What the 1% Think of Us

 

 

 

In a word, Trump. What do I mean by this? Here is a person who is perhaps the most vile, corrupt, detestable person who has ever occupied the White House & most of us know that no one gets even close to that position without having been approved of by that tiny fraction of the 1%. And this says to me that they just plain don’t give a fuck about what we think or feel.

so all female Trump fans don’t mind if men grab their pussies???

 

Trump is like that tiny fraction of the elite, morally bankrupt corporate cockroaches flipping us & the rest of the world, the middle finger i.e. we could give a shit less about what you think, feel, or care about.

our “engaged” president thinking about a Big Mac

 

Many of us have heard of the proverbial “talk” given to new presidents when they take office. The new president may have promised the world to his constituents regarding all the changes he was going to implement but after “the talk,” those promises seem to just fade away?

 

So, it’s very clear except to the willfully blind that those who give the new presidents this lesson in the reality of how the U.S. government is really run are those top-secret men behind the veil of secrecy, and they are the de facto masters of the universe.

The banking cabal, not all the Masters but a significant part

 

And my guess is that were it not for Trump being the president, most of the high-class restaurants & clubs across America wouldn’t even allow Trump in their establishments due to his vulgarity & total lack of decent etiquette or proper behavior & speech. This may be another reason why he just hangs out at his own hotels & resorts though who knows if he actually owns them or merely gets to plaster his name all over them for the grand façade of his “success” brand.

Trump’s “brain-trust”

 

You see, my imaginary reader, Trump isn’t simply some malevolent force out of the blue, no, he’s just the end result—sort of like the end result of our bodies’ processing of the food we take in—of a publicly declared agenda by the rich after FDR enacted his “New Deal.”

 

In short, they declared that they weren’t going to stop fighting until they had rolled-back every single aspect of the New Deal that helped us, the coerced taxpayers & cost them so much as a penny. Moreover, you may recall Mitch McConnel, the Machiavellian miscreant who announced from Day 1 of Obama’s election that he & the G.O.P. were going to block Obama at every single bit of legislation he tried to pass. What a noble patriot!

 

By-the-way, don’t misunderstand me, the Democratic party is pretty damn close to being equally guilty in their betrayal of us, the 99% but for the sake of brevity in this essay, I’ll keep my criticisms mostly targeted on the G.O.P. (Greedy Old Pigs).

 

So, here’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how that elite scum think of us or rather, don’t think of us.

 

  • The privatization of all public water—note Nestles water in Michigan which gets the water from the Great Lakes at pennies on the dollar while Flint’s once clean source of water is shut-off & they are forced to use the toxic water of the Flint River

    Why won’t Trump drain the swamp in Flint???
  • The elimination of all unions, public & private. Note one of Reagan’s first acts as president was to fire the Air Traffic Controllers out on strike for life. And this sent a message to corporate America i.e. it’s open season on unions

    he busted-up every union he could but didn’t break up the Screen Actor’s Guild which he used to head?
  • Sorry American public, but there’s simply not enough money for quality health care, education, or welfare for the 99% but there’s a never-ending flow of billions & trillions to the “Defense Industries,” because the terrorists are coming (and we get a nice slice of the pie!) i.e. Halliburton, Bechtel, G.E., etc.

    Do you remember how Cheney/Bush backtracked after their lies were revealed?
  • No taxes for the rich or the megalithic monopolies that are strangling not only America’s workers but workers around the world. And ever since Reagan, they’ve promised that this would cause a trickle-down benefit for all of us. Yeah, and how are you doing financially from this trickle? But we, the intimidated taxpayers are sent to jail if we “cheat” on our taxes.

    Trump’s version of “Draining the Swamp” i.e. the U.S. Treasury & the 99%’s pockets
  • No, or very rarely do they prosecute the rich & when they do, the rich, especially the giant corporations, don’t even have to plead guilty & there’s no conviction on their record. So, they go right back to committing fraud, poisoning our environment, etc., pay a relatively small fine as compared to the profits they made from their criminal activities. You or I, pay a huge fine relative to our financial status, have a record, & often go to jail or prison. And we get three strikes & we’re out i.e. your third offence could be as little as stealing a candy bar & you spend the rest of your life in prison.</li>
  • More & more protestors are being labeled terrorists so they have no rights such as habeas corpus, right to a lawyer, etc. & their lives are destroyed (see The Patriot Act) & note Obama’s prosecution of more Whistleblowers than all other presidents combined—the brave souls like Edward Snowden who warned us that our government with the help of the tech giants is spying on every single communication device & platform

    Continuous Fear/Hate rallies, above the law, silence the media, countless criminal acts-Wake up People!
  • The Hell with clean air, clean water, safe food—Monsanto can experiment with GMO food & we can’t even know which foods are GMO (would hurt their profit margin) the corporate cockroaches are polluting the entire planet & pushing into ever greater ecological disaster which threatens humanity’s very survival, Oh well? They’re getting richer by the minute.

    And you claim that you love your kids???
  • Deregulation ad nauseam i.e. deregulate every industry but when their greed brings about their downfall, we, the taxpayers must once again bail them out (The World-wide Crash of 2008 which stole the pensions, homes, life savings, & jobs of tens of millions of people around the world, but when we, Joe & Jane average with maybe a mom & pop mini-market, go under? Too bad, too sad, it’s the free market for us but socialism for the rich i.e. we are all left to that mythological “free market,” where it’s sink or swim or the law of the jungle but the elite are always bailed out by us, the taxpayers because we’re forced to. And they proclaim that they must be saved or America will go under.

    Trump is busy deregulating every industry he can becuz 2008 was so much fun

 

In conclusion, the 1% have nothing but complete & utter contempt for the 99%. Just look at Trump’s chin, poked out in arrogance like he’s Louis the XIV th or Mussolini. He’s been spoiled & protected all his life because of his dad’s wealth built largely on his being a slum lord & manipulating the loopholes of tax laws, bribing of city council members, & friendships with mafia figures.

The Great “Deal Maker”

 

And this is why Donny throws a fit whenever anyone criticizes him. He’s used to always getting his way & this is also why he loves authoritarian figures around the globe. They remind him of the mafia bosses & the fear they have instilled in their citizens who dare not speak out for fear of being killed.

Trump idolizes dictators cuz he imagines himself one but his followers don’t care that they massacre thousands of their own citizens, at least they’re “strong” men

 

Trump demands total loyalty to him like the kings during the age of feudalism but he has absolutely no loyalty to anyone except his buddy, Putin who has killed god knows how many of his own citizens. Putin even hunts down his opponents who have fled to other countries like those in England that he had poisoned.

 

Trump admires Duterte who declared himself above the law & told his police to shoot dead anyone they suspect of using or selling drugs. Tens of thousands of Philippinos have been gunned down in the Philippines, no court hearing just summary execution. This appeals to Trump again because he loves the feeling or thought that he has absolute power & his word is law.

 

We also have Erdogan in Turkey who has declared himself “sultan,” and runs his country like it as well. And don’t forget Trump’s friend whom he declared falling in love with i.e. Rocket Man of North Korea has been letting his people starve for decades so that he can live like Kubla Khan in opulence. And last but not least, President Xi of China who declared himself president for life & has also killed god knows how many Chinese citizens & has the world’s largest open prison comprised of that religious sect who harm no one but dare to dissent.

 

Moreover, what really confuses & depresses me is the fact that so many American citizens can sit by & watch Trump flout our laws—remember, we love to brag about being a nation built on law & order—most glaringly his ignoring of the emolument’s clause in our most sacred document, the U.S. Constitution, and brazenly he tries to steer the G7 Summit for next year to be held at one of his resorts.

 

Trump supporters are either the world’s biggest fools or hypocrites & willfully blind to the fact that he is clearly not one of them & has nothing but contempt for them. He’s coming for your food stamps people, Make America Great Again! I’ll see you in line at the food bank.

Ah yeah, Trump telling it like it is

 

—Rob DeLoss, Dec. 4, 2019 in Gold Beach, Oregon

 

P.S.  I almost forgot to add that the arrogance of the rich has touched my life as well. I worked many shitty factory jobs in my 20s & I hated it with a passion on one particular occasion, the owner of the factory was leading a group of businessmen on a tour of the factory. I was standing & working at the machine I was assigned to & they stood not ten feet away from me & studied the machine & never once acknowledged my presence, not even a nod of recognition. I felt like a domestic animal in their barn. That anger has helped to fuel my lifelong pursuit of knowledge in order to empower myself and not have to be in a position like that one ever again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

America’s Zombie Cult

 

 

 

First and foremost, I can relate to Trump’s followers’ anger & frustration at our establishment because I have been battling the establishment ever since I went AWOL from the U.S. Army back in 1972. And for a young man of 19 years, that was one of the scariest periods of my life.

The darkest days of my life until I lost my wife

 

As I matured, I began to see what a pack of lies my generation had been told. I saw how our public education system was built on a mountain of lies & false promises. And as I worked at one Mickey Mouse job after another, I began to realize that this was perhaps one of the cruelest myths of all. Hard work & dedication to your job rarely paid off. No, it was usually those who were related to the owner of the company or those who were the biggest brown-nosers who “succeeded.”

A real patriot, Ron Kovic, who spoke the truth after realizing the lie of Vietnam war.

 

In brief, if you had integrity & couldn’t bring yourself to suck-up to the bosses, you were usually marginalized or gotten rid of. I busted my ass pursuing higher education for 14 years. I rode a bicycle five miles to a community college, four nights a week after working an eight-hour day in a golf club factory for a couple of semesters at one point. I studied business administration, oceanography, & liberal arts and often dropped-out half way or even three-quarters of the way through a semester because I was bored & not inspired by what I was learning.

 

I pursued my dreams of adventure & hitchhiked up & down the West Coast dozens of times, across America, & around Europe several times often on a one-way ticket with a couple hundred bucks in my pocket.

 

I had been raised mostly by a single parent, my mom. She often worked two or three jobs at a time to feed us & keep a roof over our heads. I basically raised my brother & sisters & fought everyone’s battles. I got 40 cents a day for lunch when I was in high school. And I held down two paper routes to earn my spending money & pumped gas as a senior in high school.

 

I stood up against some of my mom’s boyfriends who were cruel to us or raised a hand to my mom. I clearly didn’t have a happy childhood but through it all, I kept my dreams alive & read like a person possessed.

 

And after my experience in the army, I thank God that I trusted my gut instinct & didn’t let them send me to Vietnam. I wasn’t politically aware but I had seen enough of the army’s lies to know that they couldn’t be trusted. I got out of the army with an undesirable discharge & began to read a lot of books on history, philosophy, & politics due largely to some very smart people I’d met on my travels. And slowly the veil of ignorance was removed & I began to connect the dots.

I read this book 30 years ago & it’s truly scary how ignorant we are as a nation

 

This is the major difference between me & Trump’s cult of zombies. They, often through no fault of their own, haven’t read the great authors like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, or Michael Parenti & because of this, they haven’t developed their critical/analytical thinking skills and are much more susceptible to the propaganda & bullshit of people like Trump.

 

And this is not only sad but dangerous because Trump’s followers are so easily aroused to anger & hatred because he is a master at manipulating their emotions to direct their anger at fellow victims rather than our true enemy i.e. the 1% who are the masters of the political establishment.

isn’t it interesting how the “Christian” agenda & the corporate cockroach agenda go hand-in-glove?

 

I call these “masters,” the corporate cockroaches because they hide in the dark & they have succeeded fantastically over the past 40 years or better in blaming the government for their dirty deeds. And no, I’m not saying that the politicians are innocent. Not by a longshot but if we are to survive this onslaught, we must focus our energies on the corporate sector.

smile & laugh because they are too, all the way to the bank as they steal your pension, your home, etc.

 

I must say that it really baffles me how the poor, the struggling working class can actually believe an established habitual liar who claims to be a self-made billionaire, is their champion. Trump failed at nearly every business venture he got into but daddy kept bailing him out & gave him hundreds of millions of dollars & a million dollars annually so he could never fail totally. And he has a long track record of screwing contractors & employees out of the money he owes them. This is your hero?

this is why Trump hates the Times more than any other newspaper

 

Daddy Trump made his fortune by being a slum-lord & discriminating against Black American citizens. And this is the key to Trump’s success in becoming our president, he played the race card brilliantly in his own, evil way.

 

Nothing takes peoples’ minds off their troubles easier & better than by focusing their anger on scapegoats. This is standard operating procedure for all demagogues, dictators, fascists, & authoritarians. And Trump clearly loves dictators i.e. Putin, Duterte, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, etc. Moreover, Trump fancies himself an authoritarian because he’s always gotten his way as a spoiled-child whom daddy always bankrolled & protected from the law with a platoon of lawyers. And Donny got to play the part of a successful billionaire on television—which was almost entirely a work of fiction. Check it out for yourself by seeing what the producers of The Apprentice have revealed.

Do you actually need testimonies as to Trump’s colossal ignorance on just about everything? Open your eyes!

 

And speaking of revealing, here are my revelations for those of you who give a fuck about who Trump really is behind all those Hollywood staged rallies. Moreover, I can back my shit up unlike Trump who just makes outrageous claims daily but can never back them up with facts. Why do you think he threatened every school he ever attended with lawsuits if they dared to release his grades? This mental & moral midget hides behind his wall of lies always protected by lawyers & publicists or P.R. people like Kellyanne Conway with her “alternate facts.”

would your teachers in public school accept these “arguments” for your laziness & stupidity???

 

Facebook and the other “social media platforms” like Twitter & our ‘Smart phones,” are reducing us to our basest, reptilian minds & we simply react on a flight or fight level.

 

The more successful these platforms are at pushing peoples’ emotional buttons like fear & hate, the more addicted people become to these platforms. Hence, the more time they spend on Facebook, Twitter, etc., the wealthier the owners like Zuckerberg become from the advertising revenues they collect. And what’s really spooky is the fact that over 50% of Americans get their news from Facebook. By-the-way, Zuckerberg refuses to accept responsibility for the truthfulness of the political ads on Facebook & Breitbart—the Neo-Nazi & White Nationalist epicenter—is the largest political advertising customer on Facebook. And Breitbart via its former editor, Steve Bannon, hired Cambridge Analytica which bought the personal data of over 80,000 Facebook users & by extension got all their friends as well, and this is how they targeted the Facebook users they knew would be receptive to the fake news stories about Hillary & put Trump in the White House.

The beginning of wisdom is knowing that you don’t know. (Socrates)

 

Can you understand now how perversely hypocritical it is every time Trump lashes out at “fake news” when he has benefitted more than anyone else from fake news? Let alone the fact that he received at least 23 times the media coverage running up to the election than Bernie Sanders by the “mainstream media.”

 

Continuing, so like the movies that most of us who weren’t born with the silver spoon in our mouths like Donnie was watch, they’re becoming ever more violent, bloody, gory, etc. in a constant effort by Hollywood to outdo itself in a deescalating road to the darkest pits of Hell even more horrifying than anything Dante could imagine.

I’m not a religious person but if I were, this is the anti-Christ i.e. no compassion whatsoever

 

Call me a sissy, I don’t give a shit. But I could only stomach about ten minutes of one episode of The Walking Dead series, once. It was nauseating in its gory & gruesome details of hacking a zombie to death. I thought, this is definitely not my idea of entertainment. So, you can imagine my sad surprise at the popularity of this series.

 

Another factor in how we have come to this sad state of affairs is the fact that our attention spans are growing ever shorter. Yep! The average American’s attention span has now shrunk to less than that of a goldfish. I shit you not. Does this not embarrass you? And again, we can thank Hollywood to a large extent for this tragic phenomenon.

 

Our brains have been conditioned to needing ever faster visual stimulation & an escalating volume of images mostly action or emotionally themed. We are like rats in a maze, hamsters in a cage.

 

Need more convincing? Scan your T.V. guide & look at the most popular movies of the last several years. T.V. shows & movies about vampires & zombies are amongst the most popular. Movies about the dystopian future and the coming apocalypse are amongst the biggest blockbusters along with superhero movies. Our psyches need to believe some superhero like a Donald Trump are going to rescue us from the dreaded liberals & democrats who have destroyed our once idyllic America (Make America Great Again) & ignore the fact that there never was a time when America was great for everyone.

 

Furthermore, consider what passes for news nowadays. The “mainstream” media (corporate owned) & cable news has indeed become infotainment. News reporters & pundits have become interchangeable & pass back & forth through the revolving door that has blurred fact & fiction.

the journalist who dared to take on the witch-hunter McCarthy who terrified Hollywood & the national media

 

Journalists in Edward R. Murrow’s day were supposed to be objective reporters of the facts. Of course, Murrow’s personal opinion pieces were hugely popular but they were clearly identified as editorials & in the main, the news divisions were objective & factual. Today they have abandoned almost entirely this journalistic ethic. And for the record, I was shocked & saddened from nearly the beginning of FOX “News’” introduction to our airwaves. FOX is clearly the closest thing to Russia’s Pravda that we’ve ever known. (look it up if you can spare the time)

McCarthy & Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor i.e. Distract, Deceive, Deny & above all else, keep your name in the public’s mind whether positive or negative

 

We now have a president who relies on The National Enquirer to protect him from some of his most damning actions & words. A president who openly believes in & promotes conspiracy theories from his buddy, Alex Jones who called the Sandy Hook massacre of over 20 elementary school students a grand hoax. A president who refuses to read his daily briefings & can barely form a coherent sentence and that’s becoming ever rarer.

 

In short, we’re drowning in a sea of crap. It’s all junk food for the senses with very little to absolutely nothing in the way of nutritional value for our minds or our souls. And this is why it’s far easier for us to remember the books we’ve read. Books require your mind to engage on a deep level i.e. remembering the plot, the characters, your thoughts as you ponder the actions & words of the characters, etc. But when we watch television or movies, our minds are passive & are just receiving the images & emotions and very little if any reflection takes place. This is why we, myself included, so often forget the movies we’ve watched. I’ll sometimes be halfway through a movie before I realize that I had seen it before. Movies & T.V. are like candy & taste good until they’re over but then we’re still hungry for something nutritional or substantial. This unhealthy diet of action & violence is a drug and most of us are addicted to it, especially those who fell for Trump’s snake-oil medicine show. And this addiction may very well spell the end of American democracy?

 

You see, my imaginary reader, the United States is one of the most violent societies on Earth, if not “the” most violent. And yeah, I know this is going to piss some of you off because we’ve all been indoctrinated from childhood on that America is the champion of the world. The protector & promoter of freedom & democracy. I obviously can’t distill down for you what it’s taken me over 30 years of research to learn about our ignoble past & present. And if you’re not willing to even entertain the possibility that this might be the truth, why should I waste my time & energy trying to reach you?

This is a key reason why Trump appeals to those who don’t or can’t read & those who prefer to remain ignorant. Trump again is like that candy that tastes so good for a minute but as soon as it’s  gone, you need another fix. Another fix of fiction, hatred, & blaming a convenient scapegoat who Trump is an expert on. You can’t help but remember Trump’s myriad areas of expertise because he graciously & generously reminds of them every time he opens his foul mouth.

 

To return to reality and no, not Kellyanne Conway’s “alternate reality/facts,” America is now the most feared nation on Earth—and yeah, I know earth is not supposed to be capitalized but I feel it should be because we are a planet— even more feared than terrorists.

Why, you may ask? Because of our actions like Obama’s illegal & immoral Drone warfare program and his weekly meetings in which they chose the target of the day. Yep, they were judge, jury, & executioner and even killed a couple of Americans they suspected of terrorist activity but couldn’t be bothered to taking them to trial.

 

We are feared because our C.I.A. and several of our other intelligence agencies have been overthrowing other nations’ democratically elected leaders for decades. It’s so absurd for us to get so self-righteous about the supposed Russian interference in our 2016 presidential election by hacking our system when we have assassinated world leaders who we felt threatened “our” corporate interests. And no, this doesn’t mean that I accept Trump’s conspiracy theory of the “Deep State,” and its secret mission to overthrow him.

And this is just one example amongst dozens & dozens of others.

 

Though there might be a small element of truth to the idea that our intelligence agencies would love to see Trump gone because of the very real threat that he poses to our government, I’m not going to get sidetracked by that grand conspiracy because that is just what the zombie puppet masters like Steve Bannon want us to do so we won’t notice the very real threats & destruction that Trump is getting away with.  Trump is to my mind, a clear & present danger to all of America and to the world by extension.

 

We have over 900 military bases around the globe & who knows how many secret bases where we’ve tortured or farmed-out torture to willing accomplices, those we’ve extraordinarily rendered i.e. kidnapped. I believe Russia has about nine or eleven bases and they’re on Russia’s borders? And no, in no way am I a defender of Putin, that’s your zombie leader Trump’s hero. Putin is a bloody dictator plain & simple and it strikes me as absolutely mind-boggling that the pundits warn us that if the democratic presidential contenders are labeled as being Socialist, the democratic party will once again lose & Trump may very well get another term.

 

The G.O.P. has waged a steady propaganda campaign ever since F.D.R. passed the New Deal. And they’ve been extremely successful in painting any programs or politicians who defend the rights of workers or the public are socialists or worse yet, communists. And here we have a president who openly & consistently defends the dictator of Russia but hey,  don’t let the democrats dare defend or call for socialist things like universal health care, free university, etc because that is the road to communism. Remember, that trivial thing called the Cold War & our arch enemies, Russia & China who are now Trump’s pen pals? . This is truly Alice in Wonderland. Why won’t the democratic party stand up on its hind legs and call out the contradictions & hypocrisy of this bullshit propaganda?

 

That was a rhetorical question because I know why they won’t. It’s because they are part of the same corrupt & rotten to the core system that infects our establishment i.e. everything is for the 1%.

 

Again, we have been so brainwashed over the decades as to the imperative need for a powerful military that no one dares—well almost no one, Bernie & Elizabeth speak to it to some extent—to challenge the bedrock premise of our entire military/industrial/congressional complex i.e. the barbarians are at the gates & we must be ever vigilant (was “the commies are coming” now, it’s “the terrorists are coming.”)

As a result of this relentless propaganda campaign that has existed all my life & I’m now 67 years old, we supposedly never have enough money to pay for a quality public education system, universal health care, and all those other unnecessary programs that only benefit the poor, the working class, & the middle class. Nope! We need more of those $900 hammers & billion-dollar weapons systems that don’t even work and some of which the Pentagon doesn’t even want.

 

And what has your champion, Trump done for you? Nothing, that’s what. He spews out lies nonstop because he knows that you won’t check out the facts & that you blindly believe every lie he tells you because you’re his zombie cult, unthinking & unfeeling unless he winds you up with his Hitler-like rallies.

 

In conclusion, if the 1% were to stop feeding us their propaganda of fear & hate which keeps us divided against one another, we might unite & take back our country. Of course, this would hurt them where it matters most i.e. in their financial portfolios.

 

None of this is new in world history, the elite from every nation throughout history have used the time-tested & reliable tactic of Divide & Conquer. Yep! Keep us blaming one another for what they’re doing to us all and the rich can & do get away with murder again & again. And we die in the gutters homeless, alone, & humiliated, blamed for not having made good choices in our lives.

 

Meanwhile, to some extent their propaganda has become a self-fulfilling prophecy because our never-ending wars in which we rape, pillage, & plunder the rest of the world keeps the hatred of America alive in the hearts of terrorists & helps recruits new terrorists. This is why 9/11 was a godsend to the powers that be, they now had the pretext for their hidden agenda of becoming masters of the universe.

 

Whenever you hear them use the phrase; “It’s a matter of National Security,” hold on to your wallet because that’s code for bend over suckers, we’re taking more of your hard-earned money & tough shit if you don’t like it.

 

Trump is little more than a circus ring-leader not unlike in the days of the mighty Roman Empire where they threw Christians to the lions for public spectacle to keep the Roman citizens distracted from the corrupt practices of their Senate,  who were the obscenely wealthy like Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan.

A very dangerous clown who definitely shouldn’t be taken lightly!

 

My guess is that a large portion of those who defend Trump no matter how vile his words or actions, are, are probably huge fans of The Walking Dead but while they are vicariously getting a thrill out of watching the zombies being butchered, they don’t realize that they are the zombies in real-life who are being slaughtered by the Trumps of this world!

P.S. By-the-way, Trump hasn’t honored a single one of his campaign promises but his tax break did give this gift to his crime-partners;

Trump’s Tax Cuts Are the Biggest Wealth Grab in Modern History  https://fortune.com/2017/11/03/trump-gop-tax-plan-cuts-2017/

P.T. Barnum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and boy was he right

How’s that for “draining the swamp?” (Hint; Reagan’s tired old lie is still alive & well i.e. his trickle-down theory that by giving the rich tax breaks, they’ll hire more workers & give their workers raises, etc. In reality, they piss on us & tell us it’s raining golden benefits on us. But hey, wait a minute, doesn’t Trump like golden showers from Russian hookers???

Addendum

I almost forgot. I sent Noam Chomsky—many consider him the most important intellectual alive—an e-mail a few days ago (October 23, 2019) about my belief that Facebook is mainly responsible for the election of Trump. Noam replied; “It’s a plague.”

 

 

The Christian Supremacists Pact with the Devil

 

 

Admittedly, my use of the word “Devil,” is sensationalistic but in today’s America, The National Enquirer appears to hold more sway than The New York Times with Trump automatons so this should appeal to their sensibilities?

 

Many of our fellow citizens have clearly fallen under the spell of the Charlatan in Chief & I feel sickened unto my soul at their blindness. And I sympathize with their righteous anger because I too, have been screwed-over countless times in my life—I’m 66 years old—by the government but even more so by the corporate giants which I refer to as the Corporate Cockroaches.

Trump defenders will undoubtedly spin this as proof of the witch-hunt against Trump

 

As far as I’m concerned, the key difference between myself & many, if not most, of Trump’s supporters is the fact that I have been paying serious attention to politics for well-over 30 years & I understand how the 1% who are truly running the world, have duped so many into believing it’s an elite cabal of liberals who are behind our troubles. (though there is an element of truth to this to some extent but the reality is it’s an amalgamation of greedy, self-interested forces, liberal, conservative, & numerous other perspectives)

 

If you’ll just take a brief survey of Western history, you’ll see the horrific history of what happened when the Church & the State worked together i.e. the individual got fucked royally (pun intended). And this is why our Founding Fathers were very clear about the importance of separating Church from State. Sadly, far too many Americans today either never learned the critical lessons of world history re: this matter or they simply don’t give a shit & are willingly ignorant on the subject?

substitute all the amoral/immoral acts of Trump for the word “Satan”

You see, my imaginary reader, when the power of the church i.e. Christian evangelicals & their steady encroachment into the halls of political power on the local, state, & federal levels over the decades, is united with the power of the government in the same spheres of influence & control over our lives, the overwhelming majority of citizen activist groups/organizations are steamrolled over.

 

Moreover, in today’s “connected” world via the power & scope of the Internet & the myriad so-called “social networks,” it’s very easy to spread fear, hate, & lies. And if we won’t, don’t, or can’t take the time to check out the validity of the claims by those trying to sucker us into their web of deceit, we become just more cannon-fodder for the morally bankrupt.

 

Believe it or not my friend, I do wish that I could offer you a simple method or answer to this complex state of affairs but unlike the con-man in the oval office, I won’t insult your intelligence as he does day-in & day-out. Sadly, in this crazy world of ours where the quantity of our “wealth” is just about the only thing that matters when it comes to our public “influence,” I am only wealthy in terms of the amount of time, energy, & love I have expended in my life-long pursuit of knowledge.

 

And yeah, I know that some of you, especially you die-hard Trump fans, will dismiss me as just another elitist & were this not so absurd, it’d be amusing. Yeah, me the elitist? Single parent (my mom), multiple cruel step-dads/mom’s boyfriends, drunkenness & violence throughout, piss-poor public schools, hundreds of Mickey Mouse dead-end jobs in factories, pumping gas, flipping burgers, etc. , standing up to the U.S. Army & refusing to allow them to send me to Vietnam even though they wanted to make me an officer, scoring at the 11th grade, sixth month level in reading when in the sixth grade but never given the opportunity or the encouragement to rise to my intellectual abilities. Yep! Obviously, I am just another one of the elitists that the humble Trump detests.

a dear friend who helped me emotionally weather the storm while AWOL from the U.S. Army

 

So, you decide for yourself, are you going to use your “common sense” which so many of our fellow working-class citizens love to proclaim, or are you going to continue to believe the perhaps billionaire—we’ll never know for sure because he’ll never release his tax returns—or is there the slightest possibility that I could be telling you straight-up?

“Christian” Supremacists new version of Morality & Ethics

 

Sorry if I get side-tracked & veer off course a bit but like our recently anointed Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh, I too like beer & I’m drinking beer as I write this. Yeah, there used to be a modicum of decorum, civility, or just simple decency but with the illegal insertion of Trump as the symbolic head of our government, all that has vanished out the window & the bar has been lowered to such an extent, that it’s about as difficult to step-over that “bar” as it’d be to step over the proverbial line in the sand.

 

I mean, seriously people? A president who brags about grabbing women’s pussies & getting away with it & a supreme court judge who was rammed-through the confirmation process under a very dark cloud of not being that different from the commander-in-chief when it comes to matters of morality? To say nothing of the assorted other despicable excuses for human beings that made up the Trump cabinet & keep getting replaced by more of the same.

 

How any of these self-proclaimed “Christian Supremacists,” or politicians or corporate spokesmen, etc. have the audacity to stand-up in front of television cameras on the world stage & defend this cabal of amoral human cockroaches, defies incredulity.

 

I stopped calling myself a Christian when I was about 14 years old. The hypocrisy just became all too obvious & in hindsight, I am glad that I did because I can proudly disassociate myself from all those wolves in sheep’s clothing who kiss Trump’s feet like spineless slugs.

 

In a nutshell my imaginary reader, the powers that be, the power elite, the status quo, or however you may care to refer to them, have used a tried but true strategy of divide & conquer. Yeah, this is a military term & tactic and is very appropriate because they, the 1%, have been conducting class warfare against the rest of us throughout recorded history.

 

Of course, they deny this vehemently & get all bent out of shape, stand up on their hind-legs spitting & foaming at the mouth in self-righteous indignation whenever accused of this. And it doesn’t take much effort to see the three clubs they wield with usual success i.e. God, Guns, & Gays. Trump merely added Mexicans & Muslims to the recipe & roughly a third of our fellow citizens swallowed the poison whole.

 

And even though I gave-up on Christianity as it is preached in most of America’s churches & not practiced in public & certainly not in politics, I can remember my Sunday School lessons like Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount.” In my agnostic/atheist humble opinion, anyone who has a kind heart can see that the Beatitudes summed Christianity up in a nutshell and oh, so beautifully.

What part don’t you understand?

 

Yet it never ceases to amaze me & depress me at the same time how many of these “Christian” fundamentalists, Dominionists, evangelicals, white supremacists, Klansmen, Neo-Nazis, Alt Right, etc. seem to honestly believe that they are Christians?

 

I’ve never really been that much of a “pot-head,” and in fact, many of my friends over the years have been amused & amazed at how long a quarter ounce of pot can last me i.e. usually a year or longer. But I am proud to identify myself as an old hippie because it was very simple, and yeah, naïve of us but we basically believed in peace, love, & dope (the natural dope such as pot, peyote, mescaline that wasn’t adulterated by greedy & unscrupulous drug dealers).

 

We viewed “drugs” as a tool to help in our enlightenment & we cared about one another, the environment, justice, equality, freedom, truth, etc. —not that different from what our founding fathers believed in & tried to establish in our Constitution & our form of government (and yeah, I am aware of the hypocrisies & contradictions).

 

I for one, would love to see a Renaissance of those idealistic values of the hippies, the student protestors, the dope smokers, the non-conformists, the radicals, the wanderers of the 1960s and I am 100% in favor of the proposed “Green New Deal” that is drawing more & more of us like the Pied Piper of Hamlin towards a Shangri-La, a Paradise Lost. Excuse me, it’s the literature major in me. But what do we have nowadays, if not  our dreams?

 

“Reality T.V.,” which gave us the likes of Trump and the glorification of lie, cheat, steal, backstab, whatever it takes to win. Are these the values of Jesus? And how in the hell can Mike Pence stand up there next to Trump & believe he’s still a Christian? No, it’s as clear as the nose on your face, these faux Christians will & have sold their souls and any semblance of decency they may have had. Why?

 

Because of their lust for power. They are every bit as fanatical as the worst of the “Muslims” who claim to be Muslim but commit terrorist attacks. And like those phony “Muslims,” many of the American Taliban, gladly commit their own versions of domestic terrorism in the name of their god, who more honesty should be acknowledged as the Anti-Christ.

 

Isn’t this a pitiful state of affairs when an avowed non-Christian has to remind you “Christians” that you’re not behaving very Christ-like? I deliberately used the term “devil” in the title of this essay because to me, the words “devil,” “Satan,” “Lucifer,” etc. are really synonyms for evil and evil in my book is all that hurts, denigrates, physically attacks, humiliates, rejects, attempts to silence, shames, judges others, fears, intimidates, discourages, etc.

 

I could go on and on and on but I believe my point is clear? I believe down to the marrow of my bones that all of us who clearly have love for our fellow human beings in our hearts, are the truly righteous. I don’t want to rule over others & I sure as Hell don’t & won’t let anyone rule over me though I do have to appear to play along with this evil system.

 

In conclusion my friend, there is so much more that unites us than divides us. These divisions are grossly exaggerated & are used by the 1% to keep us divided so they can more easily control us. Why? Quite simply, for the wealth of the world. We have been indoctrinated our entire lives—for me, since 1952—into believing that there was a vast conspiracy of evildoers out to enslave us or kill us i.e. the Communists, the international drug cartels, and currently, terrorists.

 

And no, I’m not denying the existence of nor the destructiveness of these forces but, if you’ll do a bit of research, you’ll discover that each of these bogey-men have been used to keep us in line & paying our taxes, and dying or being maimed in the perpetual war system that has existed my whole life. Communist Russia has/had something like seven countries under its “control.” America has over 900 military bases around the world & who knows how many secret bases? Don’t believe me, check out Chalmers Johnson for yourself. America has been financially supporting, training the secret police of dictators, & often sending in our special forces & our regular army to back bloody dictators for decades.

 

Too much to swallow? Check out Major General Smedley F. Butler of the U.S.M.C. (United States Marine Corps) if you think me full of shit and spend just ten minutes reading his quotes re:  his tenure. And here’s probably the most bitter pill for you to swallow? America, manipulated by the transnational corporations that President Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address i.e. Beware the Military-Industrial Complex—he wanted to include Congress in this unholy alliance but was persuaded to leave it out.

 

The data, the information, the knowledge, the truth, the wisdom is all available for any who seriously care & are willing to search for it for themselves. I have spent conservatively, 50,000 hours in my pursuit and no, this doesn’t mean that I have the corner on the truth but it does mean, that I am light-years ahead of fuckin’ cold-blooded mercenaries like Trump!

 

Rob DeLoss, Trinidad, CA (April 19, 2019)

The 1%’s Idea of “Choices”

 

 

An acquaintance of mine recently brought up the issue of “choices” again & basically said that I am in the situation I’m in because of the “choices” I’ve made in my life. This is my rebuttal, and instead of going into the centuries-old debate of “free will” vs. “determinism” and nature vs. nurture, I’m going to respond in my own, straight-forward manner.

 

I was going to title this essay, “Free Will and the Free Market,” but decided that would be perhaps too pedantic & too complex a topic to explore. Besides, those who claim to believe in the “free market,” have obviously already drunk the Kool-Aid of crony capitalism & its house of cards.

Get it?

 

Let me start by acknowledging that I don’t delude myself & think that I’m going to persuade any readers of this essay to reject the edifice upon which they’ve built their lives. No, this is merely the voice of a lone wolf howling in the wilderness of this shallow society.

 

You may think it extremely arrogant or audacious of me but I claim to speak for the downtrodden like myself, who’ve been screwed by this rigged-system their whole lives. Yet the 1% have succeeded to an astounding degree in convincing us that we are “losers” (one of Trump’s favorite slurs) because of our own “shortcomings.”

 

Yep! We are supposed to accept full responsibility for everything from losing a perhaps once, decent paying job & the health insurance we once had, our homes because we fell for those predatory lenders’ scams, our life savings because again, we weren’t smart enough to not trust our financial advisers who assured us that our investments were secure & guaranteed, etc.

 

Just poor choices on our parts. Too bad, too sad! But somehow, the rich always seem to come out on top? Yeah, miraculously the 1% seem to usually have the insider knowledge that not only protects their fortunes but even enables them to profit when the rest of us fail? It couldn’t be perhaps that because they have the wealth & power to influence & control the legislators who write the laws, is why they rarely pay for poor “choices,” could it?

 

Of course not! This is a meritocracy, right? Haven’t we been told all the way through our public education that if we work hard, follow the rules, & don’t rock the boat, we too can become rich & successful? Gee? I wonder where such “wisdom” originated? Well, that’s for another essay.

 

Remember! We’re a class-less society i.e. we don’t recognize or rather, we don’t acknowledge that there are different “classes” in America & we’re all equal. But don’t try driving in Beverly Hills, especially if you happen to be Black. Of course, Trump has shown the world what a truly classless person he is & represents the real America behind the veil like in the Wizard of Oz.

Yeah, as spiritually sick as Trump makes me, I’m actually glad that he’s up there on the world’s stage because there’s no hiding or denying just how rotten to the core this neo-liberal assault has been with Trump behind the desk in the oval office. And what has been the 1%’s response to this greedy, self-aggrandizing moron’s words & actions? Mostly mute because the Duck Dynasty’s Klansman has been a godsend to their continued looting of the federal treasury.

 

I may be veering a bit off topic here and could go into the “choices” that brought us this most vile, despicable, & craven mercenary but that too, is another topic for future exploration. You see, my imaginary reader, the concept of “choice” is thrown out by the rich whenever any of us, the peasants, dare to complain about “our lot in life.” This is their armor, their shield when attacked for their greed, selfishness, & the destruction they have wreaked in their blind pursuit of profit i.e. if we are unhappy with our life situations, we only have ourselves to blame for the poor choices we have made along the way.

 

Yep! If we accept this rationale of “choices,” then Trump has clearly made all the right choices in his career i.e. never admit guilt or wrongdoing, cheat/defraud thousands if not tens of thousands of employees, contractors, etc. always attack & never apologize, borrow & not repay banks, bribe city officials for permits for buildings & casinos and not honor the contracts, launder money for mafia figures, beg for loans from Russian mafia i.e. Russian government officials, and build his political career with a vicious fear & hate campaign that he never stops using to manipulate the gullible & willingly ignorant who believe in him.

clearly stuck in adolescence for life

 

But if you happen to be a simple person who believes in doing unto others as you’d have them do unto you, you are a sitting duck for the 1% who have no such moral qualms. Yes, they too made their choices & we see the consequences of their choices in the tabloids yet we continue to ignore these glaring lessons of what befalls the greedy & the heartless?

It’s really quite clear

 

Let me ask you this my friends; Did we who were raised by a single parent, usually our mothers, “choose” this? Or did we who were abused by cruel stepfathers from birth to adolescence have a say? Did we who were forced to attend whatever public school which happened to be nearby, have a choice in the academic curriculum or quality of said curriculum?

 

Did we, who went hungry at times in our childhoods, have a choice regarding whether we wanted to eat or not? Did we have a choice when it came to being brought up in a drunken & violent home? Or whether we had a decent roof over our heads, two loving parents, encouragement, cultural exposure, etc.?

Iconic pic of woman who made “poor choices” during the “Great Depression”

 

Were we free from the psychological as well as the physical harm inflicted upon us by cruel, unloving step-dads & live-in boyfriends of our mothers? Did we have a choice when it came to the fact that we never even met our biological fathers?

 

Did we have a choice when it came to being mocked, ridiculed, & humiliated every time we played sports as we grew up & our eyes crossed and our fellow students were so merciless & cruel?

 

Did we have a choice in being not only the eldest in our families but also amongst all our cousins & being forced to protect them but had no one to protect or defend us? Did we have a choice when it came to enjoying a “normal” childhood or adolescence?

 

Or what about the life or death choice of being in the military during the Vietnam war? Did we have a choice when it came to the lottery & the fact that our birth date set our fate? Did we have a choice of a college deferment when we didn’t even know of such an option? Moreover, was this an option if you didn’t have a rich daddy like the 1% who guaranteed your college tuition?

a dear friend who helped me emotionally weather the storm while AWOL

 

Remember, Donny the Duck’s daddy bribed a doctor to save Donny by claiming he had bone-spurs & now he struts the world-stage like he’s the most patriotic American there ever was. Guess he wasn’t forced into making that choice of serving? Guess the fact that a professor of mine suggested that I should be attending college at Stanford University but the fact that I was having trouble just paying for tuition at California State University at Long Beach, was just another poor choice on my part?

 

Furthermore, the 1% don’t have to worry about making poor choices or dumb mistakes when they work for daddy because they’re not going to be fired. How often are the children of the elite fired from any position they’ve ever held, no matter how briefly? Yeah, so much for meritocracy, equality, level playing field and all the other bullshit propaganda we’ve been spoon-fed our entire lives!

 

Do the children of the elite ever have to suffer the insults, degradation, & daily humiliation inflicted upon them by “superiors” who are clearly inferior in every way? Do they have to make a “choice” between eating or quitting and maintaining some semblance of self-respect? Do the elite have to refrain from the overwhelming desire to smash their supervisors’ faces to a pulp?

 

Has this so-called “power elite” ever been forced to work at jobs they knew were very dangerous i.e. handling toxic chemicals, driving trucks with faulty brakes, etc.  yet when they quit, they were labeled “losers,” unable to hold down a job. Have they ever known what it feels like to have all these pejorative terms applied to them like that crimson A sewn onto Hester Prim’s blouse for life?

 

And more insulting & unbearable than all these personal insults is the fact that I have spent my life in the continual pursuit of knowledge, truth, & wisdom yet am often forced to almost beg for some minimum wage “job.” Does this all stem from a series of poor “choices?” If you still believe that it does, it reveals you for who you are i.e. a member of the corporate cockroach class who should be stamped-out for humanity’s sake as well as for Mother Earth’s well-being.

 

Addendum

 

Isn’t it curious that when questioned about the legitimacy of their wealth, the overwhelming majority of the elite believe they rightfully deserve it because of the family they were born into or that they have “worked” so hard for it? And those of us who “begrudge” them their wealth are just jealous, lazy, not qualified, or have made “poor choices” in life.

Trump’s version of the Palace of Versailles from a Duck Dynasty perspective

 

Yeah, “poor choices” that the rich can relate to like choosing between going hungry & stealing; like quitting a dangerous job where you know you’re risking your life for minimum wage & becoming just another sad statistic or being broke again.

 

Bottom-line, you who have been fucked-over by life, often as the result of the elite’s policies & practices had & have about as much “choice” in terms of what course your lives follow as those sheltered “elite” bastards had in being born with the proverbial silver spoons in their mouths. So, don’t you buy their bullshit argument that it’s your “deficiencies” that are the cause, because if you do, you are only playing into their hands & blaming yourselves (and no, this isn’t to say that some of us aren’t guilty of laziness, etc.) rather than them, the want to be Masters of the Universe.

 

There is one historical fact that gives me hope & some sense of consolation, the French Revolution. Naturally, the powers that be will dismiss my arguments as being that of just another “loser.” Yeah, those of us who dare to stand up on our hind-legs & howl against the horrific injustices of this world are dismissed as “whiners,” apologists, losers, etc. etc. etc. because it requires honest & serious mental effort to refute my accusations.

the “peasants” will only take being fucked for so long, so 1% ers, be aware!

 

This is clearly such an easy cop-out that it is disingenuous at best & reflects a mind that is incapable of fair & logical argument.

 

The sad & cruel irony in today’s America is that Trump has succeeded to such an extent in duping his cult of the Walking Dead into believing the true enemy of the state are his fellow elite, who profit from the government subsidies/protections just as he has but that he is magically separate from it. Yep! Donald the Dick-head, the pussy-grabber, the fraudulent billionaire, the clearly senile & vile creature from the Black Lagoon ruling over the swamp lizards of Congress, has muddied the waters to such an extent that nobody knows what the future holds for America.

 

And like a cheap magician, Trump distracts us by waving his tiny hands, one hand pointed at the “enemy of the state” i.e. the press (because they do their job of informing us to some extent) while his other hand, wreaks havoc on our Constitution and our semblance of a democracy.

The Swine in Chief with his tiny fingers on the nuclear trigger. Yeah, be afraid, be very afraid!

 

Here’s a different perspective on the big picture if you care to expand your understanding? I dissected this book years ago & it gave me great comfort in its reassurance that I wasn’t crazy.  https://thesunmagazine.org/issues/487/em-from-em-br-we-ve-had-a-hundred-years-of-psychotherapy-an

 

—Rob DeLoss, Trinidad, CA (a couple of weeks before escape from this phony paradise of wanna-be hippies)  April 16, 2019

Yeah, you can dismiss me & my worries with trite comments like; We haven’t blown ourselves up yet but, the simple reality that we have come within seconds of nuclear exchange many times over the course of my life (1952 to the present) shouldn’t give any rational human being any comfort i.e. it’s mostly been due to sheer dumb luck.
 

 

Trump, the Malignant, Mendacious, Moronic, Malicious, Malevolent, Miscreant, Misanthrope, & Megalomaniac!

 

 

 

I used to get tired of hearing people say, “They all lie and they’re all crooks,” and felt it was a cop-out for people who couldn’t be bothered to get involved. But as I get older & have been paying close attention to politics for well over 30 years now, I have to admit that I see their point. Yet Donald Trump is a world apart from your ordinary lying president.

the inner Trump in physical form

Depending on how you choose to look at it, he is either an Olympian liar or he’s from the lowest or worst circle of Dante’s “Inferno,” i.e. Treachery. And he definitely personifies the other eight circles of Hell (lust, gluttony, greed, anger, violence, fraud) & many more of humanity’s worst attributes.

You don’t need to be religious to see this vile creature as evil personified

 

It’s almost too fantastic to believe that in a single human being, all that is vile & despicable could exist? Yet we witness his loathsome, sickening, & despicable words and actions daily. If he were just a private citizen, we wouldn’t need to be concerned but this babbling baboon could totally wreck our economy & start a nuclear exchange due to his mind-boggling ignorance & incompetence and his schoolyard temper tantrums.

he told us he was the greatest but not that he was the greatest threat to humanity

 

Let’s start with his malignancy. The word “malignant” is most often used in relation to cancer & signifies a tendency for the tumor or the cancer to progressively get worse & lead to death. Clearly Trump is a cancer on America & by extension, the World. His rhetoric of fear & hate is spreading around the globe & emboldening dictators to follow suit.

as one of Trump’s role models, Mussolini said; “Fascism should more rightly be called “Corporatism” because it’s a marriage of the state & corporate power

 

To get a deeper understanding of Trump’s malignant nature, one only has to briefly survey the signs of a malignant narcissist which Trump displays for all the world to see.

 

  1. A sense of entitlement: the way he struts around the world stage with his head held high & that Mussolini smug mug like he’s king of the world. Daddy Fred Trump obviously instilled in him a sense of superiority to black people, poor people, etc. And Trump’s lies regarding his being a “self-made man,” are being revealed more & more i.e. he claimed that his papa only loaned him a million dollars when in fact, daddy gave him over $420 million. But Donny helped daddy too, he set up phony corporations so daddy & mommy could hide the bulk of their fortune & not pay taxes on it.

    twin sons of different mothers
  2. A lack of conscience & empathy: the first example that comes to mind is his mocking of a physically-challenged person in one of his rallies as a presidential candidate, his disrespect of the Gold-Star family who lost their son in Iraq—while Donny’s daddy paid a doctor to say that Donny had bone-spurs so he couldn’t go in the military & possibly be sent to Vietnam, & his disrespect towards John McCain who was a prisoner of war for over five years.

    Yep! Another example of that “compassionate conservatism”
  3. A sadistic streak: there are many reports of Donny being a schoolyard bully & his personal and vicious attacks against anyone who dares to criticize or disagree with him is evident in his daily barrage of rants on Twitter. Moreover, consider his repeated calls to his Duck Dynasty Klan followers at his rallies to rough up the journalists or anyone who dares to raise their voice in protest.
  4. Egocentrism: Do I really need to provide examples here? Well, just in case any of you, my imaginary readers, have been on the Moon or some other planet for the past couple of years; Donald Duck never tires of singing his own praises i.e. he’s the best, the smartest, knows more than anyone else about any subject you bring up when he’s within earshot. Here’s an amusing video clip to corroborate just in case you still have doubts?
  5. Grandiosity: well again you would’ve had to be living under a rock for the past 40 years or better to not know that Donny truly believes he’s some sort of modern embodiment of King Louis the XIV of France & every one of the buildings with his name on them (though that’s all) must be Palaces of Versailles.
    Clearly just another Joe that his Duck Dynasty Klan members can relate to in his gold-plated bubble

    Personally, I feel that his taste in decorating is more in line with the Hispanic low-riders in L.A. who are fond of velvet paintings of Jesus, cheap, plush red velour, & dingle-balls hanging from the interior roofs of their cars. But like good old king Louie, Trump believes in the Divine Rights of Kings & since he inherited his divinity from Daddy Trump, he deserves respect & absolute loyalty. And here’s another tidbit for you, his daughter, Ivanka, who he seems to have an abnormal affection for, has the middle name of Marie & she and Marie Antoinette have a remarkably similar character i.e. “Let them eat cake.” Well take heart my friends because Marie & her hubby, Louis the XVI, lost their heads in the French Revolution (pun intended).

  6. Paranoia: Have you noticed how frequently Donny whines to his Jim Jones’ Kool-Aid drinking fans that he’s the victim of a witch-hunt, a democratic conspiracy, the deep-state, etc. etc. etc.? Could it be that he has a guilty conscience? No, silly me, he clearly doesn’t have a conscience any more than Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc. It’s probably just the realization that he’s committed so many crimes over the decades that he knows the law or public opinion is eventually going to find him out & he’s going to pay big-time.
  7. A Manipulative Nature: Duh! Donny’s very essence just screams Used Car Salesman, Snake-oil salesman, con man, hustler, grifter, etc. etc. etc. He successfully manipulates people with his 24/7 bragging about his phony accomplishments, his threats, his lies, his fear & hate mongering, etc.

    and oh so many willing suckers, what does that tell you about the intelligence of a third of our nation’s citizens?
  8. Projection (they project their bad behaviors onto others) I call this trying to turn the tables on their critics & an intellectual cop-out because they don’t have to bother to logically refute their critic, they simply accuse them of doing what they themselves are doing.

    Clear example of “projection” i.e. Trump calls the media “fake news” when in fact, he speaks nothing but lies–5,000 to date

 

In conclusion, I could go on ad nauseam & ad infinitum about this most despicable of persons let alone our president but I realize that you most likely already agree with me or if you don’t, you’ve probably stopped reading once you read the title of this essay.

for those with a “short” attention span

I’m an old fart, technologically-challenged, & definitely not a participant in the “social media” scene. Therefore, I doubt if many people will come across this essay. I have been writing like this for over three decades & have received a handful of positive feedback from a handful of readers but one of my readers of a recent essay that I wrote was Noam Chomsky. And that simple fact & his brief response has made it all worthwhile. I will leave you with one last morsel to chew on;

The Truly Pornographic

this is the truly pornographic i.e. the continuous death of war & for what?

 

The other day, my ex-wife got upset at some photos I had printed of some nude women. I believe these photos are excellent examples of natural beauty & are every bit as lovely as Michelangelo’s “David,” Botticelli’s “Venus on a Half Shell,” the Mona Lisa, etc. Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder & so is “pornography.” The true pornography is the pornography of violence that America reveres & is awash in.

I have never bought a Penthouse magazine or Hustler, etc. because to me, they are tasteless. I have bought many copies of Playboy over the years. But what occurred to me after my ex-wife got upset & felt so offended was that the true pornography is the pornography of power & the pornography of ignorance that allows or turns a blind eye to so much of the pain, suffering, degradation, & death all around us.

Trump & his “Christian” base don’t give a damn about these innocent victims of their wars for the corporate cockroaches

 

First off, what I mean by the pornography of power is the obscene levels of power that we have allowed our government & transnational corporations to acquire. Time and time again they have in effect, spit in our faces. The American public in poll after poll, voted against the bailout of Wall Street but the government went ahead & bailed them out. They tell us they don’t have the money to provide health care for all of us but they keep funding these wars in Iraq & Afghanistan to the tune of a billion dollars a week.

Of course, the “other’s” suffering & death never counts when it comes to America’s “good intentions”

Our public school system has been steadily crumbling for decades & they tell us there isn’t enough money yet the weapons manufacturers & the private mercenary corporations like Blackwater are flourishing. Our infrastructure is disintegrating

Obama’s stunt in Flint revealed his betrayal & sell-out to the powers that be

while the president of vice, Dick Cheney’s corporation, Halliburton is making record profits supposedly rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure, which we destroyed.

U.S. sent 363 tons of shrink-wrapped cash to Iraq & $9 billion goes missing, but, oh well?

 

These are but a few of the many truly pornographic or obscene acts that are going on & I wish my ex-wife and all Americans were even a fraction as outraged at these acts as those “Christian” fundamentalists are at abortion & gay marriage. It’s the pornography of ignorance that has allowed things to go so wrong for so long in this land of “freedom,” “equality,” & “democracy.” And the corporate media & the purposeful “dumbing down” of our children have deliberately spread this pornography of ignorance in our public educational system. The standards of academic or intellectual excellence have been watered down steadily over the past decades & as a result, many high school graduates aren’t even equipped to handle a minimum wage job. The paramount skills of critical & analytical thinking are taught in only a few, isolated school systems. An uninformed & unable to think clearly & rationally citizenry is easy to fool and easy to ignore.

And in Trump-land, being stupid is worn as a badge of honor

No, I’m not a ‘conspiracy nut,’ the elite have publicly declared their goals time and time again. Look up President Wilson’s statement regarding public education for a prime example of their contempt for us.

 

To continue, we’ve become so disengaged or psychically numbed that we don’t have sympathy or compassion for the soldiers returning from the horrors of the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan. I don’t see those outraged fanatics screaming that abortion is murder, scream about the suffering & humiliation of the homeless. Many if not most of the homeless are veterans of the Vietnam War, the Gulf war, & now the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan. Bumper stickers proclaim “Support Our Troops,” but this is the same shallow or simplistic jingoism as those bumper stickers commanding “America, Love It or Leave It.” If we truly supported our troops, we would house them & we would give them the best medical & psychological care available immediately. I just watched a panel of “Winter Soldiers” testify before members of Congress about the horrors of war they’d experienced in Iraq & Afghanistan and several told how they & many of their comrades turned to alcohol & drugs to escape the pain of what they’d seen & done in war and when they seek help, they are ridiculed, told they’re faking it, & put on waiting lists for up to a year or longer. Some tried to commit suicide & some succeeded.

This is the ugly truth behind the corporate cockroaches’ agenda of perpetual war

 

This is the true pornography and obscenity. The politicians & the military commanders turn these young, idealistic people into killers & then tell them they’re phonies or weaklings and turn their backs on them. Our soldiers are trained to dehumanize the “enemy,” in order to make the killing of the “enemy” easier to live with psychologically yet when they return to America, they are also dehumanized by the very people that told them it was their patriotic duty to go to war & defend America and her values. My family & “friends” have long told me that I’m “too sensitive,” and it has been both a blessing & a curse because I empathize with all the downtrodden of the world e.g. the working class who break their backs for a lifetime & live in a constant state of dread, despair, & pain; the scared immigrants who risk their lives to get here only to be treated like sub-humans & to be exploited by the wealthy;

Could it be that Trump & Co. doesn’t need cheap immigrant labor anymore when we have our prisoners to do the work? see A.L.E.C.

the people of countries that our military has invaded & bombed and killed & maimed their loved ones in the name of democracy & freedom. The corporate cockroaches & their lackeys in the government have duped us all.

 

To sum up, we should all be so outraged that we take to the streets en masse & bring business as usual to a complete standstill because it’s not until the greedy swine holding the reins of power, feel it in their bank accounts, will we begin to reclaim our dignity & honor as a people.

We need to find that spirit we had in the 1960s when we cared about one another

I’m not a religious person but when I see the picture of or an actual lovely nude woman, I feel she is a beautiful reminder of God’s handiwork just as much as those majestic Redwoods or the waves crashing on the Pacific coast. No my friend, the true pornography is that which degrades us as human beings & makes some of us do obscene things because the pain has killed that most precious gift, the human spirit!

Does this offend you more than the little Vietnamese girl burned by U.S. napalm? If so, you should look into your soul.

 

If we persist in our apathy & ignorance, this may come about sooner than we think, especially under Trump!

—Rob DeLoss, November 28, 2008

Willful Ignorance is a Cancer on America

Reminds me of Dick Cheney & his smug arrogance but Trump is a moron!

In a recent essay by Henry Giroux, “Resisting the Weaponization of Ignorance in the Age of Trump,” he starts with; “Ignorance now rules the U.S. Not the simple, if somewhat innocent ignorance that comes from an absence of knowledge, but a malicious ignorance forged in the arrogance of refusing to think hard about an issue.” I wrote this essay originally back in 2013 but wanted to insert this quote by Giroux because it is so right on the mark in this nightmare world with someone as astoundingly stupid as Trump in the oval office. And what’s worse is having to see that smug look on Trump’s face every time I watch the news or that nauseous smirk on his mug which radiates contempt. I believe he’s so self-satisfied because he knows the depth & breadth of the crimes & fraud he’s committed throughout his years. If there were a prize handed out for the most willfully ignorant person in America, Trump would win it hands-down, & willful ignorance is allowing Trump to destroy America!

“Christian” fundamentalists & White Supremacists

 

Preface: before I begin I want to state that my aim is to be briefer than usual because I know that most people aren’t willing to take the time to read anything “too lengthy.” Moreover, many on-line sites that allow you to post your writing, censor how long an article/essay can be. So, don’t criticize me if some of my points aren’t as clear as perhaps you’d like them to be. In fact, I was tempted to just make this a bullet-point list but upon reflection I realized that I must do more to “connect the dots.”

 

My simple definition of “willful ignorance” is that a person purposely blocks out new information, knowledge, or wisdom because it is basically too threatening to their belief structures. And by contrast, “innocent ignorance” simply means that a person doesn’t know something through no fault of their own, they simply have never been exposed to the new information. My thesis is that a pervasive willful ignorance is killing America and I am very concerned not just because I fear about America’s survival but also because America is such a major player in this global game of Monopoly, the survival of our planet is at stake!

an “option” for not having to go to prison for the rest of his life?

The recent revelations regarding our Justice department’s spying on Associated Press reporters motivated me to write this essay. And the general sense of apathy among the general public regarding our government spying on us so blatantly ever since 9/11 truly saddens me. When I bring this issue up to people I know or have recently met, the usual response is “Oh well, I have nothing to worry about because I’m not doing anything wrong!”

Yeah, like what you don’t know about Trump won’t hurt you either

This is mind-boggling to me & I ask myself “Then why have our soldiers died or been maimed in this perpetual state of war we’ve been in my whole life?” The constant refrain I hear is “Support Our Soldiers because they are fighting for our freedom, Democracy, etc.” How can this be when our freedoms, democracy, etc. is being seriously undermined & eliminated altogether here in America?

has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other presidents combined

 

Case in point; President Obama has prosecuted more “Whistleblowers” than All the presidents who preceded his administration. Like so many other terms or words, the word “whistleblower” has been twisted to the point that it is now almost completely understood as a negative thing. This is truly Orwellian because “whistleblowers” are the true patriots & are doing us a great service by warning us of illegal & immoral actions on the part of our government & the corporate cockroach elite.

 

Some of you may not be familiar with I.F. Stone, George Seldes, Edward R. Murrow, or Robert Scheer but these men were/are amongst a relatively small handful of our greatest whistleblowers & often labeled as “Muckrakers.” Another derisive term implying they just stirred up trouble & threw mud at political officials, corporate Robber Barons, etc. because they were jealous, mean-spirited, unpatriotic, etc. etc. etc.

and he absolutely idolized Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan/Chase the largest of the four most powerful banks in the U.S.

This is another example of willful ignorance and absolutely wrong. These men and women were the most patriotic and courageous people this country has produced because they dared to stand up on their hind-legs and blow the whistle on the thieves in high places by stating publicly how politicians & businessmen were breaking our laws as a nation & the higher laws to which humans are responsible for—the laws of humanity commonly known as ethics!

the only guy who could lose money owning casinos & now he gets to bankrupt the U.S. Treasury?

 

Today’s America is but a dim shadow of those golden ideals & principles that we were told we believed in & practiced as a nation as we went through public school. Most Americans are now either afraid to speak up or are too apathetic & as long as they have their inane television sit-coms, soap operas, sports, & “reality” shows, don’t give a shit! Willful ignorance is now held up as the way to be & well-meaning friends admonish me to not fight the system, it’s futile. I have been fighting this apathy & willful ignorance all my life and it’s been a lonely journey. For example, several years ago when my son was still in high school, his mother & her brother started saying they believed that it would be a good thing for my son to join the military. This scared the Hell out of me because I was in the U.S. Army and came close to being sent to Vietnam & knew after 30 years of serious searching for facts, knowledge, truth, & wisdom the lies, the needless slaughter of Vietnamese innocents, the death of over 55,000 American soldiers, etc. how wrong & how dangerous a game they were playing with my son’s life! (I know that my wife was innocently ignorant on this subject though)

 

So, I sat down at the kitchen table & wrote for two days, (see my post; The Politics of Patriotism https://cockroachconspiracy.com/the-politics-of-patriotism/ )every reason I could think of as to why my son, or any young person should not join the military. And to this day, I haven’t been able to persuade my son to read this outpouring of my soul in an attempt to save his life. Thankfully he didn’t join the military but I still feel the pain & suffering of all those poor, young people who have joined the military and had their souls crushed.

 

Continuing on, this isn’t a self-pity party but merely to substantiate my argument regarding America’s general sense of apathy & willful ignorance. I have been mocked & dismissed for most of my adult life because I am almost always in the minority regarding these issues & people take comfort & believe they must be right because they are in the majority when arguments arise about these topics. If we had more courageous journalists like those I mentioned earlier, then perhaps we could have averted invading Iraq and all the horrible aftermath of that war of choice?

 

Furthermore, I contend that because of our general sense of apathy and our willful ignorance, the powers that be have been, are, & will continue to erode & destroy America as a nation. And lest you think me an alarmist, conspiracy nut, or whatever, I challenge you to do a little research for yourself starting with the late, great Gore Vidal and his book “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.” In this simple little book, Vidal lists the over 200 military incursions or whatever you care to refer to them as, since 1945. Here is a blurb relevant to this point:

 

In all, the United States has only made 11 separate formal declarations of war against foreign nations encompassing 5 wars.

  1. War with Great Britain 1812 (Act of June 18, 1812, House 79-49; Senate 19-13)
  2. War with Mexico 1846 (Act of May 13, 1846, House 174-14; Senate 40-2)
  3. War with Spain 1898 (Act of April 25, 1898, House & Senate voice votes)
  4. War with Germany 1917 (Act of April 6, 1917, House 373-50; Senate 82-6)
  5. War with Austria-Hungary 1917 (Act of December 7, 1917, House 365-1; Senate 74-0))
  6. War with Japan 1941 (Act of December 8, 1941, House 388-1; Senate 82-0)
  7. War with Germany 1941 (Act of December 11, 1941, House 393-0; Senate 88-0)
  8. War with Italy 1941 (Act of December 11, 1941, House 399-0; Senate 90-0)
  9. War with Bulgaria 1942 (Act of June 5, 1942, House 357-0; Senate 73-0)
  10. War with Hungary 1942 (Act of June 5, 1942, House 360-0; Senate 73-0)
  11. War with Rumania 1942 (Act of June 5, 1942, House 361-0; Senate 73-0)9

Since 1942, of course the United States has not led the world in a seventy-years’ peace. Despite Roosevelt’s relative ease in obtaining six formal declarations of war, since World War Two Americans have been drawn time and time again into war without a congressional declaration. Gore Vidal commented:

“Since V-J Day 1945 (‘Victory over Japan’ and the end of World War II), we have been engaged in what the historian Charles A. Beard called ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace.’ I have occasionally referred to our ‘enemy of the month club’: each month we are confronted by a new horrendous enemy at whom we must strike before he destroys us.”

Vidal goes on to list several hundred wars and operations conducted against Communism, terrorism, drugs, or as he puts it, “sometimes nothing much” that occurred between Pearl Harbor and September 11, 2001.  Based on casualties alone the costliest conflicts following the last official declaration of war include the Korean War with 33,686, the Vietnam War with 47,424, Iraq War with 3,542 and Afghanistan at greater than 2,000.  http://inconvenienthistory.com/archive/2013/volume_5/number_1/war_is_declared.php 

 

 

And with the latest brainstorm on the part of the Pentagon & the politicians, we now “embed” our journalists in military units so they can “report” the facts of war protected by the units they are embedded with. Is it just me or does anyone else see the dangers inherent in this new version of war coverage by journalists? This is a very clever tactic designed to keep an even tighter leash on journalists by making them dependent on soldiers for their very lives, journalists will naturally be a lot more reluctant to report on abuses, crimes, etc. committed by the soldiers they are embedded with. And as a result, we, the American public will be left even more in the dark regarding the truth about the wars, police actions, incursions, etc. that we are continually involved in around the globe.

” We learned that the United States has approximately 800 formal military bases in 80 countries, a number that could exceed 1,000 if you count troops stationed at embassies and missions and so-called “lily-pond” bases, with some 138,000 soldiers stationed around the globe. David Vine, author of Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Overseas Harm America and the World,” https://www.thenation.com/article/the-us-has-military-bases-in-172-countries-all-of-them-m

 

One of the most pernicious myths about the Vietnam war is that it was the “liberal media” which caused us to lose that war because they were broadcasting all those horrible images of war back to our homes and as families sat around the T.V. and watched those images day in and day out, Americans gradually began to turn against the war. The movie “The Killing Fields” showed how bogus this claim was because it revealed the fact that most of the journalists covering the Vietnam war would wait until after a battle and the military had brought them to the battle scene after it had been “cleaned-up” and take their pictures & accept the military commanders’ version of what happened and dutifully transcribe it for their newspapers. Noam Chomsky clearly proved the falsity of these claims and the myths regarding the liberal opposition to the Vietnam war, etc. And again, because i don’t have the space to go into great depth, you’ll have to check out the truth of what I claim for yourself.

 

The myth or “truism” that there is a “liberal media bias” in America is just that, a myth. And it has been mostly been thanks to FOX News and the “mainstream” or corporate media which have vested interests in maintaining the status quo in America. It’s very well known that FOX News, especially during the Gulf war and the Iraq war, took their daily “talking points” directly from the White House so as to keep all their talking heads on the same page and hammering the same pack of lies day in and day out. And this brings me to an extremely important point e.g. just because a newscaster, a politician, or anyone keeps on repeating something it’s not necessarily true or a fact. I have gone around and round with people, including my ex-wife, on this matter and in particular, far too many naive people don’t recognize the difference between opinion and objective fact. Facts can be backed up or substantiated and yes everyone has a right to their opinion but not all opinions are valid or perhaps I should say, equally valid. FOX News is the farthest thing from news because it is mostly opinionated, loud-mouth bullies who believe that if they scream loud enough to drown out their disagreeing guests, they’re right and the guest has been proven wrong. Moreover, even sticking to mere opinions, if one person in an argument is arguing about a subject they have formally studied for years & have earned a degree in the subject is arguing with someone else who has never even read a book on the subject, their opinions are not equally valid. One is arguing from knowledge & experience and the other is arguing from an emotional perspective or a set of beliefs. And this is not elitist but simply logical or scholarly and is the basis for most of human progress. I know that for a lot of people I have met over the course of my adult life, this point regarding the validity of arguments is a bitter or hard pill to swallow. It sounds very arrogant of me to make such statements but consider it from this point of view if you will; I have next to no knowledge when it comes to mechanical aptitude or matters and if I tried telling some guy who had 30 years of experience as a mechanic that he was definitely wrong about some mechanical problem I was having, it would be just as absurd for him to tell me I was off my nut about some political issue which I had spent 30 years of my life studying.

 

Naturally, the power elite or the 1% want to keep the general public as ignorant as possible because it’s much easier to control an ignorant populace than a well-informed one. Why do you think they cracked down so hard on the Occupy Wall St. movement? These protestors were constantly derided on FOX News as dirty, lazy, young kids who didn’t want to work, etc. They weren’t allowed to use microphones at their meetings, they weren’t allowed to even carry a backpack but at the Tea Party rallies, they were allowed to use microphones, they could even bring their guns, and they were covered by the corporate media because they were the dupes of FOX News and the so-called conservative Republican party. Free speech in America? Yeah, right. Only if you agree with the corporate cockroaches are you allowed to be heard.

 

I didn’t start listening to what was going on politically until Ronald Reagan became president because I grew up in L.A. and I’d seen what he’d done as governor of California. Reagan the “great communicator,” cracked-down on student protestors with a vengeance & probably would’ve like to have them all shot down like dogs.

If you were rich, you loved Reagan, if you were poor, you knew he was the enemy of the people

So, when he became president I got worried and ever since his presidency, there has been a steady & stealthy building of power on the side of the rich in America. They built a network of think tanks and hammered away at the American public with their rhetoric & propaganda telling the public ad nauseam that it was the government that was making their lives tough & it was the liberals, the students, the illegal immigrants, gays, in short, anyone who wasn’t rich was the problem.

Reagan’s firing of air traffic controllers for life signaled corporate America it’s open season on unions

 

And just as Hitler’s minister of propaganda, joseph Goebbels realized, the more you repeat a lie and the greater the lie, the more people will accept it as truth. The Right-wing extremists in America now have the microphone almost exclusively & when people like myself who have been paying attention, try to speak up, we are shouted down as communists, terrorists, etc. It’s gotten so bad e.g. we’ve become such a corporatocracy that the Democratic party which once stood for the working Americans has now almost completely gone over to the corporate controlled side.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY WAS ONCE THE PARTY OF THE NEW DEAL and the ally of organized labor. But by the time of Bill Clinton’s presidency, it had become the enemy of New Deal programs like welfare and Social Security and the champion of free trade deals. What explains this apparent reversal?….According to Frank, popular explanations which blame corporate lobby groups and the growing power of money in politics are insufficient. Frank instead points to a decision by Democratic Party elites in the 1970s to marginalize labor unions and transform from the party of the working class to the party of the professional class.” http://inthesetimes.com/features/listen-liberal-thomas-frank-democratic-party-elites (In a nutshell my imaginary reader, this is why we’re so screwed today & have a supposed billionaire posing as a populist in the White House.)

 

I thought I was pretty savvy politically speaking but Obama even fooled me but only for a few weeks. After he was elected and appointed Bernanke, Summers, & Geithner to the top financial & economic positions in America, I knew I & America had been duped yet again. And if you still need convincing of this, as many “liberals” do, note Obama’s speech where he said he wasn’t interested in “looking back” in reference to calls for Bush, Cheney, et al being prosecuted for lying us into the Iraq war and wrecking the U.S. economy. Yet Obama is going after ‘Whistleblowers’ with a vengeance & he has prosecuted those who are trying to protect America more than all the other presidents did in total. Obama the Oreo as I call him (black on the outside, white on the inside) not only hasn’t given up any of the illegal expanded powers of the presidency that Georgie Bush stole, he has expanded the imperial presidency and he personally participates in a weekly meeting where he & his advisors act as judge, jurors, & executioners as they select people to assassinate around the world, even American citizens.

 

At the risk of being dismissed as just another “conspiracy nut,” I think all these racist attacks against Obama on FOX News may serve the financial elite’s hidden agenda because it keeps the yokels, both the innocently ignorant & the willfully ignorant occupied & focusing their anger on Obama rather than the truly heinous criminal class who are sucking the lifeblood out of America. We have witnessed the largest transfer of wealth from the poor, the working class, & the middle class to the obscenely wealthy in the top 1% of our population over the past 30 years or so. The traitors at the top have almost completely eliminated unions, have outsourced almost every manufacturing plant that used to be in America, have gained ever more tax breaks, have made our land, air, & water toxic, and are now focused on getting their bloody talons on Social Security & completely gutting Medicare & privatizing our public education system.

 

By keeping the ignorant public focused on guns & gays & abortion, they have emptied the federal treasury and bankrupted America & turned us into a Third World nation. And the horrific events of 9/11 were the perfect excuse for them to hide their sinister agenda behind. With the passage overnight with no Congressional review & very few even took the time to read it, of The Patriot Act and Homeland Security, they have almost completely eviscerated our Constitution & Bill of Rights. We more closely resemble Stalinist Russia than the America I was born into in the 1950s. We hear the talking heads on television, the political pundits, the politicians, the corporate crocodile C.E.O.s, the televangelist preachers, etc. constantly telling us how great America is and how proud we should be of our soldiers fighting in the steady stream of wars overseas for freedom & democracy right? So then why are so much less free here in America? We are truly living that book by George Orwell “1984” here in the United States in 2013.

 

Again, as Gore Vidal has pointed out, just about every month there is some new enemy of the month and we must again spend billions of dollars fighting this never-ending stream of villains. As they slash our programs that were supposed to act as a Social Safety Net such as Head Start, food stamps, welfare, health care, etc. they keep spending billions & trillions on weapons systems that often don’t work & kill our own soldiers. They lose pallets of money in Iraq. They pay warlords in Afghanistan hundreds of thousands of dollars month in, month out for the past decade, those same warlords who also control the poppy fields that produce the majority of the world’s heroin. Yeah, it must be nice to be stupid & not think about all these blatant contradictions & hypocrisies that are going on, but this is why you’re being fucked & losing everything but don’t strain your brain, and don’t be surprised when you join the millions of other homeless haunting the landscape.

We were forced to bail-out the Wall St. wolves and the Banks too big to fail as they stole our homes, our pensions, our health care, our self-respect & dignity but hey, let’s go beat up some gays, some illegals, some Occupy Wall St. protestors because they are the ones causing our pain.

 

If you want to be a “success” in America, it’s really simple, all you have to do is ignore your conscience & be as cutthroat, ruthless, cold-blooded as you can be. Look at Colin Powell who made it up the ranks to the highest position in the military services. He showed the powers that be that he was their boy back in the 1960s when he was sent to investigate the My Lai Massacre and returned a report saying nothing had happened or no wrongdoing had been done. If you’re tired of being ignorant about the Vietnam war, check out a book by Lt. Colonel David L. Hackworth called “About Face.” This guy was a true Audie Murphy and had been wounded more times than is almost believable. He fought in N. Korea, Vietnam, etc. and after a few years of serving in Vietnam, he couldn’t take the lies & the waste of human life anymore and started speaking out and finally resigned in disgust. And Lt. Colonel David L. Hackworth was the most decorated soldier of his time & created and commanded a unit he called ‘Tiger Force’ which used guerrilla warfare tactics to fight against the Vietnamese guerrillas.

 

Furthermore, we have the case of another highly respected officer who tried also to wake up our military commanders in the Pentagon & the political leadership as to the folly of our involvement in Vietnam:

 

John Paul Vann became an adviser to the Saigon regime in the early 1960s. He was an ardent critic of how the war was fought, both on the part of the Saigon regime, which he viewed as corrupt and incompetent, and, as time went by, increasingly, on the part of the U.S. military. In particular, he was critical of the U.S. military command, especially under William Westmoreland, and their inability to adapt to the fact that they were facing a popular guerrilla movement while backing a corrupt regime. He argued that many of the tactics employed (for example the strategic hamlet relocation) further alienated the population and thus were counterproductive to U.S. objectives. Often he was unable to influence the military command but used the Saigon press corps including Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam and Malcolm Browne to disseminate his views.

The volume begins with a prologue giving an account of Vann’s funeral on June 16, 1972, following his death in a helicopter accident in Vietnam. The author, Sheehan, a personal friend, was present. The subsequent account is divided into seven “books” detailing Vann’s career in Vietnam and America’s involvement in the conflict. Book I tell of Vann’s assignment to Vietnam in 1962. Book II “The Antecedents to a Confrontation” tells of the origin of the Vietnam War. Book III gives a detailed account of the shambolic Battle of Ap Bac on January 2, 1963 in which the South Vietnamese army suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Viet Cong. Book IV details Vann’s criticism of the way the war was being fought, his conflict with the U.S. military command and his transfer back to America. Book V tracks back to give Vann’s personal history before his involvement in the war. In the final chapters, Books VI and VII give an account of Vann’s return to Vietnam in 1965 and his doomed attempt to implement a war winning formula for the beleaguered U.S. army and how he eventually compromised with the military system he once criticized.

(A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam)

 

But of course, if you don’t mind sending your sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers, or mothers to slaughter or being maimed for life in these wars to make the rich even richer then by all means enjoy your blissful ignorance! Moreover, we are kept in the dark about the epidemic of sexual assaults against not only women in the military services but of men as well. We are also ignorant of the fact that a good percentage of the homeless wandering our streets like ghosts on the landscape are veterans who were used, chewed-up and spit out on the street with little to no assistance by the government who had promised them the world to get them to enlist.

 

As for me, I will continue to speak out, to argue, to scream about the true betrayers of the American promise, the real traitors like the politicians, the top officers in the Pentagon, the corporate cockroaches, & the cowards who crow so brazenly on television. Against the wolves in sheep’s clothing claiming to be Christians as they preach hatred, fear, & call for the murder of those whom they don’t agree with. Against the Bush administration who “leaked” Valerie Plame’s identity but weren’t prosecuted by Obama, the Constitutional law professor. True Christians know that Jesus focused all his time & energy on taking care of the homeless, the sick & disabled, those shunned by society such as the prostitutes, etc. and that he detested the rich for their greed, oppression of the poor, & their apathy. And I know what the true agenda or the motives behind the prosecution of whistleblowers are, it’s to silence the true patriots who sound the alarm warning us, the willfully ignorant, that the power elite are killing America just as surely as an inoperable cancer but under the guise of National Security. But what they mean by National Security is the military/industrial/congressional complex that gives the overwhelming majority of our tax dollars to the already obscenely wealthy while impoverishing the rest of us, the 99% forced to work for slave wages & pay taxes or be imprisoned! I choose to inform myself and will fight to inform others but of course if you prefer to be willingly ignorant, there’s nothing to be done and I feel no sympathy for you as you wither & die!

—Rob DeLoss, Gearhart, Oregon, May 16, 2013

 

“Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth — more than ruin — more even than death…. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.”

—Bertrand Russell, winner of the Nobel Prize

 

 

 

           

 

           

           

           

 

           

 

 

Anti-Intellectualism & Our Extinction

 

 

To Be or Not to Be, the haunting existential question that plagued Hamlet’s soul has now morphed into a universal nightmare stalking us all in our waking hours as well as in our nightmares. And what is the “Christian fundamentalists’” response? Celebration & thanks be to God.

Happiness is a Warm Gun

 

This is the beast drooling anxious to devour all that it can’t understand and thus fears: the freedom to experiment with one’s own life; the freedom to witness new sights, different voices, fumbling caresses, pungent as well as pleasant fragrances, the freedom to taste the bitter & the sweet; the liberty to explore the galaxies of one’s own mind & soul.

 

Any religion that demands the absolute inhibition of all that makes us human is an abomination & a blasphemy against life. It is sacrilegious to lock our souls, our spirits, our bodies in a coat of armor that cuts us off from all the life forces on this planet.

flower children

 

It is only through trial and error, pain and pleasure & the continual getting up again from the floor, that allows us to see our true beauty as free seekers of the divine within us like Michelangelo’s “David,” waiting within the uncarved marble.

at one with Mother Nature

 

These self-proclaimed “Warriors for God,” or America’s “Christian” fundamentalists have much in common with the Tea Party that had such a devastating impact on the G.O.P. several years ago & still does. As some have dubbed them i.e. the Tea Party, they are in effect, America’s Taliban. Yet because they call themselves Christians, few pay attention to their activities. This is a serious mistake on all our parts because they pose a very real threat to America’s survival and by extension, to the planet’s survival. This danger is every bit as real as the destruction we are all aware of from the Islamic fundamentalists or jihadists. And whether “Christian” fundamentalists or “Islamic” fundamentalists, they have perverted the true meaning of their religions to justify their heinous crimes against humanity.

 

And because I am an American, I will analyze this frightening phenomenon that has taken such strong root here in the nation that proclaims to be the home of the free & land of the brave.

 

The common thread that connects all fundamentalists whether they be Christian, Islamic, Jewish, or whatever, is anti-intellectualism. Let’s take a closer look, but first I want to list the main attributes of the American Tea Party which the lead character in the brilliant Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived but great series, “The Newsroom,” listed:

 

Ideological purity, compromise as weakness, a fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism, denying science, unmoved by facts, undeterred by new information, a hostile fear of progress, a demonization of education, a need to control women’s bodies, severe xenophobia, tribal mentality, intolerance of dissent, & a pathological hatred of the U.S. government.

If he’s your idea of greatness, you’ve set a very low bar

 

I wanted to list these attributes of the Tea Party because they are basically the same for the so-called, American “Christian” fundamentalists. I can’t help but wonder if perhaps Sorkin referred to the Tea Party instead of the “Christian” fundamentalists because that would’ve been too hot of a button to push with these crazies? To be honest with you my friend, I sure wish all these nut-jobs would just go off to some deserted island to live together since they hate all of us so much. But we aren’t so lucky and they are determined to make all our lives a living Hell in their religious zealotry to either convert us or kill us in the name of their “loving” God.

Onward Christian soldiers leading us to Armageddon

 

Some refer to this as a “culture war,” but I feel that is much too benign a term. These people are dead serious & truly feel themselves & everything they believe in is under attack. Yeah, they are the aggressors but they like to portray themselves as the helpless victims. The more extreme among them believe it’s okay to murder doctors who perform abortions & physically assault women who seek an abortion. Yep! They yearn for the good, old days when girls & women were forced to seek out some back-alley butcher who often botched the job so badly that women bled to death or were unable to ever have children in the future should they want to.

“Christian” hypocrisy on full display

 

As mentioned above, these Neanderthals have a hostile fear of progress & for them, progress is anything that contradicts their childish beliefs or differs from them. This is why I suggest that if you consider their belief system as a whole, it boils down to a vicious anti-intellectualism. And because anti-intellectualism is the key to understanding where these dangerous people are coming from, let me share with you, what it is.

another lovely example of “Christian” anti-intellectualism (the Spanish Inquisition)

 

I can’t remember where I heard it but many years ago, I read something to the effect that anyone who reads at or is educated beyond the fifth or sixth grade is considered suspect. This is a good place to start because it reveals the absurdity of the basic tenets of anti-intellectualism. It obviously hasn’t dawned on them that just about everything they use in their daily lives, was invented by people educated far beyond the sixth grade i.e. cars, planes, televisions, computers, medicines, etc. etc. etc.

 

Moreover, there is a deeply ingrained distrust of all things intellectual as just useless banter amongst the aristocrats. Again, they reveal their ignorance & don’t consider our Constitution as anything special either. For these mental midgets, there is only one book worthy of study, do I need to tell you what that book is? If you want to have a bit of fun, try telling one of these holy-rollers that their Christianity owes a huge debt to Plato’s philosophy but be ready, because they might physically assault you. Personally, I have a lot more respect for Jesuits because at least they spent their lives in serious, scholarly pursuits to be able to back up their beliefs. It’s far easier of course to just reject what you haven’t even bothered to try to wrestle with intellectually. And this is why I say that they’re not only morally bankrupt, they’re intellectual cowards & mental weaklings as well.

The real witch-hunt is by Trump & his “Christians”

 

This brings me to one of my pet peeves about these people so arrogant in their willful ignorance that it causes my blood to boil. Conservatively, over the past 30 years roughly, I have spent at least 49,000 hours in serious pursuit of knowledge and wisdom yet some of these airheads have the audacity to dismiss all my blood, sweat, & tears from my efforts with trite comments like; Well, I know better because God told me so. Such breathtakingly spectacular stupidity is simply beyond belief yet they smugly stroll down the street absolutely sure they have the truth & I’m the deluded one.

don’t forget how “Christians” converted Native Americans & Pacific Islanders almost to complete genocide

 

You see, one of the things that is beyond their comprehension is what’s called the paradox of learning i.e. the more your knowledge expands, the more you become aware of just how little you know & how much more knowledge, wisdom, and truth there is for us to learn. The feeble-minded think that the more you learn, the more confident you should become & they can’t comprehend that it’s only through our humility that we grow intellectually. You’d think they’d be able to grasp this since Jesus often speaks about the need for our humbleness.

Asimov wrote over 500 books & inspired many to become scientists, biologists, chemists, etc.

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” —Isaac Asimov (this is Trump & his followers in spades!)

 

Inversely or conversely, this is precisely why it’s so hard to reach these people on a rational level i.e. the more ignorant they are, the greater their walls of ignorance & superstition that surrounds them. And the more ignorant people are, the easier it is for unscrupulous charlatans to manipulate them. Just consider the many televangelists who ripped their congregations off & lived like jet-setters while screwing prostitutes, living in mansions, etc. like Jim & Tammy Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson who is supposedly worth $100 million. Yep, this is clear evidence of just how stupid people can be in that they’ll give their hard-earned money to these scum who swear that the Lord speaks to them & tells them that their congregations should give them their money because they’re doing the Lord’s work.

Jim Bakker was sent to prison but he’s out & back at it again (“Christian” fundamentalists ignorance knows no limits)

 

Undeniably, we are at an extremely critical juncture in not only our country’s history but in the history of the world because Donald Trump is sitting in the oval office. I argue this point for several reasons which I’ll soon get into but firstly because Trump has coincidentally become a born-again Christian just a few months before he started his campaign to become president. So, here we can see prima facie evidence of not only how dumb these “Christians” are for believing Trump is a Christian but also just how shallow their beliefs, values, & principles are.

“Christian” values on display for all the world to see

 

Trump can openly brag on national television that he gets away with grabbing women by their pussies & that he has walked right into beauty pageant contestants’ dressing rooms many times so he could see them naked or semi-nude. He committed adultery many times, lies & cheats his employees, is racist, has manipulated banks & local politicians to get his casinos built but when they failed, he walks away denying responsibility, etc. etc. etc. He is perhaps the vilest person to ever serve as our president & there isn’t a Christian bone in his body but his fan club doesn’t care because he claims to be their champion. And Mike Pence sits behind him like the Cheshire Cat just smugly waiting for his chance to take over and really implement their agenda of oppression against all of us who don’t believe in their hypocritical religiosity.

a man of integrity? Yeah, right!

 

The fact that millions of these faux Christians so passionately proclaim Trump their hero quite frankly, scares the Hell out of me! History is replete with examples of insane & outrageous leaders who were adept at public speaking & the psychological manipulation of their citizens, Hitler is the first example that comes to mind in this regard. And just as in pre-Nazi Germany, most of their citizens dismissed him as a nutcase who would never mount to anything. Trump has clearly revealed his fondness for authoritarians & dictators and harbors grand illusions of becoming our “strong-man.”

Jim Jones was very charismatic also, that is, right up till they drank the kool-aid

He openly flouts not only the social norms for our presidents i.e. putting his financial interests aside while president, showing an interest in the workings of our government by reading his daily briefings, etc. He shows no intellectual curiosity whatsoever & spends his days like the typical teenager watching television & tweeting. To think that this vile, profane buffoon has the codes to our nuclear weapons is a horrific nightmare. But again, his “Christian” base isn’t worried because they welcome the end of the world & can’t wait to see God. If only they’d all go again to some deserted island and commit suicide & leave the rest of us alone who enjoy living.

 

Trump and his born -again baboons share a mutual distrust & hatred of intellectuals. For Trump, his hatred of intellectuals is bound-up with the personal rejection he received from New York’s cultural elite as a young man trying to make a name for himself. And something occurred to me the other day regarding this matter, for some reason, in our educational system, we stop teaching students how to read once they’ve reached the fourth grade basically. And those who haven’t mastered the skills of reading proficiently by fourth grade start a gradual downhill slope from there on. After third grade, reading is the core skill necessary for all other learning & my guess is that Donald was one of those who didn’t master reading by fourth grade and he has been covering-up this fact all his life?

This would go a long way in terms of explaining Trump’s open hostility towards those he considers elitists i.e. anyone who criticizes him or shows him to be an ignorant fool. Moreover, it also shows why he is so fond of tyrants i.e. you can silence your critics by jailing them or having them killed if you’re an authoritarian say like Duterte in the Philippines who tells his police & military to simply shoot anyone they suspect of being a drug trafficker. Trump’s ego is so fragile that he crumbles each & every time someone makes fun of him, especially on the national scene. But his loyal “Christians,” and his racist, Neo-Nazi fan club buoy his spirits so he loves putting on his rallies as if he were still running for the office of which he holds.

how blind can people be???

 

Besides the very real threat to our survival as a species posed by this man-child, would be king with his finger on the nuclear trigger is the equally real danger our planet is facing from climate destruction. Of course, Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan, like his fellow “Christian” Klansmen, doesn’t give a shit about our dying planet because his pea-brain can only think in terms of instant gratification like the next Big Mac. He and his fellow cretins live only for today & could care less about their or our future. Shows how much they love their children & their grandchildren, doesn’t it? And I guess they don’t care that there will soon be no places left to go camping with their families, sailing on their yachts, etc. Yep! Just one living Hell right here on earth. But why do we all have to pay for their greed & ignorance? Well obviously, if we don’t want to see this nightmare come true, we need to get off our couches & turn off the sports drug programs and get out in the streets protesting against our common destruction & for a livable planet.

 

In conclusion, I just read a short article titled; “Donald Trump’s revolution against America’s intellectuals.” I thought it would be interesting & relevant to this essay that I’m writing but I have to call Bull-shit on its author! In brief, he posits the familiar claim that Trump won because people are tired of being “politically correct” and mocked for being dumb or called stupid. He goes on to state that many intellectuals are Jewish and that intellectuals in general are an arrogant clique or caste so-to-speak. Well duh! If you’ve spent your life in scholarly pursuits, wouldn’t you want to hang-out with other scholars so you can share & compare thoughts?

 

I have the misfortune of being from a poor, working-class, single parent family but I have spent my life educating myself. And my fate is that when I hang out at the local pub, I am not allowed to speak about politics because of the social taboo against it in this land of freedom & democracy. Yet, sometimes I can get away with speaking about these serious matters and I have seen the light come on in people’s eyes. Some have told me that our conversation was the best they’ve had in years. I believe most people are hungry for knowledge but yes, we, who are better educated need to be sensitive to people’s feelings and not make them feel like they’re being talked down to.

Should she be forced to be silent as well?

 

But for this author to argue that this resentment justifies the silencing of America’s intellectuals is a perverse turning of the table i.e. we’re supposed to keep our mouths shut and let the racists spew their bile? Fuck that! I am not a Christian but I know a thing or two and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount summed it up nicely.

True Christianity in a nut-shell

We are to care for the oppressed, the hungry, etc., not threaten them & ignore them. What Trump and his fellow “Christians,” conveniently overlook is the fact that the greatest welfare cheats are the “Defense contractors” who are draining our national treasury. Yeah, it’s much easier to beat-up on the poor who have been screwed every which way possible. So, for these blind zealots for Trump, your belief that he is your savior shows how monumentally stupid you are because he gave the obscenely wealthy, like himself, another massive tax break while sticking it to you rubes!

The “Defense Contractors” are the true Welfare Queens!
The darkest days of my life until I lost my wife

 

Finally, this anti-intellectualism seems to boil down to a basic inferiority complex on the part of all those who feel dumb. When I was in my early 20s and went to Europe for the first time—and before you say; “Aha! Another elitist” yeah, right. I slept on park benches, went hungry for three days, dug ditches, moved furniture, etc. —but I met a young guy who knew more about American history, literature, politics, philosophy, etc. but he wasn’t arrogant about it. I picked his brain so-to-speak and asked him about books & authors I should check out and that was my intellectual awakening. You see, the more common reaction when people meet someone they sense is smarter than they are, is to reject them by either mocking them or walking away. So again, if you feel stupid, that’s a clue that you have work to do and you should be happy because you know what to do & the more you learn, the better you’ll feel about yourself. It only took me 14 years to earn my B.A. in English literature which normally takes four years to complete but I was born on the wrong side of the tracks and wouldn’t have it any other way. And it tasted so sweet proving all my “friends” and family members wrong who had labeled me a quitter and a loser!

Living in the Land of Trump-speak

 

 

 

Talk about surreal, we have clearly stepped through the Looking Glass & are living in a waking nightmare world. Every Trump supporter I have met proclaims from practically the first sentence out of their mouths that they like Trump because he “tells it like it is.” I have to try hard to hide my incredulity each time I hear this mantra because it truly blows my mind that so many Americans actually believe he’s a truth-teller.

Pushing people’s emotional buttons is easiest way to manipulate them

 

And the second I try to point out the latest lies by Trump, they go into automatic shut-down & dismiss whatever I say as part of the grand conspiracy against their hero. The supposed billionaire who cares about the working class who have been screwed by the elites in Washington D.C. I say “supposed billionaire” because there’s no proof that he is actually a billionaire & he refuses to release his tax records. Moreover, I learned recently that Donny insisted that as part of his contract with the producers of “The Apprentice” was that every time they mentioned his name on the program, they had to refer to him as “the billionaire.”

Lies repeated often enough from a bully pulpit become Truths

 

I would think that people who pride themselves on their “common sense,” could see that something is mighty fishy here when Donny insisted on this? And if he’s so secure & successful, why does he feel the compulsion to brag about himself every time he opens his mouth? I have been a lover of learning my whole life but even a kid in elementary school knows that another kid who constantly brags about himself or herself is a phony.

Common sense tells us that a braggart is full of shit!

 

Moving on, I am reminded of when Ross Perot ran for the presidency & told us that he was tired of making money & didn’t want to become president for the opportunities it would give him to make more money. Arnold Swarzenegger also tried this ploy when he ran for governor of California. You can be sure that anytime somebody makes such a claim, they’re full of shit! No matter how obscenely wealthy someone becomes, it’s never enough & they always want more.

 

I am also reminded of all the uproar of Kerry’s “flip-flopping” on a few issues when he was running for president yet Trump flip-flops often within the same sentence but his cult members either don’t notice or don’t give a damn because this is just part of his good old country boy charm & “telling it like it is.” Jesus, talk about willful ignorance! And it also doesn’t register with his groupies that how can a billionaire be a true representative or champion of the poor, the working class or the working class. How in the hell do you think he gained all that wealth? He got it like the overwhelming majority of the rich have i.e. by screwing everyone he could.

 

Trump has been the subject of law suits his entire business career & he’s screwed thousands of people who have worked for him. He’s declared bankruptcy several times & when the banks would no longer loan him money because he screwed them, he took out loans with the Italian American mobsters who were his buddies & helped him with his casinos & he in turn helped them with City Hall & his political connections (from his dad) and then he started taking money from Russian mafia figures—do you begin to see why he loves Putin and will never say a bad word against the Russians?

 

Again, it’s just all so patently absurd & so depressing that so many Americans have fallen for this Creature from the Black Lagoon’s B.S. He truly believes he’s above the law & his brazen profiting from his stint in the White House in many of his business ventures is a blatant middle finger to all Americans & any semblance of respect for the office he holds. Even Tony Soprano wouldn’t dare to be so disrespectful to custom & tradition.

 

Every time Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan opens his mouth, it’s painfully clear that he’s a moron. The average elementary school graduate knows more about American history & politics than this baboon in the oval office & the civilized world reels almost daily from Trump’s ignorant remarks.

we could really use a Mark Twain today to slap Trump down!

 

I try to refrain from being “too personal” in my criticism usually but the damage already done by this racist, greedy idiot demands that I take the gloves off. So, if you can’t see or refuse to acknowledge the mountain of evidence corroborating what a colossal criminal & cretin this piece of shit is, you share in the responsibility for tearing America down & spitting on the graves of all those who died in service to this country!

 

—Rob DeLoss, Trinidad, CA  Dec. 26, 2018

 

P.S.  Trump reminds me of something I learned back in my 20s when I lived in L.A. i.e. you meet a lot of phonies in L.A. who seemed to think that they could get away with lying & manipulating all the time because once they got found out in one circle of friends, they could just move on because there are so many people in L.A., they always had more suckers they could screw over.

Addendum

When I was a substitute teacher in the mid-eighties, the average high school graduate read at an 8th grade level. This report shows that nine years ago, it has dropped to just above the 5th grade level. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/22/top-reading_n_1373680.html I wonder if the fact that we have a president who reads at a third to fourth grade level could reflect some shortcoming on our part? And with a faux “Christian” in charge of the Dept. of Education, what do you think our chances are of surviving our ignorance?

I bet the overwhelming majority of Trump’s “base,” or fan club don’t know a minor detail about him i.e. he doesn’t own all the properties that bear his name, in fact, he owns a very small number of them. He charges the owners to use his name on them & his whole life has been about promoting himself. Note that every time he speaks, he’s lying, exaggerating, & proclaiming he is at this & that & that ad nauseam. And this is why he becomes so upset if anyone criticizes him i.e. it poses a threat to his brand. Think about it!