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United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Thursday, December 10, 2020

Kraken Sidney Makes more Bile

                                          Like Colin, Speaking Truth, to Powell, is anathema.

Charles Baudelaire:
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” 

The blogosphere? It's Cracklin', Rosie! ... with all kindsa conspiracy theories. You can hear it sizzlin' and snappin', cracklin' and popping from every straggling strand.


But the one conspiracy theory you won't hear spun on the worldwide Web of deception is the one openly being played out in front of our eyes. You know, the one where the POTbelliedUS's Senior Attorney, having contracted the Corona Virus, admonishes people to get treatment ASAP if they expect to survive it, while  simultaneously, as on the same day, his Boss, The Don, pushes forward a lawsuit in the Supreme Court to strip the ability of tens of millions of US citizens from ever having that option by depriving them of the Healthcare Coverage the ACA affords them. This is no secret behind-the-scenes conspiracy; this is an in-your-face campaign, that no one has bothered to decry, conspiring to knowingly and maliciously bring about the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans before they have the opportunity to receive the vaccine that can save their lives. 

At its core, Evil is about loss. And these evil bastards are making sure that maximum losses accrue to their fellow citizens of the United States of America. It's what's called Evil incarnate.

Kraken Sidney, we're so gored
You've only lied till there's nowhere left to go
The death rolls grow
Lord, don't you glow
Your face is a crime you're a boor man's lady

Hitchin' on a twilight train
Ain't nothing there that one cares to take along
Swingin' on dong
To get what you vaunt
You plead on your knees for your man you slap-happy loon

Oh, filthy briefs Powell filed
She got to weigh every MAGAts' nappy
Powell and bowel in one turnstyle
Kraken Sidney, there's no more bought woman
You make me cringe with your Q'anon gummin'
Go collect your fee, churl
Your mouth keeps runnin' on

Pay it now
Pay it now, Big Daddy

Kraken Sidney lies by a mile
'Tho it makes the judges cower, that's all right
She's but a blight
Her face is a fright
Find us a court that don't ask no questions, yeah

The filthy briefs that Powell filed
She's got to weigh every MAGAts' nappy
Powell and bowel in one turnstyle
Kraken Sidney, there's no more bought woman
You make me cringe with your Q'anon gummin'
Go collect your fee, churl
Your mouth keeps runnin' on

Pay it now
Pay it now
Pay it now, Big Daddy

Kraken Sidney lies by a mile
'Tho it makes the judges cower, that's all right
She's but a blight
Her face just a fright
Find us a court that don't ask no questions, yeah


The second greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the base Trump is a good guy.  



Monday, December 7, 2020

CO too COntagion: CO2, COvid, COrona, COnspire to COst COrpulent COnsumers COuntless COrpses.

                                                                    Days of the Dead.

California is once again under lockdown as, in the Bay Area alone, an area that surpasses the entire geographical footprint of the State of Massachusetts, and includes 7 counties, has less than 15% of its hospital ICU beds available as the completely predictable surge of the COrona virus takes place. There's less than 300 ICU beds for a  population of more than 7 million people, in a country that throws away the lion's share of its economic output for the maintenance and manufacture of a nuclear arsenal that just lays around for no other reason than to threaten the entire globe (none more so than the citizens of the country in which it is housed), backed by an ever-growing "conventional" arsenal of Warships, drones, nuclear submarines, frigates, bombers, tanks, hum-vees, depleted uranium missiles and phosphorous cluster bombs, napalm, fighter jets, and the aircraft carriers needed to transport them, ongoing wars for nobody-knows-what in Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen, and the more than 1000 military installations around the world. But in preparation for a pandemic, a threat that actually exists instead of being merely the bugaboo that haunts the feverish nightmares of NeoCon reactionaries, that arrived on our shores close to a year ago now, not a single extra ICU bed has been added to one of the most populous and richest regions in one of the most prosperous and richest States of our Union (What, San Jose can you see? ICU), despite being in full knowledge that, given the mountebank running the place, this amount of viral penetration into the community was accurately forecast.  

But as the deafening silence from the mass media on the Republican refusal to accept the results of the Presidential election, while simultaneously accepting the results of their own victories that were attained during that very same election, I have not heard once that the man they are listening to as he calls the election a fraud, called not only climate change, but the current pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousand of US citizens and infected millions worldwide, a hoax. Yet far from reciting GW Bush's infamous flubbed sentiment of "Fool me once ...", etc, nary a reminder has been issued that the same sources, (such as the laughable "Epoch Times") including our rotund Furor, that are calling the Biden win a hoax are the same ones that are (still) calling a raging pandemic and a catastrophic change in the climate regime that has ruled the biosphere since man stepped out of caves, "hoaxes".

So perhaps you can see why I found the rosy optimism from Grist following the UN's Climate Report, a bit confusing.

Yes, Hallelujah! 

Not that the future will be easy, since the three largest contributors to global warming – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide – all reached new heights in 2020, the same year that every Western Governments' economy is experiencing wrenching deflation and collapse in manufacturing ... but no worries: “Emissions are 62 percent higher now than when international climate negotiations began in 1990.”

So the world has shown it is capable of restraint? ... somehow? ...

Albert Einstein is infamously claimed to have stated that, "The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest”, the reason being that, whether it's true or not, (which is irrelevant because it is what happens on earth, not in the universe, that matters during any one lifetime) its basic tenet is sound: it can make or break you, depending on whether it's compounded on that student loan your never going to be able to pay off (precisely because of compound interest, since you have to PAY it), or whether you at one time, had that loan amount deposited in a savings account that paid you interest of 5.00%, which amount is added to your total upon which the next period's interest will be calculated from. Hence, the first increase on a deposit of a hundred bucks would be $105.00, whereas the next payment would be calculated using that new figure, so isn't $110.00, as most people would expect, but, because the base amount is no longer $100, but $105, it would, instead of earning $5, earn $5.25, so your total would now = $110.25. Small pickings indeed, but over a long enough period, it is the compounding that boosts its growth to such an extent as to elicit Einstein's observation.

The load of CO2 follows that same dynamic. Which is why it's emissions are 62 percent higher now than in the 90's: just like compound interest, the percentage increase each year, which is on the upswing, such that it is akin to your interest rate on those savings receiving a higher interest rate each year on top of the increase on the compounded amount, which is of course, compounded on top of what existed the year before, which has already been compounded on what was accumulated the year before that. The only reason I'm able to still function, and thereby write this, is that nature, much like a saver who takes out some of the earned interest every year, but never touches the principle, draws down the CO2 in the atmosphere during the northern hemisphere's spring and summer months ... or at least it used to ... now Nature has started adding as much CO2 as an industrialized country, as the Arctic and other regions such as the Amazon, Indonesia, and the boreal Northwest, not only lose their own ability to generate oxygen, and take-up CO2, but also begin to add their own CO2 output from raging fires and melting permafrost, all of which are rich in CO2 content. 

The Grist article then goes on to state that, 

"According to another report released by the U.N. Environment Program and its partners, eight of the largest producers of fossil fuels (including the United States, Australia, India, and China) are planning to increase their production of coal, oil, and gas by 2 percent annually (Not to mention Russia, Brazil, Guyana, and OPEC, which all now intend to increase theirs by even more than the large economies). That’s despite the fact that fossil fuel production needs to fall by 6 percent per year over the next decade to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius". (my parens)

Did you take Note that the 2% annual increase acts much the same as compound interest? The first year's increased production figure is now added to the base production figure used to calculate the next year's 2% increase, which results in every year's amount of coal, oil and gas being, by the end of, say, ten years' time, far greater than the amount the first year's 2% was calculated on.

So "if they follow through on their energy plans (and there's no reason why they wouldn't) we can kiss the 1.5-degree goal goodbye."

That's not in reality an "If", it should have read, "Since they will". Which is why the article left me in such a quandary. Because their very next statement is,

"The situation isn’t hopeless" ... (What, you could be dead before it gets really bad?).

"Countries just need to start backing their promises with action ... "

Really? Which countries? If (Lol, there's that "If" again, when it really means since") the largest most powerful countries in the world continue to base their economies on the production, marketing and combustion of fossil fuels, what good does it do if Nicaragua, for example, backs its promises with action? That's a rhetorical question, of course, as I assume you know the answer: None. It makes not a jot of difference). 

"... before the next major climate meeting in Glasgow a year from now, every tenth of a degree of warming matters,” he said. (Really? To whom?).

"... concerted SDG (Sustainable Development Goals ... Lol) interventions suggested by the study combine behavioral changes through nudges for both governments and citizens, such as improved effectiveness and efficiency in governance and changes in consumption patterns of food, energy and water."   ...

So let's get this straight. In a world where a pandemic is ravaging the entire globe, sending hundreds of thousands to an early grave, yet mandates, health advisories and pleas to wear masks to protect the lives of their fellow citizens not only go unheeded, but result in violence being threatened and then perpetrated on those making the pleas, you somehow believe that a "nudge" to change behaviors in a far more drastic and permanent basis can be induced onto a polity that has every intention of maintaining that climate change is hoax? From what realm of the universe is that conclusion derived?    

It is now a year since the corona virus reared its spiked head in Wuhan, yet almost a full half of the US citizenry still believes it's a hoax, for no more reason than that they don't like the prospect of wearing a piece of fabric in front of their nose and mouth, and yet you somehow believe that this same group of discontented MAGAts is going to be "nudged" into changing their consumption patterns (whatever that means) of things as basic to their lifestyle as food, water, and energy? Are you insane? 

But let's for a moment assume that they would. What is the biggest change being suggested? In terms of impacts on their everyday lives and purchases, I would posit that the least onerous would be the switch, if it were in actuality possible, which it most certainly is not, from ICE machines to EV's. But like making fuel for rich countries from food crops grown in starving ones, switching to EV's sounds like a solution when it is in fact a continuation, compounding, and exacerbation of the very problem it's purported to solve. All while just coincidentally pouring huge profits into the coffers of a few MNC's.

There are more than a billion autos on the roads of the world's highways (all of which are made from highly-CO2-intensive asphalt, or worse, concrete, for which absolutely NO alternative has ever been suggested), each of which would need to be replaced with yet another billon EV's, and more, since mass transit has been jettisoned by the virus as effectively as when GM and it's co-conspirators destroyed LA's transit system in the fifties to increase their profits. Which is the entire thrust of EV manufacture ... that they are less polluting at the source is beyond argument. If everyone were driving an EV today, urban pollution from autos would be a thing of the past. But it isn't urban pollution that the "electric solution" is touted as solving (that's so old school ... as Covid has demonstrated, the health of society takes a backseat to keeping the economic engine stoked to keep pouring cash into the bank accounts of the Keptocracy ... everything else is secondary, including mass deaths), it is the production of CO2, which, completely analogous to the ethanol-from-corn imbroglio, is a case of cherry-picking the data to get the numbers you want and ignoring the true costs, a method of deception the Cowboy Capitalism of the US excels at, its accounting system would collapse otherwise. 

If there is one thing that the Covid pandemic has illustrated, it is that the Capitalist structure of the world's economies doesn't need a War to make it a killing machine. It cares not about the spread of a virus, in fact it caused it. Before there was any virus, the vast majority of activities engaged in by the richest constituents of the world's population, that cohort that causes 80% of the CO2 accumulation in the troposphere, despite their being non-essential, are deadly to the rest of humanity and other beings who share the planet with us (although the rest of humanity seems hellbent on copying exactly those activities. When China decided to get "rich", they had no intention of doing so in a Chinese manner, but slavishly copied the West. They are now poisoning their own citizens and environment far more egregiously than any Western "post-industrial" economy is. Now, however, the West is slavishly copying the Chinese. Last March, Muyuan Foods, fuelled by huge profits at corporate producers after African swine fever ravaged the country’s herds and sent pig prices soaring, are replacing small, traditional farms, many of which were wiped out by the worst animal disease outbreak in history. Muyuan’s profits grew 1,413% in the first nine months of 2020. Amazon and other US companies are now using our own pandemic to replace small traditional stores of all kinds throughout the US economy ... boasting similar obscene profits of their own).

If jetting off to Climate Change conferences in Glasgow means tons of CO2 have to be exhausted into the atmosphere, "who are you to tell me I can't jet off if I want to?", seems to be the prevailing attitude. The pleas from the CDC for Americans to stay at home for Thanksgiving, and the simultaneous lining up of jets on the nation's runways to enable them to do exactly the opposite, says it all: the swine flew. Whereas one glimpse of the lines in the airports speaks even louder: no social distancing, no masks in many of the airports I saw pictured, and no restrictions to your right to fly. 

This is not a population that you're going to "nudge" into changing their consumption patterns, least of all while their most favorite furore, echoed by his Republican sycophants and the "Right to Life" murder machine called Evangelical "religion", still insists that the reason for doing so is but a hoax.











Monday, November 23, 2020

The Plasticene Error.



They shake with hate for things they've never seen.
Devoid of love in this age, the Plasticene,
Oppressed by Dow and dreams of Mr. Clean.

Driven mad by rides from Lyft and Uber
Their bags are Glad, the air they breathe is scuba;
A conscience has become a long-lost feature
Of those convinced they're god's most favored creature.

Some strayed, most stayed, imprisoned by possessions 
Though disasters came in waves of quick succession;
The houses of the poor were thereby forfeit
While Corporations showed a steady profit.

Along the corridors of power they come and go
And quail in fear of tweets from Trumpashenko;
Nothing is sacred, least of all the rule of Law
Except for John's, of course, which has one fatal flaw:

The Mississippi Bubble he ostensibly blew
Ravaged every nation, just like our "Flu";
It fractured every Nation's citizens' trust,
Exposed paper fortunes' sparkle as so much fairy dust.

But nevermind, that's just how Capitalism works,
Handing sacred duties over to conniving jerks;
Whose spindly arms stretch like sorry vegetation
Toward the despoiler of men: Bane to his own Nation.

Instead of competition, rampant monopoly;
But never guilty, they just cop a plea,
"We weren't, you know, the people who designed it,
We're forced to use the system just as we find it".

If that should mean we're all turning Japanese
With banking systems bringing nations to their knees,
Living through serial Lost generations,
Is but a small price to pay
For the Rich's permanent vacations.

The Age of Reason, at one time it was seven.
When childish minds still think they'll go to heaven.
Now despite billions in public funds deployed
to educate them, 
They're un- and underemployed.

A glorious future is what we promised youth
Never telling them what's closer to the truth:
Take out a student loan at rates usurious,
And your future will be hopeless and financially injurious.

He looks, devoid of wisdom, from atop his gilded throne
Down on his own base with face of Revlon'd stone
His only duty now being to compel
Their gratitude for his playing the role of William Tell.

To those poor sods who trusted him, he said,
  "Take this polished apple and place it on your head".
And while those more wary soon began to shiver,
He aimed the Covid arrow he'd taken from his quiver.

This is how he planned to inspire daze of glory
Though the outcome might be astonishing or gory,
Like other ruses pulled from the bag of Capitalism's tricks,
 All the rewards would be his, while you take all the risks.


2

His followers so low, they call themselves the base:
The dregs, the low. The avatars of race
As the one and only attribute 
Needed for your  place
Of elevated privilege/
rank, 
As noxious weeds,
A wan, pale complexion 
is all anyone really needs.
White is right and right is Might
The pallid insist, well wrapped in spite.
But the Spanish flu came a century ago
Following mankind's biggest imbroglio, 
When every Nation that was ruled by Divine Rights
Plunged the entire world into its Darkest of Nights.

Mechanized slaughter of heartbreaking proportion
Helped kindle the appetite for financial extortion.
So they signed the famous Treaty of Versailles
(Watch the series, you'll see just why)
It was just a cease-fire, 
not an end to War/
Reparations
Used for Preparations
To even the Score, by getting
 Your citizens ready by whetting
Their lust for carnage, while preening their feathers
Strutting themselves in front of vanity's mirrors. To Justify
Another globalized village's rampage of rape, slaughter and pillage.

 
3

And this is the group, we're all led to believe
That'll insure the world a lasting reprieve,
From the very evil it served on a plate
to a world now being stoked by vitriol and Hate
Thinly cloaked in assertions to, "Make America Great".

But instead of "Great", to no one's Surprise,
Has risen a raft of conspiracies and lies
To mow down their enemies with a deadly disease,
Thinning out their ranks, ignoring their pleas
Mocking their request to, "Wear a mask" ... 
"Please?"

Yet in this atmosphere of Climate denial, 
This rancor, spleen and bewildering bile
Is really just a logical extension
Of negating every step of Global Warming prevention ...
It's but a ratcheting up of the White Reign of Terror
Snow-blinding everyone to the rampaging weather,
For which the sop, "We're all in this Together,"
Is thrown like a bone to a junkyard cur.

But despite millions now claiming they've finally awakened,
Their trust in Capitalism remains unshakened;
Growth and jobs is the demanded remedy
Which ignores they are inflicting the globe with a malady 
From which now nor ever will there be a vaccine: 
The economic system of The Plasticene. 


 









 











 
 



Friday, November 20, 2020

Breaking News: "Sole Superpower" means We have an obligation to NO ONE.

Don't you love insincere bromides like the one I just read in the San Francisco Chronicle: "We share an obligation to each other"?, or "We're all in this together"? Lol. It's as though the entire thrust of Western Civilization since the Reagan era can be put into reverse by stating exactly the opposite of everything that has been drummed into our heads since it became Mourning in America. Oh wait, that's the 2020 vision of Trumpashenko's Amerika, a nation of squirming MAGAts feeding off the  pawed-over leftovers scraped into the garbage bins of the Keptocracy. They (still) call it Trickle Down economics, to give the Reagan/Bush Morning in America euphemism its dew. It was the cynical name given to the program used to start the USA off on its world Victory tour de Force of destroying every non-capitalist country in existence by preaching that, "We share an obligation to no one".

Least of all to a communist country that we watched being bled dry by Nazi aggression while we spent the country's savings on developing a technology that had nothing to do with stopping that aggression (atomic bombs made zero contribution to the defeat of the Nazi's ... contrarily, had the USA spent even a fraction of the money that went into nuclear fission on additional conventional air power and conventional ordnance, or other conventional weapons' systems, we can see today what the results would have been. It was the carpet bombing B-52's and the resultant firestorms they ignited that brought the Third Reich (as it would have Japan) its crushing defeat; VE Day, that celebrated the defeat of the most technologically, scientifically advanced nation in the world, needed not a single atom to be split to bring it about. The specious Truman argument that he had to use the bomb to save American lives was a complete fabrication; the truth is that we used the bomb because he had to justify all the American lives that had already been sacrificed by the Federal government's obsession with nuclear Power; all those men killed while we twiddled our thumbs spending billions of dollars separating protons from their atoms' core while GI goes to his death. What's another coupla hundred thousand dead soldiers when we can have the ultimate weapon? As you watch the virus numbers go up, and see all over the country the unrepentant heartless nonchalance with which the hundreds of thousands of deaths of their fellow citizens are simply shrugged off, it's far easier to imagine the monstrous calculations that were made out of the glare public scrutiny then: TOP SECRET. The blame for All of those soldiers' deaths could be laid at the Fuehrer's feet, so we might as well play mad scientist in the shadow of that mountain of corpses. Listen to the scientists? Sure. But trust the scientists? They used a War to advance their own agenda, insisting the War would be lost otherwise. That was a Lie. History has proved as much. They weren't the ones dying in the front lines, they were instead using the lives of the Nation's combatants as a shield. So you can see why there's so much hesitancy to trust them now; maybe that's why conspiracy theorists are having such a heyday. Why wouldn't scientists do so now when the citizenry itself gives them Carte Blanche? They don't care, they've become Bolsonaro'd).

The core concept behind Trickle Down economics is that the well-heeled, the opulent, the people who have used this country to carve a fortune out for themselves owe the rest of the country, never mind the world, absolutely nothing. If you can manage to scrape a crumb or two from my discarded scraps, or manage to eke out a drop from the trickle of fluid running down my leg to slake your parched throat with, well, whatever. As long as you don't get in the way of the servants, I guess you can be tolerated. And as long as you don't start to think I'm therefore obliged to you in any way, I guess I'll refrain from kicking you in the face for licking my well-heeled boots.  

But if economics can trickle down, so can values and attitudes, and if the richest families in the history of the world would rather give you the finger than raise one to help anyone outside their immediate family, then the peasants, with nothing but their paltry Warmart paystubs, can hardly be expected to feel that they have any obligation to help anyone outside of their immediate families. 

Family values means exactly that. It is only you and your family that matters. You can break any law, fabricate any scam, perpetrate any villainy, so long as you do it for your "family". That's how we can have the most popular TV show be "The Soprano's", about a murderous thug America idolized for a decade because he was only running a family. 

The United States, or any other country, I suppose, apparently has no obligation to any other country. It's the hinge Climate Change denial swings from, even as we castigate China for not living up to their obligation to keep what the US President has claimed is a 99% harmless virus from spreading to the rest of the world. Huh? No American citizen, as preached from the pulpits of the rabid religionists making up the staunchest of Trumpashenko's supporters, more than from any secular source, have any obligation to help anyone, empathize with anyone, nor feel obliged to even inconvenience themselves for anyone. It is just not the Great America's Way. We did not attain Sole Superpower Status by feeling OBligated. And as the healthcare workers of America continue to be demeaned, ignored, mocked, derided and killed by a virus they are working to save US from, it is only a matter of time before they realize that no, they DON'T need to feel obliged to give their lives and work their asses off to help save the lives of your grandparents and parents when not only won't you even wear a strip of cloth across your obnoxious face to help save theirs, you mock and ridicule, and physically attack those that do.  We share an obligation, but "share", in this "America will never be a Socialist" country,  is just not in our vocabulary; it is anathema to our Ruling Class's worldview (Musk, Gates, Ellison, Zuckerburg, Kushner, Rockefeller, Bezos, Murdock, the Koch bros, the Waltons, etc, etc ... these MAGAts didn't get obscenely rich by "sharing", they don't even feel obligated to pay their own workers, contractors, or vendors a living wage).

To paraphrase my favorite Wizard,

 " ... and remember my sentimental friend, Greatness is not judged by how well you think of yourself; but by how well you are thought of by others." 

And not since the days of slavery has America's Democracy been thought so little of as now. 

 




Tuesday, November 17, 2020

The MAGAts ask, "When You Barb Aryans, Don't We Bleed?"

 

Following the scorched earth policies of Saddam Hussein and the fleeing Armenis who are burning their own homes to the ground rather than see an Azeri live in them, the US President continues to deliberately spread, together with his bilious lies, the corona virus far and wide among his own followers, knowing that they  will then, (being concentrated in the middle of the country), spread the virus all over the rest of the United States. You can watch the infection numbers climb, like a trail of slime, in his burbling wake.

The military call it collateral damage when they purposely deliver carnage to innocents, and it is a euphemism then, and it is one now, as the lethal consequences of the Furor's actions are known in advance, yet the actions are taken regardless. That is not collateral damage, that is diabolically planned murder. Mayhem delivered with a shrug of the shoulders; "Hey, it's not my fault. They're the ones who got in the way." Much like the incumbent's Partietags, which he prefers to call "Rallies": a convening of the gullible to allow the Furor to bask in their shouts of approval while culling their ranks by bringing them a virus, via his dozens of infected "Secret Service" agents, used to spread the microbe from which, he has fully-briefed knowledge, his base supporters have zero immunity. 

Following the same advise as Reagan/Bush did in the eighties, the current President is in the thrall of what its adherents still refer to as a moral majority, but one that is now comprised of religiously-addled cultists who think of themselves as chosen people. Which they are: chosen by their Furor to carry a deadly virus to the rest of the country, after first infecting those near and dear to them. As it turns out, the deplorables, now that they have shown themselves to be far more deserving of that moniker than anyone believed they were when Mrs. Clinton called them that, would not only still support the President after he shot someone dead on Fifth Ave, but as it turns out, they would continue their rabid support of their own little (well big fat, to be more accurate), Jim Jones suicide cult leader, even as he  jeers at their own elders for inconveniently living too long. Yet not even that has proven to be a step too far.

But getting back to their self-reverence/reference as the moral majority, the term doesn't apply: they are neither moral, nor are they a majority ... nor should any of their actions be confused with religion, as they are not only devoid of any religious feeling or sentiment, but contrarily, are fueled by their most avid vice: Greed. A deadly sin they worship like the Israelites who built a golden calf to worship even as the hapless Moses was up on the mount talking to, you know, the deity, who apparently had no idea the people Moses was to deliver his Commandments to would rather he brought them Gold, which they then, as now, unabashedly worshiped more than any faceless supernatural.

Moses was predictably upset. 

Not the least of reasons being that Moses knew the all-knowing knew, even as he handed him the tablets, that Moses would smash them to pieces in anger against the false idol Baal's hindquarters, so yahweh was just laughing up his sleeve at him. A LOL at it all, as the "faithful" preferred Baal.

Not much has changed.

Even as they call themselves the moral majority, they not only worship Greed as their god, but in what is the West's favorite form of navel worship, a season of Lint where no earthly pleasure need ever be foregone, but they also deride anyone who thought there was anything else on the face of the earth, or in the high heavens for that matter, that could not have a price tag or a bar code slapped onto it to mark its value.

Nowadays you can stay up into the wee hours during your lockdown nightmare and watch the servants of god promise their congregation, that never congregates anywhere other than on the airwaves, their souls' salvation by promising, in return for a hefty monetary remittance, to rain down upon them all the earthly riches their hearts desire. Paganism in wolf's clothing. Just send them your hard-earned cash, scads of it, to these modern-day Elmer Gantry snake-oil salesmen, and you will be blessed with earthly happiness. Which, somehow, reserves a place in the firmament when you shuffle off this mortal coil. (Speaking of 'mortal', such blasphemy was considered a mortal sin by religious people when I was taught Christ's sermons as a young 'un). 

No longer are these christians interested in anything as mundane as christian charity; gone are the hypocritical claims of any drop of compassionate conservatism for anything but their own comfort. While during the AIDS epidemic they railed against helping the sinners who were defying the Word of god, their true colors, as shown by their ardent embrace of the Almighty Dollar as the only thing of value, are highlighted by the deification of this avatar of Greed; they even profanely hail it as the Second coming. 

But there's a bible in every hotel room. The book they use to hold their tired carcasses up as the font of divine wisdom can be read, and interpreted, by anyone. There is no Governor Winthrop to exile the Anne Hutchinson's of the world to the wilderness for daring to have their own opinion of written words; but words mean what they mean, no matter what tome their buried in, and the stance of these Greed-as-god apostates are nowhere repudiated as forcibly as in their own bible ... time and again ... by the very man who they purport to love (the few times that word is allowed in their vocabulary. Mostly they are embarrassed to use it, as it has no place in their hell and brimstone rants, now turned into brick and mortar, as in Banks, the real temples singled out for their brand of "worship". Because, you know, Christ was such a fan of money exchangers in the temple).

                                                                Naked Greed

 

 Leaves no room for Grace. They are diametrically opposed to each other.

Religion used to claim the ability to confer grace onto its adherents. Now, however, the Furor they have let loose on the world and which they wish to continue to mock it with, evinces not a drop of grace, grace being the last word even his most ardent of followers would associate with the lumbering lump of bilious vindictiveness currently spewing his venom throughout the Twittersphere.  

Mankind lying together ...
... is an abomination.

While AIDS was the epidemic of the day, they referred time and again to Leviticus, to homos as abominations (an appellation they soon used to refer to Obama, cleverly changing it to "Obamanation", feeling themselves quite astute for such grammar-school-level mendacity. But as Thomas Mann  opined in The Magic Mountain, "“There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.”). An abomination is what mankind lying together is referred to ... an abomination being an aberration, a shock, an effrontery ... but it is not actually called out in the bible as being actually Evil. 

Greed, however, the mantle which, since Reagan, the Republican Party has wrapped itself in, even as they claim themselves to be a so-called moral majority, is time and again, in the very tome they wish to use to deprive Palestinians of their Homeland and cudgel "the gays" with, referred to not only as Evil, but as the source of ALL Evil, which is what the Love of Money, the very definition of Greed, is; yet it is the only love that the current crop of apostate christians ever discusses with unfeigned fervor, the only divine substance they consider worth pursuing, even unto their destruction. Yet their book is specific, no minced words here, no reference to it as an abomination, but called out for what it is: the love of money is the source of all Evil. Not money itslef, which cannot be evil as it has no will (and therefore no capacity for evil), no soul. It is brought into being as a means of exchange. It is only the love of money, a purely human capacity, that is referred to in their bible as Evil. (and homosexuality, unlike prostitution, has nothing to do with money. And since it is the love of money, not the love of your fellow man, that is  the source of ALL evil - not some of it, ALL of it - means that homosexuality, which is never associated with the love of money, is not, per the bible, evil; thus the "moral" stance against it by embracers of greed is but a sham, raising a cloud of dust to obscure the perfidy of their own apostasy, desecrating everything that actual lovers of Christ hold sacred).

The evangelical religion, however, is evil. And it is these evil bastards, evil by their OWN Words, cited right out of the bible in their belts, having bounced their Baal into the Offal Office to enable their embrace of the Vice they "worship" (they know not the meaning of the word), Greed, who are now doing their best to spread a virus throughout the country that will kill, despite the much-ballyhooed vaccine, (What do they care how many get killed? The vaccine will make its purveyors Rich, and it is the love of money, not of god or their fellow man that inspires their devotion) millions of their own countrymen, displaying their transparent scorched-earth policy that is far more monstrous than anything any of the so-called serial "enemies" that they have concocted over the last three generations, and is fueled by nothing more than their own rancor and avarice. It is not as though they have any plan for the country's future other than its demolition. No economic plan, no foreign affairs outlook, no Health Insurance plan, no rebuilding of infrastructure, nor any energy plan that doesn't entail poisoning the entire globe; nothing. Destruction of everything that gets in the way of their accumulation of Money is their only goal. Their entire platform consists of taking a wrecking ball to anything any "Libtard" ever held dear, and replacing the carnage with ... nothing. (Unless you call fracking everything to hell, regardless of the consequences, to excavate a product that can't even fetch a price high enough to cover the costs of obtaining it (to judge by the almighty Free Market) a plan).

And this desecration is what evangelicals call Religion. But neither Eve, nor angelicals would ever have had anything to do with these greedy, avaricious, sons and daughters of Satan. As they cast aspersions onto the rest of mankind, they defile the very word of god, which is how they refer to the bible, by callously dragging it through the mud, twisting its words to fit their own selfish, worldly aims; its most venerated maxims, to honor god (of which holding Greed up as a virtue is the exact opposite), and to love thy neighbor as thyself, are derided as Liberal Hogwash.

Little wonder that the word hypocrisy is never heard anymore. It has become the ruling mantra of the anything-but-religious right.  And it is built into its ethos of untrammeled amassing of obscene stockpiles of Wealth.








Monday, November 9, 2020

The Welfare of Warfare.

 


Somehow our long nightmare of four years has supposedly ended. That's because we as a nation , well, I suppose as most nations are, are inward-looking. We don't care about the countries we've invaded never mind about how their citizens are faring, so the long, as in almost a generation long, nightmare we plunged them into was never mentioned once during this longer-than-ever, presidential contest. 

But our Nation differs from every other country's, because ours is a pick and choose type of xenophobia. We want to go into self-imposed isolation and tariff wars only after we've spent a decade and a half using foreign venues to test the efficacy of our latest murder machines and assassination technologies. Trump-a-dump admittedly dropped a big one in Iraq, supplied Death-for-profits to bone Sawdi Arabia in their merciless war against the poorest nation on earth, and sent missiles screaming into Syria to win praise from his Zionist supporters, but compared to the level of warfare, one that included an Assassination Tuesday during the Obama administration to decide who the targets of the week were, at least his worst damage was reserved for his fellow countrymen, as it is in most countries. 

I believe Glenn Greenwald is the only journalist who acknowledged that fact, or at least tacitly, as he suggested that the GW regime was far worse than the Trump Circus, a sentiment I am completely on board with, (but dare not mention to the Freedom of the Press stalwarts on the left who will scream you down for such a suggestion). 

Which ideas, when they are harbored by twenty-somethings, is perfectly understandable, but when they come from those who barely reacted to the twin invasions of the early years of this century with nothing but a shrug of the shoulders, and a determination to follow the President's advise and Go Shopping, the silence about the international crimes of GW is, for me, far more disturbing ... as it was then ... during both of the Iraq Wars ... which they all too easily signed up for, with but the flimsiest of justifications necessary to gain their acquiescence.

And now, as the military budget continues to swell, even as the size of the economy that is necessary to support it continues to contract, the burden of military expenditure, more and more dependent on, not big corporate taxation, the very beneficiaries of War profiteering, but, having slashed their tax liabilities, paying the costs of welfare for Warfare becomes an increasingly heavy burden of taxation on every other taxpayer in the country. The growth of the military far exceeds that of the wage earners whose checks are garnished on a weekly basis to pad the bottom line of the Corporations that provide the Wehrmacht with its deadly arsenal as though they are producing new delights for Toys R US and who then use the embarrassing inflow of booty to buy lobbyists to take the burden for paying for those wars, that benefitted none of the rest of us (in fact the first of which was directly responsible for the attack on the WTC in 2001), and put them squarely on wage earners' already burdened down-to-breaking shoulders. Their increases in wages over the last generation or two, pale in comparison to the percentage increases heaped onto the military. Yet year after year we increase that amount, despite the fact that we now spend annually on militarization (to fight that frightening nemesis of little, backwards, Afghanistan; a country whose own budget is also largely extracted from the pockets of the US taxpayer) what it used to take a generation to spend ... as though we are always at War against an enemy hurling its air force across our borders, or bombing the bejesus out of our allies' cities. Yet no one wonders why the only profitable enterprises are those directly attached to the  military's procurements: the more money the Pentagon shovels into the coffers of MacDonald's and KFC, the more that smaller enterprises go bankrupt until one day only MacDonald's and KFC are left standing, and that's when prices really start to skyrocket. The main reason for this is that the largest procurement they have made since the Reagan/Bush era has been the mind of the polity, which they have convinced that without War against communism whatever, Capitalism crumbles, as War is the only means of income redistribution the religious community, and therefore their flocks, the number one supporter of murdering people in other countries, will tolerate. And without income redistribution, the monopolization of the entire business sector continues until everything is owned by IBM. Or one of the other monopolized entities that can't function without annual infusions from the Central Government.

And given that there was never a whisper raised about spending trillions to keep and feed people in barracks while throwing them bodily out of SRO's to starve in the streets, this situation will not change appreciably under the Biden presidency. Socialism will be available only for those willing to kill for their room and board. Everyone else must work to pay for their keep.

Instead, similar to in the 90's when the Corporate leaders were insisting we help China develop so we would have an enemy worth our mettle, once the inauguration has ended, and the excitement of victory dies down, given our lack of hot wars anywhere in the world, the insanity of allocating resources to "defense", a defense that is offensive, it is bound to happen that even in the USA!USA!, someone might notice that we are throwing all of our best minds and all of our profits, into an enterprise that marches gun-toting citizens around in bootcamps to play soldier while looking down its nose at civilian culture, which it for the most part holds in more contempt than any civilians in other countries do, making it far more dangerous to us than them thar ferrinners are, even though it is supposedly the Iraqi's, Iranian, Syrians and Afghans, the Bosnians and Chinese, Serbs and Russians, Mexicans and Guatemalans, Venezuelans and Somalis, Cubans and Canadians, Vietnamese and Libyans, Palestinians and Kurds, who are our enemies ... somehow. 


Enduring Freedom.

Because it is largely Israel, as the Neo-Cons so adroitly demonstrated, that decides that for us, and then let's our "leaders" know, who then obliges them by setting the propaganda machine, run all but entirely by "people of faith", in motion to manufacture consent. A fairly easy task in the USA! USA! As GW, with Pat Robertson as his vitriolic war-monger, Christ with a machine gun in one hand and a grenade in the other, was so adept at demonstrating. NO one hates tolerance and embraces murderous rampages through other people's countries like the religious, railing venomously against gay marriage while spitting their bloodlust into the microphone, spreading god's Love using depleted uranium bullets and phosphorous bombs as god's messengers from on high: it's the only sexual excitement that is allowed to them. Displacement indeed.

So while the US takes a deep breath and thanks the lord the years of chaos have ended, they ended four years ago for the rest of the world, because the American's troops weren't on the march for the first time in the 21'st Century. So for them, for whom we care not a jot, the chaos may now be ready to start all over again. An assessment I sure hope is wrong; but hope doesn't get too far against the onerous weight and crushing embrace of American Arms.


 

  

Friday, November 6, 2020

It's not What is Snot: I'm so Phlegmatic I live in the Attic.

The dark daze of summer represented the pride that goes before the fall. As Eta ravages Central America and Corona savages the US, which reported >120,000 new cases in a single day yesterday, it's hard not to read statements like, "It's been 100 years since a Dutch physicist discovered superconductivity, but now recent discoveries show we're closer than ever to developing potentially world-changing technology" without cringing.

You'd think we'd have had enough of "world-changing technology", as we reel from the deadly impacts of the repercussions that our world-changing technologies have already unleashed. Central America is hopelessly swamped, Vegas endures its 200'th day without rain (but no worries there ... real estate sales are up 11%) and yet another hurricane threatens landfall in the southeastern US. So pardon me if I register a rise in anxiety when I hear another threat of world-changing technology being loosed onto a benighted humanity ... not to mention onto the dwindling number of other species that continue to be ground into the dust under our mega-wheeled ATV's, the Jackboot being so old-school and not delivering quite sufficient amounts of the Alpha-male surge of adrenalin needed to feed our insatiable lust for dominance and destruction. Not content with the millions of miles of paved roads crushing all life underneath its poisonous asphalt, we've turned motorized "hiking" into a sport whose advocates have not the least concern for the deadly effects their motorized ramblings have on the delicate balance of life in the harsh terrains and environments where it is a miracle living creatures are able to eke out a marginal existence. Mash 'em into the dirt ... Who cares? I'm having Fun!

As the electoral circus continues to monopolize the airwaves, one thing has become abundantly clear, the election in 2016 of the Killer Clown from the Empire State was no fluke. There is a growing realization among a large part of the electorate that they are disenfranchised, their voices ignored, if not falling on deaf ears entirely. Denizens of petrochemical civilization, these petroleurs are in continual denial of how important oil is to their everyday lives, refusing to even consider the possibility that our fundamentally unsustainable economic model, one needing increasingly large inputs of energy resources to  maintain, might be at the root of our problems. Instead they fall for shibboleths like the "Space Cadets' Force", Mission to Mars, or Landings on the Moon, all of which are designed to enhance the profitability of the petrochemical  and microelectronics industries (Made in China), not to help any  of the non-college-certified population so addled by their Cult Leader they prefer to blame the very people all these projects ladle money over, while ignoring the fact that none of them were lobbying for any of these boondoggles that have been handed to them on a platter by the Killer Clown from the Empire State.

But why are they so focused on the Democratic party as their bane? I was born in 1952, the year "I like Ike" was apparently reason enough to ensconce a Republican in the White House. That GOP stalwart then commandeered DOD funds to construct the interstate highway system, setting in motion the monopolization of the US business environment that is ongoing to this day. Using the same justification as Hitler used to build the Autobahn, despite the fact that that was exactly the reason, or one of the major ones, that Hitler lost the War, given the insatiable need for petroleum reserves such a strategy leaves your entire defense industry hinged upon, the victor of that War, led by one of the generals who had his boots on the ground at the end of the day, (so knew that an Interstate Highway system was absolutely unnecessary in order to defeat an enemy that DID have one), he used it to allocate Defense Funds for commercial purposes with the result that MAcDonalds and IHOP replaced all the small Mom-and_Pop eateries that once catered to travelers, causing a destruction in the  restaurant business that hadn't been matched until the destruction the Corona virus has wreaked on it during the current Republican's reign. The same is true of the hospitality industry. Resulting generations later in the AirBNB pastiche we're left with now as the only escape from the nose-bleed fares of the monopolized industry where Holiday Inn, OMNI, Hyatt, and a handful of other Corporations control the-now monopolized hotel industry ... one that had also been far more mom and pop before that. 

President Eisenhower also cemented into Power what is now referred to as the Deep State, but which he then monikored the Military-Industrial Complex. Now, though, the GOP uses the Deep State imprimatur whenever they wish to disparage the control that the Military Industrial Complex has over the nation's decision-making processes, as they don't dare even whisper any criticism of the Pentagon, as their constituents are complete devotees of increasingly pervasive militarization of all aspects of US life. But the Pentagon is exactly what sits at the center of the Military Industrial Empire of the United States .. it is, for all intents and purposes, the nexus of the Deep State.

The next Republican President was Richard Nixon. Nixon had to pay the price of Eisenhower's getting the US involved in Vietnam. To assuage the electorate and convince  them he really "cared" about their well-being, Nixon would propose an ambitious and expensive pollution-fighting agenda to Congress, with the signing of his first significant environmental bill, the Endangered Species Conservation Act of 1969. He would go on to sign, on January 1, 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA),  as “a demonstration of his personal concern for environmental quality”. This bill mandated a detailed report on the environmental impact of all large projects involving federal funding or permitting, allowing the threat of private lawsuits to ensure compliance. "The tasks that need doing", he averred,  "call for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air, and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry, and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.” 

Nixon signed two more significant bills: one created a commission on national population growth; the other,  the Water Quality Improvement Act, made oil companies fully liable for spills.

 Nixon subsequently held an elaborate ceremony and signed the Clean Air Act of 1970 into law.

He also created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other key elements of the nation’s modern environmental regime. In his second environmental address he proposed greater EPA authority over pesticide regulation, more money for sewage-treatment centers, and funding for states to develop environmentally friendly land-use programs.

Next, Nixon visited one of the nation’s greatest foes, Communist China, to "normalize" relations, this went hand-in-hand with another top Nixon goal: to advance détente with the Soviet Communists. 

Perhaps that's what inspired him to sign the Endangered Species Act of 1973,  which added protection for threatened species and allowed federal jurisdiction over critical habitats.

All of which led to lasting, material improvements to the quality of air, water, and land.

All of which led to lasting increases in costs for industry. Soooo ....

There was no, nor has there since been, any fiercer foe to all of these Nixon-signed laws than the next Republican President, Ronald Reagan. Our first Celebrity President, he used his Hollywood image to help hand over the reigns of the Empire to the by then, far more powerful Corporate bosses. He helped George Bush Sr. destroy the Savings and Loan industry, ravaged unions, cratered to Wall St. by abetting the hollowing out of the American industrial base, leaving in his wake The Rust Belt, all facilitated by Corporate raiders and con men Milken the system by establishing Greed as an American virtue and the monetization of everything under the sun. He doubled the national debt, as well as the annual budget deficit, in order to ladle cash onto the military which used it to create the DarpaNet, the nascent beginning of the Internet, which has been the largest single source of job destruction and loss of State Sovereignty in our history, aiding and abetting the monopolization of every industry in the country, instilling, as he did, a rabid fear of communism to justify his build-up of both mountains of debt and mountains of arms to "defeat" it, while simultaneously pouring American's pension savings in to Communist China, enriching the vast communist Chinese population, endearing them to their Communist leadership, all at the expense of his own constituents.

Then, as though that weren't enough damage for one administration, he surreptitiously  funneled American taxpayer dollars in to Saudi Arabia, funding the creation of the Wahhabi-schooled fanaticism of the Mujahadeen, establishing links with the vicious Pakistani ISI to funnel these "Freedom Fighters", who would later become the Taliban, who subsequently housed Al-Qaeda in their midst, into Afghanistan to fight our battle against communism for us. 

His VP then became our next Republican President, and he embroiled us further in War, setting the stage, via his administration's Kuwaiti involvement, using his Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, to position Halliburton to test the feasibility of horizontal drilling, to pilfer Iraq's oil reserves as Kuwait's own Bergen field was sliding down the wrong side of the peak oil production curve.

The next Republican president not only presided over the firs Attack on the American homeland by a foreign threat (the Timothy McVeigh terrorist attack being the first openly terrorist attack by the Republicans on the US federal government) but then proceeded to instigate two unprovoked multi-trillion dollar attacks on foreign nations. Having cut taxes to satisfy his constituency, and then starting two Wars in less than two years, he was instrumental in fostering an environment of fraud, defalcation, and rehypothecation, using the housing market and Wall St (via many of the same mechanisms they used to fuel Enron's fraud-fueled rise) to blow an economic bubble filled with the hot air of false promises and underhanded financial tricks, learned from "Poppy", that resulted in the collapse of the entire globalized economy into what was deemed the Great Recession (never before in all of Capitalism's century's-old history, has there ever been a "Great Recession" ... it was always just called what it was: a depression), but which was in fact, as our current economic catastrophe is, a depression. Depressions being a feature of all Capitalist economies, but one that Republicans would prefer to pretend aren't ... just like the Corona depression now.

So the surprise that Trump is the worst thing that could happen to his own constituents, as the election of every other Republican President has been, is rather, well, surprising. 

And is, in my estimation, still caused by the same reason: the determined refusal to acknowledge that our modern mode of existence, specifically our adamant clenching of the steering wheel of the very vehicles that are driving us into extinction in order to live a life dedicated to the expansion of our own girth (to judge by the obesity of not only our own adult selves, but of our catered-to chauffeured  offspring) isn't just unsustainable, it's a Death cult, leaving in its wake a path strewn with millions of leaking fractured wells, miles of unusable roads, dredged sand banks, plastic gyres, cancer alley, landscapes ravaged by winds, flooded by torrential downpours, blown to bits by hurricane-force winds, and burned to a crisp by uncontrollable raging infernos.

Yet despite all this, the only reference to oil made during the entirety of the so-called election, has been the leading candidate's denial that he would ban fracking. Because in this, our overarching, militarily threatening Empire, the one that's willing to spend an exponentially greater amount of its limited resources on constructing a vast War Machine and nuclear arsenal (that will never be used) in order to enable our much-vaunted military to fight three Wars in three theaters simultaneously (that's how destructive our USA! freedom is on the prospects of everyone else, apparently), the one that's based on the continued supply of petroleum and its products, the largest burner of all forms of fuels to provide its citizens with the mirage of effortless existence, the one boasting of a Free Press, one that is free to ignore as assiduously as any politician, any question relating to a plan to guide us into a future for our country, there s a complete cone of silence around the issue of how, besides simply eliminating an enormous swath of the electorate from engaging in any meaningful way in the economic life of the country, we can better organize existence (starting with not throwing trillions down the drain of military welfare programs) so as to not leave a burnt-out husk as the only legacy of  our "Freedom".

That's why the election is indeed, as our Jim Jones of a leader insists, a fraud. And being the Queen of Fraud, he is quite understandably perplexed that anyone would not consider him its rightful Furor. Like his mentor Putin, he derides democracy even though if it were not for Democracy, the likes of him and his wayward band of thugs, would never have even gotten near to the halls of Power. But that attitude is perfectly consistent with a bankrupt's trashing of the very system that would allow him to pull one scam after the other and leave every one that trusted him holding nothing but a handful of worthless IOU's.

But blaming it on the Democrats is really not consistent with the facts. The GOP and its ham-handed approach to ... well, everything, leaves the Democrats, time and again, in the position they're in now should they win: how to fix this mess without collapsing the system and then being blamed for what was the inescapable denouement of Republican leadership. Obama had to jettison all his ideas of "Change" (as vague as they were) in order to save an economy ravaged by the Bush/Cheney-enabled piratisation of the economy, handing it over, as they did, to be run by the Neo-Con Deep State, although still calling it the Military Industrial complex. Joe Biden certainly isn't the great Hope Obama was forced to abandon, but at least he knows we are in the grips of a potentially catastrophic phenomenon that is leaving other country's economies practically unscathed while it has plunged our own, through purposeful mismanagement, into the abyss.

And Hope, what remains at the bottom of the Panderer's Box, now that the evil of Pandemic has been allowed, no, encouraged, (propelling pandemic numbers to new highs by parading around the country to Partietags that were, each and every one of them, SuperSpreader events (we wouldn't be at > 120,000 new infections a day otherwise)) to spread undeterred, might be all we'll have left once the Furor's died down.






Thursday, October 29, 2020

Talking Heads - We're on the Road to Nowhere (Official Video)


It seems more like we've already rode to nowhere, yet all we want to do is get back on track, the question as to whether it is the right track being all but squelched. Any discussion derailed. The Silver Express must be put back on the path to its terminal destination.

The Paris Accords did nothing because they were never meant to. One can see this by the lack of anything but vague, unrealistic or unenforceable curtailments and a withdrawal of financial wherewithal, labelled Austerity, from large sectors of the economy. So we have ended up, as Mona Corona has made most manifest, with the road being paved out of the bones that the Jet Set and the Yacht yahoos have ground down to dust to fuel their lounge-lizard-writ-large lifestyles. All along, emissions could have easily been abated, but they interfered too much with the preferred lifestyles of the rich and shameless.

This morning the NYT reported that the idea of modifying Earth’s atmosphere to cool the planet is attracting money and attention. That is how insistent we are to continue down the road to nowhere, we will modify the very atmosphere, (ahem ... again, you mean we will modify it again ... we've already modified it, and that's not working out so well) rather than modify our own behavior or economic system, we will modify, with no idea of the results, or the collateral damage, of which there is always a measure, it is bound to inflict. 

It is for those reasons that I am predicting, despite all the polls, that our current president will remain our chief executive. In a cockeyed world, the the truth is a lie, the absurd is the norm and Donald Trump-a-dump, Queen of Corona, reigns supreme. If to continue geo-engineering is the attitude of Science and industry, which, just as the CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere couldn't, or at least wouldn't, have occurred without the application of scientific principles by industrial processes, neither will the continued geoengineering, with whatsoever other devise is used to try to rebalance the ecosystem to redress the damage done by our unbalanced behavior, it will once again need science applied on an industrial scale, using the same fundamentals of existing science whose most important conclusions are derided by Das Furor of the same country whose entire military expansion into every country in the world is heavily science-based, not the least example of which is this medium we're using right now, as well as the Corona Queen's favorite, twitter, without which there are no tweets, and the impacts of its implementation, such as the currently controversial one of 5G, on this closed planetary system we dominate, to the detriment of all other species forced to co-exist in this giant chemical experiment we've imposed on them, than the travesty of yet another Trump term, a continuation of the Killer Clown from the Empire State's reign, seems not so much an absurdity as an inevitability.  

The Madhattan's Magnate'ism is Polarizing.
Killer Clown from the Empire State. 


Hail the Clown. Long live the Killer Clown!


Look, we know that we're going
 we just don't know where we've been
Harsh fateful winds are blowing
From places we've never seen
And just like little children
We know not what we want
Just that the future's uncertain
So we're all wracked with doubt

Yeah

We've all just rode to nowhere
Just look outside
Why'd we decide to go where
The planet is fried
I'm reeling from too much mourning
And you know
We've burnt the road to Paradise
Let it go, amigo

Hurricane winds are blowing
Everything down
The distant horizon's Glowing
Send in the Clown
Maybe you wonder where you are
I don't care
Nowhere is time still on our side
You don't care, dye your hair

We've already rode to nowhere
We've already rode to nowhere
We've already rode to nowhere

There's a hellscape in my mind
Come along and take the ride
It's not all right, baby, it's alight
And it's not so far away
It grows closer day by day
It's not all right, baby, not this flight
Would you like to come along
You can help me sing the song
It's not all right, baby, it's too bright
They can tell you what to do
Since they've made a fool of you
It's not all right, baby, it's not right

There's a hellscape in my mind
Come along and take that ride
It's not all right, baby, it's not right
And it's very far away
But it's growing day by day
It's not all right, baby, be uptight
Would you like to come along
You can help me trash this song
It's not all right, baby, it's a fright
They can tell you what to do
Tell you that it's, "Just the flu"
It's not all right, baby, it's bleak night

We've already rode to nowhere
Don't dare to get off
Now that we've rode to nowhere
Too scared to get off
Can't even use out Timeshare
Just a ripoff 
 One big ripoff





Thursday, October 15, 2020

The Verse is Yet to Come.


Aeppli's Last Supper: Let them eat Fake News.


The Dachau Ballet: A Pivot to the Past.  

As the world does its dance on the head of a pin,
Like reporters, it does so with plenty of spin;
Hence every plan for methane abatement
Is shelved, or cancelled and filed in the basement.
For now.

Some economies open, others re-shut
Leaving oil supplies in a permanent glut.
It's stored in caverns and ships, in barrels and cans, 
To sell at higher prices is everyone's plan: 
Cash Cow.

But the petro Powers are all fueled by debt, 
Their economies based on how much they can get
Per barrel for their hard-won energy reserves
But Covid has thrown them one vicious curve.
And how.

The leaders' plans have made it all but formal,
All we really need do is reset back to normal,
Once this virus, this bug, this germ most obscene
Is conquered by science with a killer Vaccine.
From Dow.

Do you remember the fall of the USSR?
An implosion faster than deposing the Czar,
This, we told ourselves, was The End of History,
Exactly why, well, that's still a mystery,
Moscow.

But the bright shiny future the Triumphalists envisioned
Ensuing events have heaped with naught but derision.
Russians by the millions lost housing and jobs
It looked much like the situation in our nation of slobs 
is now.

So, what went wrong ... is not something awry?
Or if this were the plan, aren't you wondering, "Why?"
Or hadn't you noticed Communist China prosper
Even as the US seems to have lost her
Know-how.

"Let's raise communist peasants from their rural lair,
And plunge rah-rah capitalists into bleak despair."
So the US Red Party moved our industrial base
To where another Red Party could make its populace
Kowtow. 

To constant surveillance and One-Party rule 
Re-education camps designed to be cruel,
While back in the good ole USSA,
They cut vacations, pensions, healthcare and pay.
Somehow.

So while the Bosses speak out of both sides of their mouth
The lives of the workers continually go south.
For Capitalism is, as it turned out to be,
But a system of graft and exploitive piracy.
Called "Dow".

The yellow vests are gone, there's no more Hong Kong,
The Freedom they promised has all gone so wrong,
Instead of limiting my freedom where it impacts you,
It bequeaths on the Keptocracy the "Freedom" to redo
Dachau.


Levittown Dachau.
 















Monday, October 12, 2020

FLOTUS Alone: The First Lady Vanishes.


                    Saboteur: Psycho Gaslights Suspicion by a Notorious Spellbound Frenzy down 39 Steps.


As the head honcho heaves his god-sent torso around the country, there seems to be an unearthly silence about the state of health of the other positive-testing Trump, by whom I mean his wife. Perhaps it has been asked in late-night forums, on after-hours talk shows, or other outlets I don't peruse, but I've yet to hear a single reporter, concerned citizen, or politico inquire as to how the wife of the President, whose last mention of I've heard only in relation to her having the virus, but since then, not a whisper as to how she has fared with it. 

As the roster of people infected at the Super Spreader event at the White House grows, and is reported and commented on, as well as discussion of the aggressive treatment the Chief Executive underwent, no one has deigned to ask if the FLOTUS is receiving the same treatment ... or any treatment. 

Now the fact that Malaria is easily the most useless First "lady" we have ever had makes such an omission easy to miss, as she is usually missing from anything having to actually do with the country she could care less about, except for how much money it can contribute to her bottom line, it is still quite startling to realize that nobody actually gives two cents whether she's sick, has a temperature, is showing symptoms, or is actually obeying quarantine, a moot point, since her husband flaunts his own administration's recommendations on the matter.

I first noticed this deathly silence when they were asking the President when his last negative test was, and he was refusing to answer. I was particularly curious to know, as one of my first questions was, "How do we know the Great White Hope for hicks didn't give it to Hope Hicks instead of the other way  around?" 

The answer to that first question could well answer the latter. 

Any other man, let alone the President of the world's largest military and economic behemoth, would have felt it incumbent upon himself to offer updates as to their wife's health after making it known that she had become infected with a microbe that has killed > 210,000 of her husband's countrymen, sickened 7 million worldwide and changed the world forever ... whatever happens in the race for a vaccine. 

But nope. Not Trump-a-dump. He doesn't care to mention it, and no one else cares enough to ask. 

I consider GW Bush to have been by far our worst President. Yet had he been in office when this happened and Laura Bush had come down with it, the pathos, the constant coverage, the flowers and cards would have flowed like water as the citizenry expressed their concern for her welfare, and you could be sure that even in the middle of two Wars, a re-election campaign, and an economy kept alive only by virtue of nationalized scams, embezzlements, and globalized Wall St-fueled securities fraud, that GW would have kept us apprised of Laura's condition. But Miss hoity-toity, her well-coiffed cobra-like head kept in the clouds by high heels that function more like stilts, in order to keep her away from mingling with the hoi polloi, has apparently had the effect that the masses don't really give a damn about her, returning in spades her "Let them eat ... " (well, it ain't cake) attitude toward the polity.  

An attitude, to judge from all appearances, also shared by her husband.














Thursday, October 1, 2020

Poised on The Edge of Night: FiasCOvid.

                                                                 AntiFa and Uncle Sam.

The rig count surpassed a thousand during the last days of 2019.

As Covid-19 started to tighten its clammy grip on Wuhan, and wildfires raged across Australia, "Drill, baby, Drill" was all the rage in the USA!USA!, as Americans by the droves signed on the dotted line to resign themselves to 7 years of indenture to pay for a gas-guzzling SUV whose utility will not outlast its predicted lifecycle, at which time they will be heard-pressed to get any cash for trash, or fuel, for that matterfor their behemoths.

A nation whose citizens have to push taxi-drivers out of a job so as to leave their customers desperate enough to use uninsured amateurs to drive them around, as said amateurs have no other way to pay for their own basic transportation, somehow found nothing amiss that a lame ride-hailing service became a Wall St. Superstar. It's almost as though they would have thought someone a genius because he realized you could use a computer to construct a spreadsheet. Brilliant! So millions looked to the Presidential debates to see if either candidate had any input as to how they might plan for the future (the "they" in this case meaning the citizens, but would work just as well if it referred to the debaters).

As the pundits argue endlessly about who lost the Debate, the obvious answer is, of course, We the People lost them. There are no more Presidential debates, there is only the Presidential seal and his trainers. But outlining the path forward from our pandemic pandemonium was nowhere on the agenda. Like climate change itself, it was/is mostly regarded by all as a hoax, by none more so than the media who sees it as one more crisis to exploit while endlessly berating anyone else trying to make notoriety from the disease that has become their new favorite cash-cow, the clowning antics of the chief Executive having become a bit overplayed of late. 

Surprisingly, though, it seems to be of no one's concern that the rig count declared in the first sentence of this piece has plummeted by a factor of four, from > 1000 to less than 250, in the space of but a few months. In a country that has, unbeknownst to its benighted and feckless citizens, rigged its economy to be more and more, via mountains of debt as high as the Rockies that have no hope/plan of being repaid, dependent on the last gasps of the fossil fuel industries, there seems to be not the slightest anxiety as to how we are to pay off the enormous debt assumed to exploit a resource that can't fetch a price high enough to even pay for its extraction. The Jenga analogy of Naked Shorts doesn't even begin to illustrate the disastrous mountains of derivatives left precariously teetering over the abyss that unreconcilable contracts leveraged on an asset for which their is no market are currently balanced.

An industry that is already lining up for ever-more subsidies while the Fed busily concocts "cash" flows of investment dollars to replace the ice floes of an Arctic Ocean that is, (as part of the hoax?), rapidly becoming just a colder tributary of the Atlantic Ocean. Perhaps it will be renamed the Exxon Sea.

Meanwhile, the tax receipts from those dwindled oil revenues have collapsed, while the nation's chief executive tries to conflate tax deductions as though they are revenue to the federal government in order to justify his billionaire's contribution to the nation's coffers of a mere pittance, the size of which, even my own tax bill, moi, a "senior" with nothing to tax but a meager income from Social Security and pension, surpasses.

As Malaria teetered over to her husband's side on her whore heels, the shadow of Imelda Marcos darkened a debate stage where the ongoing economic collapse of the USA!USA! was never addressed. 

Yet it was the President himself who spit into the microphone in March that, "This was an attack! An ATTACK!" Well, so was 9/11 Mr. President. But that Chief Executive used it to his advantage. He used it to UNITE the country behind him. So much so that they trusted him enough to allow the instigation of two Wars in less than two years, even while the Neocons that drove him were salivating over the prospects of even more wars to come. USA!USA! 

As I watch the handling of this crisis, it is hard not to name it after Thomas Ricks' Fiasco, the exposé of the Bush mishandling of the Iraq War, and yet GW's re-election, even as he "bungled" one aspect of the war after the other, ensuring that the US would be mired down in a quagmire, he and his own little Darth Vader VP gambled it would leave Americans still too shaken to change their President ... and so instituted a regime of  red and yellow “alerts” (that disappeared completely after the election) to keep the polity in constant fear ... a gamble that paid off, and one which the Trumpelstiltskin had hopes of replicating by allowing Corona virus to run rampant and instilling the same fear so as to manipulate the same levers as his predecessor. 

Thus does the inexplicable, "When the looting starts the shooting starts", exclamation in the face of mass protests, from the Offal Office's Occupant make sense, aping, as it did, the GW Bush gauntlet thrown to the incipient insurgency in Iraq by goading them to "Bring it ON", when he was warned about the growing danger to OUR troops (the army is under the command of the Commander -in-Chief, but it is the People's army, not the Chief Executive's) that the strategic errors being made in Iraq was fostering. As they were planned to, as it turned out. Who knows how many American soldiers' lives were lost by virtue of GW's schoolyard taunt. But more importantly, from Trump-a-dump's point of view, who cares now? Who even remembers? That's what Trump-a-Dump has counted on right from the start of his campaign: all the rhetoric about the right or wrong about what the President does, is swept under the carpet and, à la Poppy Bush, a hagiographic memory is always construed to enhance the most reprehensible behavior. Had Hitler himself been a US President, he would have been immortalized as a Christian Nationalist, a saver of fetuses, an economic miracle worker and military genius.

Thus can 200,000 dead be so blithely dismissed, by the specious claim that it would have been 2 million if not for the actions taken by his administration ... actions implemented despite the fact that Trump-a-dump fought them tooth and nail. "Open the country for Easter ... wouldn't that be nice?"

So where to from here?

His guidance on the virus having been so vilified, his advise to use UV rays to bathe your children in, or bleaching your lungs as a prophylactic, having been scoffed at during the debate by the President as obvious sarcasm, which I suppose means that using verbal irony that mocks, ridicules, and expresses contempt for all the efforts made to combat the spread of a pandemic is preferable to plain stupidity ... Really? Are you sure about that? Because it doesn't seem to me that, during a pandemic caused by a virus that is propagated via airborne droplets needs the added insult of the country's Chief Executive figuratively spitting in our collective faces, which is what making sarcastic remarks during a "Presidential" briefing on a pandemic that had made it necessary to line up refrigerated big rig trailers to ferry the heaps of dead bodies to Potter's field, amounts to. 

So, okay. No help on that front is a given. Just ask Herman Cain. Oh that 's right, you can't. Because he's dead. Having contracted the virus at one of Trump's maskless, indoor rallies. But they talk about losing a colleague with less regret than they talk about losing their I-phone. So there's that.

But even on the economy, Trump-a-dump's supposed strong suit, Cain was at least Abel to come up with his moronic 9-9-9. That was his economic plan, for those who don't have a memory for the ridiculous. However, a ridiculous plan would be a delight right now, as it is far better than the current lack of any economic plan. Do you have one Mr. President? Nein! Nein! Nein!

Because, given the county's outsized dependence on the fossil fuel regime it has fostered, its collapse, along with the price of oil, gone all but uncommented on, leaves the Nation's finances in the worst straits since the last time we decided to trust the reins of its stewardship to a Republican administration: all but hopeless.

The trade deficit, already disastrous, has ballooned; since there are no buyers for the all-but-Free natural gas we were planning to sell. And with the collapse of oil pumping, the gas being but a side effect, the supply is contracting. Supply needed for input to both the generation of electricity and the feedstock for the petrochemical plants dotting the nation's landscapes, as well as the yet-to-be-paid for LNG ports and ships, into which billions upon billions of borrowed dollars have been poured, for our glorious, fossil-fueled future, as one politician after the other lined their pockets to construct a platform from which to sell for a pittance the rest of the country's oil and natural gas supply, even while we ship one tanker of oil after the other to China to fuel the expansion of their economy while ours contracts. It has by now become apparent that the strategy of fracturing the landscape and releasing weather-changing (yes Mr. President, you were right: such an egregious belching of gases doesn't just change the climate, it changes the WEATHER, too!) gases that result in multiple multi-billion dollar catastrophes year after year, is a loser's game. 

The Fed, once again magically conjuring up funny money, has surely lost its mind. The damaged assets it purchased to pull the rich out of the abyss they had shoved the rest of us into, are still on its books, the lame attempt in 2019 to redress the imbalance having immediately spawned a credit crunch and an emergency in the repo market that sent them scurrying back to their corners, months before there was any whisper of any pandemic. Meaning? Well, meaning that even were the economy to turn in stellar performances in the next ten years' time, the amount of liabilities, now double what they were when Trump took office, will still be on its unbalanced balance sheet, while the number for the nation's budget deficit has already doubled what it was in the worst year of President Obama's fiscal years.

The Green new deal likewise has nothing to offer. Gavin Newsom has just mandated that 2035 will be the year California will only allow EV's to be sold. Yet Biden named 2030 - as recently as the DNC Presidential debates - as the year by which a complete replacement fleet of EV's would replace the ICE machines currently burning their way across the nation's byways and highways. Let's see now, that means the entire nation will have moved ahead of its most populous, ambitiously Green State by a good five years, were one to give the slightest credence (no one did ... least of all fellow Democrat, Governor Gavin Newsom) to Biden's declaration. At this rate, 5 years tacked on for every six months we get nearer to 2030 (the DNC debates were in March), means that by the end of the next President's term, whomsoever that may be, we would be looking at 2075 (4 year term = 8 six month periods X's 5years delay for each 6 mos = 40 years) as the year by which EV's will have replaced ICE machines. Which basically means it ain't gonna happen ... ever.

Likewise wind, solar, and even hydro. Because Climate Change is still spoken of as though it were some theoretical outcome that will occur in the future, but that is not the case. It has occurred already; and there's no reason to believe that it won't continue to do so. The disservice science has done us is to talk of Climate Change as though it were an event, but it is not: it is a process. As heat is added to the earth system ... to any closed system ... it causes instability as the closed system reconfigures itself into a new stasis consistent with its new reality. But the reality of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere keeps changing, so the weather/climate regime has to keep changing to accommodate itself to each new set of parameters under which it operates. But it can't keep up. As soon as it rejiggers itself, more CO2 is added to the mix, thus more heat is trapped, and the system has no opportunity to stabilize itself, so its near-term predictability is no longer based on anything beyond speculation. You can no longer use the past to predict the future. So its long-term predictability is already beyond the scope of science. Derechos flattening fields into which we have poured billions in investment are now the future. Oops. No they're not. There a present of the present. Yes, the main hit comes to agriculture (Syria knows a little about that), but eating seems to be so last week. Even the acres of corn destroyed weren't for food: we prefer to burn what's left of our oil supply and to drain what's let of our groundwater to fuel our runs to the grocery store. Obviously we are mainly worried about keeping the juice flowing, the current surging to energize our high voltage lifestyle. The only solution seems to be, "Let them eat yellowcake". Yet even nuclear needs predictable sea levels and weather patterns for the cooling of their hotrods. So what are we to do?

The problem this makes for the co-generation of green energy is that wind is a weather phenomenon: as the climate changes and gets hotter, wind patterns change, its being a function of temperature gradients and entropy, so the not slight problem, given their immensity and the cost in energy to install them and the electric infrastructure needed to carry the current they generate, of just exactly where to locate them, becomes an enigma. Where the wind is blowing strong enough to turn those giant blades today is very unlikely to be the same place in as little as ten years' time (just ask Germany), so just like with fossil fuels, you end up with multi-billion dollar stranded assets, built with borrowed monies that still have the payments to meet with nothing to show for it but an incredibly expensive cleanup ... a mirror image of the fracturing of the economy the collapse of oil prices has engendered for the US economy. It has left millions of leaking abandoned wells for the public to pay for while the keptocracy keeps their graft.

It may seem like a lifetime ago, but even as war raged in Iraq and Afghanistan, then-President Bush was photographed walking hand-in-hand with the then-King of bone-Sawdi Arabia while the headline promised our return to $20/barrel oil thanks to their negotiations. Now, however, the double-that-amount of $40/bbl is still not even close to being enough so the industry struggles desperately to goose it back up by yet another third to at least $60/bbl. So in the span of but a few short  years, far from assuring the consumers that they will work mightily to get gas prices down, this administration's strategy has been to promise to get the price of a barrel of oil up, up, up! With nary a whisper of dissent! Which doesn't, however, alter the fact that the price paid for the energy required to run our now-de-industrialized (somehow, even as it runs more and more on energy-intensive industrialized processes ... go figure that one out) has tripled while the profits to be derived from investing in that enterprise look more like Uber and Lyft: the investors pay the lion's share of the "earnings" since the rates one is able to charge a cash-strapped customer base remain stymied. Thus the "business" models of both Uber and Fracturing remained dependent on investors losing their shirts. Without new blood, what the pump-and-dump industry calls suckers, to finance the "plays", thus are they both flailing.  

So given just these metrics, it seems unlikely any economic miracle is going to be coming even from our Genius President ... It' won't come until well after 2050, if ever, by which time, at the current rate of CO2 forcing, there will be, summing up the additional ~3ppm's of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere on an annual basis, the gas-load of CO2 alone will be: 3ppm X's 30yrs = 90 + 420 (approximate current burden) = 515ppm's. That figure doesn't take into account all that leaking methane, nor methane's hydroxylation into CO2 after a decade's lapse, nor the decrease in the oceans' uptake of the gas as it becomes more and more saturated with it, nor the decrease in Nature's uptake of CO2 as we burn down one rainforest after the other to make "Green" (yes they really call it that) fuel.

But there is no  plan, and no one wants to hear any of what I just wrote, so instead we get the antics we prefer to even a dollop of truth, or any serious consideration of our future. And as the economic engine of US hegemony continues its razing of the globe for the impoverishment of our allies and foes alike, the benefits of that destruction will continue to flow at a faster and faster pace to a smaller and smaller number of our own citizenry, who will continue the status quo while the rest of us, chided and goaded by a political class system that sees our squabbling as a cover under which they can continue their own defalcations with impunity, fly at each other with bared fangs while our leaders offer nothing but platitudes and promises of change that aren't even slated to take place for decades, even as the processes that call for that change are already now again ravaging Paradise. 

Now they're scheduling a second debate? Whatever for?