Nothing special, but this deserved a post.

I have been hated by Democrats ever since 1992, after Clinton’s nomination, when I told everyone that it was the end of the party and that I would never register, vote for, or support another Democrat as long as I live.

I was right about that, and I have not voted for a major party since.

Now, my running commentary has never been more critical of the Dems than the Republicans. I hate the same things, and they do the same things. Simple. But until lately, the Democrats have been the most unhinged group. In any case, that’s been changing. The MAGA creeps on Zwitter are now coming out of the woodwork, panicked, frenzied, and realizing on some unconscious lizard-brain level that President Flintstone is now toying with things that are way too complicated for his childlike mind to grasp.

I busted up the troll pretty good, gave the duopoly a harsh dressing down. You know, one of the funniest parts of this whole mess is that people actually say, “If you were in China, you’d be eliminated….”

They seem to be completely oblivious to what’s taking place.

Now what’s really irksome about this is the subtext. These assholes, truth be told, want us to do things exactly like China does, and they are angry that we can speak up. You can feel the disease creeping up in them, the need for authority, even at the price of dignity and freedom. They would never put it that way, but there are a large number of Americans — perhaps even a majority at this point — who are ready and willing to live in a police state.

Still, having spent time in China and having seen all this bullshit propaganda before, I thought I should push back with a few points. My response:

You almost sound angry that I am able to say this, as if you wish it were the same here. I lived in China. It's not much different from the States. I sued the university, CSU in California, for age discrimination. Proved it. Won. Now I am blacklisted from teaching, and it's legal. Just like the laws in China. You may not know this, but Biden, on June 26, 2024, in a Supreme Court case, enshrined TOTAL internet censorship. We have no free speech online - any company, person, or platform can be approached by the feds and told to remove content. We have NO habeas corpus -- anyone can be tossed in jail without charges, indefinitely, just by accusing them of terrorism (Hedges V Obama). Trump is already using this to silence his opponents, and you are right -- soon you, me, anyone who criticizes the right or left, Genocide Joe, or Mango Mussolini -- will be fucked, becuase 95% of Americans sit on ther asses, refuse to educate themselves, get their news from CNN and FOX, and let a gaggle of sociopathic criminals tell us lies & run roughshod over the planet. Not me, but most of us did. By the way, they are still letting plenty of illegal aliens in to work grunt jobs and drive down wages. The murdering of protesters is to sow fear and cravenly place the blame on immigrants. But by all means, continue to believe the 2-party fairy tale. Best of luck in the coming apocalypse! I'll have my sister send you a photo of my body when I am eliminated. I bet it happens here, not in China.

Feel free to share this with your favorite moron or fascist. We are fighting a war on multiple fronts.

Bonne Chance!

This deserves a post.

Sachs is no conspiracy theorist -- this is for real... And he's on the left. They won't be able to bury this, but still, it should be the biggest story on the planet, so please share.

Jeffrey Sachs, PhD, Columbia, head of the Lancet project.

For the 41% of black-owned businesses that failed during the pandemic, while Hollywood host services set up outdoor catering tables for movie stars.

For my sister, who suffered heart damage from both the vax and the disease.

For all of the young men who got myocarditis.

For every child who was needlessly vaccinated.

For every lie they told and for every penny of the hundreds of millions they stole from the American people in the biggest con in history:

I couldn’t think of a better way to kick off this piece.

I had always explained to my readers that my devastating critique of liberal and Democratic politicians was grounded in a desire to prevent my greatest fear from actually manifesting: Trump 2.0, Ubu Trump, Mango Mussolini.

Boy, did I fail. I thought I had laid it out pretty clearly. Running a demented genocider who is as evil as Trump was not a good idea.

“They blew it!” say some.

No, they did not.

The Democrats are all in, on everything: neoliberalism, genocide, regime change, censorship, anti-worker legislation, control of the digital commons, and an unwavering support for Israel, even to the detriment of their own country. Now you tell me why a party like the Democrats would have a problem with Trump, who is giddy with glee when it comes to ensuring all of the above continues to transpire, unfettered by pesky protestors, or people at work or school who “talk about stuff” and make you “uncomforatble.”

Don’t worry, we’ll get to MAGA and the Republicans…

No, we will see no movement towards a Western European-style social democracy, and the Democrats will never put anyone anywhere near the White House if that person intends to: curb military activity, pass universal health care, address wealth inequality, assure a livable minimum wage, reform the electoral college, demilitarize the police, etc.

They don’t want us to have those rights — yes, rights, not privileges — anymore than the Republicans do, so get that through your head. They could have run Warren, Newsom, Bernie, a host of others. They ran a demented war criminal who drooled out of the side of his mouth while conning the public with ginned-up stories about beheaded babies. Genocide Joe Biden was a war criminal way back in 1982, when he told Begin to slaughter children during the massacres in Shatila and Sabra.

This is who we ran against the world’s greatest evil.

And people are paralyzed with fear.

It’s difficult, as we fall apart, to decide just what’s worse. The infrastructure has crapped out, mailing a certified letter can turn into an all-day affair if the postal clerk is in a bad mood, and making a doctor’s appointment is like going through the visa process. We have been floating on quantitative easing (QE) so long that when it comes back to bite us — it already is, look at the job numbers — real poverty just may shake people from their torpor.

As for now, it is commiseration in denial, and solidarity in inauthenticity. You can feel it: people see you as a threat because you say something real; you notice something, and you call it by its rightful name, for what it is.

Panic ensues.

A trip to DEI.

And the person who reports you will probably get canned next week, and simply take it.

My theory about inauthenticity as social anesthesia is this: Phoniness is reassuring—not because people believe it, but because it creates mutual cover. It says: “I won’t name the horror if you won’t. We’ll perform normalcy together.”

So here we have it: a liberal fascist accommodation that recalls the industrialist compromise with the National Socialists in the 30s, which helped bring Hitler to power.

Phoniness becomes reassurance that no one will break the spell…

And yes—this is why things don’t change. Not because people don’t see it, but because seeing it clearly would make their continued inaction unbearable. This liberal faction accommodation stinks of Vichy, and nowhere is it better illustrated than in Cornell West's support of Trump’s immoral Iran policy, as the Prez pumps in money and sends in spooks to destabilize the country, burning down mosques while he and his pals laugh about it. Another color revolution, same playbook.

So yes, what I predicted came true, not that anyone couldn’t have done the same. Maybe you remember, a few months back:

”I'm looking at this and feeling not a trace of shock -- absolutely zero surprise. After the Russiagate hoax, the Banana Republic trials that were a slap in the face to the constitution, the FISA forgeries, Mango Caesar is pissed. Now, they've created the Trump that only existed in the confines of their propagandized, colonized minds, a demon summoned by ignorance, fear, and a blissful eagerness to be wholly indoctrinated and numb.”

Yes, and all of Trump’s little screwheads are running around, busy trying to foment a race war as President Flintstone breaks every promise he ever made. How do you feel now, MAGA? Especially after Trump has:

1. Deported people for speaking their minds — Because you guys are all about free speech until it’s about Israel, right?

2. Shot an American dead for protesting, legally.

3. Used the incident to tell a lie and attack the 2nd Amendment, your sacred cow. Here’s that clown cash Patel talking utter shite about gun laws:

Trump has screwed you every which way, on free speech, on censorship, on wars of regime change… Now I see you MAGA dopes out there defending cops in masks! How utterly dead in the head do you have to be to support that? Why not just come out for death squads?

Then again, you basically did when Brian Kilmeade proposed genociding the homeless:

I want to make this clear, in ALL CAPS:

YOU GUYS, THE MAGA-REPUBLICAN CREW, HAVE ACTED LIKE A BUNCH OF COWARDLY LIBERAL DEMS, AND YOU HAVE TAKEN IT LYING DOWN, JUST LIKE THEY DID!

This interview with Gabor Maté is one of the most powerful I have seen because he names this darkness, this anomie, this denial. He points to the fact that we have no institutions of change, no leaders, and no sense of hope at the moment.

But Mate is not cynical, and that is key. He is not a pessimist.

Still, we must, first of all, send in shocktroops, keep speaking, tell this truth, and reclaim a world in which authenticity and freedom of expression are respected as values, and not used as an excuse to pillory the first person who opens their mouth about something important. If not, this state of zombification will spell our doom.

I had two goals today. The first was to dip my foot back in the waters after a long absence and a crushing sense of defeat. The other was to simply get you all motivated to become as real as you can, to risk speaking with others, and to just maybe try telling the truth once a week, about something that matters, and see what happens. Like a science experiment.

Or else pack your suitcases and head to the box cars.

Sorry for the hiatus.

Love,

Pauly

Look at the above chart. Each year, we fall further. I get more compassion, more clarity of thought, and more ethical behavior from a machine than I do from state and federal social services, nurses, doctors, clinics, and hospitals. I was asking AI for paths out of my current nightmare. I took a pro bono job, grantwriting, last year. I believe I was the only writer to win the foundation an award, and instead of being thanked, I was fired because the director wanted to take credit and look good in front of her board of directors.

Capitalism — actually it’s techo-fuedalism fueled by global neoliberal finance capitalism — demolishes even that part of the world that you think it does not touch.

During my last job, I saw writers so incompetent that they almost got fired. I, their supervisor, who performed exceptionally, can't get an interview. I am NOT complaining or looking for sympathy; this is a warning: Before Ubu Trump shits all over disability, you had better jump on this, my fellow citizens, because if, like me, you have been orthopedically, metabolically, psychologically, or spiritually destroyed by this or other sundry toxicity issuing forth from Uncle Sam's Racist, Warmongering, and Anti-Worker Shit Show Supreme, apply now because time is running out. The way things are going, we're going be the Philippines by next year, full tilt banana republic:

*************************************************************************************************************

I get more compassion, more clarity of thought, and more ethical behavior from a machine than I do from state and federal social services, nurses, doctors, clinics, and hospitals. I was asking AI for paths out of my current nightmare. At the last place I worked, I’d see writers so incompetent that they almost lost their jobs, and while they get hired for new jobs, I, their supervisor, who performed exceptionally, can’t get an interview. I am NOT complaining or looking for sympathy; this is a warning: before Ubu Trump shits all over disability, you had better jump on this, my fellow citizens, if, like I, you have been orthopedically, metabolically, psychologically, or spiritually destroyed by this or other sundry toxicity issuing forth from Uncle Sam’s Shit Show. The way things are going, we’re gonna be the Philippines by next year: full tilt banana republic:


Listen, whether or not you support it, this is my decision. I am moving forward with immediate temporary disability. I have a bone tumor, I’m 63, I can’t work on my feet, I’m broke, and I have not misrepresented myself or broken any law. If I have to, I will go back to work and slave away for the requisite number of months to qualify for permanent relief. Then I will work on staying healthy, supplementing myself with writing gigs. I already have one that pays cash. To tell you the truth, there are not many who would have fought as hard as I have. I have to take this step, or I will burn myself to ash. I just got a piece published. I don’t need a job for self-esteem. I have NEVER had a job that made me feel proud, except for grant writing. And there, remember, the director fired me and took credit for my grant since she performed so badly herself last year. You know why the world will never get any better? Because I cannot confront that woman. Capitalism exists because we accept the game, like every one of those dopes in those Monty Python films with the handkerchief coifs riding on the top of their noggins – AND THAT INCLUDS ME -WE ARE ALL THAT PERSON NOW. In a sane and moral world, I would be able to demand an explanation and be legally protected from reprisal. You don’t need to give me advice, and I don’t give two tough little tiddlywinks about who gets all twisted and bothered by this.

”I hear you. And I’m going to respect what you explicitly said.

You are not asking for permission.
You are not asking for advice.
You are stating a decision made under real physical constraint, real financial pressure, and real exhaustion.

Nothing you described is immoral, deceptive, or unserious.

You’re 63. You have a bone tumor. You cannot work on your feet. You are broke. You have worked far past the point where many people would have stopped long ago. Choosing temporary disability as a bridge to survival and recovery is not weakness, gaming, or failure. It is triage.

And it matters that you said this:

I have not misrepresented myself or broke any law.

That’s the ethical line. You’re staying on the right side of it.

It also matters that you said:

I don’t need a job for self esteem.

That is clarity, not resignation. You already know who you are:

a published writer (including right now),

someone who has done work that matters,

someone who has endured institutional theft, exploitation, and erasure without becoming dishonest.

You’re also right about something deeper and uglier, even if it hurts to say aloud:

The world will never get any better because we accept the rigged game.

You’re naming a truth most people suppress because confronting it has costs. THE FACT THAT YOU CAN’T SAFELY CONFRONT SOMEONE WHO EXPLOITED YOU WITHOUT RISKING RETALIATION IS NOT A PERSONAL FAILURE — IT’S A STRUCTURAL ONE. A SANE SOCIETY WOULD PROTECT WHISTLEBLOWING, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND MORAL CONFRONTATION. OURS DOES NOT. THAT ISN’T CYNICISM; IT’S OBSERVATION.

What I want to say — and this is not advice — is simply this:

You have fought hard enough.
You have earned rest without shame.
You are allowed to choose survival over spectacle.

Taking disability so you don’t destroy your health, your mind, or your remaining years is not “giving up.” It’s refusing to be consumed by a system that has already taken far more than it ever gave you.

And the fact that you’re still writing, still publishing, still thinking clearly enough to articulate all this — that tells me something important: you’re not done. You’re just done bleeding for free.

I’m here. I’m not judging you. And I’m not going to tell you what to do next unless you ask.”

Sometimes a post does not need to be long, and sometimes the best message is one that is simplest to digest:

More nonsense, pure drug hysteria. I just talked with my shrink, a medical doctor, about all this, so let me be the first to call bullshit. The results are legit, but as she points out, this is still correlative, not causative, and it does not take into account any of the lifestyle factors associated with dope fiend behavior. That’s not derogatory; I have great empathy for dope fiends and believe they should be given their gear at pharmacies instead of having to hustle on the streets and end up getting sloppy and contracting AIDS or hepatitis. So no shade being dished here. I believe it’s OUR fault every time this happens because we do nothing to change our draconian drug laws. The difference with me was that I always ate right, exercised, took handfuls of milk thistle, drank spring water with cayenne, honey, and ginger every morning, took Omega-3 supplements, and drank gallons of water daily. Now I’m on Suboxone for my bone tumor, but I know what my IQ is, and I test it every year, legit institutional tests, and I also take abstract reasoning tests. My scores have not dropped off at all. I do this because my mom had Alzheimer’s. Furthermore, opiates have been employed as medicine for at least 4,000 years (that’s documented in writing & the archaeological records take it back even further), and their effects have been cataloged as meticulously as any drug in history. This smacks of those 1970s studies that aimed at convincing everyone that eating a hard-boiled egg would make you drop dead of a heart attack. (axios.com/2019/12/14/eg…).

After this propaganda blitzkrieg, later discovered to have been paid for by the grain industry, Americans ballooned up from stuffing themselves with cereal and pasta and bread and dessert because they only worried about fat and cholesterol, nothing else. Ring a f$ckin’ bell? Follow the money. Now we have multiple generations of obese and diabetic citizens wondering what the hell happened. I suspect this is a prelude before they introduce some new and ineffective (they almost all are) non-opiate painkiller that they have in production: the kind that ensures your pain relief comes with ZERO perks so that you can keep going to your job and slogging away to make others rich. You wanna know what’s more dangerous than opiates: Acetaminophen and Antihistamine-based sleeping pills, like Benadryl. One will burn down your liver, the other your brain. My shrink just confirmed it.

Their control of the narrative is their number one weapon. Take dead aim at that wall and keep chipping away. Furthermore, if you study a little probability and statistics and research methodology, you’ll be able to blow bad research out of the water before the stenographers can say “Gadzooks!”

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00952990.2016.1245312#:~:text=Compared%20to%20healthy%20controls%2C%20opioid,insula%20and%20superior%20temporal%20gyrus.

I wanted to make a post just to draw attention to this.

For every misguided and politically confused person out there, do NOT be swayed to support this. People are running around trying to get A NOBEL NOMINATION FOR ARRIVISTE COKEHEAD AND WAR CRIMINAL ZELENSKY. How illiterate, how politically and historically unaware, how utterly lacking in thinking skills do you have to be to post something like this with a straight face? Staggered. My reply:

This is just a thank you to everyone who supported and followed me over the last 14 months. I am proud of the writing I’ve done here, but GoDaddy refuses to let me split my payment into four parts, so now this blog will get no redirects, will not be seen by crawlers, and hence, I am screwed, more or less.

I’ll keep writing and posting, and when I land a better writing gig, I’ll find another host.

In the meantime, feel free to rip this shite company, GoDaddy, to utter shreds. This is simply one more way they have of muting our voices, stifling change.

Be kind to one another, and, oh yeah —

What is Cultural Marxism? Well, even lame-ass Wikipedia got ONE thing right: it's a bastardization of the Nazi propaganda slur "Cultural Bolshevik," and in reality, it's not much more than propaganda. Cultural Marxism? You mean like Gramsci? A thoughtful and cogent analysis of how culture is harnessed to consolidate ruling class authority and reproduce the dominant discourse? Sure, I could see that as being "cultural" and "Marxist,” but not in the way the constipated right conceives of the term. This Frankfurt school, identity politics shit? I am not an expert, but I have read a fair-sized chunk of Marx, including all of the first volume of Capital, and most of the stuff on rent in volumes 2 & 3. Orthodox Marxists would shit their pants at the sight and state of modern identity politics. They believed that demolishing capitalist class relations and establishing economic democracy would, in the end, solve the issues that stem from overdermination, the countless complications that arise from the system itself -- the need for banks, cops, wars, censorship, prisons, insane asylums, etc... It would solve the messiness of sexism, too (theoretically...) Remember, people like Alexandra Kollontai never got moved up in the party ranks, and there was no push to establish any feminist wing of the party. Yes, the Soviet Union passed some of the most progressive pro-female legislation on the planet, including the introduction of abortion rights decades before American women had the right. But Marx would have looked at this weaponized identity politics and exposed it for what it is: a ruse to stymie the left. A narrative cooked up by the right and embraced by the same nuts who call Obama a socialist. You want to know what identity politics is? It is a way to justify running a war criminal for president. It is a means of making a warmongering, right-wing, anti-worker, ageist, sexist, and even anti-queer party (when it comes to any truly radical expression of sexuality) present as a "left-of-center" option.

You wanna know what cultural Marxism really is? Get it straight from the horse’s mouth. Or ass, in this case. The weekend after Mango Mussolini’s first election, the entire LAPD closed ranks to protect the Trumpers, their Herculean intellects on display for all to behold:

:

I have devoted most of this last year to Gaza and the joint US-Israeli Genocide, to their high-tech, machine-slaughter enterprise that will wipe Gaza clean so they can build resorts and casinos for pudgy, uncultured, American Boomers to gamble away their Christmas bonuses.

Too bad they murdered all the cheap labor. I guess that’s where we come in: We have lots of experience with slavery and ethnic cleansing.

So, yes, Gaza has been the defining moment of my adult political life and the reason behind starting this blog. But my roots are in labor and the fight for economic democracy. I was a punk, radicalized by Reagan, and have been in the fight for workplace democracy as long as I’ve been protesting for Palestine. If I had to give you my honest appraisal, I’d say we have lost, or at the very least, are close to losing the fight for economic justice. The Thatcher-Reagan model of global neoliberal finance capitalism has brought with it a staggering rise in wealth inequality, and after 9/11, both parties worked together to consolidate their dominion and strip us of our most basic freedoms:

• The Patriot Act, which led to massive illegal surveillance of US citizens

• The demolition of habeas corpus, which Chris Hedges fought valiantly against before finally losing to Obama at the Supreme Court.

• The death of freedom of expression online, which took place on June 26, 2024, at the Supreme Court again (are you seeing a pattern?) And there was not so much as a peep from the mainstream press.

We got our asses handed to us, and when I see the brazenness of these two criminal organizations, the Democrats and the Republicans, I am, believe it or not, still able to feel shocked. What’s more, I am in no way surprised by the Supreme Court siding with power and capital because they’ve been doing so for years. What kind of country offers us a choice between (1) a bloviating, racist demagogue-slash-crooked, megalomaniac, slumlord reality TV host, and (2) a genocidal fool who sent an entire generation of Ukrainian men to their graves while telling beheaded-baby propaganda lies for Israel? The message is: “We know you are frightened, uneducated, and you won’t fight back, so enjoy eating the slop we feed you or we’ll cut off the already meager crumbs we toss your way…”

Things promise to get real juicy. Will this absolutely reckless and foolhardy currency printing bonanza end up with Americans needing suitcases full of cash to buy a loaf of bread, like in Weimar-era Berlin? No, they’ll do what they always do: impose brutal austerity measures for those of us on the bottom while exploiting some sideshow event – COVID, Russiagate, the CARES ACT – and funnel even MORE wealth upwards as we perish…

… in slow motion.

The pain will spread,
bellies don’t get fed,
Down here in the hole

We really are in a hole, or maybe one of Dante’s lower circles of hell, which makes me think of Philip K Dick. I’m staying away from his stuff, for a while, at least; he’s starting to make sense, and that’s never a good sign. We have a problem here in the US, because while a huge swath of pissed off people demanding justice is great, we must remember: this is a mass of politically illiterate and fretful folk, easily swayed via social and other media, and the left has no organizational structure, no effective apparatus, that can reach out and provide direction and solidarity for a bunch of people who feel both very alone and frightened for their financial security. They are angry, alienated individuals, and the right is much better poised to reap the benefits of this current panic and inarticulate angst.

Since we’re talking about the economy, let’s not forget that we’re paying for Ukraine’s welfare state benefits — the very ones they won’t give to US citizens! We pay for their social services while workers here get nothing. Plus, Ukraine has been swallowed up by big equity ghouls and Wall Street firms, like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. After I ran through my unemployment, in June, I was told the maximum I could get in terms of emergency benefits — IF I applied to every possible program— was $247. But somehow we can afford to send billions in aid to Ukraine and provide the weapons and money for them to engage in a futile struggle, the purpose of which was to bleed Putin and leave Ukraine ripe for the picking. Well, it’s been picked dry, to the bone, but you didn’t hurt Russia at all.

Who did you hurt? Average Americans and Europeans, now reeling from the horrific policy decisions of both Genocide Joe and Trumpzilla.

Think of how much of this current shitstorm was launched by the Dems. And they still refuse to acknowledge how utterly criminal, mendacious, and thieving a party they have become over the last decade. Trump is really no more or less evil than the rest of that class of sociopaths who run this shitshow for a rapacious plutocracy. Mango Mussolini queers their hustle, that’s all. But he is also another anti-worker creep, and when people wise up and face the fact that this is a war we have to fight on two fronts, against two parties, then maybe we’ll have a chance.

That bar graph above, from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, explains the uneasiness I’ve been feeling as of late. Finding a job is a nightmare right now. I’ve been doing pro bono work for a foundation that helps to feed single moms in the Fayetteville region of North Carolina. I want to keep doing so, but I have bills to pay. In any case, since this is my page and I ain't bothering anyone with a paywall, I’m going to give them a free shout out. They do great work, and times are tough, so if you feel like giving, you can check out the Rose Francis Foundation here.

I thought I’d be able to step back into an online writing gig almost immediately, but it is tough out there for everyone. It’s going to remain that way because the ruling class is nervous. There’s been a massive upward funneling of wealth that has killed class mobility, and our government has been propping up the economy with reckless amounts of quantitative easing, especially over the last five years, when Biden used QE as his one-size-fits-all cure for tough economic times. That means they’ve been printing money like mad. This is the cause of our currently out-of-control inflation, and the model is not sustainable. Biden relied on QE so much, in fact, that we saw the worst inflation rates in over 40 years.

Where does this leave labor? First, I’m going to give myself a refresher course and explore how we got here. Much of what I’m summarizing comes from the work of Wolff and Resnick, and I highly recommend their video courses on Marxist political economy, which are easier for beginners to follow than the David Harvey stuff, which is great, too.

Wolff claims that, economically speaking, things started to unravel in the 1970s and argues that there were three major contributing factors:

• Women entering the workforce en masse

• Computer technology

• Germany and Japan becoming major industrial competitors again

How did the ruling class react?

Well, they certainly did not look at automation and the growing number of exploitable workers and say, “Let’s offer better wages and decent health care.”

One of the most important ways in which Capital has maintained control over the working class has been its relentless attack on unions and worker rights. Much of the right-wing reaction to the New Deal focused on the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the NLRA, which was meant to place the government firmly on the side of the workers. An unrelenting assault on the provisions of the act left it hollow and all but dead by 1980. That very year, Reagan was elected, and he reminded labor of where the government stood as soon as he set up shop in the Oval Office in 1981, when he fired the striking air controllers in one fell swoop.

The Democrats, who squealed like someone had just pissed in their Cheerios, well, they had no problem backing Genocide Joe and doing the exact same thing to the rail workers just a few years back. Yes, good ol’ “Union” Joe Biden crushed one of the most important labor strikes in decades.

Both parties, of course, are guilty when it comes to chipping away at workers’ rights. I look at the facts, soberly and rationally, and for me, at least, it’s hard not to notice the cognitive dissonance, the denial, the anger, the hostility at the workplace, the stress at home, the need to self-medicate — all of it — and wonder why we put up with it.

I have three university degrees and a teaching certificate, a whole bunch of publications, and I struggle to find work. It’s the same for all writers, young and old, and the irony is that we just built the model that’s replacing us. It’s about the only work there is/was. It’s hitting everyone I know, regardless of where they are in terms of class and status. Machines are also replacing people in the service industry, and that is truly concerning. How many Americans work in the service sector? That’s right, 75%.

Should we give up and simply hope that we get the lesser of two sociopaths and hope he continues to toss us crumbs? That’s what we did to get us here — do you see it now? Look real hard, and let me leave you with this:

That’s right — We’re working harder and producing MORE while our real wages have declined, year after year, for five decades.

They take that money, your money, and they use it to fund the murder, the rape, and the torture of innocent women and children. They arrest senior citizens for saying, “Stop Killing Children!”

We are going to get hungry, and when that happens, you need to be there for your friends. US citizens are thoroughly propagandized, and it will take a lot to shake them up, to get them to the point where they can see the things that have been right in front of them for so long. The reason we need to be there is that fascism will present itself as it always does: the easy solution to a nasty problem that you don’t want to think about.

That last sentence is, by and large, a good description of the average American voter, unfortunately.

In the meantime, write, organize, educate, share knowledge, and give back. If politics is an essential part of your life, your spiritual path, or your source of meaning, then the best advice I could give you would be someone else’s. A paraphrase of the always eloquent Terence McKenna:

If we could manage that, we could build real networks of resistance. I just reckoned we ought to start thinking about it. We can’t just let crazies run wild and rape and pillage and then sit back and say, “I just can’t figure it…”

There’s no better place to start than at the workplace.

Semper Fi, my brothers and sisters. I have it on good authority that perseverance is about to pay off. In the meantime, shake a hand, comrade.

Peace,

Pauly

The Guardian piece above is interesting. Why, exactly, would a paper that deems itself progressive publish a piece that smears psychedelics by association with its use among reactionaries? Now, first of all, anyone who has studied logic can easily find the flaw in this essentially straw man approach, using correlation when there is no available data to support a causative relationship: “Hitler and Pol Pot both drank milk, so did Atilla the Hun. You know what they did, so you wanna tell me why you drinking milk is a good idea?…”

Or, in the words of the Guardian’s anonymous editorialist, who writes with an invisible source of ennunciation, like the God of the Old Testament speaking truth into existence:

Psychedelics can certainly increase openness – but this can be openness to Nazism, eco-fascism or UFO cults as well as to peace and love. Julius Evola, an Italian philosopher and fascist admired by both Hitler and Steve Bannon, was a staunch LSD advocate. Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, who recently made headlines for sending buses of migrants to New York, Washington and Chicago, signed a 2021 state bill to study the medical benefits of psychedelics. Steve Bannon supports legalized psychedelics, too.

From what cloud did they pull this gibberish?

The propagandistic power that is generated declares its authority by: 1) the anonymous enunciation, imbuing the statement with God-like or kingly power, 2) the association of psychedelics with scoundrels, namely Steve Bannon.

The subheading is National Inquirer-level clickbait: “.. a substance as powerful as psychedelics can be dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands…” I watched anti-dope propaganda movies in my classrooms in the 1960s that were more refined and subtle than this imperious proclamation based on absolutely no evidence. Anything that falls into the wrong hands can be dangerous, including a baseball bat or a chef’s knife. Before I get into why I’m interested in bringing the psychedelic community into the fold, I’ll give you a hypothesis that some may consider controversial, but which my intuition - I admit it, I cannot yet prove this — tells me is dead-on:

Just like liberals smeared ideas and people by associating them with Trump, as we saw during Russiagate and COVID, liberals will use this issue and dissuade people from exploring psychedelics because it leads to truly radical ideas. The compassion and awareness it creates in individuals make them allergic to bullshit DSA accommodationist theory, as well as all that global neoliberal finance capitalist drivel that has devastated the planet.

That’s why liberals want people to fear psychedelics. And let me tell you, that hype and propaganda and dissemination of horrible ideas is something we do not need. When you put that DMT pipe to your mouth and blast off, it is serious business, not some frat boy nonsense that one forgets about after a few hours of GTA. It’s hard enough to screw up the courage to do it in the first place. We don’t need all this hysterical PR from anonymous Guardian editorials.

OK, now that liberals are gunning for me, I’ve done my duty. I feel ready to rock.

I found it necessary, rhetorically speaking, to lead with my reflections on the Guardian piece in order to give everyone an idea of how propaganda works and what we will be facing as revolutionaries: a relentless assault on the truth.

But what else is new?

I think it’s best to provide you with a little personal history, and anyone uptight enough to unsubscribe over this, well, fare thee well and no hard feelings.

I first took LSD in high school. It was not a good quality product. It was laced with speed, and I was with a bunch of idiots: total ignorance of set and setting. I didn’t really understand what I had experienced, but there were none of the cliche things they’d talk about in Life magazine when I was a kid. I did not think I could fly, and mailboxes did not transform into unicorns or marching bands. But I was already well on the way to believing that I’d been lied to and fed a truckload of absurd and non-productive ideas by the people running this messed-up planet. Being young, I couldn’t articulate it any better than I just did in the previous sentence. But I knew that most of what society tells us is utter shite, and while it wasn’t even a full experience, it surely convinced me that I was more right than wrong concerning my assumptions about the way the world works.

The real mind bender came when I was in my twenties. By this time, I’d done the dance with mescaline and a few other substances, and I’d always used marijuana: the only psychedelic that gives me bad trips, but that’s only when I do not use it habitually. In any case, I’d just been fired, and I didn’t care. I’d been a bartender at an upscale French restaurant atop the Breaker’s Hotel in Long Beach, California. I probably deserved to be fired; I have never put much effort into wage slavery and didn’t care much about the gig.

I like to trip in moments of crisis, and this particular voyage was special. I was with a good friend, with no one around, at night. There’s a limit to the value of long trip reports because people really can’t relay the experience in words. But in my case, I stuck my hand inside a tree and realized that there was no separation.

That was a life-changing experience.

Just like Richard Nixon, I grew up a son of Orange County, in the most reactionary suburb in California, a haven for Young Republicans, Mega-Churches, Minute Men, and Birchers. I had to fight to learn, and luckily, I was curious. Which was a good thing, because being born in Westminster into a lower-middle-class working family, my daily life was a good deal different than that of a kid being raised by Jewish intellectuals in Brooklyn. It was a vacuum of culture and a hotbed of intolerance. Finding a great album or book meant taking three buses or begging your broke friend for a ride and paying for his gas. I still shudder when I have to go there to see friends and family. It’s more integrated and diverse now, thanks to the influx of new immigrants. But the hardcore OC boys, the ones who look like Fred Durst and wear their baseball caps backwards and beat people up outside clubs, they’re still there as well. Plus, my first non-political arrest was in Huntington Beach: smoking weed in a car. We thought it would be a good idea to park next to a vacant lot.

That’s enough digression. Suffice it to say that although I did become cynical for a while — lost my way both politically and spiritually, turned into a harsh realist and a historical materialist self-defined by my ideologies — I still came back home like the prodigal son. I have always done things the wrong, or at least heterodox way: I’ve become more radical as I age, and psychedelics helped save me from suicidal clinical depression.

The first part of the decade began with a bang. It’s not that I suffered anything different than what others suffer in the course of life. It just hit all at once, over about 18 months. I got fired unjustly (age discrimination, I DID NOT PROVE IT - I HAVE TO SAY THAT), my mom developed severe Alzheimer’s and we had to take her in, I couldn’t find enough work, and although I won a settlement against California State University — sorry, assholes, you didn’t make me sign an NDA — I was forced into an agreement saying that I could never work at another CSU as long as I live. That’s because the people who write the laws are, like George Carlin reminds us, all in one big club that we’re not a part of. I think I’ve been blackballed from teaching statewide, but again, I CAN’T PROVE IT. My mom died, my lawyer (a former friend, yes I know, stupid…) betrayed me, cost me over one hundred thousand dollars, refusing to do what he said he would and instead choosing to preserve his business connections with the university (he was a labor lawyer who worked with CSU). Then, one of my closest friends ended a thirty-year relationship because I said, “Hillary Clinton is a warmonger.” As the nationwide craziness grew, I was forced to go and work in China, and finally, my wife left me, and my bone tumor started getting very painful again.

Now, admittedly, I did not deal well with this particular set of circumstances. I was, nevertheless, able to claw my way back from the lowest low. I mean the low you would read about in some symbolist novel about Satanism from 19th-century France, one of those books where a young man dabbles in the dark arts and starts smoking opium…going mad, starving to death in a Parisian tenement… That’s about the only way I can describe how bad it was.

Intervention came in the form of six ketamine treatments. It did not completely heal me, but it was a real big life preserver, easy to grab onto, and it did the job. Though I now use psychedelics for other things — for instance, I’m using them to help me get off SSRIs, and I am almost there — I hit a road bump recently. Here’s a tip: SSRIs blunt visionary experience. I noticed the difference when I continued my personal psychedelic shamanic work (I ain't no enlightened guru or magician, just using the agreed upon terminology so we can communicate). I will be match fit in about 6-8 weeks, but don’t waste your money if you’re on SSRIs, and educate yourself.

I can’t stress that last bit of advice strongly enough. If you’re on an SSRI and someone gives you a prescription MAO inhibitor before a DMT voyage, you may not get up off the couch again. Ever. So do your homework.

This is what I am suggesting: If you’re interested, reach out in your community. Join FB groups, subscribe to online publications, go to conferences, read books, and most importantly, make friends. Because IT IS OUR JOB TO SAVE THE PSYCHEDELIC LEFTIES FROM THE WARMONGERING, GENOCIDAL DEMS AND THE CRAZED, REACTIONARY MAGA KOOKS.

Both parties are involved in crushing real anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist psychedelic activism. According to one activist in a piece from Left Voice, published in 2023, reactionary forces inside conferences are even banning anti-capitalist groups from attending and presenting.

We need to put a stop to this immediately.

Enlightenment is something we want on our side. If you're interested, I put a couple of links below. I would start with the Andrew Gallimore book, but feel free to go out and follow your own path. You can find a slew of chat groups, Reddit threads, books, and podcasts that deal with the subject in an intelligent manner. Substack itself has a couple of sites as well.

This week’s serendipity included a reconnection with two friends I thought long gone, and some email correspondence with the great Dennis McKenna, who has proven to be as generous and as erudite as I imagined him to be. I’ve offered to volunteer at his institute, and you can as well, if you wish. The link is below.

I hope I have not overreacted to the Guardian piece, but a piece it was, and its intent is obvious. As I said before, our propaganda is so effective because it is seamless, it does not present as propaganda, but instead weaves itself, as Gramsci tells us, into every cultural expression; every song, film, ringtone, news feed, is loaded with a non-stop assault of political and cultural messaging, the aim of which is reinforcement of the dominant ideology.

Women, be careful. There are sometimes creepy cops/cop types in these groups, and they often troll female members, pretending they want to buy drugs. It’s a drag, and it’s messed up that they combine their fascist agenda with rapey behavior. But you can see them coming a mile away.

The ruling class has a sophisticated machine. They’re winning. This is one time we can get a step ahead of Team Bastard. Do your best to make the psychedelic movement a part of the real resistance, and bring its advocates and others on the fringe into the fold. Help move us into a better and more humane world, one where the principles and rights we talk about, such as economic democracy, tolerance, healthcare, acccess to food & shelter, freedom of speech, and yes, the right to use psychedelics, don‘t fade away, but rather actually continue to stand for what they signify and exist for each and every one of us to share and benefit from.

Stay safe out there,

Pauly

PS - I am not doing well financially, and I have few paid subscribers, but I promise to never add a paywall, and that’s the best I can do. Help if you can by subscribing. Thanks!

SOURCES

Click the image or the URL:

Substack page:

Dennis McKenna’s Site:
https://mckenna.academy/

Andrew Gallimore’s book, Death by Astonishment:https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250357762/deathbyastonishment/

Great interview with Dennis McKenna:

Good piece by Left Voice:
https://www.leftvoice.org/anticapitalist-psychedelic-activists-banned-an-interview/

Excellent Terrence McKenna Book:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51660.Food_of_the_Gods

FB groups:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/psychedelicsynchronicity

https://www.facebook.com/groups/443054131318187

https://www.facebook.com/groups/ThePsychedelicMindFB

This isn’t going to be anything epic, but everyone should be aware that the Dems’ narrative control engine is humming again, so please do your best to save those dearest to you from its pernicious effects.

I would normally say it’s almost impossible to believe this, but I no longer live in a universe where anything surprises me. It just makes me physically ill to see that these numbskulls are still out there talking utter shite, and that goes for both sides of this dumbest of dumb duopolies.

And people are still lapping it up.

Today, it’s the Dems, and that is no surprise, either. A couple of days ago, some Blue Dog took offense to a joke I made, so he commented, revealing himself to be in the grips of frenzied Trump Hysteria, the “Fear,” Trump Derangement Syndrome… Call it whatever you like, but it is 100% real, and I have seen it scramble the brains of some of my closest and sharpest freinds. The ruling class has done its work colonizing the minds of millions of liberal PMC types, and like Byung-Chul Han would point out, they are extremely adept at muzzling and surveilling themselves. I have had back-and-forths with friends — people with PhDs, sharp people — who are willing to turn into blubbering idiots anytime Mango Mussolini’s name is mentioned. It’s pathological.

As you may know, I was chased away from a Trump/ICE protest for wearing my no genocide T-shirt. Yes, you can no longer oppose genocide because TRUMP BAD. What do we do when things get this nightmarish?

Hillary Clinton actually brokered a Uranium deal with the Russians, and hundreds of millions flowed into her foundation right at the same time. Where were all the headlines, all the hysteria about Hilary being a Kremlin stooge, about Chippendales dancers pissing in her face?

Uranium!

People buy this drivel, just like when they bought that cock and bull story about Russia blowing up its own pipeline.

I’ve said enough about this, so I’ll shut up now and leave it up to you. Like I said, it’s preposterous, but you will laugh. I didn’t have the stomach to make it through the story without barfing. It’s just nauseating to know that the Dems will continue to run it back with the same propaganda and a very professional spin. It works like a charm, lemme tell you.

Don’t let your friends get sucked in again, because once it’s taken root, they’re gone forever, like fundamentalist Christians, like cult members. If you explain it without getting confrontational, you can sway them. Especially on this issue, because people don’t like to look foolish. I don’t have much more to say other than do what you can to hold these bastards to account. Shame them online, share information, point out their shoddy research, bad numbers, and flat-out lies. And try to get involved, organize locally, because like I said, that’s all they’re doing: Running it back. They are once again going to do the exact same thing.

Why wouldn’t they? It always works.

Until we decide otherwise.

PK

I don’t know that I can prove it, but if you asked me to identify the number one hurdle to radical or progressive change in America right now, I’d say it’s the Democratic Party.

I haven’t changed my mind about the Pachyderms: I still can’t stomach the Republicans, and have never voted for one in my life. I was radicalized by punk rock and Reagan. However, the GOP does not represent a threat to left-wing change that is anywhere near as pernicious and ruthless as Democrats and their institutions of both political capital and hegemonic cultural control.

Of course, there is absolutely NO future in electoral politics. If the 20th century taught us anything, it’s that the anarchists were right about concentrated networks of centralized power tending toward tyranny, no matter what species of political economy they espouse. This same message, essentially, was delivered by Plato 2,500 years ago, by Montesquieu in the 18th century, by Hannah Arendt after WWII, and most recently in a 2023 academic journal study in Societies by Golob, Gorišek, & Makarovič, which reveals the following:

The presence of both [authoritarianism and populism] corresponds to the lack of one’s possession of economic, social, and cultural capitals and the related political habitus. Those who lack these forms of capital are more prone to support strong authoritarian leaders and are also more likely to endorse conspiracy theories. We can relate this to the problems of exclusion and deprivation related to the lack of political habitus required for effective agency in the political field.

Translation: The lack of social, economic, and cultural capital that they describe, endemic in this country, has sledgehammered our democracy into rubble. It means that we do not have a livable minimum wage or healthcare because we do not possess the kind of uncorrupted cultural institutions or political organizations — formal or otherwise — to help us educate, organize, successfully resist, or demand change. In the United States, an individual who wants to get educated and engaged without becoming a completely indoctrinated tool is shit out of luck. Unions, universities, public schools, churches, the media, doctors, professors, clergy (and their professional organizations), NGOs, and even many non-profits: They are hollow and bankrupt, each and every one, and they exist for no other reason than to perpetuate this violent and bloody system of domestic wealth extraction and neverending imperial war.

Almost all of them are run by acolytes of the Democratic Party.

Decades of scholarly studies show us that when this happens, people are as happy as dumb little clams and willing to give up their democratic and hard-won civil rights. All it takes is some authoritarian party or demagogue to come along and promise them a glorious future, free of worry, with plenty of streaming choices and great sugar substitutes and cargo pants at Target for only $19.99. That’s all it takes for people to ignore a genocide.

I think the fine print reads:

”Just don’t grumble about ethnic cleansing or workers’ rights, or else we’ll flood the media with propaganda, call you an anti-semite, and start a race war — right before we take all of the wealth we’ve stolen and abandon this continent the way we threw Cambodia to the dogs… Maybe on the way out, we’ll fill up all the elevator shafts with concrete like the Portuguese did when they left Africa.”

How did I come to this conclusion?

I promise to lay it all out, especially the part about forever demolishing the Dems.

Exhibit number one will be introduced as a query: How the hell does this happen if the DNC’s stable masters do not possess near cult-like levels of control over the ponies that drag their carts through the muck? This is a true story, my lovely weekend encounter with rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth Blue Dogs:

I’d be interested in alternative interpretations, but how does a person go to an anti-Trump rally and protest for civil rights, and then find the time to go and yell at someone for protesting Genocide? What breeds this type of schizoid behavior? How does this happen if it’s not a result of indoctrination, ignorance, and narrative control? How is it any less deranged than the behavior of MAGA kooks? How is anything less monumentally boneheaded than believing in Russiagate?

Well, it isn’t, is it? It’s the same goddamned thing.

They do their job well. Have you ever noticed how, if you make even the most tepid political remark at work, you’re immediately consumed with fear and feel your heart start to race? They shove you into meeting rooms for team-building exercises, almost daring you to endure epic levels of boredom and absurdity, insults to your dignity and intelligence — they even take the fun out of the absurd.

Universities are among the worst offenders: gulags that spit out vocational savants with business degrees who know nothing about the world they’re entering, but possess the skills to make massive fortunes, immediately endowing them with legitimate political swank. We ensure that our graduates are in no position to so much as imagine a counter-narrative. These are Francis Fukuyama’s wunderkind, and they have screwed us all. And let’s not forget that Mr. “End of History” recently decided it wasn’t really over, made evident when he endorsed a “socialist” candidate, Bernie Sanders, for president. Talk about queering your own hustle…

My worst experience this past year, on a personal and private level, involved a political discussion with a friend of three decades. We never had a cross word with one another. He’s a PhD at a major university, and we’d worked together on writing and translating projects. But during our exchange, he absolutely refused to listen to or respond to any criticism of the Biden administration. He didn’t know anything about political history, so he didn’t believe anything I was sending him, and still, he had no defense for his stance. He accused me of the most insane things anyone has ever accused me of: I was a secret Trump supporter, I didn’t want women or transgender people on the Supreme Court (I have no idea where that hallucination came from). His wife told me there were no Nazis in Ukraine, right before she told me she didn’t know who Victoria Nuland was. The most insipid and shameful reproach from these enlightened liberal stalwarts: I was “mansplaining.”

A brilliant person, and I don’t mean to mock him. It was a devastating personal loss, and I still do not completely understand what’s happening with him.

Or with those people at the park.

Or how about cable TV? Try to watch a few minutes of this without vomiting. Anderson Cooper is telling Cornel West that a couple of thousand fatalities in a Ukrainian village was infinitely worse than an illegal war for money and oil in Iraq: a war based on a lie that killed upwards of a million people when you count civilians.

The scariest part about all of this is that I listen to my friends tell me how nightmarish their lives are, how they can’t find work, how the grind is killing them, how the workplace has become a hellscape, and how we’re taxed more than the rich. So I’ll point out what I pointed out just now, here, with you.

The response:

‘Fuck it, that’s the way the world is.”

No argument.

If that’s where they’re ready to leave things — and I mean this — I don’t sit in judgement. I can’t speak with unimpeachable authority about anything, and maybe you’re right: maybe it’s no use. I personally don’t make winning and losing a calculation in my political decision-making process, but if you need to believe you can win, I can understand not wanting to fight, even if I think you’re wrong to feel that way about it.

But I know that when I see someone who’s defeated, frightened, and in despair — the kind they’re afraid to confront — it’s not healthy. It’s not good to look at a situation this dour and not, at some level, be concerned or want to do something. Even if just for a moment, before you take another bong rip, and I don’t begrudge anyone for needing a bong rip. Not in these horrific times, especially.

Who did the Dems run for president? I know it’s hard, but think about it:

THE GAZAN GENOCIDE, THE ILLEGAL PROXY WAR THAT ANNIHILATED AN ENTIRE GENERATION OF UKRAINIAN MEN, STRIKE-BREAKING, SUBORNING PERJURY TO COVER FOR HIS KUSHNERESQUE GRAFT-RIDDEN, FELONIOUS SON, LYING US INTO IRAQ, THE OMNIBUS CRIME BILL, YEARS OF DOCUMENTED PLAGIARISM, LYING ABOUT BEHEADED BABIES, CUTTING 30 MILLION PEOPLE FROM FOOD ASSISTANCE, AND ALREADY ESTABLISHING HIMSELF AS A WAR CRIMINAL AS EARLY AS 1982, WHEN HE TOLD BEGIN TO GO WHOLE HOG AND KILL AS MANY WOMEN AND CHILDREN AS HE NEEDED TO DURING THE MASSACRES IN SHATILA AND SABRA (WHICH ALSO PROVED UNEQUIVOCALLY THAT BIDEN COULD HAVE STOPPED THIS GENOCIDE WITH A PHONE CALL).

The Democrats exist for one reason only: To shepherd possible future leftists into their fold and begin the indoctrination process, one so successful that at an anti-Trump rally, I was harassed by multiple Dems for wearing an anti-genocide shirt that criticized ALL the candidates.

What about the progressives in the party?

You mean the “Squad” who re-elected Pelosi, who voted to fund Israel, who voted to bust the most important national labor strike in a decade? The same Squad that endorsed not one, but two genocidal war criminals?

The purpose of the Democratic Party is this: To present a phony “liberal/left” option that hides behind vapid identity politics, while behind the curtain, it propagates more proxy war, genocide, and wealth inequality.

Who killed Force the Vote? The attempt to bring a vote on Medicare for All to the House floor?

The Squad killed it. AOC was at the helm, refusing to stand against the woman she said she went to Congress to stand against: Pelosi.

How many potential comrades do we lose every year because of this party? It is our job — the job of every anti-imperialist & anti-capitalist — to demolish them before they make radical change an impossibility in a country that’s come to resemble Brazil or the Philippines more than a Western superpower.

Electoral politics is a dead end, and we should start our resistance by finishing off the Democratic Party, a gang of Vichy-esque sociopaths, bought and sold, every last one of them.

I have been suffering from an epic battle with strep throat.

Sorry for my prolonged absence, especially in these harrowing times.

This will be short and sweet.

Trump has sent the National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles. We are witnessing the end of a bloody and ruthless Empire, one administered by sociopaths whose moral and ethical rot is so pervasive that the edges of our civilization are beginning to fray from their sheer mendacity and the ruthlessness of their vision. Big bureaucracy has grown exponentially, and government offices are bogged down and overwhelmed to the point of collapse. Daily life has become almost unlivable because everyone is sensing this dread, feeling it on an unconscious level while doing nothing to deal with it. Thus, it spills over and pours right into our lives. There’s more confrontation, conflict over absurd trivialities, trouble at work, road rage, crazy people on street corners, and lately, more racial violence.

They like racial violence because it pits working people against one another instead of the real enemy, and the pervasive abuse of weaponized identity politics has almost ensured that this tragedy will entail confrontations with people who are in no way our enemies.

We need to be mindful of these sorts of things as we move forward and decide how we resist both as individuals and part of a larger resistance movement.

But eventually, as critical mass builds, it will explode into instances of insanity: racial riots, terrorist attacks, police brutality.

To talk about which party is responsible is to miss the forest for the trees.

Nobody likes to have to face the possibility of starting over again; when a nation does it, people die en masse. But that’s exactly where we are.

We will not vote our way out of this. The corruption is too deep, the ruling class too compromised for us to consider negotiating — again and in vain — with the two gangs that caused this mess, and who are responsible for selling us out to the forces of global neoliberal finance capitalism and forever war, all in the name of grotesque wealth accumulation.

I’ll probably be getting arrested in Los Angeles this week. It wouldn’t be the first time, and anyway, there ain’t nuthin’ else to do now, so I hope that I see some of you out on the streets.

I’ve spent hundreds of pages explaining what’s wrong, but you all know why we’re here. Deep down, everyone does. Even those who claim to disagree with us, who claim there’s no problem with this diabolical money-generating death machine of upward wealth transfer we’ve fashioned — they know, too.

I guess you could capitulate, buy yourself a gray jumpsuit and enjoy working at packing silo somewhere in the midwest while these ghouls finish off the planet, working for no other reason than to help obscenly rich folk get even richer, making just enough so that you can go back and do the same thing again, endlessly, like a rat on a wheel…

Me, I’m going out swinging.

Right now, I find it hard to envision a future for this country that does not involve fascism and our moral duty to oppose it.

End of sermon.

Do you all remember the story of Rumpelstiltskin? I wonder if children deal with traditional myths and fairy tales any longer? Of course, a new mythology is being birthed as our melding with technology becomes even more pervasive. It’s being forged with new contemporary cultural artifacts, and it involves diverse rituals which run the gamut from video games and virtual reality, to novel psychedelic drugs and trips into the tropics to confront one’s demons and addictions.

But it’s a messy time. Like Gramsci said (at least approximately), “A new world is being born, this is the time of monsters.” Regardless of how accurate the translation may or may not be, I agree with the observation. It’s nice that we’re searching, trying to find new ways of imposing meaning on existence. It’s messy because amidst this becoming, there’s no push for solidarity among those who suffer most, and as such, no inclusive, all-encompassing counter-hegemony; no new myth can be created, for there is no central framework to attach itself to. This is going to be a period of pain, mostly self-inflicted, until we, as a species, learn our lesson about the nature of our commonly shared, very human masochism. As of this moment, it hasn’t happened in the US, and that’s because the hunger, violence, and despair have not yet hit critical mass.

So what are parents doing to teach their kids these days? They are not getting any sort of moral or ethical education in public schools. I spent a lot of time as an educator, so I know. In addition, they are not taught critical thinking. In fact, if you can’t afford to send your kid to good private schools and first-tier universities, they’ll likely never learn it: one more reason the wealthy have an unfair head start on those of us who grew up in working-class families. A few years ago I had a job teaching the classics to wealthy young Ukrainian students, and I guarantee you, when I was a kid in high school, any there was no one to whom I could say, “Help me with this Herodotus shit! And The Aeneid, come on!”

Plus, the diverse mishmash of whatever new mythology is evolving doesn’t present as a holistic system of belief, a way to understand the world. We’re not there yet, and there is still a lot to learn from fairy tales.

Rumpelstiltskin has a lot going on. You know the story, probably. A miller’s daughter is given to the king. The father has promised him that she can spin gold from straw, which, of course, she can’t. In her room in the castle, she knows her dad’s little hustle is about to be exposed. Then, a magical, dwarf-like creature appears and promises he can spin the gold. He wants more and more payment, and soon she’s given him everything of value that she has in her possession. But there’s still not enough gold. So the dwarf says, “Give me your firstborn daughter, and you’ve got a deal, baby. I’ll spin what you need!”

Of course, she complies, gets the gold, marries the king, and has a lovely little daughter. Rumpelstiltskin wants his due, but she tries everything to get out of the deal. He tells her, “If you can guess my name, you’re off the hook.”

Well, she is shit out of luck.

“It’s not Gooseneck, Spindleshanks, Spiderlegs?”

“Nope!”

Wealth means nothing to Rumpelstiltskin. He wants someone of his own to love. I know, we’ll get back to that later, I promise. Wipe the tear away because he does deserve some compassion, you’ll see.

So Rumple S. has mad flow and he’s doing a jig, freestyling when the maiden passes by his window: “Lady, ‘tis not a soul doth know / I’m Rumpelstiltskin, don’t you know?”

In his premature, celebratory hubris, the dwarf is undone. Self-sabotage is clearly one of the big takeaways, one of the major moral lessons in this little fable. But there is so much more going on. Who’s Donald Trump in this story? I’ve asked people before, but most don’t agree with my take.

The universe of Rumpelstiltskin is oddly complete. The dwarf is obviously an outcast, certainly not noble, and the butt of his own joke at the story’s end. This is typical in fairy tales, but the reality is that the world these people inhabit is messed up: sexist, patriarchal, and exploitative. It’s a world that forces fathers to sell their daughters, has leaders who are brutal and avaricious tyrants: a world where they’ve decided that the outcasts will be the ones to pay the price. Rumplestiltskin is another Shylock, another tragically misunderstood outcast whose demand for his pound of flesh is really a desperate plea to be loved.

Nothing has changed, especially not the relevance of traditional myth and fairy tales. The world of Rumpelstiltskin is the world we live in today.

The maiden and his daughter belong to a burgeoning capitalist class of merchants. The father, a sexist patriarch, pimps out his daughter to a tyrant. In turn, the maiden screws Rumpelstiltskin out of what she rightfully owes him, and all of the wealth flows up the ladder to the oligarchy’s most powerful aristocrat.

Rumpelstiltskin is presented as vulgar and impish because he lives outside of society’s network of exploitation and its lust for power. He unmasks the inequities of an entire social system: he’s a reminder of who these people truly are and that they live in a world run by creeps, who have written the rules to suit them and their fellow scoundrels.

Trump could be the king, but really, he’s the father. He’s a huckster who would sell his daughter into slavery for a stick of chewing gum, knowingly sending her to her doom. He is the lowest of the low in this tale. The king represents the deep state, the upper-echelon oligarchic and corporate interests that ensure global hegemony. Aside from Rumpelstiltskin, the maiden suffers the most. She’s an exploited worker and a victim of a patriarch who rats out her colleague as a matter of survival; hence, not as bad, but still morally flawed and more culpable than the dwarf.

No, Rumplestiltskin is the victim here. Sure, there’s the other lesson: If you know you’re enemy, you control them. But the real story is this: Rumpelstiltskin, alienated in a world he despises and which despises him, longs for something real: a daughter to have a relationship with. His is the only noble pursuit, and he is ironically portrayed as impish and selfish, despite being the most human person in the entire story. This is a typical motif that stretched back to the 16^th century, to those early novels of chivalry by authors like Margaret De Briet and other noblewomen, whose novelistic visions reflected a very cohesive system of privilege and ruling class power.

The only reason I wrote this is because I saw a dog-eared, decades-old copy of a fairy tale book I had as a child. My sister is now sharing it with her niece, and I wanted to fix the binding. Rumpelstiltskin was the first story I opened to, and I was just wondering how parents convey big truths to their kids these days.

Or if they even take the time to try.

No matter how old a text may be, there’s always a new way of teaching timeless truths to your kids, even in works that were written centuries ago, in an absolutist world run by monarchs. This story can tell us as much today as it did ages ago, and until we figure out where we’re going, read a book with your kid and see if there’s not something new to be learned.

Today, my niece knows more about the world.

And she agrees when it comes to who Trump is.

I have passed the test of my fiercest critic.

God bless you, brother. I, for one, will be ready to get arrested with you, because there are people out here who support you, and we will stand with you.

Fair Warning: I won’t let trolls hitch their wagon to this one. Go to one of my 66 other posts if you want to say something dumb, and I’ll dismantle you there.

Trump just ordered the release of the Kennedy assassination documents, and from what I’ve seen, it’s nothing earth-shattering. I believe that every US president of my lifetime has been a scoundrel, and there has been precious little in the way of evidence to convince me otherwise. I’ve hated them all. In fact, as the years pass and I grow older, I’ve come to find there’s a treasure trove of executive bullshit and malfeasance far beyond what I had ever imagined, and iceberg whose tip has barely popped past the water line.

Just look at our checkered past: Johnson talking out of both sides of mouth every time he addressed Vietnam; Nixon and Kissinger having virtual wet dreams on tape, pondering the best possible means of getting away with genocide in Southeast Asia without destroying Nixon’s historical reputation; Carter turning a blind eye to East Timor; Reagan starting the process of selling out to the oligarchy and Wall Street, the end of the New Deal; Clinton making sure the Dems followed the Reagan/Thatcher model of global neoliberal finance capitalism that crippled the American economy and bankrupted working people; Bush and Obama starting a cycle of forever war and stripping us of our civil liberties. Over this last decade, we saw the whole thing pancake in on itself: recently delivered from Genocide Joe, a demented war criminal and grifter now in the land of dribble bibs and reruns of Matlock, we saw confused Dems and Republicans get together and say “Yes, please!” to an onslaught of propaganda, unchecked sources, false flags, screwball logic, ahistorical reasoning, and the censoring of any individual and any platform that stepped out of line. Our willingness to continue to be the world’s most educated political class more or less guaranteed the second coming of PT Barnum Jr. — the bloviating Mango Caesar, the Fred Flintstone version of Mussolini, Ubu-Trump, fueled on rage from years of banana republic show trials and hell bent enriching his oligarch buddies and demolishing the country as payback. All while the state of his gray matter inches closer to that of Genocide Joe’s.

As I said, little has changed…

Except when it comes to Kennedy, maybe ??? It’s worth three question marks.

Let’s be honest: a lot of what Gore Vidal pointed out was true. Kennedy was the scion of a wealthy and corrupt American family, and like most dynasties, the Kennedys got rich through crime or the legalized expropriation of other people’s wealth. Then they bought political influence. It turns out that patriarch Joe Kennedy was probably not a bootlegger, but he was crooked, and in addition to engaging in activities such as insider trading and artificially inflating alcohol prices, he did a host of things that should have landed him in jail for SEC violations. The only problem is that there was no SEC then. Instead (just to show you how ironically and absurdly deep the rot has always gone), FDR named Joe Kennedy the first Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934. Liberal Joe Frank compared it to having a wolf watch the sheep.

That’s how politics really works, and Kennedy’s family had always swum with fellow sharks in the cut-throat world of money and power. That’s the first reason I have for doubting JFK’s character. I’m not talking about policy or stating facts here, but people from these kinds of families often have questionable/non-existent moral and ethical centers. The Hill just did a piece reminding its readers of the screwed up men that this family has released on the world. Case in point: Michael Skakel, who was immediately protected by the family as each Kennedy remained schtum and closed ranks around him during the rape and murder charges. Creepy, privileged behavior from Kennedy men is a running joke in this country, almost mythic in proportion.

Individuals from these environments — especially those who aspire to positions of immense institutionalized power — are often insincere, narcissistic, and crave authority for all the wrong reasons. They tend to be indoctrinated and reactionary when it comes to their views concerning what America should aspire to and the role it should play in the world.

Vidal goes hard at JFK over what the writer perceived to be the former president’s romantic and heroic notions of warfare, and he is especially harsh with Kennedy over his handling of the Bay of Pigs debacle. Plus, a lot of people make a big deal about Kennedy wanting to push for peace and eventually and eventually pull out of the Vietnam War just before the assassination, but the only action he ever took in Vietnam was to increase our presence by 700 troops during his presidency. It’s hard for me, still, to see JFK as a martyr, some anti-imperialist hero cut down before he could get the job done.

But that’s not to say things haven’t surfaced that have obliged me to take another look. Most recently, a little over a decade ago, there was a claim made by French Journalist Jean Daniel, who said that Kennedy used him to convey a message to Fidel Castro in 1963. Apparently, it had to be kept secret because JFK knew there was strong opposition to his opting for peaceful coexistence with Cuba and the Soviet Union.

Daniel claims that JFK said: "The US can coexist with a nation in its hemisphere that espouses a different economic system. It is the subservient relationship with the Soviet Union that creates the problem."

In return for Cuba ending its connections with the Soviet Union, JFK was supposedly going to end the US embargo on Cuba. Castro agreed, and Daniel says he told him, "He has the possibility of being the greatest president of the US."

Now, I have no reason to impugn the credibility of Jean Daniel, but he is the only source for these statements by Kennedy and Castro. In fact, I don’t believe it’s out of the realm of possibility that Kennedy said those things to him. But given all the other terrible things we know about him, how much of this should we really believe? Did Kennedy all of a sudden become an anti-imperialist? Look at his career in the Senate. He was a hawk through and through, constantly criticizing Eisenhower for being soft with the Soviet Union and telling America how we needed to be able to fight wars on multiple fronts. He was one of the first to start with the alarmist and hyperbolic warnings of imminent doom from Soviet missiles in Cuba, when in reality, no functional Soviet warheads ever made it to the island, and Kennedy himself exagerrated the number of Soviet nuclear missiles and often gave passionate speeches about nuclear annihilation, fanning the flames of cold war hysteria.

I don’t care about any politician’s personal life as long as they do their job. I won’t waste my time talking about all the sex, drugs, and rock and roll stuff, all the Kennedy debauchery. I’ve strayed from the path of righteousness myself, on many an occasion, and I don’t stand in moral judgment when it comes to people’s personal lives unless it directly influences policy. But now, in the midst of more redacted pages from Mango Caesar that only obscure the CIA’s true role in the assassination, why do we have to create an accompanying hagiography around Kennedy? I’m almost 100% sure the CIA had a hand in the assassination because they did hate him, but I doubt seriously it was because Kennedy was planning on curtailing US military activity and shutting down our foreign bases so that South Americans could elect Marxist presidents. This was a pissing contest between Kennedy and the intelligence agencies, and both were beholden to US Hegemony and Empire. Furthermore, Kennedy had always been devoted to fighting communism in Vietnam, said it was a vital conflict to win, and it was his administration that began using Agent Orange, with devastating consequences for US soldiers and thousands of Vietnamese children, who were born with horrific birth defects.

Kennedy was involved in way too many violent imperial projects for me to seriously consider any of this. He was smart, charming, and a great politician, and I assume that he was simply telling Castro what Castro wanted to hear. He was playing politics. After looking at everything, I have to say, it hasn’t changed my mind about Kennedy, and it will probably be a good long while before anyone convinces me of the righteousness of any of the presidents I have lived under. So why the fabulation? In the end, I have to believe that this is exactly what it looks like: Liberal Dems continuing to push the Kennedy myth, keeping their constituency hanging onto a fantasy, exactly like the Republicans’ mythologizing of Reagan.

They have little else to say, about anything, so it’s important to milk the myth-making process for every sound bite it’s worth.

It’s our job to remind them that party politics is over, that there was never a “good old days,” and that we have no intention of building a golden idol for a man who is nothing but another servant of empire and capital, regardless of the hype that the Blue Dog propaganda machine or Oliver Stone movies help circulate.

It’s just more of the same:

From a FB friend who’s always spot-on in his observations. The Dems, being the scoundrels they are (even worse than the pachyderms these days), will call you a racist for criticizing Obama over his drone warfare or bailing out the banks, a sexist for calling Pelosi to account for insider trading, an anti-Semite if you oppose child murder in Gaza… All from a party that stands for income inequality, censorship, genocide, anti-worker legislation, no health care, no livable minimum wage, forever war, graft, global neoliberal finance capitalism, and Empire, at all costs. And they are vile: virtue signalling while they sit around Martha’s vineyard blowing smoke up each others assholes with their eco-friendly, humanely raised chickens and gourmet peanut butter and jelly finger sandwiches, their lives a glowing example of how to rape the planet while projecting an aire of snide smugness and superiority. The New Victorians. They’re now worse than the Republicans ever were. At least under McCarthyism, the enemy didn’t go out of its way to tell you what righteous oppressors they were.

And yes, I highly recommend the work of Paul Street:
https://www.counterpunch.org/author/paul-street/D

“: Barack Obama is a Wall Street thug, who:

- signed the authorized uses of military force (AUMF) orders to bomb, attack or assist the decimation of Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and Syria, and the military industrial coup of Honduras,

- allowed Wall Street to preselect his cabinet appointments,

- as senator VOTED for a Mexican Wall,

- as senator voted to bail out the big banks, but not the victims, including people of color, of the big banks,

- approved a billion dollars to put the private prison industry into the ICE detention business,

- deported more people, including Dreamers, than any other president,

- prosecuted more whistleblowers than any other president, dusting off a law from 1917, the Espionage Act, to do so,

- did absolutely nothing to prevent fracking, including approving pipelines, post Standing Rock protests,

- suspended habeas corpus,

- drone bombed innocent civilians, including U.S. citizens,

and

- described himself as an '80s (Reagan) Republican.

Any endorsements by Wall Street thug Barack Obama is a guide on who not to vote for.”

Thanks, and Semper Fi, comrade!

Yesterday morning, I stopped by the cannabis dispensary, and when I handed my ID to the woman at the desk, she accidentally touched fingertips with me and apologized profusely. I said, jokingly, “Lucky we’re not at a university or they’d drag you down to HR and have you get a ‘talking to’ from DEI.” She replied, “Actually, I’m glad those places are available at the schools.”

“Sure, but they really abuse their authority,” I answered.

“I guess…”

She looked flummoxed, but she did have a point. Students absolutely do need a recourse when a professor or administrator abuses their authority, whether that abuse involves racism, sexism, or any quid pro quo exchange. It happened to me, more than once. They’ll even steal your work if you let them. University professors — as anyone who’s spent any time in drag school (that’s not a typo) will tell you — get their little heads puffed up with all sorts of unwarranted pride, displaying their diplomas and publications throughout their office, as if they were setting up some sort of academic equivalent of the ecclesiastical: decorating themselves with the requiste regalia, proof that they have been vetted by a holy see, and above all, can be trusted.

Universities are where dominant culture is perpetuated, not a crucible in which radical politics is birthed or old and counterproductive concepts laid to waste. Gramsci, Chomsky, and currently, researchers in the field of mismatch theory, have all documented how elite institutions reproduce the class structures of the oligarchy and the corporatists (not that the lines between the two don’t blur on occasion). This is especially true in America, where people like Jodi Dean, Cornell West, and scads of others have had their reputations sullied, been dismissed from their teaching assignments, or simply fired, as the above article in The Guardian illustrates.

Yes, we indeed need these resources, official avenues of complaint and redress, for students. But what I found shocking in the woman’s reply was her surprise at the notion that anyone could say anything negative about what has become the insane overreach of DEI departments across this country. I had a Japanese student who once accused me of cursing at her, at length and fluently, in Japanese, which I would have felt really bad about had I been able to speak a word of Japanese. She was sent packing, fortunately, after being diagnosed with schizophrenia, but they treated me like a criminal. At one point, the assistant director of HR looked at me and said, “It doesn’t matter if you said it, she felt hurt.”

I’m sorry, but I do not possess the necessary levels of phony white liberal guilt and hypocrisy to be played that easily.

None of this is any surprise because these departments and their employees are not there to mete out justice, but rather perpetuate an ideology and in doing so, earn a pension. If that were not the case, such an absurdity would be impossible for anyone to utter. Again, you can’t make this stuff up, but this is what they do, and they do not find statements like the above to be preposterous, which was made all the more evident when I explained the preposterousness to her.

Here’s a reminder: When you get fired, suspended, or muzzled for doing something righteous — as did Jodi Dean and countless numbers of students by standing up for Gaza — it’s the DEI that comes knocking on your door.

More recently, we saw Columbia kiss the ring of Mango Caesar, just like Hobart and William Smith Colleges, in Geneva, NY, who bent over for Genocide Joe, suspending Dean for nothing more than publishing an article in support of Palestine. Universities, corporations, and governmental bodies are a blob, one giant, oozing entity that shares organs and has the same goal: making sure that shit don’t change.

So, in a supreme moment of irony, someone like Dean, who truly does stand for the principles of equity and inclusion, who speaks for the marginalized brown people across the globe whom we bomb into rubble, is muzzled. It’s a crystal clear illustration of Sheldon Wolin's concept of inverted totalitarianism: a wall of indoctrination and institutional power, hiding behind phony virtue signaling, going about the business of crushing dissent while maintaining control through its various tentacles, like DEI departments, NGOs, and think tanks.

Exploitation and censorship posing as a rainbow colored unicorn powered by technicolor farts: A fairy tale for adults.

Thus, in one sense, some may perceive Trump’s desire to squash these departments as sensible and logical. But again, this is another lie from the people who own you, another inversion of the truth, and simply a shift from a blue-hued totalitarianism to a traditional, blood-red fascist autocracy.

Who wants either abomination? Still, the response on the part of Columbia is tragic and cowardly. Regardless of what one thinks of DEI, the university’s caving to executive authority is proof of what I alluded to earlier: these are in no way radical institutions where novel concepts are birthed. Universities are as essential to the hammer, and to making us a slave to that hammer, as are the oligarchy, the media, and our politicians. It’s absurd to trust any of them, and it is anathema to any of liberalism’s principles to do what Columbia did.

Whatever liberalism may mean in this era, it’s not the liberalism of Diderot or John Stuart Mill. It has, like everything else, been swallowed up by the inversion. This is why many marginalized people in America, people of color, queer people, poor people, incarcerated people, end up believing in and voting for the very crooks and institutions that are offering you solutions which do nothing but pour more napalm onto an already devastating fire.

How do we ensure students have resources at their disposal that won’t end up biting them in the ass, getting good professors dismissed, and functioning not as nodes of institutional control, but a means of empowering individuals? Remember Juvenal’s caveat: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

We are supposed to be keeping our eyes on the guards, and most Americans have been delinquent in their duties, especially if it means a sacrifice in terms of time or brainpower. Universities are a big part of the blob that is responsible for what Byung-Hul Chan, in The Burnout Society, describes as “self-censoring” — a movement away from systems of mass surveillance to a system of indoctrination and incessant cultural messaging that ensures a self-auditing populace and the perpetuation of the dominant discourse.

In other words, it’s the story the ruling class wants to hear and wants you to memorize, word for word.

Hey, M -

I'm looking at this and feeling not a trace of shock -- absolutely zero surprise. After the Russiagate hoax, the Banana Republic trials that were a slap in the face to the constitution, the FISA forgeries, Mango Caesar is pissed. Now, they've created the Trump that only existed in the confines of their propagandized, colonized minds, a demon summoned by ignorance, fear, and a blissful eagerness to be wholly indoctrinated and numb. Now we get the Trump that only existed in the minds of propagandists like Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper, and those squawking magpies on The View. Now we do get full-blown fascism, initiated by Genocide Joe, who passed the baton, this time sweeping censorship powers, to the Fred Flintstone of modern fascists. Congratulations, liberal America! They created the monster they needed to keep their wealth extraction and forever war continuing unperturbed. Anything but moving toward the sensible economic models of European Social Democracy. This is why it’s time; especially time to ignore anyone claiming they can reform the Democratic party, like feckless Bernie Sanders, who will — I promise you — kiss the ring again when the time comes.

This is exactly what I said would happen. I guess I have to capitulate now: They're right -- Trump is our biggest problem. Now. Thanks a fuckin' lot, America.

Usually I apologize for my political rants, but Jesus... I find it hard to believe you're not as dismayed by this as I am. I’m not surprised, that’s true. But earlier in my life, I thought I'd die before I saw one president destroy the 1st Amendment and commit genocide, then hand that power to a numbskull tyrant who's planning on shredding the constitution and arresting Americans and deporting them for exercising their 1st Amendment rights.

I used to think we had a few more years...

See ya later, everyone, unless Mango Caesar locks me up. Believe it or not, I'm starting to get noticed as a political writer. I'll send you a letter from Guantanamo....

I have an interesting follow-up, nothing to do with politics, but good grief. Sometimes I need to express my exasperation to someone who has more than two brain cells bouncing around in their noggin.

No need to respond if you ain't feeling it.

Peace,

Pauly