Category: Horror

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MANGANISM

A lot of people have been poisoned recently, mostly in Europe by Russians, if overseas media is believed.

Mark Rowley, Britain’s chief police official for counterterrorism and international security, told media that the former British agent and Russian citizen Sergei V. Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia Skripal, 33, “were targeted specifically,”  —  poisoned on 7 March 2018 by a nerve agent.

People familiar with nerve poisons have said that the poison used in this attack is impossible for a “non-state” actor to produce, let alone store and deploy to kill others. The statement by Britain’s top terrorism cop doesn’t leave room for many suspects.

Sergei and his daughter endured the mysterious deaths of several family members over the past many years. Now both lie in hospital in intensive care with Sergei remaining in critical condition as this essay is written. The killers seem to have targeted not only Sergei, but his entire family.

This essay isn’t about intentional assassinations by twisted power-trippers with appetites for terror.

The assassinations by poison in England and elsewhere set the context for something far more pervasive and debilitating — the unleashing of toxins on billions of humans and virtually every animal and plant on the earth and sea by uncaring people motivated not by revenge but by the desire to sequester money for themselves, their families, and their businesses.

A lot of money can be made by people who don’t care who or what they poison. There is no limit to how much money they can keep, either. Read Capitalism and Income Inequality.

In this essay I’m going to write about a dozen or so poisons that people are ingesting in ignorance which destroy their kidneys, their brains, their hearts, their nerves, their stomachs, their muscles, their finger and toenails, and their long beautiful hair. Who will warn people about the dangers if I don’t?

This chart is likely the best interactive periodic table on the web. The Royal Society of Chemistry (in London) provides it free to anyone who wants to use it. Click chart or this link to open it in a new window — and have fun!

Television tells us nothing except that the current president and his thugs are rolling back decades of protections against all kinds of dangerous products; nothing in popular media warns anyone that they are floating in a fog of toxins that is making them sick and killing them unawares. Without regulations, it’s going to get worse.

Dozens of people have dropped dead while using paint-strippers that contain the toxin methylene chloride, according to CBS News.  (Click link for video.) Manufacturers say that millions use their products safely. Why ban a substance that only kills a few people per year? Life is cheap in unregulated America. It seems like life is going to get a lot cheaper.

Methylene chloride is used to decaffeinate coffee and tea. No one in authority seems to care. A California judge is ruling whether a law that compels coffee retailers to warn customers about cancer risks can be enforced. The chemical in this case is acrylamide, a known carcinogen, which is produced when coffee is brewed.

Acrylamide contaminates French fries, potato chips, bread, and other foodstuffs. The current leadership at the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) is laughing at California. EPA execs continue to push for deregulation while they strive to keep the population ignorant about the risks of the products they use and ingest.

What would people think if they learned that only one person in three dies of old age? The two other unfortunates are dying from preventable accidents and diseases caused primarily by the toxins they ingest daily. Think about it.

Does anyone believe it? The punks who seized power last year after a tampered election are planning to deconstruct the United States and its agencies, whose mission was once to make life safer and easier for ordinary people.

The danger is not only inside the USA. Anyone who disagrees that homo sapiens are in danger ought to look to the plant and animal kingdoms around the world. Diversity is collapsing; the health of adult animals is deteriorating; fish and other sea-life contain high levels of toxins that make them unsafe to eat.

Were it not for short life spans, the suffering of animals and plants would be obvious to all but the most willfully ignorant. Testing of animals shows that all adult animals are suffering from contamination by heavy metals and other toxins placed into the environment by guess who? — humans, mostly.

What is manganism, anyway?  Yes, it’s the title of my essay, but it’s also a matrix of symptoms induced by the deadly neurotoxin, manganese. Like most of the poisons in this article, it is a fundamental element of the periodic table. I am arguing that a position in the periodic table does not entitle entrepreneurs to extract and market elements in the table that are poisons.

Humans need 5 milligrams of manganese daily to power up the enzymes used in cell catalysis. Double the dose to 10, however, and they develop psychosis — manganese madness. The difference between survival and suffering is razor thin.

Symptoms start as irritability, mood swings, and compulsiveness, which progress to full-fledged Parkinson disease-like pathologies that are often misdiagnosed. Manganism lowers IQ and increases aggression — a dangerous juxtaposition.

With the advent of industrialization and the follow-on of high-technology, manganese has been poured into the environment like rain-water. It’s used everywhere in industry to prevent corrosion in metals.

Most steel contains manganese; some steels have as much as 15%. Construction helmets and military headgear are fabricated from them.

Manganese is a major component of alkaline batteries. It’s found in ground water, gasoline, and fertilizers —  it’s used on the plants people eat. It’s concentrated by water-heaters that feed hot water to showers, of all places. Never swish water in your mouth from a shower-head while bathing.

Chronic exposure to air contaminated by manganese dioxide particles can cause manganism.  MnO2 is classed as a cumulative neurotoxin according to the MSDS for manganese dioxide. The black powder is used in ”salt water” car batteries, now under development to replace lithium batteries. David Pogue ate the powder during a NOVΛ television broadcast to demonstrate its ”safety.” Don’t do it, Billy Lee advises. He recommends that scientists who plan to remain capable of adding together more than two numbers avoid inhaling manganese dioxide dust. The Editorial Board

The sodium-ion battery (some call it a salt-water battery) is, at this moment, coming on line. It uses manganese-dioxide electrodes. The plan is to use these batteries to power cars by 2020, mainly because the batteries don’t catch fire. The introduction of these batteries into electric cars will add another flood of manganese into the environment where it will — eventually — be ingested by plants, animals, and humans.

Brain damage by manganese is irreversible. 

People once wondered why the people of ancient Rome went crazy. Edward Gibbon and other historians attributed it to moral decay and corruption. But the people of ancient Rome added lead to their wine to kill pathogens (like mold and fungus) and to sweeten it. Even on a good day adding highly toxic lead to wine is a bad idea.

Americans — like the ancient Romans — are weird, too. Maybe someday historians and pathologists will note the high levels of manganese in our exhumed bodies and conclude that we also unwittingly destroyed ourselves from a single chemical no one really needed and that no one took the time to forbid.

Amethyst. Natural and manufactured contain manganese, which gives it a purple color.

It takes a lot of effort to isolate manganese. People take the time to produce it for one reason and one reason only — to make money. Manganese is an iron-like metal used to impart the color purple to the gemstone, amethyst.  Producers of manganese pay lobbyists to convince congress-people to go easy on them, so they can continue to enrich their families while the planet dies beneath their shuffling feet.

Breathing manganese vapors is the most direct path to poisoning, but manganese is also imbibed by eating too many of the wrong vegetables and not eating enough other vegetables that counter-act the toxin. The balance between enough and too much is that fragile.

Modern technology is tipping the balance into the way-too-much zone. Soon people will be too far gone to notice or care. They will be weak and shaky — unable to save themselves; unable to find refuge from poisons they can’t see, smell, or taste.

Steels rust and corrode. Manganese dust worms its way into soils and floats in the air, carried by the wind. Folks spread manganese-rich fertilizers on their lawns and crops. Inhaling small amounts of dust induces neurological injury.

Introducing tens-of-thousands of tons of manganese into the power plants of electric cars is only going to add to the problems of maintaining a healthy Earth.

There is a good reason why tycoons want to make manganese a staple of the world’s diet of toxins. The supply is inexhaustible. The floors of the Earth’s oceans are covered by 500 billion tons of baseball sized nodules of manganese. When the land-based stuff is gone, profiteers plan to scoop manganese nodules off the ocean floors.

At least 500 billion tons of baseball sized manganese nodules lay on the floor of the world’s oceans. Entrapped within are other elements like the neurotoxin, thallium.

Here’s the problem: these nodules contain an additional neurotoxin called thallium, which was used as a rodent poison in the United States until it was banned in 1972 — accidents killed too many pesticide technicians.

Enough said.

I don’t want to depress or scare anyone, so I’m only going to go into detail on a couple of other poisons that are ruining lives. Then I will list a number of toxins that everyone is ingesting everyday — with links added for anyone who wants to learn more.

To any reader who has read this far — congratulations. You have courage and a high bummer tolerance.

Wall-Mart sold to “juniors” hundreds-of-thousands of Miley Cyrus jewelry accessories coated with high levels of cadmium in 2010. According to press accounts, they refused to stop selling these poison trinkets for months, because they claimed they lacked the tools to test their products for safety. Cadmium is toxic, even in the smallest amounts. There is no safe level.

Artists discovered cadmium’s toxic effects, when first they mixed it into paints to make vibrant orange, yellow, and red colors during the early 1800s. It’s a heavy metal that when ingested instantly attacks the kidneys (which it eventually destroys), lungs, and bones. It causes cancer. Smoking, welding, painting, metals production, galvanizing, and fertilizers are common sources of human contamination.

Ni-Cad (nickel-cadmium) rechargeable batteries are one of the most pervasive consumer products — used in every kind of electronic gadget, including computers and even children’s toys until banned by many countries a few years ago.

Did anyone properly dispose these batteries when they came to the end of their useful lives? I don’t think so. Most folks tossed them in the trash where over the decades they have been corroding in land-fills to poison everything they touch. There is no safe-level for human exposure. 

Ni-Cad batteries are banned for general use by the EU (European Union), but are freely available in the United States and other countries. In the current climate of deregulation, toxins like cadmium are going to be unloaded on our unsuspecting populations for one reason and one reason only; we all know why: money.

Billionaires rule, and none live in the toxic wastelands of ordinary America. Greed thrives on greed while it drives out compassion, common sense, and consumer safety.

Cadmium is pervasive in zinc deposits and is embedded in every galvanized piece of metal you have ever handled. In Japan rice grown in cadmium contaminated irrigation water causes itai-itai disease. It makes bones so weak they fracture spontaneously. Click the link to learn more.

People who work to galvanize steel can develop metal fume fever, a flu-like disease that renders them unconscious should they breathe in the cadmium that always contaminates zinc, which is the galvanizing metal. When ingested in fumes, zinc will by itself make workers sick.

Gun enthusiasts sometimes fall victim to metal fume fever, because bullets can tear away microscopic layers of gun-barrel bores; metal-toxins become an invisible mist they inhale unaware.

Zinc-oxide is the major component of sunscreens. Do sunbathers trust the manufacturers of sunscreen around the world to decontaminate zinc from the cadmium in its ores? There is no safe dose for cadmium. Smearing cadmium into the pores of sweating skin is a bad idea.

Zinc is 97.5% of every U.S. penny minted since the 1980s. The copper cladding is less than three percent. It is impossible to remove all traces of cadmium from zinc. Pennies are poisonous. There is no safe level for cadmium. Handling old pennies with sweaty hands (or swallowing one accidentally) is another bad idea.

To say again: I have compiled a list of about a dozen or so poisons that people are ingesting in ignorance that destroy their kidneys, their brains, their hearts, their nerves, their stomachs, their muscles, their finger and toenails, and their long beautiful hair. Who is going to tell them about the dangers if I don’t?

I see nothing on television; I read nothing in print media that warns the public that they are living in a poison glen of toxins where billionaires make them sick and yes, murder them.

Do these greedy monsters care? If they did, they would provide health care to the miserable people they hurt. The truth is, they could care less. The consensus among billionaires is to ruin health care in the United States and let victims fend for themselves.

The wealthy intend to privatize every government program designed to defend the helpless. Their puppets advocate for privatization and an end to regulations on conservative talk shows all the time, and I for one believe they mean it.

It must be asked again: Does anyone know that only one person in three dies of old age? The two other unfortunates are dying from preventable accidents and diseases caused primarily by the toxins they ingest daily.

Anyone who disagrees that humans are at risk ought to look to the plant and animal kingdoms. As I wrote earlier, diversity is collapsing; the health of adult animals is in a terrible state; sea-creatures are irradiated by the run-off from ruined nuclear power generators like those at Fukushima in Japan and those on sea-going vessels that have sunk like the Thresher and Scorpion submarines; sea-life is radio-active and unsafe to eat. Were it not for short life spans, the suffering of animals and plants would be obvious to all but the most willfully ignorant.

Like manganese, selenium is another element in the periodic table that is required in trace amounts for cell catalysis but is toxic in slightly higher amounts. It is produced by burning coal, among other processes.

Selenium causes garlic breath, intestinal distress, hair loss, fingernail fall-out, and neurological damage. It smells like horse-radish. Who wouldn’t eat horse radish if they smelled it in their food? Cirrhosis of the liver, pulmonary edema, and death are not uncommon.

Selenium is a major component of lithium batteries, photo-copiers, and solar cells. Brazil nuts and peaches, especially those grown in certain soils, are sometimes loaded with selenium.

So far I have mentioned three toxic elements: manganese, cadmium, and selenium. It’s the tip of a ginormous iceberg of poisons.

Does anyone understand that catalytic converters — the five inch diameter by two foot long tubes in exhaust pipes under all cars —  have a useful life of only 100,000 miles? A lot of things can wreck converters before a hundred-thousand miles — unburned fuel and leaks of coolant and oil can clog and render useless the pollution reducing power of any converter.

Whether wrecked early or not, a large percentage of cars in cities rely on catalytic converters that are ineffective, because many are old, for one thing. They are supposed to prevent pollutants that induce ADHD, autism, and Alzheimer’s in old folks, babies, children, and the vulnerable — which is everyone who doesn’t wear a face mask.

People in China and Japan wear white face masks. When they blacken, they throw them out and put on new. Who wears face masks in the USA? No one.

Catalytic converters are not working!  Look along the curbs of city streets a few days after a heavy snow. It’s a grey-black mess of God knows what. When the snow melts where do the contaminants go that the innocents trusted catalytic converters to soak up?

Isn’t it obvious? The sludge dries to become dust; it blows in the wind; people and animals breathe it in. Animals eat it, because they don’t wash their food.

Environmental contaminants measure in the millions of tons. Workers produce them in factories where they spend their careers trying to avoid the accidents that will poison them and ruin perhaps the rest of their lives.

Few coal miners avoid the miseries of coal toxins — an example that should by now be obvious to anyone who is paying attention. All the old-timers are sick. Visit coal country. Meet these unfortunates.

Go to farms where the run-off from fertilizers contaminates the wells. Only farmers who drink bottled water avoid disease. Go to farm country and look for old men. Ask them about their health issues, if you can find them.

Undiagnosed (or misdiagnosed) people who are sick from toxins do not understand why they suffer from delusional thinking, mood swings, and PTSD-type symptoms. No general tells his battle-hardened soldiers that poison impregnates their ammunition;  it’s loaded with spent uranium to make it heavier and more lethal.

Few soldiers on today’s killing fields escape poisoning by the highly toxic materials in their ammunition and the weapons-exhaust that spreads a smoke of poisons on friendly positions during war.

Some soldiers come home terrorized by a fear whose source is unknown to them. Irrational behavior, aggression, spousal abuse, persistent nightmares, even mass shootings are all behaviors that can sometimes be traced back to battlefield poisons, should anyone be brave enough to do the studies that would confirm what anyone with common sense knows is true.

Now might be the time to admit that I’ve found it best to keep essays from becoming overly long; it would take many books to cover the subject of commercial toxins comprehensively.

What follows is a simple list of a few of the elements from the periodic table that are in common use today which are toxic and will kill or debilitate anyone who ingests them. Click on the links to learn more.

  • Heavy metals – coal is the biggest source, as well as waste from the mining of less-toxic metals. Toxic heavy metals include lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and chromium. Heavy metals help to populate the list of elements below.
    .
  • Beryllium – no safe level. Used in all kinds of spark-proof tools and in the alloyed metals of outer-space and under-sea vehicles.
    .
  • Chlorine – once used in trench warfare, because it is heavy and clings to the ground. Highly poisonous.
    .
  • Bromine – until recently unregulated, it eats the ozone layer. It can cause psychosis in humans and has other toxic effects. People put it in their swimming pools — and in pesticides, which farmers spray on plants people eat.
    .
  • Cobalt – can be used to safely house “dirty” bombs. During an explosion cobalt debris converts into a deadly isotope that poisons land for decades.
    .
  • Arsenic – a poison unable to be detected until the mid eighteen-hundreds. Referred to in times past as “inheritance powder.”
    .
  • Thallium – another “inheritance powder” that is tasteless and odorless. Before government banned its use in 1972, folks used thallium to poison rats and ants. It contaminates many ores, including zinc. It is a pollutant of cement and coal processing. The skin sucks it into the body like a sponge. Low doses cause hair loss.
    .
  • Strontium – bones and teeth suck up radio-active strontium like vinegar to a sponge. It bursts into flame when exposed to air, which is one reason it’s used in fireworks and roadside flares.
    .
  • Antimony – used by the ancients to make them vomit. They believed purging was a pathway to better health.
    .
  • Tellurium – contact with even the smallest amounts will make a person smell bad for weeks. Miners try to avoid it, often without success.
    .
  • Barium – makes rat poison that is fatal in doses as small as one gram.
    .
  • Cerium – used in the walls of self-cleaning ovens, in cigarette lighters, and in camping lanterns. Commercial grade cerium always contains radioactive thorium. Civilians have been prosecuted for isolating thorium from cerium in vain attempts (thus far) to make atomic bombs.
    .
  • Osmium – an extremely toxic metal that is easily absorbed through the skin when touched. It shreds the lungs and ruins the eyes.

OK. I think this is a list that is sufficient to show that not every naturally occurring element is as safe as, say, nitrogen; probably no element is as safe as nitrogen, which is 78% of the air folks breathe. Of course, anyone who breathes nitrogen without oxygen dies of suffocation in minutes.

Are there other elements in the periodic table that are dangerous to human health? Unfortunately, yes. Most of them are refined in labs and used by the military.

This essay is about elements that the public might encounter at work or from products they buy or use to simply live their lives — like foods or building materials in homes, for example.

The problem is this: thousands of toxic materials are produced from combinations of elements that are sold everywhere to do almost everything. Unless these materials are ruthlessly regulated, pigs who produce and profit by them have proven time and again that they are willing to hurt people — sometime kill them — to get rich.

Whoever heard of a CEO going to prison for poisoning someone? It doesn’t happen.

Some people, after reading an essay like this one, might decide that living is fraught with too many dangers. Life is no longer worth living. Some might ask themselves: is it better to just die and get it over with?

Well, one way that works, I’m told, is to ingest 37 bananas. It’s important to eat the peels as well as the meat. Thirty-seven is apparently the right dose.

Bananas are naturally radioactive; they contain potassium; a lot of people don’t know. Who will tell them? Not only radioactivity, but pesticides like chlorpyrifos coat the peels so that people are less likely to get bit by venomous spiders, which most assuredly would otherwise be hiding in bunches of untreated fruit.

Bananas contain substantial amounts of hydroxytryptamine, a serotonin-like chemical that if improperly dosed or taken with other substances can induce either euphoria or adverse reactions up to and including death.

People hell-bent on successful self-immolation might try eating 38 bananas — one more than necessary — just to be on the safe side.

The practice of blowing oneself up by eating one more banana than necessary is called, bananism.  I almost used the term to title this essay.

Billy Lee

Warning by the Editorial Board:  Billy Lee recommends that anyone who eats more than twenty bananas a day seek medical attention and psychological counseling. Never eat the peels.

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BILLIONAIRE CHRISTIANS

Donald Trump is the billionaire leader of Christians in the United States today.

We might as well face facts.

Some are saying that Trump has been a Christian for years. Leaders of southern fundamentalists inside the United States like Franklin Graham  joined forces with Russia and Israel to make him president.

It’s true.

Prophet Cindy Jacobs told attendees at Revolution 2017 — an event held at the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC  (God’s base camp, she called it) — that President Trump ”will be seated and mantled with the power of God.”

I’ve written several essays on the takeover of America by southern evangelicals like Jerry Falwell Jr. who made a deal with the president to advance his vision of an America submitted to GOD’S WILL — as he sees it.  Links to these articles are provided at the end of the essay for those who might want to review them.

NOTE BY EDITORIAL BOARD: On August 25, 2020 Jerry Falwell accepted a $10.5 million severance package from Liberty University to step down. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, he blamed his wife for the sex scandals that followed him pretty much everywhere during his tenure. 

I’m writing this essay, because it seems like the entire country is in denial about what is going on. People driven crazy by religion have embedded themselves into the politics of USA! USA!  and are working overtime to transform the country into their own twisted vision of what they think God wants.

While rabid wolves circle disguised as sheep, the rest of America is starting to understand that it is being enveloped and smothered by a Jim Jones style cult, which some fear will get us killed, because these hypocrites (and they are hypocrites) plan to force their despised and unloved flocks to swallow a strychnine-laced Kool-Aid of evil that will poison Earth with the trauma of mass-suicide and murder.

These sycophants of power want to hasten the “end-times” as foretold in the book of Revelation, which comes last in the Bible. It is an incomprehensible tract, which is the capstone of their “eschatology.”

They hope to mess-up the world so thoroughly that it will force a “rapture” that will sweep them up into Heaven as their enemies are tortured and killed.

The imaginations of pedophile pastors and sexually-abusive presidents make the book of Revelation a mirror to the worms that crawl through the chambers of their raging hearts.

If you aren’t scared, you should be.

Their inspiration comes from the book with passages they don’t memorize or quote, because they are blind guides. They just kind of skip over as they slip their way into paradise and leave the rest of us behind.

Your merchants were the world’s important people. By your magic spell all the nations were led astray.  Revelation 18: 23b (NIV)

They seek the power and glory of wealth that is too often hidden in the folds of a prayer shawl.

…the deceitfulness of wealth chokes the word, making it unfruitful.  Matthew 13: 22b (NIV, Jesus speaking)

They plot to overwhelm the heathen opposition — a cabal of Hillary supporters more often than not. 

The more priests there were, the more they sinned against me; they exchanged their glorious God for something disgraceful. They feed on the sins of my people and relish their wickedness. And it will be: Like people, like priests. I will punish both…  A whirlwind will sweep them away… Hosea 4: 7, 8, 19

Billy Lee

Post Script:
Blessed are the gentle, for they will inherit the earth.  Matthew 5:5 (World English Bible, Jesus speaking)

Note from the Editorial Board:  Every member of the BOARD advised Billy Lee not to publish his latest tome, because it might be misunderstood, which would be bad; or it might be understood, which is worse.

In defense of Billy Lee, during its first year the single victory in law of the current national leadership was to lower its own taxes, which were already too low by half.

It was reminiscent of one of the parables: the rich young ruler.  Obviously, our billionaire leaders read the parable and modeled their behavior after this eager-to-please young man of the Bible. For those not familiar, click on the link.

In fairness, we would be remiss not to mention that the president continues to repeal everything ”Obama.” So, it isn’t all bad inside the USA — at least for those Americans who hate Kenyan-born, Muslim presidents who misplace birth certificates.

Our current president led the crusade to expose ”truth” about President Obama — many Americans sucked it up like mother’s milk. Think of the good causes the president pushed forward to expose the vile and evil first Negro president.

He exposed crooked Hillary too, and lying Ted, and little Rubio, and sloppy Steve, and — as we just said — that other low-life he hates, nigger Barry.

The president’s righteousness exceeds even Hillary’s pussy-grabbing husband. Women line-up to receive a shake from his groping hands. The people love him. They flocked to DC to give him the most highly-attended inauguration in human history, he likes to tell people.

No wonder southern evangelicals and the GOP love him. He is our leader — our president — and we all, every single one of us, must learn to love him too, right?  

We must abase ourselves before him — because he is a stable genius anointed by himself,  if for no other reason. 

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HATING CHRISTMAS

Bevy Mae and me live on a cul-de-sac with a lot of old people everywhere. Some of the houses are empty; folks go to Florida, mostly. Some travel to second, third, or fourth  homes located only God knows where. None have Christmas decorations. It’s too much work when people are old and no one comes to visit.

A black kid who must have spent a lot of time making Christmas candles came to our house yesterday. He displayed his wares and gave what I thought was a carefully memorized pitch for the homeless.

How much? I asked.

Most folks give twenty dollars, he said.  I held an iPhone at the ready pre-dialed to  911 in case he tried to rob me.

After looking the boy over, he seemed like a good kid, so I put the phone away and paid the money. The last thing he said as he stepped back to leave was, Thank you, sir, for answering the door. It means a lot at Christmas.

I wondered if I should tell him that the reason people weren’t answering their doors was that they had already left town, most of them.  No, I thought. Better not tell him that.

People live in my neighborhood who I think must be more paranoid and racist than me. Some no doubt refused to answer, because they darn well aren’t going to deal with a door-to-door salesman at Christmas-time.  Especially if they look like someone who might hate them because they are unable to feign even a little trust — a little kindness and love —  during Christmas season.

It’s scary when strangers approach the house who are male, black, and have never been seen before.

Christmas is supposed to be white as snow, right?

What if I misjudged the young man? Is it wise to tell someone just because they present well that the neighborhood is empty? Their friends might come back to pillage and loot.

Cul-de-sac where Billy Lee lives.

Yeah, it’s going to be a crummy Christmas.

Here are ten things I worry about that make this end of year holiday season especially depressing  — and it’s not the weather, which right now is grey and overcast.

1 –The GOP raised taxes on 25% of the public. Guess who made it into that illustrious group? Me.  I’m in — according to a questionnaire about finances conducted by the New York Times. 

2 — The president left the White House without wishing the country a Merry Christmas!  It’s another campaign promise the oinking chief-commander broke.  What good is being free to say Christmas if the president won’t say it? Everyone should be used to his lying-ways by now. Sorry — the fat-man continues to irritate me. 

3 — Will the president start World War Three on Christmas Eve? It’s just one more thing to worry about. I’m not going to bed with visions of sugar plums dancing in my head this time. Will he obliterate North Korea because they tested bombs and missiles, something the USA has done thousands of times? Who the hell knows? 

4 — Will he fire Robert Mueller, a decorated Marine veteran and arguably one of the most honest men in government? Or will he perhaps fire a random person on Christmas, because, why the hell not? 

It’s Christmas, people! The orange-man demands results. He doesn’t mess around when it comes to making America great. He fired the former FBI director James Comey, because his attempt to clear Hillary Clinton three days before the election failed.

You’re fired! quacked the presidential duck. He did it for Hillary. He really did. He was helping an old friend. That’s all it was.

I watched him say so on television. Maybe it was fake news. I can’t tell anymore. .

5 — One of the best gifts? Trump gave Americans the precious gift of the ObamaCare Repeal. It’s what he said. I saw the video on the nightly news. He promised to replace it with something way better.  Can’t wait to open that present. Unaffordable healthcare is a wonderful thing. It prevents countless thousands of Americans from going to hospitals where they risk being hurt by doctors who are only in it for the money. 

6 — Family members who have shopped say the crowds in the stores are minimal. Despite the commercial hype on billionaire-owned media, store sales have crashed. 

7 — The stock market noticed. It’s down. Yes, Russian oligarchs  are playing games by pulling out money. It’s a fun prank, especially during Christmas.

Why not?

I confess; I cut back on Christmas spending. The economy can go belly-up — I really don’t care. I don’t put money in the stock market; I don’t vacation in Vegas. The wealthy are on a shoplifting-spree, like under former President Bush. The greed of his fellow-travelers crashed the country in 2008.

The current fool’s friends are worse. So will be the results. How long will profiteering take to cut the legs off the middle-class this time around? Not long, methinks. 

8 — Churches campaigned for the biggest boob ever to run for the highest office ever in the history of the world ever — and of all human-kind, ever. He’s huge, the orange fat-man.

Churches organized bus-runs to take congregants to hear Franklin Graham  “on tour” pretend to anyone who listened that he was politically neutral while he ranted against witches (like the unnamed evil Methodist, Hillary) and abortion.

Omarosé Onée Manigault-Newman predicted that people would bow before the new leader before history as we know it ends. Omarosa is one of the many misfit toys the orange man fired during his climb to ultimate power. 

How can anyone go back to those crazy churches should their bozo-president actually screw-up everything at Christmas? The allure of Christianity rides on the back of a thrice-married billionaire who went bankrupt in the casino business, of all things.

Somehow the president hadn’t learned that casinos don’t make money, they launder it. It’s a big difference.

When things go to hell in a handbasket (as they certainly will), which churches are going to get the most credit?

If the orange-clown kills millions of people to make a point, who gets the pat on the back? Jesus? 

9 — I have sons who have made more money than I ever imagined was possible back in those times when I held them as babes in my loving arms. To a man, they think things are just fine. No worries.

Yes, health insurance is expensive, but think about this one thing for just one minute. Now is not the time for stupid, right?  Rich people don’t buy health insurance. They don’t need it. Anyone who hoards fourteen-thousand piles of one-million dollars per pile (like the president claims) doesn’t worry about a $200,000 hospital bill. Billionaires spend more on Rolex watches. 

Video clip of recent Navy UFO sighting here.

10 — During the past week, the media informed the public on three different occasions that at this moment in time when the Russians are dismantling the United States, UFOs scramble over the skies of the world on every continent. Is there anyone out there who hasn’t heard the ominous rumblings of UFOs late at night while they are trying to sleep?

Since the last news report days ago, not a peep has been heard from the media. Not a line of warning by the replicants who sit in the seats of media-power. They are life-like, aren’t they?

So Perfect. So Desirable.

They seem to never mispronounce words or make grammatical errors. Sure, they screw-up. They do.  Listen. Sometimes they say boob-el instead of bubble. That’s how you tell.

None of this is happening, right?

Surely everyone understands by now. It can’t be happening.  Not now.  Not ever. 

Cover eyes, ears, and mouth.

Stop screaming.

Why don’t you believe?

I’m a pontificator, for Christ’s sake. 

I’m trying so hard to warn you.

NOTHING IS REAL RIGHT NOW.

Billy Lee

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47 TONS

Update: March 25, 2021
Today, Japanese public broadcaster NHK News (the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation) reported that the intruder detection sensors at the Kashiwazaki-Karina Nuclear Power Plant have been broken for at least one year; inspectors and regulators rank it a terrorism risk  at the “most serious level”.

The plant has not operated since the Tsunami of 2011, which damaged and closed many of Japan’s nuclear power plants including the catastrophic meltdown and fires at Fukishima — which remain on-going. Sensor readings at the complex suggest that one of the reactors could re-ignite. The area of concern is inaccessible. 

Update: May 16, 2020  
Today, NHK News announced that Japan has officially launched a Space Defense Unit, otherwise called the Space Operations Squadron (SOS). It’s mission is to protect Japan’s many satellites from debris and other space hazards and threats. A spokesman said that communication protocols between Japan and the US are yet to be worked out. 

Update: May 11, 2018
In April Congress approved Japanese American Paul M. Nakasone to lead the National Security Agency, the Central Security Service, and the U.S. Cyber Command. Paul’s grandparents were Japanese citizens born in Japan. His father worked for Army intelligence services during World War II when Japanese Americans, many of them, were rounded up and detained in USA internment camps. Nakasone is an Army General appointed to lead an agency (the NSA) that has been led by a rotation of Navy Admirals, Air Force and Army Generals. 
The Editorial Board

47 TONS

While the Little Rocket Man and North Korea capture the world’s attention, our president is in Tokyo to deal with a threat that dwarfs anything we have faced since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 76 years ago.

The surprise attack against our Navy on Sunday morning, 7 December 1941, started a cascade of retaliation against the Japanese that three-and-a-half years later resulted in 67 Japanese cities burnt to ashes during a few months of sustained “fire-jelly” attacks by hundreds of Boeing-29 Superfortress bombers and other aircraft. After napalming the cities to ashes and dust, the United States followed the horror with a “preemptive” nuclear strike against the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Nine million Japanese civilians were left homeless. The death toll has never been definitively calculated, but two million souls is a reasonable guess.

(Click map to enlarge.) The distance from Pyongyang, North Korea to Tokyo, Japan is 800 miles; Hawaii, 4,400 miles; Los Angeles, 6,000 miles; Seattle, 5,150 miles; Alaska, 3,200 miles. The border of North Korea meanders 25 to 50 miles from downtown Seoul, South Korea.

A few years after the stalemate of the Korean War, General Curtis LeMay — head of Strategic Air Command — claimed that his pilots had killed a similar number of Koreans by aerial bombardment — 20% of the population.

The United States killed an estimated million Iraqi civilians in the more recent wars in the Middle East, which included the Gulf War and the Iraq War.

It killed 2 million Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam genocide of the 1960s and 70s. In the region of southeast Asia, the USA killed 3.4 million souls, military and civilian, by the war’s end.  

In August 1945, USA bombers killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Millions were burned alive in fire-jelly (napalm) bombings, which decimated 67 cities over several months. Evacuation of cities helped to reduce casualties. 

Why am I bringing up a bunch of disturbing statistics? What’s the point? Why not leave unpleasant memories forgotten in a distant past where they can’t impact the happy lives we live now, not then?

What possible benefit can remembering the past confer upon our contented present? Why bother puking up a sour history that only the old-timers among us experienced?

May I ask one more question? Maybe thinking about the answer will help some to make sense of current events that seem to have no rhyme or reason.

Of the fifty countries against which we have directed our military wrath since World War II, which among them has a right to the biggest grievance? Who did we hurt the most?

Which country has been forced to endure the shame of a military occupation that never ends? Ok, maybe it sounds like more than one question. Deal with it.

America fights secret and not so secret wars against communist, Islamic, western hemispheric, and, it turns out, African countries all the time. We have conducted strategic operations against friend and foe alike since World War II.

We have meddled in the internal politics of super powers like Russia and China. The Dalai Lama of Tibet wrote in his book Freedom in Exile that the United States gave him millions of dollars to incite violence against China, for example.

The USA has attacked militarily one in four of the 190 countries on the earth during the modern era. Which country is the one most likely to harbor a secret ambition for revenge?

America keeps itself in a state of perpetual war to feed the appetites of voracious weapons manufacturers whose stockholders are among the world’s most affluent. The AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Military Force against terrorists) passed Congress, and President Bush signed the bill in August 2001 for a reason — to fuel the ambition of arms dealers by freeing them from the inconvenience of securing approval of Congress to declare wars — which the Constitution demands. Only California’s Barbara Lee (no relation to Billy Lee) voted against it.

Since 1991 Congress has passed and the president signed four AUMFs, mostly to cut down on the amount of work and delays that are inevitable when large elected groups of representatives are compelled to go on record for or against any particular conflict.

We in America live under a lot of illusions. We tell ourselves a lot of lies about how wonderful we are and how everyone wants to be like us. Our enemies who fear us the most insist — some of them, anyway — that they love us; they want to live with us and be like us, and we believe them.

No one tells a command officer who is carrying an automatic assault rifle that he is a pig; the term “butt-wipe” is never used. No one wants to die for a no good reason like name calling. Our subjugates place flowers in the barrels of our guns and tell us they love us.

Everyone who has been shamed and humiliated prays for their day of liberation; the day of their revenge; the day the world is finally set right. It’s human nature. The desire to settle scores crosses cultural, religious, and geographical boundaries.

Few countries that have suffered cremation by fire of millions of their citizens forget. They don’t forgive. Not really. Think long and hard.

It’s true.

For almost a year Billy Lee lived where he could view Mount Fuji from his bedroom window during his two-year stay in Japan. The Editorial Board

The situation in Japan is dire; it is. The United States for some insane and goofy reason permitted the Japanese over the past 30 years to build the most sophisticated nuclear power grid the world has ever seen.

The USA sold the Japanese uranium-impregnated fuel rods. A by-product of their use, which is to produce the intense heat required to generate electricity, is plutonium. Instead of collecting and disposing the spent fuel rods, the Japanese built facilities to extract the plutonium. They promised to use the plutonium for fuel in advanced power generators called “fast reactors.”

Fast reactors are in principle cheaper and less complicated; they are also more volatile; more dangerous to operate.

After the earthquakes and tsunami of 2011, the Japanese abandoned “fast reactors”. They discovered during audits following the disasters at Fukushima and other facilities that their fast reactor safety records bordered on terrifying. They stopped using plutonium for fuel. With no place to “burn” what they continued to harvest, plutonium began to accumulate, bigly.

In the entire universe plutonium is found above trace amounts at one location and one location only: planet Earth. Plutonium went extinct due to radioactive decay billions of years ago.

Plutonium can be created during rare cosmic events, but the bomb-making kind — Pu 239 — is a manufactured element that does not occur in nature. It is a byproduct of nuclear fission reactions that hides within the matrix of poisons that make the remnants of spent fuel rods.

Plutonium is among the most poisonous substances known. The speck of plutonium dust that kills you, you will likely never see. Some scientists today have downplayed the lethality of plutonium 239. My advice is to be skeptical whenever vast amounts of money and power fuel a controversy.

Regardless of its lethality as a poison, no one argues that fourteen pounds is enough plutonium to make an atomic bomb of a construction so unsophisticated that a high schooler could fashion the necessary components in shop class. Sophisticated bombs require even less plutonium — a mere nine pounds.

This is what plutonium powder looks like. Japan has 94,000 pounds of it. 14 pounds are required for an unsophisticated bomb; 9 pounds for a sophisticated version.

Japan has harvested 47 tons (94,000 pounds) of high-grade plutonium from its nearly one-hundred or so nuclear power and processing plants, which include power plants, research reactors, fast reactors, reprocessing installations, and recently decommissioned facilities — decommissioned due mostly to safety concerns.

Japan’s production schedule is running at a frenetic pace — adding eight tons of surplus plutonium to its stockpile every year into the foreseeable future unless the United States is able to shut down Japan’s reprocessing installations with an agreement scheduled for negotiation in 2018. Our new president has said the old agreements won’t be changed.

By this time next year the Japanese will have accumulated enough high-grade Pu 239 to make as many as 12,000 atomic bombs. Should it ever make that choice, Japan will possess the world’s largest nuclear arsenal almost overnight. 

Plutonium is heavy. Fourteen pounds of Pu 239 is the size of a softball. Nine pounds is the size of a baseball. It is exactly the right amount to construct the 4.38″ diameter ring used in a typical bomb. By this time next year Japan will possess enough plutonium to make 12,000. Depending on how the bombs are tampered, configured, and initiated such bombs can release an equivalent explosive power in a range from 20,000 to 100,000 TONs of TNT. The bombs can be launched by artillery, dropped from planes, or delivered by missiles, drone subs and boats.

What follows next in this essay is the scary part. Some readers might want to bail and maybe find a good comic book to occupy their imaginations.

Despite agreements with the United States that followed World War II, Japan has one of the largest military budgets in the world. The country spends 42 billion dollars per year on its military. This expenditure does not include its civilian nuclear power system or its civilian space exploration programs.

The Japanese consolidated three civilian rocket launching companies into one (named JAXA) in 2003. They are launching rockets into space all the time. JAXA designed, built, launched, and maintains the largest module on the International Space Station. The Japanese have spacecraft in the asteroid belt and spy satellites in Earth orbit. These are civilian programs.

The Japanese have, over the past fifty years, resurrected RIKEN, the laboratory complex used in their atomic bomb program during WW2. The lab employed two cyclotons, which the United States destroyed in a bombing run in 1945.

Today RIKEN labs sprawl across the islands of Japan in dozens of complexes that are impossible to police. The labs are involved in so many areas of research that no one can keep track of it all even if they wanted to. Some of the research is diabolical. One administrator was found hanging by the neck in his office in 2014. Enough said.

Although the military budget of the United States seems huge, people might want to consider that the USA spends one-third of its military dollars on salaries and pensions. No other military spends as much. It maintains 800 military bases in 70 countries at an expense of $200 billion — an expense that other militaries simply don’t have. Japan spends about the same amount on defense as England, France, and Germany. A controversial argument can be made that the combined military might of Russia, China, Japan, and North Korea exceeds that of the United States. It is an argument that is hard to prove, because countries lie about their military expenditures, war-fighting readiness, and technical capabilities. The chart above is misleading in another important way, because it doesn’t include expenditures on nuclear weapons — their production, maintenance, and modernization — which are state secrets in all the countries that possess them.  

The Japanese don’t have to make bombs from their plutonium stores to wreak havoc on an adversary. They can pulverize the metal into aerosols and release plutonium dust into the air over cities.

They can load plutonium into drone subs like rumors say the Russians have done and set hundreds of them in the coastal waters of our country. The subs can lie in ocean sand and silt for decades before releasing their poisons, should it ever become necessary.

Their advanced missile technology might enable Japan to overwhelm our defenses by launching multiple warhead missiles over our homeland. It might take a few months, but poisoned populations would eventually succumb to the release of toxic dust.

And, should they choose to make bombs, well, any country with the resources of a country as sophisticated as Japan can turn high-grade plutonium into bombs in a few days; they can possess the capability to create hell on Earth in the blink of an eye, anytime they choose. With the right (or wrong) leadership they can unleash a nightmare of suffering far worse than the inferno we inflicted on them 72 years ago.

This plant is the place where the Japanese extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel rods. The Japanese have admitted on NHK television that they have 94,000 pounds of plutonium, which they have no use for nor any place to safely store.

Plutonium is an artificially produced killing material that no human being, company, or country should ever be allowed to possess or use. It is a forbidden apple of physics that can only bring anguish to whoever uses or shares it with others.

Japan has the potential to threaten the world with the same level of terror as the United States, Russia, China, Pakistan, India, Britain, France, Germany, Israel, and who knows what other countries. Many countries are conducting (in secret) diabolical engineering even now and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.

What could be worse? Believe it or not, our predicament might already be much worse than anyone in the USA is willing to think about or imagine.

What about the possibility that North Korea and China are playing a game of good cop / bad cop with our military planners? What if Japan is toying with the idea of leading an unholy alliance? Behind our backs? Do we really have enough Japanese-speaking spies to keep track of all the secret Samurai cults that might be conspiring at the highest levels of government?

Do we?

What if Vladimir Putin thinks: The United States lied to me. I helped to elect an American president who is ineffective — a buffoon who can’t help me the way he promised. Let’s get ’em!

Imagine an alliance of China, North Korea, Russia, and Japan; an alliance led by the one country that has the greatest lust for payback; the strongest ache to settle scores once and for all.

A Hunkpapa Lakota holy man, Sitting Bull, had the vision that led to the defeat of the USA’s 7th Calvary Regiment on June 26, 1876 — one week before the USA’s 100th anniversary. Five of seven battalions were decimated — one led by Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer. Sitting Bull became a celebrity who worked in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Later in life he became a leader of the Ghost Dance movement, which terrified whites, because it prophesied the exodus of white people from native American lands. Ten days before Christmas — on December 15, 1890 during an arrest by police on reservation property — Indian Affairs agents shot Sitting Bull in the head and chest in front of his family and friends. Agents removed his body to Fort Yates, where they buried him in a makeshift coffin.  

A surprise attack by such an alliance would be nation ending. It might end like the Battle of the Little Bighorn. We don’t have enough soldiers or missiles or ships to fight a gathering of tribes who possess tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.

The USA has the power to destroy the whole world if we must, but we can’t save ourselves; we can’t save our country; we can’t save the planet.

In the conflagration that took the hyper-alert Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer by surprise, all his ribbons and medals; all his accolades; all his friends in high places couldn’t save him, his men, or even his horses. The battle of the Little Bighorn was a massacre that dwarfed Custer’s reputation for being a really good person; a hero of the Civil War loved by every patriotic American.

To those who say, Billy Lee, you’ve gone paranoid on us… the Japanese would never organize an attack against America unawares… not a nuclear attack… they know how bad it would be… they suffered through one… they know better than anyone… and look at them, how they smile when we tell bad jokes. The last thing on their minds is revenge. The very last thing!

I say, you are so right!  The Japanese would never hurt us. I lived in Japan for two years after the war. The Japanese have their quirks, yes, but most of them are not cruel or insensitive. They don’t enjoy watching torture videos for entertainment, most of them. Tying up women and twisting their bodies to prepare them for rape is not something most Japanese men would have any part in. Am I right? Of course I am.

The Japanese are not monsters. They are a kind and gentle people who don’t farm or ranch or mine, because they are resource impoverished. When I lived there our Japanese house-maids and yard-boys were as sweet as they could be. They meant us no harm. I see that now.

How on Earth are the Japanese going to get rid of the 47 tons of plutonium poison they have produced? And how will they dispose of the eight tons they plan to produce each year into perpetuity — plutonium which they admit has no longer any peacetime applications whatsoever?

Hayabusa2 Rocket on pad at the Tanegashima Island Space Center off the southern tip of Japan. The rocket landed a  probe on the asteroid Ryugu on 4 October 2018. The Editorial Board 

Everybody knows plutonium has a radioactive half-life of 24,000 years. It’s never going to go away. Someday, through inattention or from whatever other cause, plutonium containment structures are going to rot, and the poison will leach into the soils, the oceans, and the atmosphere to kill all living things. It is Earth’s best case scenario — the scenario where nuclear war never happens, the world disarms, and plutonium is tucked away out of reach and out of sight of war makers and other terrorists.

The process that will sterilize the planet of all life is already well underway and cannot be stopped — not over a period of tens of thousands of years. Read the essay, RISK, elsewhere on this site. Humans are likely to be extinct by the time the unnatural poisons of war and opulence first make their advance against the innocent, less intelligent life-forms that we will leave behind — like chipmunks and kittens, for example — who will never be able to understand what is killing them or why.

Our new president is in Tokyo as I’m writing this essay. Anyone who asks him will learn — because he’s not afraid to say it — he is really smart and bigly educated. He understands people and how best to manipulate them to maximize his advantages and get what he wants. You don’t believe it?  Ask him — for the love of God — ask him.

Maybe we should help the Japanese store their plutonium in a safe place — a place much safer than their earthquake tormented islands that float within the largest fisheries of the Pacific Ocean. We could store the plutonium perhaps deep in a cave somewhere. Maybe we could store it beneath the volcanic calderas southeast of Yosemite — or some other remote location, like a trench astride the San Andreas fault.

Yeah, that sounds good. Let’s do that.

If we talk nicely, will the Japanese listen? Maybe they will, if our new president has the sense to ask. Does anyone have a better idea? For the love of God, tell someone.

Billy Lee

 

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ILLUSIONS

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 the Editorial 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.

Billy Lee

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BEGGING FOR IT

Nikki Haley, UN Ambassador, told the world that North Korea is begging for war. Her statement reminds me of the rape defense that bad men used in decades past at trial before court—she was begging for it, they would always insist.

The victim—always a woman—exercised her constitutional right to dress any way she chose. A prowling lunatic observed her and believed instead that she was advertising a willingness to copulate with a grease-ball, so he attacked.

In today’s United States the grease-ball defense no longer works. Women (and countries) have rights. The courts protect them, most of the time. When they don’t, women have recourse to civil suits.

Nikki Haley is the daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India. Her mother once owned a clothing company, Exotica International, where Nikki worked as a bookkeeper starting at age 12. She served as governor of South Carolina until she became UN Ambassador in the Trump Administration. Note from the Editorial Board: Haley resigned her UN post on December 31, 2018.

All countries (and women) have the right to defend themselves. No one should have to say it. But the United States has mucked-up the waters of international affairs by waging preemptive wars against communist and socialist countries for the past seventy-five years. It seems like these wars will never end.

The policy of the United States is to undermine any country that espouses communism; it attacks using whatever methods are devised and recommended by the brilliant, depraved minds of our intelligence community. Despite all the evidence, despite all the complaints lodged against the United States before international courts and the United Nations, most Americans refuse to believe it.

The USA birthed its war-policy against collectivism in the early 1900s when the first communist revolutions undermined the noble classes of eastern Europe. The well-connected saw what happened in Russia and Hungary and decided to do something about it. Writers like Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), George Orwell (1984), and Ayn Rand (We the Living) wrote short, easy to read tracts that portrayed life under communism as a personality-destroying nightmare. The public ate it up. 

After World War II, the job of suppression was handed over to our newly formed intelligence agencies who gave the fight its name: the Cold War. With the recent CIA assisted transformations of the Soviet Union and Red China into oligarchies (marking a putative end to the biggest conflicts) other terms have emerged from inside the intelligence community to describe how the USA is continuing to war against what few holdouts remain. The current buzz phrase is strategic strangulation.

Billionaires don’t look at the world in the same way as the disenfranchised and exploited. In the neglected and overlooked far reaches of the world where billionaires don’t live, common people sometimes try to organize themselves by producing wealth cooperatively and sharing it as best they can. Once they attract the attention of the powerful, the powerful send in missionaries and agricultural-aid workers to undermine and disenfranchise their leaders.

If God and food don’t work, they send in assassins. It’s true. Since WWII, the United States has gone to war with one out of four countries. It has overthrown (or co-opted) many states including Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Poland, Iraq, Afghanistan and dozens more.

Eventually, the USA sends in Coca-Cola and other first-line-of-attack companies to overwhelm the nascent economies of the sharers and cooperators. The wealthy move in to buy the arable land and lock up the country; billionaire power-brokers make it their business to bury every way of governance that might threaten their right to administer an economic empire built for one purpose only: to empower their own families and the families of their friends to rule unimpeded into perpetuity.

This billboard appears all over the island of Cuba. It says: BLOCKADE: THE LONGEST GENOCIDE IN HISTORY. It shows a Klansman’s noose strangling the island. Inside the USA intelligence community, it’s called strategic strangulation. Our leaders have enforced the embargo of Cuba for 55 years. Odds are it will never end.

The USA is good at undermining socialist countries. It’s why socialism doesn’t do well. When a communist country like Cuba manages to hold on somehow, they are tormented by embargos, infiltration by agents, sabotage, disinformation, slander, assassinations and so on. Radio Free Whatever is beamed into the targeted country to undermine morale and brainwash listeners with the most seductive psychological warfare techniques in our arsenal. It’s why communist countries seal their borders and jam our broadcasters.

The United States makes sure that no administrator can relax; none can kick back without constantly looking over their shoulder and keeping guard. As long as the privately-owned United States exists, countries of the opposite sex — that is, socialist countries — are going to get blamed for however the rich and powerful choose to hurt them. The better these socialist countries do for their people the bigger the target they become. Their success is their mini-skirt; their low-cut blouse. Obviously, they are begging for war as Madame Haley so eloquently put it.

Blaming the victim is as old as Cain and Abel. It’s as old as history. The bullies win. They put on coats and tails, send their kids to exclusive schools, learn to speak with a different accent, and set themselves apart. They tell wonderful stories about themselves on TV, movies, radio, books, magazines, and the internet until people start to actually believe deep in their hearts that wealthy people are more wonderfully made than themselves or their kids.

The poor and disadvantaged admire their employers, because no one is left to help them understand that they are slaves — fools before a noble class that thinks of them as having no more value than farm animals. They live in the cow-pastures outside the gates of the wealthy. A few unlucky cows get a glimpse from time to time of what has been stolen from them; most of the time they are too incredulous before the view to believe their own eyes.

Today, billionaires are planning as they have for the past seventy years to obliterate the North Koreans. Tens of millions of Koreans will die in the first hours. The North Koreans and their Chinese allies were the first countries to challenge America after WWII. Apparently, our arsenal of atomic weapons didn’t intimidate them. The USA has a long memory.

If we use nuclear weapons in a first strike, no one will live on the peninsula again. That this threat has been floated by our new president (fire and fury like the world has never known) makes it easy to understand what the USA is all about.

Despite denials in the press, America may in fact have neutron bombs in its arsenal which kill people but leave infrastructure intact outside the immediate impact zone. Only bunkers constructed from heavy concrete impregnated with barium sulfate can shield against both neutrons and the gamma ray by-products of collisions between neutrons and the proton-rich substrate of heavy concrete.

High level command bunkers are likely to be built with these materials. Otherwise elements like lead and heavy metals are the barriers of choice against most frequencies of nuclear radiation. But heavy metals tend to be transparent and ineffective against neutron bombardment.

Neutron bombs emit little residual radiation so they don’t contaminate the attack zone. An occupying force can be inserted with little risk of radiation poisoning. It’s possible the USA will use neutron bombs against civilians for the first time if the Koreans continue begging our country to kill them. A follow-on insertion of Marine and Airborne divisions would locate and destroy any surviving command bunkers.

The United States always seems to be first to try diabolical things. We used anthrax against Chinese troops during the Korean war back in the 1950s. Everyone knows about it but us of course. We have short memories when it comes to remembering our own sins like the genocidal Vietnam War and other cruelties such as the war against Iraq and the destabilization of the Middle East.

And no one seems to remember that it was a CIA agent (yes, he was disgruntled and no longer employed, the agency insists) who blew up the first commercial airliner and wiped out the Cuban Olympic fencing team. It was an act of terrorism that didn’t happen when you ask most Americans. Lee Harvey Oswald was also disgruntled and no longer employed, come to think of it.

Speaking of begging for war, is anyone out there begging for peace?  The USA killed two million North Koreans during aerial bombardments approved by President Truman. What’s stopping us from doing it again?

During the first days of the Korean War, the South rounded up 100,000 of its own citizens and summarily executed them, believing that each of their victims might be a leftist sympathizer of the North. The Korean War was an atrocity — which I won’t devote blog space to explain or explore. Click on links, those who want to know more.

South Korea from North Korea’s point of view. A massive China has their back. South Korea’s capital is close to their border — a tempting target. (Click on map to produce full-size view in a new window.)

The point is, we aren’t listening to the North or South Koreans. Most want the peninsula unified. We don’t. Most folks want to live in a safe and fair place where billionaires don’t reduce the average person to poverty. South Korea doesn’t want us to sacrifice millions of its own citizens in a military strike against the North — possibly triggering a nuclear conflagration — to make a point. It’s simple, really.

The only sensible solution is to leave Korea and to assist reunification as best as we can if the sides invite us. We aren’t leaving obviously, because our policy is to topple socialism wherever it takes root.

In the past the USA demonized so many of its enemies that it has become more confusing for most folks to know who the bad guys are this time around. Immigrants to the Americas once labeled native Americans with the pejorative, savages. We exterminated their food supply (buffalos), then their men, women and children.

Right now, no one knows who to trust. With our new president we will never know what the facts are. We will never know for sure who is begging for war, us or them.

Billy Lee

From the EDITORIAL BOARD:

Billy Lee supports private and public ownership of property (a mixed economy) but advocates for internationally enforced limits on personal incomes and estate sizes to reduce the temptations that drive the wealthy to burn down democracy on altars of greed. Read Billy Lee’s essay Capitalism and Income Inequality.

Billy Lee opposes war on humanitarian grounds. During war people get killed and are maimed in huge numbers. It sometimes takes generations for both winners and losers to emerge from the trauma and horrors.

Billy Lee supports the United States during war but in peacetime reserves his constitutional right to pontificate freely.

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OCEAN WAR

Russian hypersonic ship killing missiles fired from submarines and jets pose an existential threat to the US Navy Fleet. From AP Photo. 

UPDATE BY THE EDITORS: 5 AUGUST 2021; The Associated Press reported yesterday the following: A prospective Russian hypersonic missile has been successfully test-fired from a nuclear submarine for the first time, the military said Monday. The Russian Defense Ministry said that the Severodvinsk submarine performed two launches of the Zircon cruise missile at mock targets in the Barents Sea.

Editors Note: The January 16, 2018 edition of the New York Times reports that five Naval officers are being charged with negligent homicide related to the incidents described in this essay where seventeen sailors lost their lives, others were injured, and ships were damaged. The decision to take these officers to trial or court-martial is imminent.

The United States Navy insists that it has 277 ships on active-duty. About 132 are combat surface vessels; 75 or so are submarines. About 70 are logistical craft designed to supply the fleet.

Do the math. 132 surface ships patrol the oceans. Yes, the Navy says they have a fleet of 160 or so non-commissioned ships held in reserve, but they are unavailable and ineffective during first strike scenarios.

The New York Times agrees with the Navy. Everyone agrees — we have 277 ships. I hope the Navy and the New York Times are lying, because if they aren’t, we are in big trouble. We don’t have enough boats.

132 surface ships can’t control the Great Lakes, let alone the world’s seven oceans. Submarines, everyone knows, are almost useless except when used for nuclear deterrence.

The Navy’s Seventh Fleet is headquartered in Yokosuka, Japan. The fleet is responsible to cover 48 million square miles — from Japan to South Korea to Singapore, unless the faraway reaches of the South China Sea are included; then the square miles are too confusing for anyone to compute.

China claims the whole of the South China Sea as its sovereign territory, including all reefs, atolls, and islands.

How many ships bear the awesome duty to keep the sea-lanes open and safe from pirates and hostile powers like North Korea? The Navy says, 70. The USA deploys one aircraft carrier and 69 ships.

Some news outlets have reported that an additional carrier group has been sent into the Sea of Japan to augment the current force configuration. A typical carrier strike group consists of eleven vessels, two of which are submarines. So, the total on the date of this essay might be as high as 81.

Sorry, but someone is ordering our sailors to do an impossible job. The job is too big, the resources are too thin, and guess what? 

A flotilla of 81 vessels scurrying about the South China Sea to keep a lid on China, which is seizing islands that belong to Vietnam, Taiwan, and the Philippines as they build and fortify new ones wherever they want is more than enough problems to exhaust any navy. People get tired. Accidents happen.

We have 70 ships in theater, the Navy says. We probably have 81. What does the other side have?

Well, we don’t really know. They lie. So do we. But we and they both watch; and we and they both spy and calculate.

Hillary Clinton — once upon a time (anyone remember?) she had the security-clearance to know — during a 2016 presidential debate let slip that Russian drone submarines are patrolling our coasts. These are cheap subs that sail apparently with no crews on board.

She said it once. Her assertion was never repeated in the press or public media. Everyone pretended they didn’t hear, for good reason. The number and types of ships in the Russian and Chinese fleets that are arrayed against our tiny arsenal of boats are state secrets. It’s all classified — out of reach of everyone except those with a clearance and a need to know. 

Chinese frigates like this one often stalk US ships in the South China Sea.

It seems clear to more than a few casual observers of Chinese shipping that the Chinese are building the most high-tech navy the world has ever seen. They have been building it for a few decades now.

The Chinese have practiced their sea-going skills in coordination with the Russian navy since 2012. Last year the Russians and Chinese held joint naval exercises in the South China Sea, of all places. Joint land-based military exercises started in 2007.

China is selling its naval technologies and hardware to smaller countries that don’t normally threaten us. Thailand is buying Chinese subs. With military hi-tech weapons spread among a dozen or more countries in secret alliances with China… well… if it’s happening more than we know, does anyone think it’s good for our side?

But really, what would any reasonable person suspect are the forces arrayed against us? Look around. Hundreds-of-thousands of Russians live on the island of Cuba ninety miles from the United States.

Upscale area southwest of the airport in Havana, Cuba. (From Google Earth. Street View not available.)

Go on Google Earth and look at the Cuban neighborhoods. Some nice ones have Russian street names. It’s true. The Russians have a number of wonderfully designed, modern military bases for both subs and ships; and — oh yeah — they have fighter jets and missiles, as well.

Does anyone disagree? Go look.

Am I trying to scare people?

Doesn’t the public have enough to fear? Isn’t terrorism, immigration, climate change, distant war, disease, and precarious health care that could collapse now that the GOP is in charge enough to worry about? Of course it is. 

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson helped Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin build Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure. It is the world’s best. Note from the Editors: Tillerson resigned his post on March 31, 2018. 

Besides, our country has thousands of nuclear weapons buried hundreds of feet below the cornfields and deserts of the heartland to extinguish any threats, should we lose our Navy. Until the missiles rot and their plutonium payloads leech into our soils, why worry?

Everyone should sleep well at night, right?  Who wants to alarm anyone?  I don’t.

Secretary of State Tillerson said we should sleep well, so why not? He knows all about the Russians, having helped them build their oil industry over many decades.

Depending on when anyone takes its measure, Russia’s energy industry is the world’s largest and most productive — bigger than Saudi Arabia’s. People don’t believe it, but it’s true.

Russia is the world’s biggest oil and natural gas producer and exporter. Secretary Tillerson must know what he’s talking about, right? 

Well, here is some stuff that is not so comforting. It might scare some people. Between 1975 and 2016 (41 years) our Navy experienced nine accidents, mostly between our own ships. Only two accidents involved the boats of foreign countries. That’s not bad. That’s not the scary part. But hear me out.

The Ehime Maru was on a 74-day voyage to train high school students to become commercial fishermen when it was struck on 9 February 2001 by a US submarine. It sank. Of the 35 on board, nine died, including four teenagers.

In 2001 a Japanese fishing-training boat, the Ehime Maru, with thirty-five Japanese citizens aboard, was obliterated near the Hawaiian island of Oahu when the commanding officer of one of our attack submarines allegedly hot-dogged the craft for civilian joy-riders.

Our new president, George W. Bush, went on national TV to apologize to the Japanese, and the United States paid huge fines and compensation to the Japanese government and the grieving families of the nine who died, which included four high school students.

In 2004, the aircraft carrier U.S.S. John F. Kennedy ran over an Arab sailboat in the Persian Gulf.  15 people died, but the Navy didn’t identify who they were it seems, and no one was compensated, as far as I know. Two jet fighters parked on deck were damaged. The Navy relieved the commanding officer.

USS Belknap, guided-missile cruiser, destroyed in 1975 near Sicily.

The most serious accident was in 1975 when the same U.S.S. John F. Kennedy hit one of our own guided-missile cruisers, the USS Belknap, off the island of Sicily. The Belknap was completely destroyed; seven sailors died.

A fire burned on the Belknap for twenty hours just a few yards from the magazine where Terrier surface-to-air missiles were stored. The ship was constructed with aluminum, which caught fire. The entire above deck structure melted. It took nearly five years to reconstruct the ruined cruiser. In 1995, the Navy struck it from the Naval Registry and began using it for target practice. They sunk it during a live-fire exercise in 1998.

A year after the Belknap accident, the USS John F. Kennedy collided with another ship, this time the aging USS Bordelon destroyer during a refueling. The Navy struck the ship from its registry and sold it to Iran for parts in 1977. No one died.

So, during the forty-one years between 1975 and 2016, the US Navy had nine peacetime accidents, seven of which were friendly-fire and self-inflicted. 24 foreign nationals died; 7 U.S. sailors; 1 U.S. civilian. Ship losses: one cruiser and one obsolete destroyer. Maybe other losses occurred. I haven’t heard about them, if there were any.

The USS John S. McCain collided with a Liberian oil tanker, the Alnic MC, on August 20, 2017 in an early morning incident that killed ten sailors. The crash took the destroyer out of action for at least one year.

And now comes the scary part; hold onto your pants: In the seven months since the inauguration of our comb-over commander-in-chief (and keeper of nuclear codes), the U.S. Navy has suffered four major accidents, which killed 17 sailors and injured scores more.

It’s lost two of its most powerful missile-guided destroyers — the U.S.S. Fitzgerald and the U.S.S. John S. McCain. It might be years before they are back in service. Readers can read about the fates of the USS Antietam and the USS Lake Chaplain in the links below.

At least two dozen sailors and officers have been disciplined, including a Vice-Admiral, a Commander, and a Lieutenant Commander. Admiral John Richardson, chief of Naval operations, has ordered an “operational pause” to all fleet commanders. He’s ordered a months-long review of protocols, because, he says, “there’s something out there that we’re not getting at.”

All this commotion is happening during a time when we’re planning to conduct war games against North Korea and are daily challenging the Chinese in the South China Sea.

Can I put things into perspective? If the accident rate of the past seven months was applied to the past forty-one years, the U.S. Navy would be short another 85 ships and 800 sailors. Thousands more young men and women would be maimed and wounded, and 250 promising Naval careers would be wrecked.

In peacetime, essentially, the U.S. Navy might have lost one-third of its fleet and some of its best sailors and officers at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.

The USS Antietam, a guided missile cruiser, grounded itself in Tokyo Bay January 31, 2017. It released over one thousand gallons of toxic hydraulic oil into the bay and damaged both of its propellers and propeller hubs. Repair costs will exceed $4 million.

Here are a few of the headlines from our country’s newspaper of record, the New York Times. All headlines are from articles written in 2017. I’ve read every single one of them. Readers can access their content by clicking on the links. The remainder of my essay is written below these headlines:

China and Russia Hold First Joint Naval Drill in the Baltic Sea

Naval Collision Adds to Fears About U.S. Decline in Asia

After U.S. Destroyer Collision, Chinese Paper Says U.S. Navy a Hazard

Filipino Officials: Chinese Navy Stalked Philippine Area

4 Accidents, 2 Deadly, Raise Questions About Navy Operations

USS Lake Champlain Collision at Sea

Bodies of Several Sailors Are Found Aboard Damaged U.S. Destroyer

Sleeping Sailors on U.S.S. Fitzgerald Awoke to a Calamity at Sea

Japan Says Deadly Ship Collision Happened Earlier Than Reported

Maritime Mystery: Why a U.S. Destroyer Failed to Dodge a Cargo Ship

Navy Ship in Collision Named for McCain’s Dad, Grandfather

Previous Collisions Involving U.S. Navy Vessels

After Dangerous Collisions, Navy Will Pause for Safety Check

U.S. Admiral Says Remains Found Inside Damaged Destroyer

Commander of Naval Fleet Relieved of Duty After Collisions

Top Two Officers on Navy Ship in Deadly Collision Off Japan Are Relieved of Duties

10 Missing After U.S. Navy Ship and Oil Tanker Collide Off Singapore

Navy Dismisses 7th Fleet Commander After Warship Accidents

Mississippi Shipyard to Fix Destroyer Hit in June Collision

U.S. Navy Relieves Seventh Fleet Commander in Wake of Collisions in Asia

Wreckage of U.S.S. Indianapolis, Lost for 72 Years, Is Found in the Pacific*

*Some readers may have noticed that the last headline seems to have no connection whatsoever to this essay. But they would be wrong.

Recall that the battleship USS Indianapolis was the fiercest war machine we had during World War II in the Pacific. We used that ship to deliver the atomic bomb Little Boy (dropped on Hiroshima) to Tinian Island in the western Pacific Ocean sometime during July, 1945. It would be assembled and delivered to the Japanese people with terrifying effect on August 15.

From Tinian the Navy ordered the Indianapolis to advance to Leyte Island in the Philippines to prepare for an all-out assault and invasion of Japan scheduled to follow the atomic blasts that were soon to occur.

On July 30 the lumbering battleship encountered a Japanese submarine which delivered six torpedoes in the wee hours of the night. The sub commander later said that the clouds parted, which permitted the Indianapolis to be silhouetted by moon-light. It made targeting easy. Two torpedo struck the Indianapolis.

The ammunition on board caught fire and blew-off the front quarter. It took twelve minutes for the battleship to sink below the surface. The ship sucked four hundred men to the bottom and left behind an oil slick that would sicken and blind many of the nearly one-thousand sailors and marines who survived to face death by dehydration, drowning, and sharks.

The USS Indianapolis delivered the atomic bomb to the Air Force in the Pacific before being sunk by a Japanese submarine. The ordeal took the lives of nearly a thousand men during five days in the open sea. Read Devil’s Voyage by Jack L Chalker.

The Navy didn’t notice that their prized battleship was missing. After five days of vomiting, diarrhea, hallucinations, and shark attacks, three hundred men were still alive (some in lifeboats, including the Commanding Officer) when an aircraft on an unrelated mission saw something suspicious and flew down to take a closer look.

Twenty-two men who were pulled from the water remain alive today. The Navy court-martialed the commander, Captain McVay, and convicted him for not zig-zagging as he sailed. The Japanese sub-commander testified that zig-zagging would not have mattered. The Indianapolis was going to the floor of the ocean, in any event, he insisted. Nothing could have stopped what happened.

Losing a ship, even in war, is a big deal in the Navy. It’s not something that anyone takes lightly, even when there are extenuating circumstances and good reasons for failure. Captain McVay committed suicide in 1968—clutching a toy sailor in one hand and his service revolver in the other.

The Navy has a history of not being able to keep track of its ships. The earth’s oceans are vast, and we don’t have that many boats on them. Hiding ships from our enemies means we sometimes hide them from ourselves.

Civilian boats are another matter. Merchant fleets deploy 51,405 ships on our oceans. Most of them are bigger and longer and heavier than our 277 Navy ships. Almost all run on auto-pilot most of the time, especially at night when the crews sleep. If the computer directs the tanker to ram a boat like the Fitzgerald, that’s what is going to happen. In collisions, chances are Navy ships will lose.

Collision avoidance should be easy. Crews need only have situational awareness and the ability to steer the boat. The problem is that to perform these tasks crews rely on a complicated matrix of technologies that always seem to fail in critical situations like combat or rule violations by other boats.

These technologies should be used to confirm human observation and decisions; instead sailors confirm what the technology tells them, but only when something goes wrong, which is almost always too late. An alarm sounds and a glance at a computer screen shows that a tanker is 500 meters to starboard, so a crew member looks out a window to see if it’s there. No! That’s bassackwards and will get someone killed.

Officers might better demonstrate proficiency in the absence of high-tech aids for situational awareness and steering, then add high-tech proficiencies one skill-set at a time. Maybe they wear merit badges to enable COs to tell at a glance who can handle hydraulic controls and who is good at computer-aided navigation, for example.

Every officer doesn’t have to master every skill-set, and the least skilled officer should be able to turn off the high-tech systems they haven’t mastered in order to steer the boat and stop it using the skills they do have, when necessary.

Laser distance finders (like those used by golfers) and wide-field-of-view night vision binoculars should be standard issue. A half dozen or more sailors should be stationed around the perimeter of every boat and be required to report what they see or don’t see every five minutes or so. No snoozing!

Mischief Reef is the site of a Chinese airstrip and military installation built on a contested atoll in the Philippines.

Anyway, one thing about the four accidents this year (January 31, the USS Antietam; May 9, the USS Lake Champlain; June 17, the USS Fitzgerald; August 20, the USS John S. McCain) bothers me: the destroyer McCain was nearly sunk just two weeks after it challenged the Chinese at a contested atoll named Mischief Reef, which the Chinese have in recent years built-up into a military base.

I have a problem with coincidences that turn out bad for our side. Malevolent intent by an adversary is always possible. Every bridge officer should understand the protocols to avoid intentional (or unintentional) collisions initiated by rogue (or wayward) boats.

A Philippine-manned cargo ship, the ACX Crystal, rammed the USS Fitzgerald, a guided-missile destroyer, on June 17, 2017. Seven US sailors died. The night was clear; the seas calm. The commanding officer and another crew member were severely injured. Repairs will cost hundreds of millions and take years to complete.

Our Navy is a mess. Everyone knows it. The optics of powerful warships limping into port under the power of a dozen or so tugboats emboldens our enemies and demoralizes our patriotic fighting men and women.

We have the wrong ships, designed the wrong way, for the wrong wars, for the wrong reasons. And our Navy is overworked to the max. We all know it’s true. It doesn’t have to be. It’s good to have high-tech systems, but they are useless during a crisis. Everyone must be proficient at low-tech and know how to enable it. Seriously.

Politics and corruption, profiteering and greed, laziness and lack of zeal are going to kill us all if we don’t wake up. It’s time for civilians to step up and defend our way of life. It’s time for corporations and billionaires to do what’s right — not what makes them wealthy at the expense of our country’s defense and the prosperity of our citizens and the people of the world who are looking to us for leadership.

We are going to regret privatizing our military and using contractors instead of citizens to fight our battles. We are going to lose our freedoms and our country if we don’t fight for both. Everyone must do their part. Corruption can have no role in the process.

We must use our power to make the world safer, freer, and better for everyone, not just ourselves. People are sick and tired of “America first.” We have so much, already.

It’s time to share our advantages, with love. If we do what’s right, if we embrace public service and reach out to the disadvantaged in the world (the military, after all, doesn’t have the room or the money for every citizen), we won’t need to kill everyone who hates us like we’ve been doing for hundreds of years.

A year or two of public service by every American in impoverished neighborhoods and blighted communities might make a big difference in the why, how, and who we fight.

Billy Lee

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