The dumbing of America, from Reagan to Trump and beyond

If I am guilty of my excessive use of the word "dumb" next to American(s), here's one of Brian Karem's weekly column for Salon seen on:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/did-dumbing-america-reagan-trump-130501647.html

(For more on the theme, see: https://www.salon.com/2021/10/28/dumbass-nation-our-biggest-national-security-problem-is-americas-vast-and-militant-ignorance/)

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Thu, August 31, 2023

"To live outside the law, you must be honest".
— Bob Dylan

How screwed are we? I'll tell you.

On Wednesday, the news was all about a big bag of wind destroying Florida and flooding the South, spreading destruction and threatening pestilence and death.

Then there's Hurricane Idalia.

Also on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell froze and stood motionless in front of an assembly of reporters — for the second time this summer — so that's encouraging.

But seriously, folks. Last Thursday, Donald Trump turned a 22-minute booking for a felony indictment in Georgia into a six-hour media special, complete with a larger motorcade than the actual president's — with dozens of camera lights on the runway and a chopper-talk session.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden, the aforementioned actual president, quietly lent assistance to Hawaii after the devastating wildfires on Maui, for which he was criticized by Republican members of Congress. He also met with international leaders at the White House this week, and went after Big Pharma to negotiate reduced Medicare prices for 10 common prescription drugs.

The press? Well, we completely missed the point, as usual, and covered every juvenile tantrum Donald Trump threw in his malevolent attempt to stay in the news. The context is missing. The press is failing us, and people are too ignorant to notice the problem. That's because we're busy dividing ourselves into teams of social cheerleaders, cheering on our champions and literally booing the opposition.

Welcome to politics 2023. One man, who claims to support Christian values, continues his run for the highest office in the land based on revenge and hypocrisy, while our president, a devout Catholic, is insulted by the likes of Ted Cruz, accused of being anti-Catholic and "the face of corruption" in a post on X (formerly Twitter). Biden, in case anyone cares, goes to church every Sunday. Trump never went once in his four years at the White House. Rumor was it would burst into flames if he did.

It would be easy to claim that all of this is new. But that would also be wrong. The seeds of today's political division and reporting began with Ronald Reagan.

While lying to the press, Reagan also set out to destroy it. He himself was quoted in the New York Times on Oct. 6, 1985, saying, "A substantial part of the political thing is acting and role playing and I know how to do that."

Of course that's literally all it is today.

What else is different?

Well, the press itself is different too. Reagan destroyed the FCC's "fairness doctrine" and encouraged media consolidation. Decades later, as social media rose to take the place of the corporate media's diminished role in providing vetted information, the slide accelerated.

People hiding behind anonymous handles rather than their actual names hurled insults and threats. Twitter offered "verified" names as a way to combat that — until Elon Musk took over and turned the verification process upside down, once again making anonymous insults and trolls fashionable.

Every tool used to legitimize and verify information in the last 40 years has evaporated under the push to make money. Fewer companies own most of the corporate media. Fewer independent news platforms exist — and they often get lumped in with bloggers and trolls.

The end result is chaos. Confusion.

That's how America became stupid. Neil deGrasse Tyson, while trying to address how the U.S. is being left behind in areas such as physics, math and engineering (not to mention infrastructure) observed in a recent speech that "Science illiteracy is rampant in our culture." When he addressed the problems of journalism, he pointed out a headline that read, "80 percent of airplane crash survivors had studied the locations of the exit doors on takeoff."

As Tyson noted, there are quite a few things wrong with that headline, including this: Did they manage to interview those people who didn't survive plane crashes? Another headline reported that half the schools in a certain district were "below average." No kidding: That's what "average" means. (OK, technically that would be the definition of 'median," but to insist on nuance now is pointless.)

Our inherent, vapid stupidity in the news business makes us sound more like characters in the 1970s novelty song"The Streak" than the diligent investigative reporters played by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in "All the President's Men."

That's right. We're just as proud as we can be of our anatomy and we're inviting public critique.

Too arcane? Try it this way: We don't get it.

Donald Trump faces 91 felony charges in four different jurisdictions, brought by approximately 100 American citizens sitting on four different grand juries. This major play by the justice system is the last bid for accountability that I'll see in my lifetime for Donald Trump, and by extension for those who hold power and are willing to break the law in order to keep it. If it fails, then, quite literally, God help us. There will be no holding the rich and the powerful accountable — for anything, ever.

Meanwhile, Trump himself is desperate. He smells of it as surely as a "Supernatural" demon smells of sulfur. Yet we continue to give him a thin veneer of credibility by allowing him to claim that a legitimate prosecution is political persecution.

Who cares what Donald Trump thinks?

When Charles Manson went on trial for orchestrating a series of gruesome murders, we did not dance on the head of a pin for his demons. Is Trump a lesser demon? No. If anything, he's worse. His criminal activity has caused the suffering of millions, if not billions, across the planet and the fallout has only just begun.

We give his illegitimate political spawn, like Vivek Ramaswamy and Marjorie Taylor Greene, ample opportunity to propose bombing our allies for supplying drugs that millions of our citizens demand, while claiming climate change is a hoax. These minor demons are drafting off Trump while creating whole new lanes of lunacy.

In the corporate media, we keep fighting over competing inaccurate narratives while members of Congress contribute to the mayhem by "playing a role," as Ronald Reagan put it 40 years ago.

The stupidity of the press is actually harder to decipher than the pandering of our politicians to constituents whom they view as fans of their fictional personas. Most of us are vaguely aware of the danger posed by Donald Trump. Some of us are acutely aware of it. But we're also insecure and ignorant and not sure how to write or speak about him. If we simply call him a liar and a charlatan, we risk being called partisan. If we don't show respect for "both sides," then we are sullying our reputation — unless of course we are overtly partisan, and in that case we don't care.

Either way, we flail about because of our inexperience. Everyone — even corporate news managers — say they wish we had more Walter Cronkites than Tucker Carlsons in the profession. You know, people with experience and common sense, rather than clowns chasing shadows.

The very same managers who wistfully wish for the "good old days" do not hire or promote people like Walter Cronkite, particularly not in television. The grizzled beat reporter with vast experience has been replaced by smiling, blissfully ignorant and much cheaper talking heads who can either entice or enrage an audience with their good looks while sounding knowledgeable. They definitely aren't. We too have chased the Reagan model, and cover politics the same way politicians conduct their business: flash over substance.

You don't have to look at political reporters. Just look at how we cover natural disasters, like the hurricane in Florida. How many times have you heard a reporter tell an anchor during a live shot, "Great question!" That's usually a self-congratulatory comment, since the reporter has likely scripted the question for the anchor. The routine descriptions of all hurricanes, since I began covering them in the 1980s, includes cliché phrases like, "Never seen anything like this before" and "unparalleled destruction," while the reporters wade through flood waters trying to look brave.

Please. TV reporters have covered hurricanes and major weather events the same way since Dan Rather waded into the flood waters while covering Hurricane Carla for KHOU in 1961. His stunt reporting eventually led to him replacing Cronkite as the anchor of "CBS Evening News." Rather is revered today, but his contemporary peers often did not see him that way. He was a product of television, seen as a performer in his earlier years. He grew into his role and earned his stripes, but he was also the anchor who critics argue ushered in the new era of flash over substance. The fact that he's so respected today speaks not only to his growth as a reporter, but perhaps also to our lowered expectations of reporters.

But please: It's all about the Barbie movie! Or the horse race of politics, or the polls.

We can report on numbers and fictional characters. They are simple and clean. People are not. Covering people takes a lot of experience, an ability to understand nuances of speech, actions and culture. We have none of that today — either among the press or among politicians.

Former House Speaker Tip O'Neill said of Reagan that "he knows less than any president I've ever known." The joke that circulated around D.C. during his presidency was that Reagan had tried to defect to the Soviet Union but was sent back because "he didn't know anything." As a performer playing Reagan in the off-Broadway show "Rap Master Ronnie" put it, "If you're right 90 percent of the time, why quibble over the remaining three percent?"

John Wayne, a notorious conservative and longtime ally of Reagan's, wrote him a blistering letter in 1977 telling Reagan to stop misinforming people about the Panama Canal treaty. "I'll show you point by God damn point in the treaty where you are misinforming people. This is not my point of view against your point of view. These are facts," Wayne wrote.

Reagan didn't care. He played to the crowd he helped create, which has proliferated since he won the presidency in 1980. "You'd be surprised how much being a good actor pays off," he told the Washington Post in 1984.

Now you understand how Donald Trump and his minions can spout limitless hypocrisy and get away with it. And you understand how the press, which was once able to accurately point out the lies and hypocrisy, today cannot.

"Floating down the stream of time," George Harrison once told us "makes no difference where you are or where you'd like to be."

Yes. It is all too much.

We are led by aging and frail men and women who should step aside, or by grifters who con their constituents because they don't know or don't care about anything better.

And all of this is being reported by indifferent, insecure, ignorant and incompetent journalists whose only goal is to fill time, gain ratings and pretend they know what they're doing.

That's how screwed we are.

The only consolation is that if the Justice Department remains sound, then Donald Trump will likely spend his remaining years behind bars, staring at himself in the mirror with no access to the outside world.

Goodbye Anti-Semitism. Hello Israelophobia, the New and Improved Zionist Scarecrow

The Telegraph (a.k.a. the Daily Telegraph, and nicknamed the Torygraph) is a deeply conservative British tabloid with sympathy for the Germans during World War I. It later tried to suppress Winston Churchill's anti-Nazi posture at the onset of World War II. The Nazi and anti-Jewish ideology was very pervasive in British society, mostly within the conservative elements of society, including all the way up to the British Royal family who, let us remember, were and remain of German aristocratic stock.

According to Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Telegraph_Affair], the "Daily Telegraph Affair" was the uproar that followed the 28 October 1908 publication in the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, of comments by German Emperor Wilhelm II. The affair was a major diplomatic blunder that worsened relations and badly hurt the Kaiser's reputation. The Telegraph had fraudulently published notes by a British Army officer Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley as an interview with the German Emperor that included wild statements and diplomatically damaging remarks, the most infamous of which was directed at the English people.  

 

The Daily Telegraph logo next to you-know-whose logo

 

 

 

 

Just like all conservatives at the time, as well as those of today, the British conservative movement has in the very least deep sympathies for Fascism and anti-Jewish ideas. Their blind support for Israel is due to their refusal to admit to themselves not only the failure, but the abhorrent duplicity of their British colonial mandate in Palestine, and also to compensate for their own hatred of Jews by a boundless fake support to their colony Israel. They did it with South Africa, why would it be any different with Palestine? See appended to this piece a comprehensive list of 20th century British Fascist and Nazi parties and organizations. Their sheer number suggests that British conservative society remains viciously Anti-Semitic. 

The Telegraph seems to have realized that the term "anti-Semitic" no longer scares people who criticize Israel as an apartheid state. Their affinity and nostalgia for their lost South African Apartheid colony makes them feel closer to their still extant Apartheid colony of Israel. They lost South Africa and are trying their best not to lose Israel. So they have now come up with a new term they seem determined to implant in their readers' minds to replace the worn out "anti-Semitic" and become the new scarecrow against criticizing Israel. Now keep in mind that the Telegraph is a deeply conservative British rag with roots in the Imperialism, Colonialism, Fascism and Anti-Semitism of 18th-20th century Britain. Their desperate efforts at redeeming themselves is at the very least laughable. 

The fact is that in every colonized country it tormented and pilfered for hundreds of years, British colonialism invariably left behind it a divided land, wars, mass massacres, and shattered lives: Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, South Africa, US-Canada, etc.

One Jake Wallis Simons wrote a piece recently in the Telegraph (August 27, 2023) entitled "Israelophobia is the one hatred that polite society embraces", whose purpose is to promote a book he wrote on the subject that is apparently not selling very well. Now in British racist parlance, "polite" implies conservative. Thus, The Telegraph, through Simons, makes the following asinine arguments:

Israel is only 1 per cent of the Middle East (the Middle East being a western colonial concept to describe a geography with ambiguous boundaries and that is based on dubious linguistic and religious criteria). Israel is also only 75 years old. Therefore, Israel is like a child and should not matter that much given its size and age. A small child that kills is not like an adult that kills, and should be let loose to continue killing. Strange argument.

Another lie often propagated by Zionist apologists is that Israel is the only liberal democracy in the region, notwithstanding the fact that it is an ultra-religious fundamentalist state fabricated around the fictional garbage of the bible, namely that God chose the Hebrews as his pet people, ordered them to commit the First Nakba against the Canaanites, the Palestinians' ancestors, specifically ordering Joshua to murder every child, woman, man AND beast, and seize their land, the land He in his racist Bronze Age wisdom granted the Hebrews as their "promised land". 

Either of two things: The whole "promised land" fantasy is in all likelihood a fictional fabrication typical of biblical bullshit, and therefore this fable cannot reasonably be used to justify the barbaric existence of Israel today as a so-called homeland for the returning Jews. Now, if we assume it to be true, this macabre event constitutes one of the first recorded genocides in human history, one carried out by the Hebrews (ancestors of the Jews) against the Canaanites (ancestors of the Palestinians), a genocide for which modern Israel represents a second installment. I wonder whether Yahweh should evolve out of his Bronze Age hideout into the modern world and recant this murderous command to his pet people to genocide an entire people (the Canaanites) and dispossess them of their land. At the very least, He should be tried in a criminal court for crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Then Mr. Simons says that Israel is "not particularly violent". How sweet of his propaganda. It is only a tiny bit violent, not that much. That he admits that Israel is "sort of" violent is sufficient for sane people to conclude that Israel is indeed violent. To buffet his argument, Simons admits that Israel has killed upwards of 86,000 people, which is "negligible" when compared with the killing of 600,000 Iraqis by the Americans, Israel's main sponsors and funders after Britain lost its imperial colonial status.

Then, Mr. Simons says that Israel "is not a bad place to live".What he means is that while it is a little violent, Israel's puny violence (as one of the most hypermilitarized countries on earth, thanks to British and American military and financial assistance) manages to survive the hatred it generates among the native indigenous Palestinians whom it has eviscerated out of their millennial land and continues to brutally occupy. What success! Yes, the fact that foreign invading settlers have water and electricity and roads specifically built for them, while the native indigenous people are dehumanized and herded behind racist walls into destitute refugee camps, is really not a problem. A brilliant success, from a 19th century colonial perspective.

And now, to dispel any critique of the paradisiac features of Apartheid ultra-religious racist Israel, Mr. Simons blames a whole bunch of people, inluding Israel's own victims, and feels he must coin a new term to replace the dying term of "anti-Semitism": ISRAELOPHOBIA. Tough to utter, scarier sounding than the more poetic anti-Semitism, but it will serve from now on in the Zionist propaganda toolbox, perhaps for a while. At least that is what Mr. Simons hopes. 

First, he blames Christians after listing a bunch of Zionist lies. Since the Holy Land is "Jewish" (which is not true, as we saw earlier. Joshua's Jews massacred the Canaanites and took their land), and since Jerusalem is "Jewish" (it was, but for only 300 years of its history over at least 3,000 years), and since the fantasy and dubious figure of Jesus, the self-proclaimed Son of God, is "Jewish", then the Christians are jealous of the Jews and blame them because everything the Christians believe is Jewish! 

Hence a long history of anti-Semitism among Christians, with "anti-Semitism" being a misnomer since Jews represent only 5% of all Semites on the Globe. As people emerged from the ignorance of the pre-18th century period, they have come to realize that Jews are not the only Semites around, which made them lose the exclusivity of victimhood with which they have long blackmailed Europeans and others into subscribing to the Zionist propaganda. With this premise, Mr. Simons now makes his next move: Introduce his new Zionist propaganda tool: ISRAELOPHOBIA, by defining it as “the old hatred decanted into new bottles”. From now on, stop using anti-Semitism and use Israelophobia instead. Since anti-semitism can no longer logically be applied exclusively to Jews - worse yet, it does apply to the Palestinian victims of the Jews who thus become anti-semitic! - the new "Israelophobia" is very specific and cannot be "stolen" from them. There are so many other Semites around, but there is only one Israel, luckily for the civilized world.

Mr. Simons then places everything in the same blender as it were: "Like the anti-Semitism of previous centuries, the bigotry is based on conspiracy theories and falsehoods. Israel is accused of pulling the strings of politicians, finance and the media". 

No, Mr. Simons, if some numskulls of the extreme right and left conspiracy theory club use stupid arguments like the ones you describe, no one in the world of sane, reasonable and moderate people is accusing Israel of conspiracies and plots. You should not insidiously amalgamate legitimate questions with irrational claims, just as you should have never amalgamated legitimate Palestinian National Resistance and the right to self-determination with extremist Islamist terrorism. Stop doing that. It's unethical. Israel is guilty, and therefore legitimitally accused of land theft (true fact), apartheid (true fact), racism (didn't Israel's minister Ben-Gvir say that Israelis have rights but Palestinians don't?), expansionism (the state of Israel has no constitution, which means it deliberatly refuses to delineate its borders, which suggests that it plans of stealing more land)... And those facts do not excuse the anti-Semitism which has existed long before the creation of the colony of Israel. They simply objectively judge Apartheid Israel for its actions, as was the case with Apartheid South Africa where no one hated the white Afrikaaners because they were white, but simply because they were racist and were dehumanizing the native indigenous black south-Africans.

Israel is presented to the West by Zionist propaganda as a "white" country. In fact, the media always focus on blond-haired, blue-eyed East European or American settlers (who are only Jewish by conversion, not by ethnic ascendancy) as the prototypical Israeli, while showing dark-haired, brown-eyed Palestinians, as if to always emphasize the point that Israelis are "like us" while Palestinians are "alien" to us. If Israelis speak English with an American accent, which makes them likable to the dumb US audience, it is because they ARE American settlers from Brooklyn, NY.

Then Mr. Simons goes on to elevate every insignificant detail using suspicious percentages to Israel's advantage to make his point: Despite being such a fantastic country, tiny Israel is hated by everyone, the poor thing, including by the wealthy and rich people on this earth: "Israelophobia is now one of a suite of “luxury beliefs” about race, gender, colonisation and slavery which are taken on by the elites as badges of political identity"... "patrician liberalism and old-fashioned socialism, shot through with the sort of intense focus on race that is normally only seen on the far Right".

At least, The Telegraph's Mr. Simons admits that extremist right-wing conservative British have always been anti-Semitic, but now they have graduated into Israelophobes.

With no conscience to aid him, Mr. Simons asperges the entire world with his brand new "Israelophobia" accusation: "Wherever you find toxic identity politics, you find Israelophobia. From the EU to the Foreign Office, from universities to museums, from publishing houses to advertising agencies, bigotry towards the Middle East’s only democracy is rife." Regardless of the tiresome lie that Israel is the only democray in the Middle East, Mr. Simons's paranoia wants us to believe that everyone is against Israel, the whole old and gigantic world is against tiny, little-violent, young Israel. Mr. Simons is literally saying that 8 billion people are wrong and that the 6 million plunderers of Palestine, foreign Jewish colonists, rapists, terrorists and settlers, are right.

According to this racist eunuch, any attempt by a Holocaust guilt-inflicted world to redress the existential harm done by genocide and land theft to the native indigenous Palestinians and bring them a modicum of justice "erodes Western self-respect; undermines our history; destroys national pride and patriotism; and sows social division. It emboldens our enemies, whether Islamists or Putin’s fascists". Why he omits "Zionist Jewish racist fundamentalist settlers" from his list of enemies is questionable at the very least.

He then throws his final punch which aims at digging the guilt deeper into the involuntary autonomous brains of Western minds and, like a vaccine, immunize Israel against future legitimate accusations of further land theft and ethnic cleansing against the remaining Palestinians: "Make no mistake", he says, "the fight against Israelophobia is the fight for Western liberalism." Self-serving stupidity could not have done better!

The British conservative movement is rife with racist hatred. Just as its embers continue to glow under the ashes, anti-Jewishness and anti-anything that is not white anglo-saxon protestant still smolders in Perfidious Albion. But it's been said and proven so many times in history: the path to peace can only be through justice. Mr. Simons, who thinks he can embark us on another century of lies, manufactured propaganda terminology, and false premises, is sweeping justice under the rug. Neither he, nor Israel nor Western liberalism will ever see peace as long as the Palestinian people are treated like disposable humans by Torah- and Bible-thumping barbarians. Just like the Crusades a millennium ago who came with an identical religious argument to take back the "Holy Land": They stayed 200 years but were ultimately evicted. Israel will never know peace as long as it pursues a blatant unfair and deliberately violent approach to abscond with the fictional biblical fantasy of the "Holy Land" otherwise known by its real name: Palestine. 

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Appendix: List of British Nazi and Fascist movements of the 20th century:

PRE-WW II:

• The British Fascists (BF), founded in 1923 as the British Fascisti by Rotha Lintorn-Orman
  
• The National Fascisti, a splinter group of the BF founded in 1924 that loved Mussolini
  
• The Imperial Fascist League (IFL) formed by Arnold Leese in 1929 embraced Nazism
• The British Union of Fascists (BUF), formed in 1932 by Oswald Mosley was the largest British fascist party with support from members of the House of Lords, Commons, and others
  
• The Militant Christian Patriots (1935) were a strongly anti-Semitic propaganda organization
  
• The pro-Nazi National Socialist League, formed in 1937 by William Joyce and John Beckett
  
• The English National Association, initially called the British National Party
  
• The Scottish Fascist Democratic Party (early 1930s) under William Weir Gilmour
  
• The British Democratic Party became involved in the Coordinating Committee, an initiative of Archibald Maule Ramsay in the late 1930s
  
• The British Empire Fascist Party, set up by Graham Seton Hutchinson in November 1933, was strongly anti-Semitic
  
• The British People's Party (BPP) was founded in 1939 and led by ex-British Union of Fascists (BUF) member John Beckett, a co-founder with William Joyce of the National Socialist League
  
• The British Union emerged in the early 1930s and worked with the BF
• The British United Fascists were established in Kensington in 1933. The BUF's Blackshirts attacked their offices
  
• The British Empire Fascists were mentioned in 1920s reports in the Socialist Review
  
• The Fascist Movement was another 1920s splinter group from the BF
  
• Italian Fascismo was established in Leith in 1924, with a black-shirted uniform. It was entirely mimetic of Italian fascism and was particularly popular among Edinburgh's Italian community
• The Kensington Fascist Party 1920s-1930s. Worked closely with the BF, IFL and the Unity Band
  
• The Legion of Loyalists in 1931 signed a BF document calling for the abolition of parliamentary government. It joined the British Council Against European Commitments, a pro-German umbrella organization founded by Viscount Lymington in 1938
  
• The Loyalty League emerged in 1923 as an anti-Semitic group attached to the Conservative Party that sought to promote Italian fascism
• The Nordic League, active between 1935 and 1939, was a coordinating body for various Nazi extremist movements
  
• The Nordics were a small group of anti-Semitic "racial nationalists^"
  
• The Scottish Union of Fascists was set up by T.W. Denholm-Hay in 1934 as a Scottish-minded breakaway from the BUF
  
• The Stamford Fascists were a 1926 splinter group from the BF
  
• The United Empire Fascist Party was established by C.G. Wodehouse-Temple in December 1933 and included a former IFL member and agent for Nazi Germany
• The Unity Band was established by Lieutenant-Colonel Oscar Boulton in 1930
  
• The White Knights of Britain, also known as the Hooded Men, were a Ku Klux Klan-inspired secret society that existed between 1937 and 1938. Deeply anti-Semitic, the swastika was their emblem and Edward I of England was their patron figure due to his expulsion of the Jews
  
• The Yorkshire Fascists emerged in the 1920-1930s
  

POST WWII:

• The Union Movement, a re-founded version of the BUF that played a pivotal role in developing the Europeanist outlook of neo-fascism
  
• The British National Party (1960–1967) which uproduced pro-Nazi propaganda until 1962
  
• The National Socialist Movement (NSM), a breakaway from the BNP that was openly Nazi and was a charter member of the World Union of National Socialists
• The Greater Britain Movement, set up by John Tyndall when he split from the NSM, called for a specifically British form of Nazism
• The British Movement, a 1968 branch of the NSM, used images of Hitler and the swastika on election literature
• The November 9th Society, a neo-Nazi organization founded by Terry Flynn in 1977.
  
• The Britain First Party which is a right-wing, anti-Islam and ultranationalist party that has been described as "fascist" by multiple media outlets
• The National Socialist Action Party, a splinter group from the BM formed in 1982
• National Action, a banned neo-Nazi terrorist organization that has done political activism
• New British Union, an openly fascist group founded in January 2013 by Gary Raikes, a former British National Party candidate for Scotland

Lebanon's Christian Hezbollah Goons

Yes, Lebanon can be very confusing for outsiders. But keep it simple: the country is roughly divided between Muslims and Christians. 

In recent decades, the Muslims have regressed into barbarian ultra-religious practices and have been trying to dominate the country and reduce the Christians to a second-class "Dhimmi" citizens. That was the genesis of the 1975 war that has yet to end. Generally the Muslims look to the Arab and Muslim worlds for their inspiration.

The Christians have been mostly on the defensive, trying to rescue a system of shared coexistence and division of power they and the Muslims had agreed to. Generally, the Christians look to the West for their inspiration.

But, just as there are outlying liberal, open-minded Muslims who oppose religious radicalism and fanaticism, there are Christians who are as illiberal and extremist as their Muslim counterparts.

Only yesterday, a group of Christian thugs calling themselves the "Soldiers of God" descended on a bar in the Christian neighborhood of Mar Mikhail in Beirut, known for its nightime parties and festive environment, and attacked an LGBTQ+ party. These thugs, just like their Muslim cognates of Daesh, Al-Qaeda and other regressive religious movements, claim to speak on behalf of God and declared the bar venue "Satan's place". 

Despite its affiliation with the Vatican, the Maronite Catholic Church of Lebanon remains hesitant to follow Pope Francis's exhortation to welcome the LGBTQ community in its churches and be tolerant. The reason is that the Christian community of Lebanon is usually very conservative on social issues and lags several decades behind in its cultural adjustment to Western social and political trends, as are other  Christians throughout the Third World. The Catholics of East Timor or the African Anglicans are perfect examples. 

Unlike the West where the Church has been severely reduced to playing a uniquely religious role and no longer has the political power it once had, Christian churches in the global east and south continue to play primary political roles. But since their survival depends on their alliances with western religious institutions, the growing chasm between an evolving western world and its liberal churches on one hand, and an eastern-southern world stagnating in barbaric Bronze Age beliefs on the other, is likely to have dangerous repercussions on the survival of these minority Christian communities. 

France used to play a significant role as a protector of the Christians of Lebanon, a relationship dating back to the early centuries of the Church when the Lebanese Maronite Catholic Church sided with western christian dogmas against eastern churches, then during the times of the Crusades, and up to the 19th and 20th centuries when France endorsed the creation of a majority-Christian independent Lebanon in 1920. With France still Catholic back then, that relationship had obvious religious, but also political, underpinnings. But France has, during the past two centuries since the French revolution, gradually evolved from its status as the Church's "eldest daughter" to a secular and essentially atheist nation that could no longer associate well with the still somewhat "primitive" nature of Lebanon's Christians who desperately try to superimpose a facade of modernity over their backward religious inclinations. 

With the protestant United States indulging in a chronic dislike of Lebanon's catholics, and a France increasingly becoming a political poodle of the US, Lebanon's Christians seem to be abandoned to their fate in their increasingly assertive Islamic environment. Perhaps the Christian "Soldiers of God" thugs, in attacking the easy target of the LGBTQ community, are in a way appeasing their Islamic counterparts of Hezbollah, Daesh and others by being more radical than the radicals themselves. Somewhat like France's Vichy government rounding up Jews to send to the concentration camps to appease their German Nazi occupiers.

[See more on: https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2023/08/hardline-christian-group-attacks-queer-friendly-bar-lebanon]

Israel, Iran, Afghanistan.. What's the Difference, Lassie?

The rising trend in Israel in gender-based segregation, especially on public transport, is exposing the deeply religious nature of the country, contrary to the decades-old Zionist propaganda. While Israel claims to be a liberal democracy, it is increasingly obvious that it is just another barbarian ultra-religious country that, ironically, resembles its declared enemy Iran.

In recent weeks, there have been several media reports about Israeli bus drivers forcing women to sit in the back of the bus or simply refusing to take them on board. One report said the driver of a public bus told a group of teenage girls to sit in the back and cover up after they boarded dressed in tank tops and jeans, so as not to offend the other barbarian ultra-religious riders. Not very different from what women have to put up with in Iran.

The issue of gender segregation is not new in Israel where, as it is in barbaric Muslim countries, many observe religious practices that restrict mingling of the sexes. Activists say that the discrimination against women has always been latent and hidden, but it has been coming out of the closet in recent years. According to an activist lawyer, some Jewish groups really believe that women are the source of all evil.  

Typical scenes of Israeli women in Jerusalem

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tel Aviv, the country's commercial hub, has been the epicenter of protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's controversial plans to overhaul Israel's judiciary. Since his government is made up of ultra-religious and terrorist right-wing extremists, the mass demonstrations against the government have revealed the dual nature of Israeli society.

On one hand, the so-called secular Israelis, concentrated mostly in Tel Aviv, oppose the domination of the religious groups, but this position contradicts the essence of the foundation of the state of Israel, namely that it is a homeland for Jews. It was the secular, Communist and Socialist, and often atheist Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe - founders of Bolshevism - who entered illegally into Palestine and violently founded the British colony of Israel by exterminating a third of the native Palestinian population, driving another third into refugee camps inside and outside of Palestine, and subjecting the remaining third to a degrading racist occupation. These "secular" Jews were the founders of the Kibbutzim - Socialist-run Israeli settlements along the Soviet "sovkhoz" and "kolkhoz" models of centralized economy. These “secular” Jews in fact reject the foundational tenets and practices of Judaism, and ironically cast doubt on the rationale of the existence of Israel as a “Jewish” nation. If these "Jews in name only" reject the idea of a purely Jewish state, then what the heck are they doing in Israel? They should go back to Europe whence they came, a Europe that has become very Jewish-friendly.

On the other hand, ultra-religious orthodox Jews literally believe the garbage fiction of the Torah – Old Testament – and are copy-paste clones of ultra-religious radical Islamists like the homo barbaricus talibanus of Afghanistan or the homo putidus fartus rulers of Iran. They want to segregate women from men in public places, they refuse to serve in the military draft, and do not pay taxes, among other dispensations they have imposed. Along with their control of government and their attempts to curb the power of the courts, the ultra-religious appear to be moving Israel on a par with Iran and Afghanistan in their attempts to create and impose a more authoritarian radical form of religious government. 

No wonder that God-El-Yahweh-Allah-Dieu-Whatever-His-Name-Is has chosen them as his favorite pet people. They must provide Him with lots of entertainment because of their self-inflicted troubled history, challenging Him by being very naughty (as they are doing now in Palestine) and incurring His divine wrath. Is the putrid religious stench emanating from Jerusalem these days a warning sign of His impending august punishment?

Trump's Dumb and Ugly Den: The Southern State of MISSI-PIPPI

An example of Donald Trump’s “dumb and ugly” American culture in the backwaters of the southern states in the US, also known as “Middle America”. In this case, the state of Mississippi, named after the great river. It should instead be called MISSI.PIPPI.

Mississippi is one of those southern, formerly pro-slavery, states in the US where people are as dumb and backward as anything you can imagine. Racism remains rampant there, just like neighboring Tennessee where the Ku Klux Klan was founded. Naturally it is people like this who massively vote for Donald Dumb (98% of Mississippi republicans voted for Donald Dumb), because they see in him a reflection of their own stupidity. Here’s a story that typifies the prototypical American from the southern states.

In the town of Senatobia, Mississippi, police officers arrested a 10-year-old boy after an officer saw him peeing behind his mother’s car. The police officer first took the boy to the station prison, but later wisened up and returned the boy to his mother's car. Another dumber officer insisted the kid had to go to prison. The compromise was to refer him to youth court. Luky they didn’t shoot him.

Here are the details.

A police officer spotted Quantavious Eason peeing behind his mother's car on August 10, while his mother, Latonya Eason, was inside an attorney's office asking for legal advice. The mother posted a photo of her son sitting in the back of the police car. “This is so ridiculous. Something really needs to be done”, she wrote in the post.

In a statement, Senatobia Police Chief Richard Chandler said officers can refer children as young as 10 to youth court if they are deemed “in need of supervision”, which is determined if they "commit acts that would be identical for an adult under identical circumstances."

“In this situation, an officer personally witnessed a 10-year-old child committing an act in public which would have been illegal for an adult under these circumstances”, Chandler said in the statement. “The officer did not observe a parent on the scene during the initial contact”. Later, Chandler said that the decision to take the 10-year-old to jail was an “error in judgment” because his mother was there as a “reasonable alternative” to transport the boy to the police station.

Mrs. Eason later said that she asked her son why he didn't come inside the office to use the bathroom. He apparently was told by his sister there was no bathroom inside. She also said that the officer initially let the boy get back in her car, but a second officer arrived and said the child had to be “arrested because he can't do that”.

Donald Trump is Going to Prison

A must read about how Trump got a stupid idiot from an evangelical-lutheran-whatever-bullshit Christian sect to break the law and intimidate election officials. Anyone who still believes there is anything Christian about Trump and his fake religious bigot followers is a traitor and an idiot.

Only a portion of the article is reproduced here. Read all on:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/folks-wait-worth-donald-trump-133322610.html

Thu, August 17, 2023

Longtime White House correspondent Brian Karem writes a weekly column for Salon.

Finally. Donald Trump's depravities are laid bare for all to see in a court of law.

With the latest felony indictments handed down by a Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury, former president Donald John Trump is accused of leading the "Fulton 19" — a loose assemblage of accused criminals also known as "The Enterprise" who face charges of  trying to rig the 2020 election in Georgia.

Specifically, the "Enterprise" is accused of forgery, conspiracy to commit forgery, conspiracy to commit false statements and writings, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, conspiracy to commit election fraud, conspiracy to defraud the state, impersonating a public officer and a host of other charges.

Buried deep in the 96-page indictment are some of the most disturbing accusations ever leveled at a president. Indeed they rival those levied against the New York mafia figures Rudy Giuliani once prosecuted while with the Department of Justice.

How low did Don the Con go? Pay attention, all you Christians: Trump is accused of using a pastor to intimidate witnesses.

Stephen Cliffgard Lee is accused of knocking on Ruby Freeman's door, frightening her and causing her to call 911 three times. Lee appeared at the election worker's door roughly two weeks after Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea "Shaye" Moss, were falsely accused by Trump of pulling fake ballots from suitcases in Georgia, with Trump suggesting they committed election fraud. Lee is on videotape (from a police officer body cam) saying that he wanted to speak with Freeman because he had some "pro-bono" services to offer her and he was "also working with some folks who are trying to help Ruby out — and also get to the truth of what's going on."

Lee is a former police chaplain and pastor from Chicago within the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod denomination. He is specifically charged with "attempting to influence witnesses and conspiring to solicit false statements and writings." He is also accused of traveling from outside of the state to "intimidate [Freeman], and solicit her to falsely confess to election crimes that she did not commit."

While you try to wrap your head around a pastor bearing false witness against his neighbor (a violation of the Ninth Commandment, remember?) here's a question: What do you call a hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?

A good start? Trump's latest legal team? What?

The shocking thing about Trump's latest indictment is not how depraved he is, but how easily he manipulated others into helping him — those who had little or nothing to gain and everything to lose.

His debauchery can be summed up in a statement Trump made himself, referenced on Page 18, section five of the Fulton County grand jury indictment: "In one instance, Donald Trump stated to the Acting United States Attorney General, 'Just say that the election was corrupt, and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.'"

..... Continue on https://www.yahoo.com/news/folks-wait-worth-donald-trump-133322610.html

Mideastern or Russian/East European?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Tongue in cheek] The various kinds of hats and coats you see on these pictures represent traditional Middle Eastern clothes that used to be worn by the Hebrew nomadic tribes in the deserts of Arabia during the Bronze  Age (~2500 - 500 BC). Apparently the thick and enormous cylinders made of camel wool protected the wandering Hebrew nomads against the scorching sun. The coats also helped them against the excessive heat. 

The profound similarities between these clothes and those worn today by modern Arab tribes testify to the deep connection that these modern recently converted Jews have managed to create with the Middle East, because the fallacious 2,000 years of exile does not apply to them. Also, their reddish-blond hair and blue eyes (seen only in men, since women are hidden just like Iranian and Afghan women) is also a sign that these people are direct genetic descendants of the ancient and defunct, but otherwise dark-haired, brown-eyed Semitic Hebrews. But Yahweh forbid! that they have any genetic link whatsoever with modern Semitic Palestinian Arabs.

All of this to add to the many proofs and evidence that these people, known as modern Israelis, who illegally migrated from Russia and Eastern Europe to Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, have the God-given right to murder, ethnically cleanse and evict the native Palestinians from their land. Apparently the Bronze Age-vintage Big Zombie in the Sky, a.k.a. God, a.k.a. Baal, a.k.a. El, a.k.a. Yahweh gave them the land some thousands of years ago and authorized their leader Joshua to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing against every man, woman, child and beast of the Amalekite Canaanites - the ancestors of the Palestinians. All you have to do is look at their Russian-steppe clothes to conclude that they belong to the land of Palestine. It doesn't matter that the vast majority of them are relatively recent converts to Judaism and have no genetic or cultural connection with the Semitic Hebrews, and therefore no legitimate claim to the land of Palestine.

As an example, the Khazars were a Turkic people who lived between the Black and Caspian Seas in Southern Russia. The Khazar King Bulan is said to have held a debate between proponents of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, and on the basis of what he heard he decided to convert his people to Judaism because he liked the idea of being God's "Chosen People". When Khazaria eventually fell, its newly converted Jews went to Eastern Europe and became the Ashkenazi Jewish stock that subsequently migrated to Palestine as illegal migrants, stole Palestinian land by terrorizing, expelling and killing the native indigenous Palestinians, and created the brand new artificial state of Israel. Have you ever wondered why there are hundreds of Palestinian refugee camps all around Israel? Of note is that Ashkenazis were identified as Germans by medieval Jewish tradition, and Ashkenaz was the name used for the Rhine river, which was the starting point of Jewish settlement for the newly converted central and eastern European Jews.

The Greatest Jackass the US Has Ever Produced

Long before Donald Dumb appeared on the political stage, I had a conversation once with "pure-bred" US-born East Coast Americans whom I expected would be open-minded liberals who were not afraid of self-criticism. They argued that other countries are elitist and vertically-stratified socieites, while American democracy is more resilient and laterally structured, which is true to a certain extent. On that basis, we agreed that while mediocrity can be found across all human societies, it is much more prevalent, or at least more visible, in the US, to which I added the caveat that there are real dangers in allowing mediocrity to rise to social standings, cultural prominence, and positions of power and responsibility.

For the many decades I spent as an immigrant in the US, I rubbed shoulders and worked alongside US-born Americans, and couldn’t help but notice the social shallowness and ignorance of the average white American, which I attributed to the short history of the country and its paucity in historical references. As descendants of poor peasant immigrants from the boonies of Europe, white Americans have an innate dislike for elites, intellectuals and people who use their brains more than their muscles. Through the cultural trash they regularly dump on the world, Hollywood and corporate America ceaselessly demonstrate this paradigm to us. Hatred of intellectuals and freethinkers is, ironically, something Americans share with totalitarian societies. On the other hand, most Americans I met socially spend excessive time talking about sports and physical ability, and have innate physical skills at using weapons, tools and machines to fix and build things and kill native Amerindians, skills that 17th-18th century immigrants needed to clear forests, cut down trees, build houses, plough land, and ethnically cleanse the land of its indigenous population. But why do they hate anything and anyone unlike them, including new immigrants? 

I believe it is because their own immigrant background and mindset have them stuck in the past. Biologists tell us that when a new species enters a new environment, the evolutionary pressures of the previous environment cease to exert their adaptive influence. There is a lag time that is needed during which to forego the previous envrionment and understand the new one. So the species stops evolving for a while. It freezes in a limbo between the old and new environments. Which is where America is today. It is an incomplete experiment in which humans, though already detached from their former environment, have yet to reach an adaptive evolutionary steady state in their new environment. Hence the wild contrasts between the various communities that constitute this country, and the adolescent immaturity with which America always rejects the international community's efforts at setting universal standards: The refusal of the US to adopt the international metric system is a perfect example. Another example is the awkwardness with which Americans deal with people who otherwise appear just like them, but speak with an accent: They either deal with it from a position of inferiority, or they hate it and find it highly suspicious.

Today's immigrants don't need skills to cut trees and clear land. The world has changed. The world today needs scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs.... And there is where the anti-immigrant sentiment of old stock English and Anglo-saxon America comes from. "Middle" America, as it is often called, is essentially that of 17th-18th century English (and some Anglo-saxon, German, Irish, etc.) peasants who remain stuck in that historical timeframe, unable and unwilling to adjust to the modern world. These are Donald Dumb's followers; as change pressures them to adapt to changing realities, these American peasants react violently, unable to transcend their 17th-century frozen mindsets.

Since they were the founding stock of American society, these peasants have imposed their own register of cultural attributes: Sports and athletism over intellectual achievement, brawn over brain, God over science, etc. In addition, there is a deliberate and generalized tendency in America to bring down everything to the lowest possible common denominator. They don't want to think too much or learn anything beyond the infamously misspelled three "R"s - Readin', Ritin', and Rithmetics. In contrast to the rest of the world, street signs in America are often fully written texts ("Do Not Walk") rather than symbols. In schools, American educators teach “down” so that everyone gets a minimum education, rather than teach “up” to higher standards that not everyone can achieve. I still meet certified teachers and educated people who cannot write proper or correct English, or whose general education is limited to an inward-looking history of America, with all the fallacies and myths built around it, that makes everyone rally around a couple of central tenets. Imagine that in the land of the free, schoolchildren are forced every morning to recite a "Pledge of Allegiance", just like their North Korean counterparts. Have I already mentioned totalitarian?

Some readers might counter-argue that there is no such thing as “proper” or “correct”, and that it is more important to raise a majority of emotionally well-adjusted, albeit educationally-lacking individuals, rather than produce a few high achievers otherwise tagged by normal Americans as athletically-challenged brainy “nerds”. Perhaps this is why these "emotionally well-adjusted" American highschoolers, imbibed with Hollywood violence, go on shooting rampages almost every day. Perhaps this is why American highschoolers graduate with the need to catch up in a “freshman” year of college that focuses on general knowledge, and believe me, I have taught in US universities and incoming students don't even understand their own language. In most other countries, students finish high school already equiped with that general knowledge and go to college ready to specialize.

With this background, I am not bewildered at the immovable popularity of Donald Dumb, a mafioso crook, failed entertainer and businessman, who has no substance and is only driven by appearance and show-off, who is a bigoted liar and a serial adulterer, and is yet adulated by Middle America, particularly by its so-called Christian evangelicals. Donald Dumb is an illiterate bum who struggles to read an English sentence on a teleprompter that other people have written for him. Given the popularity of such a lowlife, and with his rise to become president of the US, I feel vindicated in my judgment that while mediocrity does indeed exist in all cultures and countries, only in America does it rise to the top. A price to pay for democracy? Perhaps, but too steep a price as Donald Dumb's current destructive antics clearly show. Most other democracies almost never bring dangerous and criminal idiots and morons to power.

Donald Dumb often makes spelling mistakes in his social media grunts, his latest being to moan that he is being “Indicated” (in lieu of “Indicted”). Another one I remember from his early political forays is “Unpresidented” (rather than “unprecedented”). Not even the spellchecker would come up with such inanities; Donald Dumb's vocabulary and language rate at 3d grade English. I must therefore assume that half of the country that adulates him is also made up of mediocre morons, "deplorables" as Hillary Clinton called them, who are poor spellers and who believe his asinine “Make America Great Again” slogan. Deep down, they are fine human beings, I am sure, like everyone else on the globe, but I suspect they think that the preamble of the constitution – All men are created equal – applies only to white men, i.e. them; they, and only they, are created equal. The rest of humanity is scum that they don’t want to learn anything about, don’t want to deal with, and definitely not allow to enter and stain their America. Donald Dumb's followers are the peasants, some of them urbanized, of America whose major contributions are to grow corn, raise pigs and worship in ultra-pagan megachurches. Those who truly make America great are its immigrants: Close to 60% of American scientists, doctors, engineers and entrepreneurs are foreign-born immigrants, and without them America would be a technological wasteland of corn, pigs, and barbaric religion.

The disasters that the Supreme Moron Donald Dumb is inflicting on the United States are ample proof that some elitism may be a bulwark against the rise of mediocrity to positions of power, and that democracy-enabled mediocrity should never be a license for anyone to become president of the United States. 

Hanibaal Atheos