Economic Armageddon

Social Skills in the 21st Century

~ cockroachconspiracy

 

 

Full disclosure; some may dismiss my remarks as being those of just another old curmudgeon but that’s disingenuous. And even though I came of age in another era, I believe that the core of social skills remains the same even though they’re becoming rarer in these times. It gives me little pleasure & no comfort to note how different the “socializing” of today’s youth is from when I was a young man.

remember the argument against homeschooling i.e. they need to develop social skills???

 

First on my hit list of things that I believe are having a deleterious effect on the young people of today is the “smart phone.” Everywhere I go, I see young people & increasingly, middle-aged people with their eyes glued to their “smart phones.” It’s like they’re cult members or zombies addicted to this techno-drug. And it saddens me to see so many people not interacting with one another because of their obsession with their gadgets. Perhaps these portable entertainment centers will serve them well as the corporate cockroaches slowly poison & strangle our natural environment? When all the trees have been felled, all waterways have become so polluted that it’s no longer safe to swim in any of them, when our air is so toxic that the entire human population is forced to wear masks like in China’s industrial zones, watching video clips of the days when humanity was nurtured by the real deal will have to suffice?

 

One of my pet peeves is when I’ll be involved in a conversation with a young person & their smart phone rings and they simply answer their phone & engage in a conversation, sometimes at length, with their “friend,” and leave me sitting there with no apology. It says to me that my feelings & my time is insignificant and reveals how pernicious the grip on their attention their phone has become. This is the height of rudeness & inconsiderate behavior in my opinion. And when this occurs, I will often just get up and leave to the surprise & amazement of my young acquaintance. They have no idea of why I left and if you have to tell them why, what’s the point?

 

Continuing on, I am personally disappointed in myself for allowing myself to get sucked into the Facebook orbit & its near universal capture of the younger generation. My gut told me long before I ever succumbed to its temptation, this is a platform for teenage girls and I resisted joining it for several years. But, a cousin of mine told me that it was how I could connect with relatives I’ve never met—which by-the-way, never panned-out—and I soon became addicted to the political posts.

 

You see, I have become obsessed with politics over the past 30 years or better & have conservatively invested over 50,000 hours or more in reading, researching, & writing about politics. And with Facebook, I deluded myself into believing that I had a real platform from which to speak and be heard. I would get an encouraging sentence or two every now & then, just enough to keep me going and God knows how much time & energy I invested in writing lengthy responses, observations, etc. on political issues over the several years I was a Facebook zombie?

 

I’ve always been a bit slow—perhaps that’s why I was a good fit as a teaching assistant in the special education field—but after the introduction of the emoticons as a way for people to “communicate” their responses on complex social & political issues, I slowly became more & more disillusioned. I finally saw the light after several, self-imposed exiles from this “Social media” megalith and had to accept the reality that my absence didn’t mean shit to my 3,000 or better “friends.” A couple of months ago, I finally took the leap of faith to sanity and permanently deleted my Facebook account after saving my history. Who knows, there may be something worthwhile to write about there?

 

Okay, onward & upward my fellow freedom fighters! You may be tempted to write me off as just another one of those Alex Jones conspiratorial nut-jobs like Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan but bear with me if you will? I’m not claiming that this is an overt or covert conspiracy on the part of the government but in terms of the harmful effects of the “social media” & the technological gadgets absorbing more & more of our attention, it may as well be a conspiracy. And the irony of calling these devices “smart phones,” would be hilarious if not for the fact that they are seriously undermining our ability to communicate with one another because of their built-in superficiality & manipulative functions.

 

Look up Tristan Harris if you doubt what I’m saying? He was high up on the food chain so-to-speak, in the Google corporation & has laid it out very succinctly i.e. smart phones are like mini slot machines in our pockets that people are becoming addicted to like gamblers addicted to gambling.

Obviously, reading is becoming an artifact from the past. Just do a brief search of Americans’ reading habits & the sad statistics that reveal how few of us have actually read a single book in the past year. The visual i.e. video clips, movies, video games, etc. has become the overwhelmingly favored mode of “learning” and “entertainment.” And returning to the subject of “smart phones,” this reminds me of another aggravating thing about them i.e. I’ll be having a conversation with someone & if I ask them a question about a subject or person or etc. that they’re not familiar with, they’ll pull out their smart phone to look it up. I try to politely tell them that I’m not interested in what their computer has to say on the subject & that they’re not being graded by me on our conversation. Sadly, far too many people today seem to believe that if it’s on the Internet, it’s a fact. But I’m old enough to remember the acronym G.I.G.O. (Garbage In, Garbage Out) i.e. just because someone entered the data on the Internet doesn’t make it truth or a fact. We have allowed ourselves to become slaves to the machines we’ve created & people have all but lost completely, the ability to think critically or analytically for themselves. And how convenient this all is for the corporate cockroaches who only have one agenda i.e. sell us as much of their crap as they possibly can!

 

Furthermore, thanks in large part to the beloved Bill Clinton & his signing of NAFTA into law, manufacturing which used to be a major part of our economy, has mostly disappeared from America so the powers that be aren’t really worried about worker strikes, etc. So, where do they think we’re going to get the money to buy their crappy products? And with their polarization of the public so effectively done by Trump with his hateful xenophobic rhetoric, along with our increasing isolation thanks to our smart phones, the status quo is smugly kicking back in their executive suites with their feet up on the table laughing at our gullibility.

 

This onslaught against working class Americans in particular & the public in general really became pronounced when Reagan became president. Exhibit A, one of Reagan’s first acts after becoming president was to fire the air traffic controllers who were on strike, for life. This sent a clear message to corporate America i.e. it’s open season on unions. And when Reagan proclaimed that the 1980s were the “Me Decade,” it was again evident that he & the G.O.P. were all about greed & selfishness and their “philosophy” was that of Ayn Rand’s. Do I need to remind you of that minor hiccup we experienced in 2008 when the world’s economy imploded thanks to the greed of bankers, hedge fund managers, the credit agencies, lack of regulations & enforcement of the regulations that were on the books, etc.? Yeah, a universal collapse that cost tens of millions of people to lose their homes, their pensions, their health insurance, their jobs, their life savings & their self-respect. So now when people tell me that they’re not interested in politics, I say, so none of the things I just mentioned above matter to you?

 

In today’s America, I rarely hear we or us, it’s usually me or I. Consider the very name of one of the most popular tech gadgets, the “i-Phone.” And they also offer the iPad, the iTablet, and God knows how many other “I” products? Get what I’m saying? It’s all about normalizing the glorification of the individual & selfishness or self-centeredness. Still not convinced? Consider the fact that Apple through clever tax avoidance schemes & loopholes takes advantage of Ireland’s low corporate tax rate of 3% to avoid the 35% it’d have to pay if it were honest in America. Again, greed is good & the hell with the public’s general welfare. We, the U.S. taxpayers pay our taxes because we can’t afford expensive whores like the corporate lawyers Apple pays to keep their profits growing. Never mind the fact that our taxes pay for the roads, highways, bridges, airports, ports, police, fire depts., military, etc. that these corporations rely on to conduct their business operations here in the U.S. even though they claim their headquarters are the P.O. Box they have in the Cayman Islands, etc.

 

I could go on and on about corporate corruption but I’ll try to refrain from doing so here. The point is that selfishness, which used to be considered a negative trait, has now become almost glorified or at least accepted as perfectly normal. Referring back to Reagan’s reign of error & terror, homelessness in America got a big start when Reagan closed down most state mental hospitals.. And for many, they became homeless because of medical bills or their companies closing down. Again, it was the greed & heartlessness of the corporate CEOs of the companies they worked for.

 

Moreover, this isn’t a partisan issue, Clinton also signed the bill that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act which FDR signed into law. If you aren’t familiar with it, it forbid commercial banks to make risky, speculative loans with people’s savings. And this too was a significant factor in the U.S. economic crash & the ripple effects in the world economy as a whole. Greed is just as popular and common in the democratic party as it is in the republican party.

 

Where has our humanity, our compassion for our fellow human beings, our empathy for others’ suffering, humiliation, & degradation gone to? Will you only care when it happens to you or a loved one? By then it’ll be too late. United we stand and divided we fall and division is what the corporate cockroaches are all about i.e. the centuries old strategy of divide & conquer.

 

It’d be laughable if it weren’t so damn serious that these “social media” are the antithesis of helping us to become more social beings. But I know that you’re probably still skeptical of my thesis and perhaps you will simply dismiss me as an alarmist or conspiracy nut so here are a couple of guys, one who is considered the father of Virtual Reality & a veteran of Silicon Valley and the other who was a part of the original team at Facebook;

and

Admittedly, I should emulate my intellectual hero, Noam Chomsky & read the New York Times and several other notable newspapers but my disillusionment with them was so deep that I turned against them decades ago. I get my news from the alternative media (not alternate facts but honest, in depth reporting) like Democracy Now! And Ian Masters on Background Briefing. I bring this up because I too was allowing myself to be manipulated by many of the “news” posts on Facebook but after it was revealed that Facebook sold our data to companies like Cambridge Analytica which played a major role in the election of Trump, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me & directly led to my escape from Facebook forever. Sadly, most Americans get their news from Facebook & not even having a modicum of critical or analytical thinking skills (I was an educator for over 20 years) they are easily manipulated by deceitful propagandists like Steve Bannon & FOX “News.”

 

In a nutshell, “social media” has taken over the role of mainstream media in terms of training us to be fearful of our government, fearful of our bosses i.e. will they fire me for something I wrote or posted on Facebook, etc.? fearful of terrorists, fearful of Muslims, etc. etc. etc. As I touched on earlier, people using these social media don’t want to have intelligent, fair debates on the serious issues facing us. No, they want to express their fears, their prejudices, their hate. And most are too lazy to even read more than a sentence, let alone respond in a calm, reasoned manner.

 

Obviously not only the corporations but also the U.S. government’s surveillance agencies like the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the N.S.A. and etc. are all tapping into our social media accounts & building detailed files on all of us. If you don’t know this by now, you must’ve been living in one of those caves that Osama bin Laden supposedly hid-out in. And please excuse me for a brief visit to Alex Jones land but how convenient for the masters of the universe who have access to all our personal histories. As Snowden pointed out, it’s all about control. Some theorize that should you become a problem to the powers that be, all they have to do is bring up all your personal history & build a case against you from there should they want to silence you.

 

Okay, back to my thesis. The reality we (not the 1% born with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouths) are faced with the fact that every last vestige of the “social safety net” that FDR established after the colossal harms done to us by the Robber Barons, is being slashed again & again & again. The Republicans have been very public about their opposition to the New Deal & have been doing everything in their power since it was established to totally eliminate every last vestige of it and have been largely successful in doing so. Trump is doing his best to help in their destruction & the simpletons who support him haven’t a clue.

 

Another aspect or result of our obsession with smart phones & social media is that they have become our shelter, the place we go to in search of solace & comfort. Have you ever noticed someone sitting alone in a café & how they attempt to escape their feeling of loneliness by bringing out their smart phone? This is yet another example of the closed, doom-loop system that is engulfing us.

 

We have Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and a president who twitters like Tweedle-Dee & Tweedle-Dum rather than read a book on history or politics, etc. etc. etc. I can’t even keep up with all this nonsense nor do I care to. We’re so alone but we have convinced ourselves that we’re not really alone because we have thousands of “friends” on Facebook, etc. Artificial reality, alternate facts, alternate reality? Where does it all end if we don’t take a cold, hard, honest look at our lives and our values?

 

Consider if you will, the fact that the tax rate on the super wealthy was 91% under President Eisenhower’s term in office and today, it is under 14% and many of them have found loopholes so that they don’t even pay that. I bring this up to highlight the fact that there will never be enough personal wealth for them & therefore they keep finding ever more ways to take every last dime in our pockets. And because most Americans have been reduced to working two, three, four or more minimum wage jobs in their desperate attempts to avoid becoming homeless, one of the few remaining ways the wealthy can still profit from our desperation is by locking us up in their prisons for profit which have the additional benefit of forcing prisoners to work for private corporations like:

 

American Express Company, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan & Company, Allstate Insurance Company, GEICO, ExxonMobil Corporation, BP America, Johnson & Johnson, Sara Lee Corporation, Procter & Gamble, Sprint, AT&T, Verizon Communications, United Airlines, Wendy’s, McDonalds Corporation, Fruit of the Loom, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Quaker Oats and Microsoft.

 

And you thought the old chain-gang days where prisoners had to dig ditches, work for farmers, etc. were over? Yeah, welcome to America, the land where the rich are above the law & the free market is a bed-time story for the ignorant masses. Yeah, some prisoners earn as much as $1.15 per day but then the phone company charges them outrageous rates for personal phone calls which pretty much nullifies that.

 

Continuing on, every which way we turn, it’s all about quantity, not quality. How much money we make, how many friends we have, how expensive our clothes, our cars, our food, etc. is. How much time we saved on our drive to work. How fast our communications are not the quality of that communication just the speed. As a society, America is among the dumbest in the so-called “developed world.” Consider who’s representing us in the oval office. Every time he speaks, I feel nauseous or like someone is scratching a blackboard with their fingernails.

 

The vast Midwest has become a series of ghost towns because they were usually one company towns & when their CEOs realized they could make a lot more profit by shutting down and moving to countries where people are so desperately poor that they’ll work for a couple of dollars per day, they abandoned their loyal employees in the blink of an eye. And cities like New York & L.A. have become too expensive for the vast majority of us to live in. Mind you, I have nothing against someone who works hard & becomes rich except when they do so by lying, cheating, stealing & in general destroying people’s lives in order to become obscenely wealthy.

In conclusion, I’ve spent my life informing myself. I’ve been an avid reader since I was in the first grade & for the past 30 years or better, I guesstimate that I’ve spent at least 50,000 hours reading books on history, politics, philosophy, etc. and making copious notes in many of the books in my extensive library. I’ve watched countless documentaries, listened to political & social speakers, written hundreds of essays & over 4,000 pages on two major books I’m writing, etc. etc. etc. but I have nowhere to turn to for social interaction.

 

In fact, this reminds me of an amusing anecdote. As I mentioned earlier, I have been corresponding with Chomsky for the past 13 years, well in one of our exchanges, I complained about the social taboo against speaking about politics in bars & Noam wasn’t aware of it. Yeah, that caused me to chuckle but it depresses the hell out of me because the few times I have gotten away with talking about politics in bars, I saw people’s eyes light up & they became very animated and really enjoyed the conversation. Some have even said that it was the best conversation they’d had in years. Is it merely another “coincidence” that we’re not allowed to talk about politics in bars? Think about it, how convenient for the powers that be i.e. if the working class can’t share their thoughts on how they’re being screwed, it makes it easier to control them? Where else in our society can people gather & freely exchange their ideas, thoughts, worries, etc.?

 

But like babies in their cribs with those colorful mobiles with animals & sparkly objects to draw their attention, we have our smart phones to distract us from our troubles. And our cribs have invisible bars that surround us. I still keep spitting in the wind so-to-speak by posting new essays on my blog that no one reads or comments on. And just before I hit the publish button, I am told again & again that my writing is too difficult, that I should write simpler sentences and should write on trendy topics. Fuck that! Our collective apathy & intellectual laziness will be our downfall and we may very well end-up living in a version of Mad Max’s world. As for me, I escaped from L.A. with my wife & son over 25 years ago. We moved to Portland, Oregon and it was a great new life for a while but my wife & I drifted apart and she passed away five years ago now. So, I move up and down the coast in my RV staying for six months or so in one little coastal town after another but I may as well be living alone on a deserted island for all the social interaction I get. Paradise isn’t so pretty when you have no one to share it with & no one to talk to!

 

—Rob DeLoss, St. Patrick’s Day 2019 in Trinidad, California

 

P.S.  My wife always took the time to read my work and give me constructive feedback even though she was always swamped with paperwork because she was a Special Education teacher. And even though we were divorced, I never refer to her as my ex-wife because there was nothing “ex” about her. She was truly my best friend and we never stopped caring about each other.

 

 

The Business of America is Fraud!

~ cockroachconspiracy
a trio of the top insiders who crashed our economy in 2008

Watch the film; “Inside Job” by Charles Fergusson if you give a shit about fraud at the highest levels. The pic above shows (Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury under Bush; Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve; Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury under Obama). Of course, we mustn’t forget Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, etc. This film won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Documentary & was narrated by Matt Damon. It is about “the systemic corruption of the U.S. by the Financial Services Industry.”

Yes indeed, the business of America is fraud and the higher up the food chain from small companies to megalithic corporations, the more prevalent fraud is & the less likely they will be held accountable for their crimes.

a world of corporate conglomerates & no more sovereign nations

 

I recently spent three months traveling around the state looking for a place to retire & a home to buy. I was looking for a small, used manufactured home, but unfortunately, they’re almost all in trailer park “communities.” And these “communities” like corporations, are private tyrannies as Chomsky has pointed out. I’m not being facetious, each of these “communities” has its own set of rules & regulations and a number of hurdles one must pass for entrance.

 

I was going to pay cash for the home and then have to pay “rent” for the privilege of living in this “community.” Rent usually includes water, sewer, & garbage and an incredible number of restrictions which, if violated, could get you evicted. Most of these “communities” won’t allow you to have a dog or a cat. The few that do allow pets, often tell you what size dog you can have, what breed of dog you can have, etc. And most of these “communities” won’t allow you to park your RV there but will allow you to park them there if you pay an additional fee. I won’t go into the absurd assorted other rules & regulations but it is truly mind-boggling.

 

I was told that my income must be at least three times the rent amount which was going to be $375 per month. I get Social Security and it is several hundred dollars more than this rent amount but because I have a “bad” credit rating, my application was denied. So, I paid $50 to be rejected by the petty tyrant owners of this “community.” The owners are a husband & wife and I dealt with the wife. She tried to persuade me to pay off the debtors who made claims against me which give me the “bad” credit rating. It was all I could do to refrain from screaming nasty epithets at her over the phone.

 

A few days before this rejection, I was in her office going over my application & the notebook full of rules & regulations. I mentioned that I write about politics & she asked whether I was liberal or conservative. I said I’m definitely liberal & she said they were conservative. I responded with yeah, most business owners are conservatives. I had also mentioned that I started collecting my Social Security early because I feared that the GOP would get their hands on it soon & had been trying to do so for decades. She argued that it was democrats who wanted to tax & spend.

Yep! It’s always those damn tax & spend democrats

This is the non-thinking mantra of the so-called “conservatives,” and they’ve been repeating it ad nauseam for decades as well. I was very tempted to ask her, well, tell me, who was it that started the war in Afghanistan which is the longest war America has ever been in & what have we accomplished there.

why we’ve been in perpetual war since WWII

I also wanted to mention that it was again the republicans who started the war based on a pack of lies, in Iraq and we, the taxpayers have been forced to pay a billion dollars a week for all these years to finance these wars but I knew that I should keep my mouth shut & not antagonize the boss so I kept my mouth shut.

and he’s going to reduce the $21 trillion dollar national deficit? Yeah, right!

 

A little later in this enlightening conversation, this petty tyrant informed me that people on food stamps & government assistance are lazy & dependent and don’t want to get off this assistance. Yep, once again it’s clear that those with all the money & privilege see the rest of us as the unwashed masses intent on stealing their hard-earned wealth. Although I was looking forward to settling down in this area because it’s only a few blocks to the ocean & a nice area in Newport, Oregon where I’ve tried several times in the past to get a foothold, it’s probably for the best that I was turned-down. I can only bite my tongue for so long and sooner or later, I probably would’ve told her just how stupid she is.

 

I use this personal experience to highlight the bigger picture of what’s happening all across America i.e. a return to debtor’s prison. Charles Dickens is revered by many scholars as being on an equal level, if not superior to, William Shakespeare. And I believe he has attained this degree of respect largely because of his vivid portrayals of the down & out in England at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. And this “revolution” has clearly run its course in America and the so-called “First World” nations & has now moved on to the “developing nations.”

King Trump’s economic plan for the 99%

 

Dickens’ own father was imprisoned in a debtor’s prison & this is why his son could write so powerfully about the degrading & devastating effects of this relatively modern phenomenon. I have also experienced the horrors of growing up poor in America because my mom basically raised four children by herself & worked two or three jobs for a good part of her life in her struggle to keep us out of the gutter. This is why I have spent the last 30 years or better teaching myself about politics, economics, history, etc. And this is why my writing is often passionate & full of anger.

and Trump fans just ask that he uses Vaseline before proceeding

 

Don’t worry my friend, I haven’t forgotten what this essay is supposed to be about i.e. fraud & private tyrannies. In our so-called “advanced” society, the corporate cockroaches have only refined their methods of oppressing us & keeping us under their thumbs. As I said, in today’s world & in America, the home of the free, if you want to rent an apartment or a house, etc. you must not only pass a credit check but also a criminal background check. Imagine if they required all politicians and CEOs of corporations to do likewise?

 

And not only does this apply when seeking a roof over your head, it is also becoming the standard when applying for a job & they often require that you pass a drug test as well. The 99% in the United States of America, you know, all us suckers & victims who are forced to pay the taxes that enrich the wealthy or face prison, are trapped in an ever-smaller vicious circle. This circle or cycle is like a noose around a prisoner’s neck that is slowly tightening around their throat & it’s a Catch-22 from which there is little to no way to escape.

 

If you’re part of the 1%, you got there because you’re either a sociopath or a psychopath. But, if you have any semblance of compassion or empathy, you realize that many, if not most of our most vulnerable citizens i.e. the homeless, the working poor, the shrinking middle class, etc. often turn to drugs & alcohol as a means of temporary escape and/or relief from this nightmare we’re engulfed in. I believe pot is the drug of choice for most of us & I believe it’s relatively harmless in the scheme of things. Unfortunately, pot stays in our systems far longer than the more harmful drugs like crack, meth, heroin, etc. I’m not excusing those who commit violent crimes against others but if we truly gave a damn about crime in terms of the devastating personal toll it has on us as individuals, as families, and as a society, we would lock-up most of the corporate CEOs in this country.

the true face of crime in America, the untouchable super bankers

 

Reflect on this if you will, try to name a single, major corporation that hasn’t been guilty of defrauding its customers/consumers at least once? Most of the corporate behemoths have been charged with fraud repeatedly yet they are still allowed to go on doing business as usual. And to rub salt in the wound, they don’t even have to admit guilt in a court of law. They are occasionally required to pay a small fine relative to the amount of profit they made from their fraudulent practices. Yet, if you or I write a “bad check,” because we’re down & out and are just trying to feed our family and we’re out of work, we’re sent to jail or today’s “debtor’s prison.”

The Land of Opportunity for Corporate Cockroaches

 

Speaking of prison, are you aware of how profitable cheap, prison labor has become in this land of the free? Moreover, Walmart which is touted as the largest & most profitable retail business in the world, uses mostly prison labor & a de facto slave labor force from China. I believe that most of us have become desensitized to the fact that advertising, like it’s cousin, public relations (P.R.), a powerful tool of the politicians & the business class, is the art of lying or fraud in all its malevolent glory.

the president who made a career out of fraud

 

So, corporations are freely & legally allowed and encouraged to lie, cheat, steal, & manipulate us. They’re allowed to poison us with their GMO foods, their contamination of our air, water, & land. They’re partners with the politicians who are their high paid whores i.e. Dick Cheney & Halliburton and use their high paid PR whores to dupe us into wars of aggression i.e. Iraq. Our poor & desperate citizens who see no way out of their misery & poverty and fall for the military propaganda, reluctantly join the military & risk their lives and sanity in the never-ending stream of wars. And when they return, often with a limb missing & serious mental issues, they are denied benefits or receive pitiful care, in terms of the quality of assistance available to them. By the way, remember our reverence for the law in this nation based on Law & Order, and our reverence for business? Then why is it that contracts we sign, like the contracts I signed with telecom corporations who defrauded me, are airtight for us and can have such significant impact on our lives as for example in causing me to be denied residence in the trailer court I applied to, but when the military invents their policy of “Stop Gap,” they are free to break the contract you sign when you join a branch of the military? A soldier, whose tour of duty is complete & their spirit is soaring with the anticipation of returning home is told, sorry, we need you & you’re going to do another tour. Some poor souls have been forced to do three or four more tours of duty than they signed up for.

the only escape from the corporate cockroaches

 

For these and oh so many other reasons are why I say that the business of America is fraud. It’s a sad & truly horrifying Brave New World the corporate cockroaches & their lackeys in Washington D.C. have created for us. You may believe that if you play by all their rules & zealously pay all your bills, no matter how many of them are fraudulent, that you may escape the nightmares I describe but you are only deluding yourself. How many horror stories have you heard of people who were obedient & quiet all their lives only to retire & discover their pensions had been stolen by their corporate executives, their health coverage they were guaranteed for life was wiped-out, etc.? I have been spitting in the wind most of my adult life & I know that I’m probably little more than a modern-day Don Quixote but I also believe to the marrow of my bones that it’s better to die standing than to live on my knees!

 

—Rob DeLoss, Newport, Oregon (January 21st, 2015)

 

P.S.  I forgot to point out that because of my “bad credit” rating, I am now forced back into renting an apt. where I must jump through all the same unfair & outrageous requirements and if I disturb a neighbor by playing my music too loud if I’ve had a bit too much to drink for example, I face eviction. We face ever more outrageous rent prices & are de facto prisoners in our own homes. We are de facto all living in debtor’s prisons, it’s just that some have bars on the windows while others don’t. I confess though that I’m seriously considering abandoning ship i.e. leaving America for good and seeking asylum, spiritually speaking, in some other country where there is the possibility of owning my own home & peacefully retiring with fewer fascists dictating when I must shit, go to sleep, etc.

this is the truth behind the “free market” myth

 

Addendum

 

Well it appears that I did lose track of the central point I wanted to make regarding “bad credit.” I did mention this to the petty tyrant who rejected my application for becoming a resident of her luxurious (sarcasm intended) trailer court, though. Charles Ferguson pointed out in the brilliant documentary that he wrote, produced, & directed, “Inside Job,” that just a few days before the world-wide, economic collapse of 2008, the three major credit rating agencies in America gave the “Super Banks,” and many, if not most, of the hedge fund firms, the insurance giant, A.I.G., etc. triple A or at least double A ratings. The petty tyrant’s response when I told her this was “Well, there’s nothing I can do about that.” So, in other words she didn’t grasp the connection or the point that I was trying to make i.e. the big boys can tank the economy of the world & cause tens of millions of people to lose their jobs, their homes, & their life savings but you’re going to reject me because I refused to pay my “bill” to a few of the telecoms who defrauded me? This is the world we live in my friends & this is what passes for justice in this corporate cockroach infested society of ours! By the way, my mom worked for AT&T for 36 years but when she died, they kept denying that she had a pension. My aunt was co-executor with me though & she refused to give up and after months of persistent phone calls, my aunt got through to an honest employee there who told us, yeah, there’s $39,000 in a pension account.

Perhaps this is Trump’s “end game” i.e. he, the corporate cockroach master will survive Armageddon?

Why We’re Losing

~ cockroachconspiracy

 

 

Because technology has enslaved us! Yep! Everything from our “smart phones” to our “social media” platforms like Facebook to our entertainment world of television, movies, & the Internet. I’m going to limit the scope of this essay to just these forms of technology for the sake of brevity, especially in this day & age when the average attention span is eight seconds, a second less than a goldfish’s attention span. How’s that for a depressing statistic?

A “friend’s” betrayal

 

Some of you may wonder how we got to this sad state of affairs & probably even fewer of you may actually even care. Of course we didn’t become enslaved by these forms of technology overnight, no, it was a gradual decaying of our intellectual abilities and a good part of the blame rests with our public education system & the forces behind it i.e. politicians & their puppet masters, the corporate cockroaches.

A poignant & insightful critique

 

Moreover, the corporate media which is now in control of something like 90% of the media in America, bears a large part of the responsibility for the dumbing down of the U.S. public. Naturally, they don’t want a well-educated citizenry because they’d lose a lot of the profits they derive from a mind-numb population of consumers.

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”
― George Orwell, 1984

 

Public relations & advertising are two huge industries and corporations don’t spend tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising & public relations campaigns because they have nothing better to do with their money. Well, this opens a whole other can of worms so let me get back to the specifics of this essay.

 

Facebook is clearly the largest “social media” platform in America and around the globe & if you think I’m exaggerating any of what I’m about to tell you, check out the PBS “Frontline” special that was aired last week, October 29 & 30 of 2018 https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/facebook-dilemma/  I have been a critic of Facebook for quite some time and yeah, I too was suckered into its shallow world for several years & was blind to its pernicious aspects for most of that time. In fact, I was celebrating my birthday last week at a local pub & tried to tell this guy about Facebook’s business model & he clung to the “fact” that it wasn’t costing him anything. I felt like I was arguing with a tree stump or something & the last thing I asked him was; If it’s free, why is Zuckerberg worth anywhere from $60 billion to $84 billion dollars? My “friend” couldn’t answer & changed the subject. But poor Zuckerberg’s wealth dropped by $18.8 billion recently because fortunately, not all Facebook users are part of the Walking Dead.

The “free market” & “free elections”

 

Why the drop in its stock value? In brief because of their allowing the company, Cambridge Analytica to basically steal the election for Trump with its army of trolls planting fake news posts on Facebook. Of course Zuckerberg has plead ignorance & innocence because to do otherwise would be the end of his empire. But I call Bull-shit! He became so obscenely wealthy precisely because of his total lack of concern about ethical business practices.

 

And this brings us right back to Facebook’s “business model” which simply means, the more time they can get people to spend on Facebook, the greater the ad revenues they collect. Remember advertising is what keeps the whole charade of business in America going i.e. the business of America & the world is FRAUD! Yes fraud, deliberate, outright lying, deception, you name it. Anything to enrich themselves and fuck the consumers, fuck the environment, fuck everything but protect the holy profits which allows them to live the Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous.

The Cult of Personality that gave us Trump via Mark’s technology & greed

 

Lest you think I’ve completely forgotten my original & key point i.e. our enslavement, Edward Snowden is a fugitive for life because he cares deeply about our freedom whether we do or not. He warned us that these “social platforms” are selling & giving every bit of our personal data which we so gullibly posted on Facebook & the rest of them, with the government. In a nutshell, by collecting & storing all our personal data, the government & the private tyrannies we call corporations, can manipulate us both as consumers & as citizens to vote the way they want us to, and if we become a nuisance, they can assemble the evidence from our personal files to frame us as a terrorist or whatever they want. https://theconversation.com/your-life-is-facebooks-business-model-like-it-or-not-35841 

 

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. (Benjamin Franklin)

Snowden warned us to be aware of Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, Google, You Tube, etc. by telling us that they were all voluntarily giving our information to the government and if this doesn’t make it clear that these high tech companies are aiding in our enslavement, you may as well go back to your bowl of Fruit Loops & FOX “News.” You have been warned!

 

Okay, onward & upward or perhaps I should say, downward? As for the ubiquitous “smart phones,” they are actually making people dumber, not smarter. Yeah I know, at this point you’re probably tempted to dismiss me as just another old Luddite & yes I’m old i.e. I just turned 66 last week but I’ve been severely critical of these phones since they came out. Why? Because any technology that has so completely taken over people’s lives that they walk down the street eyes glued to their phones & some people have actually walked into traffic because of them, is far too dangerous.

Furthermore, it’d be funny if it weren’t so sad that these phones which the advertising proclaims will bring us closer to our friends & help us make new friends with the apps they offer, etc. are more accurately anti-social. I’ve seen it time & time again, a group of young people walk into a bar or café or wherever together but they hardly speak to one another because they’re all on their “smart phones,” sharing pictures of their food, discussing the latest soap opera, checking how many likes they’ve gotten on Facebook and the assortment of other shallow, time-wasting platforms, apps., etc.

Who’s in control, the technology or humans?

 

I used to write paragraphs on the serious posts that came across on my feed on Facebook and only very rarely did someone write a sentence or even a phrase in reply. And now it’s emoticons which have supplanted even a phrase let alone a sentence.  This clearly is enhancing the dumbing-down of people already short-changed by a public education system that is about controlling us, not freeing us.  To expect someone to take five minutes to read something you’ve poured serious intellectual energy into, let alone write a sentence or two in response, is a joke in these peoples’ worlds.

The key to empowerment, justice, & freedom!

 

You tell me how in the hell we’re going to save our planet or ourselves when people can’t find the time to relate to one another as human beings except via these artificial electronic devices designed to keep us distracted & spending ever greater parts of our days on them? I forget the exact statistics but it’s truly depressing how many Americans haven’t read a single book in the past year.

 

Again, lest you think me a nut-case, there’s a young man name of Tristan Harris who worked for Google & was high up on the food chain in the corporation so-to-speak. And in a nutshell, he shows that these smart phones are like slot machines in casinos purposely designed to give people a quick fix and keep on playing. Moreover, it’s a lot more serious than that but again, I don’t want to bore you or take up too much of your attention span so here’s a good link if you give a damn?

https://youtu.be/C74amJRp730

 

I’m going to just touch briefly on television & movies because I’m sure that I have already gone on for far too long. Television has been perhaps one of the most pernicious technological tools over the course of my life but with the advent of the Internet, television has now taken a back seat to the “Net.” This is perhaps just a refresher course or remedial learning if you get my drift? But T.V., as Noam Chomsky has reminded us is just “filler” i.e. the stuff we tune it to watch and the truly important stuff is the advertising because obviously that’s where they get their money. And again I assert that the “filler” is almost entirely drivel & enfeebling rather than enlightening.

 

When the phenomenon dubbed “Reality T.V.” was born, I was dumbfounded. This was over 20 years ago roughly & the first one of these farces I watched was called “Survivor” I believe? It was a group of people supposedly stranded on a desert island & their goal was to form alliances & basically do whatever it took to win. I watched maybe two or three episodes & said to my dear, departed wife, Jeri, this is crap! Think about it, what are they telling us & what are they teaching young, impressionable minds? I’ll tell you what, they’re glorifying lying, cheating, stealing, back-stabbing, etc. in other words, doing whatever it takes to win and the hell with fair play, ethics, etc.

Treasonous
Russian
Un-American
Moronic
Pussy Grabber (What does that spell? Yep! TRUMP)

 

You might care to note that the “reality” t.v. show, “The Apprentice” is our current dunce in residence in the oval office’s claim to fame. And when I hear that shows like “The Walking Dead” are hugely popular, my heart sinks for America again. I could only handle maybe 15 minutes of one episode and had to change the channel. It’s like a regular t.v. series of a slasher movie. I could go on and on but I won’t.

 

Please don’t think I’m one of those phony “Christian” fundamentalists, far from it. They are equally responsible for the installation of Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan as “our” president. But I do share in their revulsion when it comes to a lot of what passes for entertainment in America. But where I definitely disagree with them, is on the subject of “pornography.” You see, in their feeble, twisted minds & spirits, nudity and sex are Satan’s temptations & are far more harmful than all the blood & violence in the movies. Could it be that because there is so much violence in the Old Testament in particular, that they’re comfortable with it in t.v. & movies or at least they’re not nearly so outraged about it as they are about sex & nudity?

Trump’s Christian base turn a blind-eye to his “shortcomings”

 

You see, I’m proud to consider myself an old hippie and I remember fondly the idealism of the tumultuous 60s and free love, equality, truth, no war, etc. In short, I believe the true pornography is violence, not love, nudity, & sex! And don’t misinterpret this as a blanket acceptance of the rampant, gross bondage & other sick shit in the world gone amok porno world. No, anything that degrades & demeans others in that industry sickens me but to label all nudity & free love between mutually consenting adults as Satanic or evil,  is just another version of McCarthyism or the Salem witch trials.

The consumption of pork in any form is forbidden by several Orthodox religions, including Judaism, the Seventh-Day Adventists, Islam and the Ethiopian Orthodox church. For followers, the pig is considered to be an “unclean” animal. This classification for “uncleanliness” is based on the pig’s outward appearance and behaviors.

 

In conclusion, the steady assault on our freedoms whether by the “Christian” fundamentalists, the corporate cockroaches, or whoever, is an attempt to dominate & control us & implicitly says that the “authorities” doing so, are superior to us & know what’s best for us i.e. we shouldn’t trust our own judgment but should remain children looking to their loving guidance as if we are all ignorant children dependent on their benevolent guidance.  Need I remind you of how many televangelists were eventually revealed for their “immoral” acts with prostitutes, etc.?

 

Last, but certainly not least, Hollywood movies. Again, I won’t bore you with a thorough review of this sad aspect of our social conditioning but will simply point out the first example that comes to mind i.e. “Blackhawk Down.” (and no, I don’t apologize for my condescending tone in this essay because there is more than ample evidence to support such a tone) This movie which, by-the-way, I enjoyed, like the thousands of others that came before it, always seem to glorify America’s position in each & every conflict around the world & paint the “other” as evil incarnate. Well even if you do a brief, cursory review of our illustrious history, you will often find that our behavior was shall I say? Less than honorable?

 

In summary, these factors and so many others, have all contributed to our enslavement whether we have the courage & honesty to acknowledge it or not. And as they say in so many self-help groups, recognition of a problem is the first & the most important step in solving that problem!

Ironically, these corporate cockroaches, the “Super-bankers” too big to jail, are at the top of the food chain

 

Namaste!

—Rob DeLoss, Nov. 5, 2018

Our future after Trump???

 

 

Addendum

Perhaps it’s more of a male problem due to our overly competitive natures or conditioning but movies, video games, etc. must be non-stop action in order to keep our attention & this parasitic state of being is a sort of closed, doom-loop system. In other words, the more we participate in this constant flux of meaningless & violent action, the less we are able to disengage from it & contemplate the much bigger reality, the much more serious issues that are a threat to all of humanity i.e. the possibilities for nuclear war & the destruction of the world through climate change & the continuing death of our precious ecosystems.

my book available on Amazon

Trump Telling it Like it Isn’t!

~ cockroachconspiracy

 

 

 

I was watching a video clip recently of Michael Moore being interviewed about his new film, “Fahrenheit 11/9” and a couple of things he said, really hit home with me. He said that he had interviewed the notorious S.O.B. (my description) Steve Bannon, the hatchet guy who was probably the key factor in saving Trump’s failing presidential campaign near the end?

 

And when Moore asked Bannon why the republicans just keep kicking the democrats asses (my paraphrasing), Bannon replied; “We go for the head-shot & the democrats are having pillow fights.” And it struck me like it did Michael Moore that here it is in a nutshell, the raw, ugly, painful truth. 

 

So, that being said, I’m notifying you here & now, this essay is going to hit hard, maybe even below the belt so-to-speak at times. I’m sick to death of being advised to play nice, be civil, etc. and especially now that we have such a vile, crude, corrupt, greedy, habitual liar & braggart in the White House.

 

Just how fuckin’ stupid are all of you who believe in this con-man who has lied & bullied his way to the top of a house of cards? In the last few days, it’s been “revealed” that Trump isn’t the great success he keeps telling the world that he is & this cracks me up because it’s long been known by those who have been paying attention that this is perhaps his most outrageous claim & boldest lie!

and this is only a fraction of his failures!

 

If your pussy-grabbing low-life is so successful, why has he always refused to reveal his tax returns? Is this your idea of “telling it like it is?” If he is such an honest, “tell it like it is” guy, why did he have the White House refuse to release something like 90,000 pages of Kavanaugh’s record when he was working for George W. Bush? If he’s such a successful businessman, why did he file for bankruptcy four times because he failed at the casino business which is an amazing feat in itself? Why have so many of his business ventures failed? 

 

You know, it just dawned on me, he should market Trump Kool Aid because his base has definitely drunk long & deep from this well of swamp juice. Here’s just a few of his failures which he just glosses over when they fail, like the lawsuits he loses but still claims victory in. Trump airlines, Trump beverages, Trump: the Game, Trump Casinos (even when daddy bailed him out), Trump magazine, Trump Mortgage, Trump steaks, Trump’s travel site, Trump’s comms company, Trump Tower Tampa, Trump University, & Trump vodka to name just a few of his many failures.

 

Sadly, what so many of you Trump-aholics haven’t caught on to is the fact that the vast majority of what appear to be his real estate properties aren’t in fact owned by him, no, those who own them pay him for the use of his name. And his name is everything to him & is why he gets so defensive & aggressive to all who cast aspersions on his “good name,” i.e. his brand. This is why he can’t ever stop singing his own praises, even as president of the U.S., he’s a constant pitch-man, con-man, hustler trying to convince the public that he’s a success when he’s an utter failure on every level. 

 

For those of you who pride yourself on having “common sense,” doesn’t it occur to you that the age-old wisdom/maxim that those who are truly talented at something, don’t go around bragging about it because they know that people who know them & their work, already know it. The braggarts are always those who are the most insecure & almost always full of shit! 

 

Tragically for America & the rest of the world because of the damage Trump has already done & God knows how much more, Trump’s true success is his ability to lie, exaggerate, deny, confuse, & never apologize. He learned this from his mentor, Roy Cohn, one of the slimiest creatures to ever crawl out of that swamp that Trump swore to drain but has actually restocked. And another mentor of Trump’s is the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who followed a simple formula i.e. lie & never stop lying, repeat the lie ad nauseam and gradually, the public will accept it as truth or fact. And the bigger the lie, the easier it is to get away with it.

Roy Cohn, taught Donald deny, lie, attack ad infinitum!

 

And this is why the recent revelations that one of Trump’s most treasured lies i.e. that daddy only loaned him a mere million dollars and that he paid him back with interest won’t matter either because the Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan fan club won’t believe that daddy actually gave him over $400,000,000 and that they both defrauded the government of hundreds of millions of dollars in a wide variety of tax scams. Of course, this is all part of the plan and why Donny Duck continuously attempts to discredit the media, especially the New York Times newspaper, because they print the ugly facts that could wake people up but which don’t matter if you’re from zombie-land.

Steve Benson / Creators Syndicate

 

And again for you simpletons who probably didn’t even graduate from high school, because your Fuhrer tells you to ignore everything you read, see, & hear except what he says, is an age-old technique of authoritarians, fascists, & tyrants. And you claim that you’re proud Americans? What do you think your fathers & grandfathers fought WWII for?

 

It’s truly frightening and depressing that a blatant fraud such as the girly-man Donny has duped so many of you into believing his bullshit! The Duck’s “success” such as it is, has been almost entirely dependent on Daddy War-bucks & the assistance of the Italian American mafia in New York & New Jersey whom his mentor, Roy Cohn, introduced him to and his new benefactors, the Russian mafia & their boss, Putin, who have bought/invested hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of Donny’s “real estate holdings.”

 

This duplicitous would be tin-can dictator has retained a small army of lawyers throughout the course of his “business career,” because he is constantly being sued for fraud, failure to pay workers, sub-contractors, etc. etc. etc. and you actually believe this guy is your champion? Jesus fuckin’ Christ! I believe he has had something like 4,000 law suits filed against him. Yep, clearly a guy who “tells it like it is.”

 

Here’s a specific example of your leader’s business integrity, he hired several hundred “illegal” (though I hate the term) Polish construction workers to do the demolition of a building he was going to turn into one of his casinos. The workers were so poor that they lived on the construction (deconstruction site) and they were promised a whopping $4 an hour for their work but the Donald cheated them out of even that paltry wage. How would you like to be fucked like that? Would you still sing the Dick-head’s praises?

 

And speaking of “deconstruction,” how appropriate because that is precisely what this Creature from the Black Lagoon is doing to America i.e. he’s deconstructing our entire government, all the checks & balances, every program that was established to help those of us not born with a silver spoon in our mouths, and he’s eliminating even more of the regulations on the financial services companies that brought us to the brink of total economic collapse & which I contend we are still suffering from, and the complete elimination of all environmental regulations so the oil spill that did so much for the south part of the U.S. with the billions, if not trillions of gallons of oil that contaminated the Caribbean for decades if not centuries to come, etc. etc. etc. So, if you think the crash of 2008 wasn’t so bad, just wait until the next one. Yeah, it’s going to be great fun & you’d better get your sleeping bags ready because you’ll soon be joining those poor souls living on the margins of this so-called society & civilization. The super banks, “too big to fail,” have gotten even bigger & continue to give themselves obscene levels of bonuses as they suck the blood out of our economy.

 

Yeah, just keep burying your head in the FOX “News” bubble and when your children, your wives, your husbands, all your loved ones die slow, excruciating deaths & have no health insurance thanks to the Duck Dynasty, you can sleep comfortably knowing that you supported the dictator who made it possible. When he takes away your food stamps, your social security, your Medicare, Don’t worry, be happy, Donny made America great again, but the great is for the 1% who pay no taxes, ship the decent paying jobs overseas where they can pay workers $2.00 per day and don’t have to worry about health, environmental, pollution, etc. regulations, not you or I you simpletons! Yeah, this is your American Idol, the moron who flip-flops constantly even within the same sentence he turns around and denies having said what he just said, even though it’s on tape. Yes,  it’s all an elaborate Democratic conspiracy against him. And when you wear your “maga” hat in public, you’re in fact wearing a dunce cap for all the world to see.

 

Well, sorry to disturb your “common sense” again but, if the democrats were capable of such complex conspiracies, why aren’t they the ones in power? I hate to break it to you—No, not really!—but probably the overwhelming majority of you Trump Walking Dead are FOX “News” watchers. And the fact that they have been allowed to get away with this charade or façade of being a “news” organization for over 20 years proves how truly stupid we are as a nation. Moreover, FOX isn’t even the worst of it, Donny Darko is a fan of Alex Jones, you know, the guy who claims that the horrific murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School was all a hoax. And Donald Duck also believes in The National Enquirer, that rag that anyone with more than a third grade education has always known is only good for one thing i.e. to line the bottom of your bird’s cage.

For those of you who haven’t completely abandoned concern for the truth or facts, and no, not Kellyanne Conway’s “alternate facts,” and if you can spare the time away from your Kardashians soap operas, etc., you might look up what used to be called Russia’s main newspaper, Pravda. It literally means “truth” in Russian. You see, FOX “News” is America’s Pravda i.e. state propaganda voice. It was crystal clear during the George W. Bush administration & FOX leader, Roger Ailes, you know, your friendly sexual predator just like Donny Duck, Kavanaugh, etc. etc. etc. sent the White House their daily talking points i.e. the propaganda outline for the day to just repeat ad nauseam to the mindless viewers who took it as gospel truth.

And sadly, I have to admit here that The New York Times, you know, the bastion of “liberal thought & opinion” in America was equally guilty of beating the war drums for the invasion of Iraq and we, even you, should all be well aware by now of how great that turned out i.e. the creation of Isis & just one bloody mess after another guaranteeing that we’ll never run out of terrorists to go after.

 

Yeah, I know, terrible me, I’ve been so nasty, mean, etc. well, tough fuckin’ shit! We’re circling the drain and I’m sick & tired of playing nice-nice with all these corporate cockroaches and all the morons who kiss their asses even as they’re being kicked to the curb by the same cockroaches.

 

Take an honest look at the vast wasteland that stretches across America in between the East coast & the West coast, the towns that are now ghost towns. The rust belt as they call it. Yep! The wonders of the “free market” where the rich are free to fuck us all, commit fraud via their corporations as standard business practice but if you or I write a bad check, we go to jail. And they, every great once in awhile when busted, don’t even have to admit guilt and it isn’t even on their record, they pay a relatively small fine when compared to the profits they made committing their crimes and they return to doing the same shit.

 

We’re fast becoming one of those “third world” nations we’re so fond of looking down on & we blame the immigrants because the Duckmeister tells you it’s their fault. No, you morons, the fault is the corporate cockroaches at the highest levels of true power who don’t give a fuck about America or its citizens but pretend to so you’ll go or you’ll allow your children to go fight & die in their constant wars to make themselves ever richer. What a bunch of suckers!

 

So for every one of you ignorant fuckin’ assholes who proudly defend Trump, don’t come crying to me when you join the ranks of America’s ever expanding homeless who are treated like ghosts & garbage in this shallow, hollow land we proclaim as the land of freedom & democracy, because I won’t and don’t have one ounce of sympathy & it was your willful ignorance that allowed this to come about!

The girly-man has duped his base into believing he’s fighting for them i.e. the giant tax break that goes to the uber rich & has inflated the national deficit which they will use to defend their need to cut food stamps, health care, Social Security, etc. for us, the 99%. Mark my words, you’ve been suckered by a snake-oil, con-man. The corporate cockroaches love Donny boy!

–Rob DeLoss, October 6, 2018   (Trinidad, CA)

 

P.S.  And for those of you who still claim that Trump is telling it like it is, you are clearly brain-dead & belong in an Alzheimer’s unit because you might wander into traffic & dent somebody’s car with your blockhead. Jim Jones would’ve loved having you as a member of Jonestown.

 

 

“Reality T.V.” and Trump-world

~ cockroachconspiracy

 

 

 

I believe the disturbing phenomenon of “reality t.v.,” coincided roughly with the equally disturbing introduction of what’s called “FOX News?” I’d like to begin by stating up front that I may be guilty from time to time of “lecturing” but sadly, I’ve learned that I can’t take for granted what so often seems like common wisdom. In fact, the older I get, the more I feel like a living anachronism.

 

These sinister forces began to creep into our culture roughly 20 years ago & I believe that the T.V. series “Survivor” was among the first, if not, the first of these “reality t.v. shows?” I watched perhaps two or three of this series with my wife & was immediately struck by its crassness or celebration of the worst in people I.e. backstabbing, lying, cheating, etc. In-other-words, win by any means necessary. I remember saying to my wife, what is this teaching our children, this is unhealthy, etc. I never watched it again nor any of the plethora of other “reality t.v.” programs that followed. Yeah, I know, many will probably dismiss me as an elitist snob, etc. Well, I wear that label as a badge of honor especially in this time & day where we have a reality t.v. show host as our president who is a national disgrace & embarrassment.

 

Before I proceed, here’s something to mull over; Trump’s supporters represent roughly a third of the American public, and coincidentally, approximately a third of our citizens also deny the Holocaust ever happened, & as of three years ago, roughly 32 million Americans are “functionally illiterate.” If you’re not one of Trump’s fans who has completely shut-off the rational side of your mind, reflect on the hundreds of times you’ve seen Trump address the public & his bumbling efforts to put together a single, coherent sentence. Moreover, he’s stated publicly many times his aversion to reading & that he doesn’t care to read the daily presidential briefings that all our other presidents read & knew was of critical importance. If this doesn’t worry you, congratulations, you are definitely one who has drunk the Kool Aid of our Jim Jones in the oval office.

 

Yes, this is very snide or sarcastic of me but I’m not really that far off the mark I.e. like Jim Jones, Trump has repeatedly advised his “base,” to ignore everything written about him or said about him if it doesn’t come from him. Yet, that isn’t even possible because we have tons of videotape of his public comments & he’ll deny having said what he said the very next day. It’s all a vast, left-wing conspiracy designed to make him look bad. If it weren’t all so serious & dangerous, it’d be laughable but it’s not! I remember how they labeled John Kerry a “flip-flopper” when he was running for the office of the presidency, Donny flip-flops often within the same sentence that just came out of his mouth, or at most, two or three “sentences” after whatever garbled string of words he let flow.

 

Trump has been seeking the approval & acceptance of what’s sometimes referred to as “the New York City Cultural or Intellectual Elite,” for decades, don’t forget that New York City is his hometown i.e. where he grew up & where his dad & he built their crooked, real estate empire. Naturally, they—the New York “elite” have shunned him because of his obvious ignorance & disdain for culture & intelligence as well as his crude, crass, & contemptible opinions & behavior over the decades. He now seeks to destroy their credibility like a boy seeking revenge for being bullied or socially ostracized. By-the-way, New York City is considered the intellectual capital of America & has been for quite some time because it is where the overwhelming majority of American publishing corporations are located. And, the New York Times has long been dubbed, “The Paper of Record” because they were the paper that represented the highest standard of American journalism. In brief, almost all the other major newspapers in America take their lead from the New York Times i.e. their lead stories are basically reprinted in the other major papers across the country.

 

Notwithstanding, there is a sliver of truth to Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan’s label of “fake news.” But “fake” isn’t the correct adjective to use, no, cowardly or sell-out would be more appropriate adjectives to describe the mainstream media. It’s really quite obvious, we are down to five or six megalithic corporations that own perhaps 95% or even more of our media (television, radio, magazines, books, newspapers, etc.) and they are certainly not going to allow serious critics of “our” media to be heard because it would undermine their business i.e. hurt them financially by causing them to lose advertisers which are their bread & butter.

 

As far as “journalistic integrity” is concerned, the American media have clearly betrayed the U.S. public because they have largely ceased to act as a watchdog on the government & the corporate interests. They more accurately should be referred to as “lapdogs.” And this again is why it’d be laughable if it weren’t so deadly serious that we have a “president” who is clearly proud of being an anti-intellectual. Trump is, if we are to believe that he’s actually a billionaire—who knows, he refuses to show us his tax returns—is part of that 1% who keep on reaping the lion’s share of the tax breaks & most notably the trillion & a half dollar one that he gave himself & his cronies just recently. My intellectual hero, Noam Chomsky, & his co-author, Edward Hermann, wrote the modern classic on how “our” media system really operates, it’s called “The Manufacture of Consent.”

“The” classic if you’re interested?

 

Here it is in a nutshell;

 

“ The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news “filters,” fall under the following headings: (I) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (~) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and “experts” funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) “flak” as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) “anticommunism” as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.”  https://chomsky.info/consent01/ 

 

You see, my imaginary reader, the conservatives started a myth decades ago there’s a “liberal media bias” & poor conservatives have been unfairly attacked & criticized roughly ever since the New Deal was established. And the New York Times is the bastion of liberalism in America. Yeah, right! That’s why the New York Times beat the war drums for our invasion of Iraq every bit as strongly as FOX “News.” Every time I hear FOX referred to as news, it almost makes me nauseous. For all you Trumpsters, if you weren’t so blinded by Trump’s dog whistle politics of hate, fear, & racism, you might begin to realize that FOX is truly the epitome of “fake news.” And FOX “News” is where Donny, the girly-man with small hands, gets his “facts” daily along with Alex Jones who claims the massacre of those schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax to name only one of his most egregious & shameful ‘news stories.” And don’t forget that Donald Duck also relies on The National Enquirer to keep him up to date on the latest happenings. 

 

Let me share with you another actual fact, not an alternate reality “fact” from Kellyanne Conway’s warped mind i.e. Russia’s national newspaper “Pravda” (Russian for “truth”) was Russia’s official newspaper from 1912 to 1992 when it was sold to a private company but still retains the name. The Russian people were well aware though that it was the government’s propaganda tool & was used in an attempt to manipulate their minds/opinions. Well, FOX “News,” is America’s version of Pravda but sadly, far too many Americans aren’t aware of this. And it’s so depressing that they aren’t aware. How FOX has been allowed to get away with this sham for 20 years again reflects the cowardice of “our” media’s owners & reveals that the almighty dollar is the only thing they are loyal to. And for-the-record, I hold the left-wing media in America partly to blame as well because every time they refer to FOX as “news,” they’re only helping to legitimize this dangerous farce.

“Alternative facts”

 

Here’s the brick & mortar of what real journalism is supposed to be, you determine for yourself whether FOX “News” gets anywhere close to this;

 

“…. the principles of truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness, and public accountability, as these apply to the acquisition of newsworthy information and its subsequent dissemination to the public.[1][2][3][4]”

 

To return to the connections between “reality t.v.” and its contribution to the rise of the Duckmeister, a “clear and present danger” to not only America, but the world as well, here are some more thoughts for your consideration. I read & dissected a classic titled; “Anti-intellectualism in American Life,” by Richard Hofstadter, years ago & it was mind-boggling to say the least. Seems we’ve had a long & ignoble history of anti-intellectualism almost from the very beginning of our nation. They used to be called “nativists” & today, they’re Trump’s “base” with their mantra of “America First,” etc. And there have been movements such as the “Know-Nothings” that were proud of their ignorance as well.

 

One only has to consider the climate deniers to realize the real danger these people represent. Of course, they prefer to not look into the corporations & individuals who are funding all the propaganda behind the denial. And like Donny, science is only theory & is akin to opinion and since everybody has an opinion, and all opinions are equally valid, the 99% of the world’s scientists’ “opinions” aren’t any more valid than the Duck Dynasty Klan’s opinions. Makes perfect sense, right? Yeah, if you inhabit the alternate universe of Trump, Kellyanne, Sarah Huckabee, et al. where facts aren’t facts but only suggestions or theories. Let’s ponder this a bit? The laws of gravity aren’t scientific facts so, just because you jump out of a tree, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you will always fall.

 

Moreover, electricians, engineers, nuclear scientists, medical doctors, mechanics, etc. etc. etc., don’t need to follow “scientific facts” because they’re just theories & we don’t need to follow those speed sign warnings when we’re driving on dangerous, winding mountain roads because they’re not facts, they’re only suggestions. How open-minded, democratic, & liberating of the Trumpsters. Thanks guys!

 

Admittedly, I am not of Trump’s world of delusions of grandeur & self-righteousness and call me a stubborn Irish mule but I will continue to believe in the world of science, not superstition & Alex Jones’ absurd “reality.” Here is a snippet regarding “reality t.v.” that I feel is pertinent:

The Ugly Reality

 

 

“…. are intended to humiliate and/or exploit participants. They make stars out of infamous (well known for some bad quality or deed; wicked; abominable) personalities. The actors are untalented or unworthy of fame. They glamorize vulgarity & materialism. “Sound like anyone you know? In other words, with the advent of “reality t.v.,” the powers that be in Hollywood have lowered the bar of basic decency to the lowest common denominator. And for-the-record, I said from the beginning of this sick phenomenon, something seems mighty strange here i.e. people watching an artificial medium (t.v.) to see “reality?” Seemed to me to be a collective stepping through the Looking Glass into Alice in Wonderland.

 

Continuing on this merry-go-round of American progress, almost every time I get in a conversation with a Trump supporter, it doesn’t take long at all for them to repeat the mantra; “I like Trump because he tells it like it is.” I never ceased to be amazed at how consistent this remark is from Trump loyalists. Is it something they put in their Kool Aid? Let’s reflect on this, So, if Trump asserts that Big Foot is real, that we have the bodies of aliens in Area 51, the landing on the Moon was fake, etc. etc. etc. he’s telling it like it is? Remember, he’s a staunch supporter of Alex Jones, FOX “News,” the National Enquirer, etc. Tell me again who’s in touch with “reality,” and who’s not?

 

Believe it or not, I will concede that I do understand to some extent why so many have fallen prey to Trump’s fear & hatred tactics to manipulate them and I even have a bit of sympathy, well at least for those who aren’t physically or verbally assaulting the rest of us. You see, the powers that be, the status quo, the power elite, or however you prefer to label them, have indeed been very clever in an extremely critical respect i.e. they have succeeded brilliantly in keeping us focused on the government’s failings & betrayals of us. But, the ignorant (remember, ignorant simply means “uninformed”) public fails to realize that the corporate cockroaches—the behemoth corporations—actually pull the strings of the politicians all the way up to the presidents. And most importantly, if it weren’t for “our” government subsidies, tax breaks, etc. of these corporate cockroaches, they’d go out of business. So, keep the rabble distracted & divided and scapegoating the victims of the crony capitalists, and the song remains the same. What saddens me to the marrow of my bones is that so many of us don’t remember the simple fact that we all bleed red when we’re cut, we all put our pants on one leg at a time, & we all want our kids to grow up in a better world, a world of equal opportunity, true justice, freedom, & a clean environment.

Only thing we have to fear is fear itself!

 

Let me review & perhaps add a bit here; If you recall in the blurb about “reality t.v.,” materialism is one of the hallmarks or “values” of a good “reality” t.v. star. Obviously, this is Trump in spades —pun intended—this moron who was an instant millionaire not because of any intelligence or talent on his part but because daddy gave it to him, struts the world stage like a self-made man. Yet, he managed to go bankrupt four times, lose his glorious gambling “empire,” be cut-off from any more loans from America’s “super banks,” and be saved by Russian gangsters who bought large chunks of his apartments & condos to launder their dirty money.

 

Donald, the Dick, has failed in every way that is humanly possible i.e. financially, socially, intellectually, & morally yet a third of the American public, including millions of self-proclaimed “Christians” think he’s the greatest thing since sliced-bread? Maybe it’s true, maybe I’m the one living in an alternate world? Oh yeah, for you “Christians” who love your furher, while I definitely don’t call myself a “Christian,” I do seem to recall something called “Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount & the simple guidelines he laid out for being a true Christian. Guess that just escaped your mind & your spirit?

 

Of course, those who don’t remember the lessons of history or more likely, never enjoyed history in high school, the frightening parallels between Trump & the most heinous dictators from the past as well as the present, can’t disturb your glorious dream of Donald, perhaps America’s first Fascist president, saving us from “fake news” and the liberals? But for those of us without the political as well as the moral blinders on, it’s damn hard not to notice the frightening delusions of grandeur that Trump entertains. [some deny this quote was from Mussolini but I feel it’s appropriate; “Fascism should more rightly be called Corporatism because it’s a marriage between government & corporations.” 

 

I’ll start with the superficial, out of respect for Emperor Trump. Simply do a Google image search of your idol & note his striking poses not unlike those of Mussolini, another popular fascist leader during WWII, you know, that trivial episode in our history where we fought against the Nazis & the fascists who Trump thinks contain many “good people.” And our fearless leader (who sadly couldn’t participate in the Vietnam war because of bone spurs) seems to have a real affinity for dictators & despots while insulting & alienating our “allies.” But don’t forget, these aren’t facts, because the Duck denies them. No worries, Donald will save the day, or will he? Could his colossal ego & ignorance be the wet-dream of Mike Pence and the “Christian right’s” desire for Armageddon & the Apocalypse to come about?

 

I have been concerned about the “Christian” fundamentalists for over 30 years & the fact that we now have one as our vice-president, is very spooky. My first book is about this scary phenomenon & as many have observed, the thought of Pence taking over in the not unlikely scenario of Trump being led out of the White House in chains, would be a nightmare surpassing any of the Freddy Kruger movies. Why? Because quite simply, Pence would surely set about in quick order of turning America into a “Christian” Taliban nation but with our nuclear arsenal, it wouldn’t take but a tiny spark to make their dream a reality.

good little lemmings

 

You might doubt my assessment of Trump’s ego? Okay, fair enough, but have you heard of his overwhelming obsession of having a military parade in Washington D.C.? The news headline the other day said that the original cost estimate of $12 million has now been updated to over $92 million dollars. And maybe, just maybe, you might wonder why we need or rather, our fearless leader wants this parade? Well, when he was in France recently, they had one and if you research it, he’s actually wanted one from the day he took office. Again, let me remind you of Donny’s admiration of dictators & his boundless ego. Yep! I can just picture him now, standing on some elevated platform with that Mussolini smugness as the troops file by & salute El Duce!

 

We can’t afford to fix our infrastructure, pay our teachers a decent salary, offer health care to our citizens, etc. but there’s always money available to stroke Donald the Dick’s ego & keep on feeding the military/industrial complex.

 

Continuing on, this “intellectual snob or elitist” whichever term of derision you care to choose, came from a single parent, my mom, who worked two or three jobs as my brother & two sisters grew. I got 40 cents a day for lunch when I was in high school & basically raised my brother & sisters i.e. made them do their chores, their homework, get to bed on time, fought their battles against bullies, etc. Yeah, I really had it easy compared to poor Donny. Oh yeah, you may choose to dismiss my criticisms as mere jealousy of Donald, the billionaire populist who speaks for all the downtrodden Americans. If you go that route, all I can say is that you are clearly a member of the Walking Dead, Donald’s constituency. Oh yeah, it took me 14 years to earn my B.A. in English literature because of not knowing what I really wanted to study, financial difficulties, and lack of discipline but I did it and I proved all my “friends” and “family” wrong. But far more than this accomplishment, I am proud of the conservative estimate of at least 49,000 hours I’ve spent over the last 30 years or better informing myself on matters of politics, history, & philosophy primarily. Yeah! I’m light years ahead of that mental midget in the White House and I challenge anyone to a mental competition! (except Noam Chomsky)

me & the Love of my Life, Jeri

 

Throughout my adult life, and especially since my confidence in my intellectual reasoning skills began to grow, I have heard the mantra of “All you need is common sense.” And it became very clear that this was a standard put-down of all us “bookworms,” etc. It was inferred that we were so book-smart that we were complete idiots and didn’t even know enough to come in out of the rain. Well, I eventually realized that this was a common defense of those who felt academically inferior because they had unfortunately been the victims of shitty teachers. I have realized slowly though, that I do in fact have an ample supply of “common sense,” and I have surprised myself as well as several of my friends who were/are carpenters, mechanics, plumbers, etc. over the years. Because I am humble & know what I don’t know in many of these trades, etc., I’m not afraid to ask what may appear to be stupid questions. And from time to time, I have surprised my skilled tradesmen friends with some of my suggestions for solving a seemingly unsolvable obstacle in a project we were working on. So, yeah, call me a braggart, but unlike your babbling buffoon of a president, I and everyone else I’ve ever met, know that those who feel the constant need to keep telling people how wonderful, how brilliant, etc. they are, are full of shit!

 

By-the-way, the next time the I.R.S. tells you that they’re going to audit you, tell them that you refuse to give them your past tax returns like your buddy Donald has done. See how long before you’re sitting in prison. Remember, he’s telling it like it is!

 

Believe it or not, I am getting close to winding this up but it’s hard to do because there’s just so much evidence & so many examples of this brain-dead & soulless miscreant’s trail of human wreckage, & although I have little to live for since the passing of my soul mate, Jeri, I do still care about & feel the pain of the billions of suffering souls around this planet due to the ugly greed of “people” like Donald Trump.

 

If I were forced to narrow down to its simplest form, the danger of Trump, I would have to say it’s the deadly combination of his ignorance & his arrogance. And because of the position of power that he holds, we should all be trembling unto our death (I believe this was Kierkegaard’s phrase?) This vile creature that walks upright like a primate but is more like a cold-blooded reptile or spineless crustacean, haunts my waking hours and if he doesn’t haunt yours, your children & your grandchildren will reap the consequences of a world which allowed such a creature from the Black Lagoon to become president of the United States which, don’t get me wrong, has a very long, and immoral history of which I’m deeply ashamed!

filling the swamp of moral decay

 

The mendacious, malicious, miscreant, megalomaniac (a person obsessed with their own power) creature known as Trump, is a reality that unfortunately, we have no choice but to deal with. And no, he’s not an aberration, he’s a symptom of a dark, underlying force not only in America, but around the world. Trump has made it okay for the worst in human nature to rear its ugly head & although I’m not a religious person, God save us from the likes of him!

so much for “Christian” Virtues!

 

Addendum

 

The American Press stands on the shoulders of the giants from our past i.e. Walter Cronkite, dubbed “the most trusted man in America,” Edward R. Murrow, who broadcast from London through the entire 56 days of what was dubbed the Blitz—the continuous bombing campaign with the aim of completely destroying London. I.F. Stone, called the “conscience of Washington” for his amazing investigative journalism in which he poured through the official documents/reports/etc. of D.C. to find the nuggets of truth often buried in thousands of pages of the Congressional Record & many other government documents. And George Seldes, perhaps the grandfather of modern free press, who lived through WWI & interviewed everyone from Lenin to Mussolini, covered the Spanish Civil War & often just barely escaped being captured by the fascists.

the grandfather of muckrakers i.e. truth tellers!

 

In fact, as I’m writing this, it’s very pertinent to the subject of Little Lord Fauntleroy i.e. Donny, born with the silver spoon in his mouth. Why? Because Trump’s number one mentor without a doubt was the infamous Roy Cohn who represented countless mobsters on the East Coast who just coincidentally became “business associates” with Trump & Cohn was Joseph McCarthy’s right-hand, hatchet man i.e. totally ruthless in destroying peoples’ lives with baseless, smear campaigns & assorted dirty tricks. And it was Edward R. Murrow who had the balls to go after McCarthy and his witch hunting tactics on his nationally broadcast CBS news program, “See It Now,” which led to McCarthy’s censure.

Roy Cohn, lawyer for the five largest mafia families in New York

 

Furthermore, it’s a sad fact that I feel I must remind far too many of my fellow Americans of what facts are. Trump walks around gloating because he has suckered so many of our citizens into believing whatever he says. Reflect on this truth if you will, “alternative facts” didn’t build the Golden Gate Bridge, put an American on the Moon, or find a cure for polio, no, these & countless other wonders were accomplished due to good old solid, scientific facts, mechanical, electrical, engineering, biological, chemical, etc. verifiable facts. And the fact that Donald, like the oil corporations have managed to confuse the general public to such an extent with the billions they’ve spent on their covert propaganda campaign to plant the seeds of doubt regarding climate change, is truly frightening. My hero, Noam Chomsky has been dubbed “Perhaps the most important intellectual alive,” by The New York Times but he often smiles & reminds his audiences that they leave out, the Times goes on to ask, “So why is he so often wrong?” Chomsky is on a list of the top ten most quoted people in Western Civilization which includes Plato, Aristotle, & the Bible and he’s the only one alive.

 

Excuse me for going on about Chomsky but I can’t honor him enough & again, it really saddens me that the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t even know who he is, including many self-proclaimed liberals. But, Chomsky says the two greatest dangers facing humanity are climate change & the threat of nuclear war. And we have this proud moron in the White House doing all he can to eliminate every regulation holding back the major polluters & he openly asks, “What good are these nukes if we can’t use them?”

 

No, my friend, what’s far scarier than this delusional dip-shit is the fact that a third of the American public are so blinded by his fear & hate rhetoric that he probably could get away with shooting someone in broad daylight on 5th Avenue in New York City? And the fact that people actually believe this delusional, would be American Caesar, shows that they are the ones who don’t have common sense.

Compassionate Conservative Christian “values”

 

—Rob DeLoss, August 31, 2018 Trinidad, CA

 

EARLY WARNING SIGNS OF FASCISM

  1. Powerful and continuing nationalism
    2. Disdain for human rights
    3. Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
    4. Rampant sexism
    5. Controlled mass media
    6. Obsession with national security
    7. Religion and government intertwined
    8. Corporate power protected
    9. Labor power suppressed
    10. Disdain for intellectual and the arts
    11. Obsession with crime and punishment
    12. Rampant cronyism and corruption

A true patriot will point out the relevant warning sign of approaching fascism when engaged in a conversation/debate with a Trump supporter.
 

 

 

 

 

Fake News and a Fake President

~ cockroachconspiracy

Fake News and a Fake President

         If it weren’t so deadly serious in terms of the harms already done & yet to come from this fake & shameless blowhard or as I prefer to call him, Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan, it’d be hilarious. And the fact that he has the audacity to act as if he’s some paragon of an honest & honorable person is mind-boggling to all of us who haven’t drank the FOX “News” Kool Aid regarding the dunce president.

         Admittedly, there is a kernel of truth to the girly-man’s accusations regarding the news & this is true in all forms of effective propaganda. And that’s the only fact that I’ll concede when it comes to this national embarrassment I.e. we have a world class moron as our president. So, for those of you who haven’t entirely shut down the higher functioning areas of your brains, ponder these facts if you will?

         Do you remember when John Kerry was running for president? If so, do you recall a tag he was labeled with called “flip-flopper?” Well the Trumpster has the unique ability to flip-flop sometimes within the same sentence, usually not more than two or three sentences later. In other words, Donny contradicts himself or outright lies consistently & frequently. How in the Hell can people think this is “telling it like it is?” Which of course is the mantra just about everybody who supports the Duck repeats within the first few minutes you start a conversation about him.

         Could it be that what people mean when they say they admire him for “telling it like it is,” are saying is they like his racism, fear mongering, & hate generating speech? Yeah, he is consistent in that but not in anything else. If one spends even a modicum of time researching authoritarians & dictators, it soon becomes evident that the above characteristics which the Klansman who would be king exhibits, is the common thread.

         Clearly, the Donald or his P.R. team realized that because so many millions of Americans are out of work or working two or three minimum wage jobs, have lost their homes to illegal foreclosures, had their pensions stolen, etc. they could tap into the fear & anger of all these people. And by distracting the public by scapegoating immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, homosexuals, etc., thereby giving the public a focus for their anger, he could ride that wave of rage into the White House.

         You see, my friend, the rich have long known that as long as they can divide & distract the public with various scapegoats, the public won’t wake-up to the fact that it’s the rich who should be the focus of our anger. They are the ones who write the laws that coincidentally benefit them but screw the rest of us. For example, the recent tax break for the rich, the biggest in history, is overwhelmingly going to benefit the super-rich & hurt the rest of us, the 99% who have to pay the taxes that go to the true elite, while that same class, pay a minuscule, if any taxes.

         Why do you think your buddy won’t release his tax records? Could it be that it’d show that he’s one of them, not the defender of the working class as you’ve been suckered into believing? And here’s a bit of common sense for you, you may have noticed—-if your blinders aren’t totally in place—-that Donny boy loves to brag about himself, he usually can’t go more than a few sentences without pointing out how wonderful he is. And he’s been telling us for years of how fabulously wealthy he is, right? Well, I would think that he’d jump at the chance to prove to the world how stinking rich he is by showing us his tax records. Doesn’t that make sense?

         Might it also be that by revealing his tax records, it’d be clear to all that he’s not the brilliant businessman he’s always claimed to be? He’s filed for bankruptcy four times due to his poor management of the casinos he had his name on. After his last bankruptcy, none of the major banks would loan him money so he went to foreign banks, and got a life-line in terms of financial help from his Russian mafia friends. (Doesn’t it strike you as odd that he’s so enamored of Putin?) By-the-way, I’ll share another little secret hiding in plain sight, the overwhelming majority of properties with the Trump name on them, aren’t owned by Donny, the true owners pay him for his “brand” or logo which he has been obsessively protecting as if it were his daughter’s virginity, for decades.

         The spinmeister knows only too well how important image is & he can’t stop promoting his image for more than two minutes at a time. And this connects with his pseudo war on the media. The Duck has been a media whore his entire life & his mentor in this regard was Roy Cohn, the cold-blooded lawyer for the East coast mafia & right-hand man for Joseph McCarthy in the true witch-hunt that Joe waged in the 50s that ruined so many good peoples’ lives & was thoroughly anti-democratic & anti-American.

         Roy drilled home to his young, Richie Rich protege the fact that any media attention, whether good or bad, was beneficial in terms of keeping your name in the public mind. Moreover, we can thank the so-called “fake media” for being a major factor in the girly-man’s becoming president because they gave him billions of dollars of free advertising during his campaign.

         Perhaps you prefer to cling to your conspiratorial belief that the press is the enemy of the people? By-the-way, common sense again tells us that when anybody, and especially someone as powerful as the president of the most powerful nation on earth, tells us that we shouldn’t believe anyone who criticizes us, you should be afraid, VERY AFRAID!

         So, Daddy Donald will protect us against all the evil doers in the world yet he clearly flunked junior high school history. Just about every time he opens his mouth, he reveals how mind-bogglingly ignorant he is. Don’t believe me, do a little fact checking on your own if that isn’t against your religion?

         Obviously, the Duck Dynasty Dunce isn’t living in the common reality that most of us are. I mean, when his haggard & homely witch spokeswoman, Kellyanne Conway told us straight-faced, “Well, there are alternate facts,” that should’ve been a major wake-up call to all of us. And this is a key point my friends, what Donald & his handlers are hoping is that they can convince the third of Americans who loyally support him, that facts and opinions are one & the same. Sorry to break it to you but no, they’re not. Facts are established by Science & the scientific method I.e. hypothesis, test your hypothesis repeatedly, and the more it yields the same observable results, it eventually becomes a theory, & after quite a long time of consistent findings, it eventually is referred to as a law I.e. the law of gravity, etc.

         And yes, everybody has a right to their own opinion but not to their own facts. And some opinions are far worthier than others I.e. if a guy is a great mechanic, his opinions about mechanical matters are more worthy or valuable than someone like me, whose close to being a moron regarding mechanical knowledge. The closest we can come to “truth” on any subject requires two things; 1) check out their credentials, 2) check out what other experts in the field they’re claiming expertise in, have to say about their opinion, theory, etc.

         Socrates taught us this more than 2,500 years ago in Athens, the birthplace of Western democracy. And he pissed off a lot of people because he proved that just because a guy was say, a master shipbuilder, he got a swelled head & then thought he was a master on many matters totally unrelated I.e. how to raise a child, etc. Unfortunately, in this rapid-fire world of ours with technology jumping ahead with leaps & bounds, people have become so intellectually lazy & dependent on their “smart phones,” etc. that they won’t take the time to do a little research on the serious issues facing us i.e. Donald’s dangerous ignorance & alienating of our former allies & cozying up to one dictator after another. His launching of trade wars because of his perceived insults from other nation’s leaders. And most frightening, his wholesale deregulation of every federal agency established to protect us from greedy corporate cockroaches & the protection of our environment. If this goes on unabated, who’s going to want to go on vacation anywhere? The forests will all be chopped down, the ocean will be one huge toilet bowl, & we’ll all need to wear gas masks. Note how bad the air is in a lot of China due to its reckless plundering of its natural resources with no environmental protections.

         I almost forgot another minor detail of Donald’s giving free rein to corporate America I.e. the continued & expanding deregulation of Wall St., the too big to fail handful of super banks, the hedge fund managers, etc. Did you enjoy the world-wide economic crash of 2008? Wasn’t that fun watching tens of millions of people around the globe lose their jobs, pensions, homes, health insurance, etc. Well, you’ll love the crash that’s coming because Donald Duck loves Wall St. —-he’s been kissing their asses for decades —-and he & the 1% are busy hiding their wealth in so-called safe havens where they think they’ll be safe from all the ravages that all the rest of us will experience. And for the record, I voted for Obama the first time around but within a few weeks when he appointed Summers, Geithner, Bernanke, etc. I knew he’d sold us out and it was all a lie I.e. “Change,” (his mantra as he was campaigning for the presidency.

         In conclusion, I’m again going to try to insert some “common sense” you know, that quality that us eggheads aren’t supposed to have any of. How can the free press, Donny’s “enemy of the American people,” be accurate whenever they repeat things about King Donald that stroke his ego but the second they say something “critical” I.e. negative, they’re “fake news?” Fake to me is pretty much the same as Fraud & Donald the Dick-head has been committing fraud for decades, that’s why he’s fought hundreds, if not thousands of lawsuits & continues to be in legal jeopardy. He defrauded many people who worked for him over the decades from Polish, illegal immigrants, he hired to do the demolition on a building he wanted to turn into Trump Towers, to bankers, etc. etc. etc. Don’t forget Trump University, which he quietly paid something like $25 million for in the judgment against him. Yep! He’s like a modern-day Wizard of Oz but not the kindly, old guy from the movie. And as P.T. Barnum warned us decades ago, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” If it sounds too good to be true, you can bet it is! You’ve been warned and my conscience is clear.

Addendum

         George Orwell in his prescient novel “1984,” laid out a nightmare vision of a dystopian future & the older I get, the more that fictional nightmare seems to be our present “reality.”

 “War is peace. Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength.”

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”

“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.”

“Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power”

“In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for ‘Science’. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance—meaning, in effect, war and police espionage—the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.”

       And for the record, your darling duck conservatively received over $2 billion in free media time. Bernie received a tiny fraction of media time. Why? Because the Klansman has been manipulating the media for decades and knows how to shock people so he’ll get attention. But don’t forget, the media is the enemy of the people!

       —-Rob DeLoss, Trinidad, CA August 19, 2018

P.S.  It just dawned on me that I’ve forgotten the most glaring piece of evidence—-probably because I’ve known it for so long—that I’ve internalized & I forget that unfortunately, far too many Americans still haven’t caught on i.e. FOX “News” is “The” most fake news corporation in America! And as Joseph Goebbels knew only too well, the longer the lie has been repeated, the more people begin to accept it as a truth. And appropriately, FOX is de facto, America’s answer (copy) to Russia’s Pravda —their main newspaper & “Pravda” means truth in Russian. It’s common knowledge that Trump watches hours of FOX “News” every day so, this is where he gets his “knowledge” of current affairs from. And while I’m not a gambling man, I bet you that Trump’s “base” is overwhelmingly made up of FOX “News” viewers. Do a little research on your own as to what journalism is & you, like me, will be amazed that FOX has gotten away with posing as a news organization for these past 20 years. And I hold our mainstream as well as our alternative news sites partially responsible because, they have been reinforcing this delusion every time they repeat the phrase “FOX News.” I’ve been putting it in quotation marks for several years.

The Big Short

~ cockroachconspiracy

The Big Short….

is a movie based on the reality of what caused the collapse of the world economy in 2007. In the financial “services” sector of the U.S. economy, a “short” is to bet against something.

The financial “elite” bet that they could get away with defrauding the American public indefinitely by purposely selling mortgages they knew were shit to one another & the audacity to then bet that they could bundle them together in vast quantities & hide their worthlessness. And the “credit rating” agencies upon which everything is valued & holds god-like power over us, stamped them with triple A ratings i.e. the best rating you can get. And these wealthy whores knew full well what they were doing & didn’t give a fuck because they knew the federal government would bail them out & that they wouldn’t see a single day in prison.

They were right & they duped the gullible public by shifting the blame to the poor & the immigrants as they have done throughout history. How? By labeling them greedy for thinking they could buy a home they obviously couldn’t afford. Of course they hid the true facts regarding their predatory lending practices i.e. if you were breathing, you qualified for their deceitful mortgages with the hidden balloon payments, etc.

“Masters of the Universe” (world-class thieves)

The cold, hard facts are that the economic meltdown was the fault of the insatiable greed of the “Super Banks” & many of their Wall St. cronies like hedge fund managers, the mortgage lending giants, the credit rating agencies that sanctioned the tens of millions of shitty loans, the real estate industry, the world’s largest insurance corporation—A.I.G., & all the corrupt politicians who looked the other way because of the campaign donations, etc. they received from the corporate cockroaches.

Hitler rose to power by blaming the Jews primarily for Germany’s economic depression between WWI & WWII. And once he became Germany’s most powerful man, he shored-up his power by first accusing, then beating up & jailing anyone who dared to challenge his authority. And when that didn’t work, he had them killed i.e. intellectuals, artists, writers, teachers, professors, homosexuals, immigrants, etc.

Does this sound at all familiar? Trump rose to the highest position in America, the presidency, by attacking & blaming Muslims, Mexicans, Blacks, gays, the Obama administration, Wall St., and the media. I fear that we may come to a new form of fascism, an American fascism & we may very well begin the mass incarceration then the extermination of all the Muslims living in America that the “intelligence” agencies, the military, & the police that are resembling military occupation forces more & more.

However, it will be much easier for the tin-pot would be dictator Trump than it was for Hitler because today, “our” government—what a farce—and the corporate cockroaches, especially the “social media” platforms like Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, You Tube, AOL, Skype, & Apple to name just the major culprits. Consider the fact that tens of millions if not billions of people—mostly young people—around the globe are addicted to their “Smart” phones to the point that they interact less & less with their friends in the old fashioned sense i.e. talking face to face, going out together, offering true human sympathy/empathy when their friends are troubled, etc. instead, they have developed insatiable appetites for collecting fake friends they’ve never met & the more “likes,” etc. they collect, the more popular they feel.

So, these so-called “Smart phones,” are de facto making us a much more atomized or isolated people, helping to “dumb us down,” and freely providing the government & the corporate cockroaches all our personal data by illegally & immorally all our e-mails, phone calls, physical locations which they can monitor & track, text messages, web searches, websites you visit, our purchases, what we read & write, etc. all with the friendly help of the “social media” platforms or websites & “services.”

Will we sleepwalk our way to our death & a horrific future more terrifying than any of the zombie or vampire cult movies & television programs the public is enthralled with? A large percentage of Germany’s Jewish population stood by in disbelief as Hitler’s gestapo & SS escalated their violence against them as well. And the so-called, “Good Germans” stood silently by as the evil spread like a virus among their countrymen.

Reflect if you will on the illiteracy of the American public i.e. just scan through your T.V. guide & yeah, we have hundreds of choices but it’s clearly not much of a choice if you’re at all concerned or value true intellectual stimulation. Movies are a steady stream of comic book heroes, monsters, ridiculous “Romance stories,” absurd science fiction (Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke are the rare exceptions), gratuitous violence, or pure pablum. The reading habits of Americans are the laughing stock of the world, and when is the last time you enjoyed a serious political discussion with your friends or even strangers? And lastly but certainly not least, the fact that we have the most illiterate & proudly anti-intellectual president in U.S. history, Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan is gutting every government agency established to protect the environment and us from the corporate predators & threatening a nuclear war with N. Korea, etc., should scare the Hell out of you! But hey, Hell may not be such a shock when it comes because we’re already acclimated thanks to Trump & the corporate cockroaches who are speeding-up Global Warming?

In conclusion, we’re all being shorted or bet against. The corporate cockroach conspiracy is that we’ll be too preoccupied with our smart phones & other distracting toys to notice that they’re fucking us yet again. Yep! They—the financial “wizards” which should rightfully be called the war profiteers & whores who rob us blind—were supposedly bailed-out to save our economy & offer loans to people to start new businesses, prevent bankruptcy, etc. but Paulson, Geitner, Bernanke, Summers, etc. were afraid to put it in writing for fear they might not accept the billions from our Treasury. And lo & behold, they refused to help us, the peasants who just pay all the taxes they used to bail out the Wall St. wolves & millions of Americans had their homes illegally foreclosed on.

And surprise! They’re at it again & Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan just gave the super-rich yet another giant, tax break (give away) which they’ll pocket & proclaim they must now cut more social welfare programs. P.T. Barnum is famous for having said, “There’s a Sucker born every minute.” How right he was, perhaps we should change our nation’s name to the United States of Suckers?

As the saying goes in Vegas, you drive into town in a cadillac & you leave on a Greyhound bus. You’ve been warned!

P.S.  I almost forgot to mention that those billions that were handed to the “Super Bankers” (Super Predators) helped the big boys to reward themselves with bonuses in the millions for having tanked our economy & sparked a world-wide, economic collapse. Pretty good work if you can get it, eh?

before you laugh, the joke is on us!