although we might not ever get rid of covid, we should at least consider that masking now would be a setback for the virus. The current strain is more communicable than its predecessors, so masking could reduce its spread, and the less it spreads, the less chance it has to mutate and become more lethal to a wider part of the population. Talking about kids here, for example.

So, my consideration about whether or not to mask up in public is not based on any perverse desire to impose unnecessary restrictions on society as this scribbler claims. God no, I would hate to impinge on any of his precious, selfish, self-centered freedoms. On the other hand, I do resent that he is reinvigorating the ignorance of his readers so that I might feel their ire if I do decide to wear a mask.

This guy is a privilege-drenched, half-assed bully who wouldn't know a logical argument if it punched him in the face, or the Truth if it kicked him in the nuts. I say to him: kiss my ass you right wing dipshit, you over-indulged mama's boy who was picked on as a scaredy-cat kid but now pretends he's a tough guy. Conservatives are wimps who need to gas each other up in a never ending circle jerk and pretend to be big men. How's that for an ad-hominem attack, asswipe?

Please sir, may I have yet another?

Reagan sold us on the pure bullshit that if you unburden the golden children, the gifted the entrepreneurs from paying high taxes, then their innate superiority and general magicality would be unleashed and make the world a cornucopia for all. It was called "trickle down economics" by everyone except W. Bush's pop, who called it "voodoo economics ". Of course it was pure sophism. The subsequent paring down and ultimate death of the middle class is the conclusive proof of that. But because we don't live in an actual democracy, our leaders (both Dems and 'Pubs) are continually giving tax breaks to the oligarchs as if that were fertilizer for a garden of wonderfulness.

What I have come to realize is that it's also bunk that if you interfere with the marketplace in any way, say by forcing an increase in the minimum wage, you will reduce the produce of all. It's essentially the same bullshit that's used to justify the tax giveaways of voodoo economics, except applied to wages. It's just another ruse employed by the oligarchs to keep their undeserved revenue flowing and uncut.

They claim that paying people a living wage will scuttle the boat, but for whom? The worker is drowning NOW, and we've been forgoing raising wages for decades. Maybe the average worker is just being cheated, and this horse shit about higher wages depressing the economy is just another specious argument by Richie Rich to keep all the marbles. You think?

Look, the historical evidence shows that paying people a living wage expands and strengthens the economy. Look at the post WWII period for the proof of that. Earlier than that, Henry Ford had justified paying his workers twice what the competition paid by saying it would allow them to become his customers too. Whatever his faults, the man had that down pat.

Paying people shit wages while claiming that it will lead to better wages (or conversely, claiming that paying them higher wages will ultimately result in lower wages) is even stupider than not taxing billionaires because it might dampen their limitless desire to make more money.

Bring the marketplace to heel NOW, pay a living wage, and while you're at it, eat the rich because they are certainly out to eat you.

Fascists, authoritarians, and Nazis, oh my

According to Mussolini, fascism is "the union of the corporate and the state", and he should know. But we throw the invective "fascist" around all the time meaning something entirely different, so that in the end nothing is clear. Calling people fascists when we mean "authoritarians" or "totalitarians" just muddies the water. Because fascism is inherently undemocratic it leans toward authoritarianism, but fascism is not intrinsically violent or prone to atrocity. Italian fascists did not put children on trains in an attempt to transport them to concentration camps, that was the Nazis and their puppet French Vichy.

I'm not apologizing for fascism, I'm just saying that if you think someone is a right wing authoritarian, say so, or if you think they're a left wing totalitarian, say that. But let's reserve the term fascist for when it applies. Like, well, say a government that is in bed with its military industrial complex.

Having said all that, there is another category of people who are both fascist and authoritarian, and who further indulge in the scapegoating of racial, ethnic, and other minorities, create division, and spur their followers to violence. These people should be called who they most closely resemble historically: Nazis.

Democracy Sinking

This is a political shipwreck. We have a corrupt two party system that runs on legalized bribes. That can't be changed now because of accumulated bad decisions by a tainted Supreme Court. So, we are cursed with a perpetual choice between the lesser of two evils as both sides inexorably degrade over time. No rescue via a third party is possible because we do not have automatic runoff voting, which would open the door for one. And neither of the two major parties wants automatic runoff because they don't want outside competition, so we won't get it.

The vast majority has absolutely no say in how the government functions. This is why we have a Congress that is currently suggesting cutting 62 billion from education while lavishing almost a trillion on the military industrial complex, and why there's a push for a federal abortion ban even though 70 percent of the population wants abortion to be available and legal.

While the Republican Party devolves into the Neo Fascist and the Democratic Party becomes the New Weimar, we ourselves have stopped being citizens and become instead siloed money chasers, as we were led to do by the Ayn Rand philosophers. Our democracy is shipwrecked, and there are no lifeboats.

Intelligent Species: Turning Edens into wastelands since the Big Bang

Future survivors will view sacrificing the planet's pollinators for expediency and a quick buck as the ultimate expression of 21st Century heedlessness. That won't be what destroyed civilization though, that will have been heat and violent weather. Either continuous broiling will have resulted in famine, displacement, disease, and mass homicide, or else simultaneous worldwide conflagration will have been followed by a sterilizing multi year winter. Either way there won't be much remaining to pollinate, and a major food source will probably be other people.

This is the way of the world. It's probably also the way of the universe. Gene mutations producing cleverness are ubiquitous, but there is no gene for wisdom. Hence, all intelligent species that evolve anywhere in the cosmos will ultimately destroy themselves. That was Carl Sagan's answer to Fermi's question, "Then where are they?".

The Big Cheat

Gee, somebody just downgraded the USA's credit. Big surprise. Why would our credit not be downgraded? After all, within the last several years we've slashed revenue by giving the wealthy a tremendous tax cut so that they are paying a tiny fraction of what they once contributed.

Reagan cut taxes for the rich, ran up the deficit, but then with Al Greenspan's approval tapped Social Security to cover it. Subsequent administrations, both Republican and Democratic, cut taxes for the rich, deepened the deficit, and then didn't even try to cover it up. Instead they used the deficit they created as an excuse to reduce services. That's their trick. And that's why we don't have the benefits working people in our peer counties have.

Got healthcare? Affordable childcare? Paid parental leave? A living wage? Affordable housing? Security? Well, others do but we don't, and that's why.

from The Intercept, 2-26-23:

If there were a God, then Governor Abbott would be removed to the desert and left to roast in the sun without water. Why? Because he signed a bill preventing any locality in Texas from enforcing laws mandating water breaks for outside workers. Well, he hasn't been transported, he's still sitting pretty in air conditioning, swilling Perrier, and so there can't be.

There is no authoritarian more vicious and inclined toward atrocity than a religious authoritarian. Why? Because he thinks he has divine license to torture and kill.

Hey Gov. Abbott, Greg old boy! Do you have any idea who said this?

"If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town."

Here's a hint: he's your professed Savior

Anger is a political gold mine for Republicans

Middle class people are understandably angry because their standard of living has been declining for forty years. They are angry at the Democratic Party that was supposed to protect them but has been missing in action since the Clinton Administration.

The Republican Party has exploited this anger. This is ironic, because the Republican Party promotes the interests of the very corporations and ultra wealthy who are responsible for the decline of the middle class. Nonetheless, the Republican Party has been clever enough to give the people's anger a place to be heard and reverberate in. It needs only to point out the truism that the Democrats have abandoned middle class working people. It conveniently leaves out the fact that the Republican Party has abetted the predation of the middle class.

It works. People are following right wing demagogues who offer them targets, albeit false targets, for their anger. Rather than blame the oligarchs responsible for their immiseration, people are allowing themselves to be pitted against gays, immigrants, leftists, etc., the same scapegats Hitler used to harness people's discontent in the 1930's.

The tone deaf and inept Democratic Party has been inadvertently helpful here by nobly championing the rights of these targeted groups while simultaneously ignoring the plight of working people, sometimes even scoffing at them. ("You're sinking bacause you didn't earn a STEM degree, stupid.") How better to cultivate resentment to the Republicans' advantage?

So, anger has become a political commodity to be spent by whoever is clever enough to use it. And in the end working people will be no better off because someone in a blind rage can't pick out the valid target.

Where do we go from here? Civil war? War with China? Authoritarian crackdown? The answer is this: we will be led down whichever path best leads to the safeguarding of the wealth of the one percent.

The Conservative's trick of trading Rationality for Inclusion / "How I learned to stop thinking and embrace balderdash"

People will pretend to believe, even to themselves, the most inane bullshit. This despite the fact they know a thing is hogwash. Why would they put themselves through this? Well, to them there is a palatable reward for doing so.

If you have a strong need to belong to a group and that group has some unrealistic or even obnoxious tenets, you might be tempted to embrace those idiocies just to fit in with the crowd. You might balance being left out or even ostracized against having to swallow hard and profess to believe the ridiculous. The uneasiness you'd feel standing out and alone might be much worse than the self-abasement involved in going along with obvious foolishness.

Any of us can be inclined to fall into this mode. However, conservatives are more apt to be in need of group acceptance than others, so they are more at risk. More than left-leaning individuals, conservatives gravitate toward groups. Liberals aren't as clannish, and sometimes this works to their disadvantage because they don't have ready allies at hand when they could use them. But it also causes conservatives to forgo vaccinating their children even when they understand the value, even the necessity of vaccinations. Because of the conservative groupthink that vaccinations are useless or worse, true believers will play roulette with their kids' health just to be in with the crowd.

Similarly, anyone who is sentient understands completely that the last presidential election, though close, was conducted fairly and Trump simply lost both the popular vote and in the Electoral College. But as an article of faith most conservatives have repeated the ridiculous claim of a stolen election, a falsehood that even Trump himself has never believed. They suspend reason so that they can stay in the club, perhaps even elevate themselves within it by repeating the idiotic mantra of the Big Steal louder than other acolytes.

Again, though they sacrifice their individuality and integrity in doing this, as a group they actually achieve a win: they have used the ruse of a stolen election to push through despicable laws that will suppress votes of their political adversaries, thereby gaining an edge through subterfuge. This despite the fact that very, very little voter fraud has been uncovered, and further, where it was found to have happened it was usually perpetrated by Trump's own followers.

But the whole premise here is that facts are secondary to fraternal ties. Truth is irrelevant. Belonging is paramount.

So, because conservatism is in ascendancy, backwardness and balderdash will continue to pollute discourse. The requisite is not to be correct, certainly not to play fair, but to be in good standing with the right.

Also, I think the energy behind anti-trans youth and "wokeness" might not all be down to bigotry. Rather, frantic conservative parents are trying to shield their own children from accepting these things so that if they do turn out to be gay they will at least choose to be closeted. Why? Because they want what they believe is best for their children, and in their way of thinking what's best is to be accepted by the group and not be an outcast. That's even if living a lie eats at them from the inside for their entire lives.

You can imagine a conservative of yore saying, "Put on your Sunday go-to-meeting clothes and come along to the lynchin' with us. Everybody's goin'!"

Conservatives are paper tigers who habitually need to gas eachother up and who cannot stand on their own. Once a mama's boy, always a mama's boy. Power to the sheeple!

Politicians working for the 1% are looking to reduce funding for IRS operations. This will assist in their clients' underpayment of taxes by reducing their chance of being audited. This is equivalent to burglars asking for a reduction in police patrols, or foxes wanting privacy fences around hen houses, or the cat asking if it can have a sleepover with the canary. Why can't people see this?

If you're an asshole

A) In the 80's US based international corporations began offshoring manufacturing to China because it was cheap and they could increase their profits by doing so. At the center of the advantage was lower labor costs. What this meant to US workers was fewer jobs, suppressed wages, and the death of unions. And of course, the subsequent deterioration of a large swath of the Midwest. On the other hand, people could now cash their unemployment checks and drive to WalMart to buy the stuff they used to make themselves at crazy low prices.

Now the same class of fat cats who offshored all the manufacturing jobs wants to punish China for toiling and becoming prosperous, capitalizing on our greed and stupidity. Sounds reasonable, if you're an asshole.

B) Hey, the good news is that you may be able to keep hold of some of your scattering marbles! There's another new Alzheimer drug coming on line that actually might have some efficacy. The bad news is that it will cost about $27,000 a year and bankrupt Medicare. You however, will only be on the hook for 6,600, so no worries. The drug was probably expensive to get through trials, but it's also likely that the basic research was paid for by taxpayers.

The three men who developed insulin sold their patent rights for a buck each because they wanted the drug to be available to everyone who needed it. Now in our era of financialized capitalism, there will be no such dunderheaded altruism. Instead, the drug company will be holding a gun to your addled head. Sounds reasonable, if you're an asshole.

Death and tax preparation fees

Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently disclosed that commercial tax preparers have been giving users' private filing data to tech companies. Presumably, this was in exchange for money or some other form of remuneration. This is reprehensible, of course, but the more serious problem with commercial tax preparers is that they lobby to keep tax filing so difficult that people feel the need to use their services. Tax filing should be made a lot simpler, but enough politicians experience the largess of industry lobbyists that nothing ever gets done.

In most of our peer countries, the government does your taxes and you can either accept their calculations or choose to file on your own. Of course, those countries don't have a system of legal bribery like ours has.

We're OK, really

Everybody is nonplussed about the right wing's ongoing successful attacks on abortion rights. But there is no mystery here. In a democracy, if over 70 percent of the population wanted something, they would have it. News flash: this isn't a democracy. It never was really, but it's never been further from being one as it is now.

It's an oligarchy. What the rich want, they get. They own all three branches of the federal government, all state politicians, and most of the local ones. What they want they always get and what the plebes want is ignored. The Princeton Report by Gilens and Page documents this, and they aren't the only ones to point this out.

So, why do the oligarchs want to eliminate abortion? Most of them don't, actually. It doesn't matter one way or the other to them because they have always had access to abortion and alway will. But in order to prevail in our pay-to-play elections, in addition to owning all the candidates, gerrymandering, and suppressing the vote of any opposition, they still need numbers. So, they have partnered with right wing nuts. The bargain is that the wing nuts get to call the tune on things like abortion, and the oligarchs get their votes to short-circuit democracy at the polls.

P.S. If there's anything else you think is fair, like Medicare for All, a living wage, free higher education, affordable housing and childcare, etc., you will never get those things either, and for the same reason: the oligarchs aren't interested in them. In fact, they want to pare back what there is now, including public education at all levels and Social Security. They just want to keep the money they rake in and not have to pay taxes. They just want everything, that's all.

And we will smile as we hand it to them like the racist submissives we are. But at least we still have our guns, so we're OK. (We can use them later to blow our own brains out! :)

4th of July, Senescent Empire

The USA is the Roman Empire 2.0. Recently, recently in historical terms that is, it has abandoned the Bread and Circus that FDR craftily introduced to stabilize the empire. Everybody is unhappy now except for the rich, who are wallowing in their infinite advantages. But even they sense an impending implosion.

All the outrageous inequities that exist are a result of the restored hegemony of the one percent at the concomitant loss of the plebes. That's probably an inevitable outcome of unregulated capitalism. However, as Norman Mailer said, "Marxism is a morally superior system, but people just aren't up to it." So, no help there.

We'll soon have right wing authoritarian rule, perhaps replete with death squads. The reactionaries will be in their glory. That's how badly we boomers stewarded the late 20th and early 21st century. (Shout out here to Bill and Newt!) But aren't smartphones dazzling though!

That other Freedom

What about the freedom of a seven year old to go to school and have his biggest concern be the spelling test on Friday? The freedom to attend a school where the doors are open and it doesn't resemble a county jail? The freedom to not have to endure mass shooter drills? What about that freedom?

Sure, when I was a kid we had to go into the hall and practice "duck and cover", but we weren't really scared because we were confident that the adults of the world would not be so stupid as to blow us all up. We were right, because back then we had the freedom to rely on adults not to be idiots.

Massive Misdirection

People don't have adequate medical care, affordable child care, rent money, or even food without charging it to the credit card, and they are beside themselves with worry that their kids might get slaughtered at school. So, what's dominating politics and the news? Trans athletes, book bans, and one-handed gun grips. The overlords are splitting their sides laughing.

Requiem for a Jester

We see the screwy goof perpetrated in an idle moment as a funny diversion, but for them it is a courageous act meant to fend off the darkness.

When later they start to stumble, we tell ourselves that they will pull themselves out of it, using their famous sense of humor.

When they take their own life, we are gobsmacked. We shouldn't be. They just reached a point of exhaustion and couldn't fight the darkness anymore.

In his final note, my friend said that what he felt like was being in a house on fire -with no escape.

We must be ready with our fire axes, we must charge into that house. We must not hesitate to go to their rescue.

Or at least try.

Do not fail your jester friends. Heed the smoke. Brave the flames.

Forever, not for better

When I was growing up in the lower middle working class, the world seemed benevolent and the future full of promise. My parents were doing better than their parents did, we would do better than they were doing, and presumably our children would do better still. There was enough to go around, so the attitude was that if you had the drive you could work harder than everyone else and get way ahead of the pack, or if you just wanted to live a normal life you could choose to do that and survive. Not saying that you didn't have to work, but that you could choose your own balance point.

You didn't have to chase money, you didn't have to get a college education, but if you did, you could study something that interested you and fulfilled your desire to learn rather than something that was purely for the purpose of making money.

Things have changed a little bit over the past five or six decades. Life is more desperate. It's every man or woman for themself. Eat or be eaten. It's closer now to the Hunger Games than it is to Woodstock.

And my children are struggling financially. They have all but given up on ever owning a house. They worry about healthcare.

The religious wing nuts are queing up to become our overseers. Democracy is dead. The only freedom left is the freedom to carry a gun, and even that is becoming more of an obligation than a choice.

The world I grew up in is extinct. There is no longer any such thing as society, only individuals. Lonely, desperate, angry individuals who will run you down if you stray into their path. Or shoot you

Pick the Piker

Here's a short list of countries, followed by another list showing how much each spends per person on public broadcasting, similar to our own PBS.

United States, Norway, South Korea, Finland, United Kingdom, Denmark, Japan, France.

$81, $75, $93, $100, $110, $2, $53, $14.

The lists are shuffled. Want to guess which one is the piker at under two bucks per person?

Be a Fish

When politicians aver for keeping taxes low for Americans, they leave out the adjective "rich". I was born when Truman was president. Back then, the lion's share of taxes was paid by the rich and corporations. Since then, that's been reversed. Now working people shoulder the majority of the tax burden.

Shrewdly, disingenuously, the political servants of the rich now push for cutting programs that help working families and the poor by pretending to care about the average working person's tax burden. Keep in mind that it wouldn't exist if the rich paid their fair share as they did in the 1950's. The rich have already beaten the system. Now they're just sandbagging.

Ever wonder why our peers in Europe have universal healthcare, better social programs, childcare, more time off, etc.? It's because their rich didn't get the early jump ours did in dismantling their social support net.

So, go ahead and be jealous of the family next door if they are getting needed assistance. Demand that they get nothing that you don't have. Ignore the fact the rich are bolting on the bill. Shake the hand of your smiling overlord and vote for him or her on election day. Be a fish.

Nice Guys After All

I have to confess, I have been vexed by the conservative-driven liberalization of gun laws, and I have loathed them for the escalation in gun violence that has predictably resulted. After all, when you make guns as available as Halloween candy, they will come out more often and they will be used more frequently.

I have been especially irked by the number of school mass shootings, and I have blamed conservatives adamantly for this. I have also blamed them for the need to turn elementary schools into fortresses, fortresses under siege, because these conservatives have refused to consider any common sense restrictions whatsoever.

But now I see that I have been hasty in my condemnation. What changed my mind? Why, the now clear plan that conservatives have of evacuating children from the danger zones our schools have become and sheltering them instead in comparatively safe places like meat packing plants and construction sites. They are doing this by overthrowing those pesky, socialist-inspired child labor laws that hampered children's welfare for so long. My apologies, conservatives. You really are stalwart protectors of children after all.

No Thanks

Some people want to raise their children, and my grandchildren, by telling them myths to spare them hurtful truths. No thanks. In the last century there was an advanced country that decided to raise its children on myths.

Those children later ended up freezing to death on the outskirts of Stalingrad.

Low pay means you can't play

It's a pay-to-play system and neither party receives enough cash from the working public to buy it a voice. The Democratic Party received significant cash from unions at one time, but only while FDR's New Deal made strong unions possible. Once Reagan attacked and diminished the unions, the New Democrats sought Wall Street and Silicon Valley money. Now they work for private equity concerns.

Plainly, working people do not pay either party's bills, and therefore lack representation. Gilens and Page have proven this. They demonstrated that politically, the wants and needs of the majority are emphatically ignored by politicians.

So, our beating on about tax unfairness, low wages, inequality and such is really just pointless bleating. We are an abandoned class of people who, albeit the overwhelming majority, have no power and can be brushed aside. We are like a discarded mistress acting as though she still had some claim on her former paramour, knowing it's just a bluff.

The game is definitely over for working people, and that's why we can't and won't have nice things ever again.

Triumph of the Ratings

CNN gave The Donald a "town hall meeting", which he predictably used to deliver his own version of Mein Kampf. Now they have committed to giving him a second shot at it because ratings were so darn good. But being a visual medium, wouldn't it make more sense for CNN to let him have his own "Triumph of the Will''? Doesn't Leni Riefenstahl still work there?

The Deficit Snow Job

The Republican Congress is a one trick pony, and the trick is this: lower taxes on the wealthy, creating a deficit, then cry poor as an excuse to reduce transfer payments to the working class and the needy. They have done this over and over since Reagan, and to their credit, it has always worked. The result is the current dizzying inequality in which the few possess more wealth now in relation to the many than had been the case since the Great Depression. Add to this suppression of wages and you've got yourself a really nice oligarchy. As for the poor, let them eat F35s.

In their vomit inducing way, Republicans are looking to roll back child labor laws. Their kids won't be losing any fingers.

SMUG, INSULTING, AND GUARANTEED TO PRECLUDE ANY FUTURE DIALOG BETWEEN SIDES. NEWT, YOU HAVE TAUGHT THEM WELL.

Keeping the Proles Down

Republicans don't care about the deficit. After all, they created it! They have one purpose: to crush the working class and make absolutely sure that it never again rises to the level of freedom and prosperity it enjoyed in the '70's. That's it. That's their sole motivation.

Envy and Inequality

In an interview clip, one of the founders of Berkshire Hathaway gave his opinion about the way the little people are fatally hampered by their own shortcoming, envy. This was definitely NOT Warren Buffet, by the way. (The philosophies of the two men are so different that it's amazing they were able to work together for decades to make so much money.) Anyway, I don't know how old the interview was but I think the guy is still around, and since his opinion has billions behind it, I felt it was necessary to examine what he had to say.

His gist was that there are no really poor people left in this country so that the one remaining social problem is that the little people harbor envy toward the rich. For him, it's this shortcoming that spoils everything and things would be fine for everyone if they stopped feeling this way. For the moment, forget the astounding assertion that there are no poor, forget his apparent complete lack of empathy for the millions who are experiencing financial stress, and let's please focus on the assertion that the real problem is that the little people indulge in the sin of envy.

To move the discussion along, let's grant for the moment that people already have everything they need. If that were true, then in the man's analysis they would be happy if they'd only allowed themselves to be, but instead they look at the ostentatious wealth of the few and choose to boil with resentment. To be fair to the man, he did remark that ostentation was not such a good idea, that he didn't approve of "bling" himself (he and Buffet are in accord here at least), that it's unnecessary and even tacky. Thus, he let open a small crack to the possibility the wealthy might be partially responsible in that they inadvertently feed into the stupidity of the little people. Thanks a bunch. Mighty big of you.

I am about to exploit that crack by expanding on the dimensions of the ostentation that he acknowledged.

In a hypothetical, let's say he and I are both kids in grade school and that we sit together at lunchtime everyday. I, being the scion of a wealthy investor, bring a delicious lunch our maid packed for me each day while he eats the basic food the cafeteria puts out. Further, before going back to the classroom I unfailingly get an ice cream, whereas he seldom has the money for that. This scenario repeats from day to day for the entire school year and for the duration of elementary school.

Now, in this scenario we are both being fed. Nutritionally, we are on an equal footing. But how would he feel, this little guy from the lower class? Hurt. Wounded. Gypped. Sullen. Angry. Resentful.

This is what makes his argument absurd: he glosses over that envy is an integral part of human nature, and rich or poor, rich AND poor in fact, we all feel it. Like all primates, we are constantly observing where we are in relation to others. While this is often denigrated as "keeping up with the Joneses", it serves an evolutionary purpose. If we didn't look up occasionally to get a check on where the others are at, we would risk being left behind by the herd. Envy has roots in evolution and is part of an essential survival mechanism. But if we are constantly presented with a view of the herd pulling away, we have an irrepressible, innate reaction of panic. If that feeling persists, we decline. We become sullen and resentful.

Further, why do the rich buy "bling" in the first place? Well, of course there is the lure of pretty baubles, but the rich are also exhibiting reverse envy. They are indulging in an innate need to show their dominance and superiority. "Look! I'm rich, I have everything, and you don't!" Even more crucially, the little person has to serve the rich one to obtain a few dollars so that they can survive. The little boy has to carry the rich kid's books on the way home from school every day. Understandable resentment? I think so.

Bottom line: it's absurd to rub people's noses in your higher standing of living every day and then blame them for reacting the precise way you wanted them to react, which is the way you would react if the shoe were on the other foot.

It must be very difficult to maintain empathy when one is filthy rich. You float so far above the crowd that you can't see their faces and you forget they are people the same as yourself. And perhaps you even forget who YOU are.

What makes a society (yes, ghost of Margaret Thatcher, there is such a thing as society) cohere is approximate equality. Without it, the extreme underdog has no dignity and will feel abandoned. Allow too many people to feel alienated for too long and the overlords will need to impose draconian rule or else suffer a revolution.

The Irish have an expression: "When it rains, everybody gets wet." When one does well, we all do well (because it's shared), and when times are slim we share what there is among us equally. That's the mortar that binds any community.

[Of course, during the Great Famine Irish peasants starved while their overlords continued to ship grain out of Ireland to England. And the English forbade anyone to feed the Irish lest they become lazy and dependent, which everyone other than the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire obeyed. He, being the charitable Muslum that he was, sent ships into Cork loaded with food, English edict be damned!]

That there are millionaires and billionaires is a failing of the system that can only lead to discord at best, bloodshed at worst.

Finally, why did this guy need to make so much money if not to put an infinite distance between himself and the poverty of his Depression Era youth? This is very understandable, but it is just another subconscious motivator. Like envy.

One last note: he actually said that people who were fat could not really be poor, as if a diet based on subsidized corn were a healthy diet. News flash: those fat/poor people do not live to be nearly 100 as he has. I think it was Herman Melville who remarked that the rich say the stupidest things about the poor.

The US needs an analyst

We have the means to make life tolerable, even pleasant, for everyone, but instead we waste all of our time bickering and then digging into our opposing positions. Problems are politicized the moment they're identified, so that solutions are unlikely if not impossible. There is so little common ground left that some politicians are even speaking of breaking up the country. They don't actually mean it, presumably, but their hyperbole gets them attention and donations, thus increasing their power within their party. That their rhetoric might lead ultimately to violence does not enter into their calculus because they are sociopaths.

If the US were a new patient at a mental health clinic, the initial symptoms noted would be anger, anxiety, mild paranoia, and a moderate tendency toward violence. After many sessions it would emerge that the basis of its mental problem is the dichotomy between what it was touted to be and what it has actually become. Hailed as the City on the Hill, it has been transformed into a heartless money-gathering machine. That's why it spends its day cursing and muttering to itself.

Startlingly, this is not an organic disease. It is actually inflicted on the US by a cabal that profits from the country's remaining in controlled mental crisis. Governmental dysfunction that precludes regulation boosts profitability. Precarity of the working class, perhaps 80% of the population, means that labor will be compliant and cheap. That this results in suffering for the majority is of no concern to the owners. They are rational and amoral. They chase money to the exclusion of, and to the detriment of everything else.

They are aware of the danger of going too far though. That's why they build safe rooms in their mansions, airstrips for a quick getaway on their vast properties, and purchase land in remote parts of the planet where they intend to ride out the violence that could ensue if they push so hard that the peasants finally reach a breaking point. The cabal remembers 1789. It is mindful of the extended use of Dr. Guillotine's invention then.

In summary, the US has a mental disease that is imposed on it by its gaslighting plutocracy. This affliction guarantees that nothing will be done to ameliorate suffering and deprivation. Nothing will be done about chemicals in the air and water causing a raft of medical diseases including the widespread decline in fertility. Nothing will be done to stop the planet's boiling. And most pernicious of all, nothing will be done to stop the trend toward the open denunciation of empathy. This last is the poison that will eventually break the mind of the country.

We have a national mental sickness similar to Germany's in the 1930's. Ain't we got fun!

Why are Americans so afraid and so trigger happy?

Simple. Rigid conservative values have taken over and compassion is out the window. "Woke" is a dismissive epithet, even though it means having empathy for others. Fear and loathing are in ascendancy. What's the big mystery here?

What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding? Everything, apparently. That's just the way the owners want things to be. Savor your Two Minutes Hate and keep a gun at the ready. And above all, DON'T TAX THE RICH!

Let's face it, gun violence in this country is a huge disappointment. Look at the news. Who gets shot? Nurses and elementary school kids. Older brothers picking up their little sisters. Teenage girls using somebody's driveway to turn their car around. Meanwhile, private equity investors and hedge fund managers are running around without a care in the world let alone a target on their back. Focus people. Focus.

The United States of Meanness

Right wing politicians have taken extreme and condtractory positions and are fervently turning those into "laws". They are forcing women who cannot afford to have another child to carry a fetus to term, then following that up with denying her food stamps unless she works, which she can't do if she can't provide the baby's daycare with diapers, which she can't because the rabid right wingers won't give her any because they think that is the responsibility of the mother. You remember the mother, right? She's the one who knew she couldn't afford another kid to begin with.

What are they thinking? Is this just an impulse to punish women for their promiscuity? Is it a gambit to own the libs using women as pawns? In any case, it's heartless. Since the advent of Newt Gingrich as US House Speaker, politics has become a blood sport. Draconian laws motivated by spasms of angst, hatred, and retribution are becoming the norm. The result of this is widespread misery which will intensify the longer the right wing is in power.

If my being woke bothers you, that's because you prefer being comatose.

In healthy times, DeSantis or Trump would never make it to center stage

They are right that things are out of kilter. Gilens and Page proved that what the majority wants is irrelevant. The monied elite get what they want from Congress, and if they don't want something, it doesn't happen.

But democracy did not fail us. We allowed an oligarchy to claw back into power beginning in the 1970's. They have thoroughly sabotaged the government just to save a buck on taxes and block regulation for their own gain. Now the system is vulnerable.

The nearest fascists came to taking power in the US was in the 1930's. FDR fought them off with the New Deal, but the potential FDR of our era was stabbed in the back by the DNC. Although Biden has made concessions to working people, he also reassured the financial elite that nothing will fundamentally change. Our democracy might be on its deathbed, a victim of opportunistic infection.

The school voucher strategy was cooked up out of desperation by school segregation advocates after it was finally outlawed. For libertarians, school vouchers have always been intended to be an interim step on the road to elimination of public schools altogether; Milton Freidman and his cohort freely admitted this. School vouchers are favored by those who think universal education is socialism, mainly wealthy conservatives who loathe paying taxes to educate other people's kids along with their own.

And vouchers are also being pushed by those who think the children of the lower classes should receive a more limited education, one meant to produce a caste of quasi-educated workers. School vouchers are sought by those who want a religious education for their children and they would like the rest of us to pay for it. As for what the majority of us want, we can go pound sand, obviously.

the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah are reflected in our asylum policy

I was brought up as Catholic, which means that I know more about comic books than I know about the Bible, and I wasn't even allowed to read comic books. But despite my ignorance, even as a kid, and even before I understood what homosexuality was, I thought it unlikely that Sodom and Gomorrah were punished solely for their supposed indulgence in homosexuality. Seems like a lot of effort to have expended on their destruction, too much to be explained merely by intolerance.

Now, I'm not on a rant here about how unfair the story of S&G is to the LGBT community, but rather, how it might relate to our current so-called asylum policy. Stay with me.

Somewhere along the way I learned that S&G were affluent towns. They did very well, having something to do with being on a trade route or something. They were well off. Today they'd be considered very upscale, the Malibu of their age. Evidently, they aspired to be like contemporary gated communities too, which could be at the crux of their destruction.

Back then, as it still is in much of the Middle East, extending hospitality to travellers and strangers was part of the cultural mores. Perhaps because S&G were so affluent, travellers might have gone out of their way to stop there. Perhaps some overstayed their welcome.

In any case, the people of S&G came to resent what they considered freeloaders. This "I've got mine" attitude was probably not appreciated by their peers elsewhere. Then S&G put out the word that if you came there expecting something for nothing, you would be buggered for your effrontery. (I think this likely be where the whole punished-for-being-gay meme arose.)

And so this brings us directly to the vilification and abuse of asylum seekers at our borders: Trump's henchman for immigration, Steven Miller, averred that if you start to treat children badly enough, you'll be able to convince other parents to stop trying to come with theirs.

I think you can see where I'm going here.

We scoffed at China for their former ONE Child policy, but student debt has become the de facto NO Child policy here.

There are at least three reasons for spending lavishly on defense. One is security, not the security of the country, but the security of defense industry CEO's stock portfolios. Another reason is to be able to bully numerous small countries into accepting the corporate-mandated neoliberal paradigm, rather than pursuing their own agendas which might actually be better for their people. The third reason is the true security of the nation, which could be accomplished at a tiny fraction of what's being spent now. Of course, there is a nasty fourth reason: to gear up and pair with domestic law enforcement to put down any popular uprising that might arise as a backlash to squandering so much on so-called "defense".

Forget Pizzagate, I got your conspiracy for ya right here!

The working class has been under attack for the past fifty years by the monied elite. The amazing thing is that most people don't even realize there's a class war, they just think things haven't been going their way and that the massive transfer of wealth to the upper ten percent happened organically. They've been told it's becuase of automation, or because they don't have the right form of education, and they buy that because they are trusting and ignorant. But this was no accident. The undermining of unions and the methodical elimination of the left are the two major weapons the oligarchy has employed to strip ordinary people of power and wealth.

It's all over now, they're coming in for the kill. All of the commons -that which belongs to the people together- will be privatized, worker protections will be completely eliminated, universal education will cease to exist, and the social safety net will be thrown overboard. People's existence will become even more precarious, and the stress of being poor in a rentier society will be ever increasing.

Serfdom looms ahead, and once people are completely bereft they might finally realize what's been done to them and by whom. They will either reflect on how artfully they were misled and how tragically they failed to muster any defense, or else they will still be in the dark and blame minorities or even themselves for their miserable condition. Regardless, they will be beyond redemption.

Meanwhile, every time a Republican or corporate Democrat talks about making cutbacks to "entitlements" while giving tax breaks to the rich, that's clearly another salvo in a class war that's coming to a conclusion very soon.

"There's class warfare, alright, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning" -- Warren Buffett

Sidney Marcus, cofounder of Home Depot, won the Plutocrats' Red Herring Toss last week when he claimed that Silicon Valley Bank failed because of "Diversity and Wokeness", rather than having been caught between making too many bets and operating with a bare minimum of deposits on hand, inviting a run. Sidney's not senile, yet. He's just blowing smoke up the arses of the rubes in service to the cause. Howda go Sid!

A little known and publicity-shy US Representative went before her home state legislature and implored them to protect transgender children by not allowing them to be medically treated.

She was completely insincere. She is smart enough to know that treatment has been demonstrated to improve and even to save the lives of trans kids. And the authoritarians that she's pandering to --the voters, not the state representatives who are just like her-- might know that fact or not, but in either case they won't care.

They are against homosexuality, period. They choose to see it as a vice that can be overcome if denied. Further, they reason that if you allow kids to resolve their conflicts successfully via medical means, then you are accepting homosexuality and even abbetting it.

They think they are protecting something. They never heard of "live and let live", they just conform to all norms on command and they vehemently protect the status quo. Plus, they are pining to have CONTROL as a payoff to themselves for having been so submissive.

OK, it was MTG.

Will working people realize that raising the minimum retirement age to 70 is just another bombshell in the class war waged against them?

Healthcare professionals went before the Georgia Senate to explain that treatment for gender dysphoria is decidedly better for young people than ignoring their issue. This was laudable, but it will have no effect on legislators from conservative districts. They are not nearly as concerned about the welfare of those kids as they are with pleasing their constituents, who feel threatened by any deviation from the norm, especially when it relates to sex. Reasoning with a cynical politician is futile. Seeking empathy from a zealot is pointless.

The $6K vouchers proposed by the Georgia Republicans are a siege weapon in the war against public education, the goal being to destroy it. There are two major groups behind this. Obviously, one is composed of segregationists, but the big money that funds the campaign to destroy public education comes from wealthy libertarians who are opposed to universal education in any form. Milton Freidman, the don of neoliberalism, was transparent about wanting this.

Once vouchers have done their job and public schools have disappeared, working families will find that their vouchers have shrunk in value. The wealthy will still be able to afford a superior education for their kids, but the children of ordinary people will get nothing beyond rudimentary schooling. And that is exactly what Milton Freidman wanted.

The comedian wasn't kidding

It's barrelling down the pike and it will be here any minute, V-day for the .01 percent. These are the final days in the class war that they've waged against the working class for over forty years. The Republican Party will now finally drive a stake into the heart of the New Deal, using the deficit showdown as their opening.

You didn't even know there was a class war going on, did you? There are several reasons for that, but although you're reading this and thinking it's hyperbole, during the next couple of years you'll come to realize just how much the scales have tipped, how completely the working class has been disenfranchised, and how inhumane the new reality will be.

Over the last forty-plus years, life for working people has become more and more precarious. The largely bought-out news media never comes close to telling the public the easy-to-understand reason why: the rich want it all, ALL, the same way they had it before the New Deal, and every day they have gotten closer to that goal by nibbling away the power of working people. Got unions? Of course you don't. That's the second thing they took away, right after eliminating the American Left (left, not liberal) that got you fair wages, vacation and sick time, and protection from abusive and unscrupulous bosses. Oh, and child labor laws too.

Dark days are coming. It's a certainty. We could still stop this if we woke up in time, but they are taking extreme measures to ensure that we don't wake up. Enter the New Feudalism.

Finally, if it seems that I'm parroting George Carlin here, it's not by design. Although I listened to what he said when he was alive, I took it with a grain of salt then. Only after a decade or more of observation did I say to myself, "Jesus, the bastard wasn't kidding."

Elon Musk: Willy Wanka invades General Motors.

Ronald Reagan is considered by some to be the greatest president of all. Why? Because he replaced the New Deal with the New Gilded Age.

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This is the United States of America, and it says in our Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, which is largely true. That's why we wait until they wake up from their nap after their first feeding before we start sorting them.

There will be no justice, no peace, until the last CEO is strangled with the entrails of the last corporate politician.

Feast of Crumbs

Post-Reagan, capitalists have rendered the US social system into a glop. Technology has been used not only as a tool to do this, but also as a fig leaf. But the underlying mechanism for their success has been the capitalists' skill in controlling the working class to prevent it from defending itself. How? by harnessing White working class people's inherent racial fears and animosity in order to create scapegoats and straw men.

If the working class is starving it's because it chose to subsist on red herring. "Enjoy your meal, peasants!", say the capitalists, smiling, before returning to tallying their billions. But we do not hear, because we are too busy competing for crumbs with our brethren.

The US system is becoming increasingly more plutocratic. The average family is being reduced to poverty and powerlessness at the hands of the wealthy. From tax laws, labor issues and wages, education, and housing, everything increasingly goes against working people.

And what is the self-preservation response from the proletariat? They are screaming about imagined pedophelia rings and discontinued Dr. Seuss books (although recently, due to a turn of the worm, they have switched to banning Dr. Seuss).

We are answering bullets with nerf balls. There is no immediate cause for hope for the working people of the United States of America. We are too pacified to respond to our own decimation. We might be descending into third world status, but we still have the biggest military and most of the nukes, so let's rejoice!

Jellyfish without stingers.

radical free market capitalism has become so dominant in the US, and hence the world, that humanitarianism is extinct. you are only as good as the wealth you can lay claim to. the way forward in this paradigm is bifurcated: either a prison for the majority or an abattoir for the rich, and it doesn't matter anymore who wins because both sides have lost their humanity. there are no souls left, only empty vessels to be filled with hate and fascism. god bless america.

When electricity was new, there was an effort to apply it to everything. I've read about outrageously silly devices like electric hernia belts and other quack applications that were ridiculous, ineffectual, and often dangerous. Eventually, we wrote regulations and formed institutions to assure you are much less likely to be shocked or start a fire whenever you plug in a commercially available device.

With computers, the internet, and smartphones, I feel that we are still in the "electric hernia belt" stage. We are subjecting ourselves to a lot of applications that have great potential to cause harm, but we're so mesmerized by the miraculous potential that we are uncritical to the point of credulity.

However, this new tsunami of technology is different in that quack applications aren't always distinguishable from legitimate ones. Even the legitimate ones are fraught with problems relating to privacy. Furthermore, all silo you in content that's similar to what you've viewed previously because that keeps you clicking on their site, even as it narrows your viewpoint so much that you're effectively wearing blinders. And the really bad ones are out to defraud and drain you and even rob you of autonomy.

Worst of all, AI can be used to implement a caste system wherein the masses only know how to perform tasks necessary to support the needs of the elite. As George Carlin warned, they craft education so that the masses will know just enough to run the machines, but not enough to protect themselves from exploitation. (He said it much more colorfully.)

[Personally, I do not claim to have any real education. I have a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the late 1970's, but that's training, not education. The proof is I worked for years in the defense industry, and the only way to do that is to be an ignorant, moral imbecile who's unconcerned with the produce of his activity. In this case it was to allow the government to bully other countries into doing what was best for multinational (not even US!) corporations. This also had the side effect of squandering resources, thus robbing citizens of needs like public education, financial stability, and healthcare.]

So, with the internet and AI we are being pared down to ignorant peasants unable to even examine our own lives critically. The working class is on a path to slavery and serfdom, and while it dimly understands it's being bent over, it has no clue as to who is doing it or why. Well, let me say it: it's the rich, through the use of amoral technologists like myself, who are putting the bag over your head.

The elite do it because they can never have enough. Because the full mouth wants to keep on eating. The STEMsicles do it because they are generally from the lower caste and they have no other way of making an easy living. They're just following orders. Reminds me of that quote from Stephen Gould in the 1890's, "I can pay half the working class to kill the other half."

And I don't at all expect people to ever get this figured out in time to save themselves. The very rich will have dominion over the majority and the world will become more cruel until there is an ultimate reconing. Have a nice century.

Where Greed and Stupidity Meet:

* Choice is wonderful. We need to have 30+ flavors of ice cream to choose from or we will be unhappy. Wrong: beyond three choices we just invite buyer's remorse. Strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla are plenty.

* Ordinary people who buy into the canard that "trickle down" will eventually work for them are probably also into "golden showers".

* We scour random pieces of plastic packaging in our kitchen sinks so that the planet won't be suffocated in bits of synthetic detritus. It would be much better to boycott grocery items that are packaged in plastic solely because doing so increases profit for sellers. (Secret: recycling is a joke. They throw the crap into dumps anyway, right along with the other garbage. Recycling is just a fig leaf for proliferating plastic use.)

* First there was the Gilded Age. Then there was the New Deal. Then there was "Trickle down" Reaganism. Next up? Fascism!

* We're driving behemoth SUVs and pickups around even though it's baking the planet. We will continue to do this as long as there's cheap gas, because we really don't care that much. It's going to affect someone else, not us. Besides, taking action would require government planning and regulation, and we have completely forgotten that A) good government works through us and for us and B) the marketplace isn't always right, mainly because it inherently ignores "externalities" like pollution, poisoning, and global warming. The latter should be obvious even to the most obtuse. If you're rich though, you want to keep on eating, so you refuse to get it. If you're stupid, you keep going to church and allowing yourself to be bamboozled by the cynical psychopath up at the front, who's actually working for the rich guys anyway.

* Under DJT, Republicans slashed taxes on the rich, fueling further disastrous inequality. Then they went backwards in civilization and forced women who don't want to have a baby or can't afford another child to have that child, regardless. Keep in mind that we as a country do not provide poor families with the basics, not even diapers. So, what was the public's response? A majority voted for Republicans in House races in the 2022 midterms. Is this due to racism, stupidity, or both? Or maybe it's just due to the great sufficiency of cruelty that has arisen since Reagan sold us those magic beans.

* Right wingers are particularly gleeful when they can say they have "owned" a liberal. Guess that's because they want to resurrect their family's tradition of possessing other human beings.

* When will we take the outside back from fucking cars?

* My concern is primarily with wages and wealth inequality, not lifestyle debates. However, do those good Christians who so vehemently oppose equality for LGBT, ect., really think it would be better to go back to the days when queer people needed to cloak their identity to avoid being beaten, jailed, and humiliated? (Ans: Yes.)

With controls imposed during the New Deal removed, capitalism has become a Monopoly game. Just as one player ends up owning everything in the game, a tiny fraction of the population has captured almost all the wealth in this country.

With wealth comes power, and they are using that power to make sure nothing like the New Deal ever happens to them again. To this end they have eviscerated the now geriatric Democratic Party. They have infected the Republican Party with Mad Cow Disease. They have bought the media and fitted it with propagandists on the right and trust fund babies on right and left, with the effect that the public has the choice of being either misinformed or uninformed.

They destroyed unions. That undercut funding for Democrats, which forced Dems to turn to Wall St. and Silicon Valley billionaires, thus terminating their traditional role as the "champion of working people". Now your kids can't even pay their rent, let alone buy a house. And Republicans are preparing to launch a blitzkrieg against Social Security. That's not speculative, it's imminent. So, your kids will have nothing in their old age and be left to starve and freeze, just like in the good old days before the New Deal. They really are screwed, from cradle to grave! Their children will have it even worse.

But the rich sociopaths tell us through their pet media that it doesn't matter because your kids are losers, and the sacred creed of unbridled capitalism forbids sympathy for losers! Meanwhile, the planet approaches boiling and nothing can be done about that either because you can't meddle with the marketplace, even though the free market made the problem.

What you are permitted to do though is believe stories about pizza parlor pedophelia and that a nearly flawless and obviously fair presidential election was stolen.

It's all down to unregulated capitalism, which has rebounded from the New Deal era to reinstall the age of the robber barons. The real objective now, the most crucial thing to be done to fend off another horror like the New Deal, is to end democracy. Only by doing so can the wealthy finally sleep soundly in a New Gilded Age.

And they're almost there!

"There's class warfare, alright, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning" -- Warren Buffett, financier and potential successful eye-of-the-needle pilot

"The product of the human brain has escaped the control of human hands. This is the comedy of science." --Karel Capek's play, "R.U.R." (premiered January 1921)

Republicans are on the cusp of forcing spending reduction that will lead to cuts in child medical care and nutrition. They do this on behalf of their patrons, the rich, who dislike paying taxes as much as they do conforming to public-protecting regulations. Today's rich are the most opulent in all time, but they can never have enough. The rich are Super Vampires, and the Republicans are their familiars.

The country I was born into in 1951 aspired toward democracy and equality; this country now is a caste system. This is kind of a big deal, one of the biggest of them all fact, but it gets no airing. Not even an acknowledgement. The upper class has really put one over. Seems you just can't beat 'em.

In the interest of national honesty, it would be much better to replace the motto "In God We Trust" on US currency with the more accurate ethos: "I've Got Mine".

Polonaise of the Rich Pricks

Well, the news media went straight from a compulsion with all things Trump to a celebration of the puerile antics of Elon Musk without any break in between. Why? Because they are both rich idiots, and this is an era defined by a fixation on the selfish and boorish at the top of the economic pyramid. Why is that?

Two reasons. One, the "press" is now crewed almost entirely by upper class scions who were raised to believe that, above all else, greed is good, so they lack the normal revulsion to crass billionaires. Two, the character of the general population has been so bleached of kindness, empathy, and caring for eachother after the death of the New Deal era that we accept this shit like the zombies we've been led to become.

Following WWII, we lived by the creed, "We're all in this together." Post-Reagan, it's changed to everyone for himself and "I've got mine." Since so few of us actually have anything and we've been brainwashed to think that we are solely responsible for our own success or failure, we have become bitter, isolated, and self-loathing. In other words, not the sort of people who could ever manage kindness, cooperation, or understanding. And fuckin' forget about altruism!

We have been led to become atomized, isolated and anxious. This is not accidental. Margaret Thatcher admonished, "There is no such thing as society, only individuals." Well, that wasn't true before, but then it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thanks, Ron and Maggie, for being such monumental ass-wipes that you've imperiled civilization. (Both had dementia, incidentally.)

So America, feel free to take what you've learned during these decades of conservative domination and go out and burn some books like true blind haters! Keep your gun loaded and ready in case you want to kill somebody later today. Check up on what Trump and Elon are saying on (anti)social media. Keep blaming scapegoats like minorities, immigrants, liberals, and gays for the precarious state your in, ignoring it has been the conservative right wing that has robbed you and condemned you childgren to servitude. Stay stupid. Do it for Ron and Maggie. And do it for Newt! Gawd yes, do it for Newt.

asking for help

If we cut a finger and it becomes painfully infected, we don't put up with it for long before we go to the doctor to get an antibiotic.

But if we suffer mental pain, even if it's agony, we cope with it ourselves using whatever mechanisms we have available.

Why? Perhaps we are worried that antidepressants will zombify us. This seems like a reasonable concern because the aspects of our thinking that give our inner world meaning are intertwined with those parts that produce pain.

But when the pain begins to take over completely it might be time to take a chance and explore treatment.

the high mindedness of habitual bitchers

what i don't think people understand is that those of us who like to bitch about stuff aren't doing it because we like the sound of our own voice. when someone else does the bitching and brings up a valid complaint, we nod our heads and say that's absolutely correct. we don't react jealously because someone else got there first.

there are problems in this world. there are societal injustices. there are local injustices. there are interpersonal injustices. they have to be called out if they are ever to be overcome. and truth be told, they might never be eliminated, but at least you can identify stuff that's wrong and say "Shame!".

we're not whiners. we're defenders. i pity those who never complain for being passive.

Grievance. Rumination. Retribution. the Devil's trifecta.

the four most important words my mother ever said to me: "water under the bridge."

i've noticed that lately people are driving recklessly, to the point of belligerence. it's as if their doctor just told them they had two hours to live and they were on their way to shoot their ex.

when i've mentioned this to others, the conservatives among them will lay it off on pandemic restrictions and government fear mongering, claiming these caused people to believe they were going to die, and that now they are merely acting accordingly.

i, on the other hand (the far left one), have thought that having had a bullying, sadistic pig in the White House for four years has conjured up and coaxed out people's inner asshole. this goes for his scapegoats as well as his acolytes. it's assholes all around these days.

maybe it's neither. maybe it's the stress of the economy and what it's doing to working people. we'll know soon as the Fed puts more and more of them out of work by slowing the economy.

or maybe it's the season of the witch.

If the Republi-kins had romped in the midterms, their shock troops would have been emboldened: Pelosi's husband was just the start. Guns would have been out because these neo plantationist thugs just want to shoot somebody down, "real bad".

"They have the guns, but we have the numbers." Let's hope that sticks.

In the dystopian novel, 1984, the television watched you. Big Brother could see you at home whenever you were in front of the TV. How paranoid and silly! This is 2022, and nothing like that has ever happened. It just doesn't exist. BTW, if you aren't on your smartphone right now, please check in. Giggle and Phasebook are thirsting for your data and are wondering where you are. (Just kidding, they know where you are!)

It's the holiday season and the Medicare Advantage Vampires are beating their wings furiously! You have until December 7th to assign control of your Medicare over to them so that they can syphon off a good 25 percent of the taxpayers' money intended for your care. And the promises these vampires are making! It's just too good to be true. So, won't you be a willing revenue artery for these corporate Nosferatu and sign up now before it's too late?

In its present usage, the word "Freedom" most often denotes the speaker's demand for his continued privilege to subjugate someone else. In essence, the freedom they are demanding is their continued right to deny someone else theirs. Likewise, self proclaimed "Patriots" are all too often enthusiastic traitors and insurrectionists willing to sabotage the government to further their own interests.

Inequality and democracy are incompatible. That is why the wealthy are very weary of democracy. It is also the main reason for the existence of the Supreme Court, the electoral college, and the Senate: to protect the wealthy few from the majority.

Can I get an Amen?

At its worst, organized religion is a bastion of white nationalism, misogyny, and ruthless authoritarianism. At its best, some churches are fronts for real estate consortiums. The latter merely take shameless advantage of religion's unjustifiable tax exempt status, while the former promotes intolerance and terrorism, and points the way to a new Dark Age.

We have smartphones, so everything is fine.

Under the old model of capitalism (before the 1970's) wealth was created through the manufacturing of goods. The rich fronted money for the manufacturing process and took a generous cut of labor's produce. Workers were remunerated well enough to afford to buy back some of the output of their own labor, although the rich always gave it to them grudgingly. At the end of a typical day the world had more wealth overall than it did that morning and the wealth was shared by all to some degree.

In today's capitalism, nothing is produced. The masses make their ever-shrinking wages by serving the rich as their abject slaves. The rich garner wealth by cheating the poor (calling that "finance"). Nothing real is created and the masses no longer have the ability to own much of anything, even if it were to be produced here.

And by the way, both Democratic and Republican parties are absolutely fine with it.

Ron Johnson and Rick Scott Flip the Truth on its Head

Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rick Scott of Florida are loudly claiming that Democrats have cut 280 to 300 billion from Medicare. That is a shameless inversion of the truth. What Democrats have done is allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, at long last, and this will reduce excessive drug companies' profits by 300 billion, thus saving Medicare that amount.

But drug companies and the Republicans are teaming up to spread this lie before the midterms, hoping to take back Congress based on the confusion it creates. Then they would be able to reverse the law, eliminate the savings, and make the drug companies happy again.

The full mouth wants to keep on eating, and the maw of drug companies is the biggest in history. Many politicians are its servants who toil to keep it constantly feasting.

By the way, during his tenure as CEO of Columbia/HCA, Rick Scott presided over the biggest Medicare fraud ever committed up to that time. This puts his supposed concern for Medicare sharply into question.

The Class War is Over; We Lost.

There has been a crushing class war against working people for the last four decades, and the Democratic Party has refused to even acknowledge it. That's because it stopped getting money from unions when they were systematically busted and had to turn to Silicon Valley billionaires and Wall St. for funding. While still pretending to be the party of working people, The Democratic Party serves the rich just as Republicans have always done.

Sadly, the right-wingers have been correct all along, what's going on now is exactly what the founding fathers intended for this country: the wealthy call the shots and the rest of us just have to accept what we're given. That is the authentic American Way. When they wrote "All men are created equal", the founding fathers probably were referring t0 rich colonists being on a par with wealthy Englishmen. Minorities and those without property certainly were not treated as equal.

But there was a brief time when democracy played a much bigger role in this country. I happen to have been born in 1951, when the effects of the New Deal were at their zenith. We thought we were becoming a classless society then. There was shared prosperity. Nearly everyone was doing better than ever before and it was expected that every generation would do better than the previous one. The tide lifted all boats. And most importantly, we were all in this together!

Ha-ha-ha. Little did we suspect then that right-wing conservatiuve forces would reign in the New Deal' expression of democracy and egalitarianism and ultimately restore the old plutocracy, but man have they succeeded!

The wealthy had always hated the New Deal, of course. They even tried to get General Smedley Butler to execute a military coup against FDR, but he refused and even blew the whistle before the Senate. But they were patient. They gave generously to evangelical superstar ministers who shared their antipathy for unions. They plotted. They went after US socialists and communists because those were the original forces behind unionization and workers' rights. Then they took on the unions themselves. Finally, as outlined in the ultra conservative Powell Memo, they went after New Deal academics. From John Birch to Charles Koch, they never relented, never slept.

Once they eliminated unions, the rest was epilogue. Our two party political system is pay-to-play, and only worked for average people during the short period unions were allowed to thrive. Unions paid for the Democratic Party, while business hired the Republican Party. Then the unions were gone.

So, turns out the world I was born into was a historical anomaly. The Gilded Age and Robber Barons are the true norm. Working class families are doomed to a life of precarity because we have no real representation. We are now entering an age of smartphone serfdom.

And it's disintegrating. Recognizing they've been fooled by Democratic elites, some of the working class is turning to demagogues, and Republican demagogues at that. Listen to Trump: he wants to be a dictator! He wants generals to kowtow to him as they did to Hitler. He wants unchecked power. He says it over and over. Dishearteningly, a lot of people seem to think he's their best bet now.

Given all this, can anyone expect this country to effectively deal with global warming, mass extinction, worsening pollution, or the misery caused by growing inequality? How about snowballing human reproductive dysfunction?

Fat chance. Margaret Thatcher, Reagan's political romantic lead across the Atlantic, said that there's no such thing as society, only individuals. That became a self fulfilling prophecy through right-wing sabotage of government and academic institutions, and now when the only thing that could save us is cooperation, recognition of common cause, and mutual aid, we are acting exactly like the ineffectual, isolated narcissists we were encouraged by Maggie and Ron to become.

the pulled over ambulance

Near one place I worked there was a commercial dialysis clinic. I was coming back from lunch one day and I noticed there was an ambulance pulled over on the grass on the corner across the street from the clinic. I could see a little girl and her mother. I didn't notice the driver. The mother was smoking a cigarette. Evidently, the ambulance driver had stopped and allowed her to have a cigarette before taking her child into the clinic for treatment.

I've heard bad things about commercial dialysis clinics, like they reuse filters too much to increase profit. I've read that in Europe, where there aren't commercial clinics, dialysis patients live twice as long. Perhaps the woman just needed a cigarette to prepare for the ordeal.

Though I only had a glimpse, I noticed the look that the skinny, obviously poor mother had. A look of terror and grief. A hollow look that showed no hope there was a God, one who cared at all about her child, the child of a prematurely aged woman with just a cigarette for solace in an indifferent and devastating world, a world designed to do little for her child beyond accepting payment for treatment for as long as it's profitable.

The only person in the world who cared at all that day was the ambulance driver who was kind enough to let the woman have a moment.

The Tao of Sgt. Keith

On the political right, they are gassing up their base with tales of Pizzeria Pedophelia and other foolishness. On the left, they are mesmerizing their base with the perception of Putin's Puppeteering our political system. That's the yin and yang of our politics.

In the meantime, rents have skyrocketed 30% and it has become obvious that most young families will never be able to afford a house of their own. At best, they can rent an overpriced, dilapidated single family house from an absentee private investor landlord. That's the only way they can give to their kids what they had: a yard to play in.

Wages have not tracked growth since Regan took office. If the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as Wall Street bonuses over the past four decades, it would now be over $60/hour.

The US medical care "system" is a horror show, truly worse than the cruelist Mafia protection racket that ever existed.

But the Republican and Democratic elected lackeys of the 1% feed people conspiratorial nonsense to keep them off the scent. The real issues aren't Putin or Pedophelia, but rather Plutocrats and Plunder.

It would be nice if people figured out that the talking heads on the Sunday morning yak shows are paid charlatans who lead people in circles to keep them bamboozled. Over fifty years ago, my kindly, concerned Basic Training Instructor used to admonish us at a subtle 100+ decibels, "Get your head out [of] your ASS!!!" Good advice. We should do it before it's too late.

40% Want a Dictator

I just read that 40% of people polled have given up on democracy and welcome a strongman as leader. This gives pause because if you're my age, 70, the first strongman you think of is Adolf Hitler. He's followed by Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Stalin, and a string of others, all of them murderers and torturers, all history's nightmare villains. They are all real life Freddy Kruegers.

Can't imagine that. Can't imagine that if I sit down with four other people, two of them want Freddy Krueger to chair the meeting. Can't imagine that they want someone in charge who will gleefully order the mutilation and death of their grandchildren. Are they OK with it because they think it'll just be other people's grandchildren? Can't process it in any way.

So let's skip that, let's get to the part where they've given up on democracy. This is the good part, the funny part, although tragically funny.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say they've given up on the pursuit of democracy, since there's only been a limited degree of it practiced in this country, and that peaked in the middle of the 20th Century. Since then, the will of the people has held less and less sway and the power of big business and the wealthy has returned to dominate government policy, as it has throughout history. The current domination by the wealthy has been documented by Gilens and Page, whose research showed the rich are always given what they want in Congress, and if the masses want something the rich are disinclined to allow them, they simply don't ever get it.

Think: universal medical care; universal dental care; free higher education; childcare; a living wage; an end to gross inequality. These are the things you will never get because those at the top are against it. Their numbers may be small, but they pay for the campaigns and the lucrative speaking engagements that politicians who've been good vassals get when they retire from office.

This really represents a return to historical normality. The New Deal was an aberration and with time, money, and patience those at the top have successfully dismantled it and buried the parts. They bought media outlets and they backed with cash religious icons who parroted their views. They did it. We're here in the palm of their hand now.

So, is this why four out of ten people want to chuck it and go all in with a strongman? Are they seeking a new FDR to restore balance? I would like to think so, but when you listen to them it doesn't seem like they get at all who the real enemy is. They seem more to be in thrall to the propaganda the right has put out over time. They don't blame the rich as much as they blame minorities and gays and liberals and immigrants and whoever or whatever else right-wing outlets (including churches) have told them to blame.

No, having extinguished the flame of democracy that was ignited by the New Deal, the rich have persuaded 40% of those it has robbed to go collect and dispose of democracy's ashes in a dictatorship.

That's the twist. That's the funny part. That's the joke!

Latest beach-going advice from the CDC: forget the big white shark, go for a swim!

Time to Update the Democratic Party

Beto O'Rourke called an inhumane, disgusting heckler "motherfucker", which was completely understandable in the situation. Beto got a standing ovation. Why? Because finally, a Democrat was seen fighting fire with fire.

The geriatric Democratic party has long been stuck in the glorious past, when Dems and Republicans got together at night to play cards, their differences put aside. Ah, the comity of the politics of old! Gentlemen all!

Evidently, Newt Gingrich was so onerous that these Democrats blocked him out of their consciousness. And though he only rarely appears now, like something that seemingly flushed but keeps floating back up and portends an overflow, he was real, and he forever poisoned the process of governing in DC.

Barack Obama spent the better part of eight years learning this. (And he was a smart guy!) Still, time and again he brought a Nerf bat to a knife fight, hoping each time Mitch McConnell would succumb to his charm. Result: Eric Garland.

Perhaps old school Dems relish comity so much because that's really all they have left. They parted ways with unions after the Reagan Presidency, so in this pay-to-play system, they have done very little for working people. Mostly, they have sat on the sidelines while working families have been thrust deeper down toward the bottom in what is an increasingly unequal country. It's amazing that Dems have hung on this long, but the fact that Republicans are such flagrant creeps might have helped them survive.

So, when Beto launched into that weasel, it was nice to see. (PBS didn't approve, but they know what they can do with their pearls when they're through clutching them.) It's nice that Gavin Newsom will stand up and cite Republicans' hypocrisy. It's great to see AOC and the Squad shake things up.

The point is, things aren't working. Let's get new blood into Democratic leadership (hands off Bernie though!) and see if anything changes. Of course, we still have the problem that it's a pay-to-play system and rich donors are the sustenance of both parties. But let's give it a shot. Maybe something will shake loose and working people will finally be rescued.

Finally, let's build a nice new shuffleboard court at the DNC for all those geriatric Democratic leaders who think "People don't want change."

Lookin' for Good Governance in all the Wrong Places

White working class people vote predominantly for Republicans, even though that party is the vanguard in the class war the rich have waged against those same working people for generations. Seems counterintuitive, but the Republican Party is also the bastion of White Nationalism, and white people in the US have been brainwashed to fear and loathe blacks and increasingly, other minorities. Naturally, it is operatives in the right-wing media and conservative religious leaders who are working for the rich to spread this poison. The rich are very satisfied with this system as it is currently working.

Democrats, on the other hand, are less captured by propaganda regarding fear of minorities, so they do not depend on anger to motivate their base. However, several generations ago the party separated from the declining unions, with the result that Democratic politicians don't get paid to represent working people anymore. Instead, they work for those affluent who are socially liberal, although still very fiscally conservative.

So, working people in the US can either stay out of politics and try to survive on their own or throw in with the racists and watch their grandchildren be marched into serfdom while the rich get richer due to people's misplaced loyalties. Those are the choices.

A further complication is that the current crop of Republicans actually believes its own poisonous propaganda. New Republicans have lost sight of the fact that racial enmity is just a tool to drive working people into the camp of the rich. This misunderstanding is opening the door to fascism.

Traditional Dems (they're all over seventy) and the few remaining Rockefeller Republicans are desperately trying to come to the fractured country's rescue by giving the people a common enemy, China. After all, China had the temerity to manufacture toys and trinkets for the US consumer. Sure, we lost all our jobs, but the corporations made a mint! And besides, who can fret about not being able to pay the rent or make a car payment when he or she has the newest glorious smartphone in their hand? Anyway, we've always been at war with Eastasia, haven't we?

Rise of the Egotistical Nincompoops

People who have long felt, mistakenly, that the world was not sufficiently aware of their sizable talents or appreciative enough of their special value are subverting reality in order to bolster their egos. They bang on endlessly about conspiracies, pretending to have the inside scoop. This, they think, makes them savvy and smart. Foolish memes feed their addiction to self-aggrandizement.

They are flourishing in the wake of our dying political system. (The Republican Party has been turned over to the right-wing fringe and the geriatric Democratic Party has simply decided it will represent whoever gives it the largest donation.) In society's healthier times, these tinhorns would have been scoffed at and then ignored. Now they are at the center of attention.

To quote (and repurpose) Yeats: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity."

According to Plan

The Supreme Court is really piling it on with wholesale elimination of individual rights (except for gun rights, which they are tossing around like confetti). This is on top of the condition of low wages, high rents, personal debt, and inflation caused by corporate profiteering. Not to mention the gross inequality that exists in this society.

It almost seems like the overlords are pushing it, like they're really trying to break us, putting us in our place once and for all.

They are.

And it's a good policy on their part because in the end we lack the guts to rise up, and will be content to shoot our neighbors instead of storming the castle.

"a doctrine that individual self-interest is the valid end of all actions"

Is this from Webster's definition of "egoism" or "free market capitalism" ?

Ans: same thing.

Anti-CRT isn't about protecting little kids from psychological harm.

Granted, I was not a small child, but a 13 year old in the 1960's when I watched on TV as firemen in Selma Alabama knocked African-American protestors off their feet with high pressure water and sent them spinning down wet pavement. I also watched police set dogs on innocent people. The scenes were horrific. But you know what? They didn't make me hate white people. Didn't even make me hate white police and firemen (which was good because my father was a white fireman). What they did impress me with is that there were some really narrow-minded and nasty people living hateful lives in very backward places.

Now, according to those who decry the teaching of C.R.T. in elementary schools (which is not an actual thing that's being done anywhere, just something that shrewd provocateurs invented to get defensive and easily rattled people spun up), the retelling of this story will cause little white children to loathe themselves.

Not a chance. They would be shocked that some people could ever have been so vicious as to indulge in that kind of rotten behavior, but they wouldn't identify with the perps or blame themselves. What anti-CRT operatives are really worried about is ever having to admit to their past transgressions, let alone having to atone for them.

And of course, they still don't want a fair shake for African-Americans.

"[He] who controls the past controls the future." - Orwell, "1984"

A Return to the Throne? Hopfully not.

It's known to the world that Trump used a toilet in the White House to flush away documents he was supposed to preserve. He even carped about low flow toilets afterward because of the difficulty he had doing it. Now his minions are feigning horror and expressing fury that the FBI would dare to investigate whether he took classified documents home with him, as if he were above that. What a gross insult to such an impeccably honest man! It's a parody of a tinhorn grifter and his coterie of craven toadies.

Tragically, it also illustrates where over 40 years of letting the rich run the show unchecked and unchallenged have taken us. Everyone since Carter is to blame for this lapse of protection, but special recognition goes to Newt Gingrich and his sidekick, the Comeback Kid from Arkansas, Bill Clinton for their paired contribution to the chaos that allowed the filthy rich to walk in and take over. This finally culminated in the third world style government we endured under Trump. And he might even be back on the throne in a couple of years!

Jellyfish

Where is the call for a General Strike? Why aren't people in the streets pledging to jam the wheels of commerce until the overlords tell their slack-jawed congressional vassals to take action? Why aren't people enraged that cops are tear gassing women who are merely protesting the ripping away of their inalienable rights?

I'd say we are a nation of sheep, but we are more submissive than that. We float with the current. We are jellyfish.

Here's a news flash: they are coming for you next.

They all went together when they went/ Solution to the Fermi Paradox

One day on their way to lunch, physicist Enrico Fermi and his coworkers were discussing the overwhelming mathematical probability of extraterrestrial life and the almost certainty that we're not alone. Shortly thereafter, Fermi suddenly expressed, "But where is everybody?" This has become known as the Fermi Paradox. It sums up the argument that if there's so much abundant intelligent life we should have ample evidence of it; therefore, the assumption might be wrong, and we might actually be unique and alone.

Bullshit.

Mankind has been on a quest to invent better instruments of death throughout its existence. Our best scientific efforts have been employed to develop machines that were better and better at killing an enemy. War necessitates weaponry. Better weaponry leads to victories.

Why would sentient beings anywhere else in the universe be different in this regard? Life everywhere is competitive. Gotta show the other guy who's boss. This is as true of little green men as it is of earthlings. Every society wants peace: it just needs to win the current war first.

So, any advanced species will continually invent more potent weapons. And I'm sure that they've given some guy's name to it by now, but there's a principle that every weapon ever made was ultimately used, and any weapon that ever will be invented will be used. Ergo, the ultimate achievement of any advanced civilization is to blow itself up!

In the lyrics of Tom Lehrer, "Yes we will all go together when we go!"

And that, boys and girls, is why the heavens are not awash in welcoming signals from our contemporaries. At some point, we all blow ourselves up. Rather than listening for symphonies from Sagittarius, we should be anticipating intermittent "pops" in the cosmos as evidence of intelligent life, that telltale sign that another world has just achieved self-immolation.

Life can be cooperative as well as competitive, but that takes subtlety, a rare commodity anywhere in the universe. There might be a civilization or two that has learned to get along without war and has therefore not fulfilled their destiny to become a planetary firecracker. Furthermore, they get that their interplanetary neighbors are dangerous, so they turn off the lights and pretend that nobody's home. By design, we will never know of their existence.

The comical irony regarding the Fermi Paradox is that he and his coworkers had been participants in the Manhattan Project. They designed and built the atomic bomb. How could they not see the obvious! Certainly the mental compartmentalization required to work on the Atomic Bomb left them with a defensive blindness toward its ultimate consequence. In other words, they were the last people on earth who would perceive the planetary suicide they had helped to queue up.

So, to answer the question, "But where is everybody?": they "all went directly to their respective Valhallas" very soon after they discovered the periodic table. (Two more Tom Lehrer references, by the way.)

(PS: after entering this I learned that Carl Sagan figured this out decades ago. I'm happy I was able to catch up finally.)

When will Joe Biden go all Lyndon B. Johnson on Joe Manchin's ass? Is he up to it? Was he ever?

The Grey Flags are Permanent

In January of 2021, for the first time in US history a sitting president attempted to oveturn an election by sending his followers into the US Congress to riot and potentially murder his political opponents, including his own Vice President. A year later, the Supreme Court has gone on a rampage of overturning settled law in order to joltingly reshape US society into an ultra conservative dystopia, eliminating worker and environmental protections, individual and civil rights, subjecting everyone to increased gun violence, and dismantling the wall between church and state. And they are not finished, not even close to it.

Yet the band plays on. There is great dissatisfaction among the general population, but no call for a general strike because people are atomized and feckless. Politically, there is much condemnation, but it is leading only to fundraising: "Support us with contributions because we don't like what those other guys are doing (but will do absolutely nothing about it because mean old Senator Manchin doesn't want us to)."

Meanwhile, inflation due in large part to corporations' profiteering from the coronavirus pandemic is making life even worse for working families. Things have been going in the wrong direction for them since Reagan introduced Trickle Down economics, which was not a new concept, just a reestablishment of the conditions of the Gilded Age. His legacy was cemented by Bill and Hillary Clinton's unquestioning embrace of neo liberalism and the Democratic Party's divorce from labor.

So, what comes next? Probably the country will adapt, become poorer and more miserable, suffer more deaths of despair, and emerge a sadder place filled with defeated people staring into their cell phones, searching for solace.

But then there's the issue of supporters of the treasonous former president gobbling up guns in anticipation of a civil war. All those guns are aching to be used! Surely, there will be a paroxysm of violence before we lock into our new national character of greyness, even if it's just brief and celebratory.

How did all this come to pass? Why, through the hellish marriage of racism and capitalist greed.

Congress acted quickly and decisively to extend personal protection to Supreme Court justices and their families. SCOTUS repaid The People by permitting anyone at all to carry a concealed gun in densely populated settings. Not so much a case of one hand washing another as of one hand giving the finger to the other.

The Signs were all there

When SCOTUS handed the 2000 presidential election to George Bush, the right learned that the sky was the limit.

When President Obama told the banks in 2009 that he was there to save them, it was clear that the average person had been written off.

When Tea Party geezers showed up at town hall meetings toting guns to intimidate the normal people present and prevent any discussion, that was an alarming sign of social disintegration. When no one opposed their septuagenarian gunslinging, that was the proof.

I would like to point out that the Democratic Party is not at all democratic. They stopped representing plebes during the Clinton Administration, when Democrats started serving the Meritocracy. The Meritocracy is NOT the masses. Ergo, Democrats are not democrats.

The Sanctimonious Six are not working alone

It's tempting to vent all your anger on the six members of SCOTUS who have begun in earnest to roll back freedoms, further degrade the environment, undo the separation of church and state, exacerbate gun violence, and a raft of other horrendously bad decisions that are soon to come. The Sanctimonious Six are culpable of course, but we have to remember who put them in their positions so that they could gleefully stick it to The People.

Not talking here about Mitch McConnell or the Republican Senate, although they certainly have done their part. Not even talking about Donald Trump, who installed three of the six. All politicians are just glorified errand boys. The master puppeteer behind the scenes is Charles Koch and his cohorts in the right-wing one percent. He and his chums worked diligently and relentlessly for years nationwide to find ways to distort and ultimately destroy democracy.

The job is complete. We the majority have been entirely disenfranchised. From state legislatures to the White House, Democrats consistently receive more of the votes at-large, but hold far fewer than half of the elected seats. So, there really isn't anything the majority can do about any of this. Except for a General Strike. That would at least annoy the overlords, but this is the USA, not Europe or South America where the people stand up for their rights at great personal risk, so don't hold your breath. We are the land of the gun-packing, over-consuming meek.

On a personal note, in 1969, at the age of 17, I volunteered to join the USAF. I gave my country the benefit of the doubt then. I might give it the benefit of the doubt again, but there is one big problem: my country doesn't exist anymore. It's been converted into one big cesspit of I've-got-mine neoliberalism, now edging toward fascism.

Even the Puritans believed in abortion, but today's fascistic zealots are well beyond that. They make the Puritans look like liberals. (Actually, there's a compelling case to be made that Puritans were the progenitors of US Liberalism, all based on their interpretation of the Bible.)

All of Hillary Clinton's political assessments suffer from one glaring omission: they all show either a willful or unconscious refusal to acknowledge the role the Clinton Administration's uncritical embrace of neoliberalism played in the class war against working people. That stain, along with her blindness to it, explains why she lost the presidency to a human fungus. And they are pitching her for president in 2024! We all love a good joke, don't we?

CAPITALISM

SHOULD NOT BE DIGNIFIED WITH THE APPELLATION "SYSTEM". IT'S MERELY A CONDITION IN WHICH A FEW WITH ALL THE WEALTH RULE OVER SOCIETY. IT'S DIRECTLY ANALOGOUS TO FEUDALISM, EXCEPT THAT MONEY IS (USUALLY) USED INSTEAD OF THE SWORD.

In a capitalist society, the lower part of the population is inculcated with a reverence and respect for the capitalist condition from birth. Thus the normal defence against being stomped on is stunted. In fact, the indoctrination is extended to cultivate an unfounded and irrational fear of any system that could benefit the masses at the cost of the wealthy few. This is supported by a regime of rewards for those who accept and obey, and concomitant isolation and punishment for those who protest.

And it works!

Obama Knew

The tsunami of Roe v Wade's overturning has not even subsided into the sea, and Mitch McConnell just got Joe Biden to endorse an anti-abortion judge! How humiliating! Supposedly it is all part of a deal, but whatever that deal is, it isn't worth it. Whatever magic beans Biden was promised, they don't make up for the enormity of this gaffe.

Mitch is just showing off now. Before he did this he must have turned to his Republican friends and said, "Hold my beer... Watch this, I'll get Joe to punch himself in the face with both fists!" Now it's clearer why Obama withheld his endorsement of Biden for so long: Obama knew McConnell would own Biden.

Fighting Tooth and Nail against a Medicare Dental Benefit

If the federal government were to add vision and dental benefits to Medicare, that would lead to lowering the age of admission so fast there would be universal medical care in ten months. It all hinges on envy.

Nobody begrudges grandpa his blood pressure medication, or treatment for his prostate cancer. That's probably because most younger people have never been seriously ill, so they've never been in the position to think, "Hey, I have massive medical bills because of my problem, but this old guy gets to skate away for almost nothing." Surely that happens, but not in numbers significant enough to jeopardize Medicare politically. Also, people don't like to think of themselves as ever being old, and paying for Medicare is a kind of a perceived talisman against aging or at least a way of slowing the process down. And of course, theoretically, there's a third possibility: they might not begrudge old people Medicare because they are not jerks.

But if grandma and grandpa got new glasses every year while junior has nerd tape on his until he can pay down the credit card, he might feel relatively disadvantaged. Even worse if aunty gets new dental implants and thirty-eight year old niece Margaret has a jack-o-lantern smile. Assuming these elders were not slaughtered in a rage of envy, it's possible that the juniors might reflect and come around to say, "You know, it's great that old people get these benefits, I want them for my kids and myself and my spouse too, and I don't see a good reason why we don't have them."

That is the real nightmare for the wealthy enemies of the welfare state. Soon everyone would be clamoring for the medical care every other citizen in the developed world gets. And that would be s-o-c-i-a-l-i-s-m, which in their vernacular spells TAXES.

Can't have that. Nip it in the bud. Draw the line just in front of dental, vision, and hearing. Otherwise, what's the advantage of being rich?

Live Free or (Condemn Little Kids to) Die

School kids were left in a blender for an endless hour so that "freedom-loving" weaklings can feel like big men as they fondle their guns and an Andy Worhol look-alike governor could come across as a swinging dick to a bunch of pathetic NRA jerks. Screw the NRA. And Texass.

Solid Gone

The right has liberalism on the ropes. A year ago the left was fighting for economic equality. Now it's thrown back to fighting for gender equality, and it will almost certainly lose more ground in the near future. The Supremes have served the oligarchs well by burying the left under more and more debris. It's a transactional coalicion: the socially conservative right gets to exert authoritarian control over the population, and economic conservatives get to hold onto all the chips. It's very much like the third world.

Cardinal Alito's Trifecta

Alito and his merry band of witch burners have crossed the line three times recently: throwing out a century old common sense gun law that prevented city streets from turning into the OK Corral; breaking down the barrier between church and state by blessing public funding of religious schools; denying women the right to control their own lives.

Surprisingly, the real prize was always breaking down the church/state barrier. All along, abortion has been used merely as a gimmick to keep the re-segregationists and anti-women's rights crowd engaged -and contibuting- until the barrier could be breached.

Here's what the Democratic Party will do about all this: fundraise. Here's what the American people will do: take it. Here's what these decisions will do to the country: break it into pieces. The Supreme Witch Burners will finally have achieved what the attacks on Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor could not.

Don't forget who put them there.

I don't want to sign any more petitions and I'm uninterested in anyone's fundraising. I don't want to hear from anyone at all unless they're saying these two words: General Strike.

It's liberals' turn to be angry and aggrieved.

For too long we have allowed a minority with extreme right-wing views to speak for all of us. The direct results are constant gun mayhem, accelerating loss of civil rights, interference in elections, a history displaced by mythology, and a surge in vicious white supremacy. It's time to stop placating, appeasing, and tolerating these haters. They are perpetually aggrieved and always out for retribution. The longer we let them bang on the more they become entrenched. It's time to tell them to shut the fuck up and sit down!

This needs to be done immediately, and not by appealing to reason because they are unaccommodating narcissists with zero interest in listening to others. We either take this unpleasant task on very soon or we lose everything, because by tolerating their bullshit for so long we have opened the gates of hell. It's time for reasonable people to finally say "Enough!". There are many more of us than there are of them. True, we aren't bat shit crazy like they are, but we must now accept our obligation to act.

These right-wingers are not brave people. They are weaklings that have been empowered by the right-wing rich and have thus survived to morph into bullies. Their strength is illusory, but they are committed to their narrative and they will come out guns a-blazing, literally, until they taste their first defeat, at which point they will fold like a paper napkin.

Of course, because they have the wealthy right-wing behind them, we will be fighting on two fronts, as usual.

Look, these mother fuckers are saying openly that they think violence is accepatable and it's the way for them to go. They tell us they want to kill liberals, immigrants, and gays. Believe them. If we don't take them on now we will regret it forever, asking ourselves why we didn't act when we could have, when we should have.

The next logical step is for Republicans to require that all fetuses carry firearms.

In this country there's bacteria in baby formula, arsenic and lead in baby food and juice drinks. Nobody answers for this. Nobody goes to jail. If this were to be found out in China, the CEOs of those companies would be hauled into the street in front of their offices and shot in the back of the head. Our CEOs must be very grateful to live in a country that has due process and where no one making less than 800K is above the law.

{Blow moi}

Gun nuts will say, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." So, do they also think, "Backpack thermonuclear weapons don't kill people"?

Versatile Mitch McConnell: Pied Piper and Grim Reaper

Most countries ban the possession of assault rifles by citizens, and they have many fewer mass shootings. We cannot muster a ban however, because of the Republican Party's ironclad alliance with the NRA.

What Mitch McConnell is suggesting instead is a two-pronged approach to mass shootings: turn elementary schools into fortresses; stamp out mental illness so that despite the ample availability of assault weapons, everyone will become so mentally stable that it would never occur to anyone to perpetrate a mass shooting.

The first of these proposals is not only prohibitively expensive, not just unlikely to stop mass shootings in schools or anywhere else, but robs kids of their childhood by forcing them to attend school inside maximum security prisons. All so that gun nuts can wallow in unnecessary and unneeded military hardware.

This is an awful solution, but I can see the Republicans following through on it. What I cannot imagine they would ever do is to conjure up and pay for a world class healthcare system capable of curing wouldbe mass shooters.

The second prong would necessitate marshalling tens of thousands of mental health professionals to monitor hundreds of millions of people. The surveillance logistics would be monumental, and the mountain of billable hours for diagnosis and treatment would be enough to break Elon Musk (better hurry though). It would be a task equivalent to Kennedy's going to the moon. It would mean the creation of another branch of government the size of the Department of Homeland Security.

It's a wonderful thought, but it isn't going to happen. Does anyone believe that Republicans would even put the effort into planning for such an undertaking, let alone pay for it? And remember brothers and sisters, it's socialism! No. Bringing it up now is just a ploy to stall long enough for the current furor to die down.

The Republicans who doggedly are against universal healthcare are going to foster a mental health initiative? Get real. They won't even give diapers to babies in poverty (although they will of course force their mothers to have them!).

What's next is that Republicans will dredge up the Schools-as-Fortresses card after every shooting, and they will hang onto the make-em-all-mentally-fit pitch until the indolent and clumsy corporate media finally stumble onto the inanity of that idea and force Republicans to retire it.

Then the American people will vote for a Republican majority in both houses so that we can have a Supreme Court packed with even more Opus Dei fanatics. Because, boys and girls, we get the government -and the mayhem- we deserve.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." --Frederick Douglass

Roe v Wade was a Red Herring

The right-wing has really pulled a fast one on us dumb lefties. Our hair is on fire in reaction to Cardinal Alito's edict, understandably, but that SCOUTS decision was merely a cover for achieving what has been the Holy Grail of the right all along: re-segregation of schools. Witness the largely unreported and almost undetected decision just passed down to permit public funding of religious schools. That was the real prize all along, not abortion rights denial. The latter bit of authoritarianism is just a nice-to-have.

In truth, abortion was not even on the radar when the right suffered its initial setback regarding school desegration. It was strategically chosen afterward as a vehicle for keeping up involvement of the base after a crushing defeat. It also served as a way of bringing conservative Catholics into the movement, separating them from the Democratic Party and its ideals. The fact is that no one other than a subset of Catholics ever cared about abortion prior to that. No one else really does even still.

Saving fetuses is paramount? Conservatives don't even care that poor womens' infants lack diapers! All those fetuses that are compelled to be born can marinate in their own feces once they come out! Nobody cares. But creating a parallel school system that can make up all its own rules, be unanswerable to the law, and still be publicly funded? Priceless.

Kodos to the Supreme Council of Theocracts for the ruse they have pulled off. And since the people of this country are too cowardly and lazy to fight back in any robust way (can't buy Liberty online), and since the Democratic Party has become as pointless as Monty Python's "People's Front of Judea", we can expect more mind-bending decisions from the Opus Dei Supremes shortly. Say goodbye to your freedom and liberty, say hello to the unrestricted sway of the aggrieved authoritarian right, which without any irony whatsoever, they will dub freedom.

The news has come out that Abbott, quasi-monopolist in baby food, killed not two but ten babies with their contaminated product. If they kill another nine they qualify for a complimentary AR-15 from the NRA and the Republican National Committee. "Once they're born, they're off the books!"

Republicans set to free us from the tyranny of Social Security

"...and now they'e coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They'll get it. " -- G. Carlin

This rant presaged a future that now has arrived. Senate Republicans led by Mitt Romney, Lindsey Graham, and Rick Scott, are gearing up to slash Social Security payments as soon as they win a majority in both houses, which seems likely in November. Romney has proposed the TRUST [Me] Act, which would allow a handful of senators working behind closed doors to reduce payments to individuals by approximately 25% almost immediately, and Scott has proposed a sunshine rule that could end Social Security in five years.

It's no longer a threat, this is really happening. Emboldened by the success of their tax reduction heist during the first Trump administration, they are shooting for the moon, taking a chance at ending Social Security either right after these upcoming elections, or when Trump or DeSantis wins in 2024. Why not? They have nothing to lose. They certainly paid no price for the reduction of taxes for the rich that is hyper-boosting wealth inequality and the demise of the working class. And they really, really, really hate taxes.

Meanwhile, they would greatly appreciate it if you would kindly not pay too much attention to what they're doing, and instead center on pivotal values nuggets like cancelled Dr. Seus books and trans high school athletes. So far so good in that regard. Senator Bernie Sanders is trying to raise the alarm, but we know from past experience that the Democratic establishment despises him, will probably look the other way, and would prefer that you do too. And who knows if President Joe Biden would veto a reduction in Social Security, based on his deep reverence for bipartisan consensus? President Obama would have loved to sign, as he had said many times.

We're on our own. We ain't in the club.

If the price of a gallon of gas goes any higher it'll hit minimum wage.

As the attorney for one of the January 6th defendants put it, "These are short bus people." Crude and not PC, but on the money.

These people are the shock troops for right-wing conservatism. We are all in thrall to the ANTI-EVERYTHING fever dreams of these people and their conniving masters.

When, if ever, will ordinary, rational people --who are in the overwhelming majority-- overcome our reticence and tell them to just "Shut the fuck up! Your boy, Trump, aka Faschey the Twisted Tangerine Pain Clown, lost the goddamn election. Too bad, so sad."

You don't have to go ring-around-the-rosie trying to argue against their specious constitutional arguments. That's a fool's errand. Just tell them to zip up their fly and sit down until the bell rings.

P.S. These morons have been able to take the stage only because technocratic elites have failed to EVEN TRY to stem the social-economic perdition of the working class, so our elites are to blame in the end. Somebody tell Speaker Pelosi that people actually DO want change and the roar of progress that ensues will drown out these idiots.

" ...there's a reason education sucks, and it's the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It's never gonna get any better. Don't look for it.

Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you.

They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don't want: They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. Thats against their interests. That's right. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don't want that.

You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they're coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place.

It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy.

The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people -- white collar, blue collar, it doesn't matter what color shirt you have on -- good honest hard-working people continue -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don't give a fuck about them. They don't give a fuck about you. They don't give a fuck about you. They don't care about you at all -- at all -- at all.

And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That's what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that's being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it."

--Julia Child

Immiseration of the US working class is well underway and will continue according to plan. The reason for this is the recapture of all levels of government by the 1% over the past four decades. This applies to politicians of both parties. We exist in a merciless neoliberal capitalist regime that is designed to diminish and defeat the average person and their family in order to increase the wealth and well being of the few at the top. The full mouth wants to keep on eating, and to that end it has rigged the game completely.

Historically, we are merely returning to the norm that existed prior to the New Deal. Life improved tremendously for workers following the Great Depression because of the unlikely presence of a bold and courageous leader. When the next cataclysmic upheaval happens, it would be unlikely that a new FDR would be around to save the masses again. Unless you're rich, you are among the screwed, even if you haven't figured that out yet. The class war is over, and you lost.

In the long term perspective, you never had a chance.

When Martin Luther King called for economic freedom for Black Americans, he was tolerated and even accepted by the establishment. The reason was that almost all people at the time acknowledged that Blacks had been exploited and suppressed from day one in America. However, as soon as MLK began speaking about economic freedom for all working people, he was executed. J. Edgar Hoover was crestfallen. (Joke)

Similarly, the very popular President Jack Kennedy raised some eyebrows when he fought against the remnants of Western colonialism following the second world war, but when he suggested eliminating the CIA, the American sabre of imperialism run by the sinister Dulles brothers, he was shot by a magic bullet. Even after fifty years, the details of his asssasination are still sealed.

On his path to the presidency, reformer Bobby Kennedy, Jack's surviving brother, was supposedly shot by a man with a foreign sounding name who had no motive to commit the act, and in fact was an admiring supporter.

Young Black Panther Fred Hampton was slaughtered by Chicago Police after he began talking to white power groups -and earning their appaluse.

What all these supposedly random deaths have in common is that their happening felicitously protected the status quo. They suggest that there's a marriage between very wealthy, corporate interests, and the security apparatus that works to prevent the overturning of the applecart.

That sounds outlandish, but Marine General Smedly Butler was approached by Wall St. in the 1930's to overthrow FDR in a coup. He refused. He even testified about it in Congress. We are not told anything about this in our high school history books.

We tend to think of Trump as the disruptor who broke all norms. But the norms themselves have always been a fiction.

Want to be president (and remain in good health)? Then repeat these magic words, "Nothing will fundamentally change."

How US Society came to Unravel between the 1980's and the 2020's

For a period of perhaps 50 years, the government did great things for working people and their families. Government policies increased the material well being of the working majority by taxing corporations and the very rich in order to stave off wealth accumulating in the hands of a few. It supported higher wages by fostering unions. It extended electricity and modernization to rural America. It instituted social security for the elderly and disabled. It passed laws protecting workers, women, and children. The net effect was a national condition of progress and a widespread belief in fairness and opportunity for ordinary people. The world I was born into in 1951 was getting better by the day.

Then the US Government committed a mortal sin in the eyes of the majority, it sought to extend these same benefits to its citizens of color. This turned white working class people against the government, to their own extreme detriment over time. It is de rigueur among white folk, especially those over forty, to badmouth all government. They have turned against government in general, and have continually elected people whose stated intention has been to diminish government so that it can be "drowned in a bathtub".

The result is that inequality has metastasized, dynasties have arisen, and the younger generation has lost out on the erstwhile American dream. Ironically, this has led to further disaffection of some of the working class young, who incorrectly blame liberal government for their declining opportunities in life, rather than their parents' vindictive abandonment of functioning institutions. Thus, they have come to abet their own downslide into precarity.

Add to the mix provocateurs like Tucker Goebbels who make a fantastic living by churning up anger and amplifying grievances. With demons like Tuckers on the loose, a return to rationality is unlikely.

In the end, the rich win, having reclaimed their hegemony after four decades of the New Deal. History shows that they always win in the end. Now, the rest of us find ourselves facing the spectre of life in a merciless two class system, policed by a cadre of racist theocrats operating at the behest of an ensconced plutocracy. It's getting worse by the day.

Capitalism Loathes a Worker

Chairman of the Fed Paul Volcker was appointed by Jimmy Carter and retained by Reagan. Volcker applied the cheomtherapy of very high interest rates to kill stagflation. It worked by starving out unions. Thereafter, corporate profits were maintained by offshoring to keep labor costs at rock bottom.

Marx had predicted that a point would be reached in competitive capitalism at which the profit margins were just too small to satisfy the capitalist class. The answer from Mr. Vockler was to deal out US labor, thus restoring profitability.

So in practice, capitalism has proven it cannot (not "will not" but "cannot") thrive without screwing workers, completely eliminating them being the preferred course of action. After Volcker, subsequent Chairman Greenspan spoke about the success of having created "worker insecurity".

If you don't believe that the 1% is happy to throw the entire working class under the bus to ensure profitability (the full mouth wants to keep on eating) then you're probably a church goer. You have been instructed that the rich are chosen by God, and you're a good American Christian with a righteous and patriotic pastor. And a sap.

Thank you Repugnicans for Alito, Kavenaugh, Barrett, Thomas, and Gorsuch. Thank you to all the anti-choice, anti-vacc, anti-ed, anti-civil rights, anti-gay, anti-medicaid, anti-food stamp, anti-social security, anti-union, fetus-fetishizing, child welfare indifferent, cruel, ignorant, stupid, contrarian, narcissist, authoritarian, lying theocracts who brought this day into being. And thank you too, corporate Demoflats, for hanging out at brunch while the world slid into this sewer.

"I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies." -Benjamin Franklin

If you aren't rich and still not a socialist, then you must be a submissive.

Ron Desantis is the guy who's tapping both your sisters. He'd like to go for your mom too in '24.

When will Presidernt Biden be changing his name to "Joe Weimar"?

REPUBLICANS HAVE PAID OFF THEIR COALITION CRAZIES WITH ABORTION BANS, GUN UBIQUITY, AND OTHER EXTREMIST, THEOCRATIC FEVER DREAMS. FOR THEMSELVES, CORE REPUBLICANS HAVE OBTAINED THE LARGEST TAX BREAK EVER GIVEN TO THE RICH. THERE'S NOT A THING WEIMAR DEMOCRATS CAN OR WILL DO ABOUT IT EITHER, EXCEPT TO USE IT TO FUNDRAISE. THE EXCLUDED MAJORITY SHOULD ACCEPT THAT WE CAN'T VOTE OUR WAY OUT OF THIS.

Sleazy Rich White Guy Repalcement Theory

It's too late to worry about being replaced. Pick any item off the table and look at the label on the bottom to see where it's made. US jobs went there years ago. It isn't the fault of the Chinese either because the decision to offshore was made by Rich White Guys in corporate boardrooms. They calculated that they could make more money by replacing you, making stuff for next to nothing in countries with miserably cheap labor, then offering you credit to buy the same stuff you once produced here.

Having said that, picking on Black Americans is doubly wrong: their ancestors were brought here at gunpoint. Yes, it was replacement alright, but by plantation owners. Again, Rich White Guys looking to make the most money possible were, and still are, behind replacement.

What's a two-word synonym for "dog shit"? ...Sprawling suburb.

The Republican Party is the party of values: hate, intolerance, and domination of others. Irrationally, they truly feel persecuted for being Christian even while they are in the majority and fascistically denying others their right to live in peace. They insist on their own unfettered freedom --to trample on the rights of others. They scoff at the "woke" although that means having empathy for others and striving for broader understanding. In short, they are the kind of people who would sicken and enrage the Jesus they claim to worship.

If only Ted Cruz had the charisma of Richard Nixon!

If you're an inveterate shit stick, fundamentally a coward, and a lifelong bully, join the Republican Party ASAP, you'll have a devilishly good time. They're always looking for a few good demons. If you're lucky, they can fit you into a paramilitary death squad after the midterms.

What do you call a rich country without workers' unions? A plantation. Or the USA.

Repugnicans are constantly calling Democrats perverts and peodophiles. Is this a case of the pickpocket yelling "Thief!"?

Come Back When You're Luckier

You have problems. You know you have problems, you've had them for years. You're angry. Angry at the world, angry at those around you.

Some people were born on a trajectory to success. You are not one of them. You have problems.

You've always been a half step behind. When the drill sergeant yells "Left face!" you're the one who turns the wrong way and causes a comedic pileup. It's not that you don't get it, but that you're just not good off the blocks.

Starting in kindergarten, this has been the source of a lot of pain. The pain of embarrassment, the gut punch of feeling inferior. Ultimately, shame.

            +++

So, as a form of self help, of lifting yourself up by the bootstraps, you have converted depression into anger, and suppressed embarrassment with skilled counterpunching. You have mastered the put-down. You can dismiss others preemptively. You don't want to do it, but you have to.

These defense mechanisms work. They offer the safety that a sandbar offers in a raging river. But they are not the shore. Oh to be able to get to the bank and stand on the land, to walk in a field.

            +++

You are not a kid anymore, in fact you have two kids of your own. You love them very much. You relish doing arts and crafts with them. Arts and crafts are a salvation for you and it is your gift to them.

But most of the time you are too depressed to interact with them. You have to come out of your darkened room to get them off to school, to get them fed, to put them into bed, but when you do so you realize that you are barking at them. It is such an effort. To get the job done you need to fight back the depression with anger, but the anger hangs in the air like a bad odor.

You want to make it better.

            +++

You have summoned up all you resolve, all your courage, and made an appointment for psychological counseling. You are late to the appointment, as you are always late for things. Getting out the door is like climbing out of the trench in WWI -you need to muster everything you've got to get over the top.

You stand at the reception counter. They look at your card and tell you that you have the wrong flavor of Medicaid, that you're not covered.

You ask if you can pay for it yourself. This is a desperate moment.

No, you can't. Go away and come back in another lifetime.

When I'm luckier?

Georgia Primary ballot initiatives give insight into souls of parties

Since Democrats' holding on to the Senate hinges on whether Raphael Warnock can pull a rabbit out of his hat a second time in Georgia's November election, Georgia politics has some importance beyond its borders. Perhaps you might wonder what is going on down here? The primary ballots in this state give some inkling.

Both the Democratic and Republican primary ballots contain polling questions tailored to their respective party members. While waiting outside the polling place to be let in to vote, I read the posted sample ballots for both parties. Naturally, the questions reflect the distinct values and priorities of the respective parties, but I was struck by the overall difference in timbre of the questions. Nearly everything in the Democratic poll pointed toward a better and more equitable life for average people and was positive overall. On the other hand, the Republican party polling questions reflected a fearful, angry, siege mentality. Here are the two sets of questions. It's very easy to tell which is which:

Set A.

1) Should the United States remove obstacles to economic advancement by forgiving all student loan debt?

2) Should all Georgians have access to paid parental leave following the birth or adoption of a child?

3) Should every three- and four-year-old in Georgia be given the opportunity to attend a high-quality preschool free of charge?

4) Should Georgia voters have the right to gather signed petitions to directly place questions on the ballot, whether to change the law or poll the public?

5) Should families earning less than $150,000 per year receive an expanded tax credit to help cover the costs of raising children?

6) Should the State of Georgia expand access to health care for over half a million Georgians by utilizing federal funds to expand Medicaid?

7) Should the State of Georgia expand voter access by increasing early voting opportunities, allow same-day voter registration, removing obstacles to voting by mail, and installing secure ballot drop boxes, accessible at all times, through Election Day?

8) Should marijuana be legalized, taxed, and regulated in the same manner as alcohol for adults 21 years of age or older, with proceeds going towards education, infrastructure, and health care programs?

Set B.

1) The Biden administration has stopped building the border wall and illegal border crossings have dramatically increased. Should securing our border be a national priority?

2) Education is the largest line item in the state budget. Should education dollars follow the student to the school that best fits their need, whether it is public, private, magnet, charter, virtual or homeschool?

3) Florida has passed a law to stop social media platforms from influencing political campaigns by censoring candidates. Should Georgia pass such a law to protect free speech in political campaigns?

4) Two of the three current federal work visa programs are lottery based. Should federal work visas instead be issued on job skill?

5) Biological males who identify as females have begun competing in female sports. Should schools in Georgia allow biological males to compete in female sports?

6) To prevent ballot tampering, state law prohibits political operatives from handling absentee ballots once they have been marked by the voter. To protect the integrity of our elections, should the enforcement of laws against ballot tampering be a priority?

7) Absentee drop boxes are vulnerable to illegal ballot trafficking. Should absentee ballot drop boxes be eliminated?

8) Crime has dramatically increased throughout the country including in our capital city of Atlanta. Should the citizens of residential areas like the Buckhead community of Atlanta be allowed to vote to create their own city governments and police departments?

The difference is pretty striking. On the one hand you see the have-nots reaching for something better, and on the other hand you have the nominally successful who have pulled up the ladder behind them and are dead set against sharing anything. And living in terror of being forced to. No wonder Republicans dislike democracy (they say so all the time if you listen to them), they are afraid the plebes would strip them of their wealth and advantage if given a free hand. And they're probably right!

It must be burdensome and tiring having to run around all the time trying to eliminate the possibility of someone's filching your cookies. Makes you wonder if it's worth it. But the full mouth wants to keep on eating, as Confucius said, so they have to be paranoid palace guards in perpetuity.

In an afterthought it occurred to me why so many non-rich people might identify as Republican: in their case they are losing their social-economic advantages and so also feel under siege. They make common cause with the Republican rich even though they have no common interest. They are merely both aggrieved over the threat of having to give up something they currently have.

The Democratic Party should have been able to appeal to the former group, but the dirty little secret is that neither party truly cares about working people. The D. Party gets by pretending to be the good cop, even though it went to work for the meritocracy decades ago. Meanwhile, the R. Party hands out trinkets like abortion bans, gay bashing, and a promise of "a gun in every hand (even kids')" to Walmart Republicans for their vote.

Everybody is dug in. Nothing will be resolved. The rich will get richer and the poor will be hunted by death squads --formed from the ranks of Values Republicans. What our delightful CIA did in South and Central America will come home to roost. Enjoy!

Democrats are hopeless dweebs, but Republicans are trading away your personal freedoms for the votes of religious fanatics and hinterland goobers. Almost makes you embrace the lesser of two evils.

The paranoia on the right is mammoth. I remember hearing part of Trump's 2017 inaugural speech, filled with fear and hysteria and thinking, "What the hell is he talking about? Is this a joke? What country is he talking about? In what decade?" Fear and loathing are mana to the Republican Party.

Fed to Workers: "Go Pound Sand"

Analysis indicates the recent increase in prices is more than half due to corporations taking higher profits. Behind that, about forty percent is due to supply chain issues which are usually attributed to the pandemic. That leaves less than a tenth that's resulted from wage increases (that's less than a tenth of the overall increase, not a ten percent increase in prices on its own).

However, listening only to government officials and the mainstream media you would believe that current inflation is caused entirely by too many fat paycheck dollars chasing too few goods, with a special emphasis on the now spent special covid relief checks as the culprit. That is why the Fed will continue to raise rates, making workers pay higher interest on the overpriced used cars they need to buy to go to work. The net effect for workers is that despite a recent increase in wages, their first in many decades, their buying power has been diminished further and their standard of living continues to decline.

They are being told in effect that they shouldn't even dare to ask for anything, because they will be made worse off as a result. It's a situation reminiscent of Oliver Twist being excoriated for asking for a second bowl of porridge at the workhouse.

At this stage, capitalists have profound antipathy for workers. Eventually, this must lead to either a socialist revolution or a fascist takeover as in Germany in the 1930's. I'm betting on the latter based on who has all the guns and how little awareness those people have of the class war they've been on the losing end of for forty years.

In the meantime, good luck paying the rent.

salvation-damnation

Convince people that they should conform to behavioral norms because: if they don't their skin will bubble and crackle in the fire of hell for eternity; if they do conforn then they will sit around and eat delicious creamsicles forever.

What this carrot-and-stick could possibly produce other than a psychopathic kller I don't know.

Why we can't have nice things

The R Party represents the traditional wealthy. In a nominal democracy, this presents a problem because it doesn't have a natural majority to win elections. So, it forms a coalition with a small but fervent segment of the population that is not concerned with the power of oligarchs or even its own impoverishment resulting from that power.

It would seem that there would be enough voters in the general population with rational self interest to swamp this coalition. However, the opposition D Party has done essentially nothing for this segment in decades, allowing them to fall like rain out of the middle class. The D Party let this happen because it secretly switched its allegiance from the working class to the meritocracy in the 80's and 90's during the presidency of Democrat Bill Clinton. Later, in 2016, when a champion of average people emerged again, the D Party stabbed him in the back at the direction of the wealthy donors it truly represents.

Currently, the R Party is showering its coalition partner with promises that appeal to rural, religious, white conservatives. This is likely to result in total R congressional control of Congress in the 2022 elections because the only energized portion of the electorate will be these reactionaries. Thus, despite the brutal realities facing average families like low wages, poor medical care, and gross inflation in housing, transportation, and food costs, the election will produce nothing but irrelevant and corrosive conservative victories: ending abortion access, dumbing school cirriculum down to the level of mythology, restricting voting rolls to reflect a pre Civil War electorate, and guns, guns, guns-aplenty!

The hilarious absurdity is that the D Party is actually optimistic about this. It believes the grotesqueness of it all will put them back into power in the subsequent 2024 election. It's a pity that this is the D Party's best and only solution.

Embers

Well, four times now we've put out the covid fire, rolled up our hoses, and headed back to the firehouse. Each time we've left smoldering embers that have reignited, and now it appears to be happening again because the curve of new infections shown on the Georgia Department of Health website is rising sharply again.

Were we supposed to wear masks forever? No. This was a reasonable time to take them off because rates were so low; however, this was the exact point at which authorities should have applied rigorous contact tracing and isolation measures to stamp out any hot spots.

But we don't do that in this the richest country in the history of mankind. Too expensive, too socialistic. In the US our public health departments don't take the lead in fighting an epidemic. They are merely data takers who make a few medical suggestions, suggestions that are vehemently attacked from the ranks of the Habitually Aggrieved.

That's the reason why with only five percent of the world's population the richest country on earth has suffered twenty percent of all mortality. It's the same reason China has reported fewer infections than we have had actual deaths (sure they could be fudging the numbers, but even still, China has five times our population).

So, we've rolled up the hoses and we're leaving it to the magic of the marketplace to extinguish the embers.

            definition of suburbia: pre-grave plots requiring constant consumption of inordinate amounts of fossil fuels

Remembering Medicare

There is a corporate takeover of Medicare occurring right now. It began under President Trump, and with some minor changes in nomenclature it is continuing full steam during the Biden administration. Corporate healthcare companies are being allowed to surreptitiously take control of seniors' Medicare accounts, regardless of whether those seniors elected to switch to so-called Medicare Advantage plans or not.

I have chosen plain, government-run Medicare Part B because I did not want some corporate entity dictating my care. I believe the business model for private health insurance hinges on denial of care to the patient to achieve profit. That's why I have resolutely refused to sign up for any of the deceptive "Medicare Advantage" plans advertised relentlessly on TV by weazened celebrity sellouts.

Corporations' inserting themselves in the healthcare delivery process necessarily drains dollars away from medical treatment. Furthermore, these companies will create monetary incentives for the physicians they control to skimp on patient treatment so that they can both put more money in their own pockets.

This stealth takeover of Medicare is an attack on the elderly that will adversely affect their health and longevity. I'm not sure if it can be stopped because big business and the oligarchs always get their way regardless of what the majority needs. If the Democratic Party under Biden can't protect Medicare, it might as well hang it up and anoint Trump emperor, and his progenitor, Newt Gingrich, grand vizier.

Why are my kids poor?

Answer: because you have left them at the mercy of neoliberal capitalism and the ownership class. They have been fated to live in poverty through the following sequence of steps purposely taken by the wealthy elite, which you have ignored, preferring to watch television and surf the net.

One, excoriation of the very people who were responsible for allowing unions to flourish, for he 40 hour work week, sick leave, overtime pay, and the elimination of child labor: US communists and socialists. These people were responsible for every gain the working class ever enjoyed, which is why the people in charge put so much effort into brainwashing us all to hate them.

Two, once the left was vanquished, systematic busting of unions, which led to stagnant wages and powerlessness of the individual worker.

Three, the engineered inflation of the stock prices (through buybacks driven by low interest rates).

Four, shifting the burden of educational costs to the individual.

Five, the conversion to a rentier economy: much of the present housing stock, over forty percent in some metropolitan areas, is owned by private investors, which drives up prices (more asset inflation) while decreasing availability, thus ensuring young people will be renters for their entire lives. Ultimately, the same will happen to water supplies and any other remaining fragments of the once extensive commons.

Six, elimination of taxes on the rich, which along with asset inflation guarantees increasing inequality of wealth.

These are the reasons, mostly in order of application, why your children are destined to be poorer than you ever were. Anyone saying otherwise is either shilling for the rich or an idiot.

So, go to your grave knowing that you have stood by passively while your dear children have been prepped for their entry into the Matrix.

Nascent fascism in the US is a reaction to the desperation produced by 40 years of atomization under neoliberal capitalism. It restores, for some people, a sense of belonging, through loyalty to an authoritarian leader or group (which can be the state). It allows people to put down the burden of maintaining a posture of hyper individualism and frees them to relax, join the crowd, and go with the flow.

Which would be fine if it weren't such a dog shit flow.

US politics don't make any sense -by design

The USA is not a democracy at all, but an oligarchy. Legislatively, the rich get what they want, when they want it. This is confirmed by Profs Gilen and Page in their 2014 "Princeton Study". The wealthy and powerful are, of course, content with this situation.

To keep things this way, they hire Republican lawmakers to assure nothing will change. This means that elected Republicans (and to be fair, most Democrats) will pass no legislation which would help working people at the expense of the rich.

To prevent the plebes from catching on to this arrangement, Republicans spin the public up on red herring issues to keep them bamboozled, preventing them from realizing what politicians are really up to, and most importantly, keeping the people from demanding anything that runs against the financial interests of the oligarchy.

A portion of the public invariably leaps at the inflammatory rhetoric, bogus memes, white supremecist dog whistles, and Q-anon horse manure that the right wing noise machine tosses out to them. They fall for it every time, as surely as a dog jumps up to chase a ball. Republicans keep them so busy chasing memes that they remain clueless as to what's going on, and as intended, they vote against their own interests.

That's how the game is played on the Republican side. But the Democratic Party is a sham too, pretending t0 look out for working people when it is actually in thrall to the wealthy meritocracy. In fact, the Clintons (they said they were a team, remember?) implemented policies in the 1980's that have caused working families to precipitate out of the middle class like rain, while producing a bumper crop of technology billionaires.

When Hillary ran in 2016, she had the arrogance to think there would be no political backlash for that. Well, there was, and Trumps was shrewd (and insincere) enough to include a populist message in his campaign to highlight the Clintons' failing. When she lost, she had her followers blaming Russia, misogyny, racism, and Susan Serandon, not the Clintons' previous sabotage of half the households in the US! This shows there's a cohort of Democratic voters that's every bit as gullible as the ones on the Republican side.

Bottom line: the USA is a corrupt, faux democracy in which the fortunes of working people are declining. Enough people are so cognitively sidelined by Republican and Democratic subterfuge that things are likely to go on this way forever, or until there is some cataclysmic event that produces social upheaval. When that happens, there is no reason that fascism won't surge in to replace democracy forever.

My father used to say of politicians, "They're all crooks." Of course they are, because the pay-to-play system will make them that way if they weren't when they came into office. Meanwhile, no insulin for YOU!

Democracy? Where?

In the richest country in history, one out of four diabetics cannot afford their insulin and fifteen million children go to bed hungry. This cannot happen in a democracy because The People simply would not allow it. Therefore, the US must no longer be a democracy, if it ever was one. Instead, it is an oligarchy run by wealthy elites who are served and protected by politicians of both parties. Our politicians are corrupted by the pay-to-play system itself. Monopolies and monopoly rights have triumphed over the people in what is rapidly becoming a rentier society.

Contrary to popular sentiment, such a society can survive almost indefinitely. The oligarchical model, although ethically repugnant, is a stable one. What threatens the existence of our particular system is cognitive dissonance. We repeat ad nauseum that we live in a democracy, which is an illusion. We attest to our freedom while our undereducated children succumb to poverty and opioid abuse. We pretend to believe that we engage in multiple military actions abroad in order to bring democracy and freedom to the world, ignoring the irony that we ourselves live in an oligarchy.

The incongruence of telling ourselves we are free while living under Plantationism 2.0 will lead to national psychosis. We have seen the beginning of this with the proliferation of ludicrous conspiracy theories, the refusal of a large swath of the public to accept blatantly obvious facts regarding election results and medical science, and a drift toward racism, nationalism, and fascism. Whatever comes next is almost certain to be driven not by reason and compassion, but by rage.

Franklin: "A republic, madam, if you can keep it." Turns out we couldn't.

bill and hillary were ardent enemies of the New Deal and did much to dismantle it. without it, working people are slipping into an economic black hole, living lives of precarity. this is especially true for young adults. it was absolutely predictable that without the protections of the New Deal, average people would become serfs with smartphones.

obviously, bill and hillary are hated for this and deserve to be. however, they express surprise when anyone not benefiting from the Democratically favored Meritocracy rejects them, as voters did in 2016. is this elitist duo (meritocracy is just as elitist as the Republican dynastic wealth structure is) merely feigning surprise, or can they really not put two and two together to get the anger over their devastating betrayal of the working class? are they faking it, or are they as clueless as they pretend, laying all their failures at the feet of Bernie Sanders, Susan Sarandon, social media, and clumsy Russian hacking?

the simple fact is that if you have no validity or reason for being other than hobnobbing with the ultra rich, you can be swept away by the slightest breeze. this is now true for the entire party they subverted away from performing its onetime role as champion of everyday people. neither they nor the party they destroyed merit a place in the sun.

RIP American Dream

Private investors buying up residential real estate is a death knell for the American Dream. They are removing available houses from the market, and as time goes on, single family housing is becoming scarcer and more expensive because of it.

Inflated housing prices are like the rising price of a stock to them, it's welcome, but their real financial objective is to be collecting rents in perpetuity, like stock dividends. They seek the steady and unending income they can enjoy by being landlords to almost everyone. Forget home ownership, you will be their tenant, paying them rent until the day you die. This is their goal, and it is the road to a rentier society.

The question is, do those in power care enough to put a stop to this? (I joke.)

Busting Medicare Part D

Biogen's Alzheimer's drug, Aduhelm, is on course to bankrupt Medicare. Its high price will single handedly drain the system. Biogen's objective is clear: make as huge a profit as possible, using the system's inability to negotiate prices to loot it.

For Biogen, the drug's efficacy is secondary, merely a hurdle that, with great effort, it has been able to skirt thanks to a highly questionable decision by the FDA. The bottom line is that the drug does not work, and furthermore, it has serious side effects. Those two things should have halted FDA acceptance cold.

The outrage of Aduhelm does not stop there though. The drug is raising the rates of every single Medicare participant, whether they take the drug or not. This is effectively a "Biogen Tax" on the elderly.

So, it is an ineffective drug which can kill people, it will collapse the system, and it robs the public. It's fitting that the drug's name contains the nautical term "helm" because with Aduhelm, Biogen is attempting to commit corporate piracy.

If Biogen is allowed to get away with foisting this drug on the public, it will signify pervasive disregard for patient welfare, demonstrate disdain for the institution of Medicare, and showcase the deep rot inside government agencies that are charged with protecting the public.

Child's first word, typically: "mum"

Very often, a person's last word: "Mommy"

And so it goes.

Fantasy Political Football

If the 2024 match turns out to be: Donald Trump/Marjorie Taylor Green vs Hillary Clinten/Kyrsten Sinema

we can call it:

"Faschy the Tangerine Pain Clown and his Peroxide Orangutan" vs "Pinky and The Brain"

The theme of the election would be: "Fuck it, let's just get this over with, an asteroid's coming anyway."

Global Warming - something that will kill millions of people through heat and crop failures; this is made inevitable by misguided deference to capitalist greed heads.

Ultra Global Warming - what will kill almost ALL people, rapidly starving and freezing those it does not immediately incinerate; this is made imminent by a leadership peppered with pseudo macho, imperialist assholes.

What was I saying?

I'm 70, and I'm intensely interested in knowing whether I will develop dementia in the next few years. My father had Alzheimer's disease for about a decade before dying at 84. Naturally, I'd like to be able to prepare if that's my fate, but because I contribute to my family financially --I'm still working-- I'd also like to do all that's possible now to prepare them for the jolt of a decrease in income when I can no longer contribute. That day will come in any case, it's an eventuality, but I'd like to know if I'm going to know when it's happening!

For several years I've had a Google Alert for "Alzheimer's prediction", which has turned up lots of very promising research in the area of testing. There are practical biomarker based and AI based tests that potentially could provide the world with effective mass screening for Alzheimer's and dementia in general. A lot of these, once approved, would be inexpensive to distribute and employ.

But the alert also turns up a host of high roller pharmaceutical efforts that give the impression of being mere lunges for money. These are based on the premise that the drug might do something to marginally ameliorate the progress of the disease. These quests for blockbuster drug remedies never die. Their champions are willing to do the slow, excruciating, and prohibitively expensive dance with the FDA to somehow keep their magic pill concepts alive long enough that the agency will eventually, albeit grudgingly, give them the nod. At that point the public will pay an exorbitant amount of money for something that has marginal efficacy at best.

I'm resigned to the inevitability that when anything finally does make it to market it will be 1) drug based, 2) astronomically expensive, 3) have FDA approval that's chock full of caveats and reservations, 4) be of dubious actual value, and 5) preclude the introduction of really useful and affordable tests that will be left languishing in the wings.

The former product type, the ones centered on testing, seem to come and go. Although promising, they die on the vine because nobody, not even the government seems interested in backing their development into a usable product. Their money making potential just isn't there, at least not compared to the possibility of a pharmacological bonanza.

Remember when "they" were going to cure cancer? For the most part that has not panned out over the many years since it was first promised, despite massive cash investment and charitable contributions. We are still using the poisonous chemotherapies we've employed for decades. These require a strategy of seeing how much you can pump into the patient, hoping it's enough to destroy the cancer without killing the patient first. What would make infinitely more sense would be to develop and employ tests to detect cancers earlier so that there would be much less of it when the diagnosis is first made.

But then, tests aren't sexy, they aren't as potentially remunerative as blockbuster drugs, and the researchers that create them typically don't have the resources to get over the hurdle of expensive FDA procedures. So they just don't happen. The way the system is designed, the drug company pays for everything in the approval process. The FDA is like a wedding with 700 people. Only families with considerable means can afford it. (If big pharma had set out to devise a way to eliminate competition from smaller upstarts, it could not have contrived a more effective means than this present system.)

This is your medical care system on market based, neoliberal capitalism.

Scalping tickets will get you arrested, but scalping houses will get you a corner table in a five star restaurant. Atlanta's housing stock is over forty percent investor-owned. Something needs to be done politically to make more housing available to ordinary people, but all anyone seems to be concerned with is culture war issues, like cancellation of obscure Dr. Seuss books. Red herring makes a skimpy dinner for those not involved in cornering the housing market.

When capitalism goes rancid it becomes fascism. The last time this started happening, FDR applied socialist remedies to effectively save capitalism from itself. Obviously, not all countries at the time avoided the descent into facism.

Now once again, with those remedies stripped away, capitalism is approaching a cataclysm. It will be felt by all, but the poorest will suffer the most. Order --and property rights-- will need to be enforced through authoritarian state violence.

This might have been avoided, but leaders are in denial. Naturally, no Republicans have come forward to stop the serpent from eating its tail. Even Democrats aren't seeing the problem, and if they can't see it they certainly won't find the cure. They act like a herd of Herbert Hoovers, not FDRs. So, it looks like we're not going to be so lucky this time around when capitalism pursues its defensive makeover into fascism.

Working people haven't gotten a real raise in over forty years. Universal healthcare, safe and affordable childcare, a living wage -forget about those things! Still, Nancy "Let them eat premium ice cream" Pelosi, Chuck "Is there a problem?" Schumer, and Hillary the Great have decided that the little people don't want change. Which makes the US fertile soil for fascists, a dreamland for demagogues. Let's face it, come the fall elections the game is over. This is US history at the end of 40 years of neoliberalism.

Moving the Ball Forward

When a child receives a sought after toy or other possession, they experience such strong emotion that they seem to incandesce. We felt it ourselves as children, and when we see it in our own children we recognize it. We can't experience it again, but the memory is there. We comprehend their delight.

That's why whenever we're putting together a toy that bares the image of some popular children's icon of the moment, we feel elevated. Assembling something for the house from Ikea can give you relief when it's finished and even a sense of accomplishment, but putting together a toy on Christmas Eve feels like a holy mission. We know how monumental it will be shortly in the universe of a child.

Unless you're an involved uncle or aunt, you have to have a kid to have this feeling. It's peculiar to parents and it spares no one. Even a contract hit man will feel the rush when he attempts to put his kid's bicycle together. It's a natural phenomenon that's hard wired into the circuitry of the brain and abetted by an ancient prescription of hormones.

Tonight I took apart an old "Dora the Explorer" child's bed that had been partially blocking the way in the basement. It had belonged to my oldest granddaughter, who's now eleven. It's a little bed that uses the mattress from the crib. It has a headboard, baseboard, and canopy, which in this case was broken. My middle granddaughter, now four, didn't use it. She went directly from the crib to a twin bed. So, it was time to get rid of this piece of child's furniture.

When you go to Goodwill with infant or toddler bedding, they cringe. There are too many recalls and too many suits, so the only way to get rid of some stuff is to throw it in the trash. I set to work disassembling the bed. Afterward I bagged it and threw it into the trash bin where my oldest granddaughter won't see it.

You might expect this was emotionally difficult because it is the reverse of constructing it, but it wasn't. I was just a Langolier cleaning up. What did occur to me, however, was that the couple who put this together seven or eight years ago, who I imagine felt then that special gratification of making a child happy, are no longer together.

American Weimar

Kyrsten Sinema represents the final stage in the evolution of the Democratic politician. With her, the elimination of all substance is complete.

The Democratic Party, because it created the New Deal, once deserved to be called the party of working people. Now, although it tries to retain the mantle of protector of the little guy, it has been completely retooled to serve that cohort of the 1% that is socially liberal, vs the socially conservative rich that Republicans cater to.

Where does that leave Democratic voters? Well, listen to the drivel that comes out of Sinema's mouth and you have the answer: small "d" democracy is being betrayed by a vapid con artist spewing chaff to cover her allegiance to corporations and her craving for their cash. But it's OK because she's an identity icon, which is the only credential that counts anymore in the Democratic cosmos. That and shoving public money at the rich with both hands.

Corporate Democrats like Manchin, Sinema, and the many others who allow these two to take heat for them, are selling democracy down the river. They are all reprehensible but they are not the root cause of the problem, which is a system based on legalized bribery in the form of campaign contributions.

After the New Deal, the inherently corrupt system worked fairly well for average people because unions were able to buy one party. But then the oligarchy craftily eliminated unions after destroying the American left. Now the system has returned to plutocratic control.

But it is foundering. Corporate Democrats are quietly abandoning ship while people focus on the antics of bipartisan political clowns. Fascism, lurking in the Republican Party shadows, awaits its moment to swoop in.

What movie title describes the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections? ......"Birth of a Nation"

And after the 2024 presidential election?................................."Planet of the Apes"

Lament for Big Enough Government

Big, welfare state, nanny government can make life better for all by making things more equal and liberating our neighbors from want and hardship. Even those who do not need assistance benefit because they would live in a world where security isn't required to hold back the immiserated horde. Life is just nicer all around with the government working to make sure all boats stay afloat.

But that's not what the right wing is selling. The right wing tells ordinary people that 1) if they are living in misery it's entirely their own fault, 2) it's unAmerican to ask for help when you need help because we're a nation of rugged individuals, and 3) whatever help is being given is going to the "Wrong kind of people, if-you-know-what-I-mean".

Why is the right wing always pushing this? Simple: the rich hate taxes. "I've got mine and I will fight with everything I have to keep every penny."

Why do average people accept this? Also simple: they are completely bamboozled. The corporate media won't inform them that they're being cannibalized because its bread is buttered by the 1%. And politicians of both parties serve only their big donors, so they constantly throw out red herring to keep people off the scent.

The Repubs keep people chasing their tails by emitting a constant stream of culture war folderal, while the tetchy Dems blame social media and Susan Sarandon rather than admit to having abetted the demolition of the working class over the past five decades. When Jimmy Carter came into office, a truck driver made $110,000 per year in today's dollars. Now that driver might make $60K if he/she is lucky.

That's the story. All the good stuff that was in Build Back Better would have gone a long way to help average people. We actually could have made America great again in the sense that we would have had shared prosperity across the spectrum as we did in the New Deal era. Big government could have made life better for a vast number of people. Instead, we've been drowned in a bathtub.

We have an inherently corrupt, exhausted, pay-to-play political system that has been made untenable by accumulated SCOTUS decisions. During and after the New Deal there was a power balance between workers and plutocrats because unions financially supported one party, the Democrats. Those days have passed. Manchin and Sinema are avaricious lowlifes adept at exploiting the system, but they are not the cause of our woes, they are merey odious irritants. We are abandoned by both parties. So unfortunately, we cannot vote our way out of this. Only economic collapse, revolution, or a military coup d'etat can put an end to domination of the many by the few.

A fetus is sacred to the anti-abortionists, supposedly, but once a little bastard is born, mandatorily, it can marinade in its own urine and feces as far as the Army of the Holier-Than-Thou is concerned. The only free diapers a mother and her baby will see, if any, will come in a goodie bag they get when they leave the maternity ward. The government no longer provides diapers to the destitute. (Thanks to Bill Clinton for ending welfare!)

Joe Manchin torpedoed the Build Back Better plan this week, and hence Joe Biden's presidency. Certainly, a vast swath of working people will be denied a better life as a result, but a further effect will be demoralized Democrats staying away from the polls in the midterm elections. So, the honorable bagman from West Virginia has paved the way for the party of voter disenfranchisement and calculated worker insecurity to dominate for years to come. Manchin might even turn out to be the midwife of fascism, we'll see. Poignantly, he launched his torpedo from the flagship of the right wing Republican propaganda fleet, FOX News. Nice touch to his perfidy! Perhaps he's angling to become Trump's next VP, to replace the one with too many scruples.

Collateral Persecution

When Assange is out of the way, Truth will be forced underground. Journalists will internalize that there are certain things you can't say, because if you do your will be hounded into committing suicide. What the government does not want you to know it will classify, and after that you can never know what's been done in your name as a US citizen.

Let's be clear, Assange and his organization did not hack or steal anything. What they did was to publish whistleblower information that embarrassed the government. The security apparatus has propagandized that this information jeopardized US troops or compromised intelligence operations, but those claims have never been backed up. What's clear is that an enormous, autocratic branch of government was embarrassed that its machiavellian machinations were exposed. It wants retribution and assurance that this won't happen again.

When Assange's corpse is cold it will be a great day for authoritarians. They will be beaming. Imagine the relief that will come with knowing your deathly daily shenanigans will be far less likely to be exposed by a snooping press. And of course, Hillary Clinton will be as happy as she was the day Gaddafi was defiled.

Finally, for we the citizens of this country, ugliness like that in the video "Collateral Murder" henceforth will be prohibited from sullying our spotless minds. Ignorance is strength (1984).

And Then You Die

By the phrase "have a purpose in life" we really mean this: some justification for not killing yourself on any given morning in the shitty world of adulthood. Life sucks. It does. Don't bullshit. When you were a kid there were moments when you felt secure. As an adult, you're always on the run, always on the hook, always in the crosshairs. I don't think you can blame capitalism, which is horrible, for this. I think this is baked into the cake in that being sheltered is infinitely better than being exposed. Our parents sheltered us and we sheltered our own kids.

Why did they/we do it? We are programmed genetically to mate and have kids of our own, of course. That's easy. And fun. But we are programmed further to "act responsibly" and grind ourselves away working (originally hunting/gathering) to provide shelter for the product of our frolicing. We are grateful for our parents' sacrifice. Perhaps our kids will feel the same way. Perhaps not.

But the fact is this cycle of receive-then-provide is the requisite for continuation of mammalian species. Lots of other species in other genera drop their eggs and swim/fly/crawl away. But they have lackluster, nearly non-existent childhoods.

There's nothing driving this, no ethics or morality. It's just the way it is. If it weren't we wouldn't be here. The universe would not mourn us either.

Anyway, life sucks. Pass it on. ...But be kind to children.

Disillusionment

Witnessing so many genteel people adore someone who has such a malignant psyche and revolting personality has put me in a state of confusion. It's like I've spent my whole life misunderstanding humanity. No assumptions based on prior experience are valid any longer. People seem like the surreal inhabitants of a nightmare.

The Trump followers remind me of an old photograph of smiling people in their best clothes, posing for the camera. They are at a lynching, with the corpse of an incinerated man in the foreground. The fusion of smiles with the obvious horror is grotesque.

Some are delighted at my being nonplused. They celebrate having "owned" another liberal. They are impishly perverse.

Trump is a cheesey, mildly entertaining clinker that you wish would just, please, take a break. The horde that worships him is much more disturbing though. Is there any such thing as a "good" person, or do we exist in a realm of two-sided demons?

The Medicare Carnival

For a senior, navigating through Medicare is a cross between getting hustled by carnival barkers on a midway and walking alone down a dark alley. The first describes the signup process at the end of each year, which is saturated by a storm of hyperbolic advertising for private Medicare schemes. The second describes when you're being blindsided with bills for delivered care. No other developed country has a medical system that serves its population this poorly, and that applies to all age groups, not just the elderly.

The US spends 3/4 of a trillion dollars on the security state every year, much of that going to corporations. Meanwhile, it squanders its medical dollars on jacked up pharmaceuticals, superfluous insurance companies, and inflated profits for private equity firms that are snapping up medical facilities and fleecing patients on an industrial scale. The result of this medical system, which is based on fetishization of the free market, is worse medical outcomes at every stage of life than in any other developed country. On the other hand though, our F-35's are to die for!

Heads he wins, tails we lose

Trump was sure he'd lose the election. The pandemic and his response to it had sunk his chances. The publicity savvy president could see what was coming, so he started the drumbeat that the election would be fixed. Ironically, this assured his loss because it caused many of his followers to refuse to vote in a "rigged election".

He lost. He lost because he responded to the pandemic as if it were primarily a public relations challenge. He mistakenly thought he could talk his way out of the crisis, but you can't BS a virus.

Now he is projecting, doing himself what he accuses others of doing. After lying so transparently that the last election was stolen from him, he is engineering the theft of the next one. He is successfully pushing legislation in states like Georgia, in which he lost by a slim margin, to steer control of elections away from the people and positions that refused to capitulate to his attempt to take the victory away from Biden. He is strategically positioning loyalists who will subvert the will of the people next time, on command.

Of course, the effete and feckless Democratic establishment is as unconcerned about this as it was about the Republican redistricting coup that resulted in today's conservative domination of legislatures despite consistently receiving a minority of votes. Our Dems are similar to the politicians of the Weimar government, except not as competent.

Climate Detonation

It should finally be possible to make the necessary correction and return to using the more powerful term "global warming", rather than the attenuated term "climate change". Conservatives were successful, as usual, at working the media to force us all to accept the latter, but ongoing weather catastrophes have demonstrated the inadequacy of that term.

Through substitution of the euphemism, the crisis was made to seem less menacing and its direct cause less obvious. Adequately addressing the problem would be costly, and since anything that potentially impinges on profit or that might involve raising taxes on the wealthy is anathema, the impulse to do anything substantial had to be reigned in. With the help of our milquetoast and complicit media, the fuzzier term was substituted, and a wealth-saving slowdown has been accomplished.

Naturally, this has allowed heating of the planet to accelerate, so much so that even "global warming" sounds euphemistic now. Perhaps the term "climate detonation" is more appropriate at this point.

The Road Ahead

It was idiotic to try to take over the Democtatic Party by putting a progressive on the presidential ticket. It was like trying to take over a kingdom by jumping on the throne when the king got up to go to the bathroom. There was never any doubt he was coming back.

It would be better to build from the bottom, getting progressives elected to local and state positions, then congressional seats. Sounds like the long way around, but it might be the only real road to realization of progressive ideas. Alternatively, form a third party, and UNIONIZE so there will be a source to pay for that party.

But in all honesty, it's exceedingly unlikely this inherently corrupt system can be changed through voting, especially with SCOTUS as the referee. More realistically, the road ahead might turn out to be this: fascism takes over, then in reaction to its ugliness there will be a military coup d'etat.

We live in interesting times.

Soon We might All be Dancing to Their Discordant Tune

To a hyper-assertive minority, a vaccine mandate is tyranny. On the other hand, forcing women to carry to term babies they can't afford or don't want to produce is reasonable. Further, not providing diapers to poor mothers is defensible because that avoids putting them on the slippery slope to dependency. "Let the babies' bottoms marinade while we spread the virus near and afar!"

If you manage to vote against their "values" agenda despite their best efforts to stop you, it won't matter because they've gerrymandered the districts. If that weren't enough, their once and future fuhrer is currently installing apparatchiks to steal elections in any case. Better brace for more cruel illogic coming from the soon to be triumphant right.

Keep in mind that these ethical sluts only have influence now because they are useful to the rich, who on their own cannot get a majority of votes in an election. Once democracy is definitively slain, it will be interesting to see if these crazies are kept around to control and repress the majority, or if they will be eliminated in some version of the "night of long knives". Ask Mike Pence what he thinks the chances are.

Maybe Next Year (Hang on Lee Harvey Oswald)

Fifty eight years and five days ago I was an eleven year old seventh grader at Jr. High West in Arlington MA, sitting in after-school detention. I don't remember my transgression, but I was probably there for showing off in front of Sally S. in Mr. Slattery's class again. A few minutes into this boredom-based punishment, our principal, who reminded me of Boris Karloff, walked into the classroom and said what sounded to me like, "The president has been SHOCKED." Then after a short pause he turned around and walked out.

No one caught what he said and we were all puzzled. Personally, I thought he was about to launch into some tirade about the president's reaction to all the rotten little juvenile delinquents in detention in schools around the country, but then he realized how stupid that would sound and just dropped it. A few minutes later he sent someone to tell us all to leave. We were sprung early and we bolted, no questions asked.

I walked down the hill on the path from the school to the street below, where a mailman in his delivery truck stopped to tell me that the president had been SHOT. Oh, that's what was going on. I knew this was momentus, but I was eleven. I felt bad for the adults, who really did seem to be in a state of shock. Poor old Boris Karloff!

Flash forward 58 years and President Joe Biden has just announced it would be too tricky to release the classified documents on the Jack Kennedy assination. Wow, that potato has kept its heat for all these years? You must be kidding. I'll be seventy next month. That means that anyone who had a role in the JFK assination or its investigation would be in their 90's or older now. Who are they worried about defaming? Further, institutions have evolved in the intervening time, so what is justification for the holdup? "Security concerns" is a blatant dodge. Why are they still covering up?

Either the truth is so startling that it would blow the lid off, even after 58 years, or else we live in an authoritarian state that offhandedly dismisses our right to know. Perhaps it's the latter and Biden, like Trump, Obama, and Bush before him have been told to leave it alone. Forget about it. Nothing to see here. (No surprise then they want to bury Assange for telling the American people what they have a right to know.)

I have only ever had a passing interest in conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assasination. The eleven year old didn't grow up to become deeply invested in the many details that seem to contradict the official explanation. I've found some of the hypotheses for why someone other than Lee Oswald might have killed Kennedy to be very plausible, but in the end it's all speculation until such time as the government releases the relevant documents, if then. And it seems now that that's not going to happen in my lifetime, even if I live to be as old as the people the government is supposedly trying to protect.

I do have doubt though, and it's based solely on three words uttered by Oswald when a reporter asked him about killing the president: "I'm a patsy."

I've seen that video clip a million times, and each time I ask myself, how big do your balls have to be to let you think you can, after you've been apprehended, sidestep the crime of killing the president just by saying "It wasn't me!" ? (We're not talking about farting in an elevator here.)

Yes, Oswald came across at that moment as cocky, but he seemed rational and even exasperated by the question. He seemed to me to be someone who was being set up, who knew a lot about what was happening, and was ready to spill the beans. But then along came Jack Ruby and put an end to any talking. (Shades of Jeffry Epstein?)

Anyway, we can't be told because of... blah blah blah. Whatever the real story might be, the game is definitely rotten. And I have to say I'm SHOCKED!

Business's Safe Room

The US has very often propped up dictators who were opposed by the population of their countries, or else the US has helped to overthrow popular leaders and replaced them with right wing usurpers. Why? Well, dealing with somebody who has tight control over his population and who will gladly accept bribes to stay out of the way of US and international corporations' doing business is preferable to operating in a country that's saddled with democracy. In the first case, you make a deal and move one, whereas in the second you must constantly try to convince people up and down the line that whatever deal you're proposing is not going to savagely exploit them and turn their countryside into a slag pile. That can be a challenge when the truth is that it will.

Democracy is an impediment to business that interferes with markets, injecting itself with the effect of slowing down deals and reducing profitability. Democracy is next to communism in this regard, except that whereas communism is adamant about shutting the door to capitalist exploitation, democracy can be cajoled into playing along. But then, why invest the time and effort in cajoling when you as a business could simply pick up the phone and make a deal with a despot?

This explains why the empire would rather prop up an authoritarian than deal with a democrat. It also explains why democracy is reviled as a close cousin to communism.

So, business prefers a right wing authoritarian government over a democratic one or even none at all: fascists are transactional and they keep their peons in line.

It is naive to think that the business elite's Machiavellian preference for fascism only applies outside US borders. Democracy is as despised here as anywhere else and for all the same reasons. In the lead up to 9/11, conservative talk radio was saturated with democracy slamming, comparing it to socialism, although not yet daring to label it communism. Then the planes hit and in the ensuing period of national unity the project to denigrate democracy was put on hold. But now we're back. Right wingers in congress are spattering progressives with the epithets "socialist" and "commie". To make up for lost time, they're skipping over the fizzled project to make "democracy" a bad word and are going straight for the jugular.

Well beyond that, MTG, Bosar, and others are promoting violent action against their limited opposition on the left. They insult and incite violence, some of it vaguely sado-sexual, against other politicians. They then say "I was kidding! It's just a joke!" (Wink, wink.) They're mimicking Trump's own all-too-familiar imitation of a 1950's movie gangster saying, "Somebody should oughta do somethin' about that guy! (Not that I'm sayin' to do somethin'.)"

Now Young Lord Rittenhouse has shown ordinary Joes the way toward the open killing of leftists in the general population. And behind it all, business is smiling because, although it has no politics, it can live with fascism much more easily than democracy.

Yes, fascism is as much in fashion here now as it was in 1930's Germany. Fascism, like authoritarian communism, is simpler than democracy or socialism. It is guttural, not cerebral. It runs on fear and hate, which are plentiful in a nation with as much economic uncertainty and inequality as in ours. It welcomes all, and the only price you have to pay is blind allegiance to the cause and to The Great and Glorious Leader. All you have to give up in return is your humanity. And besides, if you act now, business will give you a coupon for joining!

Once again Big Pharma has distributed enough vigorish to US legislators to stave off Medicare having the ability to barter for lower drug prices. There was never any real chance of Congress doing anything about the fact that we in the US pay at least twice for most drugs than people do anywhere else, and many multiple times more for specific drugs. Our system legalizes political bribery, which with the protection of a malevolent Supreme Court, is a fact that will not be changed. So, we are as assured of continuing to overpay for drugs as we are for internet and cell phone service, healthcare, and high tech military hardware and services, all for exactly that same reason: overwhelming corruption of both political parties. We cannot vote our way out of this.

Wake Up Time in America

It's time to wake up and say goodbye to the American Dream. The notion that everyone can own his/her home and that each generation will do better than the one before is obsolete. Equal educational opportunity is headed for extinction too. Anyone can see it. Just open your eyes.

To begin with, the decision has been made at the center of power that we won't own our own houses in the future. Private equity firms are snatching up houses now, aggressively buying everything on the market. Beyond that, they are cold calling homeowners and soliciting them to sell. Wall Street wants your house so they can rent it to your children.

In a rentier society, the rich do not run factories that produce goods, they merely own everything and collect rent. The wealthy began buying up housing stock after the 2008 Wall Street crash, with the blessing of Obama/Geithner, and it's accelerating. So, scratch that part of the American dream, it's gone.

What's making this easy to do is the fact that the rich have so much excess cash that they can't do anything with it other than buy up assets. After all, they can only buy so many super yachts! The reason they have so much cash is that they haven't been giving raises to the peons since Reagan was elected. Productivity has more than doubled, but the owners of society have resisted sharing the gains with workers. The result has been wage stagnation for workers and an explosion in wealth at the top.

It isn't just housing that is falling into the laps of the rich, they are poised to snap up everything including municipal water systems and roads. It's going to be a jolly return to medievalism! This should not shock: capitalism is a Monopoly game (originally called The Landlord's Game) and we're nearing the end of play. Only a few participants are left at the board and they own everything.

To add to your concerns, the big food conglomerates are jacking up the price per unit on the food you buy. They are leaving the price on the box the same, just putting less in the box. This is stealth inflation. The owners will not be raising your salary to compensate for the cost increases they have created, and they will even use inflation as the excuse for not doing so. Perhaps you could sell them your house to get some extra cash to buy food with!

And as for educating your children, forget about it. Public schools have been in the crosshairs of the wealthy for decades. Milton Friedman's most fervent desire was to eliminate public education at all levels. Charter schools were an opening salvo in the destruction of public schools, but eventually they will just be shut down. Public education is socialism!

The American dream has morphed into a tale of serfdom for the ordinary citizen. There is no escape from this short of a revolution because neither political party has any real problem with it. Republicans historically disregard the average worker, but despite their former mantle as the Party of the People, the Democrats now work for the one percent, same as the GOP. The Dems try to sound kinder and gentler, but in the final analysis the Dems and Repubs perform a transparent good cop/bad cop routine. They all work for the rich and the goal is to eliminate workers from the middle class.

Meanwhile, ignore what's written here because there's no easy fix and it's really depressing anyway. If you are angry and just can't contain your anger, sublimate. Get involved in the movement to decry the cancellation of Dr. Seuss books that were sales flops. Get all worked up about Critical Race Theory, even though it isn't taught anywhere other than in law schools. Insist that a fair election was stolen. Refuse to avail yourself of a perfectly good vaccine and risk having your lungs convert into haggis. Kick the dog. The cat too. Become a fascist. You'll feel better on your way to serfdom.

Property Rites

Hypothetically, let's say that I live in an affluent area that's ringed with low-income, dangerous communities where life is harrowing and the poverty is brutal. Sometimes the violence and misery crosses into my wealthy enclave, but mostly it stays outside. I hear about it on the news, but I'm rarely directly affected. However, I and others in my privileged area want to ensure we won't be affected, and are willing to spend money to make that a certainty.

Let's say further that if I were willing to part with 50 cents of every dollar I take in, changes could be made in the outlying areas to reduce the causes of grief and hardship, to the extent there would be a renaissance. Then I and my well off neighbors wouldn't have to worry about being impacted by spillover violence, and the people outside would enjoy a vastly improved life.

Alternatively, I could spend 25 cents of every dollar on security in the form of high walls and private police. If I don't mind being under siege and I feel no empathy toward those outside the walls, this is a more economical approach.

Well, guess what the haves around the world are doing with regard to inequality and climate change? Building walls and beefing up security to protect them from the misery of the majority! That's what the invisible hand of the marketplace under neoliberal capitalism demands.

What's a real scream is that most capitalists claim to be Christians! And they are, having hammered and mangled the philosophy of Jesus to make it fit with capitalism, swapping "I've got mine" for charity, and John Wayne for Jesus. Fatal mistake. To quote Johnny Cash, "Someday He's gonna cut you down, boy. God's gonna cut you down." It's coming.

The Art of Culture War

The weapons of the culture war are the red herring thrown out by conservative apparatchiks to befuddle the feeble minded and keep them off the scent. Recently a senator from Missouri went on a tirade about the plight of young men who do little more than play video games and watch porn, eschewing marriage and starting a family. This the senator ascribes to the feminization of society.

Has it escaped the senator's attention that if these young men could go out and make a living wage like their fathers could, they would be far more likely to put down their joysticks and start a family? He must get it, but since the corporations that the senator dutifully serves decided to move manufacturing overseas to avoid paying a living wage, junior remains on the couch. Additionally, junior can't afford to pay for post secondary education since the patron saint of the Republican Party, Reagan, decided that if working class kids wanted to further their education they could very well pay for it themselves.

The senator is a fraud. The people who listen to his tripe are boobs. It isn't that they are stupid necessarily, but they are narcisstic enough to ignore the obvious in favor of their own biases and ignorance.

Finally, as to the feminization of young men, that is actually happening, but it has nothing to do with family values. It's physiological: male sperm counts are dropping such that by the middle of the century most males will be incapable of producing offspring. Further, the size of male organs are decreasing with subsequent generations and the incidence of related birth defects is accelerating. Almost certainly, this is caused by the chemicals in our food and water, but the good senator would much rather look for witches to burn than to get to the root of the problem.

Why? Because in the course of making a profit the corporations that the senator serves are in all likelihood causing the problem, and the last thing he wants to do is to stand by and let them lose money. So he obfuscates, talks about culture and morality and the boobs can't get enough of it.

Waiting for the Visigoths

The just passed infrastructure bill allocates 1 trillion dollars over the next ten years, or 100 billion per year. Sounds like a lot of money, but we spend 740 billion per year right now on national security, and that figure will only rise over the same decade. So in perspective, we will spend less than one seventh on infrastructure than we spend on spying, the military, and military hardware. Republicans didn't even want to spend that much. Who needs hospitals, schools, and roads when you have an essential albatross like the F-35?

Joe's Unfathomable Lesson

Joe Biden needs to get on the scoreboard, otherwise he will never get out of his slump and his party will be trounced in the midterms. He could do this by wiping out student debt, but he won't for some reason. Too bad for him, because it would catapult his presidency past the reach of the opposition, leaving them sputtering, griping, tearing their clothes, and clutching their pearls while the overwhelming majority in the country would celebrate him for finally doing something for working people. Maybe he doesn't want to alienate suburban upper middle class Republicans who threw him a one-time bone last November, or maybe he actually believes that education is not a public concern. He's spent a lot of time with neoliberals, so maybe he believes the latter.

State college costs used to be within the reach of everyone, but now even public universities are so expensive that you have to go into more debt than you ever thought possible just to try for a degree. That's because Ronald Reagan and his neocon posse believed that the government had no role in educating the young of the lower economic class and that a school of higher education should be a private enterprise. If that was their belief regarding college, did they also believe that public high school is similarly unnecessary? In fact they did and they still do, as their backing of charter schools, which are a gambit to destroy public education, demonstrates. (This was the Holy Grail of the celebrated Milton Friedman.)

It might also be, as Thom Hartman has suggested, that when all those college kids from the lower class were rebelling in the 60's, the upper class decided they were not paying for that anymore! Let the little SOBs go into hawk up to their eyeballs if they want post secondary education, and if they are forced to work long hours while they are attending school that will leave them less time to protest!

So, the cost of college has reached the point at which it is uncertain that a graduate can ever make enough money to pay back the loans. Further, with that much debt they might never be able to afford having kids of their own. Here again, the upper class has reason to rejoice: they will not have to pay for schooling the forgone offspring of these plebeian graduates either! Further, since corporations moved manufacturing jobs overseas to avoid paying union wages, there are not enough slots for the lower class anymore; since too many unemployed young people can pose a threat of unrest and revolution, fewer is better anyway.

My favorite recollection from the Barack "Card Check" Obama presidency is his telling jobless people they should have gotten a better education. Yes, those turned away from the table because of outsourcing should have a) seen it coming, b) been book smart enough to obtain an engineering degree, and c) taken on crushing debt for the privilege of possibly landing a job that pays a living wage.

Barack and Joe, tandem leaders of the "party of the people", are unabashed toadies to our Wall Street overlords. Wonder if the Republicans will take back both houses in '22? You can bet your student loan payment on it.

Donald Trump is a composition of trap grease, horse sweat, and curb crud; his followers are demented half-wits. Still, you have to hand it to them for being willing to start a revolution when one is called for (even though they have all the wrong reasons). Contrast this to the left, which ignores the decimation, domination, and damnation of the working class by finance and merely wants to be on friendly terms with the "nice" billionaires.

We can't even do anything about a port not functioning for weeks because it's jammed with empty containers. What does that make our chances of doing something about global warming look like? Not good at all.

Civics Lesson for my Eleven Year Old Granddaughter

In a nutshell, here's how national and state politics work in the US: you have to give money to politicians in office to get the government to do anything for you. We don't call this bribery in the US, we call it making a campaign contribution, but in the end it's giving money to a politician to get him or her to do what you, the donor, want done. That might be allowing a factory farm to be put in a contested location, or stopping something from happening that might impact the donor financially, even if it's immensely popular among the general population.

Obviously then, if you're not rich and can't donate large amounts of money to those in office, you will not get what you want from government, especially if big donors want the opposite. A Princeton University study covering several recent decades revealed that the US Congress passed laws that adhered to the wishes of the wealthy nearly 100% of the time, so the idea that the system is set up to be controlled by the rich is a demonstrated reality and not just a theory.

That's it. That's how the US government works. It has been this way for a very long time. However, until the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980, there was more of a balance between the interests of the rich and those of the rest of us. Then as now, the rich gave money to the Republican party, the "party of business". But the Democrats were largely funded by unions, and working people were funding the unions through their union dues. Because the unions represented the interests of ordinary working people, the Democrats often did things that benefited average families. Back then, the Democrats were called "the party of the people".

But Reagan destroyed the unions, so Democrats had to turn to the rich to get their money, the same as Republicans did. Now no one in office is being bribed to do anything good for average people. People are unhappy as a result, and they're becoming more and more angry. Many of them voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election because he was almost alone (except for Bernie Sanders) among all the candidates to acknowledge that the system was leaving ordinary people out. However, once in office he gave the rich their largest tax break in history, which meant there would be no money left to do things for ordinary people. Trump presented himself as the champion of the people to get elected, but once in office he did nothing substantial for them. He turned out to be a phoney. In fairness to him though, not much can really be done because we still have a system that is founded on legalized bribery.

What Trump did do was to perfect the practice of stirring up and amplifying people's anger. By keeping them in a state of confused rage he is able to fool people into believing him when he says he is their only hope. This is something Adolf Hitler did to the German people in the 1930's, and ultimately it led to a war that involved the whole planet and destroyed many of the great cities of the world. Many millions of people died from bombs, bullets, and starvation. It demolished Germany. Trump has studied books containing Hitler's speeches, and this is probably where he learned Hitler's tricks for controlling people.

Why does someone want to be in charge at all costs? Because of their enormous ego and deep, painful insecurity. Why do ordinary people follow these false prophets and egomaniacs? Because they are desperate. If the system is against them and there's no hope of reforming the system, people eventually follow someone who tempts them with a promise of a better deal, even if they only half believe it can be delivered. This is sometimes referred to as "grasping at straws".

Keep in mind that Donald Trump is not the only bad guy in this situation. The political system is corrupt and neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party has any inclination toward changing it. It works for them as it is because they are paid by the tiny minority that hoards all the wealth and therefore has all the power. So, the system is neglecting the vast majority of the country, leaving the US vulnerable to every authoritarian who comes along and wants to be the king.

Geezer says world going to hell:

I Grew up to have two points of philosophy to regard the world with: "There but for the grace of God go I," and "We're all in this together." At the present, US society seems to be abandoning those principles at light speed. This has been accelerating for decades, starting sometime after Nixon left office. (Nixon had a lot of burrs, but he was not an elitist.)

The empire's torture of Abu Zubaydah, who had actually done nothing to deserve its ire, was unending and excruciating. It made Pontius Pilate look restrained by comparison. Now, because the empire will brook no embarrassment, it refuses to release Abu Zubaydah from Guantanamo after 15 years of torment there and in black sites in Thailand and Poland, lest he tell his story to the world. Perhaps he could be made to sign a non-disclosure and binding arbitration agreement like the empire's workers are required to do. Then, except for being muzzled, the broken remnant of a man could finally have his freedom for whatever remains of his life.

Kyrsten and Joe, Meet Lyndon

Munchkin and Sinemax can go on playing their narcissistic games, but if it results in Democrats' failing to deliver once again, the world belongs to Mitch McConnell in perpetuity. Discouraged Democratic voters will not turn out in the midterms and permanent control will then go to Koch and his coalition partners like the Texas Taliban. No joke.

Elected Democrats have done exactly jack for working people since Carter was in office, which is why average people in the US struggle and have so little security compared to citizens in every other industrialized nation, and why our kids are going to be serfs with smartphones. Dems need to come through with something significant for the average person now, or they are done.

If Kyrsten and Joe don't come to heel, we will be permanently locked into an economy based on rent-seeking in which the top ten percent own everything, the rest have nothing, and we will be repressed by fascistic religious overseers. If only the ghost of Lyndon Johnson could pay K&J a friendly visit in the dead of night and definitively realign their positions! Biden won't/can't do it.

Louis DeJoy's Top Secret Mission

To almost everyone's horror and disbelief, as head of the United States Postal Service, Louis DeJoy has hobbled the institution. He has degraded service intentionally by taking equipment out of service and changed operating procedures in ways that cause delays in delivery. He was a Trump appointee whom Biden has failed to replace, a fact that causes more consternation and confused misbelief.

Well, relax, everything is going according to plan. Companies that bill consumers have wanted to replace paper billing for a long time, preferably with auto-payment, and Mr. DeJoy is just giving them an assist in this regard. For instance, my electric bill last month arrived only two days before it was due. This month I received an email from the power company encouraging me to "go paperless" because the USPS, under DeJoy's management, was degrading its service by protracting delivery times. Well, putting those two things together suggests that this is a concerted effort to get the consumer to stop using the US Mail and get on board with web billing!

I get it. Web billing is easier and cheaper for companies. But I prefer getting paper bills in the mail because I'm less likely to miss a payment if I have them as a tangible reminder (unless the billers harrang the heck out of me through continual emails and texts, which they will do). I pin my bills up on a cork board in the order of their due dates, and I find this convenient. Also, while internet service might get flakey or my computer might die, I can depend (at least until now) on the US Mail to deliver my bills, come hell or high water.

So, the USPS is being hamstrung so that corporations can lower operating costs, so that (here comes the punch line) they can pass the savings onto us, the consumers! Thank you Mr. DeJoy, turns out you're a really nice guy after all. And kudos to both presidents for allowing this guy to accomplish his mission.

Once religious fascists take over as the enforcers for the oligarchy, there will be changes in the way holidays are observed. On future Columbus Days, employers will cut off the hands of under-producing employees, just as the great man once did to natives who failed to bring him their quota of gold.On Labor Day weekends, workers will be required to work a twelve hour day on Sunday and forfeit the equivalent of eighteen hours' pay to their boss. On Veterans Day, ex service members will be required to wear dunce caps printed with the words, "There was nothing in it for me." And of course, on Christmas the enforcers will round up witches, gays, non Christians and atheists and burn them all at the stake. Values matter.

Those who carp endlessly about infringements on their freedom generally are referring to their assumed right to continue denying rights to other people, especially poor people and peole of color. (If you're caught picking pockets, it's handy to shout "Thief!" to escape in the confusion.)

Tightening auto emissions to reduce air pollution is an inherently good idea, but there are also beneficial secondary effects. Mandating lower absolute pollution from each vehicle model will lead to smaller cars overall. Smaller cars use less material in their manufacture, which means fewer resources consumed and less CO2 released. Also, because smaller cars have less inertia, they can move quickly from a stop, and as a result they contribute less to traffic slowdown than SUVs; the relative easing of traffic results in less fuel consumed, less pollution, and faster commutes for drivers. Finally, trending toward smaller cars would ultimately eliminate the lethal mismatch between a Honda Fit and a Chevy Suburban in an accident.

from Three Days of the Condor:

Higgins : It's simple economics. Today it's oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?

Joe Turner : Ask them?

Higgins : Not now - then! Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!

Plantation States of America

The people who run this country (directly and through their politician vassals), have the same regard for working men and women, and their families, as plantation owners had for their slaves. Look around you, it shows.

Black Americans have been held down for centuries, but there's something new: now even working white Americans are the target of economic exploitation and political disenfranchisement. (Oh, you can still vote, but for your choice of whom?) Keep identifying with THE Man my fellow white guy, and you will be further stabbed in the back. When you fall, you will land right next to your slain Black brother.

Privilege is not Enough Protection

Let's face it, the rarified wealthy who run the world believe that they can weather any storm, and conclude that allowing something to be done about global warming would cost them too much in taxes. They prefer just paying out-of-pocket for the occasional tweaks and purchases necessary along the way to maintain their personal physical comfort as the planet slowly cooks. The rest of us would suffer, but they would rise above it all.

It's not going to work. The tsunami that's coming will tower over whatever perch their money has bought them. The amusement of their hysterical panic on discovering this will be cold comfort to the rest of us dying beside them.

The Democratic Party. Playing pocket pool for forty years while working people got eviscerated!

The Unraveling

The good old US of A has become a dystopia patterned on the plantation model. In antebellum times, plantation owners increased productivity by using the bullwhip. Now, Amazon tracks its employees electronically, and if they unknowingly fall below some secret productivity point, they will be fired on the spot. This creates fear and anxiety, which is exactly the desired effect.

Summarily losing your job means being thrown into chaos. How will you pay your rent? Will the sheriff put your family's belongings out on the sidewalk? How will you make car payments? If someone in your family is sick and undergoing treatment, how will you continue the treatment? How will you eat? While it's not as physically painful as being tied to the whipping pole, it's diabolically effective at terrorising you into complete submission.

Jeff Bezos alone is not to blame, he has merely exploited the system for his own profit. The decimation of unions is to blame, and this couldn't have taken place without a phalanx of politicians doing the bidding of the one percent while selling out the vast majority. It also required good men to do nothing while the owners ratched up "worker insecurity" to fatten the bottom line.

Sadly, people will never figure this out. They are kept in the dark by gaslighting politicians and a media that only obfuscates. Together they conspire to persuade you that your troubles are all of your own making. It will be this way until we make our descent into fascism, the lifeboat of capitalism.

Newt Gingrich --the patron saint of partisanship and national disintegration

Why refer to the Supreme Court as SCOTUS any longer, when it has become SCOD, the Supreme Council of Opus Dei? Installing these ultra-conservative Catholics has been a shrewd move by Republicans: they are reflexively deferential to big business, and meanwhile they will satisfy every whim of the far right religious component of the Republican Party coalition. If you're not rich, or not a religious nut, then tough, because this one of the three legs of government doesn't think you deserve a voice. Or perhaps, even to be alive.

Nothing can or will be done about the looming climate catastrophe until the entrails of the last CEO are used to strangle the last billionaire.

HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED that the most staunch conservatives at work, the ones constantly giving lip service to Personal Responsibility are the biggest gold bricks? It's like these lazy mama's boys are trying to cover for the fact they can barely tie their own shoes (which mommy does for them anyway). Conversely, the people at work who carry the load, the producers, generally have a more "There but for the grace of God go I" attitude toward the unfortunate. Funny, isn't it?

Covidiots

There have been true heroes during the covid pandemic, foremost among them medical workers, and many, many others as well. They can never be properly thanked or fully repaid for their toil, dedication, courage, compassion, and sacrifice.

But on the other hand, there have been individuals, groups, organizations, and even nations who have acted in reprehensible ways, motivated by greed, cowardice, and even vindictiveness. Beyond that, there's been the occurrence of pure insanity. Here are some examples:

In the early stages of the pandemic, when it was just taking root in US cities, some high-ups in the Trump administration decided to do nothing, or at least not hurry to do anything about the pandemic. Why? It was a political calculation. Big cities were the first to be affected by the coronavirus, and because almost all big cities are run by Democrats, the Republican administration slyly let them stew for a while, believing the resulting pain and chaos would damage the Democratic regime's hold on those big cities.

So they sat back passive-aggressively and let the cities twist in the wind. This was cruel and negligent, but it was also stupidly shortsighted. What goes around comes around, and the pandemic is certainly coming around now to red state rural areas --with a vengeance. The virus inevitably spilled over from metropolitan hubs to the hinterlands.

To be fair and Foxy, reprehensible behavior has not been contained to the Republican camp. The Biden administration, like Trump's, has refused to waive patent protections on vaccines, so that the global south cannot stave off the pandemic unless and until it can pony up enough to pay off Big Pharma, which it is completely unable to do. Bad for them, but really just as bad for everyone eventually, because it allows the virus to survive in the global south and mutate. It will ultimately make its way back to the privileged global north as a more communicable and perhaps deadlier variant. Oh well, insisting on adhering to patents will extend Big Pharma's bonanza by expanding the market for vaccine and requiring new versions, so it's obviously well worth it.

The US government isn't stopping at prioritizing Big Pharma's profit over global health though. It is also using the coronavirus as a weapon. In it's sanctions (ie, economic siege) against Venezuela, the US has prevented that country from purchasing vaccine from abroad. When Venezuela tried to obtain vaccine, the US actually coerced a complicit international bank to freeze assets for the exchange. That's right, we are prohibiting vaccine from reaching Venezuela as a tool to push for a coup there. We're doing the same thing to Cuba by preventing their obtaining hypodermic needles to administer vaccine they either make themselves or obtain from China. (Please tell me again about our being a Christian nation, I love being preached to by pious predators devoid of empathy, touting American exceptionalism.)

Returning to the Trump administration's gross misbehavior, Trump himself made not wearing a mask and eschewing vaccination litmus tests for his cult members, so that now infection and death has come roaring back in the US via the dominant delta variant of the virus. It is now affecting not only the unvaccinated adults in his covens, but children and even some rational people who did become vaccinated. Again, this keeps the pandemic going and gives the virus further opportunity to survive and mutate.

Anti-mask, anti-vaccers are effectively pro-pandemic. But they're mad as hell and they are not going to take it anymore. They are aglow in their infantile fury based in toxic individualism and an unfounded persecution complex. Meanwhile, they spread the disease and die.

Which brings me to my favorite covidiots: the dickheads who aggressively attack and threaten health professionals at school board meetings where those professionals attempt to explain to them the need for masking during a pandemic in which the virus is spread from one victim to another through the air they breathe. Not only do these narcissistic jerks want to endanger their own kids, but they want to imperil our kids and grandkids. Why? To satisfy their need to be seen as special.

The common thread running through all this rotten behaviour is narcissism and a lack of empathy, which, come to think of it, is the bane of human existence and a root cause of suffering throughout the ages. It is almost certain to block any effective action against global warming or to address economic inequality, so humanity is in for a rough ride.

The common voter is like an interrogation subject in a good cop/bad cop scenario. Sure, we feel relieved when the door opens and it's the good cop, but don't forget Democrats and Republicans are working in unison, for the same bosses, to provide the same result, and it's not one that's in your favor.

Industrial livestock farming squanders antibiotics which results in bacterial resistance -Would you like plague with that burger?

The Desirability of Leaving a Good Corpse

Wouldn't it be great if, before the final nuclear showdown with China (that all serious people in our government seem to be aching for), everyone were finally able to quit smoking? That would be terrific! Just think, while pooping out their intestines and fending off armed assailants trying to steal food to feed their own irradiated and starving families (won't be able to grow any more food for a long while with nuclear winter upon us!), the pitiable defender will at least not be craving a cigarette! (In theory, at least, although there could be some weak-willed recidivists. How disappointing.)

Fox Haggis

Fox News has cultivated vaccine hesitancy just to make a buck. It continually raises questions about negative effects of the vaccines while downplaying the severity of the actual disease. Here's the real scoop: rarely or occasionally the vaccine can have side effects; the true effect of not being vaccinated can be laying in a hospital bed, on a ventilator, while you slowly die as your lungs convert into something resembling haggis. Fox doesn't so much as have blood on its hands as it does haggis.

Faschey the Tangerine Pain Clown and his Peroxide Orangutan in '24!

Millions on the verge of being tossed into the street. The elderly mugged by drug companies. Tax evading billionaires taking joy rides into the upper atmosphere and charging the spectacle to the credit cards of the working poor. Young people foregoing having families because of incapacitating student loan debt. Oh, and just for good measure, sterility rising so drastically that in 30 years naturally conceived babies might be a rarity.

The situation is so bad and the system is so rancid that it resembles Germany's plight during the Weimar period. Where will we go from here? Well, how many extreme right wingers do you know? How many committed socialists? Right.

Spreading covid-19 in the classroom

If one asymptomatic kid with covid goes to school without a mask on, they will spread it to others whether the others are wearing masks or not. Because they will be spending long hours couped up in the classroom together, spread is inevitable. Depending on the ventilating system, the spread might go well beyond their one classroom.

Those parents who are against mandatory mask wearing in school surely understand this. We are not new to this pandemic and over and over we've seen how the virus spreads between unprotected victims, not just here, but throughout the world. So, unless those parents are engaging in magical thinking, they probably believe that covid infection in school aged children is not very serious. In their opinion, wearing a mask is worse than kids getting the disease.

Maybe they are right, but how can they be sure? What if there are unanticipated long term effects in children that we won't know about for months or even years?

One thing is for sure though, schools without mask mandates are laboratories for breeding a viral strain that will more readily infect children. That is true by definition: mutation of the virus will occur; if a mutation occurs that is advantageous to the continuation of the virus, that mutation will flourish; in the classroom environment, the mutation with the most obvious advantage is one that can spread easily among children. Therefore, if a strain develops that affects children more than the current one, it will probably evolve in a classroom.

The real question is not whether kids should wear masks, but whether they should be going back to school at all before vaccines are OKed for them. This is true whether covid is currently lethal for kids or not, because if it's still around in coming months, it has the potential to change its characteristics and home in on younger, unvaccinated victims with a fury.

Supposedly, syphilis began as a tropical skin condition, but when sailors brought it north to colder climates where people necessarily covered up with more clothing, spread was limited. As if in response, but really just randomly, a mutation occurred that no longer depended on casual skin contact for spreading. Nature "found a way". (The organism that causes syphilis in a bacterium, not a virus, but the principle is the same.)

Suggestion for T-shirt in Gov. Ron DeSantis' reelection swag collection: "Don't Fauci my Florida funeral!"

Jaws Atlanta

The storyline for the 1975 movie "Jaws" on IMDb reads, " It's a hot summer on Amity Island, a small community whose main business is its beaches. When new Sheriff Martin Brody discovers the remains of a shark attack victim, his first inclination is to close the beaches to swimmers. This doesn't sit well with Mayor Larry Vaughn and several of the local businessmen. Brody backs down to his regret as that weekend a young boy is killed by the predator."

We all saw the movie, and today's reality echoes its plot. All you have to do is substitute "Mayor Keisha Bottoms" for "Sheriff Brody", "Atlanta" for "Amity Island", "Governor Kemp" for "Mayor Vaughn", "mask mandate" for "closing the beaches", and of course, "covid" for "shark".

(In fairness, Gov. Kemp is more Elmer Fudd than Mayor Vaughn.)

Nobody will say it, nowhere is it in print, but the underlying reason the country is so fractured is that it's been torn apart by four decades of neoliberalism. As UK Prime Minister Thatcher said in the beginning, under neoliberalism there is no such thing as society, only the individual. No one asked her if that wasn't obviously a death sentence for community and a celebration of sociopathy. It was.

Hillary Clinton lost the presidency because she was the Grand Duchess of Neoliberalism. Bill had been the Grand Duke and of course Reagan had been the king to Thatcher's queen. Voters knew Hillary was an elitist who was disdainful of average working people.The Democratic establishment blamed Bernie, the Russians, and even Susan Sarandon for Hillary's loss, but it was people's understanding that she was an economic aristocrat that resulted in Faschey the Tangerine Pain Clown getting into office. She came in as an elitist, meritocratic defender of neoliberalism, and she went out that way.

While the Democratic Party has slowly and reluctantly begun to learn the lesson of the 2016 presidential loss, it cannot correct itself by as much as it needs to because it has come to serve and depend on the moneyed class as much as the old Republicans once did. Meanwhile, Republicans have become the Plantationist Party/Klan 3.0, and it's all due to the corrosive effect of neoliberalism.

A Thank You Note to the Unvaccinated

There was a point a few weeks ago when my future was in doubt, but now, thanks to your help I am back on the rise. Those of you who failed to get vaccinated gave me enough time to reformulate and produce a new strain. Combine that with an open field of unprotected people and I'm making a comeback!

A special thanks to those of you who had the wisdom to refuse vaccination on ideological grounds. If, Lucifer willing, I can mutate again, this time to be more effective in infecting children, I can make the previous 600,000 US deaths look like a token down payment! You know I love you MTG, but who cares about the delta variant? ME!

Best wishes,
Coronavirus

P.S. Freedom!

Ordinary people -not Trumper's, they're a breed apart- are feeling the effects of all wealth being funnelled upward to the elite. Republicans consider ordinary people less than human, and the Democratic Party long ago forsook them for the managerial class. So, ordinary people are apt to stay away from the polls in '22 simply because neither party in our corrupt two party system cares about their plight (Repubs dismiss them outright, and Dems only pretend to care about them if they're LGBT++). As a result, an army of highly motivated, narcissistic, pro-fascist neo confederates can win by default. That's the picture. Congratulations fascists!

I Wish

I remember how I felt going out on a sunny morning when I was a child. The world was so beautiful and I was happy. I remember going for a walk with my mother to get ice cream, how buoyant I was. Fairs held in the school playground had a curious magic. And I remember the excitement of walking through the shops on the boardwalk with my grandparents.

Don't see much of that now except when I take my granddaughters out on excursions. I can't feel what they feel, I can only provide the backdrop so they can soar now in their own time.

At some point we were told we had to stop loving the world and grow up, which meant putting school, and then work, first. For a while we compensated for our having to buckle down with drinking and all those other things we use for a needed dopamine fix. Eventually we had kids whom we love and are glad to have raised. (Personally, I hope that I wasn't too like the father in Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle".)

I would love to be that little kid in the sand again, having his arm tugged by a flapping box kite on a windy day. I also wish my kids and grandkids didn't have to undergo their metamorphosis. I wish we all could be small and play together for an eternity of sunny mornings.

there?

i miss you.
haven't seen you in years.
just a glimpse now and then
but mostly i deal
with that ferocious bodyguard.

hope you return someday.
even if i'm gone

Voting for the lesser of two evils is a rational tactic, but alone without a strategy, it's a death spiral.

they can never have enough

big news! the filthy rich don't pay taxes!

no kidding. who believed they did? we don't tax wealth, only income, and the rich gain wealth while skirting too large of a reportable income. if i owned a company i could live in a house that technically was owned by the business. i could drive a company car, travel to any vacation paradise, call it a business trip and put it on the company credit card. i could pay myself relatively meager wages to skirt taxes. i could give myself stock options that would pump up my wealth but not count as income. if i needed a pile of cash i could always borrow against my sizable 401K.. that's the way it works.

but the insipid press is all a-twitter because somebody (THEY'LL hang!) got hold of tax records of the rich and shameless and those papers divulge that the rich aren't paying. if you're surprised by that, i find THAT shocking.

in an oligarchy like the United States of America in the 21st century, the rich don't pay taxes. that sterling rich guy, Donald Trump, told us during the 2016 campaign that he was too smart to pay taxes. weren't you listening? this modern oligarchy isn't too unlike that of medieval times in that the poor pay the taxes, now as then, and not the rich.

the rich have done fantastically well during the pandemic. that's not true of most of the rest of us. groceries and household goods have actually gone up stealthily because containers at the supermarket have shrunk while prices on the boxes have stayed the same. hidden inflation.

and we STILL cannot get an increase in the minimum wage! or universal healthcare, or public transportation, or free post secondary education, or daycare.

worst of all, we are crushed by unresolvable personal debt which we have incurred over time because we don't make enough to cover everything we and our families need.

following WWII, working people could afford cars, houses, and vacations on their salaries. no more. that era is dead. the New Deal was murdered by the tag team of Reagan and Clinton. they handed the kingdom to the oligarchs and let the working class wither over forty years (longer if you count the groundwork done by that anti-union, anti-worker southerner, Jimmy C.).

so, you live in an oligarchy and you -and your children- are doomed to a life of precarity. furthermore, there is no way you can vote your way out of it because both parties serve the rich. period. and that won't change.

when you are working for less than you made ten years ago and you are starting to panic because you think there might be more than just a little fentanyl in that opiate you took a few minutes ago to soothe the pain, just remember what that prissy scold, Barack Obama, told you while he was giving away the store to Wall St. banks: if you have no life it's because you failed to get a good education. you have only yourself to blame. slob.

and since you were amazed to find out what should have been blatantly obvious to everyone for decades, that the rich pay no taxes, you probably buy into the canard that your plight is your own fault, rather than the direct result of belonging to the working class in a country run by and for oligarchs. they NEVER have enough, and your suffering is their delight.

This is our Weimar Period

Ronald Reagan was the picador and the matador was Bill Clinton. Together they stabbed the New Deal to death. Federal government, whose worst sin at the time was making an attempt to establish a degree of racial fairness, was greatly reduced by these two. Now, apart from protecting the wealth of the elite, the US Government doesn't do much of anything for ordinary people anymore.

Domestically, we have the cops acting like an occupying force, squatting on the poor. Internationally, we have the CIA and US Special Forces rooting out anyone who stands in the way of Western multinational corporations. We also have a State Department orchestrating economic sanctions against uppity regimes, which in practice are a worldwide group of sieges. Oh, and the government also acts as a sales rep for US arms manufacturers.

That's all the federal government does anymore, since Ronald Reagan convinced mainstream (ie, white) America that, "The government IS the problem!". Acting on this belief has brought us to the present in which the children and grandchildren of boomers who voted for Clinton and Reagan are not faring nearly as well as the boomers did. You don't have to make a case for this. It's blatantly obvious and undeniable. This is how things turn out when the wealthy are free to control the economy and run roughshod over the lower class.

The upshot is that large numbers of people have lost faith in the system, which does nothing to halt or prevent their slide into precarity. Maddeningly, Democratic elites have mouthed the insipid line that there's no fundamental problem! Hilary Clinton made this claim while running against Trump, and still doesn't get that's why she lost. (She blames Russia and Bernie instead.) Before her, charmer Obama told people their difficulties were due to the fact they hadn't obtained the right educational credentials. Apparently, we can all be math wizards and computer programmers if we just get off our lazy asses and try!

As a result of the government's refusal to protect the welfare of the majority of its citizens, we now have a large proportion of the population that has given up on rationality and begun to embrace ludicrous memes and myths. Fox News and its imitators are happy to profit from this and ceaselessly reinforce irrational beliefs and toxic memes in order to sell soap. Above all, we have a Republican Party that will styme any vestigial impulse the Democrats might have to help the working class, so that people wander further away into the forest of myth and misunderstanding. It seems that there's no stopping this process now.

Where else can this lead to other than to fascism? We are Germany in the 1930's.

Donald's Stand Up Double

DJT had two big accomplishments during his term in office. The first was economic and the second was socio-political. Both transformed the country.

Giving a gargantuan tax break to the rich was the culmination of Paul Ryan's life's work. His work finished, he retired as soon as Trump signed the tax break into law. Not only does it increase inequality between the classes, it guarantees that the rich will get richer, compounding their wealth into the foreseeable future while the rest of us get pushed down further.

It also precludes any new social expenditures and will even lead to the reduction of existing programs.Why? No taxes, no spending. Otherwise, DEBT would be created. Even Baroness Nancy of the House is a staunch adherent to "pay-as-you-go", meaning we can't have any additions to the budget without eliminating some existing expenses. Republicans, having reduced revenues through this monumental tax rollback, set up the Democrats yet again in that old recurring bind: "We would love to help, but the money just isn't there!" (Where did the money go? Toward Jeff Bezos' new superyacht!)

Because the Democratic Party has been the wealthy's JV team since Clinton handed it over to them, in its heart-of-hearts the party really doesn't want to help working people any more than Republicans do. It will act nice whenever there's an issue that doesn't cost their socially liberal super donors anything, so the DNC will stand on the correct side of identity issues, but do nothing, NOTHING about a living wage, universal medical care, homelessness, free higher education, consumer debt protection, clean and affordable drinking water, free daycare for working families, public transportation, or the climate. Further, as soon as it can the Democratic Party will find a way to undercut Social Security, as Obama ingloriously attempted to do.

When Joe Biden fails to deliver on promised covid relief and infrastructure investment because of Repulican obstinance and Democratic duplicity, Trump will benefit. Assuming he's still physically able to run in 2024, Trump can win because democratic voters will be too demoralized by then to turn out, whereas Trump's base will stream out to vote.

This brings us to DJT's second massive achievement: he made his Anglo-Saxon Protestant base feel good again. He reaffirmed their privileged position and supposed superiority. For this he is adored by WASPs, from evangelical Christians to the deepest rednecks. He strokes them with the theme of white superiority, using Mexicans, BLM advocates, and Muslims as scapegoats in exactly the way Hitler used the Jews and communists in Germany. He even throws in references to "socialists" occasionally to round out the Hitlerian performance.

I sometimes wonder how he would answer if any reporter ever dared to ask him if he was following Hitler's playbook by relentlessly mining the discontent of the population. I suspect he might casually admit to it.

His ardent followers know their demographic is losing its majority position, and they are determined to hold onto their privilege. Trump speaks to them warmly about their guns, as do his acolytes in the Republican Party. He and his followers know he will do whatever it takes to keep WASPs in the driver's seat. That is the essence of his politics.

If it takes a descent into full bore fascism, he'll do it. If it takes a brutal and illegal crackdown on protesters and the opposition, he'll do it. If it takes midnight abductions and murder by paramilitary death squads, he'll do it. If it takes the ultimate overthrow of the US government, he's already demonstrated he won't hesitate. And his followers, cloaked in fake patriotism that is a veil for racism, are with him all the way, from the bizarre carnival of the January 6th putsch through to a second civil war to preserve their hegemony. Reflecting traditional Anglosaxon morality, they exhibit toxic individuality and they play to win.

So, DJT delighted the rich, which got him onto first base. He exhilarated his WASP base, getting him to second. When the Demoflats inevitably fail because they just don't have game anymore, that'll bring him home. Sucks for the rest of us. Sucks for fairness. Sucks for empathy. Sucks for humanity. Sucks for democracy. Sucks for the rest of the world too, because we have almost all of the nukes and we have a ubiquitous military that's crouching behind every garden wall on the planet.

the sea commands us all
and only the moon controls the sea

Political Lemon

Leaving a meeting at the White House, House Minority Leader McCarthy said, "Raising taxes would be the biggest mistake you could make." This statement demonstrates why there will be no social, political, or economic progress in the US anytime in the future, barring some great upheaval. Republicans and corporate Democrats have lifted the tax burden off the rich, which shifts it onto the lower classes. Further, relief for the downtrodden becomes politically impossible because it can no longer be funded without creating deficits. Deficits are Satanic, so more will go unsheltered, underfed, and untreated as the obscenely rich order bigger and bigger yachts. Finally, the wealth of the already wealthy will continue to compound without limit while the working class goes further into hopeless, unrelenting, unresolvable debt.

By the way, as for the trickle-down benefit of reducing taxes on the rich, that is as big a falsehood now as it was in the 1930's when Will Rogers said: "Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickled down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the dryest little spot. But he didn't know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow's hands."

"Fascism is merely capitalism in crisis."

CDC: Deadly and Balanced

It is imperative that we try to extinguish covid ASAP. If we don't, mutant strains that are more communicable and/or more virulent could arise. They might also prove to be resistant to our speedily developed vaccines, necessitating another herculean push for new ones.

Perhaps researchers won't be able to come up with new vaccines as rapidly as on the first go-around with the virus. If that happens, we will look back longingly to this period and wish we had done more to eliminate the virus when we had the chance.

Vaccination alone might not be enough. Countries with high vaccination rates that have relaxed masking and distancing have seen a resurgence of the virus. Startlingly, almost a third of victims were vaccinated. They might have less severe cases than they otherwise would have had, but it's obvious vaccinated people can still become infected.

With blanket vaccination and the discipline to continue wearing masks and practice social distancing while we reach for herd immunity, we could squash the virus. For places with the ability and the right disposition (ie, lacking a culture of toxic individuality), contact tracing and effective quarantining can amplify that effort.

Now our CDC has come out saying that fully vaccinated people don't need to wear masks or rigidly practice social distancing. Are they saying that you can't be infected? Obviously that's not correct. Are they saying that if you do become infected then you can't spread the virus? That seems absurd.

So, why are they saying this? Perhaps they just want to "balance" public health with the health of the economy. But that isn't their charter, is it? No, not any more than the Treasury is in charge of vaccine distribution.

The CDC sounds like the grasshopper playing his fiddle for private sector business.

Jack Kerouac, in a letter:

The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Rocks dont see it.

Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you're already
in heaven now.
That's the story.
That's the message.

Nobody understands it,
nobody listens, they're
all running around like chickens with heads cut
off. I will try to teach it but it will
be in vain, s'why I'll
end up in a shack
praying and being
cool and singing
by my woodstove
making pancakes.

The Back of the Bills

I sat down to write at my kitchen table on this sunny Sunday morning. Then I got up again. the screen on this Windows-HP laptop said "Undoing the changes made to your computer". It said that for about a half hour, during which time I went down to the playroom and cleaned up the disaster my 3 year old granddaughter had left there. When I came back to the kitchen table, the computer had progressed to a green screen telling me to wait (some more).

I'm using this computer because my ten year old granddaughter stopped using it to attend school virtually. she didn't go back to attending in person, she just switched to a Chrome based computer, which has the uncanny ability to work reliably without becoming bogged down for no apparent reason and needing to be updated constantly. Nor does it have a non cancellable Cortana voice recognition program eating up resources and continually trying to break into whatever it is you are trying to do. I was able to get this computer back on track by letting it update, but my granddaughter simply avoids it now, having abandoned it for a much better alternative. She is wise to do so, as this morning's experience demonstrates.

I return now to my original intended theme: elites. that is, those who by virtue of supposedly being marginally more clever than the rest of us have thus been bequeathed, on the basis of genetics, with the lofty position of arbiters of every aspect of our lives. we on the other hand, have no say; we're just not smart enough to make the calls.

Thus, someone like Bill Gates, who hornswoggled a hard working software engineer to get his hands on the original operating system he sold to IBM (a connection he had through his father), is at the apex of the elites. This naturally grants him the power and prestige to subsequently lurch through the land, trashing essentials like the public school system, making them as dysfunctional as his OS. It is his birthright to insert himself into all things because he's rich, ergo he's smarter than the rest of us.

Smart people rule. They have a natural right to do so. That's why when super-smart Obama talked of "Clean Coal" no one threw a shoe at him. Not then, nor when he hired Tim Geithner to lavish trillions on banks and Wall Street while putting working stiff homeowners on the ice flow to be eaten by the (remaining) polar bears.

Bill & Hillary are smarty-pants elites too. They realized that the best course for protecting working class Americans was to continue the work Reagan had begun and finish dismantling the New Deal. We're so dumb we can't even appreciate how great an accomplishment this was. We actually think the precarity this has left our adult children in is a bad thing! And don't forget they also brought us mass incarceration far exceeding that in any other country! Smart. Smart. Smart. And we are so dumb, dumb, dumb.

I think these elites should be rewarded, even beyond their current elevated position in society. In appreciation for their greatness of intellect, I would like to see them all given a free ride to Mars with demigod Elon Musk and all their other elite friends too. Bye-bye Bill! bye-bye Barack! bye-bye Hillary! bye-bye Other Bill! Don't let the Gates hit you on the way out!

Of course, we shouldn't leave out the fascist elites either: Donald, Tucker, Sean, Lindsey, Mitch, Marjorie, and Ted, you've earned an exclusive vacation trip to... the sun!

Love to see the back of all of you.

March of the Fascist Grannies

The similarities between here and now and Germany in the 1930's are staggering. Smug, corrupt technocrats in charge dismiss or ignore the plight of the common people while demagogues wait in the wings for their time to emerge. Trump might prove to be too old to recoup power in 2024, but with a Democratic Party wedded to neo liberalism and a Republican Party expertly playing it's game of divide and conquer and focused solely on winning, fascists will return like a rip tide to pull us out to sea in the very near future. SCOTUS turned voting day into an auction. The Democratic Party stopped representing working people under Carter, and Bill Clinton drowned what was left of the New Deal. Although it looks like Biden is less of a sellout than Obama, it remains to be seen whether he can spare democracy from a fascist rampage fueled by discontent.

Meanwhile, all those smiling grandmas and feisty grandpas who are the products of religious authoritarianism want their country back. They other group alive in the world. No matter, it's their country because the wealthy have paid preachers to steer them into accepting the property rights and privileges of the rich. In exchange, they are being allowed to triumph in the Values War. When they eradicate Blacks and gays, leftists and Muslims, they will start going after each other.

How will it end? Will fascism be halted by a world war, as it was in 1945? Given that we have enough nukes to destroy the planet many times over, a fascist US might win, but what will be left for the victors? Nana and papa don't care! The fact that there's no abortion, Blacks are vanquished, and gays can't get married is enough fare unattuned to economic unfairness, inequality, and systemic racism. They loathe all that is not exactly like them, attack Congress to overturn an election they dislike the result of, and then declare themselves to be patriots and the rest of us communist scum.

Their authoritarianism is leaden. They know Trump lost the presidential election, but they simply state the opposite and demand we acknowledge that they believe he won. But they don't believe that at all. They are just bullying us into accepting things their way. They are not stupid. However, the rest of us are stupid for not seeing the obvious: nana and papa are fascists.

When they tell us they love God and Jesus we buy it. We never counter that their worldview is hardcore capitalist and that it's antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. They are armed-up to fight a race war; they have no empathy for the people who have been abused longer than any or them. They have the same mindset as the coronavirus patients who screamed that covid was a hoax with their dying breath.

Let's get to the truth about nana and papa: beneath their sweet mannered exterior they are howling demons. They are like the crowds that cheered Hitler, so outwardly happy and oblivious to the cruelty they were abetting. They have mastered the simultaneity of comity with visceral hatred.

Skipping "Tiger"

People buy into the most absurd, harebrained tripe coming from QAnon and the right in general. It's comical even as it's alarming. It might be chalked up to monumental stupidity, or else be interpreted as a sly subterfuge used to cover up a white supremisist agenda. On the other hand, some people might gravitate toward conspiracy theories, even the really asinine ones, to explain the world around them. Perhaps they are unable to process the challenges of existence without some sort or explanatory narrative, regardless of how insipid it might actually be. This group does not deserve condescension or condemnation, it deserves help.

When I read about humble, unobnoxious people who get caught up in the vortex of paranoid fantasies being peddled, I am sadly reminded of a loved one's decades-long battle with psychosis. She would arrive at and be deeply vexed by the most absurd interpretations of minor events and subtle signs that the rest of us gave no thought to. I would explain to her endlessly that she was giving too much weight to unimportant, unintentional, and inconsequential things. She would understand the logic of my argument. She would concur.

Then she would turn around and be adamant that paper scraps in the driveway were placed there by a malevolent neighbor who intended them to convey an intimidating message which was coded in the color of the paper. Moments before she had agreed that the random scrap had been left there by the breeze.

So, are innocent souls buying into offensive and perhaps ultimately fatal beliefs because their brain chemistry makes them susceptible? When your relationship with reality is slippery, you can't be expected to have a functioning bullshit detector! I remember seeing an interview with a highly-placed, high functioning psychotic person who explained psychosis this way: when you say "lion" to the average person, they respond with "tiger", but a psychotic passes right over "tiger" and responds with "stripes".

There are many human beings who can't help but overrun first base on the playing field of reality. Stressful times have increased that tendency. This era of growing precarity and deepening inequality might be provoking more and more people to grasp for illusionary explanations. The right is taking advantage, and it's a field day for demagogues.

There's one way to describe the Georgia and other Republican state legislatures' ruse to curtail the voting rights of young and minority people: cartoonishly villainous. It evokes every stereotype of an evil, smug racist that ever existed, and the rationale used is so ludicrous it's laughable. Belongs in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Unfortunately, it's our reality.

An Analogy

Picture a boat that has been unable to dock for months. The people onboard are anxious to return to land. Finally, the boat finds a harbor and is approaching the dock. Everyone is excited at the prospect of disembarking.

But from high up on the first class deck, there's shouting to the people below, "Jump! Jump!". And whether from being nudged or leaping, some do jump. And since the dock is still too far away, they plummet into the water, to be drowned or crushed against the piers.

The analogy is this: the sea is Covid-19; the dock is herd immunity; the twits in first class are governors exhorting people to rip off their masks and party!

Ruminations on Death, "the loss of the inner world" (3-3-21)

this construct i keep in my head, a model universe of people and things, when i'm gone it all goes with me! isn't that the greatest of tragedies?

first, it's a great construct. so much that is wonderful. isn't it fortunate that consciousness came with icing? i guess it had to in order to keep the species going. the characteristic for not feeling enough euphoria to make life worthwhile died out during evolution, although it's in perpetual tension with the need to be vigilant. (optimism trumps but does not obviate the need for pessimism.)

second, i will never know the absence of my construct. it and my consciousness will exit simultaneously.

third, this is my burden, trying to preserve all around me. i have to give myself permission to stop playing Atlas.

fourth, it is merely my passion i'm projecting. it doesn't matter that much. the world i cherish will be mostly unaffected by my disappearance, except that my family will struggle. this i deeply regret.

fifth, redundancy. our poor brains are in exquisite isolation. but to a greater or lesser degree, every living individual on the planet feels as i do. we are all unique, but we still have countless soulmates we never met.

then the trick is not to defend the construct by raging at death, but to think that there's a near infinite backup, so we don't need to defend it. we can lay our body down.

sixth, my model world is just a fetish anyway. when the time comes, die already.

flash: capitalism = bullshit!

temperatures are rising. there are fires and floods, freezing and roasting, all happening with increasing frequency and severity.

people are vexed. a third want to change the economic system to make things more equitable, while another third want to just go full-bore authoritarian and ban any admission that all's not supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, with draconian punishment for those that don't come to heel.

human male sperm counts (the best kind, as opposed to female marmosets' sperm counts) is plunging such that if it keeps going at its present rate of decline, the only babies born after mid century will come from sperm banks. antique sperm!

nothing will be done about any of this by any person alive. only the Invisible Hand of theMarketplace can act, no other interference is allowed.

Lot's of luck. Capitalism is Perfect.

Capitalism for the [M]asses

about 40% of adults in the country are either white supremacist neo-confederates or people who just want to punish SOMEBODY. if our society were a better one, one in which all were cared for to the degree government could provide it, then that percentage would drop in half. but that isn't about to happen, ironically, because that 40% will fight it tooth and nail against welfare (and against their own interests). and the elite wealthy will buy them an inexpensive lunch for playing their part!

why do trumpers hate socialism? ans: simply because it avows to try to bring equality for the downtrodden. trumpers hate the downtrodden. the darker they are, the more they hate them. but it's not just racial: trumpers want inequality, even if it effects themselves negatively. why? because they just want someone to be screwed HARD! (tortured, hapless, mentally off-the-mark, bent assholes that they are.) real or imagined, they think they've been screwed and they want RETRIBUTION. i wonder what % of trumpers were second in birth order? did they always feel like familial inferiors, and is that the genesis of their rage?

which is not to say that brunch-scarfing, centrist liberals are any bargain either.

The rich will always stomp on the stomachs of the poor just to grab the change that pops out of their pockets. It has always been that way. It will always be that way. Jesus couldn't stop it. Buddha couldn't change it. The full mouth wants to keep on eating, and the rich will stuff their maw regardless of the suffering that causes.

If roles were reversed nothing would be different. Anyone who says otherwise is an ass, a fool, or a cheat.

"I'm from the government, and I'm here to say... F#%K YOU!"

First Katrina, then the pandemic, and now the Texas blackout. All three reveal that in the 21st century, government is not only uninterested in helping its population through a crisis, but is rabidly ideologically opposed to the idea. It is enraged by any suggestion that part of its job is to step in to relieve the suffering of the general public. "We're not a bunch of damn Socialists!"

In the sunshine of Neo Liberal Thought, government only has one function: protect the property rights of the rich. To do that you need cops to keep the plebes in line locally. Internationally, you need a military to bully foreign governments so US companies can continue doing business in an unfettered way regardless of whose soil they stand on.

So, don't complain like a little commie bitch if you're downing/ freezing/ burning at home. The rich have generators, servants, and safe rooms, and they don't complain. Survive on your own or die quietly, but don't ask the wealthy to part with any of their ever-accumulating, dynastic treasure through [gag] taxes to bail you out. Taxes are for stupid, little people like you. You might not have healthcare, or a blanket, or a hose to put out the fire, but you've helped buy another F-35 Funky-Fighter. Be Proud. Freedom!

The United States of Toxic Individualism

The next time someone has the temerity to ask me if I love my country, I'll say "I loved my country, but my country is gone now." What stands in its place is a usurper. In my country we were all in it together, all boats rose on the same tide, and it was taken for granted that the future belonged to everyone. This new entity exists for the few. Its creed is winner-take-all/ eat or be eaten/ be your own brand/ I've got mine.

No thanks. I don't hate my country, I mourn its death. Meanwhile, I reject this current state which I find unacceptable, even repugnant.

That sweetheart of the Western world, Margaret Thatcher, backed by her Hollywood had-been hunk, Ron Reagan, explained the new paradigm to us: "There's no such thing as society, only individuals (and families.)" And so began the Neo Liberal era, and concomitantly, the gradual asphyxiation of my country. To put it bluntly, if you can't have a society, how can you possibly have a country?

The horde that overran Congress on January 6, 2021 does not require any effort to understand it. They are merely the stubble that remains when civilization has been scoured from the earth. They're what's left 40 years after the cancellation of empathy, altruism, honesty, caring, belonging, and inclusion. They are the zombies that inhabit a world anchored in toxic individualism, in which there's no such thing as "society".

I miss my country. I loathe this human slaughterhouse that stands in its place. I feel heartsick for the many who are abandoned and abused during this shameful era. And for the usurpers, I have infinite contempt.

I'm wondering if Germans are looking at the US and its infatuation with Trump and saying, "Yeah, your turn now!" Maybe not, but if not, only because there aren't enough people left in Germany who recollect their fascist era.

We Can't Be Too Smug

What was it like psychologically for an average person living when slavery existed? Obviously, slave owners had ways of dealing with their sin, had built up barriers to self-reproach and developed justifications which other slave owners shared, repeated, and relied upon to cover their crimes. But what about ordinary people? How did they feel knowing there were other human beings alive who had no say in their own lives, who could be forced to do anything their masters wanted, who were subject to being sold on a whim and had no expectation other than to die in servitude?

Well, let's not be disingenuous, we know exactly how that feels. We don't often, if ever, think about it, but there is one group of hundreds of thousands or perhaps several million people in the US who live like dogs and whose lives are so controlled that they are de facto slaves: agricultural workers. These people make little money and have no choice about what they do. They have no rights. If a grower needs to spray a field with pesticide or herbicide that's next to a field that's being harvested, those working in the field are doused with overspray and no one cares. They toil in the hot sun and in the rain. Their kids don't receive an education because their families are on the move, following the crops. They live in squalor.

They make little for their effort and they are at the whim of their employers. They are often immigrants who are subject to harassment by the SS (excuse me, ICE). They are justifiably afraid to speak up for themselves, so they endure. The biggest difference between them and former chattel slaves is their method of purchase. One is paid a pittance insufficient to live on while the other was owned outright. Either way, both are slaves. Neither is free.

But our system has evolved to keep food prices low at the cost of enslaving those at the bottom while squeezing the growers. So we have slaves. And we deal with it by not addressing it. Good men saying nothing, just like in the bad old days.

White Nationalist Related Anemia

The existence of an upper chamber of congress, the Senate, to which each state sends just two representatives regardless of population: a concession to slave owning plantation plutocrats from sparsely populated hinterlands. The existence of the filibuster, through which a minority in the Senate can easily stymie enlightened legislation: a capitulation to Sen. John C. Calhoun, S.C., a staunch defender of the plantation system. Upper middle class white supremacists invading Congress on January 6th: long term but direct result of not banishing all plantation owners to a penal colony after the Civil War.

The South did not create all the country's problems, but deferring to rancid plutocratic racists has been a drag on progress for over 150 years. If the American Revolution had waited another 25 years, the British Crown would have ended slavery in the US and sent all those arrogant, evil, coniving, slave owning rats to an island somewhere in the middle of the ocean (big water!). Avoiding royal retribution is the sole reason Southern aristocrats joined the American Revolution. If not for Southern aristocrats, the US would now be a better place by orders of magnitude. For instance, we'd have universal healthcare, which nearly came to pass during the Truman Administration, until Southern politicians withdrew support at the last minute because they didn't want to be in a hospital bed next to a Black.

White supremacists are a disease. Decade after decade these seething parasites have drained the lifeblood of the country. They have shown they will not go away on their own.

Flowers for QAnon

Wow, talk about revelation! First, the leader of the Proud Boys turns out to be a prolific FBI informant. Then, horror of horrors, turns out Trump really has been groomed for over forty years by Russian intelligence to be their boy in Washington. He is too dumb to know he was being used (the applicable description is "useful idiot"), but they stroked his ego and steered him into pro Russian positions, then pushed him onto the political stage. He was a long shot that paid off. Even Putin was happily surprised.

So, to all you QAnon pistachio brains: keep on pumping out those ridiculous stories about the supposed abominations of nasty liberals! You were never interested in Truth anyway. You would much rather believe in shit, make up shit, and repeat shit ad nauseum. Your only concern is to deflect from the fact that the stench you're wrapped in comes from the load in your own pants. Fear-centric, irrational, authoritarian haters are a danger to themselves and others, and a turd in the punchbowl of society.

From the Bottom of the Peach Basket

We're 49th! Yep, there's only one other state with a slower, more unorganized roll out of Covid-19 vaccination than Georgia. That's unsurprising, considering Georgia's government has been among the most nonchalant about the pandemic all along. Remember when young Lord Kemp (aka governor) declared isolation and restrictions to be over so hastily that even The Donald said he was too eager? That was darkly funny because Kemp, who was desperately trying to show fealty to his orange master, was thrown under the bus the very next day by him! If a certain erstwhile Secretary of State had not been allowed to oversee his own gubernatorial election a couple of years ago, we would now be closer to ending this pandemic. But as it stands we are 49th in line and there are new, more virulent strains approaching to pick us off before we can be immunized.

One Who Had Conquered Fear

from the time i was small i was presented with an image of Jesus that was one of kindness, compassion, forgiveness, and empathy.

not too surprising, since he was a Jew, and there's nothing brighter than a good Jewish heart. that's because to a Jew the reward for living a good life is... living a good life! there are no carrots and no sticks, ie, no promise of eternal bliss and no threat of eternal damnation. just try being better than the asshole you might have been otherwise.

i learned about Jesus from the nuns and the Baltimore Catechism at Sunday school. i was raised for the first 13 years as a Catholic. my mother, thankfully, was Episcopalian so the religion didn't drag me over the event horizon. i was able to separate when the authoritarianism became obvious.

anyway, Jesus said to feed the hungry, attend to the sick, visit the prisoner, and treat everyone as your brother or sister regardless of their station. and above all, "Turn the other cheek." with the last one he went beyond being a Good Jew and became a revolutionary prophet. ("Pay it forward" is an extension of this, it seems to me.)

let me be open and honest: i do not think he was a deity; i don't buy into the existence of deities. i'm not inherently a worshiper. but i do know wisdom when i hear it.

Jesus was the antithesis of vanity, selfishness, domination of others, and any flavor of elitism. if you entertain any notion that you are superior or cut from a different cloth, then you part with him spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually.

Jesus had conquered fear; if you are an and authoritarian and/or a fascit, you are ruled by fear.

the thing is, the people who have commandeered religion in the US act in a way that's totally inconsistent with my image of Jesus. to them: might makes right; people are entirely responsible for their situations, no excuses or mitigation; unqualified love is stupid; get the other guy before he gets you; i've got mine!

they call themselves Christians. they're garbage. but i shouldn't hate them even so, should i?

Awaiting Trump 2.0

Trotsky wrote that Hitler never really had an ideology. Instead, he had deep grievances and an innate ability to resonate with the populace over their discontents. He played to the crowd and took it to the limit. Trump read Hitler's speeches. He emulated Hitler in mining the anger of his crowd. Give the Devil his due, he was pretty good at it.

The hallmark of conservatism is feeling aggrieved and put-upon without any demonstrable reason for it. It's untenable, but avowing persecution is essential in order to justify conservativism's core belligerence. Conservatives need an excuse to act like the paranoid authoritarians they are.

Trump's followers were mainly well off people. Their real credo is the old, tried and true "I've got mine!" It's not that they have been left to rot in the Rustbelt and therefore staggerd into the trap of a right wing populist. They just want no taxes and preservation of systemic racism so they can keep their money and their privilege. They are sandbagging, petit bourgeois. Besides them, there are the callous, unempathetic, faux Christians who, having replaced Jesus with John Wayne, easily embrace a heartless, hollow bully like Trump.

Screw all of them, Trump, Hitler, the petit bourgeois, the deranged religious bigots. I'd say, "Adios, MFs!" but the reality is that they aren't going anywhere. They will float back in on the tide by the next election, having sought out a more wily version of Trump to be their new fuhrer.

Nancy Stabs Katie Porter

As displayed in this clip, US Rep. Katie Porter is not timid about challenging banksters. That is why multi-multi millionaire Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi removed Porter from her seat on the House Financial Services Committee. Can't antagonize Wall Street donors! After all, raising cash from the oligarchs is Nancy's forte, and the basis for her calling herself "master legislator".

Pelosi's move means one less champion for the people and one step closer to creating a representation vacuum, thus welcoming in the next Trump++.

Spores of American Fascism

Boy, have I been dumb! For the past four-plus years I've been laying Trump's popularity with the working class at the feet of economic inequality. But the beating the Rust Belt has taken and how that's left workers there susceptible to demagoguery is less than the whole story. True, when people's difficulties become more burdensome every day, that contributes to their readiness to follow an authoritarian, but there's more than that at work here. There is a spore of perennial fascism and core racism that was waiting in the ground for Trump to water it, and that is at the root of the movement which culminated in insurrection on January 6th.

When MAGA-tites say Trump won the election and that it was stolen by fraud, they, the same as Trump generally, are not to be taken literally. From Trump on down, everyone of them knows that Biden received more votes, that mail-in voting is probably less susceptible to tampering than electronic voting, and that more people voting, especially minorities, made the difference. Their toxic individualism lets them see it as fraud though, because it's just not what they wanted.

What they really mean is that Trump SHOULD have won, and that they will not give in to the contradictory result. What THEY want takes priority over what the majority wants, and they will do whatever they have to do to ensure their will prevails. They don't cherish the Constitution any more than the Kama Sutra. They just want it THEIR WAY. They don't have values, they have DEMANDS.

Their speech is contradicted by their actions. They claim to cherish freedom as they enthusiastically deny basic rights to a wide swath of the population. They call themselves patriots as they commit an act of treason, invading Congress for the first time since 1814 to deny the will of the electorate. They profess love of country while they essentially reenact the attack on Fort Sumter. But they are patriots because they SAY they are patriots. Loudly! They love their country, but only as long as it's doing THEIR bidding. They are White Nationalist authoritarians who have burrowed their way in time from Reconstruction through to the present. They are in the continuing line of latent American Fascists.

And they will be around after Trump is gone. If we restore unions and thereby bring about improved conditions for workers, people might feel they have a reason to defend democratic government against authoritarians. Otherwise, we could be dealing with full-on fascism sooner than we imagined. Fear and hate easily trump empathy and understanding, so look out!

Flying monkeys have chased us through the haunted forest, but now we've come through to a vast open meadow and Oz in all its majesty stands on the horizon. The relief is enormous, but don't slow down. If we stop to rest in this field of poppies we could perish.

With a vaccine (actually, multiple vaccines) in sight and the holidays upon us it's tempting to let down our guard. Don't succumb. Keep pushing toward the emerald city. We're in the home stretch, don't give the virus any opportunity to strike.

Mitching Inaction

Forget Trump, he's checked out and retreated to the golf course, a Nero too pouty to play his fiddle. It's Mitch McConnell, that smug, supercilious squid who could get the ball rolling in order to distribute vaccine. But he won't. Not his priority. Another quarter of a million people will die here --absolutely unnecessarily-- in the next year because Mitch and the Gang have walked away from the task. Trump gets credit for the first 250K deaths, but Mitch gets it for the next batch.

Repubs are experts at demagoguery and disenfranchising, they are terrific at winning elections, but they don't govern any better than a cat would. This is allowed to continue because a huge chunk of the population is too deep into toxic individualism and cockamamie conspiracies to wake up and tell these death-bearing ass clowns to do their job.

The Donald acting like the Don!

Austerity follows Profligacy

You know what would make for a really idiotic political Punch And Judy Show? If every time there was a Republican administration they'd cut taxes for the rich and then spend money like water on corporate welfare, defense contracts, and boosting the stock market. Then when the Democrats got in after them, they'd scream about the deficit they created and demand austerity from the general public, even if we were in the grip of some really grave crisis. Of course, the Dems would go along with the plot since they work for the rich too, not for the average person.

That would be idiotic. And tragic. And US history since Reagan.

Executing Lisa Montgomery in January will serve as a thank-you note to the Devil for the years of incomprehensibly cruel beatings and serial gang rape she underwent as a child. The men behind her execution, who pose as tough guys, are anything but. They are insecure, scared little boys who overcompensate by acting cruelly and sadistically. They are not unlike the cowardly, defective men who abused Lisa. This is the way of things.

The quest for supremacy always ends in degeneracy. -- (paraphrasing) journalist Simon Tisdall

"They had things, levels of voting, that if you'd ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again." -- Donald J. Trump (1946- ) grifter, tyrant, sadist, bully, & fascist pain clown

...and here's how it worked out (he wasn't lying, for once!):

So, after all the prognostication, reading of tea leaves, psychoanalysis of the electorate, chastising, shaming, fearmongering, and fortunes paid to consultants to persuade and propagandize, the election's outcome came down to this: if your household income is under 100K you voted for the Democrat by a 13% margin or thereabouts, and if it is over 100K you chose the Republican by about the same margin. All the rest just comes from foolishly hyperfocusing on the fringes and margins. (This suggests once again that the news media universe comprises a small iron core of simple fact surrounded by a multiple light years thick cloud of bullshit.)

Charlie Chaplin's speech at the end of his first talking movie, The Dictator

John Wayne Nation

The joke is that US religious zealots claim America is a Christian nation. Ha! The USA is a country captivated by capitalism. It is a Capitalist nation. The two, capitalism and the teachings of Jesus, don't square.

The only way to make them somewhat compatible is to change one of them. Well, US Christians have intentionally mistaken John Wayne for Jesus, and that willful misunderstanding has led to the hypermasculine, pro-capitalist faux Christianity avowed here. This seems to go unnoticed and uncommented on, but as the Duke himself would say, "It's a Capitalist nation! Got it, pilgrim?"

Freedom of the Press 1.0

Per Robert McChesney, the first amendment was not merely an admonition to leave the press alone; rather, it was a stipulation of government's obligation to foster and nourish a strong independent press. Why? Supposedly because the FF's thought an informed public was fundamental to democracy. (Although they were pretty particular about whom they would allow in on their democracy, weren't they?)

To this end the US Post Office was formed and subsidized so that everyone, even those out on the rolling frontiers and backwaters could receive news freely and nearly free of the cost of delivery. The USPS was never conceived as a profit center or even to be self-sustaining financially: it was allowed to lose money in fulfilling the grave obligation embodied in the first amendment to maintain an informed electorate.

Hence, in the early days the USPS was chartered with carving out and maintaining Post Roads throughout the country. The FF's were serious about informing the citizenry and willing to spend vast sums of money to carry this out. The USPS was their prime instrument for creating, fostering, and protecting democracy.

How times have changed! Now the USPS is being weakened by political picadores, leading up to the final kill.

At the same time, we no longer have a viable print press. There's no surviving investigative media, and what we mistakenly label as news is just flavoring and spin that's peddled to separate market tastes. Making a mockery of its mission to inform, electronic media restricts itself to catering to people's confirmation bias.

This remunerative business model was first popularized by Fox and is now copied by MSNBC and CNN. Facebook contributes, funneling ads and stories that its algorithms determine you will click on, based on your prior interests, so you wind up inside a taylored bubble designed to appeal to your biases. No one is actually informing anyone of anything.

Meanwhile, if there's a tornado five miles down the road, you might find out about it at around the same time they hear of it in a city two thousand miles away. That's because there's no real local news left, and you're forced to wait to hear of any happenings from one of the remaining radio/tv national quasi monopolies. (That's if they report on it at all -and if you're still around.)

We Ain't Nothin' but a Pound Dog

You wouldn't know it by watching TV news or reading the papers here, but European governments are much more attuned to their citizens' financial wellbeing during the pandemic than the US government is. Governments there seem to treat their citizens like family and go to significant lengths to insure their welfare, such as underwriting payrolls so that people won't fall down financially.

By contrast, here in the good old neoliberal USA the federal government can't be coerced to do much of anything for the average citizen. Not only do politicians not seem to consider the little people as family, they don't even rate them as high as the family dog. To them we are like dogs in the pound: they will barely spend enough to keep us alive until we can either be foisted off on someone or euthanized by the invisible hand of the marketplace.

It'll get worse. The federal government, after having slathered corporations and the stock market with trillions and filled the Christmas stockings of weapons contractors will soon be peddling the need for austerity to balance the budget. So, states and municipalities will not receive any more money and that means teachers and firemen will be furloughed. (Cops will be kept around though, just to ward off any revolutionary impulses among the pack.) There won't be money for food assistance or to provide shelter for families. The dog pound will see cuts. Gotta belt-tighten!

But Nancy P. thinks a one time $600 door prize should make us whole again. Just think how many dog biscuits that'll buy -as long as they arrive before we're put down!

Deep Political Questions:

Did Nancy Pelosi really say $600 "buys a lot of ice cream"?
(Ans: No.)

In "Breakfast of Champions", Dwane Hoover's psychotic delusion was that everyone around him was a robot put there to serve him. Is that what Donald Trump believes?
(Ans: Yes.)

If a low wage working man were on fire, would Hillary Clinton bother to piss on him to put out the fire?
(Ans: No.)

If a man were drowning in a maelstrom, would Obama/Emanuel tell him his problem stemmed from his not having a STEM degree?
(Ans: Yes.)

Do rich Republicans marvel with gratitude at the fact working people still can't seem to figure out who's screwing them?
(Ans: Yes.)

The fruits of capitalism are starkly unevenly shared. This extends to access to water. Millions of Americans cannot afford to pay their water bill. This partly stems from their condition of impoverishment, but what puts affordability even further out of reach is that in many cities the cost of residential water has been escalating non-stop for decades.

Before the 1980's [i.e., the Reagan presidency] the federal government invested substantially in infrastructure, including, of course, water supplies. But society has come to embrace neoliberal capitalism, which denigrates public works and anything done to preserve the commons. The result is that we're living in a high tech version of the Gilded Age where even drinking water can become unobtainable to those at the bottom.

For all capitalism's acclaimed supremacy over the failed communist system of the Soviet Union, I don't recall ever having heard of people in the old USSR being left to live without water, at least not as a matter of policy. I'm sure there is a counter argument, but for all its failures, central planning in the USSR never included intentional disenfranchisement from the wellspring of life.

Freedom!

The Cruelty of Neoliberal Capitalism's Social Darwinism

Average people can lay down in the snow and die as far as either the Democratic or the Republican Party is concerned. If you're not wealthy, the R's don't want anything to do with you except on election day. If you're not college educated and successful, the D's feel the same way. The D's do believe in granting equal opportunity, whereas the R's are more hard nosed and will only accept proven high flying financial success. Of course, once you've blown your chances to become solid middle-managerial class, the D's won't give you the time of day either.

While D's acknowledge that systemic racism has denied opportunity to many and endeavor to give minorities a fair chance at scaling their financial Everest, most individuals eventually will fall short because of their own limitations. Therefore, the party ultimately will reject most minority aspirants and cast them into the void along with white workers. Younger African Americans sense this, which is why they're not as committed to the D Party as their parents were.

Young and middle aged whites who were not high school valedictorians resent the D party's emphasis soley on minority uplift while it ignores their problems and dismisses them. But if they are only average, apart from a possible few years of diversion, in the long run they would no more benefit from the outreach than minorities. The obvious and immutable fact is that we can't all be above average, that's by definition, so the elite of both establishment parties will consider us to be subhuman whatever the hue of our skin. We will all end up being equally screwed and discarded.

If you aren't school smart you can become a soldier or a cop, but beyond those self immolating enforcer roles the only existence remaining is one of a 21st century serf. (As for the old, tired Land of Opportunity canard, the fact is that upper mobility is lower in the US than it is in Europe.)

The D Party worships the meritocracy, and that's why American life is becoming like the Hunger Games. Yes, to be average in the US is to live on the precipice of an abyss. It wasn't that way while the New Deal was in force, but that era has been erased by New Democrats and conservative Republicans working in tandem.

What's absurd is the premise that this way is natural! Consider that if all elite achievers were put on an island, they would have to reset the average point, and the smarter/stronger ones would subjugate the others who were previously members of the elite. Why? because somebody has to haul away the trash! Neoliberal capitalism needs an underclass. It is this winner-take-all system that is the cause of constantly increasing misery for the average person, not people's supposed lack of STEM education, as Obama and Rahm Emanuel, both epic liars, repeat constantly.

There isn't cause for optimism. The elite will not voluntarily relinquish their priviledge or control. In fact, their power is solidifying in the global north. In Davos they talk of a consolidated body of elites running the world in the near future. That will probably occur, but afterward a new Dark Age is certain to come.

PS: Boy, have we strayed from the path! The US wasn't always so cold toward its people. Below are points from the economic bill of rights proposed by FDR in his 1944 State of the Union Address:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security.

Dear MAGA Meat Puppets,

Donny Boo Boo has fucked you. He gave tax breaks to the rich that actually encouraged job offshoring. That's not what he said he'd do. You believed in him. Your bad. After all, he TOLD you he was a snake!

But we can't blame people for throwing the dice in times of duress, times when nothing seems to be working for them, when everything seems to be working against them. The rich have run away with EVERYTHING. People are screwed and they know it, but they're not sure how it happened. They don't understand who exactly is sticking it to them. They are grasping at straws, like the straws held out by that rich jerk Trump who inherited almost a half billion from his heinous old man, Freddy.

People will buy into conspiracy theories when they need something to explain the horrible things happening to them. The rich taking over the system lock stock and barrel and disemboweling the working class is such a horrible thing. News media, pols, and paid-for preachers will tell you to vote for the party of pompous pricks that put you in these dire straits. They lead you down the primrose path, telling you it's minorities, immigrants, and leftists who have taken away your middle class living.

Fuck that. Those other workers are used, abused and disposed of even more quickly then you were. The rich have wiped their asses with all workers, and the topper is that the rich have convinced you that the very people who brought you sick leave, paid vacation, the forty hour work week, paid overtime, occupational safety, environmental protection, and an end to child labor are your enemy. And you fucking BELIEVE it!!! Yes, the left brought you theses things, not the conservative fuck wads whom you adore and who blow smoke up your ass endlessly.

Follow the money for God's sake and stop letting yourself be punked by the rich and their lackeys in the pulpit and on the radio and TV. Form a fucking union and get back real goddamn power. Or you can just dick off and watch your grandkids starve. Or join a fuckhead fascist death cult. The choice is yours. Do your thing.

Dems have punked this lefty for the last time. Enjoy brunch with your big donors, you posers as friends of working people. The meritocracy you idolize screws the average person just as hard as the Republican oligarchy does. Adios

P.S. Call me when and if you ever see your way clear to giving average citizens what nearly everyone else has: universal healthcare; free post secondary education; affordable childcare; bulletproof Social Security; freedom from hunger; guaranteed shelter; action on renewable energy. Also. throw in economic equality (by taxing the holy shit out of the rich) and break up the goddamn monopolies! Until then, so long assholes.

A note from Dr. Guillotine:

If you are calling the shots and you're really into executing certain people, why screw around with the toasting, injecting, hanging, or chopping genres, or even those quaint old fashioned firing squads when the easiest, quickest, cheapest, least painful and surest way to snuff out a life is a 22 bullet behind the ear? It ricochets around inside the skull and there's no question as to its efficacy. So if you insist on the state's being in the business of terminating the odd life, why not do it that way? What's wrong with that? Not stupid, brutal, morbid or sadistic enough for you?

The Supreme Court of the United States handed down the Citizens United decision just a decade ago, and now the rich have paid politicians from Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to DJT to whittle down their taxes to almost nothing. What a strange coincidence!

SCOTUS, with the exception of the New Deal period, has always been the ultimate defender of the wealth and property of the rich. SCOTUS was designed to protect oligarchs from the average citizen, as intended in the Constitution. Of course, unless we get rid of both wholly undemocratic institutions, the senate and the supreme court, we will shortly be living in a prison state run entirely at the behest of the one percent. Until China makes us its prize colony that is.

Jeff Daniels delivers news anchor Will McAvoy's monologue in the HBO Series "The Newsroom": monologue

Politically Correct COVID-19 Denial

The original meaning of "political correctness" was that the individual must self-censor to conform with the party line, irrespective of facts. If Stalin said the sky was pink, then everyone had to agree it was pink and had never been blue. A case of authoritarian demanded doublethink.

Thanks to talk radio, political correctness has shifted to mean having to self-censor offensive and insensitive speech or risk being scolded by the manners police (liberals). Although it started as slyly humorous tongue-in-cheek wordplay, this usage has taken over completely from the original. It now means your right to swing your rhetorical fist shouldn't have to stop at the other guy's ear and you have a first amendment right to let your inner boorish asshole run loose uninhibited.

Not wearing a mask or practicing distancing during an epidemic because a political leader thinks it challenges his authority fits the gold standard for political correctness in its original meaning. Mouthing "Masks look stupid and the coronavirus is a Chinese Hoax." is politically correct, as sure as the sky is pink.

[Other People's]Starvation Before Secularization

Insofar as aid to the poor (that's more and more of us now), Lefties have tried to incorporate policies consistent with the teachings of the Prince of Peace into the running of government, which inflames the hatred of many Christians. This seems surprising at first because supposedly the goals of both groups are aligned. But US Christians are more concerned with who redistributes wealth and how assistance is passed out than they are about actually doing it.

After all, lefties have cut out the middleman, the church, and sought to carry out in a systematic way what The Man prescribed as it regards charity. This is accomplished without attendant worship or kowtowing to authoritarian religious figures who make lavish livings herding their flocks. It's a big deal because it messes with a very profitable business model.

Organized religion's position is that it would rather forgo charity than have it administered in a secular way. Let the masses starve and they will be especially appreciative when finally thrown a fish --by a church. US Christians hate secular humanists because humanists have stolen their moves and don't pay dues to any organized religion.

When Pigs Fly, Take Cover

Rahm Emanuel said it again recently when speaking about people in dying rural areas: they need to get a better education. Supposedly that's the cure to the evaporation of the middle class. Getting a STEM degree is the responsibility of the individual, and not getting it is their own fault. This was also the standard refrain of his former boss, Obama. The result of heeding this advice is that millions of young people are pinned down by massive student loans. They still can't get good jobs, but have merely added unresolvable debt to their burden.

Both big shots know they are selling a nostrum and gaslighting people. In the neoliberal universe there is no longer any room for plebes whose parents were the backbone of America. The big shots toss out that red herring about education just to make the plebes go away confused and self-blaming.

The truth is it's policies that encourage monopolies which have created inland economic deserts, not the lack of degrees among the inhabitants. Walmart came in and flattened local downtowns. Industrial agriculture gobbled up family farms. Plants closed when manufacturers offshored jobs to gigantic Chinese state companies. Hospital chains chasing the dollar shut down small rural hospitals. These all stem from decades of intentional government policy, not because rural kids didn't jump on the magical STEM bandwagon!

An analogy if you will: if you pave over a pig pen the pigs will be miserable. If you were Rahm Emanuel, you'd tell the pigs they need to sprout wings and fly to a better place.

We have recently had a heavy hint of where this cynical callousness is taking us. Continuence of the Emanuel-Obama brand of bullshit will just generate more anger and discontent, paving the way for an even worse authoritarion, right wing populist than the one leaving in January.

Susan Sarandon Made Me Do It (NOT)

OK, I'm a marginal member of the meritocracy, a retired engineer. I was lucky. I came from a working class background and went to college on the GI Bill (the good one that the WWI Bonus Army got for WWII vets and some of us who came later were also fortunate enough to receive). I made an adaquate salary. Money was never a problem when we were raising a family. I remained a Democrat throughout my adult life, during which time the Democratic Party divorced the unions and started its affair with the managerial/professional class.

Now I'm watching my children struggle. Neither of my daughters turned out to be STEM-utantes. They are everyday people, and they are struggling just as the vast majority of young adults are today. Neither party wants to budge on issues like universal healthcare, affordable childcare, free post secondary education, a living wage, or really anything that would help out the average person. If you're wealthy the Republicans will embrace you. If you are successful the Democrats want to be your BFF, but if you are an ordinary person neither party wants you around except on election day. Trillions for wars, trillions for banks and Wall St., but zilch for average people. Neither party has any real problem with the issue of increasingly gross inequality.

One day my daughter, who lives with her husband in a rental house in a decent though modest neighborhood, said to me matter of factly, "We're poor." She was right. Although they have the basic necessities they are limited in their prospects and unable to save. It's a precarious existence and there's little hope of improvement. I have failed my kids. We have failed our kids. The Democratic Party has failed our kids. I want a political party that will help my kids and grandkids, even though they might not be the type that enjoys differential calculus, even if they aren't rich.

I'm out. I've left the Democratic Party fold. Tell 'em Susan Sarandon made me do it, aided and abetted by Vladimir Putin, but if they ask, tell 'em I'm gone.

The Game is Rotten --and Getting Worse

President elect Biden will not admit the obvious, that the system is rigged against average people. President Trump, somewhere in his inexhaustible torrent of word salad, probably admitted to it, but he still went along with Big Mitch and Paul Ryan and gave the rich a monstrously large tax break, further accelerating inequality. It seems like all that's going to change in the White House is the color of the drapes. There will be no relief for the average working person.

Things are actually going in the opposite direction. In trendsetting California, Democrats just passed a referendum that allows companies to escape paying any benefits to employees by characterizing themselves as not employers, but rather as merely one party in a (very asymmetric) business transaction. Look for this to spread throughout the country rampantly, shredding the established rules about sick leave, overtime pay, etcetera. All gone.

Furthermore, the new Supreme Court is poised to remove whatever slim thread of rights workers and consumers still have through the corporate bludgeon of forced arbitration. The march to high tech feudalism is taking giant strides forward.

One Party with Two Faces

There is only one political party in our purported two party system, and it works for the wealthy. One branch is labeled conservative and the other is centrist/liberal. While the two branches have different branding, neither works for average people. The fact is that under this system we are reliving the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, and before long there will be only a high watermark remaining as evidence of a bygone middle class.

The Democratic Party gaslights the population, saying all is well when it clearly is not. It maintains the fiction of its being the party of the people by tepidly supporting social causes that while moral, necessary, and just, are pointedly limited to actions which cost their Big Money donors little or nothing. Obama ran on Hope and Change. He produced very little of the latter and completely eliminated the former. When Obama was finished, the Democratic House Speaker declared that people didn't really want change!

The Republican Party, under its conman without peer, convinced a worried population that he would drain the swamp to deliver them from the greedy clutches of the wealthy elite. Once in office he replaced that enemy rhetorically with socialists, immigrants, and minorities in a classic authoritarian bait-and-switch. Then he bestowed the rich a monster tax break.

Without a functional left to mount a defence, we will continue to be the victims of shrewd and nefarious divide-and-conquer techniques employed by the right, under the orchestration of masterminds like Steve Bannon. These will continue to be wildly successful and might even end in internecine strife. Whether or not we end up exchanging gunfire with our neighbors, the wealth of the 1% will continue to proliferate without cease. Meanwhile, corporate Democrats wedded to the managerial class will be coddling meritocracy to the exclusion of more than 80% of the population, helping Bannon in every way possible.

A Nursery for Demagogues

Apparently Trump increased his share of votes among almost all groups including Latinos, women, and Blacks. This by no means is to say Trump received anything even close to a majority of the Black vote, for instance, but that he did a little better in 2020 than in 2016. Why this is so, no one can say at present. Perhaps he has grown on people, or perhaps there's just a tendency to vote for the incumbent. Maybe authoritarianism is becoming more appealing.

One group that actually reduced its support for Trump, astoundingly, was white males! Were these guys who just didn't vote in 2016 but came out this time to vote for Biden, thus changing the demographic? Or did some of Trump's 2016 supporters decide they had had enough of his antics and were disappointed at his failure to actually deliver for working people, despite his prodigious promises?

If the latter were the case, it would seem that some working white males have reluctantly come back to the Silicon Valley worshiping Democrats after having walked away in 2016. Perhaps they voted for Trump then as if it were a chance in a raffle. He did speak to the plight of working people while campaigning for that election, getting to the left of Hillary. They might have been skeptical, but given the fecklessness and insincerity of the corportist Democratic Party, it was reasonable for them to take a chance on Trump. Didn't turn out, so they have bounced back (temporarily?) to the lesser of two evils.

The arrogant Dem leadership will assume these white males are back to stay, but they will follow policy whenever someone turns up that has some. (Bernie who?)

Well, it would be nice to believe that at least a fraction of my cohort, white males, was rational, and what's more has the Democratic Party's number, but there's probably some other explanation. One thing's for sure anyway, by disregarding the very existence of the average guy, the Democratic Party is daring the Republican Party to produce a slicker Hitler clone next time, someone who can not only skillfully mine people's discontents, but also successfully overturn the existing government. Heck, Trump might do it himself on the rebound. He has four years to work on it while the Dems continue to gaslight people, saying everything is great when it clearly is not, not for the everyday worker.

Average people are falling deeper into poverty each payday, like mastodons sinking into the la brea tar pits. Meanwhile the DNC brunches at the seaside in Malibu, sipping mimosas and doing their best Weimar impression.

Say hello to forced arbitraion and back alley abortion!

The Supreme Court is now a hand-selected posse whose job it is to head off any and all democratic impulses at the pass. Together with the packed federal courts it has become the unapologetic instrument of the wealthy, just as it had been before FDR and the New Deal. A super majority of justices have been chosen by ultra conservatives and the court is now tasked with taking on cases specified by those same wealthy people. The outcome will always be a foregone conclusion -the rich will win, win, win them all! Also, because Republicans have bribed evangelicals in order to expand the otherwise minority Republican voting base, the courts will transactually pass rulings for religious extremists that are grossly unpopular with the vast majority of people.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Connecticut explained this perfectly in a half hour civics lesson during the Amy Barrett confirmation hearing/ram-through. With Barrett on the court, the rich and powerful will definitely get "tired of winning!" as the Billionaire in Chief is fond of saying. Capitalism in its rawest, most tyrannical form has killed democracy as surely as poisoning his tea kills a Russian dissident.

The flowery language we listened to in school about the Supreme Court's being a check against abuse of power is now decoded: the Supreme Court exists to ensure the wealthy get what they want, and the majority can pass laws until hell freezes over, but to no avail. This is a sea change in US governance. From now on, thanks to conservative courts, the rich own our asses.

Making America Grate Again

The Democratic Party will not help you much. Nonetheless, Biden is preferable to the cruel, racist Trump who is currently undermining Social Security, killing the ACA without any replacement, and sabotaging the Post Office. Trump tells followers to beat people up and plans to place gun-toting zealots at polling places to scare minority people away from exercising their right to vote. That's just a partial list of his domestic transgressions. On the global front, he's always champing to light up the planet, saying repeatedly, "What's the point of having nuclear weapons if you can't use them!"

But on the other hand, Biden is a corporate vassal who will do nothing to reform a system that funnels all wealth upward to the oligarchy, be it of the meritocratic variety or dynastic kind. He's already planning to place Republicans in his cabinet! Don't get your hopes up for actual change during the Biden/Harris years ahead.

If we had ranked voting we could actually vote for a candidate who might help us, but the Democratic Party won't have that because it relies on its position as the Lesser of Two Evils to stay in business. It does not want to be pressured to help the working class. It jealously guards its leverage of L.O.T.E., saying "Who else are you going to vote for?"

Meanwhile, the morally bankrupt Repblican Party is a relentless power shark. No claim it makes about a principled position can ever be taken seriously because it continuously indulges in deception as a means to an end. Conservatives work the ref endlessly, and they have successfully kidnapped the federal judicial system to project the absolute power of the 1% into the lifetime of the yet to be born.

The only possible way for working people to get back any power is to form strong unions, and subsequently BUY back control of the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, people have been so inured to the neo liberal paradigm of total corporate hegemony that we are probably incapable of standing up for ourselves. People's self preservation instinct is pruned back so drastically that they're only capable of following right wing populist demagogues, and the next one will make Trump look like the amateur he is. The authoritarians who love Trump now will eventually get their fuhrer, and that's when the fun really starts. Eventually we'll be as tired of winning as the German people were in 1945.

China Bad. China Hurt US, make it sad.

Do you remember back 35 years ago when China put a gun to our heads and demanded that all the cheap shit sold at Walmart be made there so that American corporations could escape US labor costs, sell at lower prices, and still make a bigger profit? Me neither. Remember too when China insisted our high tech gadgets be made there and that our companies give away all our technological secrets to make it happen? Yeah, seems to me that we just handed it all over because we wanted a shortcut to higher quarterly profits. Oh well, guess we'll just have to start a cold war to straighten out our own greed-driven fuck-ups.

Trapped Below Deck in America

When the Titanic hit an iceberg, third class passengers were locked behind gates in the hallways below to prevent them streaming onto the decks above and interfering with evacuation of the rich. When it became apparent in closed meetings that the coronavirus was a looming pandemic that would ravage the economy, our (mostly Republican, but not all) senators went directly to their wealthy donors with a warning so they could disinvest and reshuffle their portfolios.

While we have been mesmerized by tweets and preoccupied with outlandish accusations of high level perversion, they have locked the gates. If we were to take our eyes off our smart phones for a second, we'd notice our feet are getting wet.

Will the Real Amy Coney Barrett Please Stand Up

ACB has taken the 5th throughout her confirmation hearing. She has even refused to say whether a sitting president should accept the results of an election! She knows there's no point in trying to win over her opposition, and that she will be instated to the Supreme Court easily by the Republican Senate as long as she avoids making some inexcusable gaff.

It's universally known that ACB is ultra conservative regarding reproductive rights, but the big money behind her nomination has a much more practical reason for placing her on the court: she is ardently pro business, to the detriment of workers and consumers. She will be the ultimate authoritarian in service of the oligarchy, instrumental in cementing a two tiered society, the upper 15% or so living well, with the rest living as people did in the old days when robber barons ran the show.

Ronald Reagan famously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." That's still true, but only because if you hear them it means you're suffering an auditory hallucination. The US government now does jack to help anyone unless they're rich. How to go, Ron.

Come On Joe, Get with the Program, Man

President Donald Trump has suspended payroll withholding for Social Security during the pandemic. He has gone further though, stating that if reelected he will end withholding permanently. If he does this, Social Security will have no source of funds and will go broke within three years. It's a program that has worked stupendously well for 85 years now, but like almost all wealthy Republicans Trump would like to see it either ended or drastically changed so that Wall St. can profit from it.

For several generations, Social Security has been a backstop for people at the end of their work life. Yanking it away will cause severe hardship for those who have paid into the program for a lifetime and are reliant on it now, but it will also be sorely missed later by young people when it's their time to retire. It is not hyperbole to say this is a tragedy in the making.

Trump's move is tremendously impactful to millions of people of all ages, so you would think that candidate Biden would be all over it, tirelessly repeating that Trump has an imminent plan to destroy the most popular social program ever implemented. Nope. Crickets. This is mind boggling. Are the Democrats really this inept, or have their big donors colluded with Trump's big donors and agreed that nothing will be said until it becomes a fait accompli? Seems unlikely, but no more unlikely than Biden's failure to attack on this issue.

Demockracy Brings Country to its Death Throes

In a democracy, the leaders are elected by majority vote; in the USA, two of the last three presidents received fewer votes than their opponent, but they were put in office anyway via the electoral college. Therefore, in this the USA is not a democracy.

The number of senators is not proportionate. There are two per state regardless of the state's population. So, 51 senators from the least populous states can prevail over the other 49, even though the other 49 might represent 70% of the population. There again, the USA is not a democracy.

The Supreme Court is packed with mostly political idealogues who are all on one side. At present, there's likely to be a new judge that holds the same beliefs, which are in opposition to those of the majority of citizens. The majority of people want universal healthcare, childcare, a living wage, free college, legal abortion, and LGBT rights. The soon to be judge is hostile to all those things and is certain to vote down any legislation that attempts to provide them to the people.

She has vowed to destroy the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), let alone support full blown universal healthcare! She is extremely anti-abortion. So, this nominee is the anchor of the conserative drive to undo all that's been done to implement a progressive agenda that reflects the will of the people. Supreme Court judges can persist for a generation or more.There again, not a democracy.

Above all, US politics is structurally corrupt, and corruption and democracy are mutually exclusive. It's a pay-to-play electoral system, and the money has to come from somewhere. Where it comes from is the top 1%, because they want to influence legislation to favor their fortunes, and in our system politicians are openly for sale. This isn't bribery, these are "contributions". And don't forget, ex-politicians (notably ex-presidents) are rewarded upon retirement by corporations in accordance with how obedient they were while in office.

Of course, these purchased politicians always vote according to the desires of those that brung 'em to the dance, the 1%. The result is that the outcome of legislation conforms to the will of the 1%. All of the time. Always. You don't get much further away from democracy than that.

The upshot of all this is that the country is tearing apart. It has become susceptible to demagogues who pretend to support The People whose will has been ignored and whose welfare has been overlooked, but these demagogues merely lust after power and in the end will only intensify the miasma enveloping the common person. It can't be long now before the whole edifice crumbles and after that we will be lucky to arrive at military rule without having to go through a bloodbath. Pop goes the country!

Trumpo the Fascist Pain Clown Goes to the Doctor

If his name had been Martinez instead of Trump, he'd be dead. Mr. Martinez, a hypothetical 74 year old grandfather and retired laborer, would not have been tested or admitted to the hospital so quickly, would not have received the same aggressive treatment, and certainly would have died from the shock of owing more money for his hospitalization than he'd made in his entire life. But Trumpo the Facist Pain Clown pretends he survived because of his awesome genes, his strength, and his general magnificence. Reminds you of W, the president who was born on third base and thought he'd hit a triple.

Nihilism by the Numbers/ The Tao of Trump

Smart people don't pay taxes, they take a free ride on the backs of working people who have no recourse but to pay in full whatever they owe on their meager earnings.

Soldiers who lose their lives serving their country are suckers because there was nothing in it for them. They made a really bad deal. Stupid. This stance is consistent with neoliberal economics and its companion transactional philosophy -do nothing that doesn't directly reward number one.

Mine and amplify the grievances of a group and pit them against the rest of the world. Be their pied piper. Do not seek understanding, compromise, or reconciliation; instead, cry out for retribution and vengeance. Threaten violence. Be a bully. Only through creating chaos and causing conflict that will end in grief and mass suffering can you dispel the miasma that fills your own existence, if only temporarily.

Screw everyone. Rape when you can. Fling your feces constantly. Make common cause with religious extremists. Coddle authoritarians. Kiss up to brutal dictators. Strut. And when the spinning of your grotesque top stops, take your own life and bring the rest of the human race down with you. After all, "What's the point of having nuclear weapons if you can't use them?"