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United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Not Even a Cold War: Just Broken English.




                                                       What are We Fighting For?

As though lying in bleak and beautiful fields of snow, we lay buried. We are like ghosts ourselves. The consequences of Shelling and Strafing in Stealth aircraft like invaders from outer space over our enemy-of-the day's heads with impunity has come home and uprooted us like fir trees. Constant war has us wearing masks of indifference and leaves us stripped of compassion. Spiritually we are as torn and disfigured as foliage after a drone strike. We are incapable of thinking anything beyond shells, detonations, explosions, black thoughts, blood, death. Lately those black thoughts have come to represent the ravages unending war has wrought in our young souls. Only a sheer hoarfrost veneer of toughness and danger and the fresh snow of silence conceals our wounds, till the last of us fall in the frost from Cold Wars that have resulted in piece by piece of us breaking off. We've already become mere shadows of our former selves.

We wanted to forget the past, letting it crumble to pieces like the shards from the Berlin Wall, and bury it, yet we couldn't. We instead started rootling about in it once more, and freighted the urns of our dreams with the inescapable reality of what we have seen and done.

An Iron Curtain of frost has settled back in, as though a polar wind were blowing down from the stars. The white moon glows more harshly down from the whirl of the clouds. Our hands and feet become alternately benumbed and prickly. We suffer from a self-induced persecution mania. We pass through these years surrounded by invented enemies, taking leave of our senses as we descend into the maelstrom of madness. We live in the midst of paranoia and mistrust, having turned the commonplace on its head. We've learned to hate our time and to embrace our wars. While within we still cherish the idea that all this sacrifice hasn't been futile, so as not to fall into the despair of the soldier in an exposed, hopeless, hostile position.

But the narcissistic obsession with our own greatness is nothing but dementia. With little more than scraps of cloth, man stands between unfettered forces, a cipher, a weapon, an obedient body, servant to the machine, that is in turn the slave to the fuel that powers it. Whether we are courageous or trembling, bold or cowardly, grimly prepared or frantic, nothing weighs so much as the fact that none of us goes voluntarily. Like the machines whose cold steel and opaque glass we admire in fetishistic obeisance, we are driven; piloted to a destination we would not on our own have chosen. Only occasionally, on the brink of madness, is there the heroic sacrifice of an individual who has lost belief in his own life.

We have become automatons; dulled beings, vegetating in cubicles and corner offices like soldiers in trenches and bunkers; wasting our time without hope, bragging, swearing, smoking, worrying, enduring, obeying, cowering; dehumanized caricatures simultaneously bewailing our imprisonment while bragging about our freedom; we hype our senses to an overwrought tautness with meth and crack; level our emotional schizophrenia with Prozac and Zoloft; escape into endless reverie with Oxycontin and black heroin.

It is very rare for any humanity to show itself in war. Even, maybe especially, this endless bloodletting cynically propagandized as constant war to maintain the Peace. So compassion is taken as weakness, even treason, and probed like a wound until it bleeds. Until it hurts. And then festers. A wound that must be cauterized to form a scab over our heart. Until war strikes us as a necessity, as divine commandment, a cosmic happening, purposing the completion and annihilation of the individual. We never learn, blinded as we are by flurries of propaganda, blusts of Fake News, blizzards of hatespeech, and squalls of Nationalistic furor, that war is demanded of men by God, or that only ignorance can start an avalanche that will engulf everything. Yet no victory, no conquest justifies a single death; a man starved, a child abandoned, a woman raped and left frozen, lacerated.

All War wants is itself.

Yet we will never come to understand that it is our willingness that has gotten us here. How easily we humans come around to the prospect of surviving in inhumanity and, like Brian Williams, fall in love with the intoxication and beauty of destruction, praise the shards of our own destinies, adore carrion, delight in carnage, revel in soulless illusions of superiority while cowering behind the shield the invincibility of a nuclear umbrella provides. And we gave it our yes long ago and have never looked back on or questioned that assent.

"But we didn't. You must be mistaken.

"We are mere playthings of history and probabilities.

Well then, who are we?

What are we?

Besides a spiritually ravaged sum of blood, guts, and bones.

Our comradeship, always derided, is now torn to shreds by invading waves of radio and microwaves delivering electronic distractions that replace personal interactions, erodes love's traction via emotional contraction and companionship's putrefaction. Face-to-face looks usurped by Facebook, an electronic scrapbook housed in a Cloud of easily vaporized mist, more like Fecebook, as electronic miscommunications reduce us to an army of dung beetles scurrying over the mental excrement of mankind to glean a scrap of meaning, a glimmer of hope, a sliver of humanity to cling to.

Is it then any wonder that our humor is born out of sadism, gallows humor indulged in like jugs of Gallo's wine? Satire, obscenity, sarcasm and spite, rage fueled by an incessant bellowing of bile; like a Weekend with Bernie, we play pranks on corpses in fits of stir-craziness wherefrom sprout occasional blooms of wit like a seed sprouting in the middle of a pile of manure.

Philosophy, ethics, and thought have been replaced with the rockhard nugget of the drive for self-preservation. Even as selfishness gets derided, we find it to be the only thing we have because we don't matter to anything else. It's as if we don't belong here, the only UFO's are our own inventions, the only aliens, ourselves. And so each soul builds wall after wall around itself to conceal itself from the din of history. Like sleepwalkers passing over the mystical bridge of life, we hear all around us the grandeur of the Götterdämmerung of the West, while Russia and other Asian nations brave the flames, driven by the belief the Valhalla we've lost is theirs to gain.

Without the iron curtain the future stood in front of us like a raw block of marble. At first there was nothing but fear and foreboding. We stared at the rubble left in the wake of the Wall's destruction and gazed into the expanse of no-man's land and felt the nearness of danger and pain like light seared onto a roll of film, a spectral shadow of dread forever trembling in a shimmering refulgence. But the years of darkness were just beginning. We are become beggars who have left behind the wreckage of our youth, crashed and burned alongside the freedom, love, mind, pleasure, and worthwhile work we traded for the hypnotic allure of carnage. We are now required to subject ourselves to the will of the age, but our destiny began in a tale of duress, patience and death. We can not escape the law, there is a breach in our unfinished sense of the world, and like a dream, the march into the other and the unknown has begun, and, having chosen our destiny, now believe its denouement in destructive annihilation inevitable, and have thrown wide open the gates that lead to our destruction, thereby assuring the very outcome we most fear, leaving little wonder that all our paths end in night.

Thursday, May 25, 2017

Humanity's Ongoing Suicide: 13 Reasons Why.



Strange Love: Never Miss Hitor Missile gives good Warhead.
 
Various writers on the interwebs have speculated that there is now no escape from mankind's rush to extinction because Climate Change has not only been allowed to go too far, but been prodded poked stoked and nudged into going too far by callous Capitalists and dick-headed dictators, the mentality of both being exactly the same. The only difference is that Capitalists exist in countries where the government has some power to control them, whereas a dictatorship doesn't, but they both have the same personality drive to dominate those who get in their way (The difference between Henry Ford and Mussolini better reflected their external circumstances than their internal drives), neither one being too circumspect over the means of doing so.

But the  hawkers of Climate Despair have been rebuked by those who insist there is still hope for a remedy to our onrushing catastrophe if we can only act in time, such pronouncements being then in turn spurned by accusations delivered as a screed for rejecting the Creed of Imminent Extinction, since, it being the future we're talking about, no one can be right until such time as it won't matter. So as we accelerate our streak toward a collective NDE (Near Death Experience) referred to as NTE (Near-Term Extinction), perhaps there are some things we can point at that, had we considered them or reacted to them differently, we may have changed what now looks like an inevitable outcome.

1) From Greed to Götterdämmerung. The catalyst that catapults the Gods to their Twilight in Wagner's Lord of the Ring Cycle is the same as that which impels humanity towards its own ... such was Wagner's genius. Like the theft of stolen goods Wotan uses to pay the ransom he has himself necessitated by promising the builders of Valhalla Freja, trading away love, beauty and fertility for vast empty halls of grandeur. Casting aside that which makes them truly great for the trappings of power to stoke envy: Style for Substance, Hollywood for Holy Writ, Wall St for Main St. The only person who can keep the gods from growing old is sold as payment for empty Vanity. The parallel to Capitalism's promises of everything for nothing couldn't be starker. But like Wotan, when it cannot deliver it substitutes for it empty promises of a future it can't afford, unless it ransacks the accumulated savings of the innocents: The Rhine Maiden's gold. Capitalism uses promises of future benefits: Pensions, healthcare, education, which it also has neither the intention nor wherewithal to deliver, unless it can contrive to steal the means from someone else. Banking on the fact that by the time it need to fulfill its obligation, those to whom its made those promises will either be too old and weak to fight for what they were promised but robbed of, or, thanks to governments being more beholden to the Corporations that bribe its officials than to the pubic that voted for it, reneges and leaves us in the situation where a failed Presidential Candidate can write a book calling for a Revolution, mining discontent and inciting violence, not because it will improve the lives of his constituents (Revolution in Syria, Libya, and Egypt have delivered nothing but failed states, military dictatorship, and entire cities turned into piles of rubble with no hope of there being anything left in the future with which to rebuild, causing floods of refugees to pour over national boundaries and spread destabilization and mayhem in their desperation and consequent thirst for revenge) but because it gives a doddering old fool coin with which to buy his own brand of populism  (and boost his own form of Grift You book sales) he is hailed as a sort of folk hero.

 Wotan also creates a Hero. Which brings us to the Side "B" of greed:

2) Militarization. Greed needs armed forces to protect the hoards it amasses from the hordes whose labor created its wealth. The level of manufacture, dissemination and deployment of Weapons of mass destruction, all of which  are Chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction, by Nations now unable to deliver even a modicum of the promised benefits of Cowboy Capitalism to its citizens, is now the main source of international exchange. Because manufacturing the goods that said population need for their everyday existence has been off-shored to places where the destruction of the very air they breathe and the consequent debilitation and death that that necessarily entails, is the least of that government's concerns, leaves the Arms industry with its astounding profits greased by bribing corrupt officials to spend their country's treasure on prestigious arms instead of the education of their citizens. Arms sales have become the main preoccupation and source of coin and corruption in the rich countries even more than in those it exploits. Like Black Gold, the Devil's Excrement, becoming Merchants of Death taints everyone it touches, leaving a slimy film of despondency and despair in its wake. This unites the world in its desire to uplift itself by spreading promises of immortality that lies in another, better world ... Look!, there, right over the horizon, lies your afterlife. And thus we slither into the realm of the Children of the Con:

3) Religion. Jews, Christians, and Moslems are the main purveyors of violent murderous rampages in the name of a deity, but even the so-called peaceful Buddhists and Hindus are not innocent from the crime of provoking religious-stoked murder. It is the easiest kind to incite, because its perpetrators always cloak themselves in the garb of avatars, they're merely agents delivering their own god's Wrath; washing the blood of their victims off in the Holy Waters of Faith. A faith that always endorses:

4) Family Values. A sentiment everyone finds difficulty in finding fault with, even as we have a known rascist history in Europe, especially, but in every other continent as well, of royal families murdering their own children, brethren or parents for the sake of power, money or prestige. And these are not the peasant classes they so disdainfully look down their long aquiline aristocratic noses at, these are the Royals, the Divine Right of Kings' bloodline, claiming therewith as the one and only reason for their right to rule. Supposed god-appointed monsters who see their subjects, who their position puts them in moral obligation to protect, as cannon fodder to secure, not the nation, but the royal family's privileges and prerogatives. This corruption then seeps into even Presidential politics as crony-Capitalism gives protection to those who could care less about their country, and put the protection and illegal enrichment of their own form of courtiers above that of the nation they have sworn to serve and  protect. All of theses are supported and made even more intractable by:

5) Mechanization. Every year since the beginning of the millennium the US has sold close to 17 million vehicles per annum, more than a quarter of a billion ICE machines, with the worldwide total more than double that amount. Resulting in more than a billion cars plying the roads of the world, dwarfing in their collective CO2 output, the pollution the industry that produces them creates, yet allowing those that push their pedal to the metal a feeling of complete irresponsibility for their part in poisoning the world and turning it into a hothouse. The mechanization of all human activity has resulted in the outcome we have arrived at now, where the lives of more people are dedicated to the maintenance, manufacture and preservation of machines than to people. There is nary a howl as loud as the current one against Obamacare while it underwrites contracts to produce billions and billions for industry, yet would prefer to render nary a nickel for healthcare, and housing is only for the rich (condo fees alone are more onerous, as a percentage of net earnings, than a mortgage for a home was a mere generation ago ... and they only go up, whereas a mortgage is eventually paid off), while education is to be gained only by hocking the future.

 6) Democratization. A form of tyranny that promises its adherents freedoms it never quite defines, but seems to have become the single most polluting engine fomenting climate change. The more Democracies in any part of the world, the more pollution and the larger demands from its citizens for more benefits that promise even more pollution. Living in a democracy is great. And you can see why by looking at the Korean peninsula from the space station. The more democratic So. Korea is lit up like every other democratic country in the world while No. Korea looks as though it's in a blackout. The former Soviet Union, Cuba, most African States, eschew democracy and all contributed to the carbon pollution that is our death knell to a far less degree than any democracy. The end of the Soviet Union was the beginning of the ramp up in the amount of carbon being spewed into the atmosphere: it was like the firing of a pistol at the start of a race, because, in actuality, that's what it was. Since then there has been, and continues to be, a pell-mell scramble to dig up and burn up every last fossil fuel on the planet. Asia has been populated by civilizations of humans as far back as prehistory, and it still groans under a wealth of natural resources. The United States, in existence for a mere two and a half centuries, has burnt through an entire continent of riches and now stalks the globe like a marauding Hun, devising new Visions of Empires of Evil as excuses for its rampages when in fact it is only a tarp to disguise that is is really simply using Military ascendancy and domination to abet its search for the necessary resources to keeps its economic engine from sputtering out. In which effort it is abetted by:

7) Computerization. Like many of the items in this list, computerization started out as a phenomenon of startling innovation that was hailed as an enhancement to human creativity, but was rapidly monetized into a nightmare of hardware-software battle for ascendancy that put the concept of planned obsolescence into overdrive. That is why you never hear the term anymore, but it sits at the heart of the computer industry, and has since its inception as embodied in Intel's Grove's maxim that processing speed would double every 18 months, turning it into a mantra , and enabling the inevitability of your  purchasing power's decline. The most obvious way of doing this was by the Clinton administration's inclusion of the concept of heuristics in its calculation of the CPI. What this particularly nasty bit of legerdemain does is count that doubling of processing power as a reason for a new computer's increase in price, so that the increase couldn't be attributed to inflation, because the increase was not for purchasing the same product, but for a new, improved product. However, as you may have noticed, that faster processor speed is quickly eclipsed by larger software programs no longer so efficiently designed, and now in hostage to the security programs that eat up more cycles of your CPU than any of the Apps you actually purchased the equipment to run. Soon enough the new improved processor is so bogged down with overhead, it is running slower than the one you replaced it with , so you have to buy the next generation and the cycle starts anew. Militarily this has enabled:

 8) Mobilization. Never have so many troops been in so many countries for so long a time as they have since the Neo-con imposition of the Pax Americanus as they usurped the power of the executive office to unroll their project of Full Spectrum Domination of the rest of the world to fulfill the puerile fantasies of a rabid group of modern conquistadors in their Project for the New American Century (PNAC). In little more than a year they managed to change the world perception of the United States from one of a modern progressive State to one that's a pariah to its neighbors and allies, trusted by none, and respected only through fear of the unpredictable use it might next deploy its vast insatiable War Machine for. Sucking down more oil reserves than the entire country of Sweden, it also manages to spew out more polluting gases than most countries and leave in its wake a trail of radioactive depleted uranium like an invisible mine field that, instead of exploding people to pieces like the millions of mines left in Laos, spews atomic-sized particles that rip through innocent civilians' tissue and internal organs. Unlike Corporate offices, the civilian sector's version of mobilization, military deployment, as Chalmers Johnson's Empire series illustrates, is far less subject to the host country's rules. Using SOFA's (Status of Forces "Agreements" (Yeah right, like Okinawa had a choice)), the US can override host country's laws and trample any environmental concerns with the usual attitude such men have for anything as sissified as caring about any other living creature. The military is like an ATV, it may not be its intention to mow down any thing that gets in its way, but it is equipped to do so and won't hesitate to, and in most cases does so without even a second thought: it's immaterial, not even something worth taking into consideration. And because might makes right, it partners with: 

9) Monopolization. Of all the reasons for the intensification of the concentration of power in the hands of fewer and fewer  people, the role of Computerization is all but ignored, but it is in fact the chief enabler. Whole floors of office building were emptied out of middle management, factory floors cleared of laborers blamed on robotics lie empty because of the role that computerization and the miniaturization of it components enabled. Robotics and computerization, in other words, are inextricably linked. And both are the servants of monopolists in their drive to concentrate power in their owns hands and drive competition out by dominating their markets, not for the betterment of their customers but the destruction of other enterprises that might put a restraint on their ability to raise prices and dictate terms.  As the declining quality of products on Walmart's shelves and the increasingly fraudulent use of Goldman Sach's customers' account money demonstrates, the sole purpose of monopolization is to accrue more and more power to abuse your customers while leaving them with no ability to redress the wrongs you heap onto their head. They have no choice, as the competition has been destroyed.

10) Monetization. Theft, really. It entails the extraction of everything of value and turning it into a marketable commodity. That vein of coal running through the hillside has to be exploited to make it profitable and to create the jobs necessary to enhance the financial position of the region from which it's taken. But, especially in the current environment of Cowboy Capitalism, monetization always entails rapacious disregard for the environment and enshrines in the position of power the very people who should be barred from it. And once monetization is started, like a bribe to a politician, the power dynamic quickly changes such that the political entity has ceded its sovereignty to the marauding exploitation of the developers. It always extracts the value before the first shovelful of soil is excavated, though, and to do this they use:

11) Amortization. Amortization is the paying off of debt with a fixed repayment schedule in regular installments over a period of time, for example with a mortgage or a car loan. It also refers to the spreading out of capital expenses for intangible assets over a specific duration (usually over the asset's useful life) for accounting and tax purposes. It allows banks to fund the purchase of a house at terrifyingly low interest rates while sloughing off the risk to the taxpayer via the current scheme of selling them to the GSE's. They can take the money and run, but tshould things go south, it leaves many of their victims in financial straits and generally increases the rate of:

12) Incarceration. There are more inmates in America's prisons than there are citizens in several of the countries to which we give large amounts of dollars, amounts that are the subject of protest from various groups, yet which amounts are completely dwarfed by the level of expenditure needed to feed, clothe, guard, and care for its burgeoning population of miscreants . While hardworking citizens have problems getting heatlhcare, prisons, such as California's San Quentin, boast of their own State-of-the-Art hospitals. Hospitals that are built with money taken from those same hard-working citizens who can't afford it for their own children or parents, yet must pay for it for the murderers and  hardened criminals languishing behind bars. The level of this vast growing sea of wasted humanity is rising faster than that of the oceans we obsess so much about, and it is a contributor to that rise because of the enormous allocation of resources needed to sustain it. The economy needs to generate billions and billions of dollars to make their upkeep possible. And because the militarization of civilian life means that arguing for the education or job-training or any other ameliorative attitude toward prisoners gets ridiculed as being soft on crime, few prisoners are capable of contributing to society even once released. So, unlike the way an investment in a hospital patient or college student can be argued to make such investment worthwhile, prisons are just economic rat holes into which billions are poured down, with the most likely outcome being a bite in the ass. And all these reasons are exacerbated by the huge and growing problem of:

13) Overpopulation. Which is intimately, although you'd never know it, entwined with sexuality. Billions of people are forced into a heterosexual existence that they  have no choice of entertaining any alternative to, and encouraged into creating billions more human beings to push out and destroy all other vestiges of life. You might hate homos, disdain same-sex relationships, prefer murder to sodomy, as all the religions of the world teach you to do, but if the result of drug-addled wild sex brings an early death to those who engage in it, that is a far more desirable outcome than forcing them in to a life in a world whose human population threatens to overwhelm and push into extinction the very biodiversity on which its own survival depends. With the Moral Majority's claim from the eighties that homosexuality is "Unnatural" completely discredited for the nonsense it is, the counter argument that people are born that way has also become completely counter productive, and should be shelved as well. Any perusal of the more erotic of the on-line sex and porn sites and tumblr listings demonstrates the fluidity of sexual activity and that the ability of the human species to make long, caring, committed relationships with members of the same sex (or even short, casual, intense ones) and the more than obvious preference that even  heterosexuals exhibit for members of their own sex in most realms other than sexual congress, should inform us that insisting on maintaining the prevailing attitude of heterosexual reproduction and attraction and the child-producing couple as the only acceptable form of adult relationship, we not only put a lie to the Freedom the very people who deny people that choice have emblazoned on their sweatshirts and baseball caps, we produce a bounty of unwanted births, force an unmerited parenthood onto people who would never qualify for the job if it were a position in the most lax of companies, and contribute to the above item, #12, incarceration. Instead, in most of the world, they incarcerate and torture them, as in Chechnya, bully and beat them up, as in Russia and re-educate them to live the "right" way, in places like China, and continue to exile them and force them into hiding in most of the rest of Asia, as well as Africa, where American missionaries feel free to travel to and show them how write laws that put them to death. All while overpopulation gets more and  more intractable, and all for the sole reason that it is found to be morally repugnant, whereas nation after nation and religion after religion revels in murder and destroying lives while standing on that moral high ground they've stationed themselves on from which they can more easily kick the rest of humanity in the face. Even as they despoil the planet their enforced heterosexuality is peopling with their children they claim to love. What kind of morality is that?

So that is my list. It could be longer, I'm sure it should be shorter, but as it will change nothing, I will change nothing on it. (Well, at least not until tomorrow).

Monday, May 22, 2017

Hawken' Hope: Faith-based Prof-essay.


                                                  Renewable Fuels have consequences too.

 Paul Hawken, hawking his new book, " Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, seems to have forgotten the theme of his previous book, "The Ecology of Commerce":

"the origins of issues with respect to the environment must reside deep in the longings of people to lead fruitful lives ... while causing as little suffering as possible to all and everything around us".

However, as the course of American politics traveling ever rightward, replete with  the never-ending hagiographic adulation of Ronald Reagan, coupled with the Maniacal insatiable greed impelling the rush to ruin via stoking the polity's desire for More, More, More, Bigger, Faster, Now!, evinced by the already well-off American middles class during the Bush error demonstrates, the fantasy Hawken entertains of humanity's most earnest desire being to lead "fruitful lives", is, or should have been, eclipsed by one that (like both Adam Smith did for economics and the United State's founding fathers' philosophy did for  political institutions) better takes into account and exploits humanity's real longings and intractable failings.

Because it's become apparent that mankind's  real desire has nothing to do with anything as edifying as leading fruitful lives. Additionally, Humanity, in reality, could care less about any suffering that our actions may cause on anything around us, but comes far closer to realizing the atavistic dreams of a Reich-like ascendancy of Nietzsche's Superman, desirous of nothing less that the complete subjugation of all they survey and its replacement with one dedicated to the fulfillment of their crass materialistic dreams, one that endows us with the ability to crush underfoot and grind into submission everything crawling on the earth that threatens to impede the attainment of our most trivial pursuits.

Although it serves our egos and our pretensions to altruism, the propensity to mold mankind into the image and likeness of our conception of Man as a being ruled by reason is, like humanity itself, doomed to failure.

And both of these hypotheses are best dissected by studying the real dynamics that are the basis of our government and  our economies, and our concept of our lives as we live them in this most modern of worlds: the source of the energy that runs it and the enabler of procuring that energy, the Military and the arms trade that is its enabler, together with the entity that undergirds them both: Democratic governments that cater to the conception of self-rule while undermining it by spawning a Military Industrial Complex (a Corporate-sanitized phrase used to mollify the populace into accepting the transition from a civilian economy into The Wehrmacht) we've created to over-rule any objections to its existence and its infiltration into every aspect of our lives. In other words, to turn Democratic institution into pillars of Fascism by disguising their takeover by the military.

This is, of course, best illustrated by the sarcastic phrase, "I'm from the Government and I'm here to Help", that was uttered by the same man who was responsible for the largest build-up of military forces in the history of the world. And yet those military forces are part of that self same government Reagan so derided. Yes Ronald Reagan, that hero to millions of Americans, is the man who purposely set out to undermine rule by civilian government, replacing it with military rule, because civilian rule is just, oh so lame, and he did so with borrowed money and the manipulation of the price of Oil in an Economy he hailed as Free-Market, even as he actively changed it to one that, via a tsunami of deficit spending, was reconfigured to cater to the source of its largest demand: the Government. But this time in the guise of military expenditures, thus perverting it so completely it has never regained its ability to serve the civilian sector except as a second thought, all its major innovations having been created by and for the Military procurement process, only then "spinning them off" to the civilian sector, mimicking the process FDR/Truman used to massage it to pour billions into first creating a Nuclear bomb and then to sell its bastard son, Nuclear power, disguising and minimizing its dangers and limitations so as to justify the enormous expenditures required for its continued existence.

This is the same trick, with a different sleight of hand that Hawken uses to placate his readers (well, to sell his book, really) with Utopian dreams of a future of easy living with no fossil fuel hangover, even as the very atmosphere that hangs over our heads gets more and more saturated with CO2, methane, water vapor, and various other heat-trapping gasses. A kind of 21'st Century cartoonish return to, not the Jetsons, as we prefer to imagine ourselves, but to the Flintstones: a humanity unable (thanks to religious indoctrination started while we are still at an age of total vulnerability and dependency) to move beyond the Stone-age mentality of supernaturalist superstition, overlaid with all the trappings of a modernity of which they rarely understand either its genesis or ramifications. Both  of which have far more to do with the manufacture, selling, maintenance and deployment of an unconscionable tonnage of war-mongering-enabling Weapons of Mass Destruction on a scale that dwarfs the economy of all but the most powerful of Countries. And those countries in turn, have every aspect of their economies, from Burger King to KFC, from ipones to apples,  attuned to meet the needs of the military, because the military has, more than any other facet of economic life, an unquestioned and unquestionable access to public monies; access that is unaccountable, access that is unaudited, and, as a result of those two features, access that always and everywhere, eventually becomes access that is completely irresponsible. And like any power that is absolute, it is totally, incorrigibly, corrupt.

And that is also what Hawken's book is, irresponsible. Because the first item of his top ten list of things that'll drawdown CO2 and reverse global warming (first let me note, that the top ten list has nary an item that has anything whatsoever to do with a drawdown, which would entail the removal of greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, not the mere diminution of the rate at which they are being spewed into it) he places refrigerants and points to an article by Brad Plumer in which he explains the transition from CFC's to HFC's as refrigerants and the ongoing transition from HFC's to HFO's, which are promised to be far less effective at heat-trapping than the HFC's currently used and don't, at least theoretically, punch a hole in the ozone layer as CFC's (Freon) did, well, do, but far fewer are used nowadays. (Which wouldn't matter in the least if the externalities of manufacture and sale were borne by the companies that profit therefrom. But Capitalism cannot survive, could not even exist, if those who poison and destroy that from which they derive their profits were made accountable for their dissemination in the first case and ravenous destruction in the second (the burnt-down rain forests for example, the combustion of which pours CO2 into the atmosphere while simultaneously destroying a vast engine for its removal, all to produce biodiesel, sold to the public as "green" fuel ... Flintstones, Meet the Flintstones). Like Superdump sites that must be cleaned up at taxpayer expense while the profits derived from the poisoning of the sites in the first place are safely sequestered in the pockets of those who had no need to take those costs into account. If they (the HFC manufacturers) did have to, the refrigerant gasses would never find their way into the atmosphere in such prodigious quantities in the first place, since the companies that use them would be held responsible for making sure they are never released from their products, as the functioning of said products never demands the refrigerant be released).

But here, if nothing else we run up against Jevon's paradox. In the very next sentence, Mr. Plumer sites the statistic that what we're still calling "third world demand" is on pace to install some 700 million air conditioners. This could result in total HFC concentrations in the atmosphere rising by 140 percent:

 "Basically, we stopped one environmental problem only to confront another."

Well, not exactly. "We stopped one environmental problem only to create yet another" environmental problem would be more accurate. We've yet to actually confront the problem, else there'd be no need for Mr Plumer's article. But this is the language the so-called progressives like to use, because, given the fact that the economy is a Wehrmacht, we adopt everything militaristic, from  the fact that "You're killing it" has become praise, to the fact that all Silicone Valley firms name their conference rooms "War Rooms" to glorify the military and enhance their own sense of self-importance, glorifying their mundane tasks of configuring a router to the point of national importance, to the substituting of the phrase "to confront" to replace the actual reality, of "to CAUSE", a problem. And no, this choice of words was not accidental. The biggest disservice that computerization has done to the collective subconscious is to convince everyone that things just come about without the necessity of effort. But just as War Room has to be decided on and agreed to and then a service hired to make a placard with the name and number (most firms have many War Rooms on their "campuses"), and then a different service hired to then align and install the sign on the door, similarly, an article has to be written and words consciously decided upon, and the word "confront" was purposely chosen and agreed to by at least one editor, as it makes it less obvious that it was engineers who created the problem in the first place, and to keep the reader from asking the obvious question: What unforeseen (because, in our naivete, we give them the benefit of the doubt that it was indeed, unforeseen. It more than likely was not however, it's just that those who brought up the objection that it had 10,000 times the global warming potential of CO2 were silenced) negative consequences will this new refrigerant gas produce?

But that's a question I don't know the answer to, although I suspect there are those that do. But what I do know is that the manufacture, distribution, installation, powering and maintenance on 700 million air conditioning units that do not exist today but will exist in the not-to-distant future, per the projections of these green-thinking authors, who fail to mention a thing about how many of the   millions of AC units already in existence would need to be replaced, nor how such an enormous increase in production, would impact, via the tremendous amounts of CO2 created from all this energy-intensive activity, the supposed savings from the replacement of HFC's with HFO's.

If you then take into account the installation of the units, the mining of the materials to make, not just the AC units themselves, but also, this being third world countries, the infrastructure over which to transport the energy to the end user, the miles of copper, the heat produced by overcoming resistance over the transmission lines, the conversion of the fuel into usable energy, and the heat content a 400ppm CO2 atmosphere already has us blanketed under, you begin to see that  the premise of their whole argument is highly suspect. When one next considers  their argument that those objections are met with the statement that the units will encourage "the adoption of 100% clean, renewable energy" you know the entire argument is specious, as there is no such thing as renewable energy ... if there were you would not need renewable fuels. This is not just semantics, the difference is very real and their choice of the term renewable energy calculated.

Renewable fuels is actually a misnomer as well, of course, as all the fuels necessary for a mass-produced machine would all have to be renewable, such as gasoline, butane, propane, all are renewable, like your gas tank is refillable. But energy itself is never renewable, it must be generated; some form of some kind of matter or another form of energy must be transformed into the type of energy you wish to use to power your devise. And what gets released in this conversion process everywhere in the universe, is heat. So if you were to complete the entire installation of the additional 700 million AC units, remembering that AC is, along with the refrigerators sitting in every modern kitchen, the biggest energy hog you own, the additional energy needed to run them would be prodigious. But whereas Fossil fuels are indeed the worse offenders in terms of the heat they produce (or at least are assumed to be, although when a battery in something as small as a Samsung smart phone generates enough heat to produce an explosion, one can't really be sure of that, and no one's about to tell you the truth on the subject).

But the ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere is no longer the historical 280, but an elevated 400ppm, at its minimum, so all that heat we're producing by generating, not renewable energy, but energy that must be generated again once it's used up, then, even if it's using fuels that release no additional CO2 into the atmosphere, it will increase the level of global warming by an astounding amount, because the very fact that the term "Renewable Energy" is bandied about tells the real story, and that real story is that no one is contemplating, never mind initiating, any diminution, never mind cessation, of energy production. The only diminution of energy production envisioned is that via the combustion of fossil fuels. However by all indications, whether by reading derivative contracts, or government-to-government contracts (how do you think the Saudis are going to pay for the $350Billion of War gear they've just reportedly contracted with the US President to procure? Solar cells?) it's clear that only after every last drop of oil has been squeezed out of the ground, only after every last molecule of natural gas has been ignited, and only after every last ingot of coal has been torn from mother earth, will energy from non-CO2 producing sources be the only one used, and by that time, the CO2 blanket covering the planet, efficiently keeping in all the heat that energy conversion, transmission, and re-conversion into the form the end devise uses will be so thick that little of the heat thereby generated will be able to escape into space.

Like Elon Musk, or any of the stalwarts of Silicon Valley, Hawken is selling his book and selling you out to make a fast buck. Like politicians that prostitute themselves while pretending to be in Government "Service", when the only interests they serve are their own, such claims of miracles of science should carry the same weight as any claim to miracles. They should be looked at askance, if not totally rejected, because miracles don't occur. Although fuels can be renewable if the source from which they are derived continues to produce, energy has to be generated and its generation always comes at a cost, and one of those costs is always heat, and every person who can read Paul Hawken's book knows this. You know this. But you just don't want to hear my smart-Alecky rants that remind you. But, although you don't have to like it, it gives you a different perspective, I hope. One that helps you quickly identifies the people who are blowing bubbles in the air to distract you from the truth that you already know, by using terms that sound oh-so PC in order to tell us we can have our cake and eat it too, so will allow us to go on as though nothing is wrong. Everyone wants that. I want that (well, not the Wars, and the hunger, and the cruelty, the homelessness and the hate, but other than that ... the science part .. the TV, planes, modern medicine, and, of course, computers).

But there is something wrong, deadly wrong about the current scenario, and no one wants to contemplate it. But unless we do, how can we ever at least try to change it? And inventing a new refrigerant to enable the acquisition of 700 million AC units to people who've lived without them their whole lives is just going to slather another coat onto the Uh-oh Zone layer.

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Kremlin Ties Russian Plants to Thaad&Mir Putin.



Orange is the new Black Market.

The predictable Lavrovian Response of salivating at the mere  mention of the President's name in any context whatsoever with Russia, as called out as mass hysteria by Matt Taibbi in The Rolling Stone, was in full Orlando Bloom yesterday, cementing the transmogrification of headfake News into The Trumpan Show/Reality TV version of "The Apprehensiveness", wherein the world holds its  collective breath waiting for the Man Who Fell to Earth from Versailles to shout "You're Fired" to another bevy of tomahawk missiles, while inside scalpers sell tickets to the Firing Line to make a few extra Buckleys on the side.

As he once again made America grate, The Spicer Girls went into overdrive about Presidential leaks that didn't occur in a motel room this time, while Presidential spokespersons demonstrated their unique abilities of carrying their McMaster's water. They've poured kitty litter into Schrödinger's box, causing the same effect as pouring sand into a Think Tank, slowing down the Perpetual Notion Machine so much that they can't tell whether it's empty or full, but the reek it's creating tends to make me think it's the latter.

But what do I know? The things that interest me are so different. For example, in the prologue to Andrew Feinstein's The Shadow World (Inside the Global Arms Trade), he sites the 75million Pound gift (grift)of an Airbus to Prince Bandar by the British arms company BAE, and this morning I read that Afghanistan has minerals worth $89billion, for which the US has already spent at least $1 trillion in war-mongering to assure access (Take the OIL, we shoulda just taken the oil), to not oil this time, but  other minerals and rare earth elements. It is the same calculus as the arms sales, only in reverse: Instead of the smaller amount represented by the Airbus for access to resources worth a thousand times more than the gift, the resources, this time in Afghanistan, are worth a thousand times less than the amount invested in their eventual confiscation. What this makes obvious, and to my way of thinking would make a great News Story, is that those who stand to profit from the attainment of these resources aren't investing their own money, but are risking what used to be referred to as the Nation's treasure, ie the resources the nation has accrued through the effort of ALL of its citizens, yet the profit from which will flow only to those on the White House's (and Congress's) short list.

As citizens get the Dickens beaten out of them, "our" President's turned the White House into Bleak House, while showing us why his wife's called The Tail of Two Cities and he plays The Donbey and Son-in-Law in Washington, parading around like Pickwick, creating pandemonium wherever he goes, despite pumping up his acolytes with diaphanous promises to fulfill America's Great Expectations from a pile of coal dust dumped by Our Mutual Friends, the transnational corporations, but delivering nothing more than Hard Times while he brags about being David Cop-a-Feel by giving Olive a twist in her most  private of parts.

While we instead eat up the news cycle with the circumlocutions and daily antics of everyone's favorite Barnum & Bailey sideshow attraction, there is no air left to discuss, for example, what the real intent of the cyber attack over the weekend portends. Like the Melissa attack of yesteryear, it purposely showed its hand when it needn't have, and the real question is what signal, what veiled threat, what shadow attack, lurks behind the amateurish hack that the ransomware charade represented?

Like the news itself, the signal gets buried in the noise, and, like throwing out the Bibi with the Ba'ath water, the message in the bot'll never be understood, as everyone's too busy deciphering the Oracle to notice the fact that what's being kept close to the vest'll verge on the trump card being played unremarked by those who should be heeding it.

Instead, acting as an ally to those it disparages, the media enshrouds facts in a haze of its own, one impervious to even their own kleg lights. You only know there's something there because you know there can be no such noxious smoke without an underlying fire. We're privy only to a blur of soot and smoke, now confusedly scudding one way, now another way, now aspiring to the stratosphere, now murkily creeping along the ground, as the blasts of hot air rise and fall, or change their direction: a dense formless jumble, with streaks of crosslight in it that show nothing but more masses of obscuring darkness: Cloaktown is the news media, suggestive of itself while not a speck of truth can be discerned.

The financial crisis and the myopic mentality that pervaded the nation and most of the OECD countries should have alerted us to the omnipotent ability of the News to completely hoodwink a public it is supposedly serving into believing the pablum they ladle out in dollops of drollery while themselves rollicking with the same rich and powerful we're told "Freedom" of the press (freedom to lie to your face, freedom to ignore what is right in from of their eyes, freedom to paint the most atrocious perfidy in colors of red white and blueblood) protects us from.

The wonder is that there's a there there at all anymore. It's been ruined to such an extent that it's amazing how it has borne so many shocks. Created so many pseudo-celebs, haranguing reports, newsworthy dog rescues, while, by catering to the desires of advertisers, it has, like hospitals, education, and housing, become another example of the ongoing destruction of value wrought by Cowboy Capitalism on the very institutions that the vast majority of people hold most dear, and need most desperately. Because the News is now one of the prime examples of the same devastated wreck left in Kamikaze Kapitalism's all-consuming wake.

As Cindi Lauper, of all people, wisely intoned, "Money ... Money changes everything." And she did not necessarily mean for the better. Nor the bettor, which the more than 700 TRILLion dollars in derivatives shows is what the economy has, not devolved into, but been purposely engineered into. I may wish the Market forces be with you, but they are far more often than not ranged against you in this new "Everything's a sucker's bet" economy, wherein our leader is the President and founder of Grift You, yet, as per their usual no's for news, there is nary a word of what that portends for the future of our Why Ma Wiipublic.






Friday, May 12, 2017

The Electorate Decided to Gore Bush and Then Opted to Trump Clinton.


Looking at the picture of Al Gore in Time Magazine's Dec/2000 issue, the same kind of steely-eyed disdain is evinced on Gore's face that reflects the same mindset that thought calling the opponent's supporters "deplorables" was a good idea.

Victim of Putsch Putsch in the Bush.

Bush, on the other hand, may look feckless, illiterate and about as presidential as Inspector Clouseau, but his expression communicates that, even though he'll be the closest approximation to having a retard as President as is likely we'll ever get, at least he'll mean well, a funhouse reflection of Gore's mien, which contrarily suggests he just does "Mean" well.

Ended up with blood and Gore on his hands.

But Gore, like Clinton in 2016, was, to the elites of the DNC, the safe choice. Just not one in whose choice the voters had much say, or could warm up to with very much enthusiasm, as his problem was the same as Hillary Clinton's: he comes across as cold, entitled, and hopelessly corrupt. So the cluelessness of the Party to its own constituency's dislike of its hand-picked candidate fell on deaf ears in 2000 and then reverberated its eerie echos through history's corridors to fall on the same deaf ears in 2016.

Because the Democrats were/are so intent on using the strategy of vilifying the other Party 's candidate as their main argument to convince voters to vote for their guy, that they neglected the issues, real issues that affected peoples lives, and that would be more constructive in convincing the electorate of the positive factors they should weigh when considering their choice for President.

In other words, they used the strategy Bush Pere used to defeat Dukakis, forgetting that what works for Republican Party adherents doesn't necessarily work on Democrats ... in fact is more effective at convincing Democrats to simply not go to the polls.

Which, if it were used once and subsequently served as a learning point from which the Party moved forward, would be one thing, but when the lesson learned its simply forgotten and the same strategy adopted once more 16 years later, suggests quite another.

It suggests an arrogance and hubris that is not to be dissuaded by facts ... or the will of the voters, which, without the interference of the pro-Hillary press (the most blatant of which was Rachel Madcow's obvious and un-journalistic out-of-hand dismissal of Bernie Sanders as a serious contender, and the DNC itself, as revealed by the Wikileaks e-mails and the subsequent resignation of Debbie Wasserman Shultz), may well have nominated Mr. Sanders instead of that lightening rod for everything that's wrong with the Democrats' rule: Hillary Clinton.

To cite one of my posts from before the election, I do believe that I reflected the opinion of a lot of Americans when I wrote:

" ...until Trump got on the stump, the two major parties were perfectly content with the prospect of presenting the electorate in November with a choice between the criminal Bush family or the corrupt Clintons. Back to the future of 1992. Thanks a fuckin'  lot."

Yet the Democrats had not a clue that their party of so-called progressive politics offered their constituencies nothing but regressive solutions to problems their adoption of the Reagan/Bush agenda of off-shoring jobs and entire industries to allow American Corporations the "freedom" to crush wage demands, pour pollutants into the atmosphere, rivers and soil, and deprive their workers of healthcare benefits, paid vacation time, or pension plans. And to then simply offer job "re-training" to prepare those thrown on the slag heap of unemployables for the jobs of the New Economy that never materialized.

Here in San Francisco you can see the results: they are two-fold. The Prius buyers who, snug in their smug political correctness, pay more for an electric vehicle or hybrid than they will ever save in fuel cost reduction, while on the other hand the swarms of bicyclists wending their way en masse through the city streets, who will never, for the most part, ever be able to afford a car of their own. Contrarily, if you look to Beijing's city streets you see exactly the opposite: traffic jams so monumental they have on occasion lasted for days have replaced the hordes of bicyclists that streamed through those same city streets a mere generation ago. All funded by the investment the Communist economy could never have amassed, using instead the stolen savings of American labor to build enterprises that would funnel earnings back into the pockets of CEO's and the bank accounts of the wolves of Wall St.

All while the Liberal Democracies claim their ascendancy makes the political structure of the West the "End of History". So then why did no Democratic candidate for the Presidential election, including Mr. Sanders, address the issue that it is a totalitarian Communist regime that has experienced burgeoning growth that none of the calcified western liberal democracies can even come close to? Why has the era since Reaganomics and the canonization of Free Markets left the economies that espouse them in the dust, its citizens mired in "austerity", with less and less with each passing decade until their citizens are not only left with nothing, but their prospects of ever affording something as normal as a Doctor's visit that was taken for granted a generation ago, now considered an unaffordable luxury? Where DB (defined benefit) pension  plans have been replaced by 401 K's that are so laden with "maintenance" fees and overhead, that, even when they do make gains, they are skimmed off into the pockets of the pirates of the financial sector, and any other investment is left to lie fallow, while the Fed ensures that the "money" they create via nothing more than a wave of their magic wand flows into the stock market, giving hefty returns to those already in it, but making the entry point too high for those who aren't, yet simultaneously leaving it as your only choice. All of which means, something not lost on even the financially naive, that the more you put in, the more you are likely to lose, and at a time in your life when it will be too late for you to ever recoup your losses. You don't need 3-D glasses to see that this is the best that Clinton and her so-called progressives offer the working masses: Despair, Destitution and an early Death from opioid addiction.

And you blame the Russians for your electoral defeat?

"The fault, dear Democrats, is not in the Tsars,
But in yourselves, that you think us your underlings."

The only Communist Country on the globe is the most powerful economy in the world, the economy that all the "End of History" economies were forced to rely on in order to pull them back from the abyss that the malfeasance, embezzlement and other fraud-on-steroids grifts had plunged it into, yet not a peep is heard as to what that stark reality portends. The best they can do is promise more of the same.

Instead we're grifted with the excuse that the Russians interfered with our elections. I'm quite sure they did. But, like during the financial free-for-all that ended in the collapse of every financial institution in the country, one that was contrived by our own countrymen conspiring for our ruin, was obvious what was happening then, and it was just as obvious during the election cycle that the Russians were trying hard to discredit Clinton as early as, and really, even before, the Parties' conventions, yet, as in the Bush years, no one said a word. During the Bush era, because they were too busy building financial empires on shifting sands to worry too much about how the crash would effect them (everyone's always convinced they'll get out in time and remain unscathed by the coming debacle), and during the election cycle, because they were too convinced that Trump was such an obviously flawed candidate, that he was in possession of neither the mental resources nor governing experience to have his chances of victory be taken seriously (a perspective President Obama  gave voice to when he squelched Comey's investigation into said interference because it might look like he was abetting candidate Clinton ... but this doesn't fit into the picture being painted now by his fellow Democrats who are screeching hysterically that such interference is an ACT OF WAR! ... now which party sounds fucking insane? Because these two reactions to Russian interference in our elections simply do not gel).

So as the President bears out every fear any sane person had of how he would conduct himself in the Offal Orifice, the Democrats react as the only way they know how, like a bunch of drunken sophomores at  a football game at which they've lost due to a bad call by the ref: They've been cheated and demand restitution that can never be granted and that would change nothing if it were.

The Gore/Bush of 2000 election followed the Gorbachev decade, and both roiled their populations and ensconced a new cadre of entitled, oligarchical ruling elite in seats of power. Russia came up with Putin to push back against the pillagers of their country. His success at doing so, and the possibility that some candidate could promise to try it here, is what stokes the fear that provides the real bellows behind the flames of War being fueled by our own plutocratic, ruling elites, who then engineered the placement of one of their own on the throne. This, regardless of the chaos the child-King's rule would surely engender, as he would push their agenda, nevermind the consequences.  And, as always, it is the real people who stand to gain nothing, and lose everything, but get blamed for everything and treated as nothing.





Thursday, May 11, 2017

Look Who's Back, Still Promising to "Make Germany Great Again"


Look Who's Back ... why it's none other than Adi Shicklgruber! That's the theme of this German film that depicts Hitler waking up outside the bunker in which they torched his body in 1945, only it's 2015 and he rises Lazarus-like from a smoldering grave without having aged a bit, and very much the Adolph we've all come to know and love ... to revile. And promising, matched word-for-word by the braggadocio of our own current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,  to "Make Germany Great again" (including the implicit underlying message of, "Whatever it takes").

But, as if to give credence to the adage that history repeats itself, first time as Tragedy, the second time as Farce", the current brandisher of the phrase, "Make (fill in the blank) Great Again",  has it emblazoned on a baseball cap instead of military headgear, and wears a flag on his lapel instead of the Swastika The Furor wore on his, to convince the proles that he cares about the country while his machinations only further its cataclysmic destruction. But, so as to mimic the Fuehrer, whom he admires as only a fellow-German can (his current moniker "Trump" was chosen to replace the family's actual name of  Drumph, so as to hide their German roots), his entire strategy for his Presidential campaign was lifted entirely from the movie, not the least of which is his stated belief that only He can save the Vaterland by steering the Leviathan, via his own appointed SS, directly onto the path of disaster that would make his name immemorial while destroying his country, whose people matter to him not a jot, via the same undisguised and unapologetic, foaming-at-the-mouth desire for Weltherrschaft (World Domination). A desire his compatriots, for the most part (despite their insistence that they live in a Democracy (the two are incompatible)) readily share. One of the first things the resurrected Hitler notices is, of course, TV, a powerful propaganda technology he can't believe is wasted on cooking shows and programs to teach the correct application of make-up.  

But as the cameras chronicle the behind-the-scene ratings grabs that the current wasteland of advertising-revenue-controlled programming has become, it is apparent that the lessons the Furor (sic) learns were not lost on Drumph. All objections to the unsavory nature of giving airtime to this comedian (naturally no one believes it's the real Furor) are shouted down as the ratings tick up, highly reminiscent of the period before the last American election in which the media - papers, TV, and radio - all fell over each other in order to show the latest outrageous statement of the orange-haired Bozo running for the highest office in the land, castigating what he said by giving him coast-to-coast, all-Drumph-all-the-Time, coverage, such that his campaign spending was for all practical purposes nil, as each media outlet strove to be the first to broadcast his bromides while they watched in glee as their ad revenues went through the roof, setting all-time records for "news" programs, which they are still called despite their descension into the realm over which the candidate they so assiduously bemoaned reigned supreme: Reality TV. 

What's the difference anyway? News/Reality TV ... aren't they after all just different names for the same thing?

In the final scenes in the movie, when the fired newsman Sawartski, who first brought the resurrected Furor to his countrymen's attention, realizes that somehow, inexplicably, this IS the real Hitler, he confronts him and tells him that he won't let him do it again; he won't allow him to sway the public with his propaganda. But, Hitler argues, it was not propaganda in 1933. The Germans were told in full what his plans were and they put him in office nonetheless. Not, similar to Drumph's election in the US, by a majority, but by the votes of more than 13 million Germans who cast their ballots in his favor, even though Hitler hoped to use the presidency to overturn the Weimar Constitution, just as Drumph questions the relevancy of our own, since it overrides his conviction that no matter how foolhardy and ridiculous his campaign promises were, they should be rushed into fulfillment for no other reason than they reflect his Will. 

Upon the surreal discovery of his real identity, Sawatzki takes him by gunpoint to a highrise rooftop where he accuses him of being a monster. But Herr Hitler disagrees,

 "I am not a monster", he insists, "They were just ordinary people who decided to elect an extraordinary man, and entrusted the fate of their nation to him. Have you never asked yourself Sawatzki why people follow me? It's because at their core, they're just like me. They share the same values."


"And that's why you won't shoot me."

Which words are barely out of his mouth when Sawatzki does exactly that. And we watch as the Furor's leather trench-coated body slips off the roof and plummets toward the ground. But as Sawatzki looks over the roof's edge, he sees no body, he only hears a voice behind him say, 

"You can't get rid of me".

 And as he slowly turns around to behold The Furor alive and well behind him, Herr Hitler continues, 

"I am a part of you". 

"A part of all of you."

In the final scene he rides in a motorcade waving to his fans, and he intones to himself as the camera shows scenes of mobs attacking immigrants, neo-nazis beating fags and protesters setting cars on fire, among other scenes of mayhem and displays of fear-fueled attacks on unarmed refugees, he looks around with a tight grin on his grim lips and gives his head a confident nod as he assures himself, 

"I can work with this."

Himher: Not even his wife wants his name.


Himmler: Fulfilled Fuehrer's Judenfrei Fantasies