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.
I read a report about the lunatic in Las Vegas; he was a multi-millionaire who owned nearly 50 high-powered guns plus a lot of other scary stuff. His dad graced the FBI’s ten most wanted list—ten years a fugitive.
These guns, which many civilians now own, were designed to shatter the bones and scramble the internal organs of victims—violating the spirit of international norms, agreements, and treaties agreed to by all countries before and after World War II.
These Geneva Convention prohibitions (and others) were crafted to make hollow-point style ammunition illegal. To evade these restrictions, US gun-makers designed weapons to fire high-velocity bullets that tumbled—to inflict crippling injuries with more ferocity than the banned hollow-points.
Billy Lee has never visited Las Vegas nor does he plan to. It was built as a stopover during WWII for GIs on route to the west coast, where they boarded ships to fight their way to Japan. According to legend, criminal syndicates built “Sin City”. People say the bad guys moved out. The president owns a hotel there. The Editorial Board
During combat officer training in the Vietnam era, I fired one of these weapons (an M16 rifle) at a bucket of water. The bullet went in clean but blew out the back. Shards of metal and water flew everywhere. The container exploded, basically.
Every massacre involving these weapons reaps what we sowed. The USA violated both the spirit of the international consensus and basic common sense nearly six decades ago. Our country put the lethality of heavy weapons into rifles that handled like toys. Weapon manufacturers created bone smashing ammo.
People shot by these guns don’t recover. Survivors carry their wounds to the grave.
Modern high-tech guns and ammunition are inhumane, lethal, and crippling. The military shouldn’t use them; neither should civilians; especially civilians who aren’t properly trained or supervised; some civilian gun owners have an unhealthy obsession with these kill-sticks; some are lunatics.
Flags are set at half-mast across the USA to honor the fallen in the Las Vegas attack. This pic was taken by Billy Lee in a Belle Tire parking lot. The Editorial Board
As for hollow-point ammo, police inside the United States ignore the international prohibitions. Many agencies use black-talon style hollow-points to reduce the penetrating power of tumbling slugs (that can kill bystanders) while dramatically increasing debilitation to the person shot.
Misunderstanding of the second amendment has put four million tumbling-slug killing tools into the hands of ordinary people who have no accountability and who are in some cases insane.
After all these years only God knows where these weapons are. What could possibly go wrong?
Despite being a pontificator who by definition lacks expertise, I don’t generally speculate about things I know nothing about. I really don’t. I try to not think about the hundreds of mass shootings that have taken place during past decades, because it is depressing and demoralizing (and scary) to believe that going to public venues is dangerous.
It’s hard to say who is worse off during these mass-casualty events, the dead or the wounded or those who witness the violence up close and personal. So many people are traumatized for no good reason. I suspect that even viewers of television coverage get a sick feeling in their stomachs when these horrors occur. I know I do.
The recent attack in Las Vegas was strange. A number of active duty U.S. military personnel — recently returned from Afghanistan, plus their wives and partners — attended the Route 91 Harvest country music festival. Daesh — called ISIS or ISIL in the U.S. — claimed that the shooter, Stephen Paddock, was a contractor who worked for them. He was a kind of highly-paid sleeper mercenary; he did what he was told when his time came apparently.
His handlers—who may have helped to set up the killing zone—occupied the hotel suite alongside him during the attack. They might have killed him to make it look like suicide and exited the building via a service elevator disguised as hotel workers—maybe. It’s possible.
Another disturbing possibility is that they let the shooter live expecting that he would escape and join them in another attack. He might have been disabled by gas — perhaps injected under the door by police. If so, he is now in custody.
Anything is possible, when conspiracy theories start percolating. The shooter might have been a kind of patsy, like Lee Harvey Oswald claimed to be (for those readers who have convinced themselves that Oswald did not conspire alone).
If the Las Vegas massacre was an ISIS attack (as ISIS claims) it’s not likely that the United States will give the group the satisfaction of an acknowledgment. Disclosure would undermine confidence in law enforcement’s capability to protect the public from terrorist attacks. [Editors Note: As of January 2018 the number of casualties stands at 58 killed and over 500 wounded.]
Agencies will instead work behind the scenes to uncover, debrief, and terminate with extreme prejudice all the players. Justice will be served. It will be methodical and relentless. It could take time — months or even years.
This vehicle is being tested for battle-worthiness.
Most Americans never fully understood the Iraq War that spawned ISIS and filled its ranks with experienced and ruthless fighters; nor have they grasped how powerful is Saddam Hussein’s family, his friends, and his army — once one of the world’s largest and most formidable. I’ve heard people say some dumb things about what all that fighting in the Middle East was about those many years ago.
Before the Iraq War Saddam’s family was one of the world’s wealthiest; they owned a lot of stuff — popular media and franchises, magazines and food networks, even sophisticated enterprises, some with international reach.
Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, second in command in Saddam’s Iraq and founder of ISIS.
Saddam’s closest advisor and deputy — who President Bush called the King of Clubs — was never apprehended. His name is Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri. Some believe he is the mastermind behind the formation of ISIS.
A few years ago reports appeared in the press that Ibrahim died during an attack on his security detail. But no one saw him die. No one attended his funeral. His body (including DNA evidence of his death) is missing.
Some say that ISIS agents planted these stories of al-Douri’s demise. Ibrahim faked his own death. Saddam’s allies own a significant chunk of the world’s media.
Who knows?
Anyway, my understanding is that ISIS was formed by members of Saddam’s family and loyal remnants of his army who are trying to take back what they lost during the Bush presidency. That’s how many see it, including reporters at Haaretz, an Israeli news organization.
When the USA conquered Iraq, Saddam’s army (and leadership) melted away, but they had billions of dollars stashed in banks, the walls of buildings, and in holes underground. They have not been afraid to spend it.
ISIS travels first class. It has the best of everything, including trucks, cars, weapons, and drones. It captured an astounding amount of USA war fighting machinery in fights with Iraqi Shiites (ISIS is Sunni) after the USA exited Iraq.
Some of the captured equipment included MRAPs (see earlier illustration). It seems unbelievable, but its true. (Note from theEditorial Board:Billy Lee helped design the run-flat wheel that permitted fighting vehicles in the Gulf wars to stay mobile after their tires were shredded, punctured, or shot through.)
Billy Lee helped develop for Chrysler the run-flat technology used by combat vehicles like this one. The Editorial Board
The way I understand the conflict, the Sunnis of Iraq could reasonably be compared in some ways to the southern whites who served the confederacy during America’s Civil War. The Shiites in this analogy would be the negro slaves.
Think about it. After the Iraq War, the downtrodden Shiites (with help from the USA) took control of Iraq from the entitled Sunnis, much like blacks took control of the southern states after the Civil War with help from the north’s military occupation (called Reconstruction).
Southern whites eventually wrested control from their former slaves, but it took twenty years of terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan to make it happen. A similar dynamic is underway in the Middle East today, it seems. The Sunnis are reestablishing their control through terror, for the most part.
Eventually the Sunnis might win — like the Ku Klux Klan won their fight. In the meantime, a lot of innocents are getting hurt and worse.
The territory that ISIS controls in the Middle East is vast. It is comparable in size to the country of Egypt. Yes, USA backed forces have recaptured some ISIS cities and towns in recent months, but the fights are costly in lives and treasure; the victories do not seem to have turned the tide of the war, at least not yet.
Every time the USA hits ISIS hard, as it has in recent months, ISIS seems to find a way to hit back. In the meantime, we destroy towns and cities in order to “save” them. The cities aren’t coming back — not for a long time.
It’s difficult (some would say, impossible) to defeat a determined foe in their own country. We learned this lesson in Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. The fight against ISIS is going to be a long one. Our country might go bankrupt before victory comes. It’s possible.
No one wants to admit it, but the USA is teetering on the edge of financial collapse right now, as this essay is being written. Our last president, Barack Hussein Obama, (now called Barry Obama by friends) worked out some fixes to stave off an economic crisis, but the current president seems hell-bent on bringing our country to ruin.
The president and his wealthy friends seem to want to eliminate the estate tax so that they can leave thousands of millions of dollars (they call them billions) to their crazy kids who can flee with our national treasure to whatever solvent country will welcome them after the dust settles.
I’m told that the people around the president are Christian patriots who are determined to prevent really big screw-ups from being implemented. The country is safe.
More importantly, Christians don’t do genocides. They don’t do mass killings of civilians like that lunatic in Las Vegas. Yes, Hitler said he was Christian, but history has judged him differently.
The Christian patriots in the White House won’t permit the president to first-strike North Korea, for example, with nuclear weapons. They won’t kill ten to twenty million people over a few missile tests, which many countries conduct without threat of retaliation, including the United States.
Atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll. Hydrogen bombs are much larger.
The USA dropped dozens of hydrogen bombs in the Pacific Ocean, remember, and no one did anything about it. Countries around the world have conducted 520 atmospheric nuclear explosions and 1,352 underground detonations. We aren’t going to exterminate an entire country like North Korea over a few low-level, underground atomic tests. No rational, humanity-loving civilization would even contemplate such an atrocity.
So far, so good, I guess. Yes, we are in good hands, I’m told. No one is insane — not here; not there.
In time, no one will remember the killings in Las Vegas, anyway. No illusions. Everyone knows the truth when they see it, right?
When given a choice, decent people do what’s right, don’t they? Of course, they do. They show mercy; it’s what the Bible says God wants.
I lived as a teenager and young adult during the 1960s in an America where abortion was illegal in every state. At least 10% of women and girls got abortions anyway, maybe more.
Who knows? The technology of abortion is not complicated; people performed them for pregnant girls and women, usually for small fees. Birth control was something new. Girls and young women, most of them, did not yet understand how it all worked. They suffered shame and ignorance. Many got “into trouble” who never imagined it could happen to them — learning about their pregnancies, some of them, long after their boyfriends had moved on.
In junior high — it was 1961 — I was thirteen. In those days, Thursday was Queers Day. Anyone who wore green was considered queer and could be harassed — no mercy.
God help the wearer of green on QueersDay. I had no idea what being queer meant. I knew it was bad. Queer folk went to prison, some of them. They couldn’t get security clearances in the military, not in the Navy, anyway.
Dad told me, so I knew it was true.
Blacks couldn’t vote until 1964. I was 16. Until the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, businesses like hotels, drugstores, theaters, and realtors could choose to not sell their products to anyone they hated — usually Negroes. Yes, a few companies sold to black people but not many. After Martin was murdered, 125 cities erupted into racial violence. Some say more. Congress, fearing the unraveling of America, passed the Fair Housing Act and other legislation to make racial discrimination by business owners illegal. I never saw a black face on television until 1965. I was 17. Black musicians and singers entertained on the radio and in night clubs in most large cities. On the radio it was not possible to know always if the singer was black.
Otis Redding released a hit song during Christmas of 1964. I loved it. When Otis died in 1967, I did not know what he looked like. I’d never seen a picture of one of the most popular American singers of all time. When I graduated from college, one thing I did know for sure was what all the many brands of cigarettes looked like. I knew Marlboro tastes good like a cigarette should.
The jingle burned my brain. I will never be rid of it. TV forced hundreds-of-millions in the USA and around the world to watch countless thousands of cigarette commercials.
Viewers back then couldn’t pause or mute programs. Remotes didn’t exist.
Of course, I smoked. Who can resist sophisticated advertising?
I can’t.
Back in the day, the one and only control anyone had over what they watched was the on-off switch. The “off” switch meant choosing to be lonely, sometimes.
On television news, I watched the USA fight genocidal war in Vietnam. I signed up to serve as an infantry officer, no less. I learned that war is bad — much worse than I imagined.
I protested, and the army stripped me of my pending commission. I was arrested at an antiwar demonstration and spent hours in jail before some good lawyers set me free. Historians have argued that sometime during 1952 (I was four) the USA dropped anthrax munitions on Chinese troops stationed in northern Korea. The act of bioterrorism was justified by the idea that the alternative was nuclear weapons, which everyone believed involved more risk.
When doing research, I learned that everyone in the world seemed to know about the anthrax attack except Americans.
In 1976, a “rogue” CIA employee blew up a commercial airplane carrying, among other folks, the Cuban Olympic fencing team. The bombing was the world’s first act of aviation terrorism — a form of warfare our enemies would one day turn against us.
A “rogue” CIA asset named Oswald assassinated President Kennedy in 1963. I was in high school. Back in the day, rogue actors seemed to show up from time to time in places where unusually catastrophic events erupted.
Wikipedia reports: According to a 1963 FBI memo that was released to the public in 2008, [former president] Ford was in contact with the FBI throughout his time on the Warren Commission and relayed information to the deputy director, Cartha DeLoach, about the panel’s activities.
I lived in America under President Nixon, the closest thing to a Nazi ever elected to the White House. I was 26 when Congress started the impeachment process against him, but Nixon chose to resign in exchange for a pardon by his vice-president turned president, Gerald Ford.
During high school, I lived in Virginia, where white people went “coon” hunting to find and execute random black people.
Government leaders lie. Many are hypocrites. It’s often not possible to know what’s true. A lot of people who wear suits and ties are haters and power-trippers.
Slavery was 100 years old in America when our nation established itself under a constitution in 1776 — it was 150 years old if indentured servants — who were white and European — are included. Two-thirds of whites came to America as slaves. True, they weren’t in chains, and their “contracts” expired after seven years. Slavery is the fertile soil out of which the thorn bush of capitalism spread its vile branches of greed and exclusion. The institution of bondage makes getting rich a lot easier for those who own slaves. Who doesn’t love the roses of capitalism? But its spines can grow long enough to wound and kill the unwary. Unlimited incomes and estate sizes turn capitalism into a predatory exercise; without limits people get hurt; democracy is devalued; economies stall; recession and depression follow. The disadvantaged poor are as often as not sent to war by the rich and powerful to further maximize their enormous advantages. Threatening war to take the oil of Iraq is an example — an idea recently floated by President Trump.
Since the beginning of empires, every thinking person has known that greed, unchecked and unrestrained, destroys civilizations. The Bible says that the love of money is the root of every kind of evil.
It’s true.
Almost everyone in the world today lives under authoritarian governments run by men who don’t give a damn about freedom. It’s always been this way.
Even in an America with its Statue of Liberty, its Bill of Rights, its wide-open spaces and fast cars, most people find themselves trapped in jobs they hate working for rich folks who can disrupt and sometimes ruin their lives with two words: You’re fired.
To put things into perspective: unless our new president decides to arrest and execute dissenters, or drops nuclear bombs, we will get through what seems to some like a living nightmare. It is not, not really, not yet. We’ve been down this nasty road before. It leads to upheaval, yes, but if my generation survived and prevailed, then our kids and grandkids have a chance to prevail as well. My advice is to be smart; dignity and love demand that each person resist evil as best they can. Unfortunately, my experience is that the brave who resist lose every battle.
Who can close their eyes? The USA targeted and killed resisters in both Asia and the United States during the Vietnam debacle, to cite one example out of many. War resisters lost every fight; every argument; every skirmish; every battle.
People still ridicule baby boomers who said no to war. Ads on TV make claim that many boomers suffer from hepatitis C. Imagine — the generation that said no to war is a leper colony according to pharma pigs, who always push imaginary cures. Like everything else billionaires tell us, it’s bullshit. I don’t know a single person from my generation who has hepatitis C. Yes, some boomers have hepatitis C; that much has to be true; it’s simple statistics; and, yes, some voters cheated during our recent presidential election. There are always some, always on both sides, it turns out.
Anything is possible.
Everything is possible.
Powerful people can paint the people they despise in any colors they want.
Crooked Hillary.
Lying Ted.
Sleepy Joe. Slander is not new. The 9th Commandment forbids it. No one cares. People increase their power by violating it. It’s the way power rolls.
It always will be. It’s why Jesus said that unless graced by a miracle by God, the wealthy have as much chance of getting into heaven as a camel squeezing through the eye of a needle. Despite the harm that billionaires do, they can’t change the reality that Martin Luther King Jr. described during his short life of suffering for the cause of freedom and equality:
The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
They murdered Dr. King when he was 39. He didn’t live long, but he changed the course of civilization on Earth for as long as civilization lasts.
We, every one of us, can share Martin’s hope: non-violent resistance is not futile. Not yet. Not ever. It only seems futile when we are tired and discouraged.
Statement: The Billy Lee Pontificator Editorial Board
This essay is a collection of Facebook rants that Billy Lee wrote and later deleted, because he is a coward and feared readers might turn on him; even stone him to death. Billy Lee deleted his tantrums from Facebook, yes, but he copied and pasted them into what he thought was a secret file on his blog site.
Billy Lee has no secret files; not any he can hide from us, anyway — his EditorialBoard. Nuh uh…No way…. We got to reading his ”secret” files the other day, and guess what? His Trump file was pretty good.
We decided to tell Billy Lee to stand up; to act like a lion, not the mouse he so often seems to be. Publish this stuff, we told him. Even Billy Lee Junior and Fannie Jeane agreed. They talked him into it. They really did. It was them two, not us.
So here goes: Billy Lee said we could publish his warnings about the orange-man — who he fears will destroy the country we love if he doesn’t make some changes to his deplorable personality. Billy Lee insisted that we encrypt the name of ”orange-man” to protect our site from harassment by Trump trolls and bots. No problem.
The Editorial Board
Note: On September 18, 2016 Billy Lee removed the encryption we used to hide his essay from web search-engine spiders. He told us that he wants to stand (or maybe crash and burn) on the words he wrote. NO FEAR! he choked between bouts of episodic projectile vomiting. NO FEAR!
Note:On November 9 (11-9) news outlets declared Trump the winner of the 2016 presidential election. We wish our new president the very best. We pray that he will reassure all Americans that he loves them and will serve with the humility and respect for human rights and freedoms that his high calling demands. One way to start is to apologize to the civilians (non-politicians) he insulted and falsely accused of crimes and human failings during his campaign. The Editorial Board
Trump
Ted Cruz of Texas took many evangelicals away from Trump. For this, we must thank him for his courage. His sacrificial act at the Republican National Convention brought wrath from the Trump goons, but he was trying to save America from making the worst mistake in our history. God is good.
Editors Note:(November 19, 2016)Exit polls now show thatTrump received the largest percentage of evangelical votes, ever. 81% voted for him; Hillary Clinton received 16%.
Senator Ted Cruz says he is a follower of Jesus. A Trump surrogate called Cruz a ”Zika virus.” Cruz refused to endorse the GOP presidential candidate because the orange-man slimed his wife, among other insults.
A top Trump super Pac leader called Senator Ted Cruz a Zika virus. The GOP doesn’t want him. Good riddance to the Zika virus. The rhetoric reminds me of Hitler: the way he painted his detractors.
Editors Note:On Friday September 23, Cruz tweeted that he would vote for Trump to honor a promise he made before the GOP convention to support the nominee; Hillary Clinton was too liberal. His ”non-endorsement” lasted two months; it ended two days before the first presidential debate. The Pontificator endorsed Hillary Clinton on February 10, 2016.
I’m feeling good vibes about America tonight. Our neighborhood sounds like the happiest war zone anyone could ever imagine. [from a July 4th Facebook entry.The Editors]
God is healing our country, apparently, even when we can’t see it, some of us.
All we have to do is love and forgive. The rest is easy. Be confident and do what’s right. That’s the goal for summer and fall and into the elections. All else is up to God, whose angels protect us twenty-four seven.
Ted Cruz, you are a beautiful man. Thank you for what you said and did at the GOP cross-burning. They called it a convention, but you knew better. 2,500 delegates showed up; 18 were black — less than one percent.
Nobody in leadership attended; not the Bush family; not the McCain’s; nor the Romney’s — not anyone of integrity, good will, and national stature. It took bravery, Mr. Cruz, and you showed it. May God bless and protect you.
My take away is this: these are very sad days for Trump and his family. He loves America, he says, but he’s lived inside a bubble of privilege his entire life. He doesn’t understand which way the wind blows, and he seems dangerously close to a heart attack every time he speaks. (He’s 70 years old.)
Despite his words, which some take to be patriotic, he and his friends plan to wreck America (much like Bush W. almost did) by making the country a hostile, unfriendly place for people who want to use the freedom granted by its Constitution to warn us of our follies.
The people who support Trump, many of them, behave on the internet like vicious animals (apologies to my furry friends in the animal kingdom). Team Trump seems to carry a lot of race-hate in their hearts as well as hatred for my gal, Hillary, who I love. Log onto the Internet and go to their Twitter feeds, anyone who doesn’t believe it. Hillary Clinton is Mother Teresa compared to many of them.
Editor’s note:On January 6, 2017, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report (click this link), which concluded that agents of Russian intelligence created bots on social media to intimidate and suppress Hillary Clinton supporters. Billy Lee received threats on Twitter from a few of them.
Despite all this hate, many Christian pastors and opinion leaders have jumped on board the Trump train — if you ask them privately, which I have. It disturbs me to hear pastors defend Trump; they say he ”accepted Christ” a few months (or years) ago; yes, he behaves badly; we must give him the benefit of every doubt — he’s a ”baby Christian” after all; he needs time to grow.
It reminds me of the excuses religious leaders gave Hitler, who not only claimed to be a Christian tasked to carry out God’s Holy Will but encouraged his minions to stamp the words, “Gott mit uns” on their military-issued belt-buckles.
God is with us, Team Hitler chanted as pastors and congregants alike took the world to war and caused the deaths of nearly 100 million people in a futile and absurd quest to exterminate the progeny of ”those people” they blamed for the Crucifixion of Christ. To add context, the crucifixion was a state-execution by the Roman Empire of a rogue rabbi carried out over two-thousand years ago.
Today the Jesus-haters are Muslims, they tell us. We are supposed to elect a candidate who says he will exterminate them — the really bad ones anyway plus their families — at least for right now. Later … well … we’ll see about that — after we figure out just what the hell is going on.
What is going on — what’s wrong with America — Is this: our elites aren’t carrying their weight; they aren’t supporting the people in the countries that protect them. They are — many of them — decadent, immoral, insensitive, and entitled.
Trump is a billionaire. No matter how well-intentioned, he is the last person we should pick to lead our country.
On the RNC twitter feed, a trumper challenged me for posting the following:
“A few minutes ago on Fox News Congressman Darrell Issa said Hillary was 72 years old. She is 68; Trump is 70. Turn FOX NEWS off.”
The emotions of the haters are high right now. It’s probably a good time to get off the Internet and let these lunatics implode on their own. I’m a coward anyway. Until today, I didn’t have the guts to challenge them. I was too scared.
I must have blocked at least 100 tweeters so I could follow the Democratic convention on Twitter without seeing grotesque images and reading threats in the feeds.
[As of the day of this posting, Billy Lee has blocked over 3,000 Trump lunatics. The Editorial Board]
The amazing part for me was to learn that Twitter was also blocking crazies. What I blocked were trumper-nazis who were somehow getting by the censors.
What I learned is that it doesn’t matter if Trump is good or bad. Who knows? — he might be a Christ follower — some Christian leaders say he is. What matters is that he and his movement are unleashing the dogs of war on the American people. These dogs stalk the Internet; they worship guns; some have tens-of-thousands of followers.
They say vicious things; they make veiled threats and not so veiled threats. They post disgusting images. They rally around Trump with confederate and American flags; they carry guns; they ride hogs and choppers. They’ve got it all figured out.
The cure for what’s wrong is violence, they believe. They embrace the cure. They worship cruelty. They behave like bullies. They take no prisoners. They show no mercy — at least on Twitter.
In the real world outside Twitter they might be little-old-ladies in combat boots texting away on iPads inside nursing homes for all I know, but I block them anyway and pray that their hero never makes it to the White House.
Trump supporters worked themselves into a frenzy at the GOP convention. They chanted, ”Lock her up! Lock her up!” They never explained why.
After the GOP convention, I felt more confident he won’t win.
Lock her up! Lock her up! hisdelegates chanted. It sounded to me like, Crucify her! Crucify her!
Only haters scream words like these. Sometimes they get their way. Haters locked up Christ Jesus and killed him, right? Some people said, he did nothing wrong. Some said, he loved others. He healed people. He lived a perfect life.
To paraphrase Hillary Clinton: What difference did it make? Right now, I’m not sure about the results of the approaching election. Some polls show that Trump will be president.
The Russian mafia is working with the GOP to take down Hillary, some people in the intelligence community report. It’s a nightmare scenario.
During a debate last year, Trump explicitly said that he’d met Putin while the two of them sat backstage waiting to appear on 60 Minutes.
”I got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes; we were stablemates,” Trump said at the time.
Trump insisted this summer that he doesn’t know Putin. He’s never met him.
Trump married two women from communist countries — his first wife, Ivana and his current wife, Melania. The one non-communist he married, Marla Maples, bore him a child out of wed-lock. He later married her.
Marla and Donald divorced before a sunset-clause in their prenuptial agreement expired. Marla got nothing — a reported 2 million dollars out of the many thousands-of-millions Trump had accumulated.
Has anyone visited Trump Twitter feeds to see who his acolytes are? I did. I saw thousands of bots with 5 followers and 25 tweets flooding feeds with pro-Trump, anti-Hillary nonsense. It was annoying and scary.
I also found Trump worshippers, some with tens-of-thousands of followers. I blocked the worst of them — the ones with pornographic images of Hillary, or assault weapons, or threatening messages in their bios.
People are afraid of Trump and his rabid cult of followers; he promises to enable cops to become even more aggressive than some already are.
Is it any wonder that the Donald has zero-percent support among black citizens who must endure a militarized police-state that the USA has engineered to suppress righteous rage?
People are afraid to advocate for what they know in their hearts is right, because GOP thugs scare them. Most white Americans are not accustomed to being scared; to experiencing fear; they aren’t in the habit of self-censorship to protect the people they love (except at work, where disagreements with owners can cost folks their jobs).
We can’t let fear stop us from speaking out. We can’t let Trump thugs terrorize us into silence — not while we still have a chance, no matter how slim, to stop them.
Here’ something to remember:
After the Russians captured Hitler (to be historically accurate, no one ever claimed responsibility for finding him), German citizens said they knew nothing about concentration camps; they were shocked when the allies forced them to walk through the slave-labor camps where six million people toiled and died, many by poison gas and immolation.
After Trump is elected, we won’t hear about the bad things that are happening in our country. It isn’t going to be on television. People are going to disappear, and we won’t know why or how.
Trump will muzzle the press (some are saying that his surrogates already have), but we won’t know. A nation that can’t figure out FOX NEWS is not going to understand sophisticated attacks against democracy by people who are truly evil.
It’s why we have to speak up and vote. We have a chance to stop the rise of fascism in America. We have to take the chance we still have.
Tony Schwartz wrote Trump’s Art of the Deal. He spent 18 months at Trump’s side following him around to listen to conversations, phone calls, and observe relationships. He wrote the book; Trump signed it. Trump and Schwartz split the money 50/50.
Like Trump, Schwartz is a ”tweeter” who I started following recently.
Tony Schwartz made millions from the sale of the book he wrote for Trump: The Art of the Deal. He is warning voters that Donald is a sociopath.
Schwartz now says: I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.
Schwartz says he wishes he titled his book, The Sociopath.
What bothers me is that people who have read Art of the Deal believe they know Trump. The writer says no — they read a book designed to sell a lot of copies and make money, which a ghost writer penned. (The writer was Schwartz himself.)
Tony Schwartz didn’t seem to believe that Trump would run for president someday. He now regrets the bad thing he did for money.
I spent four weeks in 1974 living within the limits of this Wisconsin city. Being a Navy kid, I had spent time in many places both inside the USA and outside — in Europe and Asia. I remember thinking at the time that Milwaukee was the most racist place I’d ever seen. I couldn’t understand why people didn’t object.
Here are some reasons:
In 1974 socialist Germans who hated minorities ran the city. They would have loved their fellow German, Donald Trump, if they knew him, which is possible because he was the son of Fred Trump, the German billionaire developer who built 27,000 segregated rental units in Queens NYC and was rumored to be the richest American. His son — in his late twenties at the time — was already wealthy and making a name for himself in Manhattan.
The people I worked for in Milwaukee told me that the police were able to prevent blacks from coming into the white areas by using traffic stops. I never saw a black person while I was there. But I heard a lot of racist talk from whites.
Blacks made nearly half the city’s population. I heard white people talk about how bad they (the blacks) were, but I never saw any in the month I lived and worked in Milwaukee. Remember: 1974 was six years after an assassin murdered Martin Luther King and ten years after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. Segregation was illegal.
Today — 43 years after — only one city in America has more poor or more homeless than Milwaukee.It doesn’t shock me that the city experienced race-war this summer. It doesn’t surprise me that the city crushed the insurrection and that we no longer remember it, most of us.
America’s beer supply remains safe and sound.
I am afraid for the black people in Milwaukee, because as bad as the national-socialists mistreated minorities when I visited, the current leadership demonstrated this summer that they are capable of worse.
The election of Donald Trump to the presidency will reduce risk to racist supporters who hope to suppress minorities.
Like I said earlier, I’ve been on Twitter. I’ve read the feeds. Under the right leadership, a genocide is possible. Some would say we have a slow-burning genocide unfolding right now.
Trump is unleashing the dogs of war; dogs who destroy civilizations. With almost three months to go, how will anyone patch the breach in the dam that holds back barbarians armed to the teeth with weapons of war? Go to any gun range and watch Americans practice.
Wake up. Everyone. Take a stand now. It will be impossible to make a difference once we are standing behind razor wire waiting for our turn in microwave ovens. These monsters are not going to stop with blacks.
They will move on to the journalists and people they think are radicals. Eventually, they’ll burn the unfit, the retarded, the disadvantaged and of course, the Muslims.
Then they’ll show their true colors: they’ll go after the Jews; people with birth defects; autism; bad breath; body odor; torn jeans; the list of defects and moral failings that bother them will get longer, not shorter.
Somewhere along the line, the attacks on Christians will begin. Some say the attacks have already started. The take-downs of Ted Cruz and John Kasich were the first of many to come; operatives will sprinkle the suppression of Christians into the mix like salt; no one will notice — not until it’s too late to do anything about it.
We’ve seen this movie before. It is the natural course of empires like Germany, Japan, Russia, ancient Egypt, Persia; and of course, ancient Rome — the list is long. We in America will be living in it soon if we don’t vote to stop it.
A billionaire candidate staffed by paranoids to advise him doesn’t need GOP money; he doesn’t need anyone’s approval; he doesn’t need to buy television time.
He has access to communication networks involving AM radio stations, private mailers, internet ads, and e-mailers to spread whatever conspiratorial excrement he chooses to dispel; he can easily discredit and defame reasonable people who might dare to defend our country and the shared values enshrined by our constitution.
Evan McMullin, ex-CIA official and presidential candidate.
Fox News, OAN, and Rush Limbaugh among others in this network have driven their stupid listeners into a psychosis of evil. It’s disturbing; I would say it’s terrifying. Even our CIA worries.
Evan McMullin, former CIA officer who is running for president, told Thomas Roberts of MSNBC that providing security briefings to Trump …is a threat to [national security], because he has been co-opted by Vladimir Putin, he is aligned with Vladimir Putin; he would not be able to secure a security clearance at even the lowest levels…he doesn’t know the first thing about fighting terrorism…
David Preiss, former longtime CIA briefer to the presidential candidates, told Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC that after the 2000 election the CIA continued briefings to Al Gore who they believed won, and suspended briefings to George W. Bush until a few weeks later when the Supreme Court stopped the election-law mandated recount of votes in Florida to give the presidency to Bush who CIA analysts believed was the loser.
If the CIA was correct about the election, it must have irritated its directors when Bush falsely claimed that the CIA told his staffers that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction — a lie that some believe began the unraveling of our country. The Great Recession that followed the stolen election and illegal war wiped out one-third of the accumulated wealth of the middle-class; you know, folks like me and my life-partner Bevy Mae.
I hope our readers will have the common sense to vote against Republicans at every level of government so we can set things right.
This summer in Dimondale, Michigan Trump told white confederate militia members from nearby Charlotte about black people. Speaking directly to blacks, none in the audience, he said: You live in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs. What the hell do you have to lose?
The answer is: everything. The New York Times reported a few weeks later that Trump might be 650 million dollars in debt. No one really knows. Could they be right? If true, it means that every black person in the USA has a higher net worth than the Donald.
Aren’t folks tired of predators running everything, ruining everything, wrecking everything, taking everything, and playing everyone?
As our Editorial staff has advocated for two years now, the United States must establish an internationally enforced limit to personal incomes and estate sizes — for the simple reason that unlimited wealth destroys self-governance, democracy, and the benefits of civilization which ordinary citizens want and deserve.
Billy Lee believes incomes and estates should be limited to some reasonable ratio of the minimum wage. The reason: to prevent legalized looting of our institutions. People could easily buy expensive homes and remain well within the limits proposed by the Pontificator. The Editorial Board
The limits can be very high and do no harm. My suggestion has been to link the minimum wage to a maximum income and estate size; my recommendation is 1,000 to one for income and 20,000 to one for estate size; we’re talking about an estimated $20 million per year income limit; $400 million maximum estate sizes; inheritances might be limited to $5 million per inheritor.
Limits like these will encourage entrepreneurs but discourage looting like the kind we see going on in our financial sector. During the Bush administration a director of one of the stock exchanges drew an annual salary of $150 million. That’s crazy wicked.
Limits prevent isolated individuals who lack supporters from unduly influencing elections. Wealthy men like Trump won’t be able to get off the ground their drive-for-ultimate-power unless many other (hopefully reasonable) people get behind them at the start. Healthy democracies don’t need a Lone Ranger to rescue them.
The process we are witnessing now — where fawners and sycophants leap on board the choo-choo train after it has already left the station — shouldn’t happen in a democracy like ours. The stakes are too high.
The apparent nepotism of the Trump campaign demeans and insults the brave and free people of the most exciting country on Earth — the one country where ordinary people govern themselves; where the wealthy and the powerful don’t rule over us until we are able to thoroughly vet them; until they earn our consent by becoming transparent under scrutiny.
Otherwise, it’s not right. We all know it.
Possession of wealth beyond certain agreed-upon, international norms should be a felony enforced by national and international courts. People who exceed limits could be given one (or possibly two) grace-years to turn over the excessive portion of their wealth to charities or the government — otherwise they spend a year in prison while the courts trim their assets to the lawful limits.
No one runs for public office after a lifetime of plundering and taking until they divest themselves to the lawful limits.
How can anyone trust someone to hold high office who says they have accumulated 14,000 piles of a million dollars each? The person is either a liar or they aren’t. If they are telling the truth, someone should be asking, how does a person accumulate that much money without cheating people; without hoarding; without recognizing the needs of the poor and miserable who are all around; who refuses to help by sharing what they plundered?
The truth is — for anyone who has the courage to face it — behind every great fortune is a dark secret; sometimes many dark secrets. It’s true. Folks can believe it, or not.
How can anyone who understands the difference between right and wrong even consider casting a vote for the current GOP candidate? How heartless are some Americans? Very, according to some polls. Yes, more than a few people are uninformed. So what? Ignorance is not an excuse. For those who don’t have time to investigate the candidates, I do. Take my word for it.
We are on the precipice of bad things. Unimaginable things. Men like Trump get worse after victory, not better. People are going to die. Seriously. Many of the people who support this sicko are gun nuts who are still fighting the Civil War. Consider the movement behind the Donald when making the decision to participate, to vote, and who to vote for.
Who leads America is a serious issue. Election is no joke. People who don’t vote share the blame if we get a bad result. We can’t elect men who cheat on their wives; who hate minorities; trash the environment; hunt endangered animals; lie compulsively; build casinos; fleece contractors; steal, cheat, and take revenge on anyone who dares to refuse to worship them and the ground they walk on.
We can’t elect men who are unable to tell truth from fiction; who won’t apologize to people they’ve hurt; who spread preposterous conspiracy theories; who destroy people they think are disloyal to their self-centered vision. We just can’t.
The candidate’s children stand to inherit windfalls — if they stay on message; if they hang on to their seats on his train. We are not going to hear dire warnings from them — though they know better than anyone what a hairball he is.
Disclaimer by the Editorial Board: The following story, No Good Deed… is a work of fiction by Billy Lee. Events and persons depicted in the story exist only in the imagination of the writer and have no connection to living persons or actual events.
The old woman ahead of me in the checkout lane at the grocery sat in a battery-operated three-wheeler and struggled to move her purse off her wrist into the front basket. She couldn’t do it and gave up. She was grossly overweight; she couldn’t maneuver — her fat arms were black and blue right down to her fingernails. Diabetes, I thought.
I wondered if I should help, but she soon stopped and let the purse dangle where it was, on her wrist. It was a bad angle. It would be awkward for me to reach for it; and besides, it was her purse, a personal item she might try to defend. It was a good bet she fought this fight every time she shopped. No big deal. Let it go.
It was her own cart that she sat in, from the looks of it. She probably had used it for years. Held together by duct tape and bubble gum, it was dirty; a yellowed eggnog color; depressing to look at.
The cashier at the register — a black college-aged girl — finished the tally; the old woman sitting in the beat-up cart fumbled unsuccessfully to open her purse; the line of shoppers behind us continued to grow. It was busy. It was Christmas. I was in a hurry. What the heck… I reached over to the card reader and inserted my card. I’ll get this, I said. Merry Christmas.
The old lady looked up at me and said, thank you.
You look like you have enough to worry about, I said, beaming. We’ll make it one less thing.
Yes, she said. I worry about so many things these days. She fell silent and looked down. Something drippy fell from her mottled face into her lap. The eyes of the young black woman working the cash-register grew large and began to sparkle from tears, which she tried to hold back.
She would tell me later she had just immigrated from Ghana, Africa. She has stories, that girl, I would think to myself. The African regained her composure and gathered the old lady’s items.
As the cashier and myself exchanged a sympathetic look, the old woman with the black and blue arms and drippy face reached for a button on her cart and sped away. She didn’t remember to collect her receipt. I don’t think she felt embarrassed. Maybe she thought I might change my mind; make her pay for her own groceries, or something.
The cashier rang up my stuff. It was all good. I started to get that warm glow one gets when they’ve done something for someone, especially a stranger.
A melodic accent from somewhere out of Africa interrupted my reverie, Oh, look! Here is a bag of things. Are they yours? I think I forgot to give them to that person.
We checked the contents against the old woman’s receipt. Yup, they weren’t mine.
The cashier grabbed the bag and ran down the long aisle of the store to search for an old woman driving a beat-up mobility scooter with a missing bag of groceries. The folks in line behind me started to stir. A few threw unfriendly looks in my direction. My warm feeling turned to heat, then dread.
The cashier returned; she hadn’t found the customer. Since I had the receipt, I decided to take the groceries. If the old lady returned, she would be unable to convince anyone the groceries were hers, I reasoned.
I began to worry. It was Christmas. Undercover cops — temporaries with little training or empathy — lurked pretty much everywhere. They loved to patrol the parking lots, someone once told me.
What if store security decided to stop the old lady in the busy lot? What if they intercepted her before she could rendezvous with whoever was driving her home? Maybe she lived alone nearby, and there was no one to escort her. Minus the receipt, they might arrest her for shoplifting.
They might already have her in a little room somewhere, hidden from the public, to interrogate her. That’s why we couldn’t find her. I loosened my collar as my mind began to race. I felt sweat bead on the top of my head.
She would notice — under the intense pressure of questioning — one bag of groceries was missing. And she couldn’t produce the receipt. He took it, she’d realize. It was the old man! I could hear her screaming. She was cursing me — the old codger who had stood behind her and had the audacity to jump into her business for no good reason.
Of course she had the money to pay for everything, she screamed at the SWAT team as they held her down; as they restrained her. Of course she did. She didn’t need that smelly stranger’s credit card. And he stole a bag of her groceries! Arrest him! It was he, the grey-beard, who robbed her; it was he who took her receipt; it was he who confused her — and the cashier! He got her arrested. It was he, he, he — an old FART! — not her!
I imagined her anguish. By now she must realize that she would spend Christmas in prison; behind bars; isolated; alone; cold; away from family and a warm fire in the hearth — for I just knew she had no money for lawyers or bail.
I thought I could hear her weeping. I could hear her, but I would never be able to find her. No one else could hear her cries for mercy, no one would ever step forward to defend her and confirm her story. Take her out of here, I heard the arresting officer boom. Thief!
My parting words to the cashier were short enough. I hurried to my car and drove out of the busy parking lot, quickly, furtively. I cast a side-long glance into my rear-view mirror. No flashing lights. No siren. An old red van with a tree tied on top pulled up behind me.
It was Christmas; the most wonderful time of the year.
