The rich and the powerful really do engage in viciously abusive child sex-trafficking

"Pizzagate" is probably a false-flag psy-op designed to discredit the promotion of the Wikileaks information. However, child sex-trafficking is a real thing that is happening, and Bill Clinton is personally implicated in it. And as far as I'm concerned, Bill and Hillary Clinton are a political tag-team, so the sins and crimes (of which there are many) of one are the sins and crimes of the other as well.

Russian hacking mind-control psy-op bullshit

David Lindorff serves up the Truth Tea.

Let's say for the sake of discussion that the Russians did furnish the Wikileaks information. Wouldn't that simply mean that the they simply did the job that the mainstream media should have been doing by making the public aware of information that was absolutely true? The Democratic Party Kool-Aid drinkers have been sinking to such brand-new lows lately that I don't think I will ever vote for another Democrat ever again. (And I was mostly at that point already. Anyone who doesn't like it can fucking suck it.)

Why the Democratic Party Kool-Aid will always reek of vinegar

The Democrats Do Their Job Again by Paul Street writing at Counterpunch.org

Though one flaw in Street's analysis is that the neoliberal-neoconservative faction of the Deep State isn't just taking defeat lying down. Here is my analysis of what I think is going on:

What I think is going on with this clusterfuck of an election is that two different factions of the US Deep State are in open and hostile conflict with one another, and neither one of these factions is "on the side of the angels". The neoliberal-neoconservative-consensus faction is pursuing confrontation with Russia and China that could lead to global thermonuclear war, and a more paleoconservative faction that is usually content to remain silent decided to get behind Trump's campaign in the interest of preventing armageddon. To be sure, the Republican establishment doesn't really like Trump, but they also realize that this may be their last real chance to get Obamacare totally repealed. And since I really don't think Russia wants World War 3, either, it stands to reason the Russians would do whatever they could to help this mysterious rogue faction.

And now the dominant neoliberal-neoconservative-consensus faction is trying to retaliate by creating a new McCarthyism of which the special-snowflake Tumblrina feminists with their "76 genders" are ironically enough making themselves the willing dupes. But I guess it's not surprising considering what easily manipulated authoritarian fools the special snowflakes are. The faking of hate-crimes to make Trump supporters look bad sure is a nice little touch of class, isn't it?

While I'm sure the Russians engaged in psy-ops and counter-psy-ops aplenty (and possibly even the cyber-attack on the Democratic National Committee), I continue to harbor strong doubts that they were the source of the Wikileaks e-mails or were involved in any election-theft that might have occurred. Such allegations are probably more psy-ops from neoliberal-neoconservative-consensus faction of the Deep State.

Mark Ames on WaPo neo-McCarthyism

Truthdig.com has really been on fire since the election, which is odd, because most of the time they're actually kind of "meh". Today their site featured an in-depth piece by Mark Ames that opens up the Pandora's Box of Cold War far-right racism, nuclear-war-mongering, and general extremism behind the promotion of the Propornot website's neo-McCarthyist agenda.

The neoliberal-neoconservative consensus faction of the Deep State, which is represented by Hillary Clinton and Democratic-Party Kool-Aid drinkers, must be getting truly desperate. But what's truly funny is that they wouldn't be as "on the ropes" right now if they hadn't insisted on forcing the Obamacare boondoggle down the country's throat and blindly continued to drink the Kool-Aid about it when it was clear that the whole thing was imploding!

Matt Taibbi's take-down of the whole "Propornot" debacle is also worth reading.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

In case any readers jump to the conclusion that I am somehow objectively pro-Trump, this article on Truthdig.com about Trump's cabinet picks sums up why that isn't so.

I am outraged, *outraged*, I tell you...

...that this blog didn't make it onto The Washington Post's McCarthy-list of websites that disseminate Russian propaganda!

This should do it:



Sing along if you already know the lyrics! :-D

Election 2016 post-mortem

Donald Trump is moving into the White House, and liberals put him there by Thomas Frank.

This trainwreck of an election

Unsurprisingly, an article on Counterpunch.org manages to sum it up better than anything else I have read to date.

Of course, the real power in the land is the Deep State.

Donald Trump supporters

A more compassionate, fully-realized view.

Shillary's professional trolls

Sometimes the only thing there is to say is, "Fuck off, troll!"

Update: Now it's really starting to become tempting to think that Hillary wants to lose!

Further update: There is another side of the story indicating the possibility that Internet rumor-mongering has exaggerated the nature of the situation even if the fundamentals of the story are pretty much true. Also, many other pages went down on Facebook when those pro-Sanders pages went down.

"Your Love" by The Outfield

A song from the old daze that has been playing in my mind of late.

Final cannibalization stage

According to The Economic Collapse Blog (which I am aware is run by a fundie Dominionist, but the guy still talks about things that really are happening in the global and domestic economies), big corporations are piling on massive debt in order to buy back their own stocks in order to artificially inflate the value of these stocks, in some cases taking on so much debt that they end up defaulting on it. If this is what they have to do to keep the financial markets propped up, I would go so far as to say that we are in a final cannibalization stage that presages a very major, very world-shaking correction.

New York Democratic Primary voter suppression

Because New York City is Hillary the Reptile's seat of political power, I knew she would win New York state's Democratic Primary by hook or by crook. To the surprise of nobody who knows what time it is, it would appear that she did so "by crook".

"Kill the gays" fundie dominionism really exists

And Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is apparently down with it.

ISIS in retreat

According to The Washington Post, the Islamic State terrorist group is in retreat on multiple fronts. This is largely due to the efforts of the Russian military, in my opinion. The reason the IS has been able to get as far as it has prior to his point is on account of US allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia helping them every step of the way. In fact, both countries were recently on the verge of setting off World War III by invading Syria and just may yet attempt such a profoundly foolish action!

The spite voters have crowned a king, and his name is Donald Trump

Spite the Vote by Mark Ames. I've published this link before, but it's more relevant now than it has been in the past. It doesn't mention Donald Trump, but it well and truly explains all about his recent political rise.

As desert to that main course, I also present Revenge of the Simple by Matt Taibbi.

No more champagne and the fireworks are through

Some people like to play Ald Lang Syne every new year. I was an ABBA fan as a teenager, so this is my New Years Day song. It was written for the 1980 New Year, but of course we know that the new decade doesn't really begin until the year ending in "1". The lyrics are very Doomer-friendly, of course, as the Zeitgeist of the late seventies wasn't exactly optimistic. Of course, we buried our justified pessimism by blowing through our last stores of cheap fossil fuels in a massive growth-for-the-sake-of-growth binge, all the while doing nothing to prepare for the coming Age of Scarcity, so....

The torture report

What I found truly scary about the now-infamous Senate report on CIA-sponsored torture of terrorism suspects is that we became so torture-happy that we tortured our own informants.

Have we lost our way as a society, or what?

And of course, none of this evil activity did anything to make our country safer. If anything, it only made us that much more insecure.

Civil religion in an age of collapse is for the birds

To understand from where I am coming in this post, it is probably helpful to read John Michael Greer's blog-post on The Fate of Civil Religion. If you don't feel like doing that, what the post is about is how people in the modern world make quasi-religions out of politics and other non-theist ideas, and one major drawback of that sort of religion is that being of this world, it is very brittle and prone to cognitive dissonance because its premises are inherently falsifiable. Greer's classic example is the way communist ideology definitely became such a religion, and when the communist regimes of the previous century proved unable to deliver the promised paradise on Earth, very many people simply stopped believing altogether. These days the only old-fashioned Marxists you tend to find, in the USA anyway, are ivory-tower academic types or splinter-party cultists who get together every now and then and grimly pretend that the very flow of history they revere hasn't left them flat on their backs in a dusty ditch somewhere.

I see the Democratic Party civil religion as now arriving at a similar point in its particular journey. Don't get me wrong, here. I am most certainly not comparing post-World-War-Two American liberal ideology with the ideology of the old USSR and its now-defunct client-states. I'll leave that sort of invidious comparison to the slavering, inbred fuckwits who live in Glenn Beck-istan and need right-wing talk-radio to tell them when to eat, sleep, shit, and play with themselves. The only respect in which I am comparing liberal Democratic-Party faith and Marxist ideology is that the adherents of both have become devotees of a sad ghost of a bygone era that will never be able to deliver a different and better world.

An instructive metaphor may be helpful here. I see supporters of the Democratic Party faith as being a bunch of people, many of them in hipster garb, running down the street chasing after something that passersby can't see because that something simply isn't there. It looks awfully futile and silly to the passersby, but the folks who are doing this clearly have an emotional investment in maintaining their pretense that keeps them existentially intact somehow. Now, just as long as the pursuers aren't interfering with the business of the passersby and the pursuers feel this is something they really need to be doing, the more rational and well-adjusted passersby won't attempt to interfere with the contrived business of the pursuers. After all, any passersby or apostate pursuers who would get all caught up in attempting to stop any of the pursuers and show them the error of their ways would be just as silly and codependent as the pursuers themselves. In fact, such people would certainly turn out to have issues of their own that they might be doing a much better job of managing instead of trying to set other people right.

To extend the metaphor a bit, I can easily imagine an intelligent grade-school-aged boy asking his mother why those people are so frantically engaged in an endeavor that appears to be so imagination-based from everybody else's point of view. The boy's mother would distractedly reply, "That's just their religion, honey" and the young lad would nod in sudden clarifying comprehension. Indeed, if you look at such devotion to the politics of the weak and dying Democratic Party as this devotion exists on the Internet, calling it religion is not just a cute metaphor employed by cynics such as yours truly looking for some clever new way to make our point. This devotion is increasingly using not just the attitude but the language of religion, and it really is old-fashioned, service-attending, heretic-excoriating, demonology-obsessing religion in the truest sense of the word. As such, it is inherently non-falsifiable and more about keeping the psyches of the remaining faithful intact than it is about any concurrent social, political, or economic reality. And I really do think that the only way one can deny this is if one is a devotee of this religion who doesn't wish to admit that it has become a civil religion.

I suppose if I would have realized this sooner, I wouldn't have felt the need to waste all this time commenting on it and simply decided that I'm probably too much of an old-fashioned theist religionist (I suppose it would be not entirely unfair to describe me as a reconstituted or reformed New Ager, even though I don't think there's going to be any freaking "New Age" of goodness and sweetness and light in this world anytime soon) to be able to go there with the Democratic Party civil religionists of my era. Devoting oneself so thoroughly to an entity as manifestly unworthy as the Democratic Party of the USA seems to me to be about as creepy and sad as creepy and sad gets. Besides, I've done the civil-religion thing back when I was a know-it-all denizen of the college PC scene (which is, let's face it, mostly a post-modern reconstitution of Marxist ideology), and to say I ultimately found it unrewarding and untrue would be the understatement of the year. Those idiots including myself were much bigger losers then the Democratic Party's codependent doormat supporters ever could be.

If my "civil atheism" somehow qualifies as a species of civil religion, in the same way that today's atheist-skeptic orthodoxy has become a religion in its own right, I guess I can live with that. I'm not going to sit here and fatuously claim, "What I believe isn't a civil religion because I'm always right about absolutely everything!" in a manner comparable to some sophomoric Richard Dawkins fanboy from Reddit.com.

Considering that we're facing some pretty harsh shit as a civilization in terms of exhausting energy and resources, pollution, agricultural exhaustion, and climate-change, it probably is rather uncharitable of me to paint liberal supporters of the decidedly not-liberal modern Democratic Party as being nothing but silly nincompoops because I'm sure that's not all there is to them. They do have some significant awareness that things are changing for the worse and that changing how we do things would be a good idea in the face of that. Even if the approach they continually pursue is based upon an illusion, their wanting to do something about the troubled nature of current human life in this world comes from an essentially good place. I guess where I part company with them is in being of the mind that things have progressed too far to halt or significantly mitigate any consequences of what is charging at us over the horizon, and US society is too locked into the way it now is for it to be anything but too late. Whatever is going to happen is simply going to happen.

Well, du-uh!

Princeton [study] makes it official: USA has become [an] oligarchy, [there] is no democracy

This blog will likely fall into increasing disuse in the near future. Things are now at the point where everybody who cares either realizes this or is too addicted to false hope to do anything except just keep right on "shootin' up".