Hillary the Shape Shifter, Flint Water, Fukushima, and Pussy Riot

A rule I follow in my personal life, and also in my political life, is to deal with the biggest problem first. I believe that this approach often results in the smaller problems being solved automatically. Sometimes it's easy to figure out what Job One is, but when there are dozens of huge Job Twos looming, it's not so easy.  

There was a time when the obvious Job One on the whole planet was to impeach Bush Jr and Dick Cheney. Now, with terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Syrian refugees pouring into Europe, and ISIS spreading far and wide, we're seeing the result of our failure to accomplish this.

Today, I believe Job One for Americans is to get Bernie Sanders elected. It may seem that Hillary would be a fairly innocuous president, and in the scheme of things, we know that she would be a competent president. But what kind of country do we want to live in? An oligarchical empire that crushes millions of lives and destroys Earth's environment in order to add to the wealth of billionaires, while forcing us pay its bills? Do we want to continue living under our present system of soft fascism, in which TV's are used in place of gulags and America is slowly transformed into a Third World nation right before our eyes? 

The main purpose of my blog post today is simply to share this video (2 minutes) of Hillary helping Bush Jr sell his illegal, immoral, and unwarranted 2003 invasion of Iraq. This invasion and occupation has resulted in the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqi people and 5,000 brave American soldiers, destroyed the whole country of Iraq, and recruited millions more terrorists, all while stealing about $3 trillion dollars from our Treasury, or more accurately, from our children's future labor! 

Every minute our children and grandchildren work to pay taxes to cover the cost of this war crime will be a minute that they will be in slavery, having their labor stolen from them to pay for crimes of which they are totally innocent! We too are enslaved, every minute we work to pay the percentage of our taxes that goes to the Pentagon, that pays Bush's and Obama's war debts, that pays for the hundreds of F-35's that can't even fly correctly (over $100 million each!--the software required to fly them is already more than 24 million lines long, and programmers are finding it impossible to make the plane fly at night!). Hillary is very good at making people forget who she really is, but this old video, just 2 minutes long, is a good reminder that Hillary is a shape shifter.

We must avoid automatically caving in and voting for Hillary. If we vote for Hillary while Bernie still has a shot, it will be an admission that we live in a country where the government is absolutely no longer a servant but a master. We will be admitting that we have no choice but to be party to murder and to be complicit in the further breakdown of our country's culture and infrastructure. And we will be gladly accepting our position of privilege while knowing that millions of our fellow Americans are going without healthcare, without affordable college, without decent jobs, without safety in their neighborhoods, and even without enough food to eat. 

How would Hillary handle the present Flint, Michigan infrastructure EMERGENCY? Would Hillary go after the perpetrators, who have knowingly poisoned tens of thousands of (mostly black) children? Here’s How Hard It Will Be to Unpoison Flint’s Water. There's a huge looming Job Two for you! What is the United States government going to do about this emergency affecting tens of thousands of Americans? This is staggering! And how many other of our cities, with their aging water, sewer, and natural gas systems, are on the brink of similar problems? 

I think it's doubtful that the oligarchs will allow Bernie, a self avowed socialist, to actually win the presidential election, but people thought it was impossible for a Catholic (JFK) and for a black to become president, and yet these things happened! The prospect of Bernie winning is very exciting! How could young voters not be totally excited about voting for Bernie? His wining would be an actual revolution. Checkmate, elite .001 percent! We didn't like the only two flavors you made available to us, Trump/Rubio/Cruz or Hillary (Coke or Pepsi?), and you have been trumped! The elites lose! We win!

After losing Iowa, will Trump now deflate like a stupid looking balloon full of hot air and blow out of sight? My intuition tells me that many Americans are becoming willing and able to look at reality instead of meekly allowing politicians to trigger their feelings and control their loyalty by pushing their pre-programmed buttons--about gays, immigrants, abortion, socialism, etc. People are finally starting to notice what most of you reading this have been able to notice instinctively for years--that is, when a politician is talking total bullshit. 

A quick check of videos on YouTube, such as Stephen Colbert's excellent Trump vs Trump debate, shows that Trump is all over the board on every issue. Electing Trump president would embarrass America before the whole world! And allowing Trump to have the keys to our nuclear arsenal would literally endanger every human on Earth. What a humiliating, insecure, frightening position to put people from other countries in, who didn't have the opportunity to vote for or against him. This election is important, brothers and sisters!

The Hillary vs Bush video I've linked you to here shows that Hillary is in no way a progressive, but truly just a neocon in Democrat's clothing.

Bernie is the only viable candidate, the only one actually talking about the wellbeing of the people. If he won, he'd still have to beat his head against the brick wall of Congress, but by the same token, we would have restored sanity to one of the three branches of our government! That's something we didn't achieve with Obama, who immediately appointed Goldman Sachs' Tim Geithner Secretary of the Treasury and doubled the size of the war in Afghanistan. 

Another huge Job Two is Fukushima. The media behave as if the the earthquake and tsunami that disabled the Fukushima reactors 5 years ago were the disaster, but actually the disaster is just getting started, the biggest industrial accident in history, threatening Japan and ultimately the world. Can I interest you in a tuna sandwich? What will happen if they have to evacuate Tokyo?

And last but not least, Pussy Riot is back in the news! From the New York Times:

The Russian punk protest group Pussy Riot sashayed back into the public eye on Wednesday with the release of a music video savaging the country’s prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika, who locked up three members of the group in 2012. 

It is a black satire of the Russian criminal justice system, in which the women, playing prison guards, rap lustily about money and torture a man with hot clothes irons.

Unlike Pussy Riot's previous videos, this one features high production values and choreography! And the young women aren't wearing ski masks! The whole NY Times article is here.

What do you think? Are we being naive if we once again let ourselves believe that a president can make a difference? Please click the comments link below and let me know.

The Lesser Evil? Seriously?

If your only 2 choices for president of the USA were handsome Jeffrey Dahmer, who tortured, killed, and ate 17 boys (between 1978 and 1991), or his (hypothetical) handsome twin brother, Timothy Dahmer, who tortured, killed, and ate only 5 boys, and who had actually been known to help boys from time to time, for whom would you vote?

What if we had a third choice, their ugly older brother, Ron Dahmer, who was a little bit crazy and had been a strong Reagan supporter back in the day, but who was strongly opposed to torturing, killing, and eating boys and who had never done so? Would you vote for Ron, knowing from statistically conclusive polls that almost everybody would be voting for one or the other of the handsome Dahmer twins? Or would you be doing your best to make sure that at least we didn't get stuck with the worst of the Dahmers?

Usually when I post something on my blog, I feel pretty sure about the inherent logical self-evident "alien sociologist" objectivity of what I'm writing. But this time, I'm writing about how confused I am.

Chris Hedges, author and foreign war correspondent, is a hero to me. He was recently the lead plaintiff in a suit against the government regarding the military detention law included in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed by Obama on New Year's Eve, 2011, that allows the government to charge Americans as terrorists, arrest them, and hold them indefinitely without a trial "until hostilities cease." Perhaps for 20 years in some dank offshore prison, even Gitmo. Chris Hedges knew that he and his supporters were likely to lose the lawsuit, but his patriotism and love of liberty impelled him to try. Thanks to a brave district court judge in New York, Katherine Forrest, who ruled it unconstitutional, Hedges won. So at least for now, the government has been barred from enforcing the military detention law, although Forrest's judgement will probably be appealed. And this brilliant, brave man, Chris Hedges, says that we should vote for a third-party candidate. 

When a man this great, a man whose every word I have always (well, almost always) agreed with, says, "Go ahead and vote this November. But don’t waste any more time or energy on the presidential election than it takes to get to your polling station and pull a lever for a third-party candidate--just enough to register your obstruction and defiance," what am I supposed to do? 

The thing that makes me feel justified in my predictable stance--I believe we all should vote for Obama--is that so very many of our fellow citizens are going to vote for Romney. In a democracy, you have to accept the will of the majority, right? Even if you think their ideas and plans are stupid. If the election were held today, perhaps a majority, or at least a very large percentage of voters, would chose Romney. We're stuck with these Romney voters. We can't just wish them away. Just because we want a more ideal government, one that doesn't borrow money from China to fight fake wars while our schools and highways crumble, one that doesn't bail out criminal banking organizations while hardworking Americans lose their homes and go without health care, doesn't mean we can have one. As long as the peasants (which includes upper-middle-class educated Americans as well as trailer trash and hillbillies) keep voting Republican, we are doomed to the status quo, which any thinking person knows is unsustainable. 

Like Hedges says, we have been colonized. WE ARE COLONIZED. When Americans vote for Romney, they'll be voting for a more oppressive, more total colonization. They'll be voting for an extension of Bush's presidency, for a proxy McCain/Palin presidency. So, in the real world, since so many of our fellow citizens will freely go to the polls this November and freely choose to turn UP the volume on the dictatorship and increase the level of our oppression, doesn't it somehow justify my stance, that we should do the only thing that we can do to grab onto their arms and try to hold them back as they turn up the volume? The louder the volume, the more it hurts! It would seem that we don't have the luxury of voting for a more perfect candidate, since in our particular democracy, which includes so many ignorant, provincial, scared, simpleminded people, we can't HAVE a more perfect candidate. 

AND YET, if I vote for Obama, I'm going against the will of my dear Chris Hedges! Plus, I am voting for evil. Obama has licensed 4 new nuclear power plants in the South, the first president to allow new nuclear plant construction since the 1970's! How many Chernobyls and Fukushimas here in America will be acceptable to Obama? One a decade? Two? He quadrupled Bush's drone strikes and doubled the size of our fake war in Afghanistan! He has strengthened the anti-Constitution Patriot Act! I am really confused! Hedges makes it sound so easy and so right to register our protest by simply pulling the lever for a third-party candidate. But basic math, simple real-world thinking and real-world statistics, dictate that if we vote third party or don't vote, Romney will be our next president. 

When you let a retarded child into your antique shop full of ancient Ming Dynasty vases, even for only 4 minutes or possibly for 8 minutes, is that a prudent and patriotic thing to do? Does allowing bad guys to break things valuable and precious to us really help our cause in the long run? Do we really need to let criminals take our money and break our stuff before we can finally get mad enough to start fighting to take our country back? Is allowing an invisible committee of global billionaires to rape us (even harder than they already are) for the next 4 or 8 years what a smart revolutionary would do? I honestly don't know, but it sounds somewhat illogical to me.

My friend Tony has been kind and clear, and yet persuasive, in arguing that after the failure of the Obama administration to deliver "change we can believe in," and after his proving to us that, actually, "NO, we can't," should we finally be done voting for evil, even if it's the lesser evil? Tony has made such a wonderful case for not voting for evil ever again. For example, he sent me this chart:




So I am writing to you, my loyal readers and to anyone you forward this to. I hope you will help me make sense of the quandary I'm in.

Before you render your judgment, I remind you to keep in mind that we're a democracy, not some utopia or even potential utopia that can be just the way Ron Paul supporters want it to be. In the real world, 57% of all white male Amerikan voters recently chose to give the keys to our nuclear arsenal to insane McCain and stupid Palin. Since our fellow citizens are choosing to ratchet UP dictatorship, that is the will of our democracy! Since none of us seem to have the guts, at least at this point in time, for real revolution, or for risking many years in prison like Chris Hedges just did in fighting the military detention law (that damned terrorist!), it would seem that in accord with our being democracy, we should make compromises that are doable and workable and realistic. 

Even if half of our voters are dumbasses, who would vote for a lifelong business failure, war dodger, recently reformed alcoholic (who had been behind bars 3 times for drunk driving), simpleminded inarticulate fundamentalist Christian guy (Bush Jr.), we either have to accept their will or we must impose some kind of dictatorship on them, which would be counterproductive for those of us who value democracy. More recently, these same dumbasses voted for for a guy who graduated 894th out of 899 at Annapolis, crashed 4 American airplanes, was a liability, not a hero, in Vietnam, and who was a prominent member of the Keating Five, a gang that cost American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars during the Savings and Loan Scandal. This man bragged about supporting 95 percent of Bush's policies (which brought our great country to its knees), and he joked about "bomb, bomb, bombing Iran" (sung to the tune of a Beach Boys song). These fools voted for McCain even though that meant they were voting for greater subjugation from nameless, faceless billionaires, and that their votes might even translate into the deeds to their own homes being on the line, and even, for many of them, their own sons' very lives on the line!

Just think about that last point. Remember, we are not living in some perfect experiment that has suddenly gone awry. We are living in Amerika, a land where a large percentage of the people are ignorant peasants who believe the creator of the universe wrote the Bible, who hate gays, who want to control what people do in their bedrooms, who don't mind blowing up people in foreign countries that have oil, and who want to prevent women from terminating unwanted pregnancies. They want to perpetuate our barbaric health care situation, that puts us 34th in infant mortality statistics, right below Cuba and Cyprus! They call the successful health care systems of Germany, France, and Taiwan socialism. But look at where those countries appear on this list! And look at the CIA list right next to it, where we appear 39th.

There's one more aspect to my voting problem that I need to mention, and I think it will be very useful for you to consider. If you don't have children, it might not come naturally to you to think about this issue like I do. I think that in America, there are two very basic tiers of reality: for adults, there is the adult "real world," and for children there is the somewhat ideal world of childhood. Adults here have a pretty good life relative to most people in the world, but there are serious difficulties we face--a scary economy, high divorce rates, health care worries, mortgage payments, medical bills, etc. But children here, especially comfortably middle- and upper-middle-class children, have amazing, almost magically charmed lives. And regardless of how fkd up the world actually is, their lives are almost identical to lives they would live in a perfect world! They are insulated from pain, danger, and disease. Their lives are enriched with cultural experiences, high tech learning and playing devices, good food, and travel. (My children have travelled overseas many times. They get to sail around in the San Francisco Bay on my brother's new 45' sailboat (2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms), and they've had thousand-dollar Mac laptops since they could walk. And they get all this while being almost completely insulated from political guilt and political worry and even from political danger.) In many poor and unstable countries children don't have the luxury of living in a separate tier of reality, because they do have to step over dead bodies in the street, they do have to experience bomb blasts in the marketplace, and they do have to watch their mother shrieking in agony when her husband has been taken away by the authorities to be tortured.

So, when I vote for Obama, I'm prolonging, measurably prolonging, the insulation that my children enjoy from the harsh reality of life on this planet, and allowing them the best odds possible to better themselves, to strengthen themselves, to remain idealistic, and to keep believing in the possibility of a better world. I saw my daughter's transcript yesterday, and she's number 1 out of all 321 people in her 7th grade class. My son was number 1 in his high school, and now he goes to UC Berkeley and is doing very well there and in his side business of designing local advertising. He's a second-degree black belt while my daughter will soon be testing for her provisional black belt. They speak Chinese. They're the kind of people who will help build a good future. And I was able to nurture their lives and their personalities free from backpacks blowing up in cafes and free from radiation falling on their skin. 

My revolutionary act of not voting for Obama and instead voting for Ron Paul or whoever the Green Party candidate turns out to be (they're considering Roseanne Barr!), in the real world, would narrow their opportunities, because that's what happens when a BLATANT tool of corporations such as Bush, McCain, or Romney comes to power. Admittedly it's almost as bad under Obama, but it's certainly not AS bad. Obama stopped the Keystone Pipeline from traversing the Oglala Aquifer, prevented the dumping of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, allowed 26-year-olds to stay on their parents' medical policies, saved the American auto industry, and much more. Obama might be a selfish egotist, but some of his actions indicate that he has a heart. Romney's history and his demeanor indicate that he might actually be an automaton.

What gain will my children obtain if I allow their buffer zone to be diminished? If all I get out of voting for a third party is to feel good about myself--"Jeff is such a smart revolutionary!"--would that be worth it?

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