Abandon All Faith

I can hardly condemn people for getting much if not most of their news from the Internet. It's efficient, you can read many sources quickly and you don't have to sit through all those TV commercials or deal with all that newsprint. That's why you're here, right?  The problem is, obviously, that for every legitimate news report there are uncountable sources of propaganda, slanted news and totally fabricated lies. Unless you're just looking for laughs you tend to believe them because you want to. We all want our prejudices, or as we like to call them, our principles, to be confirmed. Indeed far too many of us log on first thing in the morning desperately seeking outrage, scandal and condemnation. It's like a strong cup of coffee to get us going, and as with all things, where there is a demand, there arises a supply. It's called the Internet.

There are web pages that closely mimic the major outlets and unless you look closely you may think you've logged in to CNN.com or a legitimate newspaper. There are all sorts of web sources attached as supporting links on the things you get on Facebook or in email demonstrating that whatever it is you don't like is a fraud, fake or a harbinger of doom. Many are just more propaganda, many don't even exist.

But there are all sorts, put up by all sorts of organizations or individuals or political parties. My opening delight this morning was labeled as World News Politics.com and in the wildest of hysterical terms proves that Hillary Clinton hates and wants to persecute Christians:

Hillary Clinton: CHRISTIANS IN AMERICA Must ABANDON FAITH IN CHRIST, Adhere To NEW LIBERAL LAWS

Screeches the headline. a misquoted menu of quotes mrom Mrs. Clinton proving this premise follows. Why this found its way to me, I don't know, being a cynical and fairly well informed atheist, but the claimed 277,000 "shares" means others welcomed the chance to feed the addiction, to feed the Hillaryhate, that newest branch of the Clintonhate religion that dates to Bill's first campaign. Of course none of those predictions or maledictions came true and Bill may have been the most successful president in our history, but faith never dies, nor do lies  and they're still predicting all sorts of horrors that never happened then and won't happen now. One of those things is the persecution of Christians.

The writers of News World Politics may or may not believe this idiocy, but they know you desperately need it as a vampire needs blood and the people who pay them make their living from your fear and hate and other psychological problems you like to call Christianity. What you may depend on for your identity and self respect along with your Confederate pretense, your sense of biological superiority and your guns.

It's not going to die, it's not going to go away and it will continue like a cancer in America no matter that it's fake and like the "tax and spend" meme, the Gun Grabber meme, the "spread the wealth" calumny, it's designed to make you abandon your faith in America. Can you imagine what kind of people with what kind of motivation are behind this? That's not too hard, is it?

Even if It's Not Indian Summer in Your Location This Should Bring You Cheer

Julian Assange is without his beloved internet access and there is no one that he can call. The government of Ecuador has decided to suspend his privileges. Ha ha! What a hoot. I stumbled across this using my own cable modem and later traced the original article to Monday's edition of Wonkette. Our poor and very dear little baby-faced boy must be so upset. Not much to do all shut up inside in London as he has found himself. The government of Ecuador remains committed to protecting him from political persecution. However, it would seem that they are, at least temporarily, seeking to prevent him from doing any further harm on the behalf of Putin and his puppet, Trump.

Say it My way.

The right to advocate for a cause, almost any cause, is guaranteed in the US.  The right to assume the place of sole advocate or sole owner of a cause is not.  To express your own feelings that might in fact share the same goals as that organization is a guaranteed right and no group has a copyright on goals. If I create Fogg's Fight Against Fraud, I do not thereby gain the right to preclude another fight against fraud from pursuing  that fight in their own words. I do not have a monopoly or protection as sole spokesman for truth or justice. I have no right to condemn the good intentions of someone who simply isn't part of my organization.   

A New York police sergeant responding to a call about an “emotionally disturbed person” fatally shot a 66-year-old woman wielding a baseball bat.  We can, of course  be sure this is explained by police racism, although the article gives no description of the woman.  So how can I be sure?  Because James O’Neill, the New York police commissioner said “Every life to me is precious.” and was answered by a call from the crowd of "black lives matter." O'Neill is a racist and that's that. Act inclusive and you're a racist or in other words not a member of BLM, Inc.

You can't call me a dog hater because I think all animals shouldn't be abused nor called a racist because I think no one should be subject to police abuse. Yet I am and Commissioner O'Neill is, and a chorus of Liberals tells me I have no right to stand up for freedom and  justice for all if it interferes with the program and agenda of self-appointed BLM. 

The implication of this attitude is that authority and morality and social obligation and equality under the law are based on race. The reason for the blindfold on all those statues of Justice is to refute that and to use that blindfold as a gag is simply shameful.

  

Donald Trump Overture

Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Trump, Trump, like some ghastly, grotesque operatic overture. Trump, Trump, Trump, the boys are marching; marching  like the boot heels of goose stepping Trump Troopers trampling respect, compassion, freedom, truth and the fabric of  decency - the remains of Democracy.

I no longer take my second cup of coffee and watch the news and weather in the morning. It's nothing but Trump today as it was Trump yesterday and the day before. Three days of conjecture about the upcoming debate. Three weeks until it's over, How long until he starts taking prisoners, rounding up undesirables, sending them somewhere.

Heil Trump, he'll make Deutschland America great again - soon - after we remove those elements rotting our greatness. It was a disaster, remember, a Disaster. Mexicans groping your wife, you daughter, your mother, remember?

Trumpgestapo  at your door:  your papers please!  Vote for Clinton?  Come with me. No one will care, no one will see.  You with the scarf, you with the beard: track 6, the red boxcar, all aboard.

You can hardly see through the fog of hate. You can hardly see anything but that snarling orange face, snorting like an angry bull. You can hardly see America from your window.

Cheatos for Breakfast

I begin each day with morning coffee, a newspaper, and a glance at the opinion pages. This morning, I found a letter to the editor exhorting us to “Vote Republican (even if you don’t like Trump).”

Written by Robert G. Bannon of Vero Beach, FL, I wondered: Is this Bannon related to Steve Bannon (who choked his wife, faced battery charges, and threatened to kidnap his own children)? The one who hates Jews and considers them to be “whiny brats?”  Steve Bannon of Breitbart, the fright mart of cringeworthy conspiracy news?  Steve Bannon who now serves as Donald Trump’s campaign manager?

My overactive imagination jumps to conclusions; never judge one Bannon by another. Nevertheless, I penned a reply:

Bill Clinton cheats on his wife. Impeach him! Trump demeans women and brags about sexually assaulting them (while cheating on his wives). Elect him?

HRC oversaw the State Department when 4 people died in an embassy attack. Put her in jail. Over 200 people died in embassy attacks under two former Republicans presidents. Huh? Colin Powell called the Benghazi hearings a partisan “witch hunt.” Anyone listening?

Immigrants don't pay taxes. Build a wall and kick them out. Trump doesn't pay taxes. This makes him a genius?

The Clinton Foundation spent 87% of their donations helping people. She’s a crook. In contrast, Trump bought himself artwork, paid lawyers, and paid off investigators to avoid prosecution … spending less than 5% of donations on actual charity work (forcing NY State to shut down his fraudulent foundation). Savvy?

HRC declares a $700k tax loss. Lock her up! Trump declares a billion dollar tax loss in one year … leaving behind a trail of bankruptcies, lawsuits, and small contractors who were never paid for their work. This makes America ggrr8?

Hillary apologizes for using private email servers. Lock her up! Trump lies about everything he actually said (with his own voice on tape). Hero?

Honest Republicans have disavowed him. Yet, Trump supporters filter only the news they want to hear. Their double standards are offensive. Their blind willingness to support a scoundrel with recycled rhetoric is absurd. Tone deaf denials are not facts. Hypocrisy is not a platform.

Donald Trump is a Fascist

"The political establishment that is trying to stop us is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country dry."

-Donald Trump-

I hear these speeches, cheered on by sign-carrying and furious Trump Troopers and it all sounds familiar. Not just in content but in tone and although that tone has everything in common with the rants of dictators and revolutionary heroes longing to become dictators, the content suggests an ancestry shared with the NSDP or as we're used to calling them, the Nazis.

The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion has been around a long time, has been thoroughly and resoundingly debunked by many different students of our human history of evil, but of course it survives, postulating a shadowy international cabal that controls the banks and financial institutions for malicious purposes: the Jewish enemies of freedom and prosperity.  Sound familiar?  My copy was published by a "Christian Nationalist organization in California and it's widely printed in the Arab countries and taught as true.  Sounds like Trump,

doesn't it, but it sounds like the deranged and obstinate beliefs of hard core Trumpists now that his candidacy has all but been destroyed by his speeches and actions. His use of that 1000 year old meme about Jew in the banking system and how it cheats noble countries like Germany and the USA out of their fortunes. Somehow, though, perhaps as an adjunct to the evil Jewish cabal, Hillary Clinton runs that show.

Then there was the American Fascist,  Father Coughlin, still revered in some Christian and anti-Semitic circles, with his radio rants stinking of the Protocols: the same sort of blame games found in Hitler's speeches. He had to be silenced by the Roosevelt Administration for his open support of Hitler. He lived until 1979 and although he was no longer on the air that I know of, one still finds web sites supporting him. Yes, he sounds like Trump too.

"Safe for dictatorship?" whines Coughlin "Or safe, safe for the international bankers?"

Listeners were left with no doubt that in this speech advising us to leave Hitler alone in sein Kampf against the world wide control of the Zionist elders, Back Hitler or you let in the Jews. He was talking about Jews: hooked-nosed, swarthy, hand-wringing, usurious, Christ Killing Jews, the ones who secretly control the world along with Hillary Clinton, the Illuminati and the Ancient Aliens.  

Jews were the illegal aliens of Europe, although they had been there for thousands of years. They were aliens and had to be deported as Ezra Pound said on the radio in 1942 while living in Fascist Italy: 

"You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire." 

 He sounds like Trump too because they are both Fascists and the sound of Fascism, the sound of Trumpism, is the sound of hate. The enemy is hiding among us and we have to keep them behind walls.We have to put them in boxcars and send them to remote places for "special handling"

I realize that Trumpers don't give a damn about these things. Not the least little bit, but Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League are trying to be heard with not much success.  

But to remain quiet is to repeat the mistakes of those here and abroad who kept quiet in the 1930's until at least 20 million people died.  Donald, who openly brags that his intelligence comes from his Aryan genes. Donald whose staff have launched anti-Semitic tirades of name calling against Jewish critics, and his son, Donald Junior, has been criticized for making a gas chamber joke as a warning to critics.

Safe indeed. Is America safe for free people with Donald Trump and his beer-hall rabble and all their guns?

Nothing is True and All Things are Permitted

Half truths, whole truths, twisted truths and bullshit. Whether or not it takes all kinds, we get all kinds and although you'd think "fact checks" like I just saw on NBC would be there to check facts objectively, Don't Risk Offending is the operating principle. The news is not a public service, it's the entertainment business. Don't risk offending.  Checking Trumps assertion that the Obamas had launched the most vicious personal attacks against Hillary Clinton - ever, there was no way they could get around the falsehood and rated it untrue.   Did that make it necessary to call her assertion that we were now for the first time energy independent a lie?  Of course the "ever" part is, to be kind, hyperbole. We were energy independent back when oil wasn't very important and things ran by coal.

We certainly were not under the previous administrations lascivious love affair with the Saudis and Prince Bandar and the Bin Laden Bank were keeping W out of the financial troubles he had got himself into.  Remember when we were told Obama was anti-energy and his policies of forbidding exploration was going to destroy the US? Well the percentage of foreign oil used is now down to 28% from it's peak in 2005 of 68%. and on track for nearly zero in a few years. Remember all that "drill baby drill" rhetoric?  Well if you're looking for actual lies. . .

So we're nearly there and on track for 90% independence in short order, thank you, laws of supply and demand, Barack Obama's "policies" and screw you Sarah Palin and John McCain. That was all a lie. But to NBC, Hillary was lying -- just like Trump and so they're both proven liars.   That's where the bullshit part I mentioned above comes in. Do they check his indefensible and offensive facts and figures?  Not really. It's just one lie each and they're both equally guilty and any stretch, and innacuracy is the same as murder 1.

It's been that way a long time.  I remember back during the Bush Vs. Gore ordeal, one of the network nitwits looked at the camera and said "Gore lied -- he lied" in a whining tone.  The lie? he had quoted some figure as 4.6% instead of 4.8%.  In this world of grotesque and titanic lies it hardly seems to count and the tiny discrepancy was utterly meaningless, but to be fair and balanced, the Media can't actually take a stance and the truth is just a commodity. We need only a Pilatus to ask us Qui est Veritas in this sick passion play.

Is it any wonder we can no longer tell the difference? anything can be explained away, anything can be painted up as satanic and to our spinning heads the far fetched, ad hoc ad hominems and hilarious hypotheses about how he's not a rapist or a bigot or a racist or even a misogynist might just as likely be true as the unfettered conclusion that he' really is all of those things and William of Occam be damned. What, after all, is truth.

America and its Fears

What are we so afraid of, we Americans?  Everything it seems. Everything is too dangerous, nothing is nearly safe enough now that life is safer in America than it ever has been. We live longer than Americans ever have. We're less likely do be murdered, to die in a car accident or shot in a robbery. Sure, the progress isn't smooth and it affects us erratically, but the things certain to kill us are heart disease, Cancer, organ failure and complications of Diabetes. We're making progress on those things, but yet we have Americans terrified of  the very remote chance of  a pressure cooker bomb but who smoke, text while driving and are 150 pounds overweight.  We are now and always have been irrational creatures, reluctant and even afraid to base our actions and opinions on objectivity. On that fact are our political passions based.

A survey by Chapman University results in a list of what Americans fear most and by far, the largest concern is corrupt government officials. Nearly 61% tagged this as their biggest fear.  Is government so much more trustworthy than it was in my childhood when nearly everyone trusted the government?  Does it correlate to any actual increase in corruption over the days of Nixon and Agnew?  It's easy to dredge up lists of the worst presidents using Google, but basically any premise can be supported with Google searches and any president shown to be corrupt, but so much of it is motivated by political objectives.  Near the top of the list of the search I just did is titled Obama: The Most Corrupt and America-Hating President in US History  That's seriously untrue and there also seems to be an odd correlation between popularity and the reality of a president's term in office. What you blame them for or credit them with says more about your prejudices than their principles.

But next on the fear list is "terrorist attack," fear of which seems loosely linked to risk statistics. more than 40% of are afraid of swarthy invaders with bombs. Should I suspect that people a hundred years ago were just as afraid of Bolsheviks  and Wobblies and Anarchists with just as little reason? But of course nearly as many are afraid or very afraid of Obamacare. 38 1/2% are afraid of gun control. 37 1/2 % are very afraid of economic collapse.

Not all fears are unwarranted at all, more than a third of us are afraid of losing a loved one, of not having enough money in the future. These are real possibilities, but fear of irrecoverable economic collapse seems less so and our record of predicting such things seems laughable. We've had 8 years of panic about the imminent collapse and before that 8 years of denial of the probability and at present, we can't agree whether we're in a bull or bear market even if the Dow has gone from 7000 to over 18000 in 92 months of increase.

To fear is human and animal too, for that matter, and evolution has predisposed us to worry too much than too little, but so much of what we fear and the degree to which we fear it is the result of deliberate action and the actions of opinion makers and fear mongers; scam artists and profiteers. On the internet we find as much support for a flat earth, a 7 day creation and the fraud behind the Pythagorean Theorem as we do for   Obama: The Most Corrupt and America-Hating President in US History or for Hillary Clinton as liar, thief and murderer and like the cowards we are and are trained to be, we select the scariest, not the most plausible or the most supported by facts. We do the same with the promises of politicians.  Ask yourself whether you really believe your candidate can hope to do more than give lip service to the Utopian visions he describes or whether in fact anyone could given the complexities of government. Do you really?  Do you think your 4 door Nissan sedan is a race car like the commercial says it is or whether women will swoon over your "crossover?"  And if we elect politicians on such a basis and we look at or overlook their performance with the same selective eye, whose fault is it?

The Numbers Don't Lie

Watching Bloomberg TV this morning as I do on weekdays, I heard mentioned that we're in the 92nd consecutive month of the current bull market. But what do they know? Uncle Donald says it's a disaaaaaster.

That's consistent with the TV ad I saw a few days ago talking about the current bear market and maybe with all those ads of a few weeks back urging me to buy gold at more than $100 an ounce higher than it is today.

Of course unemployment is a disaaaaaaster too, hovering around 4.9 to 5 percent although Trump has assured us it's really over 30% and anything you read to the contrary is a lie, but like oil and gasoline and coal prices the numbers are set, not by the free market, but by Hillary Clinton just as John McCain assured us they were set by Barack Obama when he was a candidate. Laws of supply and demand? Market forces? What? When Trump becomes Führ - I mean President, that will change, let me tell you!

Locker Room Talk, misogyny and Cover-Ups

It's evidently difficult for Americans to tell an unsupported assertion from a hypothesis based on evidence. That's more true than it ever has been because we have the Internet to support anything no matter how insupportable.  All it takes to launch a cult is a plausible assertion and an anecdote, neither of which has to have any basis in reality at all as long as it satisfies that old human passion for conspiracy, bigotry and the hunting of witches.

Normally I avoid dressing conjecture up as a campaign, but the gloves have been off for quite a while and it's hard to take too much more of Hillary-Killary-Shillary who flies around on a broom and has been making all major policy decisions for the Federal government for 30 years. The search for things to attack her with is so desperate that when the supply wanes, the demand for fiction will bring creative results. No exoneration no matter how rigorous or lengthy or hostile can overcome the certainty of her universal guilt of something and everything.

So here it is: Donald J. Trump has gender issues and he's afraid you'll find out.. What he calls his love of beauty and what he calls "Locker Room" talk are ego defenses covering up the inner Donald who is afraid of and perhaps even disgusted by women.  He seems horrified by the fact that women need toilet facilities, that they menstruate. If he is indeed attracted to women, or if he just uses them as props, they must be young and beautiful in the extreme so as not to allow any question as to his machismo and of course to flatter his fragile narcissistic ego. I've never heard such exaggerated raunchiness in a locker room unless it's by 14 year old boys full of fear and lust and sexual frustration but eager to seem like men. Real men don't talk that way. Real men don't call their daughters "pieces of ass." Donald is not a real man.

Trump needs to think you see him as an icon of manhood and to him that means demonstrating dominance and control over women while asserting that women can't resist him and not just for his money. If they do, it's because they're fat and ugly and crooked and disgusting and have no judgement.  How could they if they're not fawning all over them as he gropes and grabs.  Feeling like the man for Donald means bragging and the right to feel contemptuous. It means arrogance and I suspect the roots of arrogance lie in a hidden sense of humiliation. How can I not suspect that like Hitler, a fulfilling relationship with a woman was impossible.


And speaking of Hitler- that's right, I said the gloves were off, didn't I?