Category: False Patriotism

Damn Right There’s A “Rough Beast Slouching Towards Bethlehem To Be Born” — It’s Republicanism & Permanent Minority Rule!

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Just like Trump’s election caused people to seek therapy in droves (that’s a fact — it really, really did!), it caused people trying to articulate what this experience is like to pick up William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming”. Bits and pieces of the poem are now part of the vernacular —

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

Or —

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And then there’s the “icon” —

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats was writing — in 1919 (when he published the poem) about Europe after World War I. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” — which was the context for the best lacking all conviction while the worst, full of passionate intensity, won the day. What Yeats doesn’t answer — though he seems to have an inkling — what exactly IS that “rough beast”, its “hour come round at last”, slouching toward its second coming in a metaphorical Bethlehem?

The seeds of World War II were firmly planted in the result of World War I. And World War I was, in most every way, the death knell of Old Europe. Power was shifting from the hands of the continent’s royal families (they’re all related by blood one way or another) to more democratically-run governments that relied more on the people for their right to govern than because they king said they could. Political ideas like communism were morphing from the abstract into the real with violent consequences. Anarchism seemed a viable alternative to the supposed “order” since that “order” had led everyone into the most catastrophic war ever.

Yeats was writing about a world totally in transition from one thing into another. The problem — what will that “another” become?

We’re in transition too — the whole world. The social democratic order we all took for granted is under assault by backward-thinking greed monsters who can’t bear sharing any of the power or any of the money. If asked directly, the majority of Americans have no desire whatsoever to live in a fascist state. Given a choice between that and a “socialist state” where — while they may not get to be quite as rugged an individual (if your rugged individualism screws with other peoples’ right to live their lives to the fullest, your rugged individualism needs to be curtailed — sorry), most Americans would opt for a country where everyone got to vote, everyone got health CARE (not health INSURANCE) so that going broke cos you got sick was an impossibility, and where everyone got educated or trained to the best of their ability — for “free” (meaning our tax dollars pay for it) because the smarter and better trained our work force and innovators are, the better we’ll solve our collective problems and continue to thrive collectively.

Kinda the opposite of what we’re doing now — while insisting our way must be better, the data be damned.

I don’t know that Yeats anticipated fascism’s rise. Extreme right wing nationalism was very much in the mix in Europe. It was in Ireland. And England. He could have been referring to the Bolshevik Revolution that blew through Russia in 1917, two years before Yeats published his poem.

If ever a man fit the bill “rough beast”, it’s Donald Trump. And the thing causing all those desert birds to flap around so indignantly is the thing that will “be born” when the rough beast finally slouches all the way to Bethlehem — authoritarianism. Permanent minority rule.

Make no mistake. We are living through a coup d’etat. The Republican Party — recognizing their eventual demographic irrelevance — made an actual power grab. They didn’t see themselves working with Trump at first. That part looks like an “improv” born of changing circumstances and tons of Russian Kompromat. We still don’t know what’s contained in all the stolen RNC emails — yes, the DNC’s emails weren’t the only ones Russia stole.

We don’t know, for instance, what caused Lindsey Graham to go from the ultimate Never Trumper to a man who could tell us in great detail what Donald Trump’s ejaculate tastes like. That’s metaphorical, of course. I think…

I wonder — if William Butler Yeats could experience a “second coming” — if Yeats could look around at our world in the context of his poem — what would he say? What would he think?

What would he write?

I’m going to go out on a limb here. I bet Yeats would write: “Didn’t any of you idiots read my damned poem?”

Dear Pundit Class — You Don’t Get Why Bernie Is Succeeding Because You Still Think Everything’s “Politics”

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Say what you will about Bernie Sanders, one thing he is — consistent. I think of myself as a socialist — well, a social democrat in the European sense. That’s what Bernie Sanders is, too. A social democrat who believes government’s biggest responsibility (outside of defending us from outside harm) is to level the playing field so that as many citizens as possible can realize their full potential — which will benefit us all in myriad ways.

Democratic socialism is very aspirational. It wants something better than what is. Will it cost more than what we’re doing now? It depends on how you total it all up.

The average middle class American — even with a half-way decent employee-provided health INSURANCE plan — still spends a small fortune out of pocket to get the actual health CARE they need. And nothing in their insurance will save them if they get really, REALLY sick and blow past the insurance coverage’s caps. Hello, bankruptcy. When that average middle class American’s kid gets out of college or university (they’ll need a degree still to compete both here and abroad), they’ve got a whole mountain range of debt to get past before their lives can really begin.

Those are two examples of what we currently think is “acceptable”. Funny thing? Most other modern, industrialized, democratic countries? They don’t agree.

One of the things that never gets mentioned in the apples to kumquats comparisons we get of democratic socialism vs what we have now is that although Europeans pay more in taxes than we do, they GET a whole lot of things that they WANT & NEED in return. Things they can point at. Things that they know make their lives better.

Reminder — no one in a country with that boogeyman “socialized medicine” ever goes bankrupt or loses their family home because they or someone they love dared to get sick.

My opposition to that isn’t “political”, it’s moral. Our system is flat out IMMORAL. Fight me on that — I double dog dare ya.

The idea of giving every one of our children either a (public) college education or technical training “for free” (it’s paid for by tax dollars) isn’t a political idea, it’s a philosophy: we educate our children because it makes US better & smarter as a society. Billing ourselves exorbitantly to accomplish that is stupid on steroids.

That’s why other countries don’t do it. That’s why other countries are competing better than we are. We think it’s all about money and politics.

For us, it is. For all those European Democratic Socialists? It’s a philosophy.

The notion of the “rugged individual” is a fabulous fiction. A very MALE fiction at that. Rugged individuals “alone can fix it”, right?

Bullshit. Even as a philosophy — that’s bullshit. But, ironically, in order to make that philosophy a reality “I alone can fix it” — you have to get political. Because THAT’S a philosophy no one believes and no one (with a brain) will buy. So you have to turn to politics — manipulation (that’s the goal of politics — to manipulate towards an end) — in order to have your way.

Our pundit class still thinks the House Democrats impeached Donald Trump because of politics. That was not the case. Though the Democrats are, indeed, a different political party — and were acting as a group — what motivated them was NOT politics. Yes, Democrats oppose Trump on political grounds, but the actions the Democrats were citing were violations of the law and the Constitution. They weren’t reacting politically, they were reacting patriotically. Not the same things.

Keep in mind — if it’s so that Russia impacted the OUTCOME of election 2016 in in any way (and we KNOW that Republicans not only accepted MILLIONS from Russia into their campaign accounts but handed Russia proprietary polling data on top of it all) then we have to ask — for real — whether we can accept the outcome of an election that was neither free nor fair. Worse — the election’s outcome was Russia’s desired outcome. They put their choice into the White House and have had full control of him ever since.

Between now and the election, Trump’s Russia problem will not go away — no matter what Bill Barr does or tries to do. There will never be a day when Trump gets good news on that front — unless it’s Bill Barr successfully obstructing justice. The PR horse is out of that barn and it’s not coming back.

Our pundit class — like the news media that feeds them — still can’t get the idea that Trump isn’t a normal POTUS out of their heads. They can’t get it INTO their heads that lies and truth don’t have equal weight. When a person lies to you, you IGNORE what they say. You don’t ask “But, what if that’s true…?” because it ISN’T true. It was NEVER true.

You’ve just wasted your time — and our time — running down a rabbit hole you should have avoided. Because it was complete bullshit. A person (a reporter even) who calls out a lie in real time, isn’t acting politically. They’re calling a lie a lie.

Can Bernie accomplish everything he says he wants for America? Probably not. But aspirationally, it’s a far better direction than where Donald Trump and the Republican Party want to take us — permanent minority rule. At least Bernie’s version of America doesn’t divide the way Trump’s America does.

At the end of the day, what Bernie’s really selling — it’s what Obama sold — is HOPE. Hope for something better than what is (and aiming for the middle of the road is aiming for a slightly better version of what is). Bernie’s not selling “Hope Adjacent”, he’s selling full on Hope — while Trump sells the diametric opposite.

Ya see, Pundits — it ain’t about politics. It IS about philosophy, And it is about darkness vs light.

If you don’t think even the dumbest Democrat on the planet can sell that? You’re blinded by politics.

If The Question Is “But, What Can We DO To Stop Trump?”, The Answer Is “Let’s Start By Agreeing: Donald Trump Was NEVER The “LEGITIMATE POTUS”

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

A schoolyard bully who steals your lunch money and claims it was always his, is wrong. Not just morally but factually. The lunch money was never his.

Same token — a person who cheats on their bar exam or pilot’s license isn’t actually a lawyer or a pilot. They never actually qualified for it and therefore never really had rights or privileges that were given them UNDER FALSE PRETENSE. Get that last part — the FALSE PRETENSE part? Stick a pin in it. We’re coming back.

The guy cutting you open may call himself a doctor — and the scalpel in his hand is horrifyingly real — but he is not, in fact, by our mutual agreement (because we have created standards for our mutual benefit and safety) that thing he’s calling himself — be it doctor, lawyer, pilot — or POTUS.

Now, I’m simply going by the Rule Of Law here — and, as always on this blog, I assume we’ll find a way back to a world where the Rule Of Law “is” again because the overwhelming majority of us prefer it that way. Maybe that’s why I remain hopeful (if uneasily so) — though Americans should have taken to the streets en masse many insults to human decency ago, there will be a point where even the most apolitical American gets up on his hind legs and says “STOP!”

The majority of Americans do not like being told what to do by “outsiders”. They love their creature comforts — a lot. They want simple lives, yes, but simple lives of comfort. Trump’s impact on this country is only just playing out in full-assed Technicolor. It’s been building to this from the day Russia stole the 2016 election for Trump.

We’re not talking about the Trumpanistas. They’re “never-wozzers” where Democracy is concerned. They’re a more malignant version of the 29% of Americans who still approved of Nixon on the day he resigned because of Watergate — the last Republican power grab that we managed to stop just in time. We’re talking about the 40% or so of Americans who never or rarely engage with politics.

These are the cynical ones — never instilled with civic pride because we just don’t teach it. Civic pride doesn’t instill itself, ya know. To a degree, their cynicism is understandable. Money has always had a louder voice and bigger vote. They got that. But, that was the whole point of “giving money the vote” — to further empower the money and further disempower the actual voter.

2018 began something — a very real awakening. The surge of women into politics will continue unabated because women finally cannot tolerate living in a male-dominated world. That won’t merely effect the sex of the people doing the legislating, it will effect how those people legislate. They’ll do it like women. They’ll do it more multi-laterally than unilaterally. In fact, it’ll be the rare decision that ever gets made unilaterally at all. Because women’s bodies are designed to bear children, they know in their atoms — no one can have or raise a child by themselves. They can try — and they might not die. But they absolutely will not thrive.

Women know a lot about legitimacy. I don’t mean as it pertains to kids with married parents, I mean how it pertains to who deserves what and who doesn’t. Women have had to fight damned hard to get a fraction of what men get in the marketplace — not because their ideas are worth less or their skills less — but because they’re women. Glass ceilings are completely illegitimate. They’re not a legitimate thing. They don’t represent a legitimate reason to exclude women and their talents from the game.

Legitimacy matters.

I believe women will refuse to accept Trumpism going forwards because they will have rejected it in their guts from the get-go. Trumpism is built on a gross, male lie — “I alone can fix it”. If I want to stick my dick somewhere, I’m sticking it there.

That’s not legitimate — except as a rape threat.

We must see EVERYTHING now in its totality. We cannot see all these isolated bits and pieces of the mosaic — Mitch McConnell denying Barack Obama all those lifetime federal judges especially the SCOTUS seat — Mitch McConnell refusing to let Obama tell us that Russia was all in to make Trump POTUS — Every Trumpian lie about Russia — Trump Tower Moscow — Every Republican lie about Russia including the fact that they’ve always known about (starting with “I think Putin Pays Rohrbacher & Trump”) — every time Trump has attached himself to Putin’s anus like a limpet to a shark — every sledgehammer blow to our system of government — we have to see every single corrupt shard as part of a gigantic corrupt whole: Treason.

People who commit TREASON to become President of The United States? They can’t BE President. They’ve already broken the main rule. Remember False Pretense? You cannot “win” the presidency of this country under it.

It’s a contradiction of terms therefore to say you’re president when, in fact, you are not.

Donald Trump did not clear the most basic hurdle of becoming LEGITIMATE POTUS. He did not win the presidency legitimately.

Once we make that the foundation — our starting point for all facts going forward — then first fact we have to acknowledge is Donald Trump is not now — nor has he ever been — the legitimate president. Not being the legitimate POTUS, he never had ANY of the rights, privileges or the authority to do what legitimate POTUSes do — create legislation, represent our country abroad, nominate judges.

I’m not authorized to make air traffic decisions. I might show up and claim I have the authority and even bring along powerful friends who agree with me — that I do. But I don’t — and clearly I’m not making air traffic decisions because I care about safety in the skies. I’m not sure why I’d lie about being an air traffic control person but I know exactly why I’d lie about cheating to become POTUS.

How can the victims of a crime — that’s what We The People are in this instance — be forced to endure a lifetime of the criminal getting away with it? Who says that has to happen — when we can prove how utterly criminal the criminal here is? An election result was stolen from us. That’s not an abstraction.

We The People voted for open-minded, progressive-leaning judges — that’s who the people WE THE MAJORITY voted for. We got fascists instead. That’s not our democracy working, that’s our democracy being hijacked.

We do NOT have to listen to hijackers. We do not have to do what they say or let them win. We can turn — right now — and look these criminals right in the face. They won’t meet our eyes — of course they can’t. They’re guilty little boys who’ve been caught out again. And this time we caught them doing something diabolically bad.

That’s why they’re fighting so hard to kill our democracy dead. If the Rule Of Law is still a thing? Every last Republican (okay — save, MAYBE a few) is going to prison for the rest of their lives. Traitors deserve nothing less.

What can we do to stop Trump & the Republican Party? Let’s start by calling them what they are — TRAITORS. Let’s also make it clear that we view 2016 as not an election but a crime scene. The election result needs to be inspected in far greater detail. We The People want the facts — as best we can reconstruct them.

We want to know what REALLY happened in 2016. If Trump — or ANY Republican — worked with Russia IN ANY WAY to facilitate Trump’s “win”, we cannot say that election was free or fair. Considering what we KNOW Russia was up to — and why?

Tossing the results of election 2016 is a big ask. But how else can we possibly proceed from a starting point of “DONALD TRUMP WAS NEVER LEGITIMATELY PRESIDENT”?

Why on earth would we insist on legitimizing what we know was treasonous? Who the hell could that possibly serve?

Oh, wait — I think I know…

If Every Human Could Be Merged Into A Single REASONABLE Human, Here’s What THAT Human Might Do…

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

If we were able to put out a “help wanted” ad on some cosmic Craigslist, but the ad stressed that the human we’re looking for MUST BE REASONABLE, we’d instantly exclude a third of humanity. I’ll own it — I’m extrapolating from this country onto humanity in general.

Trump’s approval ratings in America still ping-pongs somewhere in the mid-40’s. On the day he resigned from office — because of Watergate — Richard Nixon’s approval ratings sat at about 27%. So, dots connected, Trump’s mid 40’s approval probably includes every one of those right wingers who still thinks Nixon was a god.

Wasn’t it Steve Bannon who pointed out that if Dick Nixon had had a Fox News at his disposal — he would never even have been threatened with impeachment. Reasonable people see rules — the Rule Of Law — as essential to co-existing as fairly as possible. Unreasonable people see the Rule Of Law as something “in their way”. So — everyone surrounding Donald Trump? They won’t make the cut.

Hell, no one around Trump can even spell the word “reasonable”. That’s because they’re all bullies — and bullies don’t “do” reason.

Being as every Republican Senator except Mitt Romney refused to convict Trump — for reasons no one can argue about (as we watch Trump & Bill Barr bludgeon the Rule Of Law with everything they’ve got), none of them can claim to be “reasonable”. Same goes for every single Republican House member who stood in the way of the investigation and knew for a fact that they were obstructing justice in real time every goddamned day.

For the moment we have one, single Republican who qualifies — for the moment, I repeat — as “reasonable.

As we know, if there’s anything that separates people from reason, it’s religion. As readers of this blog know, I draw a distinction between spirituality (which everyone has in one way or another) and religion (which is really just some people trying to quantify & manage other peoples’ spirituality). No one needs rules or regulations — or a church for that matter — to tell them how to be spiritual. The unreasonableness always starts when some “church” claims to speak for a deity. Better do what (they say) the deity wants or (so they say the deity says), there’ll be “hell to pay”.

Man, are those dice loaded.

There is nothing reasonable about thinking people need to behave a certain way because YOU THINK a talking snake REALLY & TRULY convinced a woman to eat a piece of fruit from a tree she wasn’t supposed to eat from — which caused all the suffering on the planet. If YOU THINK a sky deity wiped out every creature on the planet because he was angry at ONE GROUP of creatures (and, hey — what about all the life that lived in water? Did all the fresh water destroy the ocean’s salinity? Where’d all that additional water go (since the amount of fresh water on earth is actually FINITE)? There is nothing reasonable about thinking anything written by men ignorant of germ theory, astrophysics, biochemistry or even rudimentary psychiatry has any value to a modern human outside its literary value — especially when we can prove that everything they thought WAS WRONG.

“Doing unto others”, by contrast — that IS a reasonable thing to do. Hell, “doing unto others” is reasonableness defined. Even a humble atheist can happily “do unto others” without harming his atheistic bona fides. Because even a humble atheist can be reasonable.

Ummmmmm, Mitt? Unless you want to let go of the fantasy that Jesus (we’ll give you “he existed” for argument’s sake) CAME TO NORTH AMERICA and a(nother) talking serpent revealed magical gold plates to Joseph Smith and when Mormons die they all get their own planets, then here’s where you and “reasonable” part ways.

So close, so far, eh, Mittens?

So, now that we’ve culled the herd of unreasonable people, let’s take a look at our Single Reasonable Human.

Ms. Reasonable wakes up one morning to learn the following things are happening in her world:

  • The climate is super-heating super-fast because of shit HE’S DOING.
  • Americans take it for granted that their children getting shot at their schools is normal.
  • Children are in cages at our border.
  • A cabal of men is protecting Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking
  • A hostile foreign power (Russia) launched a successful-beyond-its-wildest-hopes intelligence operation against America’s 2016 election and managed to put THEIR GUY (Trump) into the White House.
  • The Entire Republican Party (save for Mitt Romney) is 100% complicit in a cover up meant not only to keep Donald Trump in power until the next election but to keep Trump (and the Republican minority) in power FOREVER.
  • The news media continue to mis-report the most important story in ANY of their lifetimes because they were convinced (from their journalism schools?) that “both sides do it” and so had spun a massive false narrative around election 2016 that Trump’s win was legitimate (all his projecting that it wasn’t aside) and that as abnormal as his presidency was, it still had to be “normal” cos they lacked the imagination to see what was happening in all its abnormalness.
  • Elections do indeed have consequences — but stolen ones have even BIGGER consequences.

So — having “learned” all these things, what would Ms. Reasonable do?

There’s a lot to deal with in lots of different directions. In short order, a reasonable person would do everything they could think of to stop the climate from crashing down around them first.

They’d stop buying products that hurt the environment — and they’d start demanding packaging that broke down quickly after its single use. Better, Ms. Reasonable would do everything possible to make single-use plastics a thing of the past. Reusable containers would take their place. Need new shampoo? Take your empty shampoo container to Target where Target happily sells you the shampoo itself — which you then put into your empty containers (which Target weighs — minus the weight of your container — and then charges you for).

Ms. Reasonable would take her own cup to Starbucks or Peete’s or she’d happily buy a new reusable cup or (just as happily) pay a premium to buy a single-use cup manufactured to break down quickly and decompose completely.

Ms. Reasonable would stop constantly thinking she needed new stuff. Not needing new stuff all the time would take a huge load off the environment. For real.

Ms. Reasonable would free everyone in a cage. She’d reunite children with their parents. She’d stop the inhumanity and deftly set in motion a system that mitigated the harm we’ve done while seguing into an immigration policy that actually resulted in sane, reasonable policy built above all on perspective.

Guns get the reasonable treatment, too. It’s unreasonable to think we’ll ever get rid of all guns in America. But, Ms. Reasonable will make owning a gun lots harder. She’ll remind everyone that the second amendment — with its well-regulated militia being the arbiter of who gets to “keep & bear” (not own) arms — is all about gun CONTROL and not gun proliferation. Want a machine designed to send a piece of hot metal flying through the air at a live target so as to kill it? Fine. But you will need to be trained in the use of that death machine and you will need to be fully licensed to “keep & bear” it. You will NOT “own” it as the Constitution does not give anyone THAT right.

Your weapon will have technology that allows ONLY YOU to use that gun. No one else may pull its trigger and cause death to hurtle from its business end. If anything bad can be traced to your gun? The onus is 100% on YOU, the “responsible” gun owner. Gun owners will, indeed, FINALLY be “responsible” when Ms. Reasonable is on the case.

All those men hiding behind Jeffrey Epstein? Ms. Reasonable exposes every last one of them. They all follow Harvey Weinstein to prison and ignominy.

Finally, Ms. Reasonable turns to Russia and what Russia has done and is doing.

Learning that her government was now being run by autocratic oligarchs, Ms. Reasonable would remind everyone how the Rule Of Law works. Doing that would take care of all but one of Ms. Reasonable’s most pressing problems. By making The Rule Of Law “a thing” again, all those Republicans guilty of UNDERMINING The Rule Of Law would have to stop undermining it and, instead, feel its wrath.

Reasonableness demands The Rule Of Law. It demands we follow it TO THE LETTER.

If The Rule Of Law suddenly becomes a thing, then Ms. Reasonable’s remaining problem — the News Media’s inability to do its job — might get solved incidentally.

With The Rule Of Law back in place, even our most dim-witted MSM-ers would understand that, no, both sides DON’T “do it” and never did. Perspective would replace “Both Sides Do It” at Journalism Schools and journalists would no longer equate Republicans acting politically to undermine the Rule Of Law with Democrats acting PATRIOTICALLY to STOP THE REPUBLICANS. Even Chuck Todd would grasp that the victim of a crime (having an election result STOLEN FROM YOU) cannot be the PERPETRATOR OF THE CRIME too.

Ms. Reasonable would get to watch cable news that featured Nicolle Wallace and Joyanne Reid and Rachel Maddow and broadcasters like them 24/7 — because even the news networks would — finally — have become REASONABLE.

Of course, when I woke up this morning, Ms. Reasonable wasn’t actually there. She had already been knocked the ground and trampled by Trump & Barr & McConnell and the inept MSM and every unreasonable dickhead with a Twitter account.

Am I crazy to put out a “help wanted” ad regardless?

Dear American News Media — If You’re Covering Jeffrey Dahmer, You’re Allowed To Call Him “A Cannibal”; If You’re Covering Donald J Trump…

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

Rules are funny things, aren’t they? Journalism has no “laws” guiding its practices, it has “rules”. Ideals of how journalism is best practiced, its ultimate goal the fair, unbiased reporting of what’s happened, what’s happening — and what’s likely to happen next.

Somewhere along the way, American journalism took that desire for “unbiased” reporting to mean “neutral no matter what”. As in “no matter what that reporting uncovers or reveals”. As in — even if we knew the worst about someone — as we reported their story — we’d still report on them as if they weren’t as horrible as we KNEW them to be.

That’s a strange approach for a storyteller to take. Stories work by building new information upon older information. Learning things is ideally what causes characters in a story to react — and drive the story forward. And yet, our news media — when reporting the story of Donald Trump — seems determined to never begin its reporting with what we know NOW. They keep starting the story with what we knew A WHILE AGO — back before we had hard evidence that took us to what we know NOW.

Trying to tell Trump’s story without STARTING from the very beginning (he’s a corrupt-to-his-core narcissist who’s been in bed with Russia from the beginning and whose criminality isn’t just conjecture, it’s verifiable) makes no sense. Yet that’s what our press does every day. They tell Trump’s story without telling it’s core truth. It’d be like telling the Jeffrey Dahmer story without mentioning “Hey, by the way — Jeff’s a cannibal”.

But, “strangely” (meaning NOT strangely), the press didn’t worry about not being able to “smoking gun” their evidence, without finding his victims’ DNA in Jeffrey Dahmer’s shit, the press was willing to go full cannibal in their reporting on Jeff — well before those were legally verifiable facts…

It wasn’t hard to figure out what was happening at Jeff’s house. The evidence was all over the place. Just like it’s not hard to figure out what’s happening at Donald’s house (formerly The Peoples’ House).

Would our press get squeamish suddenly and refuse to call Jeffrey a cannibal? Would they refer to his “unusual diet” instead — his “keto-on-steroids” choice of animal protein? No — the media went full cannibal the moment they had a whisper of cannibalism. They couldn’t get enough “cannibalism”. They got so obsessed with cannibalism you’d almost think IT was “eating” THEM.

You’d think they’d be equally hungry at the thought of treason. Treason FFS!

There’s a legal term: “the preponderance of the evidence”. It’s a smoking gun’s “get out of jail free” card. Even a smoking gun can get away without a smoking gun if it brings the preponderance of the evidence into play. Yet, our media has it in their heads that either 1) no such “preponderance of the evidence” standard exists (they’re wrong) or 2) their neutrality prohibits them from calling things what they are because calling them what they are would undermine their neutrality. Or something like that…

Jeffrey Dahmer was a cannibal as soon as the press could call him one. Donald Trump might never be a traitor, a money-launderer, a rapist, a con man, a liar, a thief or a traitor because no one the press gives credence to will call him any of those words directly. No smoking gun despite smoke so thick you can’t even see through it.

Maybe THAT’S the problem. Our press doesn’t know that it’s hair is on fire. They don’t know the whole house is aflame all around them either.

Shame… as assuredly as Jeff Dahmer chowed down on the people he lured into his apartment for comfort — to keep him company, Donald Trump will gobble up the news media (as he always does). The media won’t know it’s happened until well after Trump starts farting and shitting them out.

Our new media… they’re always the last to know anything.

The Most Dangerous Tool On An Authoritarian’s Belt (After Propaganda) Is CYNICISM

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

As annoying as the sound of Trumpanistas Autho Trump is, it’s understandable. One expects bullshit to flow from a Trumpanista.

It’s the sound of cynicism flowing from friends and loved ones that bothers me far more. That’s the sound of Trumpian lies landing where the Trumpanistas couldn’t.

The first thing your textbook authoritarian comes for (so the textbooks say) is The Truth. They murder The Truth so that no one really knows what is or isn’t without Big Brother weighing in. Haven’t we ALWAYS been at war with Eurasia?

But getting to that place where Truth is entirely at the authoritarian’s disposal takes time. There are other stops before full-on fascism flowers. Before authoritarians can have their way, they have to convince enough people that there’s no choice. We might as well do what the authoritarian wants since they’re going to do it anyway. It isn’t necessarily so — that the authoritarian will do it anyway.

Knock an authoritarian down a few pegs — most are such sissies they won’t get back up. They’ll crawl away bawling their little bitch eyes out. They’re schoolyard bullies in need of an ass-kicking. But their goal is to convince you that resistance is futile. All hope is lost.

We probably got here faster than we might have thanks to “Both Sides Do It” journalism convincing us that whatever nastiness the Republicans were up to? The Democrats were up to something just as devious. What can the average person do to fight off corruption when “both sides do it”? Consequently, Americans got jaded when getting jaded wasn’t called for.

Gerrymandering and massive Republican voter suppression has piled on. Where gerrymandering happens, the majority electorate votes one way but gets the opposite result because their “majority” has been split up into bite-sized district pieces any knuckle-scraping GOP candidate could win. Consequently the electorate feels removed from what they tried to elect. They sense corruption in the system. They see it. And decide the system can’t help them.

But, outside “the system”, what options are there to address your valid grievances? None, it turns out. A bad result is guaranteed no matter what. Why bother getting involved?

From the cynic’s point of view, that’s checkmate.

The worst part is when you point out to these people — and we’re all in this together, we all agree — that what happened in 2016 was outright theft. The Will of the American People was literally STOLEN from the American people by an active Russian intelligence campaign allied with pretty much all of the Republican Party. This was a willful theft of an election’s outcome. For a reason — to, above all, hijack the judiciary. It’s not a coincidence that even as Trump’s regime teeters, Mitch McConnell is still cramming radical right wing lifetime judges (not a one of them qualified to judge a pie-eating contest) into the system and down the majority’s throat. Rather than respond, “Gosh, how do we assuage the crime victim’s obvious wounds and begin the process of righting a wrong?”, we get “We couldn’t possibly overturn what happened — how would we do that? Those people would be so angry!”

What about “these people” — US? What about We The People — whose election outcome was STOLEN from us. Worse, not only didn’t we get the choice the majority voted for, we got its diametric opposite shoved at us. Why, I’d like to know, are we so worried about how the car thief will get around once we take our car back from him?

Screw him! He’s a thief. Of course he’ll be angry — he got caught and was forced to return what was never his to begin with.

But, see? Even people who feel wronged here — who WERE wronged — have convinced themselves that the wrong done to them can never be put right.

Why do they think that?

I’ll tell ya — it’s the exact message these criminals WANTED us to get: the crime perpetrated upon us can never be undone. They will always get away with it because they’ll threaten violence otherwise.

The rapist will get away with rape.

That’s where cynicism takes you. The correct answer is “No”.

Resisting cynicism is hard. Damned hard. Because the message coming at you is so pervasive: “resistance is futile… give up!”

Remind the class everyone — what’s the correct answer again? “NO”.

Not even “No, thank you”. Just a curt “NO.”

Dear Fellow Humans: Can We All PLEASE Admit It — We’re Making It All Up As We Go Along

~ A L Katz ~ Leave a comment

You know how kids learn not to trust adults because, kids quickly get, adults are lying pretty much most of the time about pretty much everything?

What we all experience as kids is a moment of absolute clarity — about adults and the world adults make for us all: it’s all bullshit. Kids realize that adults don’t actually know what they’re talking about; they’re falling back on “how it is” or “how it’s always been done” instead of really thinking about the questions they’ve been asked.

Take religion, for instance. Most religions frown on kids asking questions about the faith. Kids ask questions because all organized religions (religion and spirituality are not the same thing) rely on nonsense to justify themselves. Instead of simply saying “Hey, want to live a good life? Just do unto others, okay? Ya got that?” Christianity buries that simple directive that anyone can do (atheists included) inside great, massive heaps of fiction. “Doing unto others” quickly becomes irrelevant because the fiction requires so much pretzel logic in order to follow it. Instead, the church wants its followers to worry about heaven and hell and eternal punishments all caused by a fictional woman eating a symbolic piece of fruit offered up by a totally fictional snake.

Ask a Buddhist or a Taoist or an animist or a polytheist how they feel about that. Turns out? Their mythology doesn’t line up — at all.

Hmmmmmmmmm… could somebody be making stuff up here?

Hmmmmmmmmm… could it be EVERYONE?

That’s not a knock on us. Homo sapiens are damned clever. It’s the good news and the bad news about us. Granted, it took us hundreds of thousands of years to graduate from hunter gatherers to whatever the hell we are now, but once we figured out how to dominate our immediate environment — and the planet (so we thought), we became unstoppable. Unfortunately for us.

We’re curious. We want to know how things work — the Universe, for instance. In the absence of hard facts, we’ll imagine what the answers could be. In the absence of hard facts, we tend to get a lot of things wrong. If the men who wrote the OT (and the NT) had had access to the internet, if they’d had microscopes and telescopes and all our modern technology available to them, would they have written their texts — where they tried to imagine how the universe worked — the same way?

Of course not!

Their view of the universe would have been an informed view — and, with that knowledge in hand, they would have written their texts differently.

In other words — they would have made up what they made up differently. And they WOULD HAVE had to have made some things up because — fact — we don’t KNOW with certainty how the universe began. Or why (or if there even is a “why”). Religion fills in the gaps in our knowledge — for those who need it filled in.

The big difference between people of faith and atheists is that people of faith get triggered by uncertainty — of not knowing why we’re here, what it all means and (most important of all) what happens to us when we die. Atheists accept that there are things we don’t know yet. Rather than fill in the blank with an imaginary answer, atheists shrug and say “I accept the fact that we don’t actually KNOW this yet”.

The Rule Of Law is no different. As the Republican Party proves to us every day now, the Rule Of Law doesn’t exist if people don’t willingly follow it. Trump breaks it repeatedly every day. Nothing happens. Republicans like Bill Barr break it every day. Nothing happens. That kind of proves that the Rule Of Law is only as “real” as we make it — because, in truth, it ISN’T “real”. We made it up.

Human rights? Sorry to break everyone’s heart. There’s no such thing. We invented it. No one has any “rights”. We’re born, we live, we die. Life comes with one guarantee — that eventually (if not sooner) it will end. We’ve invented pretty much everything that happens to us while we’re here — religions, governments, neighborhoods.

We need all these things, of course. How would we live with each other without these fictions guiding us?

The point is, they ARE fictions — human inventions as malleable as our own DNA (and, as we keep learning, our DNA is plenty malleable).

We’re only as trapped by circumstances as we think we are. Donald Trump is a bully — but he’s not a bully capable of dominating us. THAT PART’S a total fiction.

At any moment, if just one brave journalist called Trump out for being a liar, a corrupt criminal & a traitor — to his face on live TV? The whole FICTION that is Donald Trump would start to crumble. Because Trump would crumble.

Trump is a fiction surrounded by fiction that’s all fed by fiction — that white people and their money are superior to everyone else.

Mmmmm — is that bullshit I smell?

Sounds like something only a white guy and his money could make up.