Was the Tarot an Ancient Astronomical Calculator? Also, Eight Comment-Thread Posts from Elsewhere

AS BEFORE, I am still at work on a (very) lengthy and emotionally difficult anthology of essays and photographs, this in preparation for my death, the approach of which is radically accelerated by severe post-Covid complications that have already reduced me to an invalid, and which -- since I was fully vaccinated -- strongly suggest at least some of the vaccines given us old folks were useless pacifiers, a probability most assuredly in keeping with the genocidal intent of  patriarchy and ever-more-nazified capitalism.  Assuming I live so long, when I am able, I will resume "normal" blogging (and yes, I trust the quotation-marks will excuse the malapropism).  Beyond that, for those who might be interested in speculative archaeology and anthropology, here  -- slightly modified -- is an excerpt from a note I sent to a fellow pagan just before the Summer Solstice:  

Apropos the probable original function of the Fool and the Tarot in general, what follows is an analysis in keeping with what -- if memory serves -- is one of Colin Wilson's hypotheses in his epic work The Occult -- specifically his supposition that many of the items used by present-day psychics originated anciently as practical tools the original functions of which are suppressed by patriarchal theocracy as "heretical" knowledge. (My apology for the lack of  a more precise bibliographical reference; my copy of Wilson's  book and several pages of associated notes were destroyed by the 1983 arson fire.) Nevertheless, if I remember Wilson's theory correctly, and if it does indeed apply to the Tarot deck, its present-day role as a popular tool of clarification and accurate prophecy may well have evolved from a Cargo-Cult-like folk-memory of its ancient use as a mathematically precise predictor of solar and lunar eclipses.   

The card known as the Empress signifies feminine power of such magnitude it resoundingly refutes the pseudo-scholarship that strives to associate the deck with the Hebrew alphabet, which would enhance its marketability by binding it to the ecogenocidal misogyny that defines the scriptural cores of the Abrahamic religions and is the doctrinal anchor that invariably -- and despite courageous efforts at reform -- drags Judaism, Christianity and Islam  back to modern repetitions of their murderous histories of patriarchal fanaticism.¹  Thus after a dream focused my mind on the riddle posed by Wilson's hypothesis, I began questioning how the Tarot might have originated  as a portable tool for answering two riddles posed by the breathtakingly ancient “Song of Amergin”:  

Who (but I) can tell the ages of the moon?
Who (but I) can tell the place where the sun rests?

That was in September 1972; the subsequent essay of maybe a dozen typewritten pages -- a relatively brief chapter in the arson-destroyed “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” – focused on the abundant but then mostly ignored evidence indicating the Tarot is a carefully disguised relic of the age of the Goddess. Thus, like much of the traditional balladry rediscovered by the folk renaissance of the 1940s and ‘50s, the cards were a then mostly unrecognized but nevertheless still powerful invocation of her return. That chapter was  therefore part of the extensively footnoted material I cited in “Dancer,” which was a 150,000-word redefinition of the 1960s Counterculture as the first wave of the resurrection of the Goddess and the beginning of global revolution against patriarchy. Illustrated by about 100 photographs, "Dancer" was burned just it was on the brink of major publication. The fire also destroyed all my other significant work. Nevertheless, I remember enough of the Tarot piece to summarize it here, for whatever paths of contemplation it might suggest .

Because the Fool is the one unnumbered card in the 22-card Major Arcana, I took it as one of four marker-cards in what I believe was originally a late Neolithic or early Bronze Age pocket calculator a traveling priestess or priest might have used to keep track of the astronomical calculations done at Stonehenge. (Irish tradition dates “The Song of Amergin” to 1268 BCE²)  Eighteen of the remaining 21 cards through which the Fool journeys I took as representatives of an Ogham calendar-alphabet (rather than the Hebrew alphabet to which they were then typically assigned), and I sorted them into the appropriate 13 consonant/months and five vowel/seasons. (Alas, I no longer remember which cards I assigned to what months, and I do not have the spare time it originally took -- about a month of evenings and weekends --  to restore the destroyed work.)  I assigned the five obviously female cards – Priestess, Empress, Strength, Justice and Death – to the seasons; the fifth season of these ancient calendar-alphabets was the season of the new year, which added five days to the 360-day lunar year to make it approximately synchronous with the 365¼-day solar year.³    And I took the Star, Moon and Sun as additional markers, these to be used in conjunction with the Minor Arcana’s 56 cards because – thanks to research at Stonehenge – we had learned from its prehistoric builders that 56 is the lowest common denominator of eclipse cycles, and three the minimum required number of its movable indicators.⁴
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¹Despite their propagandists' claims to the contrary, the history of Old Testament Judaism -- like histories of Christianity and Islam -- are defined primarily by expression of the misogyny and ecogenocide mandated by their core scriptures.  See for example  Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother, Harper San Francisco: 1987;  pgs. 230-234.

²Robert Graves, The White Goddess, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (amended and enlarged edition):1966; pgs. 205-206.  

³Ibid., pg. 274 ff.

⁴Gerald S. Hawkins and John B. White, Stonehenge Decoded, Barnes and Nobel Books: 1993; pgs. 140-146. (My original source, part of the personal library destroyed by arson,  was the Doubleday edition published in 1968.) 

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Agitation Via Other Websites' Comment-Threads: 

Trump or Biden on Israel? I am daily more astonished so few of us see what history should have long ago made obvious to anyone with the proverbial lick-of-sense: that the Biden candidacy is merely the "Democratic" (sic) Party's most "plausibly deniable" way of throwing the election to Trump, thereby completing its post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party.

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Biden Should Blame Corporate Monopolies for Higher Prices. Love your anti-inflation video, Mr. Reich; it's a superbly explosive and properly saturating piece of work, puns obviously intended. But when oh when will you acknowledge the ever-more-excruciatingly obvious truth the Biden candidacy is the "Democratic" (sic) Party's "plausibly deniable" means of completing its post-JFK role as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party and throwing the election to Trump.

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Trump Will Not Accept Election Results. I salute Mr. Reich's courage and admire his persistence, but it is increasingly obvious Trump's victory -- and with it a new Holocaust -- is unavoidable.  Anyone with the proverbial lick-of-sense has already awakened to the terrifying truth there's no stopping  the  "Democratic" (sic) Party's "plausibly deniable" scheme to use the Biden candidacy to throw the election to Trump. .

Meanwhile, The New York Times'  latest disclosure of the Democrats' innumerable  treacheries reveals the obviously premeditated pro-Trump shenanigans of Biden's appointee at the Federal Election Commission. (Though most of the mainstream-media propaganda machine is suppressing this story, there are a couple of exceptions.  If you're not an NYT subscriber, google "federal election commission deregulation" without the quotation marks.)

Thus the Democrats move ever closer to fulfilling the final obligations of their  post-JFK, 100-percent-compromised function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party.

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California YIMBY Joins Corporate Landlords to Kill Rent Control. I had not known of the YIMBY movement until I read Mr. McDonald's report,  for which many thanks. But I have long been aware of the aggressive, self-obsessed, Ayn-Rand-spawned moral imbecility -- actually a variant of nazism (white supremacy and misogyny included) -- that seems to be the required ethos of high-tech professionals. I encountered it years ago, as a member of the working press, when the technofascists -- and that is precisely what they are -- began gleefully destroying newspaper editorial and mechanical departments with computerization.  I realized at the time they are all Josef-Goebbels-caliber liars, peddling their inventions as a great benefit to humanity when in fact their wholesale elimination of jobs proves them to be the most socioeconomically destructive force on the planet. I witnessed their vindictive self-obsession again in Occupy; though few in number, they functioned quite successfully as anti-solidarity agents, a Fifth Column that subverted us from within as we were being assaulted from without, and I could not but wonder if this was their clandestinely assigned role. Then a couple of years later came GamerGate, within which they shamelessly revealed their infinite malevolence. Thus YIMBY is no surprise. When combined with all the other evidence, it suggests the technofascists might be a new subspecies, genetically sociopathic, utterly devoid of empathy, and that the manifest cruelty of YIMBY is, like the boundless misery inflicted by their technology, the deliberate expression of their contempt and hatred for us all.

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TikTok Bans Video Demanding Bogdan Syrotiuk's Freedom. While I initially agreed with Comrade Zaremba apropos China's arguably pro-Russian, anti- UkraiNazi interest, on second thought I see the censorship of Tic-Tok as predictable for two reasons. It is (A), exemplary of the magnitude of China's concern over the looming (and obviously unstoppable) USian Empire ban of Tic-Tok. And it is therefore (B), irrefutable proof China's state capitalism is as neoloberal -- that is, as incipiently nazified -- as any other form of capitalism. In which context note also the unmistakable echoes of the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

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Electric Trains Are the Powerhouse Electric Vehicles. Unfortunately we'll never get adequate national rail transport -- no matter how it is powered -- for the same reason USia ranks last in the developed world for local mass transit: the bottomless hatred of socioeconomic benefits that is unquestionably the deadliest venom of white-supremacist racism. (Doubt this? Google "racism vs. mass transit," without the quotation marks. And it isn't conjecture or refutable as "conspiracy theory"; it is long-proven, eternally unchanging fact.)

Indeed it is at least arguable we on the (real) left should be thanking Trump for revealing the extent to which The New York Times' breathtakingly courageous 1619 Project is unequivocal truth: that the infinite malice of race hatred is not only the definitive characteristic of U.S. history, but that it remains the sole unifying ethos of about 73 percent of the Caucasian population. It is an apocalyptic malignancy so uniquely potent in the U.S., that here -- unlike in any other nation -- race-hatred long ago replaced class-hatred as the core dynamic of socioeconomic strife.

(Additional educational references for those who still have their heads in the proverbial sand are, Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law; James Q. Whitman, Princeton University Press: 2017; and An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States; Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Beacon Press: 2014.)

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And two from The New York Times:

New Report Underscores the Seriousness of Long Covid. Long Covid is literally killing me. Fully vaccinated, I was nevertheless felled by the virus a year ago. I will never again have any sense of taste or smell; it has intensified my osteoarthritis to the extent I am naught but a cripple; and it has worsened a hitherto-medication-stabilized atrial-valve deficiency of 10 percent to a deteriorating and therefore fatal failure last cardiogramed at 90 percent. Merely hobbling on my arthritis-mandated walker the 10 feet from my living room to my kitchen now leaves me breathless. An incurable fungus infection I brought back from extended military service in Korea c. 1961-1962 denies me valve-replacement surgery. My cardiologist told me last September that, thanks to Long Covid, I have at the most two years to live, probably somewhat less.

Apropos the virus itself, its rapid mutation makes it uncontrollable, an apocalyptic threat that fills me with a difficult to describe mixture of anger and the most profound sadness I have ever known. At age 84, I have no fear of death; I have lived long enough to be exempt from the rightful fury of the younger people whose lives it has stolen and destroyed. But the shameful lack of easily accessible treatment as a classic example of how we the people are so often victimized. Nor can I overlook how the characteristics of the virus make it perfect for socioeconomic and military purposes, which suggests why the facts of its origin remain so difficult to ascertain. (My comment got 80 "Recommends.")

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Men Fear Me, Society Shames Me, and I Love My Life. Ms. MacNicol...as an 84-year-old, anti-patriarchal, Marxian, Gaian-pagan male photographer and writer who ultimately refused submission to the soul-killing, spirit-obliterating, mind-destroying oppression of capitalism and its theocratic facilitators, I most wholeheartedly salute you and applaud your assertions. (My comment got 22 "Recommends.")

LB/22 June 2024

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Biden Is the Plutocrats' Most "Plausibly Deniable" Way to Ensure Trump Wins; Christonazi Victory'd Make 2nd Civil War Inevitable; 5 More Posts from Elsewhere

STILL WORKING ON updating essays, a project that has morphed into preparation of an anthology for my post-mortem beneficiaries.  Nevertheless -- journalist to the end -- I spend the first hour or so of every day reading the (real) news, and when a report, analysis or disclosure moves me to do so, I post a comment on the associated thread. (Sometimes, as did the last three comments below, these get rejected, at which point the uplifted-social-finger portion of my alleged mind insists they too be published here.)

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Major Trump trials delayed until after election

Biden is merely the most "plausibly deniable" of the ruling class options for throwing the election to Trump, thus guaranteeing the perpetuation of capitalism by permanently reducing the U.S. to a zero-tolerance Christonazi theocracy. But how many more times must this be said before the Moronic Majority awakens to its looming subjugation?

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Two Americas: the Slow Divide

Unfortunately, Mr, Reich, the Christonazis' core belief -- that they have a divine mandate to conquer the world and exterminate all of us who refuse to declare for their demon Jesus -- is bound to overcome the Neoconfederates' isolationism. This will make a second Civil War unavoidable. Which leaves three questions:

(1)-Will the so-called Blue States be able to overcome their anti-gunowner pacifism enough to train and mobilize an effective defense against Waffen-SS-minded Christonazi fanatics? 

(2)-Will the Blue States be able to react fast enough to seize and utilize the military assets within their boundaries?

(3)-Given that the destruction of the United States is in the interest of its  primary global opponents  -- these are Russia and China; probably India; depending on the time-frame, perhaps also a pan-African union -- where will the Blue States (which, thanks to outsourcing by capitalist profiteers, lack the manufacturing capabilities essential to winning even a small war) -- find the allies essential to their victory?

Apropos my use of the "so-called" adjectival prefix in question (1), as someone who's aware of psycho-linguistics, I am infuriated by the Orwellian, silence-dissenters-by-destroying-our-vocabulary methodology obvious in assigning red -- the color (as in the Red Army), of liberation from the Original Nazis, and the color (as in "yeah damn right I'm a Red") of socialism  in general  -- to the permanently Christonazified regions of the "United" (sic) States.

A more truthful color assignment would be derived from our (first?) Civil War: blue for the states remaining true to the best of our founding principles, gray -- or better yet the feldgrau  of Hitler's Wehrmacht -- for the states of the Christonazi Neoconfederacy.

By the way, the same psycho-linguistically malicious subversion of meaning is evident in Trump's theft of socialism's clenched-fist salute.

As to what will actually obtain, I'm sure I'll never get to find out, which admittedly vexes my journalistic curiosity. But there's no escaping the fact I am 84 years old and terminally ill, so I may not even get to find out who wins in November, though I cannot doubt it will be Trump and the final triumph of the permanent nazification that's been underway – mostly by the diabolical cunning of the boiled-frog method – since our plutocratic masters embraced those legions of Original Nazi war criminals as advisors and comrades-at-arms. 

Biden? He's merely the plutocrats' most plausibly deniable method of throwing the election to their new Führer.

A near-lifelong student of history -- also part of the working press c. 1956-1959, 1962-1986 and 2004-2009 --  I've always recognized the murder of President Kennedy as a coup. I recognized the murder of his brother as the end, forever,  of any possibility of a counter-coup; I saw the 1976 election as a final act of surrender; and I recognized the 1980 election as the beginning of the inevitable post-coup national "cleansing," prefaced as it was by the decade of additional political murders that began in 1964. Thus I have long argued that -- assuming our species has  enough future to produce historians (which I gravely doubt) --  22 November 1963 will by the U.S. Empire's equivalent of 4 September 476, the latter the date the Roman Empire died. 

As to which side will win our second Civil War, that  will undoubtedly be determined by who gets the nukes. Which will also determine whether the war stays within the boundaries of the original U.S. or morphs into the apocalypse that exterminates our species and reduces our Mother Earth back to the bug planet she was four million years ago.

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Then and Now: 1968 and 2024
(Second paragraph slightly revised here to correct the error I made by too hastily editing the original.)

I must respectfully disagree with the definitive portion of Mr. Albert's attempt to define what killed the revolutionary potential of the 1960s. While his overview is (superficially) correct – what might be loosely termed "poor choices" did indeed help facilitate the Counterculture's extermination -- those (alleged) “choices” were not caused by any absence of self-sustaining "reason and evidence." Nor were they the sole factor in its destruction. As a near-lifelong professional journalist and an activist in the post-Sputnik Education-Reform, Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam-War, Alternative-Press, Back-to-the-Land, Environmentalist and Occupy movements, I know any (accurate) analysis of such failures must begin with the necessarily painful acknowledgment of how patriarchy combines two distinct  types of force to perpetuate its historically proven omnipotence.

One type is, as Mr. Albert implies, self-inflicted. But Marx’s Manifesto and FDR’s Four Freedoms are potentially as compelling now as they were in 1848 or 1941 respectively; once adopted, their principles are never abandoned by “choice” per se. Instead they are nullified by the methodically conditioned caste, racist, sexist and egotistical hatreds that have ever-more-irreparably fragmented human society since patriarchy’s imposition six or seven millennia ago. Today these hatreds are perpetuated by patriarchal religion and its capitalist derivatives, the latter including the Madison-Avenue-induced, morally imbecilic self-obsession that began as  USia's media-vectored terminal illness and is now fatally infecting all humanity. As intended, the resultant malaise prohibits the solidarity essential to overthrow or even ameliorate patriarchy’s ultimate function as the planet-poisoning, species-exterminating mechanism of a global Final Solution, its dynamic first evidenced by smallpox-envenomed blankets.

Though in 1970 I kept my ideology semi-closeted in an (ultimately doomed) effort to preserve my journalism career, I have been a Marxian since my teens. Thus in June of that year, exiled from my New-York-City birthplace and home, I was relieved to discover most of the women I met in the Pacific Northwest were as feminist as those I knew in Lower Manhattan. But in startling contrast to the males I knew in the City -- a vivid example of how NYC of that era truly was, as James Baldwin put it, Another Country -- most Pacific Northwest males remained stubbornly misogynistic. And it is only here I've repeatedly seen solidarity slain -- even in alternative-press collectives -- by bourgeois antagonism toward alleged socioeconomic inferiors. Nor are these reactionary attitudes much abated; now they are merely camouflaged by language proven false by behavior.

Patriarchy's other movement-destroying force is the escalating sadism of its military and police, their murderous brutality intensified by technological supremacy and psychological terror. These are mandates of what Jeff Sharlet reveals as the “fundamentalism” that dictates USian domestic and foreign policy. In the '70s, it was locally proclaimed on Christian reader-boards: "Organic Is Satanic"; "Environmental Means Of The Devil"; and the far more ubiquitous "God Hates Hippies." Now its proclamations are international news.

Honed to invincibility  by the legions of Nazi war criminals the empire adopted after WWII, the synergistic combination of these internal and external forces perpetuates the reduction of our planet to an ecogenocidal death-camp. As a near-lifelong student of history, I know any notion patriarchy includes  a “moral arc...toward justice” is a tyranny-protecting Big Lie. In a sane world, it would be symptomatic of clinical delusion if not outright dementia. Therefore I see no (logical) escape from the looming apocalypse. But I also know the Gaia Theory does not exclude the possibility of last-minute rescue. Apropos that, let us hope an '80s bumper-sticker -- "Goddess Is Coming and She Is Pissed" -- is more than mere fantasy.

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The Supreme Court Might Rescue Trump
(I wrote of "Trumpler" and his "smear-all-putsch" on a sarcastic whim, merely because it rhymes with Hitler and his beer-hall putsch. Nevertheless I believe the comparison is valid, particularly given how Trump has followed Hitler's example of packing the judiciary with puppet judges. It's also noteworthy that some psychics now claim Trump is Hitler's reincarnation, for which go here and here. ) 

As I have been pointing out since well before Trumpler's 6 January smear-all putsch, the USian Christonazis have followed their German Nazi forebears' strategy of packing the judiciary as the one sure means of permanently abolishing democracy without alarming a submissively complacent citizenry. This  nullified all the Weimar Republic's constitutional protections just as it has done likewise to those of the (equally doomed) U.S. republic.  Indeed I would argue that anyone who supposes Trumpler's judiciary would not  declare him  immune to prosecution  is clinically deluded.

We are thus left with three questions:

• (1)-Will the "Democratic" (sic) Party continue the failing Biden candidacy, which -- despite his superficial, intentionally deceptive emulations of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- ever-more-obviously demonstrates the party's post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic)  Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party?

• (2)-Assuming the Democrats  continue  Biden's plausibly deniable pro-Christonazi candidacy (because that is the only option their Wall Street owners allow), will enough voters recognize the infinite horror of the Trumpite threat to vote Biden a second term despite his many flaws?

• (3)-Assuming Trumpler wins, will the so-called "blue states" have the courage necessary to resist the Christonazis' armed might -- but if they do, where will they find the necessary allies?            

Bear in mind too that in reality, it was the Red Army that saved the world from Hitler -- and that in today's world, there is no comparable force to save humanity from Trumpler. (Which is precisely why I'm thankful I'm terminally ill and will therefore most likely be spared Trumpler's concentration camps.)

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The following three comment-thread posts were rejected, the first two by the World Socialist Web Site, the third by The New York Times. Apropos the topmost WSWS-suppressed post,  I was initially surprised it did not appear. But on reconsideration,  I realized it was probably censored for two reasons: focused as its moderators are on class warfare, and locked as they are into a fundamentalist definition of dialectical materialism (yes, unfortunately there are Marxian fundamentalists too),  they seem loathe to recognize the Trumpite onslaught is as much a resumption of religious warfare -- specifically Christianity's two-millennia crusade to impose zero-tolerance global theocracy -- as it is a class war; they likewise refuse to acknowledge it is also resumption of the race warfare that has defined European colonialism in the Americas since its birth in 1492. Plus there is the fact the site's moderators are adamantly opposed to any sort of alliance with less-ideologically "pure" Marxians, New Deal advocates or any other sorts of socialists or social democrats, the potential solidarity of such a united front implicit in the best-seller status accorded the disclosures by Jeff Sharlet. About the suppression of my other attempted WSWS post, I can only guess it was killed because the moderators might have  considered it an elaboration on an exposé published earlier this year by Jacobin, which it most assuredly was not; I did not discover that report until tonight, 18 May.  But WSWS moderators harbor an especially intense hatred for Jacobin's semi-official parent organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, because they (correctly) condemn DSA as the "Democratic" (sic) Party's weapon to co-opt and thereby nullify the growing demand for a national alternative to the two (pro-nazi) capitalist parties.  Apropos the NYT-suppressed post,  I can only suppose the editors deemed it too brutally honest to be fit to print.   

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Nearly 3,000 protesters arrested  in U.S. as crackdown on anti-genocide encampments continues internationally 

Disclosure of how the USian Empire is an ever-more-tyrannical theocracy governed by "secret fundamentalism" -- for which see Jeff Sharlet's The Family (Harper: 2008) and his subsequent works --  shows how all the diverse atrocities of capitalism are expressions of this fundamentalism's  ecogenocidal intent.

Sharlet's ongoing investigation reveals how the "Democratic" (sic) Party's national-prayer-breakfast, post-JFK treachery as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party ideologically enabled the Vietnam War; the destruction of the New Deal; the imposition of economic neoliberalism; the expansion of national and global theocracy; the re-conquest of much of the world by white-supremacist neo-colonialism; the wars for capitalist lebensraum in the Ukraine and Palestine; the Christonazi take-over of the U.S. Supreme Court to guarantee theocratic expansion and permanence; and the militarization of the USian police to suppress any domestic opposition to theocratic subjugation, much as the imperial war machine suppresses such resistance abroad. 

Recognition of how  these atrocities are theocratically connected brings into sharp focus how this "secret fundamentalism" not only justifies capitalism's ecogenocidal greed as divinely ordained, but mandates USian alliance with -- and military support of -- other fundamentalist  theocracies. Ruled as they are by zero-tolerance tyrannies -- Israel by genocidally fundamentalist Judaism and the Western Ukraine by de facto nazis -- the blank-check support given them by the empire is among USian fundamentalism's unapologetic public expressions. 

So is the skyrocketing militarized-police violence unleashed against Occupy, Black Lives Matter and now against pro-Palestine demonstrators. The message here is that in the eyes of the ruling class, we of the 99.9 Percent, regardless of race or ethnicity, are all defined by the N-word -- and will be savaged accordingly should we dare  protest. But once we Marxians begin making these connections obvious, it may also begin to be obvious that -- as an old labor-movement slogan puts it -- an injury to one of us is truly an (intentional) injury to us all.

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Fed says interest rates to stay higher longer

Given that the pro-Trump USian ruling class, like its pro-Hitler German ruling-class predecessor, has determined nazism is capitalism's only salvation; given also that resurgent inflation is one of several factors -- including the Biden candidacy itself -- that are ever-more-obviously scripted to ensure Trump's victory in November; it is entirely plausible to assume the Federal Reserve and Wall Street are collaborating to continue victimizing us with ruinous prices and prohibitive interest rates. We already know the price-hikes are expressions of run-amok corporate greed rather than problems of supply and demand, which in turn suggests the Fed's role is that of enabler rather than regulator.

Moreover there's the fact Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is living proof of the "Democratic" (sic) Party's post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party. Powell was appointed to the board by Obama, elevated to its chairmanship by Trump and reappointed to that post by Biden. As we should all know by now, Hitler-disciple Trump's appointees were at least Christonazi sympathizers, else they'd never have received the wanna-be Führer's endorsement. Thus Powell's re-appointment by Biden is a tacit endorsement of the Trumpite agenda -- further proof the unprecedentedly unpopular Biden candidacy is the "plausibly deniable" strategy developed by the thoroughly Christonazified spy-and- secret-police apparatus for throwing the election to Trump.

Where the Gaza War itself fits into this strategy remains to be seen, but there's no doubt the violence Biden has unleashed on pro-Palestine demonstrators is intended to goad the youth vote into boycotting the election, thereby further ensuring Trump's victory and the final, permanent reduction of USia to the modern, technologically omnipotent version of a slave-plantation state the financial aristocracy has sought to impose on us at least since the defeat of the Bankers' Plot in 1934.

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Biden Is Not Winning. His Campaign Should Stop Acting Like It Is.

Those who persist in proclaiming Biden a certain victor have their heads deep enough in the proverbial sand to blind themselves to two absolute realities. One of these is the fanaticism of the Trumpites, who will vote for him even if he is imprisoned, and some of whom have already pledged armed rebellion to free him should he be locked up. The other is the ultimate indifference of the nation's youth, whose core belief is they -- and ultimately the entire human species -- are doomed, regardless of who wins in November, and who will therefore be easily convinced to refrain from voting, thus to avenge the police brutality they believe Biden has unleashed against their pro-Hamas peers.

The one unknown that might reverse this growing probability for disaster -- the one factor that could save us from an increasingly certain Biden defeat -- is the women's vote. This is rightfully mobilized to near-revolutionary fervor by the theocratic misogyny imposed by the Trumpites' state regimes and perpetuated by the Trumpite seizure of the federal judiciary, the latter an application of the strategy pioneered by the German Nazis. But if the women are convinced their ballots will be nullified by Trumpite anti-voter schemes -- perhaps due to the refusal of Biden to rigorously enforce the few remnants of the Voting Rights Act -- they too may refrain from voting, guaranteeing the transformation of the nation into the de facto Fourth Reich.

LB/1-18 May 2024

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Posted at 12:35 PM in Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Current Affairs, Ecogenocidal apocalypse , Feminism, Guns: Forcible Civilian Disarmament, History, Human extinction, LGBTQ , Marxism, socialism, Memoirs, Misogyny, Mother Earth, Patriarchy, Religion, Weblogs, White Supremacy | Permalink | Comments (0)

 

"Persecution in the Lord's Name," Plus Another Six Pointedly Provocative Posts from Websites Elsewhere

Three of the estimated 6,500 homeless persons who eke out meager livings in Tacoma and Pierce County, WA,  using an outdoor faucet for bath water, 30 May 2023; the owners of the  property have since gated and fenced it, specifically to deny such people access. As noted in "Christonazi Supreme Court Majority,"  below, the tyrannical judges will probably approve the mass arrest of all unhoused victims of capitalism, thereby providing the de facto plantations of the prison-industrial complex with an antebellum-sized supply of slaves. (Photo by Loren Bliss © 2024).

 

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I AM UPDATING a 12-year-old essay so extensively, the process -- associated research included -- is scarcely different from producing new work. Hence I am not certain when it will be finished, though I am giving it at least six hours of intensely focused effort every day. Because as a near-lifelong journalist I cannot divorce myself from current events,  I will continue publishing comments I've made elsewhere -- just  as I have done below -- whenever I feel it's warranted.

For those unaware of my circumstances, this is part of the proverbial clearing-of-the-decks mandated by the death-sentence Covid imposed on me last summer, which indeed makes me wonder if the vaccination and boosters I dutifully got were nothing more than pacifiers. Yes, I had a pre-existing, potentially fatal condition, specifically congestive heart failure, with a 10-percent loss of atrial valve function. But the CHS had long been stabilized by medication, and the best estimate was I'd  most likely live another ten years. Nor was my osteoarthritis-inflamed spinal injury -- the 1978 gift of one of  Washington state's obscenely graft-protected, judge-coddled, defiantly habitual drunken drivers -- anything more than occasionally crippling. Now, thanks to Covid, my atrial valve loss is 90 percent. Because an incurable jungle-rot fungus I brought home from Korea in 1962 denies me  valve-replacement surgery,  my cardiologist informed me last September I had, at the most,  two years to live -- probably far less  due to looming kidney failure precipitated by the massive doses of diuretics now necessary to compensate for my radically diminished blood circulation. Meanwhile my arthritic pain has become so devastating, I am ambulatory only with a walker, which means I have to do all my shopping online, depend on delivery services to bring me my groceries,  and rely on kind-hearted neighbors to carry my garbage and recycling to the outdoor bins. Even with the walker, there are days I can barely go from one end of my apartment to another.

But as a near-lifelong photographer and writer, there remains a substantial amount of work I hope to complete before this incarnation ends. After I finish the aforementioned revision and perhaps a half-dozen more editing tasks,  there remains the dreadful clerical odium of sorting, filing and cataloging thousands of post-fire pictures and the far more repugnant tedium of keyboarding  type-written or printed texts into electronically accessible formats. Nevertheless, thanks to the Goddess, I am already at peace with my life and circumstances -- more profoundly at peace than ever I imagined I could be -- no matter  what I am able to accomplish in my remaining time.

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Persecution in the Lord’s Name: a remarkably courageous, properly infuriating expose´ of how the federal government’s theocratic interpretation of “religious freedom” as the right of Christians to express their doctrinal, implicitly ecogenocidal sadism within their organizational realms -- never mind that beyond those boundaries, their biblically mandated viciousness would not only be criminally unconstitutional, but in most cases feloniously so.

Despite my applause for Ms. Lee's courageous exposure of Christianity's intrinsic hatefulness and LAP's bravery in publishing it, history compels me to reject her underlying assumptions:

(1)-Regardless of claims to the contrary, the three core principles of Christianity -- likewise of the other two Abrahamic religions (Judaism and Islam) -- are inescapably hateful. These are: (A)-the claim its deity is "the (only) true god; (B)-the claim its followers are "the (only) divinely-chosen people"; and (C)-the ecogenocidal misogyny by which these claims are enforced. Claims (A) and (B) establish each of the three Abrahamic religions as rival, master-race cults of ubermenschen. They are at war with one another, and with all the rest of us -- pagans, Buddhists, Hindus, Baha'i, First Nations traditionalists, agnostics, atheists, etc. -- simply because, by definition, you can have only one master race per planet. Thus the religious wars that characterize the entire history of patriarchy will not end until the present (alleged) civilization has destroyed itself, probably by exterminating our entire species and reducing our Mother Earth to the bug planet she was 400 million years ago. Which brings us to (C), the relentless misogyny demanded by each of these credos. This hatred of all femaleness originates from the patriarchal fear of the re-emergence of the Great Goddess, the Divine Mother who was our species' primary deity until the patriarchal revolution began its rape-and-murder conquest six or seven millennia ago. While the Goddess was its initial target, the patriarchs quickly recognized femaleness itself was a doorway through which she could re-emerge. Thus the sadistic Abrahamic god's vengeance against Eve, cursing us all for her "original sin," damning all females and non-hetero-normative persons as her potentially demonic collaborators. Thus too these religions' ecogenocidal histories, most especially the rape of the planet that, barring a genuine miracle, has already doomed us to extinction. And since these atrocities are the products of scriptural mandates, to claim any Abrahamic religion can be reshaped into anything less murderously hateful is no less deluded than claiming that Nazism, which is based on the biblical-caliber hatefulness of its messiah as expressed in Mein Kampf, can be converted to humanitarianism.

(2)-Like it or not, the 13 colonies were founded as Christian theocracies; the anti-First-Nations ecogenocide was mandated by the invaders' theology (see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States); and despite the Founders' courageous efforts to make the fledgling U.S a genuinely secular state, the Machiavellian-minded financial aristocracy -- recognizing the historically proven effectiveness of Christianity as an ultimate weapon of oppression -- has always worked to subvert the founders' intent and ensure the USian empire is forever tyrannized by what Jeff Sharlet has courageously exposed as "the secret fundamentalism" of its governance. Our Masters' most recent weapon of forcible Christianization is The Family, the group whose nazified methodology and terrifyingly global influence is documented by Sharlet. Its successes include the permanently Christonazi U.S. Supreme Court and -- in all probability -- the looming re-election of Trump, which will mark the beginning of a new Holocaust, the death-toll of which will shrink its (equally Christianity-enabled) German Nazi prelude to a mere footnote. What began as zero-tolerance theocracy shall ever remain so.

(3)-For these reasons, the lawsuits encouraged by Ms. Lee are absurd. Given the permanence of Christonazi control of the judiciary, the plaintiffs have absolutely no -- say again, no -- possibility of success. Our liberation -- if we truly seek it -- must therefore be achieved by other strategies and tactics.

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Revolt in the Universities: protesting students across the U.S. face mass arrests, suspension, eviction and expulsion. Those who live on campus are summarily evicted, thereby condemned to homelessness just as the Christonazi-dominated U.S.  Supreme Court seems posed to make homelessness a crime, thereby providing the prison-industrial complex with a potentially unlimited supply of slaves.   

My contribution was in response to an otherwise accurate comment-thread post that erroneously stated Nixon had begun the war against student activism:

Actually, Mr. Weir  -- with no disagreement with your overall assertions implied or intended --  the punitive use of USian universities  was established well before the Nixonazi regime. Google "Censorship: Lessons from Ralph Nader and a Knoxville Atrocity," without the quotation marks.

("Censorship" is not linked in the original because the site does not allow URLs.)

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A Long Way Down: an elderly upper-middle-class male describes how -- once an older person is flung into unemployment by the reigning economic savagery -- capitalist viciousness nullifies a lifetime history of significant professional success. Includes supportive statistics.

This -- Mr. Suarez’s self-portrait as an unimpeachable, absolutely blameless  victim of the ecogenocidal sadism of capitalism (which our Masters will intensify beyond even the German-Nazi magnitude of Evil once the U.S. Supreme Court, the "Republican" [sic] Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party and their "Democratic Party" [sic]  Fifth Column finish handing Trump the presidency and turning the USian Empire into the de facto Fourth Reich, all to ensure capitalism's permanence with a New Holocaust and guarantee its [intended] outcomes) -- is by far the most relevant essay I've yet seen in LAP.

Hence my most heartfelt thanks to Mr. Suarez for having the defiant, revolutionary-caliber bravery to write it and to LAP for having the courage to publish it -- though it should have been given lead-story status.

(And what is this "[intended] outcome"  of capitalism? Think of it -- and the toxins of patriarchy from which its own venom is derived -- as the ideological equivalents of smallpox-contaminated blankets. Their collective purpose is revealed by the apocalyptic consequences they irremediably inflict:  extermination of our species, extinction of all other advanced life-forms, and reduction of our Mother Earth to the overheated bug planet she was four million years ago.)   

As implied in my comment, I believe the story portrays the doom that awaits any of us who are not part of the Ruling Class -- that is,  any of us whose survival depends on our ability to earn adequate salaries or wages. 

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In Supreme Court arguments, Biden administration demands unrestricted power to separate families "without judicial oversight."

This case provides another (particularly vivid)  example of how, beneath the camouflage nets of capitalist propaganda, the only (real) difference between the "Democratic" (sic) Party and the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party is their relative speeds of intended subjugation. The Christonazis and their allies want zero-tolerance white-supremacist Christian theocratic tyranny imposed immediately, while the Democrats -- still trying to hide their tyrannical malevolence behind a screen of  "plausible deniability" -- want to impose it more by stealth,  no doubt in the belief a more gradual enslavement will condition us to be more accepting of our  powerlessness and thus far less likely to revolt.    

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Ten Times More Toxic Pesticide will poison our foods if EPA approves agro-monopoly demand.   

A vital story the imperial mainstream media is ignoring -- again proving its function as the world's first privately owned, for-maximum-profit model of Josef Goebbel's Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. 

I always wash my celery and tomatoes before eating. I use warm water and dish detergent, then rinse well. Old and on a fixed income, too physically disabled to hunt, fish and organically subsistence garden as I did for so many years, I cannot afford the 30 to 60 percent higher costs of allegedly "organic" vegetables. However, washing store-bought vegetables is merely an intuitive solution;  though I am a skilled researcher, I have never found any information about how to cleanse fruits and vegetables of the (genocidal) toxins inflicted on us by the imperial agricultural cabal. Does  anyone know if this cleaning is sufficient?  Please respond...

The following was my response to another comment on the same thread:

Apropos the pending EPA decision -- and given that the permanently Christonazified U.S. Supreme Court is obviously doing everything with in its power to guarantee Trump a second term,  we know what it will be -- perhaps now the USian left will finally stop its suicidal rejection of our Masters' (repeatedly demonstrated) intent to exterminate most of the 99.9 Percent as  mere "right-wing conspiracy theory."

An adjunct-faculty college instructor  in the late '70s and early '80s, I know genocidal reduction of the working class was even then favored by many  environmental science majors. Therefore I find it entirely credible University of Texas Professor Erik Pianka (for whom google) would urge the methodical extermination of 90 percent of the human species -- never mind the story was broken by a publication infamous for its Ayn Rand rebranding of Hitler's ubermenschen ethos. Ideology should not blind us to truth, particularly when it is already proven beyond dispute by our Masters' weaponization of Covid, for which see the World Socialist Web Site, hardly a "right wing"  outlet.

Links in italicized text excluded from original because the site does not allow URLs.

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Christonazi Supreme Court Majority seems ready to approve mass arrest of homeless people.

This should surprise no one who acknowledges four irrefutable truths about capitalism: firstly, that the U.S. Supreme Court is doing everything within its power to guarantee Trump a second term (and thereby convert the USian Empire to the de facto Fourth Reich); secondly, that criminalizing homelessness  will clear the way for the Trumpite-promised mass arrest and lifetime concentration-camp enslavement of anyone too poor to afford housing. Which -- thirdly and as intended -- will  provide our Christonazi/Neoconfederate Masters with the antebellum-magnitude slavery they deem necessary to restore their profiteering to the unlimited maximums defended by the old Confederacy. Fourthly, let us never forget that while U.S.  capitalism -- shaped as it was by the legions of Original Nazi war criminals our Masters adopted as advisors after WWII -- is capitalism's most unapologetically sadistic global form, its ecogenocidal intent is shared by all capitalists everywhere.

Self-explanatory; no further comment necessary.

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Inside the Crisis at NPR: Listeners are tuning out. Sponsorship revenue has dipped. A diversity push has generated internal turmoil. Can America’s public radio network turn things around?

The New York Times included my response on this report's comment thread:

At least some of the decline in the NPR audience -- like the declines in other media usage (and no doubt like the decline in younger people's interest in elections) -- is fueled by their increasing conviction we are a doomed species on a dying planet. For those who hold such views, all other events, elections included, are reduced to irrelevance. And every younger person I know -- "younger" defined as folks in their 30s and 40s (about a dozen people, all professionals or skilled workers of one sort or another) -- is not only resigned to the inevitability of our species' extinction, but in that context of bottomless hopelessness increasingly regards the news (and current events in general) as nothing more than a best-avoided intensifier of depression.

LB/28 April 2024

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Posted at 07:25 PM in Austerity as Genocide , Capitalism: Apocalyptic Threat of, Censorship, ChristoNazism, Nazism, Facism, Coronavirus , Current Affairs, Ecogenocidal apocalypse , Education, Environmental crisis, Feminism, History, Human extinction, Humanitarianism, LGBTQ , Memoirs, Minorities, Misogyny, Mother Earth, Neoliberalism as Neonazism, Patriarchy, Photography, Poor People, Religion, Science, Seniors , Spirituality, White Supremacy | Permalink | Comments (0)

If Trump and His Christonazis Make America Hate Again, Nex Benedict Is Any of Us Who Dare Resist

And It Will Not Matter to the MAHAs Whether We're Marxians or New Dealers; Male, Female, Nonbinary or LGBTQ; Caucasian or Peoples of Color; Pagan, Indigenous Traditional, Agnostic, Atheist or Spiritually Indifferent

I BEGAN THIS essay as an intended contribution to the discussion thread of the World Socialist Web Site’s mostly well-done 18 March report about the Nex Benedict atrocity, but the ferocity of my reaction -- delight at the censorship-defying boldness of its disclosures, disgust at its editorial flaws, fury at yet another  Christonazi outrage -- seems to have (unintentionally) invoked the Muse. Thus was I thrust into the  Zen-like trance that often births the most intense expressions of my sensibilities.  A right-brain state defined by the eerie sense of having involuntarily become a conduit rather than a source,  its irresistible momentum is as ultimately indescribable as it is welcome. It had frequently enhanced my photojournalistic gavotte  and the guitar-accompanied recitals of traditional folk music I am now permanently denied by arthritis, and it has often given me, in a single encounter, the entire content  of what might justifiably be considered a poem or at least a poetic rumination, but never until now has it uninterruptedly yielded a complete body of prose. And  when my left brain yanked me from its enchantment, I was decidedly startled by its 11-hour suspension of physical awareness and the surprising fact my text had grown far beyond the very reasonable 400-word WSWS comment-limit.

In retrospect, I cannot doubt the death of Nex Benedict was --  at least for me -- the mental equivalent of the proverbial last straw. I am the son of a man purged for his Marxian politics by the post-WWII  U.S.  government, and much as he was, a near-lifelong student of history. I began learning in my early teens of the historical USian penchant for embracing its own variants of nazism. I recognized nazism's appeal in the skyrocketing popularity  -- especially amongst southern whites -- of Ayn Rand's turgid fictionalizations of the  übermenschen ethos central to  Mein Kampf  -- never mind she wrote as wretchedly as Hitler himself. I saw the yearning for nazism implicit in segregation and the federal government's devious censorship of the mainstream press.  My father cross-referenced 1964 Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater's speeches to their Mein Kampf origins, a meticulously researched work he offered as campaign ammunition to local officials of Lyndon Baines Johnson's "Democratic" (sic) Party, men who vehemently rejected it, no doubt because, unbeknownst to us voters, the Democrats were even then the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Fifth Column they have so obviously since become. I've experienced countless flickers of worry and disgust generated by the steady encroachment of USian nazism ever since. But there is a profound difference between my psychologically guarded journalistic objectification of the Christonazi threat and  the sudden bayonet-thrust of woe  and dread  that pierced me to the heart when first I viewed the obituary portrait of Nex and was seized, smitten and overwhelmed by its wrenching similarity to the obituary portrait of the murdered woman who was Heather Heyer.

The psychic kinship of the two photos spawned a momentary mental maelstrom that flashed through my own vivid memories of raggedly impoverished Knox County children needfully scavenging random lumps of coal from Vestal's L&N tracks and churned them into a wrenching spiral of dystopian imagery that mixed wirephotos of assassinations, wars and mass murder with my own decades of textual and photographic witness to socioeconomic despair and its expression via demonstration, riot and metaphysical rebellion. Then it replaced the stab of terror inflicted by the visually confirmed certainty of doom with an indescribably  down-pressing pang of grief at cultural loss that lumped my throat and brought tears to my eyes. Suffice it to say my right brain now feels the fist-in-the-face, boot-in-the-crotch, truncheon-across-the-spine  toxicity of what my left brain hitherto de-emotionalized by the distancing essential to journalistic  abstraction.   (I am sorry I cannot say it better; I apologize for my gross ineptitude at expressing my own emotions.) 

As a result I now know a bit more about the psychological dimensions of the victimization of Nex Benedict and the martyrdom of Heather Heyer and the skyrocketing frequency of  hate-motivated mass murder and the statistically camouflaged but undoubtedly soaring executions of uncounted USians by the murderously weaponized bigotries of intentionally fatal neglect and homicidally relentless persecution and how all these atrocities signify USia's headlong, unabashedly joyful embrace of the same bottomless evil knowingly embraced by the German electorate between the 6-January-2022 equivalent of the 1923 Beer-Hall Putsch and the death-stroke dealt the Weimar Republic by von Hindenburg's appointment of Hitler as Reichkanzler a decade later. 

The intensity of my reaction was prompted by my realization our masters' deliberate resurrection and re-empowerment of our species' most relentlessly ecogenocidal foes of humanitarian empathy compel us all to reflect on Martin Niemöller's  confession and its ever-more-obvious USian variant, "first  they came for the women and the LGBTQ people..." thus   to recognize the fatal persecution of Nex and the murder of Heather and all the women assaulted in what is now obviously an organized attack by New York City misogynists  exemplify the fate the Christonazis will inflict on all of us who dare oppose them regardless of our race, ethnicity,  gender, ideology, spirituality or lack thereof. In that sense, we are literally already all targeted as were Nex Benedict and Heather Heyer and every other such victim. 

Nor can I doubt our future -- however long it may last before global capitalism's  now-obviously inevitable  apocalypse terminates the patriarchal perversion of “civilization” -- will be increasingly defined by Charlotteville-caliber violence and the constant escalation thereof.¹ As I have repeatedly said to my friends and comrades, if the second civil war I now fear is inevitable actually occurs, the so-called “winner” will be determined by whichever side gets the nukes, never mind the doomsday ruin sure to be inflicted by their use.

A slightly revised version of my original essay -- the writing I initially intended as a comment-thread contribution -- begins beneath this prelude’s footnote.

__________________

¹See for example -- if you can find it (and afford its outrageous censorship-by-price cost -- the late David Smail’s profoundly relevant Power Interest and Psychology: Elements of a social materialist understanding of distress, PCCS Books, UK: 2007.

*****

DESPITE THE LAUDABLE breadth of Chase Lawrence's analysis, the WSWS piece that evoked my response is unfortunately headlined “Questions remain surrounding Nex Benedict’s death following release of autopsy summary,” a statement rendered absurd and therefore meaningless by the sort of misplaced modifier that exemplifies the distracting grammatical errors too many of us -- through no fault of our own -- are increasingly too poorly educated to avoid or correct. In any of my years as a supervising editor, I'd have caustically demanded to know if Nex had indeed died while tracking the summary's publication, which is precisely what the head says happened, and which makes it grammatically incomprehensible to those for whom English is a secondary language.   But I suppressed that impulse until now, when I realized it is more respectful to flag the error than to ignore it -- and to remind us, en passant, that correct grammar is essential for effective communication, without which the clarity of mind necessary for successful revolution remains out of reach. Minimizing our ability to understand one another is therefore one of the (intended) consequences of our masters' definitively anti-revolutionary restriction of our access to education. It is yet another expression, albeit a far more subtle one, of the zero-tolerance agenda that employs bigotry as thought-control and therefore as (another) weapon to suppress us, we of the 99.9 Percent, the working class, which makes it relevant to the present discussion.

(For the record, here is the head as it should have been written, counted to fit the space of the original and properly phrased -- as all heads should be -- in the active voice:  Autopsy summary fails to answer questions of authorities' complicity in Nex Benedict's death.)

Unfortunately, Comrade Lawrence buries his most damning conclusion -- and therefore his proper lead -- in the less-than-adequately developed details of his 12th paragraph; this is the fact the circumstances of Nex Benedict's death prove it to have been yet another psychologically engineered (and therefore "plausibly deniable") murder inflicted by relentless Christonazi sadists. Its burial thus minimizes the significance of how the suicide diagnosis thus becomes -- regardless of its officially authoritative medical source --  a maliciously victim-blaming deception.

Nevertheless, Lawrence's text contains many laudable elements. So does Christopher Wiggens' report, in the 22 March edition of The Advocate.  Wiggens leads with how humanitarians  are again legitimately infuriated by Oklahoma's permanently Christonazified governance -- this time aboil with wrath provoked by the local obersturmbannführers who've honored Nex's de facto executioners with school-approved, prosecutor-guaranteed, police protected immunity. Wiggens also details the glaring scientific improbability of the suicide verdict, facts of which I don't doubt the mainstream media’s billionaire-owned, for-maximum-profit variant of Josef Goebbel’s Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda deliberately sought to deny us.  Like Lawrence, Wiggens exposes the extent to which the methodical, potentially deadly persecution of LGBTQ students is already institutionalized as official policy throughout the emergent Christonazi confederacy. And Lawrence's report  includes documentation of the ever-intensified misery deliberately inflicted on all K-12 students, LGBTQ or not, as even the so-called blue states are forced ever closer to unabashed nazism.

But each of these reports follow the seemingly mandatory practice by all USian news media -- whether alternative or mainstream -- of ignoring how our national history  shows  such persecution is neither sociological coincidence nor cultural anomaly. In infinitely damning fact, the history of USian bigotry is so uniquely ecogenocidally murderous, it -- like its racism-inspired, corporate-financed eugenics, -- were the working models from which Hitler built his Holocaust. These are therefore the only constant (and thus truly defining) qualities this nation has ever possessed. In other words, the alleged “founding principles” of the so-called “United States” have never been more than colossal Big Lies.

A contributing element in Nex's victimization is the fact so many in my generation, like the Baby-Boomers who came after us, were arrogantly delusional enough to convince themselves activism alone had permanently purged USian society of its oft-denied but irrevocably defining ideology of interwoven hatreds. (That same arrogance led many of my fellow activists to foolishly imagine it was our anti-war protests -- not the indomitable courage of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese People's Army and the sustained militance of their Soviet benefactors -- that forced the USian Empire's panicked retreat from Vietnam¹.) Apropos USia's defining bigotry, certainly we knew a few sparks of our nation's signature ethos smoldered on, particularly in the perpetually hateful theocracy of the white Christian South, but we smugly assumed the metaphorical dampers had been closed by legislation, that whatever cinders remained would eventually be extinguished. Obviously we were  deranged; our assumption USia's historically dominant lynch-mob ethos² could be suppressed by any methods less stringent than those by which the Red Army cleansed Europe of the Original (N.S.D.A.P.) Nazis is now proven false. 

The proof -- an irrefutable and properly terrifying real-world parallel to Harry Turtledove's fictional denunciation of pacifism³ -- is of course the fact it took Hitler-disciple Trump and his bring-back-Auschwitz-legions of Christonazi Neoconfederates only a few public exhalations of unabashed hatefulness to blow  the seemingly dead embers of bigotry into a nation-destroying conflagration that rages more apocalyptically with every passing minute.  Wildly cheering their "grab-'em-by-the-pussy" führer with  Zieg-Heil-equivalent chants of "USA! USA! USA!," the malevolent minions of the second of our species' three fatally competitive ecogenocide-by-divine-commandment theologies make no secret of their fanatical intent to replace our sorely wounded republic with a zero-tolerance white Christian male-supremacist theocracy, thereby fulfilling the initially clandestine, now triumphantly brazen⁴ plot behind our masters' addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.

Thus their favorite acronym --  MAGA (for "Make America Great Again") -- is a lie. Were it truthful,  it would be MAHA: "Make America Hate Again." 

But the significance of MAHA as the renewal of our nation's longstanding, chronic (and therefore definitive) malignancy remains deftly hidden by one of the most effective means of self-protection the USian ruling class has yet devised -- that is, by cleverly inducing and perpetuating our mind-crippling national aversion to studying history, chiefly by ensuring it is force-fed to impressionable adolescents as an infinitely boring tedium of dates and names of people and locales proctored by so-called “educators,” typically athletic coaches specifically chosen because they are too dimwitted to effectively narrate the dramatic events that connect the names with the dates and geography. Indeed they are but disguised propagandists, too fanatically “American” to dare explore beyond government-mandated texts, much less allow any questioning of the texts’ often misleading or unequivocally false conclusions.

Yes, the standard method of using coaches to teach history, civics and other social studies is yet another manifestation of how our masters -- whose primary intent is obstructing our ability to revolt -- deliberately deny us vital education. A further example is the unquestionably deliberate infliction of ideological confusion by dubbing the emergent realms of Christonazi/Neoconfederate secession as “Red States,” thereby obscuring the original meaning of the term “Red” as a synonym for Marxian and the fact the Red Army literally saved the world from the (primarily) German manifestation of Christonazism’s predecessor.

The One Percenters know that were the resultant ignorance ever overcome, we of the 99.9 Percent would no doubt quickly acknowledge history's overwhelmingly conclusive body of circumstantial evidence -- a weight of proof far beyond what's necessary for conviction in a court-of-law -- that, for example, proves the assassination of President Kennedy was the hinge-pin in a bipartisan, multi-generation, two-century nazification scheme that  began with the Bankers’ Plot of 1933.⁵ History also informs us the Banksters’ underlying ruling-class vindictiveness was nothing new – that it is easily traceable to the bipartisan racist treachery that ended Reconstruction in 1877. .

Our present circumstances, MAHA included, were imposed on us by the ruling class after the Red Army's epic victory at Stalingrad made it clear Germany would lose the war. Their original intent had obviously been to openly ally the U.S. with Germany as soon as the Third Reich and its allies won the war. But fearing the extermination of nazism was the prelude to the extinction of capitalism itself, the banksters of 1933 -- granted lifetime congressional immunity in 1934, and since then ever-more-protected by wealth and privilege --  further reinforced themselves and their collaborators  by secretly compelling the government's adoption of innumerable Original (N.S.D.A.P.) Nazi war criminals as their co-conspirators. The  Original Nazis' unprecedented skill at sadistically industrializing mass murder and irresistibly propagating  collective deception was applauded by Hitler himself as heralding the emergence of a fanatically aggressive  "new man," representative of a people genetically programmed for unquestioning loyalty to their masters and immune to any moral, ethical or empathetic restraints that might obstruct their obedient savagery. And it granted the USian ruling class precisely the weapons it needed to impose its intended postwar global empire.

Subsequent U.S. history clearly reveals the Kennedy assassination's most undeniable consequence is its permanent reduction of the "Democratic" (sic) Party to the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party -- the function first irrefutably demonstrated by JFK-successor Lyndon Johnson's subsequently revealed role as chief provocateur of the Vietnam (actually Southeast Asian) War. Since then, the Democrats' Fifth-Column treachery has been repeatedly affirmed by their innumerable betrayals of popular will and the ruinous debacles so enabled, MAHA included. Quoth an  old GRU ⁶ proverb: "once is coincidence, twice is alarming, thrice is enemy action."

What the Christonazis now do openly and without restraint, their "Democratic" (sic) Fifth Column has long enabled in a variety of "plausibly deniable" ways, not just LBJ's Southeast Asian onslaught, but Carter's undeniable  Hyde-Amendment betrayal, the Clintons' equally undeniable health-care and welfare betrayals and the apparently deliberate losses of national elections in 1968, 1980, 2000 and 2016. Each of these defeats were foreseen far in advance by suppressed, ignored or media-camouflaged analyses and should thus be investigated as expressions of criminal intent; that each has  imposed ecogenocidal triumphs is clear suggestion of motive and purpose. Chief amongst these consequences -- permanent Christonazi/Neoconfederate seizure of the federal judiciary -- is now nullifying every progressive  measure enacted since the (first?) Civil War. In this context it is thus entirely rational to assume the Christonazis’ long-range scheming includes the court’s 21^st Century restoration of its 1857 Dred Scott Decision.

While the national legitimization of MAHA bigotry that killed Nex Benedict and Heather Heyer is obviously one of the Christonazis' top priorities, the Democrats' backroom role as its enabler proves the two parties' collaboration in its probably terminal nationwide resurrection, not just to former lynch-mob intensities, but ultimately to the death-camp magnitude Hitler-disciple Trump's endorsement of theocracy  is again making publicly palatable.  

Meanwhile the already unprecedented unpopularity of President Biden is cunningly intensified to a toxicity no propaganda could possibly overcome -- firstly by the (entirely predictable) denunciations of the president by Trumpite functionary Robert Hur, whom the Biden Regime self-destructively appointed as special prosecutor; and now by the USian economy's newest statistical relapse into inflation. Known to be inflicted solely by unchecked corporate greed, that should leave us all legitimately wondering if (or when) it might skyrocket into a Trumpist variant of Pinochet's deadly, University-of-Chicago-sponsored "economic shock treatment."

Thus the irremediable odium of Biden's candidacy is obviously the Democrats' latest  "plausibly deniable" method for throwing an election -- clearly another manifestation of "change we can believe in," a magnitude of malignant mass deception Josef Goebbels and his U.S.-adopted henchmen would most assuredly endorse with hearty Zieg Heils. 

In this dire context, the MAHA persecution and death of Nex Benedict -- whatever its medical circumstances -- is, like the MAHA murder of Heather Heyer and the attacks on New York women, a terrifying prophecy of all our fates unless we of the 99 Percent set aside our egotistical differences and unite in our species' one remaining option for survival -- the militant socialism of revolutionary working-class solidarity. As Heather said in the eerily appropriate epitaph her last Facebook post became, "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."

__________________

¹Classic photo of the frantic U.S. retreat from Saigon.

²See also "Racial Violence in the United States Since 1526" for a more complete chronology of attacks against Blacks.

³"The Last Article" (full text of the short story in question).

⁴See also "How 'One Nation' Didn't Become 'Under God' Until The '50s Religious Revival,"  "How Long Have We Really Been ‘One Nation Under God’?" and "Views of the U.S. as a ‘Christian nation’ and opinions about ‘Christian nationalism’"

⁵See also the Harper’s Magazine report of Prescott Bush’s central role in the plot and additional details provided by a much more omprehensive report published in Rolling Stone.

⁶See also Spetsnaz GRU.

LB/18 March-6 April 2024

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Trump's Embrace of Christian Theocracy Is Another of His Dreadful Moron-Magnetizing Emulations of Hitler

25 February 2024

(NOTE:  this February extra edition is prompted by two stories, each below. The first is the perplexing suppression of my reminder -- a review of historical facts -- that Trump's political embrace of Christianity is another example of how he's following Adolf Hitler's methodology for seizing power. The second reveals the national mainstream media's  outrageous delay in reporting the apparent murder of a nonbinary teen at a public high school in the Christian theocracy of  Oklahoma.)

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TRUMP'S TERRIFYING ADMIRATION  of Adolf Hitler and his repeated application of der Führer's methodologies of deception and subversion have become so obvious, even the USian  mainstream-media monopoly -- the world's first privately owned, for-(maximum)-profit model of Josef Goebbels' Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda  (Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) --  now openly acknowledges it.

Nevertheless, the World Socialist Web Site's refusal to publish the following comment-thread submission demonstrates a perplexing unwillingness to inform us of yet another of Trump's terrifyingly seductive emulations of Hitler. This is Trump's oft-asserted, always enthusiastic  embrace of USian Christianity's fanatically ecogenocidal theocrats, which closely parallels Hitler's many collaborative endorsements of the equally hateful, similarly murder-minded factions in European Christianity, the papacy of Pius XII included.  Here is what I submitted to WSWS  on 22 February in response to "Alabama court ruling on embryos: A sweeping attack on democratic rights and science," (the comment's expansions for publication here indicated by  boldface type):

Thanks to the mind-crippling ignorance of history cunningly imposed by USian "education" (sic) -- in this instance an ignorance maliciously abetted by the brazen lies of theocratic propagandists -- most of us don't know of Hitler's enthusiastic support for Christianity. It takes a bit of research to ferret out the fact Hitler used Christianity as perhaps his most effective means of perpetuating the population's submissiveness to zero-tolerance subjugation, which -- not coincidentally -- is exactly as it is being employed again today. (For the terrifying truth about the union of Hitler, Nazism and Christianity, google "Adolf Hitler on Christianity: Quotes," without the quotation marks of course.)

From the cited source: "Despite how often Christian apologists try to argue that Adolf Hitler is an example of the evil caused by atheism and secularism, the truth is that Hitler often proclaimed his own Christianity, how much he valued Christianity, how important Christianity was to his life, and even how much he was personally inspired by Jesus - his 'Lord and Savior'...'The national Government sees in both Christian denominations the most important factor for the maintenance of our society':  Adolf Hitler, speech before the Reichstag, March 23, 1933, just before the Enabling Act is passed."

See also: the English edition of Positive Christianity in the Third Reich (complete, easily readable text).

Supplemental background from The Daily Beast: available on Netflix, The Family is a carefully documented, legitimately terrifying adaptation-cum-expansion of The Family (2008) and C Street (2010), two nonfiction books by Jeff Sharlet, These warn us, "the most powerful club in America is a consortium of religious true believers bound by their fanatical love of Jesus...It works overtime to avoid publicity. Its ranks are comprised of both Republicans and Democrats...Their unabashed goal is a global Christian theocracy—no morality, or democracy, required...In line with their long-standing fondness for authoritarians (including Hitler and Mao), the Family views Trump as a kindred spirit who understands that some are predestined to rule over others...The Family lifts the veil of secrecy surrounding this shadowy outfit, and what it reveals is a new world order that’s not only on its way—it’s already here."

Thus the ever-more-tyrannical USian proclamations of Christian fanaticism, whether in Alabama or elsewhere, are no surprise to those of us who (correctly) recognize the addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 (link added) tacitly declared the United States a (white) Christian theocracy, precisely as these fanatics themselves now defiantly proclaim.   Until 2016, slowly but surely, often imperceptibly and always with venomously predatory stealth, the theocrats relentlessly tightened their ultimately apocalyptic stranglehold on public opinion. Since then, the Christians'* triumphant resurrection of Hitler in the person of Trump allows them to brazenly reveal their sadistically patriarchal theology as the ecogenocidal manifestation of infinite evil its history of tyranny and persecution proves it to be.

As for the submission of the "Democratic" (sic) Party, that is but another proof of its post-JFK function as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party.

And unless we of the global working class unite in world-wide socialist resistance, the fanatical worshipers of its deified symbol of sadism, tyranny and apocalyptic doom will indeed enslave, then exterminate our species and in the process reduce our Mother Earth back to a bug planet.

*(Note: despite its deceptive claims to the contrary, all Christianity -- and in fact all Abrahamic religion -- is founded on the cosmic misogyny asserted in Genesis, the apocalyptic doctrine by which even Nature herself is implicitly cursed as evil. That's the primary reason Christianity always, as irrefutably proven by its two-thousand-year history, reverts to tyranny. Therefore, until the non-Christonazi churches unite to set aside their theological cowardice and condemn Christonazism in the harshest terms possible, I will not modify "Christian" with any conciliatory adjectives, for in this matter, their craven silence is in fact consent to the imposition of Christonazi theocracy.)

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NATIONAL MAINSTREAM MEDIA took at least eight days -- for some outlets the delay approached two weeks -- to report the apparent murder of the late Nex Benedict, though a source I know to be 100-percent reliable informs me Tik-Tok -- today's equivalent of the alternative press that so effectively served USians during the fifth, sixth and seventh decades of the 20th century -- had the story almost immediately. The delay is significant; the 16-year-old high school student was assertively nonbinary, for which they were savagely bullied. They were also of First-Nations ancestry. Regardless of a questionable effort by local police to raise doubts about the  cause of their death, Benedict is thus yet another casualty of the forcible imposition of Christonazi theocracy on a formerly secular nation. Their victimization in a probable a hate-crime should therefore have been instant national news -- all the more so since they suffered the fatal misfortune of living in Oklahoma, another of the 22 states conquered by Christonazi theocrats, which like all its counterparts in the Trumpite neo-confederacy encourages its murderous fanatics to run amok.

Given these circumstances, I cannot but wonder if the plutocrats who own and control the mainstream media (propaganda) apparatus have given orders to back off on the coverage of the forcible imposition of  Christonazi theocracy and the deadly consequences thereof.

Meanwhile, exactly as predicted,  the Christonazis are radically expanding their war against sexual freedom far beyond resurrecting the persecution of  LGBTQ folks and reducing all women to reproductive slavery; now they say they'll  prohibit "recreational sex" by banning all forms of contraception,

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Posted on Another Website
Why Won’t Biden Wave His Magic Wand to Stop Israel?

Based on the post-JFK history of the "Democratic" (sic) Party functioning as the Fifth Column of the "Republican" (sic) Christonazi/Neoconfederate Party, for Ms. Kolhatkar (or anyone else) to assume the Democrats truly want to retain the presidency is like assuming the Republicans want to preserve constitutional governance. 

Indeed, the Democrats' history of methodically back-stabbing  its voters -- note LBJ's Warren-Commission deception and Tonkin-Gulf betrayal;  the Senate Democrats' overwhelming-majority collaboration with Nixon to put Powell-Memo author Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court (look it up); Carter's Hyde Amendment misogyny; Hillary's health-care scam, proven so by the huge "job-well-done" payoff via the health-insurance cabal's 1996 campaign contributions (again, look it up); Slick Willie's maliciously genocidal betrayal of welfare recipients;  Obama's devastating turnabouts on union card-check  and single-payer health care; the innumerable promises likewise broken by congressional, state and local Democrats -- all this proves Biden is merely following the Democrats' updated Fifth Column playbook. In other words, he's deliberately throwing the election by "plausibly deniable" means.

Barack the Betrayer's "change we can believe in" is thus again revealed as both the most injurious Big Lie in U.S. presidential history -- note what it did to voter turnout -- and as the One Percent's triumphantly snickering declaration the only genuinely believable "change" is that which methodically worsens our lot.

Recognizing this, it should surprise no one that some of  us on the real left are beginning to wonder if Obama's radical inflammation of the never-extinguished embers of the white electorate's murderous racism into its present-day Trumpite  conflagration might well have been intentional fulfillment of his presidency's clandestine ruling-class purpose.

Thus too it seems increasingly obvious Biden is nothing more than the ruling-class tool forged to shoehorn Trump -- or some other Christonazi/Neoconfederate Hitler -- into the White House, thereby fulfilling what history would tell us (were we allowed to properly study it), has been the One Percent's top priority since the 1930s.

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To clarify: under the present circumstances, I do not suggest (and will never suggest) we vote for an alternative-party candidate or protest by refusing to vote. I passionately hope Biden will voluntarily resign his candidacy, as it is increasingly unlikely he can beat Trump. But if Biden remains on the ballot – and if I am still alive in November – I will indeed vote for him. Why? Because he will be  our only alternative for delaying Hitler-disciple Trump's final transformation of the U.S. into the de facto Fourth Reich and thereby postponing the civil war that will almost certainly follow in response to Trumpite military invasions of non-Christonazi states and the attendant genocidal persecution of sexual, racial, genetic, physical and psychological minorities.  

LB/25 February 2024