The war we've been waiting for
Weapons from the factories of American manufacturers are flooding into Ukraine-- to even a greater degree than they already were, and now the flooding can be freely promoted publicly. Western state media is also now reporting that Sweden and Norway-- non-NATO countries both-- are the
next nation-states in Europe warming to the idea of joining NATO in order to be protected from the Russian menace. This is what we used to call an “escalation.”
And it is precisely the moment in history that our Cold Warriors have been waiting for-- playing out to perfection. We’ve been wooing Eastern European nations and arming them essentially since the thaw of the original “cold war.” It’s just too lucrative an area of economic growth for us not to slip our guns into former Soviet countries-- even though the promise that NATO would not expand eastwardly was a promise made to Russia as a condition of Germany being reunified in 1990.
As per usual, you can’t trust a damn thing that America promises. We told Muammar Gaddafi that we wouldn’t attack him in Libya if he chose to abandon his pursuit of nuclear weapons. He believed us and complied. We took him out anyway. Cute trick by us. You lose, loser. Except that Kim Jong-un, among others, looks at international betrayals such as these and recognizes an objective foolishness that would come with abandoning his own nuclear weapons program. An escalation ensues in his region instead and our oligarchs shed no tears over it because that escalation is highly profitable. We’re not an honest player upon the world stage and we don’t seem to even care if we’re perceived as such.
This is the world that sits in front of Vladimir Putin. Our intelligence state invented evidence that he manipulates our elections. There were phony dossiers, fictional pee tapes, manufactured stories that his agents met with Julian Assange during his asylum with Ecuador in London and with Trump representatives in the lead-up to the 2016 election. Vlad is a “Hitler” because our motive requires a Hitler. The military industrial state needs one at all times to justify its very existence. We can’t be permitted, as Americans, to understand that we are the 600-pound gorilla sitting astride the world-- with military bases in each of over 200 countries but no actual enemies of any formidability anywhere in the world. Instead our dangerous opponents lie secretly in wait supposedly in Asian rice paddies, Central American jungles, and Middle Eastern sand bunkers. You can’t see them, but oh, my goodness, they’re out there. Believe you me.
Trust me on this. If you give one damn about the people of Ukraine, there is only one thing you can do now-- and it’s sadly not very much when matched against the immense power of the bipartisan, consensus war state of the American executive and legislative branches and its complicit media outlets. That one thing is to demand that your leaders-- who control the actions of most of the major players in the world-- engage in cease-fire negotiations with Putin and the Russians. There needs to be a peace agreement and it has to be negotiated, like all peace agreements. If you’re not demanding this, but instead promoting on social media, and/or literally supporting with your financial assets the arming of the government of Ukraine, you’re giving the war pigs exactly what they want from you-- the only thing they want-- the opportunity to present Ukraine to the world as the new Afghanistan.
The last Afghanistan was Afghanistan itself, but that turnip has been squeezed of all its blood over the course of more than two decades. The hope for more profitability there grinded to a halt, along with its entire civilization, and albeit about a decade and a half after American military and political leaders privately admitted to each other that a war there could never be won. (Thanks to Assange and WikiLeaks for revealing this hidden piece of intelligence.) Bully for us, I guess, that we could keep stretching out the bloodshed so long even after all was knowingly lost.
Ukraine is the next best hope for the profiteers. Its most well-heeled opponent, Vladimir Putin, has already been falsely blamed in the U.S. for Hillary Clinton having been soundly beaten by the least-popular major presidential candidate in U.S. polling history. He’s a well-established enemy, a bogeyman, Slenderman.
Putin’s invasion of his neighbor is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for-- and, indeed, vigorously attempting to provoke. Thanks to Assange, we know that our government has anticipated this scenario since at least 2008. Leaked diplomatic cables presented to us by WikiLeaks and making Assange a permanent enemy of the state revealed that we have long known that continuing to push NATO into Ukraine was a major sore point, not only for Putin’s government, but even for the many liberals that live in Russia. It’s long been perceived by them as a threat to their regional sovereignty when up against the 600-pound gorilla.
That’s the reason that President Obama, alone among the last three of our presidents, refused to allow weapons sales to Ukraine. But Trump lifted that moratorium and then Biden fell in line behind him-- since the claim of a two-party political system in the U.S. is a myth. Selling weapons to Ukraine and other former Soviet bloc countries has become a multi-billion dollar industry for western states. There are missiles in silos in Poland aimed at Russia less than a hundred miles from its border. (Imagine the reaction here if Canada permitted Putin to have missiles aimed at the U.S. from Calgary, Alberta. Actually we don't have to imagine it. The provocation can be thought of as the ongoing eastern hemisphere version of the Cuban Missile Crisis.)
Since our leaders have long viewed this assault by Russia upon Ukraine as inevitable if we continued down our path of heightening tensions, we have to also assume that we now welcome it. There have never been any attempts at negotiating with Putin over this issue, not during the last seven years anyway. And there still haven’t recently-- not even since bombing started. The joint chiefs and the CIA command might actually be wondering-- what took the man so long? They've been working their ass off for years trying to politically justify a weapons build-up, and, in the meantime, have had to fuel instead a major escalation in the pretend-fighting between “liberals” and “conservatives” over strawman issues at home.
Finally, we’ve got an overwhelming Washington consensus in support of war-- Putin is Hitler and we’ve got to unite as one to shed the blood of some more people that live in countries that aren’t this one. That’s the only way you can deal with a Hitler-- meeting might with might, but always meeting in a road game or a neutral site, never at home. We can’t negotiate with him. He's a tyrant. We can’t even be permitted to hear what he has to say about it. He would only speak in lies. Ukraine is an even better Afghanistan than Afghanistan was because it’s located in Europe. These people are white. They're not Somalis, Iraqis, Syrians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Yemenis, or other mud peoples. No, these people "look and live just like us"-- something Richard Barrons, a retired British general and one-time head of their joint forces of command, actually said on BBC Tuesday. There's no luxury of political correctness any longer, only the need for simple truths.
“Consensus” is always the political goal in war because it’s the most profitable version. We've attained it now. There's no difference anymore in the rhetoric of the "left" and the right. The applause lines in regards to Ukraine were the big winners at Tuesday's State of the Union. In fact, they brought down the house. Who would now dare dissent at home above and against the din of the drumbeat of war? Who has the courage to do it?
How we're being pro-vaxxed into Ukraine
I'm double-shot vaccinated. And boosted. I feel the need to tell you that at the outset. Additionally, I want to say that I would love for my employer to mandate the vaccine for my colleagues. It's a clear matter of worker safety, as far as I'm concerned. Your rights end where the next person's begin. But here's where our autocratic government begins to struggle- with the first line item in its Constitution.
It begins with the reality that we have privatized our freedom of speech. And this is not a bug in the system, it's a feature. Big tech companies under the private control of billionaires-- and facing a constant barrage of hearings from a partisan Congress-- hold a tightening grip on our modern platforms of speech. Congressional reps are constantly putting their fingers on the scale in order to influence what should and should not be allowed on these platforms. It has become a pathology of American liberalism. You get a taste for that power of silencing someone and you only want more. It is not simply the "consequences" of speech, therefore, as they claim when they attempt to silence, it is government pressure being applied to Constitutionally-protected dissent.
I don't agree with everything Joe Rogan has said on his podcast. I don't agree with everything I've said on this blog. It's not the point. There is no greater threat to our democracy at this time than our government's attempt to define "misinformation." Its overreach explains why pitchforks are being sharpened. The party in charge of each of the presidency, the Senate, and the Congress is bleeding voters. The purported threat of "misinformation" capable of clouding our brain puts us under the protection of so-called "experts." Who are these experts? Well, in the case of Covid-19 and its spread, they are the medical professionals and the researchers-- and god bless 'em. But they are also the vaccine manufacturers at Big Pharma, the people whose advertisements sometimes seem to be the only ones sponsoring your favorite news programs. Before we privatized our freedom of speech, we privatized our public and personal health.
Our government does not care about your health. Let's just be clear about that. Vaccine policies and public health policies have not been different under a President Biden than they were under a President Trump. The same dance of school closings and re-openings has continued. The rhetoric might be different but the policies aren't. Dr. Anthony Fauci is still in charge. Biden can push out items he knows will be rejected, never seeing the light of day, and he can talk the talk they always talk, but trust me, if there wasn't a Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to absorb the liberal wrath for maintaining the status quo right down the line, there would be two others, or three others, or four, if need be. That's how it works. Fifteen years ago, we had the same Democratic control of both the executive and legislative branches-- for two years (like this time)-- and that time it was the lack of a "super-majority" that was to blame for why the Democratic president couldn't deliver on the change he promised. When you read the attacks on Manchin and Sinema from the other members of their Democratic caucus, please remember that it is entirely performative. It's Lee Harvey Oswald pushing "Fair Play for Cuba" in the French Quarter. They all got their payouts from the same donors. And those donors are getting exactly what they ordered.
If the Democratic Party really cared about the spread of Covid-19, or about your physical well-being beyond anything other than you as a medical "consumer," it would not be doing everything in its power to make sure that vaccines were unavailable in the Southern hemisphere-- in countries were Black and brown people live, incidentally. Instead, as those people die off at the fastest clips, Biden sides with Big Pharma to also protect the Pill Cartel--the one whose profit was created by taxpayer-funded research at the National Institute of Health-- against the existential threat of generic drugs. As a bonus to its stockholders, this leaves Covid free to more easily evolve into new strains in underprotected locales like South Africa, where the most recent one did, and where they can later return to us again and again and again, and force booster after booster after booster. Free shots!-- don't you know-- except for the money you already paid to develop the science and then the money you continue to pay to your government to reimburse Big Pharma for each biannual jab you endure.
What do you think the typical Intelligence agent does with his or her day? Does she wear a fedora and sniff around cafes in Prague? Does he go undercover in Damascus and try to infiltrate gangs of young Muslim political anger? No, he or she sits at a computer. The job of almost all of their agents is to sit at a desk and go digging online, seeking out already-existing distrust in American Power or perhaps just inventing it. They are literally agents of "misinformation." We know this because Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, both now mortal enemies of the intelligence state, leaked the facts of what they do to us.
What they don't seem to understand--politically-- is how transparent it all is to everyone without a still-festering Trump Derangement disease, the one that leads one to believe that a largely-ineffectual leader was a threat above par and one that now wholeheartedly embraces Dick Cheney, of all people. They, themselves, ignore the "experts" on climate change, as just one other example. Or on the nutritional science that says unequivocally that meat consumption is bad for one's health. It's only the vaccine deniers that get targeted for muzzling.
Joe Biden's family was up to his facelift in dirty dealings in Ukraine and in China-- not just his son, but his brother, too. The details have been outlined in this space a couple times, and the story has now been proven true in its entirety by Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger. The details were initially labeled as "misinformation" back when they threatened Joe's candidacy against Trump and the Cold Warriors' crusade against Vladimir Putin. These "experts" are the same ones we're now told we need to be listening to during the standoff with Russia over Ukraine. You don't even have to ask them. They'll promote it. MSNBC and CNN have hired them. They're retired ex-spooks (and sometimes not even retired ones), dozens of them, that now serve as on-air "national defense" experts, rattling the sabers for war with Russia in Eastern Europe. They are the war pigs that took us into Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and also, for the sake of making the point, left those locations oh-for-three.
Obama vaguely stood up to the national defense "experts" before leaving office. He all but proclaimed that we have no vital national interest in Ukraine, a non-NATO country. But he was also punting. At the time, he assumed that Hillary Clinton would be taking over possession of the football. Obama had a short window where he could speak the actual truth that Americans have no stomach for such a war. The Deep State understands that reality still. Americans want to be at war with Russia like the CIA wants to be declared obsolete. Not only would it be an unacceptable cost in blood in a region of absolutely zero strategic importance to the United States people, we would fuck it up. We're terrible at war. We haven't won one in the age of television. Like every other conflict we stick our beak into, we would simply use our military and economic muscle to prop up a strongman obsequious to us who would proceed to corrupt and loot their government. We would lose yet another war "for the hearts and minds" of the people that we were pretending to assist. And this time, our opponent would have nukes. We would be at the end of our soft preseason schedule.
Don Draper couldn't sell this war with Ukraine. So what options are left for the pigs? Only their old playbook-- declaring treason by your opponents and then keep trying to flash those bona fides. See these stripes on my sleeve, this bird, I'm a military expert. Most importantly, they try also to suppress the mountains of conflicting information. Label it "misinformation." Damn that pesky First Amendment. We're not saying you can't disagree. We'll just pressure you off your platform if you don't toe the line. Your view is "harmful." See the parallels now with health information? If you can't, trust me that others easily can.
Now, when you have dimwits like Neil Young playing helpfully along, it helps to reinforce the required distraction. Neil Young doesn't want his musical songbook sharing a platform with the podcast of Joe Rogan because of Rogan having provided a platform, at times, for anti-vaccination advocates, or even just vaccine skeptics, as it were. Young is not exactly attacking Rogan. He's attacking Spotify, Rogan's digital platform. If it were an attack on Rogan, the rocker would simply say, "I'm not going to listen to him." He's not saying that. He's saying, "I don't want anyone to listen to him. It's either him or me." Rogan is not Young's competition. Gordon Lightfoot is. This is the dangerous idea. It fortifies-- to the tremendous benefit of American Power-- that private communication platforms should be controlled by the government. I don't agree with something-- so it shouldn't be heard at all. Fortunately for all of us, Spotify made the choice it did. Rogan's critics lie about his various positions on political and social matters. They often assign positions to him that have only been staked out by his generally free-thinking guests. They equate his platform with his endorsement, and, frankly, that makes them look like idiots incapable of residing in a free country. Is it just because I grew up with Phil Donahue casually on television that I'm capable of realizing, for example, that someone having the leader of the American Nazi Party on his or her show is not providing their political backing also? (Rogan, the supposed "right wing nut," incidentally, endorsed Bernie Sanders for president in 2020. None of the television news networks or largest newspapers in the country certainly came close to doing that.)
They hope to influence the people that are generally ignorant of the Rogan podcast, which-- no coincidence-- has often provided a platform also for critics of American foreign policy, such as Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Tulsi Gabbard. The attacks on him are, you'll pardon the phrase, "misinformation." Rogan, at least, will occasionally admit he has been wrong about something. His opponents don't do this, as a rule.
The movement to silence is also a concentrated attack by dying media entities upon more resonant modern platforms like Spotify and Substack, which have no stockholders or advertisers to attack as surrogates. They're finding that it is much more difficult to pressure independent-thinking Americans directly than it is to pressure naturally-skittish ad execs.
Our government officials lie, and there is no more open secret than that one. Therefore, people also innately understand that when the hammer of censorship comes down, it must be connected to this trust deficit they have with their leaders. The greatest weapon Kennedy assassination "conspiracists" have ever had at their disposal, for example, was the laughable Warren Report. Americans are not ignorant of the fact that their government was overthrown in 1963. Read the surveys. They apparently just don't know what the hell to do about it. They would no longer tolerate an armed services draft, or believe military reports unquestioningly, not after Vietnam. The freedom of information in the press during that slaughter of humanity queered the warmongers' hustle. So the agents began embedding themselves with the enemy-- that is, with "the free press." As a result, almost the entirety of real journalism today has to be conducted illegally, like the work done by Julian Assange. The punishments for whistleblowing were made extreme because that was the greatest threat.
The medical community has largely had the science on their side in vaccinations, but they've already been proven wrong multiple times. Of course there's cause for fair examination and critique. Here, we're talking about the combined entities of the FDA, CDC, NIH, certainly the White House. At first, the spread of the virus was not thought to be airborne. Reports that the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, were very officially labeled "misinformation" at one time. Now, the Biden administration admits that it's not so sure that hypothesis can be discounted. Candidate Biden, in July of 2020, went so far as to claim that you wouldn't get the virus if you were vaccinated. (And you thought his other promises were busts.) Making it worse, the good folks at Politifact later declared this whopper only "half true." Dr. Fauci, our point man with a stethoscope, has not only held three different public positions on the efficacy of masks, but he has essentially admitted that he lied to us about them at one point for our own good-- so that emergency workers could have less restricted access to them. He and the other "experts" have flip-flopped on the separate subjects of ventilators, cloth masks, lockdowns, and what constitutes "herd immunity." This is not to criticize their grasping or their efforts. It's to criticize their posturing and their arrogance.
I'm no medical expert, but I do consider myself an expert on the American people. I'm an insider. We're naturally skeptical, and rightfully so. Our government overthrew one of its most popular presidents. It lied its way into, through, and out of multiple wars of aggression and imperialism. That's the current threat to your public health-- a government that was already completely ill-suited to cope with any challenge that required truth and candidness. Americans hear the word "misinformation," and they instinctively know that what you really mean is "unofficial information." We're forced to sort new pieces of info today basically for ourselves and together with our fellow citizens, and this info comes at us relentlessly and often very persuasively. The anchor sitting at the news desk in front of the camera vouching for Pfizer and Moderna is the person that's still vouching for the expertise of the Iraq War neocons after this next commercial break. But go ahead and tell us again we're stupid. There's a mid-term coming in about nine months and there's going to have to be some new scapegoats.
How Hunter Biden and "the big guy" came to be above the law
Donald Trump had become such a dangerous man after 2016 that the rules had to change. There could be no “October surprise” in the presidential race of 2020. One simply could not be allowed to happen, just as an anti-corporate candidate could not be allowed to secure the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Joe Biden had been ordained the party’s best, albeit-compromised hope. Its leaders had chosen to apply hospital corners to a sleazy waterbed and now they had to lie in it. Biden simply
had to win the general election.
When the “surprise” attempt was sprung by Republican operatives in the tenth month of the year-- timed for maximum damage, we were looking at a reveal that Joe’s son, Hunter, was up to his eyeballs in overseas corruption while trading on his family name. Not only was the story suppressed, however, by the major left-leaning news outlets, but those few outlets that did cover the story-- such as the right-leaning New York Post-- found themselves “de-platformed” from the internet. It was “misinformation,” we were told, which-- with more of the details now available, should tell us all we need to know about what the Democrats in Washington have in store for Mark Zuckerberg. They don’t want to destroy Facebook. They simply want to hijack it.
Ben Schreckinger of Politico has written a vital book called “The Bidens” that details the soft (and sometimes-hardening) corruption that has infected the first family of Delaware going back to Papa Joe’s first statewide race in 1972. Those aforementioned news outlets have chosen not to review the book, but the literary product is detailed and aggressively sourced. I give you my word as a Biden: It’s a must-read. There’s no agenda. Right-wing pundits momentarily embraced it, but then found that it wasn’t a partisan hit.
Hunter is referred to in one chapter title as “the Notorious R.H.B.”-- Robert Hunter Biden. Some political reporters, most of them now dead, owe Billy Carter and Roger Clinton retroactive apologies as Joe’s youngest of two sons is, without a doubt, the biggest fuckup in the long history of fucked up presidential relatives. He’s a drunkard and drug addict of the first rate-- present tense-- and those pastimes probably qualify as his least-damaging attributes because at least when he’s holed up in a crack den and chasing those big scores, he’s only hurting himself. The rest of his waking hours seem to be spent chasing after and conducting large-scale financial scams, cozying up to corrupt international businessmen, and ripping off U.S. taxpayers. If he were the son of any political figure other than the guy that was Donald Trump’s major opponent in the most recent election cycle, Beltway reporters would have come crashing down months ago on both him and his elected relative.
Choosing just a random starting point to save time, the time was May of 2016. Federal agents arrested two of Hunter’s business partners, Devon Archer and Jason Galanis, plus several other of their associates, with defrauding the Oglala Sioux tribe out of $60 million. Charges were not filed against Hunter in this case, nor would they be later that year when he totaled his car in Joshua Tree National Park and police found a crack pipe, a Delaware attorney general’s badge and a Secret Service calling card inside the cabin.
He went into business with Ye Jianming, an oil man from China, on a series of lucrative energy projects. One of their partners later confirmed that he had been led to believe that Joe was aware of his son’s business plans, and an email with an authenticity that has never been questioned by its subjects suggested that Joe would hold a ten percent ownership in one of the projects. The email read “10 held by H for the big guy?” Another purported email from Hunter indicated that he was receiving a $10 million annual fee from a Chinese billionaire for “introductions alone.” In 2020, Joe was on the presidential trail telling Americans that President Trump was overhyping the economic threat of China. Ye’s top lieutenant, Patrick Ho, was ultimately arrested for money laundering and for passing bribes to high-ranking government officials in the countries of Chad and Uganda. As Ho went off to prison, Ye disappeared.
Hunter has more notably served on the board of directors for a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma Holdings-- because that’s what the boards of billion dollar companies are looking for-- crack-addicts who have been drummed out of the Navy reserves for failing a drug test. The criminal division of the IRS started investigating the source of his income in 2017, possibly before, and the FBI put him under surveillance. Their concerns included potential money laundering, tax fraud, and counterintelligence complications, but in their investigation, they also found large payments made by Hunter to Eastern European women.
When Hunter was sued for paternity by a stripper, he denied a sexual relationship with the woman. After a paternity test confirmed he was indeed the father of her child, he claimed he had no recollection of what had been a one-night encounter in September 2017. The child was born eleven months after their night together. This incident is not a crime, except for him to have lied under an oath administered by the court.
In 2018, in Delaware, Hunter got into a fight with his girlfriend, Hallie, and she threw his gun into a garbage can outside of a grocery store. His relationship with Hallie began when he was married to Kathleen. When Kathleen divorced him, she cited in court documents his extravagant spending on drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts to other women. Hallie held the distinction of being his dead brother’s widow. Their relationship was none of our damn business. When Hallie went back to retrieve the gun that particular night on Hunter’s orders, it could not be found, but the Secret Service was now involved. The agency was working to find the paperwork on the purchase of the gun, even though Hunter was not under Secret Service protection in 2018. On the purchase form for the piece, Hunter had claimed that he was not an active user of illegal drugs, which was not true. It’s a felony to lie on the form. An elderly man who frequently went through the store’s trash bins eventually turned the gun over to authorities and no charges stemmed from the incident. This store was located across the street from a high school.
The Bidens’ strategy when they’re confronted with Hunter’s various crimes and misdemeanors is to strike back. How dare you try to make my son part of this race, Joe warned non-compliant inquisitors in 2020, in-between Vaseline-smeared verbal odes to his other son, the dead one. When asked about Hunter’s business dealings by a voter in Iowa in 2019, Joe snapped back at him, “You’re a damn liar, man.” Hunter stoops to any depth for self-preservation as well. When he was trying to sneak his homeless, crack-addicted girlfriend, Bicycles, into a Washington D.C. building called the House of Sweden, which houses the embassies of two foreign governments, he accused the building staff of racism, dropping the Obama family name as well as his own. He penned a letter that said, in part, “If (a Sweden House employee) has an issue with the race or dress of my visitors I think we should sit down and discuss with an attorney present.” By the night we’ve reached the grocery store occurrence, he shares with police his opinion that this particular store has a lot of “shady” people working at it. He expressed the sentiment just as two Hispanic employees of the store were walking by the scene. According to the police report, the officer then asked if Hunter was referencing the two men that had just passed by his comment. Hunter replied, “Yea, prolly illegal.”
In April of 2019, Hunter dropped off a computer laptop for repairs in Wilmington, Delaware. A month later, he was in Los Angeles introducing himself to a woman he would marry within a week. The rest of the Bidens, as close-knit as a family can be, didn’t know he had a girlfriend until after he had tied the knot.
There’s no question that Joe Biden, as vice president, traveled to Ukraine and demanded that a special prosecutor there be fired. This prosecutor had launched an investigation into Hunter’s company, Burisma. The reason there’s no dispute about this is that Joe bragged about what he had done in 2018 in front of the Council on Foreign Relations. It was a story that made him sound big and tough so he told it. “If the prosecutor is not fired,” he told the council about his tough stance taken with the Ukrainian president, “You’re not getting the (U.S.) money. Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.” Nicely done, captain. You’re tough on criminals here at home but tough on rogue prosecutors in the former Soviet bloc.
Meanwhile, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, “America’s Mayor,” was privy to Biden’s potential conflicts of interest in Ukraine because he was competing with him in a grab for dollars. It often takes one corrupt careerist to recognize another, and business contracts of vast wealth, by their nature, often leave other bidders resentful and out in the cold. Trump proceeded to do what he was accusing Biden of having done. He attempted to pressure the Ukrainian president into opening an investigation into the Bidens. This is the shit we’re forced to swim in because of our leaders. Trump would be impeached, but not removed from office by Congress.
The charges against the Bidens, as launched from the mouths of Rudy and Donald, held little credibility with voters because the two messengers were mirrored versions of the criminals in question. If anything, their lobs smelled of professional jealousy. The “fake news” companies protected Biden, and-- save for the simplistic, manipulative labels that Trump attached to their actions-- the fact of the media applying a double standard was undeniable. Traditional outlets were now being up front with their customers that the old rules of journalism could no longer be applied due to an unprecedented assault upon democracy being waged by the president. One side’s “fake news” was the other side’s “misinformation.”
Just days before the 2020 election, details were disclosed in the Post about what was found on Hunter’s laptop. The computer had found its way from the repair shop in Wilmington to Giuliani. Members of the Washington press corps closed ranks against the story. These members were largely left-leaning and in the employ of left-leaning billionaires who despised Trump for the unrepentant, crude and steroid-infused way that he did what they also did.
The Bidens, for their part, never denied that it was Hunter’s laptop, or that he had left it at a shop and failed to pick it up, or the reports of its contents. Several months after the election, Hunter admitted to CBS News that the laptop could “certainly” be his.
Included in these emails was a 2015 one from a Burisma executive to Hunter thanking him for setting up a meeting with his father, the vice president. The email served to contradict Joe’s steadfast claims that he kept an iron wall of separation between his political career and the business dealings of his family. Only a fool would have ever believed him, but even Lincoln had once recognized a nation of fools.
The press had strong recall for the manner in which Hillary Clinton had been supposedly done dirty in 2016 by that election cycle’s “October surprise”-- emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee detailing the organization’s internal machinations, descriptions of undemocratic scale-thumbing, and stirring the public towards a strengthened distaste for the party’s nominee. Never again.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the network television news refused to share the specifics of the Hunter charges, except to dismiss them outright. Twitter and Facebook both blocked the story completely, disabling the account of the Post, the oldest newspaper in the United States. Twitter claimed that was operating under an existing policy of stifling the information contained in stolen materials, but the owner of the shop displayed a copy of his repair agreement outlining that any item left in his shop for 90 days was considered abandoned and now his possession.
It only made sense that the social media giants would do this. While left-leaning Americans started talking a big game, post-Trump’s election, about how private companies had the right to censor what was on their platforms, replacing the liberals' previously-avowed First Amendment principles with an alternative argument in favor of so-called “consequences,” they collectively neglected to address the fact that social media titans had been called to testify before Congress no less than three times in 2020 prior to election day and threatened there with greater regulation in the case of potential non-compliance with the legislature’s wishes. There was also the fact that America has now essentially privatized the First Amendment.
Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, later categorized his company’s killing of the Post story as a “mistake,” but by then, the Donald dragon had been slayed-- at least for a period of four years. Another example of recent “misinformation” permitted and perhaps even perpetuated by rogue social media companies is the “right wing” and “racist” claim that the Covid-19 virus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, rather than in a zoonotic “wet market” of that city’s streets, as first suspected. Shortly after Biden took office, however, his administration began a formal investigation into whether the lab escape hypothesis was, in fact, true.
The Biden campaign put out a new statement in response to the laptop matter just before Election Tuesday. The legalese within was much richer than at any time previous: “Joe Biden has never even considered being involved in business with his family, nor in any overseas business whatsoever. He has never held stock in any such business arrangements nor has any family member or any other person ever held stock for him.” So unless the Barisma or Chinese reps are dumb enough to put his name in an email, we’re on solid ground here. And in related news this week, the owner of the NFL’s Washington D.C. football team was similarly "punished" for operating under a business atmosphere of sexual intimidation and harassment so his team was transferred into his wife’s name. We’re not all stupid, Joe. We know that you can help yourself by helping your son. The impropriety is still there even if Hunter is set up to be the one to wear the black and white horizontal stripes.
Having Donald Trump be the person to outline the case against Hunter Biden and explain to the public why it should lead to a general distrust in a theoretical “President Biden” is much like having a 12-year-old do those things. Not only does Trump struggle at communicating complicated words and ideas, particularly to people generally predisposed to oppose him, he’s also a compromised spokesman for clean government. During the second televised debate, Joe combatted Trump’s attacks by calling the Hunter charges “a Russian plant.” He did not elaborate. Screw the details, America. Putin is hiding under your bed. This next time around, Republicans might consider the possibility that a brighter, more trustworthy candidate could make a stronger case for the now-incumbent’s malfeasance.
Ultimately, the news media succeeded in making a strong enough claim to us that the unreliable players bringing the charges against Hunter and Joe made the charges unreliable also. (In this way, it was precisely the same as the charge of sexual assault that had been brought against Joe during the campaign by a former Senate staffer of his named Tara Reade. Only one broad? Trump still loses.) And it’s apparently no longer the job requirement of a professional journalist to attempt to prove or disprove a volatile charge that’s been made in the public arena, only to wait for leaks and then make an editorial decision about whether the accuser seems credible. And then also go with what’s best for the media company’s financial bottom line. I’m sure we’ll take a hit to our credibility for not investigating this charge, but our credibility is already in the crapper. We don’t have to be trusted, only more trusted than the competition.
Even “right wing” Fox News didn’t seem to fight hard for the Post story. That outfit was pissed with Trump too, and Biden is not really viewed as a threat to their hustle. Their decision-makers are not allowed to talk openly about this, but I’ll disclose the truth finally: Fox News’ ratings actually go up when a Democrat is in control of the nation’s highest office. Inversely, the financial fortunes of MSNBC are in a long-term committed relationship with Trump Derangement Syndrome. They win even when they “lose.” They’re all in it together, as a wise person once said. Just as Bill and Hillary happily attended the wedding of Donald and Melania, it seems that Hunter Biden once wrote a letter of recommendation for a young relative of Fox News’ biggest superstar, Tucker Carlson. We know this because the truth of it was on Hunter’s laptop. It was actually Bernie Sanders that was the only true threat to the nation’s council of power.
This laptop story has legs. It had legs in October of 2020. A crack addict wanted to get a laptop repaired. Then he left town on a drug-fueled trip to California and forgot that he had taken it into the shop. That’s a plenty believable scenario. In fact, a second Hunter laptop wound up in the possession of the government. This one was grabbed up by the DEA after a raid on the office of one of Hunter’s former partners. The guy is a little sloppy when he’s spiraling.
All of this dirty Biden activity is just what transpired during the age of Trump. There’s a closet full of Biden family skeletons dating back decades, as chronicled by Schreckinger. It’s only because of Hunter’s wide shadow, for example, that we hear so little talk of how Joe’s brothers, Jim and Frank, also enjoy sticking their hands in your pockets and getting in bed with the same type of unsavory global player that their nephew does. The family’s laundry list is so long that even the loudest Biden apologists have had to audible at the line to ultimately dismiss Hunter as a “troubled” chip off the old uncles while it was tragic Beau, now lost, that would have been the straight-shooter like dear old Dad. Joe successfully spun the Trump attacks on his son into electoral gold-- he successfully fended them off, at least. The Bidens have relatable family problems, as far as many Americans are concerned-- the tragedy of death and the scourge of addiction, if not the multi-million dollar Chinese oil deals.
Had enough of political dynasties yet, America? You loved the Bushes and the Clintons. The Biden’s “Delaware Way” would-be dynasty ran into a roadblock of a cemetery and a crack den, but there’s still Don Jr. out there. Conflicts of interest, undue influence, and special treatment are as American as your mother’s apple fritter and the ground-rule double. This foundation of our nation shows no sign of crumbling as the people refuse to demand anything better than the already-used tissue they’re always being handed. And I give you my word on that as a Biden.
"...And stay out"
Doesn't it feel good? Afghanis never attacked us but we went in there and we kicked some ass anyway as a revenge-- against the Saudis maybe(?)-- for September 11th. We haven't talked about the freedom of Afghani women for twenty years-- and so maybe it was never about that, anyway, but we marched through and we liberated them at the points of our guns. That feeling you're feeling in the pit of your stomach is really gratification for a job well done.
No military tactics were capable of "winning" this war. No additional technological advantages were going to accomplish anything. We hadn't learned any lessons before Afghanistan. We weren't going to learn any lessons while we were there. We're the anti-vaxxers of the world's military industrial complex. We're still oh-for-the post-Hitler era in winning wars. On the other hand, we haven't formally declared any of these subsequent wars-- they've all been illegal-- so we've got that to our record in the standings as a technicality.
We could have never won. Aside from the fact that we were a group of bumper sticker warriors against a band of actual freedom fighters defending their own country, we never declared an objective. But our military leaders also knew we couldn't win. The Afghanistan Papers that were leaked revealed that each of three different presidential administrations were lying to us about what was actually our utter lack of progress. How badly were we outmatched by the Taliban? Even when we're on our way out, we're still being attacked by suicide bombers. Suicide bombers, think about that. We're evacuating and they're still giving up their lives as just a special way of expressing "get the fuck out and don't come back."
Not only were Afghanistan and the Taliban never a threat to us, nobody anywhere is a threat to us. Our weapons budget is bloated, gassy, and without any enemy. Our military and its adventures only exist to serve a single purpose-- to line the pockets of five principal war profiteers. They are Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrup Grumman. Last year, these five corporate entities alone took $167 billion out of our national budget--even during a lockdown global pandemic. These "contractors" are really profiteers with a vice grip of weaponry upon our country and the world.
We were never there to assist with "democracy-building." We weren't actually there to help build up the Afghan economy. Our industrial capitalists are at cross purposes, fundamentally, with the economic success of other nations. Their victory would be our defeat. Our actual motivation is simply to pillage and destroy for the profit of a few. The military mission can't be explained to the citizenry in any honest fashion by U.S. government officials because the true mission is only murderous piracy. Of course the Afghan government we set up would be villainously corrupt. Ours is villainously corrupt.
There are other governments on the planet that are more vicious towards their own people than ours, but none are more vicious towards the world as a whole. None can even come close. We're engaged-- even upon another hideous defeat-- with still endless bombings of endless targets, "collateral" murders, starvations, the toppling of governments, election interferences, and the ongoing creation of countless refugees.
Barack Obama called this war on Afghanistan "the good war." He might be a war criminal, but he's no dummy. He was stealing this terminology from the late Studs Terkel from his shared hometown of Chicago. Studs titled his oral history book of World War II "The Good War," but he put a question mark after it. Obama knew the only way to sell this moral-cheapening and disgusting destruction of a devastatingly-poor country was by inferring a parallel between the Taliban and the Nazis. That's how we do. At the same time, he knew and protected the big secret of the intelligence apparatus he ostensibly controlled-- that we were losing badly and were powerless to do anything to avoid ultimately losing.
We've allowed our language to soften which each subsequent defeat since the Cold War commenced, but we are baby killers. We kill often and we kill indiscriminately. Our soldiers leave their moral consciences at home by direct order of deployment and then they return to emptiness and mass suicide after they act without conscience, if they return at all. We send robots to kill now when we run short on soldiers.
During the nightly drivel that is cable television news, the former CIA pundits still under the agency's sway and sometimes not even accurately "former," they summarize that we "didn't win," but that we didn't lose either, or perhaps it's that we defeated ourselves. They debate which of the two parties is to blame. But if ever there was an epic failure of pure bipartisanship, this fucker was it. Both sides approved the use of force, both favored escalations when their man was in charge-- two Democrats ultimately and two Republicans also. Both sides participated in and benefitted from the corruption. Representatives in both parties-- nearly all representatives in total-- approved the funnel into their offices that takes the profiteers' payouts and sends it back in the form of campaign contributions. They are murderers. It was a failure of both of our criminal parties-- indeed, a failure of the two-party system itself. The twenty-year Afghanistan blood-drenched clusterfuck was a product of the red state/blue state tumor that eats away at America. It's a colossal failure too of Senator Bernie Sanders and "the Squad" in the House of Representatives, who believe that any meaningful change can ever take place without the creation of a third party-- in fact, any third party with any philosophical leaning whatsoever provided simply that it not accept any money from the profiteers.
Of course, the Afghanis were seen celebrating this week. Since when do nations not cheer when they gain their independence? I'm so, so very glad we lost. I'm only sorry that it won't be the last time.
The Screw Joe Jackson Game
Sorry for the continued hiatus. On the occasion, however, of the "Field of Dreams" spectacle tonight in my home state of Iowa, here's a re-post of my initial thoughts when this promotional event was announced two years ago. We would have all been better off had it been skipped due to Covid-19, like it was last year. Having the Evil Empire come out to the sticks from New York, taking on the White Sox and helping Major League Baseball to cash in on what was Shoeless Joe's profound grief while he was alive, makes it all the worse somehow.
Thursday, August 08, 2019
A Field of Dreams without Shoeless Joe
In 1989’s classic movie Field of Dreams, set and filmed here in Iowa, ghost baseball players walk out from a cornfield outfield onto the soft grass of a baseball diamond that has been carved out-- complete with pitcher's mound and backstop-- by novice farmer Ray Kinsella. The ghost players are spiritual tourists that had once been the eight Chicago White Sox players banned for life by major league commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis in 1921 for conspiring to lose the 1919 World Series to Cincinnati. When the ghost of the best of these players, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, asks Kinsella about the floodlights that are illuminating the field, the fantasist farmer explains that team owners had subsequently discovered-- about one score after 1919-- that they could make more money by installing lights and playing the games at night. Jackson replies, dismissively, “Owners.”
Today comes word that Major League Baseball, the Chicago White Sox, and the New York Yankees, are planning for the two teams to meet on the new “Field of Dreams” at the film site in Dyersville, Iowa next summer for a game that will count as much as any of the others in the American League standings. I don’t wish to make too much of my opposition to the game except to say that I think it’s another symptom of the spiritual death of America.
The long and the short of it, and the reason for my expressed angst, is that this game is really a thoughtless money grab that ignores the actual legacy and meaning of something important. This ballfield was created first, back in the '70s, in someone’s mind-- that of a short story author from Canada named Bill Kinsella, at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in Iowa City. (He died in 2016.) It was a story that tied the unforgiven “Black Sox" to something more spiritual than the game they played, beyond life and death, something nearing religious for a few of us. If it wasn't a personal story to Kinsella too, he wouldn't have gifted his last name to his main protagonist.
The point of the plot-- which excited Iowans seem to be forgetting today-- is that these players were no longer welcome in Major League Baseball. That's why they came here-- to Iowa. They received lifetime bans-- ones that have since been extended from “lifetime” to “eternal.” This field belongs to those men. Ray built it for them. He told us so in the movie. It’s their refuge. It’s unsanctioned space, a thing separate. It’s the prison yard of the correctional facility of their banishments even after death. Since they wouldn’t be allowed to suit up in a major league game at a major league park in 2020, I’m utterly unconvinced as to why Major League Baseball should be permitted on theirs. With the Field of Dreams, Iowans think they have a tourist attraction that's even capable of bringing Major League Baseball to town. They actually have something even better than that. Something not everyone is even capable of seeing. Something... sorry, heavenly.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, conversely, is a man completely overwhelmed of the civic responsibility he holds. He has zero imagination, no discernible depth to his being. He’s a baseball commissioner who pursued that job because it's a good job to have. It's clearly not because he likes baseball. He doesn't. I'll never forget watching his first game on the job in 2015, opening night, Cardinals and Cubs in St. Louis. He tells ESPN's TV crew that Busch Stadium is lovely. He's never been there... So he's been Commissioner Selig's top financial officer for two decades, the second most powerful man in the sport, and this Busch Stadium, opened in 2006, has on this night already hosted multiple games in each of three different World Series, five different League Championship Series, and an All-Star Game. And he's never been there. Now that's a fan for you. If you were privileged to be the CFO of Major League Baseball, with all the salary and perks that that position entailed, how many games would you attend?
Manfred thinks the games are too long and boring. We only hear from him when he dreams up another idea he thinks will make it less boring. I'm waiting for the alligator pit in center field. He thinks its pace is out of step with the modern world-- and you know what? He’s right about that one. But he’s too woefully ignorant of the history of the league he oversees to know that critics have been saying that since the beginning of professional ball-- during Reconstruction. Baseball stands still as a tower-- a staggeringly profitable tower-- because it is out of step with the conventions of time and with our modern era, not despite of it. It is pastural in an increasingly-urban nation, unhurried in a frenetic one. It was an anachronism from the moment it was birthed.
In Dyersville, you’ve got a new temporary “stadium” being erected, one that will seat better than 8,000 fans for this contest, and presumably one that looks nothing like the one in the film-- or in the book that inspired the film: “Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa.” In the details of those media, the grandstand was a much more modest thing. It amounted to a single set of bleachers. The disembodied and inexplicable voice in the cornfield told the fictional Ray, “If you build it, they will come.” Now a new one is going up that has more bells and whistles. He built it, they’re going across the road.
By tracking mud across Joe Jackson's home turf here, Manfred is showing us testicles that are each the size of a Homer Bailey hanging slider, belt-high. When he took over the league's top job in '15, he turned down a reinstatement appeal on behalf of Jackson from the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum and Baseball Library. That's located in the former slugger’s hometown of Greenville, South Carolina. Jackson, in case you don’t possess all the historic particulars about him, always proclaimed his innocence in the scandal. He was lumped in with the seven other men who “fixed” the series-- who were all acquitted of the crime in a court of law, incidentally, and who each claimed that Jackson was not involved. 1919 saw Shoeless Joe break the record at the time for most hits lashed out in a single World Series, and he played error-free at his position in right field. (He was also illiterate, and signed his lifetime ban with an “X” because he couldn’t write his name. He could have used a lawyer.)
What will make you laugh is Manfred’s stated reasoning behind extending a then-approaching century-long banishment for Jackson, who has also been dead longer than Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He wrote back to the museum that he was moving forward behind the logic of another dead commissioner, Bart Giamatti, from the 1980s: “The Jackson case is now best given to historical analysis and debate as opposed to a modern-day review with an eye to reinstatement.” Hmm. In other words, we can’t now review the case because it’s been too long. Manfred's is not the place to question the wisdom of the commissioners that came before him, some of them fans of the sport.
Joe Jackson is no longer a man in the eyes of Major League Baseball. He’s a formless, tragic character from the long ago past. They think nothing of profiting off what they think you remember about him-- which is as one of the men who was chased away for the sake of the “integrity” of the game-- when there were actually many more than just eight villains. Every World Series outcome prior to 1919, back to the first in 1903, has to be considered suspect because of the prevalence of gamblers surrounding the sport at the time. Club owners winked at it-- and may have been on the take as well, in some cases-- until it blew up so big as to threaten its standing with the paying public. By scapegoating Jackson, Gandil, Weaver, Schalk, Cicotte, Williams, Risberg, and McMullin, a first-ever "commissioner" in 1921 was able to assure Americans that their national pastime-- actually a big business masquerading as a game-- was what it always claimed to be, but rarely had been. It’s a re-costuming ten decades later as Manfred, Chicago club owner Jerry Reinsdorf, and New York’s Son of Steinbrenner appeal to your heartstrings again by heading to the heart of the heartland.
The movie did its fair share to misrepresent history in 1989, but its immense heart was in the right place. One of the inaccuracies of the film is that Shoeless Joe didn’t like his contemporary Detroit opponent, Ty Cobb. On screen, Ray Liotta’s “Joe” remarks that Cobb wasn’t invited to suit up with the other dead players on the mythical field because, colorfully, “none of us could stand the son of a bitch while he was alive so we told him to stick it.” And documentary filmmaker Ken Burns did his part to misrepresent the actual truth about Cobb in 1994’s Baseball series on PBS, but Burns also chronicled the story of Cobb poignantly traveling from Georgia to Greenville to see Jackson late in each of their lives. He found the long-banished player working at a liquor store he owned. He bought something from Jackson and said at the counter, “Don’t you remember me, Joe?” Joe replied, “Sure I remember you, Ty. I just didn’t think you or any of the guys would want to remember me.” That was the price he was still paying-- the enduring representative of the castaway player-- and throwaway person, the fallen idol, the cautionary example for every professional athlete that would ever follow.
This is a battle between Major League Baseball and its own ghosts. A battle that continues very much today since MLB would still have you believe that the “integrity” of their competition is only seeded in the ethics of the players, and never with the often-conspiring owners. It's also about the aims of Major League Baseball to try to own everything connected with the sport, to ultimately trademark it all. It's still a mystery to me as to how the corporate entity of Major League Baseball can dictate that Shoeless Joe Jackson, or any person, for that matter, is ineligible for enshrinement in the NATIONAL BASEBALL Hall of Fame. But that's where we are and have always been. This is one more way to kick Joe Jackson, to monetize the misery this league inflicted on him. I like to think that if he were around today to ask, or if you were chanced to encounter his ghost here in Iowa, he'd tell them to stick it.
A break
Apologies. I've been on a little break, but not from writing. I've got a new project with details to come. Stay tuned.
Woody tonight
On the occasion of HBO's sneeringly one-sided Woody Allen documentary airing tonight, here's a repost of last April's piece in defense of Allen from the unsubstantiated charges he still faces from his ex nearly three decades on. I'll be very curious to see what evidence of child molestation these documentary filmmakers can come up with that two state investigations at the time could not. One change that needs to be made to the text is that I said the statue of limitations is up on any hypothetical civil case. Not true, according to writer and historian Bob Weide. Dylan Farrow could still choose to pursue a civil case against Woody Allen if she's willing to be questioned about the case by legal authorities and not just her mother's and brother's journalism friends.
