Update: 7 February 2023 Tonight, President Joseph Biden established himself, at last, leader of the Free World. He serves at the hour of Earth’s greatest danger, its greatest need. Pray, those inclined, he gets everyone through unharmed. Speech starts at minute 26.
The Editors
The New York Times surprised some readers by refusing to include the name of Joe Biden (current president of the United States) even once in the first and second sections of its Sunday issue (24 April 2022).
38 silent pages.
Think.
On the second-to-last page of another section—the Sunday Review—Ross Douthat stepped up. He wrote an editorial with the word “Biden” in it.
Joe Biden doesn’t like oligarchs, and they don’t like him. They called him Communist when he first ran for elected office. Who remembers? It wasn’t true then and isn’t now. To my mind it had more to do with his Irish roots and connections to other prominent, unpopular Irish Americans like the Kennedy’s.
How about that?
Is hatred why Americans see Trump in their daily media feeds more than Biden?
Oligarchs own media, right? A half-dozen men, give or take, hold ultimate control over 90% of what Americans see and read. Billionaires have problems with Biden because they don’t control him. It’s why they ignore everything he says and does—when they can.
Jimmy Carter had the same problem. Who is old enough to remember? Carter holds historical honor for being the only U.S. president who served his term without murdering anyone. But that was then. This is now.
Is Joe benevolent?
I really don’t know.
The entitled rich hope Biden will go away and that others more favorable to wealth and its privileges will take his place. Media announced today that a rich man bought Twitter for 50 billion dollars, give or take. The man claims to be acting in good faith to bring freedoms of speech inspired by public forums of ancient Greece.
He calls it digital town square.
Everyone knows he will unleash dogs of Trump on vulnerable Americans who lack protections afforded by wealth and gated living. Who wants to argue loud in public spaces where monsters lurk to harm their families and friends off-line?
Does anyone believe free speech emanates from the enterprise of unstable manic-depressives accountable to no one?
Not to pick on any particular oligarch—all pose dangers—but Elon Musk didn’t become a U.S. citizen until age 30—a short 20 years ago. Despite tenuous ties to America, he manages to gather popular support. He plays Congress like a fiddle. Congressional appropriations flow like water. Clearly, he keeps more than a few Benjamins for himself.
It’s not right.
Our founding fathersbelieved that power corrupts those who wield it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s why we govern ourselves with three co-equal branches of government.
Checks and balances are fundamental to prevent fallible humans—whose success blinds them to their own flawed visions—from overwhelming the Constitutional freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights.
Who disagrees?
To cut to the chase, it is insane for civilized society to permit private individuals to accumulate the wealth and power of governments. What is the point of civilization if not to limit the horrors of jungle living?—to stanch suffering, which always follows when might makes right in those arenas where the strong disrespect and eat the weak.
Proud people create elected governance to protect their rights; they don’t hide behind private cartels who don’t really care about us,Michael Jackson warned.
Sergei Lavrov is one of Russia’s wealthiest men. Yesterday, this privileged strongman threatened nuclear war. He said, “…we must not underestimate it.”
It is never good to permit dictatorial power and nuclear weapons to mean-spirited bullies who intend to destroy civilization should they not get their way. The USA put leaders of Russia on notice that they will not outlive Ukraine.
Who is brave enough to acknowledge what everyone knows? Ordinary people are fed-up with oligarchs and dictators. People want to breathe free without fear.
Secretary of State Blinken said, “But we do know that a sovereign, independent Ukraine will be around a lot longer than Vladimir Putin is on the scene.“
The most notorious terrorist threatened by the USA was Osama Bin Laden. They fed him to sharks. Later, they killed unrepentant members of his family. Putin might be wise to apologize now and start nuclear disarmament talks. Then again, it might be too late.
Who believes he will take the opportunity? The chance to survive Hell is better, some advisors might argue.
The Russian “president” seems to think that because Bin Laden didn’t possess nuclear missiles or hypersonic technologies of war, he couldn’t win. Is it really possible that Bin Laden could have conquered Earth had he mastered the alchemies of the current crop of Russian leaders?
Who knows?
The international scene requires x-ray vision. One in five sanctioned oligarchs seem to be Israeli citizens—according to a recent analysis published in the Jerusalem Post. Say it isn’t true, Joe. Apparently, USA’s closest ally and friend is protecting powerful people who are entangled with Russian wise guys. It’s not a good look.
I’d say it’s terrifying. Who wouldn’t?
Kentucky politicians—readers, some of them, know who they are—sleep in the same bed as Russian oligarchs who control much of the world’s aluminum supply. Reports say they operate a manufacturing plant in Kentucky which employs thousands. Is there anyone who understands how difficult the situation becomes for countries where international thugs accumulate vast monies and political powers?
The mighty must know that with age comes loss. Everyone they love and know will die before them should they enjoy long life. What good does wealth and power do anyone who is confined to a wheel-chair unable to control even the beating of their own heart?
What chance is there that the powerful will give all they have to the poor to serve the cause of love for the unlovable, which is what most of 8 billion humans are. Will anyone say it out loud? Most people are unloved and uncared for by those who together have the resources to make a better world for everyone now living and for those who will come after.
It is incomprehensible to me that advantaged people would shell the shit out of people simply because they are in the way—through no fault of their own. Apart from the love of God, I don’t see how human civilization as we know it today will survive.
Perhaps the powerful have made a calculation that Earth is better off when humans are reduced to a few hundred million souls, not billions. They have the ability to minimize us all—to zero, I suppose.
The United States has the power and skills to get everyone through the current crisis unharmed.
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
I want to believe it’s true. I don’t know for sure.
Who will save us?
Joe Biden walks in the gap between civilization and Armageddon. He’s the last man standing able to rescue humanity from the slavery that follows the victory of totalitarianism.
Maybe it’s time to climb aboard his peace train while all sides still can.
Billy Lee
EDITORS NOTE: Added 8 May 2022: NYT Joe Biden blackout blooms. No mention of Joe Biden & family in Sunday Edition. In fairness, the Friday May 6 online newsletter published a briefing on page 10 titled, “Biden’s Unpopularity.”
During my high school years, I was an Explorer Scout. My troopmates were spelunkers.
On weekends the guys drove from Arlington, Virginia into the hills of West Virginia to look for hollows where the presence of solitary trees sometimes signaled the openings to caves. We off-roaded from whatever lonely lane we were on at the time to navigate through wild terrain where we parked our vehicles and equipment as close to the cave entrances as possible.
We used gray powder to light our headlamps. A water drip made the powder give off gas that burned bright, clean, and complete—no noxious residue.
After an hour or so the powder turned into lumpy, useless ash. To keep lamps burning while remaining oriented, every caver dumped their used-up powder on cave floors exactly where they stood before measuring a new charge.
We always looked for virgin caves that had never been explored. Little gray clumps of depleted calcium carbide cast onto floors created dead giveaways that someone had explored the cave before us.
A clean cave meant we were first; we were going to see things below that no humans had ever seen.
The risk of course was getting disoriented in a labyrinth that only we knew existed. In those days, cell phones were not invented. Calling 911 was not a thing. Should we get turned around—if we exhausted the calcium carbide supply—no outsider would learn we were lost, maybe for days.
Without the aid of an unseemly mix of water and gray powder to produce acetylene light, we risked being entombed alongside stalactites and stalagmites deep inside corridors of ruthless darkness that robbed the senses of time and place. No one would be alerting anyone at all about our predicament.
Families would have no idea where to start a rescue. West Virginia was a big place.
Think about it.
Until a search party discovers their cars, isn’t it reasonable to assume that the lost will quickly abandon hope that anyone will find the entrance to the labyrinth that ensnared them? If searchers got lucky and stumbled onto the hole, without lamps and experience how would they navigate a maze that might zig-zag for miles beneath the earth?
Only luck provides any chance at all that the lost will one day reunite with families and loved ones. The risk of dying—forever un-located within a chartless tangle of passages and dead-ends—is real.
As stupid luck would have it, during one adventure we lost our way. We crawled on our bellies for, I don’t know, 10 minutes or so before the cave floor opened beneath us and we were able to stand up enough to stoop.
Hunched over and bending forward we struggled to find openings, made selections, and for an hour picked our way though narrow forests of stalagmite columns and their shadows until we found the end, which was a concealed passage into a room; a large room that we nearly missed.
The scoutmaster pushed each scout into the passage one at a time. It wasn’t long before the entire troop was through and milling around inside the chamber.
A few minutes passed before the scoutmaster directed our attention upward. Everyone looked. In the lights and shades of bobbing headlamps, no one saw a ceiling.
The room was gargantuan.
Perhaps intimidated by its immensity, the scoutmaster decided it might be getting close to the time when the troop should pull back. The clock was ticking, after all.
We had explored a long time; the trek back to the entrance promised challenges. It is easier for a cavern to seduce a caver into its depths than for a caver to retrace their steps to make a happy extraction. For one thing, caves look different on the way out than they look on the way in. It is not unusual to become directionally untethered.
When the scoutmaster groped to locate the path we used to enter the orifice, he couldn’t find it. It turned out that dozens of unnoticed openings beckoned in the expanse of walls all around.
In the glare of dancing headlamps, the array of passages became tangled knots that no one could untie. The openings looked the same but each passage searched became disturbingly unfamiliar and unnavigable.
I began to panic.
The scoutmaster ordered everyone to return to the center of the chamber; to extinguish our headlamps to conserve carbide. He ordered everyone to calm down. He would pick a route at random to find the way out himself.
A lengthy search for the entrance might become necessary—I won’t be gone long, don’t worry, the scoutmaster said. …lots of unknowns…makes it hard to know exactly how long….
He clutched the troop’s bag of calcium carbide. He always carried it. It was his responsibility to keep the powder dry and safe; to prevent someone less careful, less experienced, from losing it.
With any luck at all he would return to rescue everyone before nightfall, he promised. The carbide in our lamps would last until he returned. Conserve it, he warned. Emergencies only!
The scoutmaster hugged me and a few others. He hurried some goodbyes and vanished—into the abyss.
He needn’t have worried. I was nearly out of carbide; we all were. The gray powder would become gold to be hoarded.
Darkness in a cave hundreds of feet below ground is nothing like what people experience above. My mother had read somewhere that spelunkers wear watches with radium dials that glow in the dark. I was wearing one she bought me as a gift for my trip.
“You will always know what time it is no matter how dark it gets in those cold caves,” she said. She wrapped her arms around me and rubbed my face with her cheek.
After the scoutmaster left and we extinguished all our lamps, I discovered that my timepiece didn’t work like it should. No one’s did. Not one scout could make out even the faintest trace of a glow on their dials.
An older guy said that caves suck light out of darkness like drains suck water out of bathtubs. He didn’t explain. We waved our hands before our faces but couldn’t see them.
Like an ocean wave, panic struck again; it almost knocked me off my feet.
I decided that the best way to escape fear was to sleep. I dropped to my hands and knees and slithered through the dark until I found folds in a wall. I curled my body like a snake against the hard surface.
The cave’s silence roared in my ears like a pounding train that quieted only when I started shaking like a branch in a storm and dropped somehow into a darker place.
My bones filled with ice; I slipped deeper. I wrapped myself in my arms as the floor of the cave pushed its full weight into me and in time crushed my soul.
My season stranded in hell lasted a year, it seems. The search crew didn’t find the scoutmaster. A few others were missing. Everyone must have died, they said, except me.
I was the last.
No one survived.
“A cave rat ate a few, bones and all,” one guy said.
Rescuers said terrible things. They sent me home to be with mother for what turned out to be a few days. I don’t remember any of it.
I don’t mind solitary confinement. I’ve been caged for 48 years.
I’m used to it. Somehow it doesn’t seem that long. Besides, food tastes better here than the rotten mess I ate in the cave to stay alive. It’s a taste and smell I don’t forget.
Someone put a bulb in the cell that can’t be switched off. It’s bright. The light drives me insane. It really does.
It’s protected by a metal cage. I feel its heat but can’t touch it because the sadistic bastards chained me to the floor—for screaming constantly, they said.
I so want to be with mother to tell her how enraged I am about the watch she gave that didn’t work. When I inform the staff, they refuse to look at me. For a year I didn’t know what time it was. I told them. I told them all. They know about it but don’t care. They say I’m crazy because of her.
Mother doesn’t visit. She never did. The staff said she died. They convinced me to believe unspeakable things.
“He did something wicked,” prosecutors said. “He used a bone-saw, for the love of God.”
Nothing they say is true. I know that now.
Not one word!
Who does bad things they don’t remember?
NO ONE!!!
Who believes it?
They make you hate. I see it on their faces.
I will snap these chains someday, I know it.
I have a plan.
A wonderful plan.
Guards help.
It happens on Halloween night.
They break the chains.
Put your light on.
Listen carefully….
Boots are shuffling on lawns like dead leaves falling on the wind…
studying doors…
searching for final solutions.
Smash the bulb!
You’ll see.
It hurts in the dark and the cold. People do things—terrible things—to make it stop.
They shake like branches in a storm. They fill bones with ice and push down to the darkest places.
They control what’s true.
They understand everything.
Soon, so will you.
Truth becomes the trap…
Spells enchant…
fragile hopes collapse…
They watch you rot in that cave where everyone dies but one…
…and laugh.
HaHahahaha…!
Slither to the walls like snakes and find the hard folds.
Pray for sleep that cannot come.
Control truth.
You’re one of us, now.
The truth couldn’t be more clear.
Hell is forever.
Billy Lee
NOTE FROM THE EDITORS: The essay, Halloween Revision, is a fictional work based on events experienced by Billy Lee—an Explorer Scout in a troop of spelunkers who got lost in a cave in West Virginia during the 1960s. The rescue is based on other events about which Billy Lee may or may not have direct knowledge. Billy Lee published a version of this story to answer the Quora question: Where in the world is it dark constantly?
November 1, 2019:Since this essay was first published 17 months ago, things have changed. We have a new attorney general who believes his job is to protect the president.
Democrats control the House of Representatives. New Speaker Nancy Pelosi is methodically unfolding what soon will become articles of impeachment.
Michael Cohen, the president’s fixer, is in prison. Felix Sater, Cohen’s childhood friend, has disappeared off media radar screens.
Despite the rapid rate of change, Billy Lee’s essay has never been more timely. America is in a race against the clock. Trump and his allies are unraveling America at a frenetic pace. Clocks are ticking, and time is running out.
The Editorial Board
Our president seems to be working against our country, not for it.
He started a trade war. He’s bullying our trading partners.
He insults allies. He breaks treaties. He threatens fire and fury, then coddles our enemies.
Get out of the stock market ASAP, I’m thinking. Trump is going to trash the country and mess up the world for freedom lovers. Not much time before all illusions shatter, it feels like.
Don’t do denial. Don’t go there. It will do no one any harm to protect cash and property from those billionaires who will steal it anyway from anyone stupid enough to give them a vehicle.
Trade warscan and do work for business owners but no one else. They wipe out the little people by driving up prices and reducing goods and services. Don’t be a little person,Billy Lee. Not this time.
Greed-hogs root-snouted America’s financial institutions in 2008 and took a big chunk of 401K money intended for ordinary folk’s retirement.
Does anyone remember when the GOP spent vast sums on wars & drugs to help their friends in weapons manufacturing and pharmaceuticals? GOP added fuel to the fire by reducing revenues — they created tax loopholes for the wealthy. When markets went south, they emptied the nation’s retirement piggybanks (called 401Ks) to cover their losses.
They did!
They crashed the United States of America like a plane into a skyscraper. USA was hours away from becoming a third-world country when Congress approved a rescue that involved massive transfers of wealth from the middle-class to the wealthiest families in America. It was called the Great Recession of 2007-2008.
Who says it can’t happen again?
Interest rates are sure to rise; GOP will empty social security and Medicare. They have no choice because USA won’t have tax revenues enuf to cover high rates on the national debt. Republicans passed another tax cut for oligarchs a few months ago.
Surely, someone remembers.
It’s not about making America great again. It’s about making America break again.
Why? Because they can.
Billionaires don’t really care about us. They never will. Michael Jackson produced a song about it. They killed him.
Americans have to push the GOP (who are defenders of billionaires) out of government ASAP. Everything about our future depends on it.
Republicans are afraid of Russian oligarchs — the ultimate mob bosses. Russian oligarchs are the richest men on the planet. Aren’t they intelligence operatives who carved up the Russian corpse after Reagan drove their empire into bankruptcy?
Republicans are paralyzed by the fear of foreign mob bosses with Boris Yeltsin accents. They seem incapable of doing the heroic things that need doing to defend & save our country.
It’s true.
GOP leaders are holding onto hope they can get their families through this takeover; things will be set right someday, somehow, by somebody. They are dead wrong.
If not them, who? If not now, when?
Remember Germany and World War II? The silent ones ended up cooked, eventually — poisoned by gas and shot in trenches, bodies burned in ovens to hide the evidence.
This is no time for cowards. It’s time everyone let go of fear and play the heroes we must become to protect everything & everyone we care about.
If they take away our right to vote by subverting it, we will deal with it then.
For now, it seems we are able to vote and have our votes counted, at least somewhat accurately. Yes, the last national election showed evidence of voter suppression — tampered vote counts around the edges in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois, some said.
The GOP stopped investigations into irregularities and statistical anomalies. No one seemed to care.
Reality Winner, incarcerated NSA hero who exposed widespread voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election. She is being held without bail. NOTE by Editors: July 4, 2018 – Reality Winner has agreed to plead guilty. Her trial was scheduled for October, before the mid-term elections. She will accept a 5-year sentence plus 3 years strict probation. No electronic devices or communication with media is allowed. The NSA contractor revealed that certain voting-machine companies were compromised — raising possibility 2016 outcome was rigged. Bad people who care nothing about democracy have silenced Reality Winner and driven her into anonymity.
Nevertheless, voting is what we must do until we no longer can. It’s the only recourse. Everyone pray for Reality Winner, NSA heroine, who rots in jail with no prospect of bail because she tried to alert Americans to terrors coming from sabotage of elections and loss of freedoms.
If the day comes when America can’t save itself by voting, it will be hard to avoid Civil War. The last war didn’t go well for anyone on either side. Difference this time is foreign agents crawling over our institutions & media.
These agents don’t like us. They foment civil unrest. They crave violence. Many play the role of patriots. They quote Bible passages — like Two Corinthians.
Don’t be fooled.
We have a lot to attend to, but the State Department and most other parts of government are being systematically dismantled. Here are three things among dozens to look after:
1 — China, Russia, and their allies are working furiously to overturn the global financial system. The plan is to leave USA and EU in the cold. It’s what bit-coin schemes are about. Think about it. USA financial clout is scary. Certain state-actors want to make impossible USA financial extortion of their leaders through sanctions and trading bans.
2 — Japan is accumulating the world’s largest inventory of bomb-grade plutonium. It built infra-structure to weaponize. It has developed modern missile systems. Focusing on Korea’s nuclear weapons means nothing. Are Koreans buying fissile material from Japan? It takes ten pounds to make a bomb. Japan has 47 tons and is adding 8 tons a year. Does anyone know for sure what the hell is going on? Is some samurai cult making a killing?
3 — Russia has developed a new generation of high-speed multiple-warhead missiles impossible to see or shoot down. They bragged about it on state TV. What happens if we attack North Korea and Russia comes to their defense like they did last time during first Korean War? What if China joins in, like last time? Read T. R. Fehrenbach’s book, This Kind of War. It could become a war where we get our pants handed to us — like last time.
Problems Russia presents go far beyond Korea; they extend to the Middle East certainly but also to the Americas where Russians have built military bases in Cuba and Venezuela. USA state and national elections are drowning in Russian interference according to intelligence agencies.
Media is powerless. It does not protect our country. It protects billionaires. We cannot expect to look to media, whether right or left, for insight or guidance. At its end, takedown of America is not going to be televised. The military is led in many instances by good-ole-boys from states of the Confederacy like Louisiana, Virginia, and Mississippi. It’s not ideal circumstance that leads necessarily to unity.
Current leaders, some of them, have proved to almost everyone they are haters. Many are white supremacists. The attorney general isn’t the only cabinet member with a reputation for racial bias. Members of the current administration behave like wolves in sheep’s clothing who hide their intentions between the covers of Bible and American flag.
Does it have to be this way?
Since WW2, USA killed millions of Koreans, Japanese, Arabs, Asians, Germans, Native Americans, and Africans. People around the world aren’t blind. They see USA’s love affair with guns, mass shootings of preschoolers, and extra-judicial executions of civilians by militarized police.
Rabid people like NRA gun nuts say the dead had it coming. Gun lovers have a duty to kill bad people to protect the world and our values. The way to stop bad persons is give good persons guns. Some say number of executions by USA gun-toters exceeds sixty-five million during modern era alone. Carnage flowing back to slavery & Indian Wars is incalculable.
People fear our leaders, and they should. America is a handful of countries short of conquering entire world. Under current leaders chances are good every country will fall under our power sooner, not later.
Like ancient Rome, USA has blood on its hands. We incarcerate millions of our own citizens in ratty prisons; tens-of-thousands rot in solitary confinement.
We have moral obligation in victory to become better people as we rule the world and force our values on people who do not necessarily share them 100%.
We have unmatched power; America is on cusp of living its destiny in total victory even as it dominates a world divided against itself, which is road to ruin according to Christ Jesus — who our political leaders say they worship, many during Congressional prayer breakfasts.
Yes, the president tried to get Speaker Ryan to fire the congressional chaplain. Yes, he canceled traditional Easter services at the White House. Well, they weren’t traditional. Black Muslim Obama started them. So, it’s all good, right? Can we get an amen from the White House press corps?
Because USA possesses unmatched power, the stable genius who leads may risk World War III. The writer of Trump’s masterwork, Art of the Deal, said if anyone starts nuclear war, it will be the Donald.
Is anyone certain when that war ends, it will be USA who counts bodies of the dead and writes their history? What if the other side counts our dead and writes our history? What then?
One thing about war is certain. The outcome is never certain. That chilling line from the screen play No Country for Old Men echoes in my head. In the contest between man and beast, the outcome is never certain. Rancher shoots cow. Bullet ricochets off cow’s head and kills rancher. Cow fine. Rancher dead.
No one ever really wins at war. If history teaches anything, it teaches that war solves nothing. Yes the victor gets first dibs on spoils, but in war to come spoils will be irradiated — poisoned by heavy metals.
Short of nuclear war, what can break America?
We have warriors on our side who are among the most powerful and dangerous who have ever walked planet Earth. Imagine the scariest ISIS terrorist. We have agents on our side who are scarier.
Felix Sater speaks fluent Russian because he was born and raised in Moscow, Russia. He says he and Michael Cohen became best friends after he & his sister were able to emigrate to America from Moscow via Israel when he was eight. During process of switching countries Felix changed his Russian family name to Sater. Who knows why? Michael Cohen is president’s fixer and attorney, right?
Felix Sater and the president are friends.
Felix changed his last name as a kind of joke, I think. In Kabbalah numerology, Hebrew letters for Sater add to “666”. It’s the only Hebrew root that adds to 666, so it’s easy to identify and remember.
It’s a word that means contrary, disheveled, or chaotic. The number was made infamous by book of Revelation in the Christian Bible. Chaos shares the number of the anti-Christ, apparently. Look it up.
666 Fifth Avenue is a property owned by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. He made the buy in 2007.
The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, bought “666 Fifth Avenue.” He and Sater may think it funny to own a building so named. Maybe it is.
God doesn’t scare them, is what they want folks to believe. They’re bad boys, and they’ll mess up anyone who crosses them. It’s what they like everyone to think, maybe. When they hurt little people, God looks the other way. They seem sure.
Felix smashed a piece of cut glass into someone’s face during a bar-fight. He spent year in prison for it. So yes, he can be scary. He bilked investors out of 40M dollars in Wall Street scams. I watched him apologize on national television to all he ruined while insisting that today he loves and serves America. He is a changed man.
He might be. I’m not saying he’s a liar but when I listened to his explanation, he reminded me of Michael Corleone in the movie, God Father Part Two, when he testified before a congressional committee.
In the movie, some readers might recall, Michael was a Marine combat veteran, defender of everything American, he told investigators. His reputation meant everything. Then again, he was a fiction invented by writer, Mario Puzo.
Sater is friend to the president. It’s true. Trump has powerful friends; some are family. His sister is judge who sits on second highest court in America — second only to the Supreme Court. His late uncle was an MIT professor.
NOTE BY EDITORS: In April 2019, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry retired from her position as federal appellate judge for the state of New York.
In the 1960s and 70s, government waged war against the Mafia. People got hurt. Many switched sides and made deals to stay out of prison.
This cooperation started after Castro came to power in Cuba in the 1960s. The CIA teamed with Sicilian families who had lost casinos in Cuba. The idea was to overthrow & assassinate Castro and various leaders of the revolution. They had some success.
Revolutionaries who were murdered are not known to most Americans so it’s pointless to name them. Readers can click on links at end of essay to learn more.
CIA didn’t need the mafia to kill Che Guevara. They and 1,800 special forces they trained in Guatemala were able to carry out that particular hit-job all by themselves with only the tiniest bit of encouragement from Rene Barrientos, president of Bolivia where Che was found.
I’m not picking on Felix. He didn’t start cooperating with FBI until after war with Sicilian mafia was mostly won. He has proved since he is untouchable and able to engage & influence most any power player on world stage. But in a fight for the survival of our republic and the freedom it promises ordinary people, are folks who seem to have no limits the best we have to defend us?
Are we truly defended, truly, for real, or are we undercut and subverted? Does right make might, or is it the other way around? I honestly don’t know. No one tells truth about anything anymore, it seems.
Rome was an empire unchallenged for a thousand years. It’s in the history books, right? The empire fought its wars on its frontiers to protect its heart, as does USA. In the end Rome fell because a mob of barbarians walked into the capitol city with clubs & broom handles and were hailed liberators.
The wealthy, most of them, lost everything because the army that defended Rome ran like rabbits from heroes who scared them with their hairy bodies, bad skin, and missing teeth. It took centuries for civilization to recover from that ancient catastrophe. Who knows if it’s true?
In the modern world, biological, chemical, & nuclear weapons will make meltdown harder to endure. Who agrees?
I’m taking a knee, hands folded, head down. I’m believing that in the gut of every thinking person is fear that no weapon in this world can protect any of us from what’s coming next.
Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, it’s moving fast.
It’s strong.
Scary.
Birds in sand cherry tree outside chirping like monkeys…
It’s morning already. Bevy Mae at the open window. She says sun is bright. Supposed to rain, according to Siri.
How is it I haven’t slept and the time for sleeping is past?
Stay up all night again? Bevy Mae asks.
I feel good. I’m not tired.
I reach for my wife. She pushes me away then messes my hair.
