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.