nuclear winter

Drain the Swamp?

~ cockroachconspiracy

 

 

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

—Edmund Burke, the philosophical founder of modern Conservatism

Yes, this is absurd but then again, isn’t everything about this megalomaniac absurd?

 

Trump has redefined “corruption” in our political elite much like Caligula redefined orgies in the ancient Roman Senate, and only someone who has been lost in a swamp for the past four years would fail to know that this “Drain the Swamp” mantra was one of the key promises that the Liar in Chief made on his presidential campaign. This was Trump’s vow to chase the corrupt politicians out of Washington D.C. But, had he followed through on this promise, where would he & his cabinet along with everyone he has appointed during his administration live?

 

“Base” is one of those words that political pundits love to use ad nauseam & refers to a politician’s main supporters. And in Trump’s case, “base” is the appropriate word to describe a lot of the people who love Donald no matter how base his actions or words are because they (for the most part in my opinion) are lacking in the higher qualities of mind or spirit.

 

Moreover, I bet if you were to take a poll of Trump’s cult members, the majority of them are also fans of the series; The Walking Dead. Personally speaking, I watched about 15 minutes or so of one episode in the first season, I believe? And it turned my stomach. Guess I’m just one of those elitists Trump fans love to hate?

 

In the same way, I can’t handle watching one of Trump’s never-ending fear & hate rallies for more than 15 minutes or so. Why? Because Trump revels in all things base or crude & enjoys whipping his base into a frenzy of hate & violence. You see, fear & hate are the two most powerful emotions & this is why authoritarians depend on them to “keep the rabble” in line (Chomsky) And this reveals what is truly dangerous about this demagogue in the Oval Office. By-the-way, fear & hate are the secret power behind the “social media” and why it has spread like a plague (Chomsky) over the Earth.

 

By appealing to the lowest common denominator in his cult, Trump has unleashed an ugly force not unlike that of lynch mobs like the Ku Klux Klan. More specifically, Trump’s public boasting of being free to grab women by their genitals, walk into women’s dressing rooms, or sexually assault them is laughed at by both the men & the women who make up his base. And any woman who would cheer this kind of language or behavior clearly has a very low opinion of herself or women in general.

 

Now, you may have heard the phrase; “rude, crude, & lewd,” and this is another appropriate description of Trump’s kind of “people.” And Trump can’t understand why New York City’s social elite have always laughed at him & rejected him from their social circles?

 

Let’s return to that primordial swamp that Trump & his army of zombies crawled out of & which he promised to drain. And if it weren’t so deadly serious, it’d be hilarious that he has the audacity to label others as corrupt when he’s the king of corruption & all that we hate in politicians as well as people in general.

 

Trump apologists obviously know next to nothing of their leader’s background or the world of crime & corruption that spawned Donald doesn’t trouble their “Christian,” sensibilities? Similar to that list of over 16,000 or more lies that Trump has told just in the first three years of his reign of error & terror, the girly-man probably has an equally long list of criminal activities he’s been involved in or committed?

I am going to expose a small portion of this wanna-be mafia boss’ track record in this essay starting with the fact that he has exemplified a stupefying degree of lying. Moreover, he’ll spout a lie & in the same sentence contradict himself & swear that he never said what he just uttered? And his behavior in both his personal & professional life has been one long stream of corrupt practices.

 

Donald’s father was a slumlord who discriminated against people of color & bribed city officials re: building permits, tax breaks, tax schemes, and a close relationship with New York’s mafia elite. These mob bosses were known for their union-busting. Fred Trump was awarded federal govt. contracts to provide housing for the poor which he repeatedly didn’t honor.  Fred Trump used his political connections (bribes) to “win” these sweetheart contracts available through the Federal Housing Authority established by FDR to help those suffering under the Great Depression, etc. etc. etc. and sonny boy Donald followed in daddy’s footsteps & his grandiosity (greed) knew no bounds. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/fred-trump-tax-dodge-donald-inheritanc 

*Note how often Trump condemns those who feed off the government like parasites but of course this criticism to him or his daddy.

 

Trump is infamous for not paying contractors on his construction projects & God knows how many individual workers over the years? But one example stands out in the little background research I’ve done on Trump and that is the group of poor Polish construction workers who worked on Trump Tower. These poor guys were exposed to asbestos & other unsafe working conditions.

 

“As noted in an Aug. 25, 2016, story in TIME, Trump hired a group of undocumented Polish laborers who put in “12-hour shifts with inadequate safety equipment at subpar wages that their contractor paid sporadically, if at all.” https://time.com/5039109/donald-trump-undocumented-polish-trump-tower-bonwit-teller/

 

By-the-way, when Trump did pay these Polish workers, it was for a whooping $4 per hour & they were so poor that they slept at the construction site. In brief, Trump has used undocumented workers to build his real estate “empire,” but now he rails against them in his hate & fear rallies because as every tyrant knows, you gotta have a scapegoat to focus your base’s anger on. So, the undocumented continue to work for the slumlord Trump but now as scapegoats. And being the cowardly bully that he has always been, he loves picking on the weak & the vulnerable. Moreover, the poor immigrants who both Trump & Obama have persecuted & prosecuted, can’t even fight back in their own defense because they have basically no voice in the corporate media but Trump has the largest bully pulpit in America & gets to bash these poor souls every day with little  in the way of push back.

 

 

Furthermore, Trump has also hired undocumented workers at his beloved Mar-a-Lago & some of his golf resorts. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2018/12/06/president-trump-uses-undocumented-immigrant-labor

 

Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan by auto reflex dismisses every journalist & their news outlet as “fake news.” Doesn’t it ever occur to any of his willfully blind loyalists that when these same news outlets say something complementary about him he brags ad nauseam of it. He has even had the audacity to tell his brain-dead groupies, Don’t believe anything you read or see, only believe what I say.

Oh, if  only the public would read the short list of the early warning signs of fascism, they might wake-up before it’s too late? But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

  • Powerful and continuing nationalism
  • Disdain for human rights
  • Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
  • Supremacy of the military
  • Rampant sexism
  • Controlled mass media
  • Obsession with national security
  • Religion and government intertwined
  • Corporate power protected
  • Labor [sic] power suppressed
  • Disdain for intellectuals & the arts
  • Obsession with crime & punishment
  • Rampant cronyism & corruption
  • Fraudulent elections
some argue that Trump doesn’t have a fascist agenda but he’s doing a pretty good job of following fascism’s playbook

 

Continuing with the amazingly corrupt career & behavior of this cretin in the White House are Trump’s consistent threats to sue anybody who criticizes him. This has been his modus operandi his entire business career & reveals his Achilles Heel i.e. his brand which is simply his name.

You see, modus operandi or M.O. as police detectives like to say, means “mode of operating or working.” And “the Donald” is nothing without his image or brand name recognition. He has skillfully promoted his brand i.e. himself, for the last 40 years if not more? I bet the majority of his indoctrinated following actually believe that he owns everything with his name on it? They haven’t caught on yet that he leases his “name,” to many companies, individuals, etc. allowing them to use his name because it usually brings them more business.

And this is why Trump never stops promoting himself, no matter what happens in the world or what anyone says, Trump will find a way to brag about himself in his response. I bet this lunatic even brags to himself in his dreams? So, Trump attacks anyone who dares to question him let alone commit the unpardonable sin of criticizing something he said or did, like a junkyard dog. He’s so insecure that he’s in a constant state of paranoia lest any sliver of criticism goes unchallenged. Like that pervert who was the Emperor Caligula, Trump lives in perpetual fear that someone may poison him. But in Trump’s case, the poison is slanderous remarks made about him.

Another critically important aspect of Trump’s personality & behavior was what his idol & role model perhaps even more important than his father? His mentor, Roy Cohn taught him i.e. the three D’s (Deny, Divert, & Detract). Cohn was a mob lawyer & introduced Donny the man-child to several of his more prominent clients like the heads of several of New York’s top crime families who just happen to control the construction business in New York, most notably, the cement business.

 

Roy Cohn taught Donny two absolutes; 1) anytime someone attacks you no matter how slight it may be, hit back viciously, & 2) it doesn’t matter if media attention about you is negative, because media attention keeps your name in the public eye. And because journalism in America has pretty much become infotainment & ratings are everything, Trump got billions of dollars in free advertising when he was running for the office of president. Why? Because Trump knows that the more outrageous, profane, & crazy his words or actions are, the more media attention he will receive.

Additionally, perhaps the single greatest factor in his “winning” the presidency is the fact that he starred in his own “Reality show” the Apprentice for several years. And once again, I bet the majority of his acolytes were regular viewers of this absurd sit-com? If you’d care to gain some valuable insight into how this series boosted Trump’s image so profoundly, watch this short You Tube video by the creators of the show. And yep, you guessed it, this series made me nauseous also within 15 minutes of watching it.

 

Anyone who tarnishes the girly-man with the small hands image one iota is public enemy #1 and must be shredded instantly! To maintain & protect his fragile ego and precious, gold spray paint image, Donnie has probably retained a platoon of lawyers over the years though I couldn’t find an exact number of them?

 

Believe it or not, I still maintain a bit of optimism that Trump’s die-hard believers might be slowly waking to the fact that they’ve been duped? Chinks in this tin-pot dictator’s armor of arrogance are beginning to rise to the surface & I predict that as our death toll numbers continue to grow, the willfully brain-dead will be forced to remove those scales from their eyes?

 

I have been urging people to develop their critical & analytical thinking skills for decades now but I’ve been about as effective in this as a screen-door in a submarine. Sadly, I bet that the majority of Americans don’t even know what critical thinking is & probably think it means to simply criticize someone? And I contend that this is another significant factor in the public’s gullibility?

 

Furthermore, I’m confident that the majority of Trump supporters are regular viewers of FOX “News,” and/or listen to Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Glenn Beck and other spewers of hate ad nauseam 24/7. I must admit that I didn’t catch on to FOX “News” for probably the first year or so of its existence. Perhaps I never became a regular viewer of it? But after I realized its agenda & function in our society, I was even more disillusioned that the mainstream media & to some extent, even our alternative media failed to denounce FOX “News.”

 

Ignoring the playground bully doesn’t make him go away & ignoring FOX “News,” and not denouncing it as fake news hasn’t made it go away either. I firmly believe that every time the alternative press refers to FOX as “News,” they are adding to its credibility.

 

Moreover, I have been living in small towns along the Oregon coast for the past several years & FOX “News,” and Limbaugh are about all there is in terms of “informing the public.” And I am only too painfully aware of the fact that anyone who would take the time to read any of my essays would realize that I haven’t really taught them anything, or very little, that they already don’t know?

 

I think that at bottom, I write for those ordinary working-class people whom I’ve always lived among. I have been obsessed with informing & empowering myself for well over 40 years & even though I am mostly spitting in the wind, I am compelled to go on not unlike Don Quixote, tilting at windmills.

 

Continuing on, FOX “News” with its sham of being “fair &. Balanced,” has caused very significant brain-damage in its viewers & this has been going on for 20 years now. And we can thank Ronnie Reagan to a large extent for this tragic turn of events because of his elimination of the “Fairness Doctrine.”

 

This “doctrine” quite simply required that broadcast news present both sides (which in itself is absurd because like life, there are many sides to most of the important issues we face) which was simplified to merely the “conservative” side of an issue & the “liberal” side of the same issue. Cable “news” was exempt from the fairness doctrine & Reagan vetoed the bill from a Democratic Congress that sought to have it reintroduced. And FOX “News” was born on cable news of course.

 

My central point here is that with the advent of cable news & the elimination of the fairness doctrine requirement for broadcast news, the range of debate about the critical issues we have faced ever since then has narrowed considerably. Mind you, I am only speaking about the surface of this truly vital function of what euphemistically called the “free press.” My intellectual hero, Noam Chomsky along with a colleague of his, Edward Herman, wrote the definitive classic on the subject in Manufacturing Consent which was published in 1988. In it, they detail & elaborate on the five filters through which the “news” must pass before it is aired or published. And they explain how narrowed the range of acceptable discussion of vital issues has become over the years. So, to some extent, I probably shouldn’t judge FOX “News” viewers so harshly but I do & I’ll continue to do so!

 

Thinking about this issue reminded me of how much I used to love watching the CBS news program, 60 Minutes. I watched it religiously for about 25 years but became more & more disillusioned as I watched its standards slowly devolve which I believe had to do with its executive producer, Don Hewitt, leaving & his passing away in 2009?

 

One of my favorite segments of the 60 Minutes weekly show was Point-Counterpoint which was included through most of 1970s. It had Shana Alexander who represented the liberal side of issues & James Kilpatrick who represented the conservative side of issues. And I believe this was the beginning of my political education? 60 Minutes had the reputation of being the most watched news program for most of its existence & I owe a lot to it. And I can think of no better or starker a comparison to portray the enfeeblement of the American mind when it comes to being informed about current events than from the height of journalistic integrity that was 60 Minutes & the gradual decline which is exemplified in FOX “New.”

 

Moving along on this trail of broken hearts & spirits to our current Commander of Thieves, Trump, the hypocrisy between what we were taught in public school about America’s defense of freedom & democracy around the globe, and the de facto reality that the U.S. now has the distinct honor of being the most feared & hated nation on earth should cause all sentient beings to pause & reflect on how we got here?  Therefore, perhaps in a sort of perverse logic, it’s appropriate that we have such a venal & vile creature sitting behind the desk in the once, well at least much more respectable guys who sat there?

 

And because Trump has been sliming Mexican immigrants in particular pretty much in an unabated malevolence for three years, I want to express what I’ve felt about the subject of “illegal immigrants,” since I was in my 20s. Please don’t misunderstand what I’m about to say but for argument’s sake, say we were to agree that “illegal immigrants” shouldn’t be allowed to stay in the U.S., why is it that the corporations, the construction industry, the hospitality industry, etc. etc. etc. that hire these loving, good-natured, & extremely hard-working people & exploit them, are rarely ever locked up?

 

 

I’ll tell you why, it’s again because of the corporate greed & hypocrisy. If the politicians & the countless corporate cockroaches were hit with devastating fines & lengthy prison sentences in our toughest prisons like Pelican Bay, every time they employed these poor souls, you can bet your bottom dollar it would end illegal immigration in a heartbeat! And one last point on this subject i.e. if it weren’t for the immigrants who toil away in the hot sun in our fields in the Central Valley of California & elsewhere, food prices would skyrocket. Moreover, for all those phony liberals out there who portray Obama as such a wonderful president, he wasn’t dubbed, “The Deporter in Chief” for nothing! A guesstimate is that somewhere around three million people were deported under the wonderful & wise leadership of Obama. By-the-way, I voted for him on his first bid for the presidency but not his second one because I saw from the beginning of his first term that his appointing Summers, Geithner, & Bernanke to name just a few, meant that he was a Wall St. lackey & therefore a phony champion of the working poor & the middle-class in America.

 

On the subject of abortion which Trump has flip-flopped on through the years, several times, he clearly “took the position of being against it,” to placate the faux “Christians” who praise him & played such a significant role in his infestation of the White House. Moreover, the vast majority of the Evil Evangelicals & the Fascist “Christians” who pretend that life is so precious to them & that’s why they’re fighting to protect the unborn, are some of the most vocal critics of our welfare system.

The $100 million dollar televangelist con man & the Con Man & Chief Thief.

 

This translates into the unnecessary suffering & hardship for millions of young women who can’t provide a roof over the heads of their newborn babies or to feed them, etc. etc. etc. And this war on welfare got a major boost under that other darling of the lying liberals, Bill Clinton. Don’t get me wrong, I believe the republicans are even more vicious in their lack of empathy for all the downtrodden in our society.

 

As for the subject of “gun control,” this is just another red herring i.e. it’s an absurd argument! Allowing for the fact that perhaps it’s true that many people enjoy target practice & truly feel more secure if they own a gun, I argue that okay, allow simple handguns that can only fire six shots & hunting rifles. But to claim that the liberals want to take all your guns away is preposterous. Nobody needs an automatic rifle or handgun. These serve only one purpose & that is to kill as many people as possible in as short a period of time as is possible. I submit that those who demand that these weapons of mass destruction must remain legal, are de facto cowards & owning these kinds of weapons makes them feel strong. They are insecure little boys who like Trump, revel in bullying others & want the freedom to parade around in public with these murderous weapons to intimidate others. Moreover, I bet that most of these people are incapable of winning in debates without resorting to either physical threats or insinuated threats with their automatic weapons?

 

I believe that the majority of these anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, & pro-gun people are a large, if not the largest, segment of Trump’s “base?” And time after time we see that Trump’s hypocrisy in his speech & his behavior doesn’t trouble them one bit. Why? Because they don’t believe in their own lies & rhetoric either.

A third of the American public don’t believe the Holocaust ever happened

 

Trump has elevated willful ignorance to a level of national pride & proof of their patriotism. And this is why these simpletons actually believe there are alternative facts. Today, we are facing a nightmare pandemic that could’ve been greatly weakened in its proliferation in the United States were it not for the unfathomable ignorance & lack of empathy of Trump, Mitch McConnel, & all those craven cowards in the GOP who didn’t have the backbone to stand up to the inhumane policies & speech of Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan!

 

Some pundits point out that Donny boy masterfully exploited the very real & honest anger at the elite of D.C. and insinuate that we shouldn’t therefore judge the Trump sector of our populace, too harshly. I say fuck that! Ignorance is no excuse & certainly doesn’t justify their glee in watching Trump & Company’s destruction of our government or their acts of violence against everyone different from them.

The first graduating class of Trump University

 

How much longer will Trump’s army of the Walking Dead defend him? Will they continue to defend him when the politicians take away their Social Security checks, their unemployment, they die in the streets as many of the poor around the globe are doing & they are forced to live in those streets with corpses all around them? Perhaps not even a real-life world that grows ever closer to the horrific series they love to watch will deter them from singing Trump’s praises? Too absurd you say? Remember Einstein’s words;

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

Albert Einstein

 

         Undeniably, we are witnessing perhaps the most egregious displays of how inhumane the 1% truly are, in our lifetimes? They proclaim every time we ask for universal healthcare, “Oh, we simply can’t afford that! Yet every time the obscenely wealthy’s unfettered greed (deregulation) causes a panic among them, we are told that it’s a national emergency & we must bail them out once again.

 

But when we have the audacity to ask for help, they condescendingly tell us: “Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps;” “You weren’t fiscally responsible;” “You didn’t save or plan ahead;” “Welfare makes people weak & dependent or lazy;” “You must take responsibility for your actions;” etc. etc. etc.

 

Moreover, whenever we deign to protest, we are mocked & ridiculed for being naïve, idealistic, or childish to believe we can change this putrid political system. This is just the way it is!

 

 

And because we’ve allowed them to get away with their greed & irresponsibility for the past four decades or better, they aren’t even bothering to hide their contempt for us & our lives. Yet that smug serpent, Trump is still getting away with his charade of being the champion of his base. Those who can’t see that the only thing Trump has accomplished besides his sabotage of every single bit of legislation or program that has Obama’s name attached to it, is his massive tax giveaway to the Masters of the Universe.

 

I can’t help but wonder if those who voted for Trump because they wanted to see him cause havoc in our government, are still happy about their decisions?

 

Yet even in the overwhelmingly abundant examples of Trump’s lies, selfishness, & destructiveness, his die-hard fans are still perplexed as to why the evil Democrats, liberals, intelligence agencies, journalists, etc. continue to plot against him & want to see him fall?

Jim Jones’ believers who drank his Kool Aid of Death because of their blind faith in him. Will the die-hard Trump supporters follow suit?

 

If you remember the horror that was Jonestown that Jim Jones was responsible for, you may recall the fact that he supposedly had his followers so hypnotized that the overwhelming majority of them willingly drank that deadly Kool Aid he’d poured for them? I honestly fear that most of Trump’s staunchest defenders have drunk the poisonous Kool Aid that Trump has given them?

 

Just how much more obvious does his corruption have to be? Trump was involved in over 3,500 lawsuits before he was installed in the White House. Yep! 1,900 lawsuits in which he was the plaintiff, 1,450 in which he was the defendant, & 150 which involved bankruptcies or third parties, or other matters.

 

Yeah, poor Donald, the picked on rich boy who daddy bailed-out of his failed business ventures again & again & again, is the victim of a vast Left-wing conspiracy. The Democrats & the Liberals hate him because he’s the protector of the poor, the working class, & the middle class & he made his vast fortune through his willpower, intelligence, & skills as a businessman.

 

I’ve had brief conversations with people like Trump’s acolytes over the years & when I realize that I’m simply beating my head against a wall not unlike that Wall that the petulant man-child is so proud of and my patience has grown short over the years so I no longer will waste my precious time on such imbeciles. In other words, I now realize & accept that I don’t have to “win” every argument. No, that is for the petty minds & petty spirits like Donald Duck. We have only so much mental, physical, & emotional energy and we shouldn’t waste it on the likes of this protoplasm that oozed out of the primordial swamp before humankind took form.

 

I know that Trump would whine that I’m not nice for these terrible things I’ve said about him but guess what? I don’t give a shit! And in fact, I’d love it if he were to catch the coronavirus because maybe if his life was on the line like the hundreds of millions around the world, he might find some remote, tiny speck of empathy in his black heart? You can be damn sure that he’d get the best medical care in the world but as to whether he’d change his policies blocking progress by our medical experts is another matter altogether?

 

But I do know one thing for sure i.e. if he were to get the virus & fighting for his life, there’d be Dancing in the Streets as Martha Reeves & the Vandellas put it.

 

Trump’s Cabinet of Corruption & moral cowardice may very well cause the unnecessary deaths of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Americans? And though I have no voice outside of a half dozen friends will hear, I will not be silent in my anger & hatred of everything Trump & that includes his inhumane & non-human cult worshippers. And quite frankly it simply baffles me as to how anybody, even his most loyal can fail to see through his façade of caring about Joe six-pack or America?

 

Trump is basically little more than a glorified used car salesman or ambulance chasing lawyer & is held in about the same regard as these two fields of scamming & rip-off artists by the two-thirds or more of America that see him for what he is.

 

This liar in chief who has over 16,000 lies to his credit in just over three years, and has brought a tsunami of corruption to an already corrupt government & political process but he has raised the bar of corruption to a level never witnessed or even imagined before? In fact, the corruption is so patently obvious that we should change our national bird from the bald-eagle to the vulture or more accurately a Vulture Capitalist.

The greatest fraud perpetrated against the American people, the Vietnam war!

 

In conclusion, one of the most obvious signs of corruption in a business or corporation or an industry is the evidence of rampant fraud. And how appropriate considering Trump has been a fraud all his life. In fact, we should call him the Emperor of Fraud. After all, he does enjoy strutting around like he’s an emperor with that Mussolini smug arrogance or Cheshire Cat smile on his hideous face. And here is a window into the fraudulent practices of the financial services industry that brought the world to its knees. The price of doing business?

 

It occurred to me that in some ways, Trump is a current version of the fairy tale; The Emperor Wears No Clothes, but he’s the Emperor of Fraud & has gotten away with his life of crime & deception for the better part of his life. Oh, he gets slapped on the wrist every now & then in the form of being forced to pay a settlement in a lawsuit against him like his fraudulent; Trump University but he denies having lost any of the lawsuits in which he was convicted, changes the subject, & attacks his detractors to take the spotlight off of himself.

 

Moreover, like that emperor in the fairy tale, Trump is blank to his own nakedness i.e. his corruption. And like the corruption & moral decay of the ancient Roman senate, Trump is destroying the American Empire not that it would be such a bad thing if it were done in a more rational & piecemeal manner?

the inner Trump in physical form

 

No, this swineherd has flung open the vault of the federal treasury & encouraged all his fellow pigs to help themselves to our taxes that we, the peasants are forced to pay under threat of imprisonment, but that the 1% don’t have to pay.

 

This private gorging at the public trough reminds me of an old television series of many years ago. Contestants were given an empty shopping cart & so many minutes—perhaps 15 minutes or so? –to run through the empty grocery store & stuff their carts as full as possible from the shelves of the store & whoever had the highest total of food items typical prices was declared the winner.

 

Trump can never stop, not even for a few moments, his self-promotion which is a blizzard of lies, exaggerations, & phony hype about himself. He needs to keep not only the public fooled & distracted from his agenda of greed & destruction, his ability to maintain a semblance of being in control of himself is critically dependent on this wafer-thin illusion & delusion he lives under. He is constantly living on the edge & being at risk of going bat-shit insane!

Greta’s facial expression says it all i.e.righteous moral outrage

 

A prime example of this fragile monster’s childish temperament was when he felt the need to mock the teenage champion of the world’s environment, Greta Thunberg because, like the child in the fairy tale, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, who had the courage to declare; the emperor is naked, Greta had the temerity to call out the hypocrites who give lip-service to the necessity of slowing down the world’s climate & environmental destruction.

Greta’s facial expression as well as her short scolding of the adults posing as our leaders, was priceless, and Greta like so many young people around the world aren’t impressed or fooled by Trump’s veneer of success. No, that is for the willingly ignorant & for Donald himself.

 

He hides his moral bankruptcy & the hole in his chest where humans have a heart behind his screen of ostentatious wealth that is about as subtle as Attila the Hun’s diplomacy in war. And when I see those pictures of the would be dictator sitting in his gold, spray-painted living rooms, I have to chuckle & I am reminded of some of the low-riders where I grew up in the ghettos of L.A. & their cars that were everything to them, their status symbol that said they were special with their tuck & roll upholstery that was often installed in Tijuana, Mexico complete with the little white dingle balls (I believe they were called?) that hung from their ceilings.

Maybe Donald will invite some of his supporters from the coal mines of Virginia over for a barbecue?

 

Trump’s function as the ringmaster in this farce we call a Democracy & that is to keep the rabble in line (Chomsky) with his traveling circus & carnival of fear & hate. And his occupation of the White House represents his only value to the power elite, that of keeping us divided so we will remain conquered & subservient slaves to the status quo.

 

This Divide & Conquer strategy is as old as recorded history itself. Yet, even with the astronomical power & wealth of the “Master Class” & their arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, their ownership of the financial “services” sectors of our economies, their domination of the world’s corporate media, public education systems, etc. etc. etc., the brave & loving men & women on the front lines in the fight against this deadly virus, show us again & again that the true power of this world is the power of love, compassion, & empathy. Here is a portrait of some of those compassionate brave souls fighting for us on the front lines who keep their spirits up as well as ours during these nightmarish times;

 

And the overwhelming majority of mankind have not allowed themselves to slowly morph into creatures from the black lagoon like Trump & his zombies. No, we know to the marrow of our bones that Love Conquers Hate and it is only by our mutual love & care for one another that we will survive not only this deadly virus but also the destruction of our climate & the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation!

 

Humanity’s true heroes & greatest protectors have been the humble teachers like Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Martin Luther King, Noam Chomsky, & Howard Zinn to name just a few who have led by example, not the shallow rhetoric of tyrants like Trump the Terrible!

—Rob DeLoss, (alive & kicking in beautiful Gold Beach on this sunny day, April 12th 2020)

 

Namaste & Persevere my Brothers & Sisters!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mafia Nation

~ cockroachconspiracy

 

 

 

Isn’t it time to just come out & admit that we’ve thrown in the towel and given up on democracy? We’re certainly not fooling the rest of the world, they are scratching their heads in confusion as to how we could’ve elected such a corrupt moron as Trump to represent us. And two thirds of the American public know full well what a racist & sexist megalomaniac Donny is but I guess that third of the electorate that are in the Trump cult must cling to the charade that America is still a republic. I refer to these people as the Duck Dynasty Klan because they have clearly drunk Trump’s Kool-Aid & are living in Trumptown waiting for the signal to self-destruct.

Jim Jones cult weren’t that different from Trump’s

 

Here’s a brief overview for those of you in post-literate America, of Donny the misanthropic misanthrope’s background.

 

Donald Trump brands himself as a builder and manager of luxury developments, including Trump Tower, where he resides. He is surrounded by marble and gold, as well as the finest furniture. However, what most people fail to see that the roots of his fortune were built on the lower and middle classes, largely with the assistance of the government.  http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/ignatoff/160219 

the humble populist his supporters find so reassuring

 

If your memory hasn’t calcified, you’ll note that Donny with the girly hands & bone-spurs, came to power proclaiming his defense of the real Americans i.e. the working class & the ever-dwindling middle class. But if you’ll do even a little reading & research, you’ll soon learn that Donny & his daddy built their “real estate empires” on the backs of those same people Donny now claims to be defending. The Trumps took advantage of government loans to build many of their low-income projects (recall how much Donny hates the government?) & basically, became slumlords who often refused to make necessary repairs for their tenants. Moreover, the Trump crime family often turned-down rental applications from people of color.

People on Welfare Bad! People who get govt. contracts to screw the welfare people, Good!

Furthermore, in Atlantic City, Donny got a special building permit which allowed him to erect one of his casinos right next to a freeway offramp because of his promise to build low-income housing which he never delivered on like the tens of thousands of promises & lies he has made in his road to success. And if you give a damn about facts & truth, you know, those concepts so foreign to Donny boy, one of the best historians of Trump’s rise to celebrity & wealth is the late, Wayne Barrett in his book; “Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth.”

 

You see, Trump like so many corrupt politicians & businessmen count on people’s intellectual laziness & pitiful memories. Here’s another insightful little snippet from the link I provided above:

 

The Trump Organization was built by his father, Fred Trump, and later headed by Donald Trump from 1971. The senior Trump built small homes in the boroughs of New York City after WWII, largely with the help of low interest government loans. He also built and managed apartment complexes that were far from luxurious, also with help from the government. He built the Beach Haven Apartment complex in Brooklyn, New York over swampland, and the foundations were continually settling. These and other developments would eventually bring in great wealth from the United States government, utilizing the federal Section 8 housing program, which was designed to assist low income people.

 

Yep! That terrible government of ours which Trump refers to as The Swamp but if it weren’t for that same government, the Trump tyranny might very well never have come into existence? So, it seems the Trumps have been promising to “drain the swamp” for decades but they failed to mention the swamps under their building projects & how it affected their trapped tenants. I don’t know about you, but I’ve known more than my fair share of slumlords in my life, owners who refused to make repairs & always seem to find an excuse to not give me my security deposit back when I moved out? Yet Trump’s Walking Dead believe he’ll protect them from the government which helped make him obscenely wealthy by manipulating building codes & permits and gave him fraudulent tax breaks at the same time?

 

Again, with just a little bit of effort & research, you’ll discover that the super-rich, the G.O.P., & many, if not most of the sell-out Democratic party, have been manipulating the government via their armies of lobbyists who help or literally write the legislation that protects their wealth & gives them perpetual loopholes to avoid paying taxes, ignore regulations, & make the public pay for all their “mistakes” i.e. environmental destruction, pollution of our rivers, create the infrastructure for them to do their business, etc. etc. etc. And their refrain is always the same i.e. we can’t afford universal health care, a quality public education system, welfare, food stamps, etc. No, whatever money is available must go to the military/industrial complex which the 1% coincidentally happen to own.

 

 

Returning to that lovable liar in chief of ours, who learned the three most important tactics of his business & political life from the infamous, mob lawyer, Roy Cohn. And they are; Deny, Divert, & Detract. If you’ll make an effort to remove your rose-colored glasses while watching any video of Trump, you’ll see countless examples of him sticking to these three tactics 100% of the time.

 

Another bit of historical background is the fact that Roy Cohn, one of the most disgusting & despised lawyers of his time, served as Senator McCarthy’s hatchet-man during the McCarthy hearings that destroyed countless American writers, journalists, etc.’s lives & with little to no evidence to support their character assassinations. McCarthy relied on the lies, the gossip, the propaganda, etc. supplied to him by Cohn who built his fortune on defending the mafia crime bosses of New York, New Jersey, & Philadelphia to name a few. And Cohn, a self-hating homosexual who kept it in the closet until his battle with AIDS could no longer remain hidden, introduced Donny to his mob boss friends/clients.

 

Of course, the fact that many, if not most of these new friends of Donny’s happened to be in the construction business & concrete in particular, had nothing to do with Trump’s growing real estate empire. Nope! Donny didn’t receive any special rates on the cement he used in his building projects that he bought from the mafia bosses. Moreover, Trump didn’t benefit from his new friends’ control over labor unions in the construction business either. And once again, it was just a stroke of good luck that when all the other casinos’ employees went on strike in Atlantic City, Trump’s employees didn’t go on strike as well.

 

We’re supposed to believe that it was Donny’s business savvy that made him so rich, just ignore those countless mafia movies we grew up on, especially The Godfather which was so popular. Nothing to do with reality, right? But the “reality” of T.V.’s avalanche of “reality T.V. shows over the past 20 years is “real,” right? Obviously, the fact—remember Kellyanne’s ‘alternate facts?’ —that Donny, the self-proclaimed billionaire who demanded that every time his name was mentioned on the show, must be followed by the words; “the billionaire,” also had nothing to do with his “success” & clearly wasn’t a major factor in his becoming president.

 

Here’s another troubling fact for the blowhard in charge, King Trump the Dumb, appointed the most corrupt cabinet in U.S. history but hey, remember, he has always felt most comfortable in the company of crooks. And here’s another inconvenient truth for you Trump zombies who prefer to remain willfully ignorant (from the same article I quoted earlier)

 

When the former Soviet Union immigrants arrived in New York in the late 80’s and early 90’s, they needed a place to live. The Trumps were more than accommodating. First, they bought condemned buildings in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York and brought them barely up to code to rent to them. However, they also had multiple apartment buildings that they could convert to Section 8 for low income people, and the immigrants fell into that category. Most came from the Ukraine, and many were released from Soviet prisons.

They could only take the equivalent of $200 American dollars out of the Soviet Union, and these people had no jobs waiting for them. Also, most did not speak English, and the possibility of work seemed remote. However, they were eligible for Welfare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Education, Job Training, and Section 8 housing.

 

Gee? Guess Russian immigrants are okay in Donald’s world-view? Just not Mexican or Muslim immigrants. I can’t help but wonder if this was when Donny boy started his love relationship with Vladimir Putin & the other Russian mobsters who took over Russia’s government? Of course, now that Trump is supposedly so wealthy, he’s declared war on all those programs that assisted Trump’s Ukrainian friends because now he’s concerned with assisting his best buddies in the 1% of America’s wealthiest who are suffering under the weight of their billions of dollars. How I would love to be there to watch each of Trump’s blind followers when they lose their food stamps, public assistance, section eight housing, Medicaid, etc. I wonder if they’ll still be chanting; Make America Great Again?

 

So obviously, Trump has expanded his network of friends from the Italian mobsters who terrified the working class in New York, etc. to the Russian mobsters (oligarchs) who terrorize the entire Russian public. Are you beginning to understand why Trump the Mendacious loves & respects the world’s most vicious, bloody dictators like; Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, Duterte, Xi Jinping, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi (Egypt), Erdogan (Turkey), Mohammad bin Salman (Saudi Arabia), Netanyahu (Israel), Bolsenaro (Brazil), & President Modi (India). And because these days, one can’t even assume that most people even have common sense, let me spell it out for you i.e. the people you admire says a lot about you—your values, your ethics, your principles. Gone are the days when our leaders & especially our presidents used to proclaim our respect for & our support for democracy, freedom, equality, and the law. Now we have a brazen lover of authoritarians & murderous dictators & a despiser of many of our former allies. So, what did all our friends & family members die for in the non-stop wars we’ve been involved in all my life (since 1952)?

Why do we have this vile, crude creature from the Black Lagoon sitting behind the desk in the oval office? One of the two forces we fought against in WWII was fascism which originated in Italy & the Nazis whom Trump & a sizeable number of his staunchest supporters love & respect i.e. the Neo-Nazis who attacked & beat the anti-Trump protestors in Charlotte, South Carolina and killed one young woman & Trump said; “They’re many good people on both sides.” Be careful what you wish for you Walking Dead & morally-bankrupt because Trump & his kind have brought fascism to a large extent to America already.

 

Continuing on with Trump’s reign of error & terror against America’s citizens, Donny has been laundering money for the Russian mafia for decades & mostly through his condos & other real estate holdings. Again, if you can bother to take the time or aren’t afraid of having your little world collapse, read on. After Trump declared bankruptcy on three of his casinos, Trump Plaza Hotel, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, & Trump Entertainment Resorts, American banks would no longer loan him the money to buy even a hot dog. And don’t forget his long list of business failures like Trump University which was proven a scam from the beginning & the countless Trump products that failed.

 

But for the Russian mafia, Trump was the ideal business partner because they could launder the billions they stole from the Russian people by buying condos in Trump’s gaudy & tasteless hotels, etc. & in return, they loaned him all the money he needed to keep from going completely belly-up in his businesses. American banks didn’t prosecute Trump for the hundreds of millions he still owed them because they figured they might eventually recoup some of their losses from this business tycoon that all the country rubes believed in.

 

Here’s some food for thought? Why is it that not only the republicans but also the corporate democrats keep attacking Bernie Sanders as being a socialist like it’s some sort of horrible crime yet Donald sings the praises of communist leaders from China & Russia and etc. & does business with them but I don’t hear any criticism of Donald for being in bed with communists & his supporters don’t seem to mind one bit? And here’s another historical tidbit that very few seem to remember or having ever known, if it hadn’t been for the Russian communists in WWII, we might have lost the war. The Russians lost something like 20 million of their citizens but overnight, after the war, they were all of a sudden Public Enemy Number One? Could it be the machinations of that slimy 1% who have all of us under their boot-heels?

 

Note that all authoritarians need a scapegoat to focus the citizens anger & hatred while they rob us all. Trump has clearly distracted his zombies on the vulnerable Mexican immigrants who are fleeing the drug cartels & even more obviously corrupt than our own government, their government leaders. Also significant is the fact that the Mexican crime lords have been murdering journalists in record numbers & Trump would obviously like to be able to do the same thing here.

 

Like all successful dictators, you must discredit the press because they investigate corruption & report the facts. Trump hates the media, especially the New York Times because they had an investigative team that spent over a year & a half investigating Trump’s claim to be a self-made billionaire who only received a small loan of one million dollars from daddy. They discovered & reported that in fact, Daddy Warbucks bailed his failure of a son out repeatedly & used his political contacts to get special deals for Donald in his real estate endeavors like tax breaks, special zoning permits, etc. And in fact, Donald the Dip-shit actually got more than $400 million dollars from daddy. My bet is that it’s probably far more than that but the investigative team could only substantiate the $400 million.

Here’s another conjecture for you, my imaginary reader, that is definitely not my original idea but I do add my personal touch to it. It just dawned on me today as I’m writing this essay that even though Al Capone committed numerous crimes including murder many times, the government couldn’t convict him on anything until they nailed him for tax evasion. Think about it, why do you think Donald Duck has been fighting tooth & nail for decades to keep his tax reports hidden? The most obvious reason that many have suggested is that if his tax records were revealed, they’d most likely show him to be the biggest phony & liar that he’s always been because he’s not really a billionaire.

 

I read somewhere that Trump used to call in to radio shows when he was still struggling to gain fame and he’d pretend to be someone else & would sing his own praises & grossly exaggerate and lie about his business successes & the amount of wealth he had. In fact, he lied about how much he was worth to Forbes magazine so he’d be placed on some list of the super wealthy. This is the guy who keeps proclaiming “fake news?” Wake-up people!

 

Trump has been a bully all his life & this too is why he loves dictators because after all, they’re bullies on a grand scale with their imprisonment, torture, & killing of their dissenters. You see, Trump has been on a non-stop self-promotion tour all his life because his most valuable commodity is the brand he’s built up over the decades i.e. his name which he leases out to corporations because of its name recognition. But sadly, most of his cult believe he actually owns everything that bears his name & therefore believe he’s nothing but one huge success story & that they too can become successful if they just listen to his wisdom & accept his principles as their own, that is to say, having no principles.

 

And this is why we have the first Twitter president who behaves more like a malicious, teen-age bully attacking every single person who dares to point out his lies & contradictions. So much for the “social media,” and its illusory bringing people together. No, Trump is like that Wizard in the Wizard of Oz who hid behind a curtain & used a loud, bellowing & spooky voice to intimidate his subjects and only the seriously challenged mentally & morally could fall for such a scam & sham as P.T. Barnum Trump.

 

Need I point out the obvious like the fact that the mafia uses verbal threats, then physical intimidation, & finally if all else fails, murder to keep people fearful & turning over their hard-earned money? Particularly revealing is when Trump in his Nazi rallies calls on his henchmen to beat the hell out of a protestor & get them outta here. I am truly fearful that this may only be the beginning of these brown-shirt tactics?

Also like his mafia role models, Trump hands out favors to those who are loyal to him & publicly kiss his ass or do his dirty work but when they get busted every now & then, all of a sudden Donny declares; “I don’t know that guy.” That’s girly man’s idea of loyalty, a person who will take the fall for him even when he publicly claims he doesn’t know you or had nothing to do with whatever crime you committed at his request.

 

Talk about a nation of suckers, roughly a third of America’s citizens are slavishly loyal to this fake megalomaniac & we have now reached a point where it can literally mean their lives! Yep! When the coronavirus first came to our attention, Trump declared it a hoax created by the Democrats to hurt him in the 2020 presidential election. And this declaration as well as advising people to go to work even if they’re feeling sick proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he doesn’t give a damn about anyone except himself & his reelection because as long as he’s president, he can’t be prosecuted for his long list of crimes.

 

It really boggles the mind that his supporters will back him on every dirty deed he commits no matter how egregious & now, no matter how deadly believing in him can be. If this isn’t the hallmark of an authoritarian wanna be dictator, they’d better change the definition? Like mafia bosses whose words were absolute & anyone who didn’t follow their orders to the T, are silenced one way or another.

 

Returning to the pandemic now terrifying the world, Trump’s cult also conveniently ignores the fact that Trump in his obsession to eliminate every single act, no matter how valuable it may have been to the general welfare of all Americans;

 

“In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure.”  https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump-united-states-public-health-emergency-r

 

“Building on the Ebola experience, the Obama administration set up a permanent epidemic monitoring and command group inside the White House National Security Council (NSC) and another in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—both of which followed the scientific and public health leads of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the diplomatic advice of the State Department.”

 

The last quote is from the same link above & for the record, “Foreign Policy” is a conservative & highly respected journal among America’s academic & military elite, hardly a liberal publication.

 

“But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.”

 

Doesn’t this make you feel safe & secure? Yeah, about as safe & secure as living in an inner-city ghetto controlled by drug lords or cartels. Trump’s hatred of everything Obama is clearly pathological & my perhaps simplistic take on it —but then again, we are dealing with a guy who reads & speaks on a fifth grade level—is that Obama humiliated Trump at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner in 2011, showing him for what he is i.e. a fake who built his political base by starting the “Birther Movement” that just wouldn’t stop in its obsession of proving that Obama wasn’t born in America.

 

Of course, this stirred the blood of America’s racists & bigots who refused to accept the fact that a black guy had been elected president & Trump’s base to this day is primarily made up of such patriots. Here’s the video clip if you’d like to enjoy a few laughs?

 

https://youtu.be/HHckZCxdRkA

 

But returning to the deadly seriousness of our situation re: the coronavirus, here are a few more details of how mind-bogglingly irresponsible this moron in the oval office has behaved;

 

“In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10.” (again, from the same article as above)

 

I could continue citing more depressing info from the article but I’m sure you take my point already. Perhaps some of you may recall how another great Republican president, George W. Bush, responded after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Well this time it’s not only the Black residents of New Orleans who are going to be thrown under the bus, but all of us.

But don’t say the G.O.P. doesn’t have a sense of humor, no, because they clearly do i.e. George Bush Sr. declared that under his leadership, America was becoming a “kinder & gentler nation.” I’ll leave it to you to decide for yourself as to the veracity of that claim. And not to be outdone by daddy, George W. Bush, declared that under his stalwart leadership, the Republican party were now known as “Compassionate Conservatives.” Yeah, I’m sure the Iraqis would agree with that self-assessment as well.

 

Okay, back to our present “compassionate conservative” who proves his patriotism by hugging a U.S. flag in a somewhat perverse manner, Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan aka Mafia Don.

 

Because I have a habit of trying to educate people by way of my writing, my essays are often lengthy & in this post-literate society of ours, very few are likely or perhaps even capable of such sustained attention. So, I’m going to just list the rest of the points I’d like to make in my assessment of how we, the U.S., who have been kicking ass & taking the resources of a large part of the Developing Nations for decades now while under the banner of; ‘”Bringing Freedom & Democracy to the World,” have de facto become a nation ruled by Mafioso but legal mobsters because they got the stamp of approval by their captains in Congress.

 

  • Forget the obsession by the DNC that Russia put Trump in the White House (this is a distraction by the DNC to avoid their own incompetence as a major factor in why Hillary lost But the Russian government is made up of & headed by a mobster & Russian troll farms did spread millions of false rumors, etc. about Hillary & pro-Trump ads and Facebook sold Americans’ data to Cambridge Analytica which it used to zero in on the “persuadables” which they bombarded with their fake news & this did indeed play a major role in Trump’s theft of the presidency.</li>
  • Rule #1 in the Mafia, keep your mouth shut & we’ll take care of you & this is Trump through & through though he rarely keeps his word to his flunkies who fall on their swords for their amoral boss
  • And like mafia bosses who have judges, police commissioners, D.A.s, etc. in their pockets, Mafia Don has the Attorney General in his pocket & the Justice Dept. so it’s “All Skate Day” for Trump’s cronies
  • The girly-man also hands out favors like mob bosses to those who have been loyal to him
  • The Emoluments Clause of our Constitution, the bedrock of our legal & political system, (the Constitution) is crystal clear i.e. a sitting president can’t receive money, expensive gifts, etc. or in other words profit off the presidency. Trump says fuck that! And even more brazenly, he tells foreign leaders, etc. to stay at his properties so he collects tributes (bribes) in full display but no one has the balls to nail him on his blatant disregard of our laws.
  • Donald Duck has been a consistent business failure throughout his career but daddy bailed him out time & time again, then the Italian mafia bailed him out in his Atlantic City casinos, then the Russian mafia when U.S. banks wouldn’t loan him any more money because he was already in debt over $4 billion but Donny Boy’s skillful manipulation of the media throughout his life has enabled him to dodge, bury, & switch the attention of the media, to scapegoat selected targets & divert the attention from his failures, incompetence, & corrupt business practices</li>
  • Like mafia loan sharks, Donald tells his Walking Dead cult members to beat people up i.e. “get him out of here & if you get sued, I’ll pay for your legal fees” Mafioso start with breaking people’s knees, then burning their businesses or their homes, & finally in “eliminating” their public enemies not unlike in Las Vegas where they end up buried in the desert
  • Donny follows similar tactics Mussolini, the fascist leader of Italy in WWII whom many of our top business leaders loved, & coincidentally, the American mafia got started in Italy, Sicily in particular
  • One of the most nauseating facts about this swine in the White House is that he was able to dupe so many poor & working-class people into believing he was/is their champion. This is akin to the mafia bosses who took over America’s labor unions, claiming they’re the defenders of the American workers, who fought for a decent wage, overtime, workplace safety, etc. for decades i.e. the Teamsters being the most infamous case. American mobsters ran a decades long program of intimidation, beatings, & killing of union leaders. And now, Trump has fooled the gullible, though understandably fed-up with the spine-less Democrats who sold them out in the 1970s, into believing he, a guy who has screwed poor, working class tenants & employees, & contractors throughout his artificial rise to billionaire status. So, if you believe a mafia boss is your friend & champion, you clearly need to remove the scales from your eyes.
  • Like mafia bosses, Trump is eliminating every program that offers help to the poor, the unemployed, the homeless, and the dying, so you will have no one to turn to for help but him, the Emperor with No Clothes who decides your fate like the Kings & “nobility” in the feudal ages depending on his mood at the moment. No laws, no rights, no nothing unless you bow, scrape, & grovel at his feet and praise him as he does himself
  • “Fake News?” Yeah, the duplicitous duck knows all about this subject because he has mastered it over the course of his fake life. Trump clearly believes in Joseph Goebbels (Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda) major insight i.e. the bigger the lie & the more often you tell it, eventually will become a “truth,” or a “fact” in Kelly Anne’s “alternate facts” universe. “Inconvenient truths” are dismissed as “fake science” or “fake facts” and only the almighty Oz (Donald) knows what is fact & what is fake i.e. anything that is critical of him is fake, and anything that says he’s a genius & etc. ad nauseam, is a fact!
  • Here’s a little-known fact for you—here in the real world where the laws of gravity for example, are a real fact—Donald the Insecure demanded that every time his name was mentioned on “The Apprentice,” they must say “billionaire.” The creators, producers, & writers of the series have openly admitted that the show was fake from beginning to end but evidently, many, if not most Trump believers took it as proof of Trump’s superiority & business expertise. And for-the-record, I’m going to interject here & brag about myself—Trump does it 24/7 but I’ll probably be accused of making this all up just to tarnish the image of Little Lord Fauntleroy, the Fuhrer from Queens. I watched one episode of “Survivor” over 20 years ago which I believe was the first “reality” t.v. show & was immediately turned-off. I thought & I said to any who would listen, first of all, there’s something wrong here when we watch T.V., an artificial medium designed to dupe us into buying products we don’t need, to get a picture of reality.? This is an oxymoron or blatant contradiction in terms. And secondly, from the beginning of this tragic phenomenon, these shows all have one thing in common & that thing is what Trump has built his fortune on i.e. lie, cheat, steal, do whatever you have to do to come out on top. And this is our national leader? The kind of role model we want our children to emulate? So, Hell yeah, I’m proud as Hell that I saw through this bullshit from the get-go!
  • And America’s election system has become almost as indistinguishable as that of the so-called “Banana Republics” we love to look down our noses at. In other words, our political system is just as corrupt as any mafia’s hierarchy where he who has the most money & the most politicians & judges in their pockets, “wins.” I have long recognized the fact that the Democratic Party is basically spineless but I deluded myself into believing that at least they cared a little about the poor & the working class but I no longer believe this. Bernie Sanders is not perfect by any means, but he clearly has a very long track record of fighting for the common man. Yet, I have to face the fact that the DNC with the help of the so-called “liberal” MSNBC cable network is blatantly sabotaging Bernie’s bid for the presidency. Why? Quite simply because he represents a very real threat to their corruption as usual policies & practices just a little less overt than the G.O.P. Again, not that different from the mafia-controlled unions who pretend to defend the American worker. By-the-way, I have not forgotten that the supposedly “liberal news network, MSNBC, fired Phil Donahue for his unforgivable crime of having on one “anti Irag invasion guest for every two, pro Iraq invasion guests.” So much for MSNBC’s reputation as a bulwark against the Right wing’s assault on Democracy. (there are many other examples but I need to get to the point of this essay)

 

 

In conclusion, I was going to end this essay without including one of the most obvious facts which I’d forgotten i.e. it was the Italian/American mafia that built Las Vegas & Atlantic City so they could launder the hundreds of millions they’d gained from their criminal empires. And Trump clearly never would’ve made it to where he is without being in bed with the American mafia in the beginning of his ‘career.’ So now our president is a former casino owner i.e. laundered millions for both Italian mobsters & Russian mobsters? Boy has the bar dropped in terms of the caliber of man we’ll allow to be president of the most powerful nation on Earth. At this rate, we won’t be on top much longer!

 

Then the Russian mafia saved his stupid ass i.e. how dumb a businessman do you have to be to fail as an owner of a casino? For example, it never dawned on Donald the Dip-Shit that opening other casinos in the same town would be competing against yourself for business. And only mafia figures who had so much to gain by backing Donald the Moron,  no matter how stupid he was because he was very valuable as a circus master to distract the public & the government from looking too close in to their shady deals, would loan this loser money.

 

And like the millions of suckers every year who lose their money, sometimes their entire life-savings in gambling, all those who voted for Trump & bet on his making a real change for the better in their lives, will maybe someday realize what a fool’s errand they were on? The house always wins & the house is the mafia dons, the corporate cockroaches, & the political “leaders” like Mitch McConnell who have sabotaged every single piece of legislation that could help us, the poor, working (well, sometimes?) class to live with just a modicum of dignity or self-respect?

 

You see, my imaginary reader, the common factors between mafia organizations, drug cartels, dictatorships, etc. is that in order to maintain power, you must rule with an iron fist. And to do so, you must master the techniques of effective threats, intimidation, & fear. Say what you want about Donald’s inability to speak in coherent sentences or a semblance of logic or rational thought, but he is a master manipulator & fear monger.

 

And a “successful” mafia boss must never be troubled by things like a conscience, empathy, sympathy, morality, or principles. Donald is clearly at the top of that class along with his favorite despots around the world like Putin, Duterte, Erdogan, Xi, Bosonaro, & his love interest, Rocket Man of North Korea, to name just a few, in terms of not being hampered by those irritating humanistic qualities.

 

Unfortunately for humanity, all those who are not members of the 1%, the mob bosses are gambling with our lives & if the coronavirus doesn’t kill us, global warming, or a possible nuclear exchange which Trump with his 5th grade intelligence level & impulsiveness & preference for running the American government via Twitter just might be tempted to launch in one of his frequent temper-tantrums at imagined or real, public sleights or criticisms?

Rob DeLoss, Gold Beach, OR March 8, 2020

 

 

 

 

A Critical Point

~ cockroachconspiracy

 

 

 

I remember something I learned almost 40 years ago in a basic introduction to computers class i.e. G.I.G.O. (Garbage In, Garbage Out) & it struck me recently how relevant that is to American society today.

 

I have been struggling for over 30 years to connect the dots and/or simplify some of the complex issues facing us. I am a working-class guy & I have experienced or seen much of the suffering visited upon my fellow blue-collar citizens over the course of my life.

 

The only difference between me & most of the people I have known or met in my life is that I have an insatiable appetite for knowledge & strive to make sense of the chaos that engulfs us. Many, if not most of my family & friends over the years have dismissed my obsession & laugh at my efforts. But I continue in this lifetime goal because of my belief that each of us can make a difference.

 

Returning to G.I.G.O., it dawned on me that because we find ourselves now living in a “post-literate” society where many, if not most people, won’t or can’t write, & more and more people prefer texting to speaking to one another, we are facing an even greater mountain of obstacles than I had thought?

so much for the “social skills” school is supposed to teach kids

 

I hate to sound so doom & gloom but burying our heads in the sand won’t make the problems go away & certainly won’t save us from a possible nuclear exchange or total climate destruction.

 

I live in a constant state of frustration because I can’t seem to find the right words to awaken & inspire others to realizing that reading good books—challenging books like in the set of the Great Books of the Western World that was published by Encyclopedia Britannica—helps us develop our critical/analytical thinking skills.

 

And writing helps us to organize our thoughts & speaking to one another affirms our humanity i.e. gives us comfort & the energy to continue in the struggle to save ourselves from the destructive & greedy ones.

 

Tragically though, many of the so-called “best & brightest” have an almost religious devotion & belief that technology & Silicon Valley in particular, will save us. Well as I said, G.I.G.O. and if we (the working class & the technocrats) continue to cling to this delusion, we are shit out of luck!

the “social network” that is dividing us & dumbing us down

 

My religion (and I love saying this because I know it drives the “Christian” evangelicals/fundamentalists crazy) is humanism i.e. we got ourselves into this mess & it’s up to us, not some mythical god, to get ourselves out of it.

The “School of Athens” (Greek philosophy, the foundation of all knowledge)

 

I don’t know how true it is but when I hear it claimed that our average attention span is less than that of a goldfish, the more depressed I become. How can we reach people when the violence & titillation of murder, sex, destruction, greed, the end of the world, etc. preoccupies them? Oh yeah, speaking of our gold fish attention span, it gives a new meaning to that phrase; “living in a fish bowl” eh?

 

Moreover, when I see the absolute loyalty to Trump no matter what he does or says, it’s hard to not slip into utter despair. That craven cretin & totally despicable person even had the audacity to proclaim that he could stand on fifth avenue in New York & shoot somebody and it wouldn’t affect his supporters’ love for him. I wonder if they’d even turn a blind-eye to his inhumanity if he were to rape their 12-year-old daughter? I don’t ask this lightly but because it seems that we’ve sunk so low in terms of what is acceptable behavior & speech in this country.

his buddy Jeffrey Epstein trafficked in underage girls, Did Trump participate?

”

I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. (Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan)

 

Yet still there is hope & fighters like Bernie Sanders inspire hope in many of us. And despite the betrayal of the so-called liberal MSNBC & their attempts to sabotage Bernie’s campaign like the DNC did in 2016, it is possible that Bernie could pull it out. So, in that spirit, I too continue to struggle to reach people & show them some concrete tools they can use to empower themselves.

this is the Liberal channel?

 

A few of the “tools” that I tell people about are the Great Books which I already mentioned & which has a study guide for people interested in forming a small group to discuss/debate the Great Ideas that are central to Western Civilization as well as Eastern Civilization.

And one book in particular that a Jesuit scholar turned me onto many years ago is titled; “Problem Solving & Comprehension” by Arthur Whimbey & Jack Lochhead.” It is full of challenging problems with guides for people to work together in finding solutions so you need at least one other person to work through them together.

 

Continuing on, when trying to explain why people should read the more challenging books of our civilization, I use this analogy; suppose you are going to enter a foot race with the fastest kid in your school, well, you know that you are going to have to put out far more effort than you would if you knew your opponent was only a mediocre runner. In other words, the tougher the challenge, the more effort you’ll have to expend & as a result, you may not win but you’ll definitely come out stronger.

 

Developing our critical/analytical thinking skills is self-empowering & helps make us less vulnerable to liars & con artists like Trump.

If you’re not one of the Walking Dead, think it over?

 

We are at a critical point in human history & we can take the “Critical Path” that Buckminster Fuller showed us or we can continue to “Amuse Ourselves to Death” that Neil Postman warned us about & continue chuckling at the monomaniacal moron in the White House but the last laugh will be his & will be on us if we don’t get serious about saving ourselves & our planet!

Bucky Fuller known as the planet’s friendly genius & the modern day Leonardo da Vinci!

 

—Rob DeLoss, Gold Beach, OR Feb. 12, 2020

Addendum

 

I have this nagging feeling that perhaps I wasn’t as clear as I could be re: G.I.G.O. & its relevance to this critical point in history? In a nutshell, if as I argue, the information that we are fed via the “news” & the web is more & more unreliable and at the same time, we are getting dumber & dumber because of our lack of critical & analytical thinking skills and  several other factors such as a habitual liar in the Oval Office, it’s becoming more important than ever that we become highly skeptical & suspicious of what we read, see, or hear on the web as well as in the news. Anybody can post on the web & if you are ruled by your emotions i.e. hot button topics like God, Guns, & Gays which the 1% know how to play like a finely tuned musical instrument to manipulate the public into voting against their own best interests, you are playing a sucker’s game. And this game isn’t a game at all, we’re talking about our lives & the sustainability of our planet that our lives depend on!

 

 

The American Taliban under Trump

~ cockroachconspiracy

 

 

 

I first heard the term; “The American Taliban,” on the series; “The Newsroom,” which was created & written by Aaron Sorkin. But as is often the case, intelligent television doesn’t go over well with American viewers so it was a short-lived series.

However, we were fortunate in that Sorkin laid out the key features of the American Taliban in one of the series’ episodes & I am using them as an outline for this essay. Determine for yourself how accurate a portrait they give us of America as of January 21, 2020, the day the farce of the Impeachment against the miscreant in the White House began.

 

“Ideological purity: Fundamentalism is an term used to describe religious movements that reject modernism (particularly scientific thought and secularism), that claim to find all truth, including science, history, and psychology, in their sectarian scriptures, and that often try to impose some degree of religious law on all citizens of any government they are able to control. The type species is the Christian Fundamentalism of the 1920s, which is a reaction against Darwin’s theory of evolution; by extension the term is applied to Haredi Judaism and Wahhabism in Islam. In more abstract terms, it can refer to any movement to recapture an ideological “purity” within a religion, that supposedly has been lost by mainstream adherents of the religion at large;”

    • This “ideological purity” is an absolute that all fundamentalist leaders must strictly stick to whether they be Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever. They must claim to know the Will of God & therefore, any who dares to question their claims is a heretic & must be driven out or killed in order to preserve the purity of their version of the truth. One would think that the founding values & principles of a religion would also have to adhere to this “ideological purity,” but clearly this isn’t the case when it comes to American “Christian” evangelicals. Why? Because Trump is the poster boy of how to violate every one of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount guiding principles for self-professed Christians but they love him anyway.
    • Compromise as weakness: and again, I’m confused because if compromise is weakness, why have the 60% to 70% who proclaim absolute support for Trump, compromised their “principles” & “values” by supporting such an evil person? Of course, the GOP who have gotten nearly everything on their wish list, won’t compromise an inch with the Democrats because they, the GOP have the upper hand because they control the Senate. And Mitch McConnell stated it very clearly from the beginning of Obama’s presidency that the GOP was going to block every single act or law that Obama tried to pass. This shows clearly that McConnell & the GOP don’t give a damn about the American people, only about maintaining & expanding their power. And again, the “Christians” believe that any compromise with non-Christians, especially Secular Humanists is a de facto bargain with the devil.

      Obama bent over backwards trying to compromise with GOP & as a result, we got Trumped!
    • A fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism: Yep! Like back in the days of the Old Testament, people really did live for 800 to 900 years, Noah actually took two of every animal species on Earth into the Ark, etc. etc. etc. And if you dare to question such things, you are guilty of heresy and may be stoned like the Islamic fundamentalists enjoy doing in Afghanistan but it’s usually women who are the ones getting stoned for some reason?
    • Denying science: this one goes almost without saying as the one I just covered makes clear i.e. Science easily proves the absurdity of such claims as people roaming the earth with dinosaurs, etc. so organized religion has been at war with science throughout most of history. Just reflect on the fate of  Galileo for example. In fact, the modern variation of Christian fundamentalism basically sprang from the days when Darwin’s Theory of Evolution started being taught in our public schools. And tragically, in Trump’s reign of ignorance, Climate destruction denial which denies the scientific proof of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists on the planet & the Christian fundamentalists are tickled pink about it because they can’t wait for the destruction of our planet & believe Jesus is going to thank them for their ignorance & their help in bringing an end to the world. Remember, Jesus loves you!
    • Unmoved by Facts: Yep & as Trump’s resident witch, Kellyanne Conway tells all their faithful,” there are alternative facts. “Of course, there are in their alternate realities. I wish someone would dare Kellyanne and Trump to demonstrate their alternative facts by jumping off a high roof to prove that gravity isn’t a fact either. Naturally, the Trump team spout alternate facts daily but we, non-believers have always referred to alternate facts as lies. In fact, I think Trump is going for the world record in alternate facts with his list of lies which is somewhere around 16,241 but hey, who’s counting?
    • Undeterred by new information: a polite euphemism for stubborn as a mule, willfully ignorant, and you may as well give up hope of them ever opening their minds. They have their “faith” and that’s all they need. These are just the kinds of people who make good, little Nazis, cult followers, etc.

      a third of the U.S. public has drunk Trump’s Jonestown Kool-Aid
    • A hostile fear of progress: like their fear and rejection of science & facts, progress is seen as a threat to their calcified beliefs that they desperately cling to or else their entire belief structure could collapse. This scares the hell out of these pea-brains & they’ll kill you rather than admit their errors. Of course, they conveniently ignore things like the automobiles which they drive were invented due to progress. And it never ceases to amaze me how they constantly love to portray themselves as the victims of our society. When they are the bullies & the ones who persecute people, who don’t accept their hypocritical principles & values & seek to enslave us all.
    • A demonization of education: this is a subject that is dear to my heart because I have loved education all my life, been an avid reader since second grade, & have worked as an educator for the majority of my work career. In fact, my first book is about the Christian fundamentalists war on secular humanism which they see as a clear & present danger to their reign of error & terror. It’s not a coincidence that Trump appointed Betsy DeVos as our Secretary of Education, a person who never attended public schools, who is rich, & who is pushing Charter Schools down our throats.
      “It Can’t Happen Here,” right?

      Also bear in mind that one of the first things that all dictators, whether religious (theocrats) or oligarchs do is either shut down all the public schools or take them over. Why? Because as people slowly become more & more informed, they begin to question established “authorities” like the Church & the State. {if you’d care to spend 10 mins. watching this video, you’ll gain a great overview of how the GOP has duped so many Americans into focusing their anger on the govt. rather than the corporate cockroaches who deserve the lion’s share of the blame for why we’re in this terrible state of being}</li>

    • A need to control women’s bodies: this is one of those aspects of fundamentalists’ beliefs that I can only speculate on because it is hard for me to fathom their fear of women? Perhaps it’s as simple as their insecurity as men & their wish to always remain in control over their families? And by being the authoritarians in their communities as well as in their families, they never have to worry about pleasing their wives sexually?

      Trump’s “Christian” values i.e. “Grab them by the pussy.”
    • Severe xenophobia: strangers & foreigners who are by definition strangers, like knowledge, new information, etc. are a threat to their belief systems which are clearly very fragile or they wouldn’t be so insecure about it. Why? Because contradictory ideas may slowly infect their communities, their families and they will lose their precious control. Of course, this also helps to justify or rationalize their racism & their desperate attempts to maintain the purity of their ideology. And once again, they just conveniently ignore all inconvenient truths & facts i.e. that America is a nation made up of immigrants from all over the world. If these frightened & dangerous children had their way, they’d live in a nation not unlike what Hitler wanted for Germany where everyone was blue-eyed & blonde.
    • Tribal mentality: well, as I just pointed out, fundamentalists ideally would like to live in a world where there are as few physical differences between their faithful as possible but given the realities of this world, a close second is a common mentality or way of thinking about the world. And this is why they paint a picture of you’re either with us or against us as our illustrious, chicken-hawk president, George W. Bush, the Coward from Crawford declared when he launched his “War on Terror.” This simplistic & obviously ignorant Manichean view of the world makes it easier for their faithful to carry out their crimes against humanity in the name of Jesus, God, Allah, or whoever.
    • Intolerance of dissent: this attribute of the fundamentalist mindset is one of the scariest in my book & again reveals how dangerously ignorant these people are. Jesus was clearly a dissenter in his time in that he spoke out against the Roman authorities & committed civil acts of disobedience. And in America’s history, our founding fathers were all dissenters from British rule. The United States would’ve never even come into existence without dissent but fundamentalists don’t want us to remember these facts or to ever even learn about them. Again, showing how weak their faith is!
    • Pathological hatred of U.S. government: and here we have another one of those very convenient crossing of paths by the “Christian” fundamentalists & the Republican party. You see, my imaginary reader, the Republicans swore that they’d overturn every single part of FDR’s “New Deal” which established much of what we now refer to as the “Social Safety Net,” for all of us not born with a silver spoon in our mouths. And they’ve been spreading their anti-government propaganda ever since i.e. you too can become rich if you don’t rely on the government for unnecessary handouts which only make you lazy & prevent you from becoming self-sufficient & wealthy. We’re supposed to ignore the fact that most of the rich & the giant corporations who have monopolies over us, have been subsidized by that same evil government. Yep! The same government that keeps handing out tax breaks to the rich, subsidies for their Research & Development, tariff protections, the infrastructure that allows them to do business, the military to protect their corrupt businesses overseas, etc. etc. etc. And no, this isn’t a free pass in terms of excusing our government’s long track record of crimes against humanity. But, the government is the only force capable of standing up to the corporations when their greed is just too far overboard. Moreover, it does occasionally stand up for us & does provide some assistance to we, the people, every now & then. The corporations behind this decades long propaganda war against the government want to abolish everything the government does to help us but preserve every handout & protection it provides them with our tax dollars. So, when I hear these morons i.e. Alex Jones, Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, etc. railing against the government, I wish that I had a public forum from which I could call out their hypocrisy. Hell, if it weren’t for our government allowing the corporations to steal our public airwaves, these conspiracy theorists & traitors like Jones, Limbaugh, & Beck wouldn’t have the platforms they do to spew such bile and fear & hate.

 

Unquestionably, the Trump campaign team knew they’d have to throw these dangerously crazy evangelicals a big bone to gain their support for Trump, hence Pence as his running mate.

Trump is clearly one of those with the attention span of a goldfish

 

Some argued no big deal, the vice president does nothing of any significance but the fact that were Trump to have a heart attack or something, we could end up with this American Taliban as leader of the free world. Yeah, pretty scary shit, right?

 

A lot of us who live on either coast tend to forget or perhaps never knew just how powerful these “Christian” fundamentalists are & how many millions of regular Americans listen to them on the radio daily as well as to the Rush Limbaugh show. And we ignore these people at our own peril!

 

How soundly can we sleep knowing we have someone who prays for the end of the world, a heartbeat away from the presidency? Remind you of anyone? Osama bin Laden perhaps but with the mightiest arsenal of nuclear weapons on the planet at his fingertips?

 

Scare tactics you say? Fuckin’ A! But bear in mind that the corporate cockroach masters who own the media & Washington D.C., are using scare tactics day-in & day-out and have been for well over 40 years to scare us into spending over half our budget on weapons of mass destruction while letting our health, education, & welfare go to ruin.

I am trying to warn you but we have become so used to the steady barrage of fear mongering by the powers that be that honest warnings like mine fall on deaf ears I fear? If the public knew of how many close calls we’ve had regarding nuclear exchanges between the U.S. & Russia, they’d be shaking in their boots.

 

Conclusion, we have a 73-year-old who is obviously cognitively impaired to many, if not most of our mental health professionals. And he is also clearly morally bankrupt to all but the willfully blind & ignorant who proclaim they’ll support him no matter what. Gee? I wonder if they’d still support him if he raped their 12-year-old daughter? After all, he was buddies with Jeffrey Epstein though of course he now denies it.

I wonder what Trump’s buddy, Jeffrey Epstein might have told us about Trump?

But he did hire Epstein’s lawyer, Dershowitz, to help with his fight against his impeachment. And Dershowitz succeeded in getting Epstein a mind-boggling deal after being convicted of sexually trafficking teenage girls.

 

Yeah, once again we see on full public display those good, wholesome American values the American Taliban love to brag about along with their GOP (Greedy Old Pigs) pals.

 

So, we have this spoiled, rich brat as president who more resembles a teenage girl spending the majority of her day on Twitter spreading gossip & rumors and viciously attacking other girls’ character with lies. And our “commander in chief” who can’t even be bothered to read his daily briefings because he’s most likely not even able to comprehend their complexity, is sitting in the White House playing with matches in a gasoline-soaked room. And if he continues playing with the powder kegs in the Middle East, he may just make the American Taliban’s dream of the Apocalypse a reality?

“Christian” evangelicals’ Wet Dream

 

As for me, I’m an atheist who believes in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and that’s how I live my life.

 

Rob DeLoss, Gold Beach, OR on January 22, 2020

 

Nuclear Winter or Global Hell?

~ cockroachconspiracy

Well, as our Zen master of linguistics & global politics, Noam Chomsky, has put it, the two greatest threats to humanity are nuclear war & climate change. And I find it absolutely incredible that we, especially in the West, are still so remarkably silent & passive about these very real threats to our existence? Perhaps our apathy & ignorance will be the root cause of our extinction as a species?

Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people are dying around the globe monthly if not weekly & crustaceans like Trump are accelerating the death count & the destruction of our planet’s ecosystems which give us life. Can we really be so blind & short-sighted as to not see what’s going on?

The world’s major religions that have stood the test of time all have one common rule, law, commandment or whatever you want to call it, Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you! Ignoring our fellow brothers & sisters will not erase our culpability in the evils being done. Are we going to wait like the “good Germans” who never spoke up or stood up as the Nazis came for the Socialists first, then the Trade Unionists, & finally for the Jews?

Do you not see the ominous parallels between Trump’s agenda to “Make America Great Again” and Hitler’s program to make Germany great again i.e. first silence & get rid of the muslims, then the Mexicans, then the feminists, gays, blacks, the poor? Who will be left after the coming genocide? Do you want to live in a world of the Walking Dead, because that won’t be far off the mark?

All of us who are physically and mentally able to fight have a moral imperative to do so. There are no other options. As Dylan Thomas told us; “Do not go gentle into that dark night, rage, rage against the dying of the light!” That light my friends is the divine light in each of us, our souls, our spirits and only we can allow that light to go out.

Each and every one of us bears the responsibility & the weight of the world on their shoulders. As that beautiful song from the 1960s said; “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” We must look for every opportunity to not only block but to stop the further development of nuclear weapons & go even further by committing peaceful acts of civil disobedience until we succeed in destroying all weapons of mass destruction.

Moreover, we must likewise halt the fossil fuel industry and all the destructive energy practices & uses that are poisoning our land, water, air, food, & homes. What the world needs now is hundreds of millions of compassionate human beings who will use their bodies as human monkey wrenches or cogs to stop the death machinery.

The corporate cockroaches & the ruthless rich are too blinded by their greed. They don’t even care about their own children or grandchildren or as Cat Stevens asked; “Where do the Children Play?” We have to be the torchbearers of the Truth & the protectors of humanity and our Mother Gaia. Spread the word my brothers & sisters who have joined me and the countless other flower children in our human revolution for Light, Life, & Love!

Persevere in Peace!

                                                     —Rob

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

― Elie Wiesel (survivor of both the Auschwitz & Buchenwald Death Camps & awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, at which time the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a “messenger to mankind.”)