Chez Netflix "The Invisible War"

About the many, many female (and some few male) soldiers in today's mercenary, all-volunteer American army who find themselves raped.  How surprising it is to them, and how shattering, both psychologically and physically.  Of course, there is in them not a glimmer of an understanding that the business of soldiering itself (of giving and following orders, and killing on command), by its very nature, is vilely obscene.  But of course not.  It's the unconscious indecency of women that, to my gaily fastidious eye and mind, lends them all the allure of carnivorous gastropods, and makes the undoubted fact of their being often raped a nauseating reflection indeed on the horrors of mindless heteronormativity.  Eww.  Ick.

Make Believe Wars...Real Soldiers

When Israeli Air Force jet fighter aircraft and Israeli Navy motor torpedo boats attacked the United States Navy technical research ship USS Liberty in International waters north of the Sinai Peninsula, about 25.5 nautical miles northwest from the Egyptian city of Arish, on 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War, killing 34 crew members (naval officers, seamen, two Marines, and one civilian, wounding 171 crew members, and severely damaging the ship--and both the Israeli and the US governments so-quickly concluded that the attack had been a "mistake"--A little light went on in my head: The attack had been deliberate, agreed upon by both governments, because: (1) The Purpose of Military Engagements in the Modern World of Make Believe Warfare is to Use Up (Expend) Matériel and Personnel (Soldiers), thereby both justifying and acquiring further tax-funding for them; and (2) The Primary Function of Military Personnel is to Inflict Casualties, and the Concomitant Secondary Function of Military Personnel is to Take Casualties.  

So I immediately perceived that the CIA  (or MOSSAD), not some mysterious "Islamic Jihad," had perpetrated the Beirut Barracks Bombings on October 23, 1983, killing 241 American servicemen and 55 French paratroopers.  And the identity of the perpetrators of the spectacular murders and controlled demolitions of September 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center in New York City was similarly, plainly obvious to me.  I wouldn't call myself a Conspiracy Theorist, because I see nothing at all theoretical about it.

The greatest difference between Protestants and Roman Catholics is probably the age at which they are baptised...

Roman Catholics, baptised as infants, are in the Faith before they are conscious of it, and generally have to struggle harder to leave it than Protestants, who wait until something like the Age of Reason to be baptised and to confirm that they understand and accept the tenets of their Faith--and who may actually then, as I did at age eleven years old, find that they do not agree with the tenets of Christianity, and that they do not wish to be baptised or to make a profession of Faith in it.  There was in fact, in all conscience, nothing else that I felt I could do, then or ever, but to reject it, since I completely disbelieved, and disliked the Christian religion, such as it was expounded to me, by a Protestant minister who was sincerely attempting to persuade me of its truth and moral necessity, and who was perplexed and confounded that I did not agree: that my heart was corrupt, that I was sinful by nature, or that I needed to be saved from my sins; when my belief, as a boy of good conscience, was that I myself should atone  for my sins if I were able to--or, better, just not commit any sins.  The peculiar thing about rational decisions, be they made never so early in one's life, is that they require no subsequent alteration.  So I have troubled no more about Christianity in the course of a long life than I have about Zoroastrianism or Fire Worship--though I still wonder why so many have been its dupes for so long, when its falsity, nullity and absurdity were to me so early and clearly evident.

A frequently asked question, by those of a lower class than Methodist-Presbyterian to whom I have recounted this anecdote of my boyish apostasy, is "Why didn't your parents beat your apostatic little ass?"  There are two answers:  (1) By the 1950's Middle Class Americans above the rank of Baptists (in the Northern United States) no longer beat their children for apostasy.  (2) If I had not been entirely serious (i.e., just farting around or showing off) they might have.

Not every human female who wants to should be allowed to bear children...

It should be an explicit part of every national government's governance to determine how children may lawfully be born, to whom, and how they are to be nurtured, cared for and educated, once they have been brought into existence.  Children deserve no less.

So, yes, bullshit aside, the first thing that must be determined is the prospective female breeder's physical and (so far as it can be evaluated) mental fitness to bear children.  And yes, those judged unfit should be sterilized. 

Secondly, the physical and mental fitness of the proposed sperm donor must be objectively evaluated; if judged unfit, and heterosexual (i.e., likely to reproduce if allowed to do so), potential sperm donors ought also to be sterilized.

Thirdly (the first two pre-conditions having been satisfactorily met), with or without the participation of the child's parents (though, of course, hopefully, with), the birth, nurture, care and education of the child will  be supervised, regulated and provided for by the state.

Every pregnancy being thus provided for, protected, and in fact made possible by the state, abortions will be permitted only in cases of medical necessity--never at the mere whim of a prospective mother who's changed her mind.  After all, in my experience, life does begin at conception.

After Elvis performed in New York, a quarter of the seats had to be replaced because so many girls had wet their pants.

Need I say more?

In fact, if I wished to be understood, I'd have to say a lot more.  But perhaps I don't wish to be understood--It only antagonizes people (the vast, stinking heterosexual booboisie) to be told that the mean little shit (Elvis) they idolize as a singer and musician was a turd-vulgar necrophiliac with the soul of a cop.  And that girls' wetting their panties over him was the consummate expression of bad taste through bad manners; not (God help us all) "passion."  If people understood that, and how little I sympathize with (or at all like) young girls and their emotions (much less their pissing in their seats), they would grow angry with me and start heaving rhetorical brickbats at me, and even, if they could, real brickbats.  'Cause young, emotional, incontinent girls get a lot of slack in this Culture, and people, like me, who find them utterly distasteful, get a lot of grief.

Poor Whites

In all honesty, I've lived most of my life without actually knowing anybody of the class of Southern Poor White Trash, although I certainly early-on recognized, recoiled from and sneered at the type in Elvis Presley: The malignant stupidity in that boy's face!  So, it wasn't till my late fifties, that I moved to Columbus, Georgia for a few months to take care of the mother of a friend of mine--an aristocrat--who had Alzheimer's, that I met my first, real-live Poor Whites:  They were the Yard People, four seriously unkempt persons with front teeth missing, who cut the grass and trimmed the hedges and apparently lived out of the back of a beat-up old pick-up parked at the end of the driveway.  And when I, as chief cook and major domo, invited them into the kitchen of the Big House for lunch, they wouldn't sit down at the kitchen table, but mumbling excuses, ran back outside and sat in the bed of the pick-up.  So I brought them out plates of food--and that was okay, they could eat lunch that way.  

But, as I was going to say, the difference between these Poor Whites and Elvis Presley, was that the Yard People were--very much to my surprise, and quite unlike the creep from Tupelo--nice, with a distinctive animal sweetness about them that froze the word "Trash" in my gullet.  And I've only used the full phrase "Poor White Trash" since, in talking about Elvis and his mother, and in trying to communicate with Northerners and Westerners who don't understand about social classes.

But still, does being a huge H.L. Mencken fan make me a racist?

I think that, in terms of the odious Southern Law Poverty Center, alas, it does.  I could explain, and explain, that I personally refuse to judge anybody on the basis of such externals as skin color or the size of his buttocks (unless she's a Kardashian); that my loathing of, specifically, the Black, Jewish, Irish-American, and Southern Poor White Trash (including Appalachian and Ozarkian Hillbilly) Cultures does not extend to anyone who is actually in those cultures; that I am resolutely fair-minded and deliberately color blind.  True, I really, really hate their music, and I am disgusted by their high opinion of themselves, and appalled by what they think is funny--and I would rather die than sit through a performance of Fiddler on the Roof--but that does not mean that I hate them, or wish them ill, or would object to a child of mine (if I had a child) marrying one of them (Although I might commit violence to prevent a grandchild of mine from being circumcised).  Even so, you see, I am pretty careful, while freely denigrating and despising whole Cultures, not to extend my put-down to the Ethnic Groups which unfortunately actually produced those Cultures.   And I realize that Mencken was not so careful.  But be it said, that having negative opinions about ethnic groups is as nothing compared to the wickedness of being prepared to do them injury, and of this Mencken cannot be accused:  He denounced lynching and the Ku Klux Klan, and he proposed to allow the Jews being persecuted in Germany and elsewhere in Europe to emigrate to America and Canada; which, had the immigration authorities of those countries permitted it, might effectively have forestalled the Holocaust.

‘Feet or Buttocks?’ Shocking Video Shows Gaddafi’s Son Being Tortured in Libyan Prison : Information Clearing House - ICH

‘Feet or Buttocks?’ Shocking Video Shows Gaddafi’s Son Being Tortured in Libyan Prison  :  Information Clearing House - ICH

This is the most sickening, most appalling video I have ever seen; worse, more horrifying even than Collateral Murder, because I have known personally (from video interviews) and have ever well loved its subject.  But it demonstrates, for once and all, that "harsh interrogation" has nothing the fuck whatsoever to do with "interrogation." Torture exists for its own sake.   And the next CIA or NSA or DEA or FBI agent who says different should have his tongue torn out.

When's the last time anyone mentioned Sandra Bland? Or the Slaughter of children in Gaza or the Yemen....?

If it matters--The Pew Research Center has just released its latest finding that Putin, and Russia, are very unpopular in Europe and the Americas.  Of the three press releases of these findings that I've read, all cite as reasons "Russia's support of rebels in Ukraine," and mention the "mounting evidence" for it, without, of course, specifying what that evidence might be; while none of the press releases mentions the latest, unbiased polls showing that Putin's popularity in Russia has risen to an unprecedented more than 90 per cent with his own people.  And why should the ridiculous opinions of the dupes of the Evil Empire's propaganda machine matter?  Alas, stupidity always matters.

Reading...and re-Reading....

Mencken's coverage of the Scopes Trial, with its full descriptions of the characters and the setting, is an endless delight, like a Schubert quartet, or a whole series of Schubert quartets, in which the characters and the place-descriptions are, in the manner of Schubert's melodies, endlessly recurrent--and, in  each several strain, hauntingly, morbidly, peculiarly fascinating.  There is an art to it, a fine, over-arching compression and synthesis, but above all there is the constant flickering and glitter of Mencken's diabolical wit, that spares nothing and no one, and which, to the truly deserving, like to William Jennings Bryan (who had, after all, served as Wilson's Secretary of State, and had overseen the American military rape of Haiti), Mencken is almost (but oh how satisfyingly) unbearably cruel.  I had thought that Pope, or possibly Swift, had attained the fullness of savage verbal excoriation, but nothing touches, say, this, of Mencken anent Bryan:

"Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not."

The Left Coast

As Thomas Jefferson so presciently foresaw more than two centuries ago, the lands that lie along the Pacific Coast of America are geographically and culturally far too distinct, self-identified and utterly dissimilar from the rest of the United States to constitute anything other than their own, admittedly rather peculiar, country.  And so--with (1) the signal failure of the Mob/Mafia to take control of local government (as it has throughout the United States east of the Mississippi), anywhere in the West but in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and in Southern California; and with (2) the absence in the West of anything like the massive under-class that hangs inert and crushingly dependent on the society and economy of the Eastern United States; and with (3) a consistently high regional standard of free and compulsory education; and, not least, with (4) the populist/popular regional legalization of cannabis--the self-actualization of the Pacific states envisaged by Jefferson proceeds apace.  Several things, however, yet impede the full and sovereign realization of what must one day be, in its glory, from Juneau to Santa Barbara, the free and independent Bioregional Republic of Cascadia: Chiefest among these impeding things being the (vampire-in-a-bloodbank, or zombie-in-a-charnel-house) remorseless voracity of the Federal and Corporate Higher Powers of the Evil Empire, which will not cease to extort the revenues in taxes which flow from the incomparably richer Far Western States to the impoverished remainder of the country.  But hardly less frustrating, to the achievement of the rational and deserved autonomy of the West, is the inability of Far Westerners themselves to come to a consensus about, or even explicitly to acknowledge, the issues which unite them, and which must, eventually, dissever them, forever and forever, from the evil, violent and corrupt oligarchic prison-state into which the rest of America has devolved.

An especially annoying regressive current in the philosophy of even those Far Westerners who seek to found an anarchist/socialist bioregional republic (endemic perhaps in the historical Far Western culture of Vigilantism and Rugged Individualism), is a sentimental neo-primitivism or neo-Luddism--a mistrust of technology and of modern urban civilization, and a preference for a wished-for, imaginary, pre-industrial, bucolic, spuriously "Native American" ecology and society: This in a society that has invented the Personal Computer and the Internet, and is likely soon to master the technology of Nuclear Fusion, and within whose geographical boundaries lie five or six of the loveliest and liveliest cities in the world.  There is even among some a nostalgic effort to revive the Chinook Jargon as a lingua franca--in a region where, as it happens, English is spoken, and written, with unparalleled correctness and clarity, effortlessly, as the First Language of those who are,  beyond question, the most literate and best educated people on the planet.