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WHAT’S GOING ON?

What’s Going On?

UPDATE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD: On 26 March 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Nicolas Maduro on charges of drug trafficking and narco-terrorism, and the Department of State offered a $15 million reward for information that helps ”bring him to justice”.

It’s an album title – prophetic in its way — by Marvin Gaye, who was shot and killed by his own father on April Fools Day, 1984. Marvin would have celebrated his 45th birthday the next day, April 2.

Spring was on its way; no one saw winter coming.

It seemed at first that a fight between his parents went terribly wrong. Relatives tell different versions. In the end, it went down like this: Marvin’s father, a Pentecostal Minister and Healer, shot Marvin in his heart with a .38 caliber pistol Marvin gave him for Christmas.

Left behind were an adopted son, two bio-children, two brothers, two sisters, a half-brother, and his parents.

What’s Going On?

His father, it turned out, suffered from an undiagnosed brain tumor located on his pituitary gland. It made him violent; it drove him crazy. He felt scared. He feared his son. He shot the boy-man that he told everyone who would listen he truly loved.

What’s Going On?

Marvin Gaye propelled the Motown sound into the stratosphere of American popular music during the 1960s. Like most gifted black men in those years, he was a traumatized human being. He made the best of it.

Albums like What’s Going On and songs like Sexual Healing brought reassurance and comfort to millions of folks who suffered the emotional stress of living inside but apart in apartheid and militarized America.

In those days, like today, America itched for a fight. It found a good fight in Vietnam; it would soon find many others – all pointless and needlessly wasteful of both national treasure and human life. Like Marvin’s dad, America shot its sons in their hearts. America wasted a generation, which it forced to choose between fighting war and fighting against war.

Father, father
We don’t need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some lovin’ here today, oh oh oh
Picket lines and picket signs
Don’t punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what’s going on…

A few souls managed to tightrope between the chasms of violence on both sides, but not many. Today, the United States is a couple of countries short of conquering the entire world.

Venezuela is one country among a dozen or so that sit at the top of a hit-list.

What will come next?

What’s Going On?

I’ve answered a lot of questions about Venezuela on Quora. I’ve never visited the country. I know almost nothing about it except what I’ve read in books and on Twitter by people who live there. Still, I have opinions. I’m not afraid to pontificate about the situation, because I’ve seen these coup-scenarios playout my entire life – seven decades and counting.

It’s like listening to a scratched record that constantly skips to play the same musical phrase; it’s like watching reruns of familiar shows like Leave it to Beaver and even the Twilight Zone. I can tell anyone how a show will end, because in their way all the old shows have the same predictable endings.

What’s happening in Venezuela and how it will end is both predictable and depressing. My standard of living and yours depend on what happens next. The security and safety of our Union depend on it.

The Russians and Cubans must lose. America must win.

Why?

We take the spoils, because if we miss our chance to seize the oil of Venezuela, over time the United States will slide into economic decline. Prosperity and the power of USA billionaires depend not only on free-trade and favorable trade agreements, but also on the resources they sequester; how much of the bounty of others they can steal.

It’s true.

What’s Going On?

TheBillyLeePontificator.com is now open for questions. What follows are answers. The most recent questions are first; the oldest are last.

1 – What’s happening in Venezuela right now?

Over the past several years the United States has been reestablishing its control over the countries of the western hemisphere, right? Dilma Rousseff of Brazil is a prominent example. Anyone who doesn’t know who she is — or her story — isn’t paying attention.

It won’t help to name others. People who know Ms. Rousseff need no explanation. For those who don’t, no explanation will suffice.

It’s easy for Americans to claim ignorance about what their country does to maintain its control over the resources and people of South and Central America. It’s not pretty. People are imprisoned and shot (murdered) to assert USA sovereignty.

Does anyone want to watch the processes by which the sausage they eat is manufactured? Of course not. No one wants to even think about it. The process is brutal and inhumane. It’s better not to know. All anyone really wants is for the sausage to taste good and not make them sick. No one prays for the safety of the pigs who give their lives so that people can enjoy their breakfasts.

It’s the same in Venezuela. The country has massive oil reserves. The leadership is allied with countries who exert their powers on the other side of the world. These countries are always making moves to gain a foothold on American turf. The result is turf wars, which is what Venezuela is.

The United States will kill and imprison as few Venezuelans as possible, hopefully, but it will prevail; it will secure Venezuela’s natural resources, including its oil, for the USA to use and buy from the billionaires who shape its vision.

2 – Considering that every superpower had its rise and fall, do you think that the US will ever drastically fall, and how far into the future do you think that will be?

Since World War II the USA has militarily attacked one-fourth of the world’s nation-states. Of the 195 countries in the world, the USA controls or “unduly influences” all but twenty-five, give or take — through treaties, alliances, trade agreements, and so on. The United Nations is located inside the United States for a reason.

The USA controls the entire western hemisphere and exercises its military dominance without much interference anytime it decides. The Pentagon is a big place. People underestimate its power, because the majority of its structure is not viewable — most of it is below-ground. The vast scale of US power is necessary to operate 800 military bases, which are located in every region of the world.

The financial system of the USA is a force-multiplier that enables the USA to quarantine with knee-bending sanctions both individuals and countries who oppose its goals. American financial leverage is legendary.

The United States is on a trajectory toward world domination that would make the Third Reich stand up and take notice. It is remarkable how US power has grown during my lifetime. The USA is always at war with somebody.

Except for the four years of the Carter administration, the killing and dying doesn’t stop. The numbers of murders has reached into the tens of millions since the end of the last world war.

I believe that the American empire will collapse when the Yellowstone Supervolcano erupts. It might be 500 years from now or next Tuesday. There is no way to know for sure.

3 – Are the recurring power outages in Venezuela due to US interference in their country?

The United States could easily send in technical experts to stand up Venezuela’s power grid. It chooses not to. Not only that, it refuses to provide any kind of aid at all by refusing to work with the elected representatives of that oil-rich country.

Worse, the United States is plotting to isolate and embargo Venezuela. The US president wants their oil; USA oligarchs are at war with socialism; the State Department is at war with Russia who is providing aid to the beleaguered President Maduro.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that the United States cares nothing for the ordinary people of Venezuela; it instead is destabilizing the country to secure its resources.

Securing resources in the western hemisphere is something the United States has done repeatedly since the end of World War II. Ask any bona-fide historian if I’m right. Its success is one reason why the United States has the highest standard of living of all other countries in its half of the world.

4 – Russia sends troops to Venezuela to give the United States a ”red line”. Should the United States be worried, and do you think this could start a war between the United States and Russia?

My answer is a guess based on no knowledge or evidence; here it is: the USA will not challenge Russia militarily as long as Trump is president. It’s not collusion; Mueller proved that our president is the most patriotic president that the USA has ever had (and will ever have since he is likely to be the last).

Every red-blooded gun-toting Christian in America knows that Russian oligarchs with the help of almighty God put Trump into power to kill us all for allowing gays to marry. It’s not hard to understand.

5 – What is Venezuela’s national anthem?



Glory to the Brave People

6 – Is it technically possible to sabotage a country’s electricity infrastructure using an electromagnetic attack, as Venezuelan president Maduro has claimed, as the cause of his country’s power failure?

Where were you during the Iraq War? Taking down Saddam Hussein’s electrical grid was a point of pride during that war. Our leaders bragged about it on the evening news.

USA’s ability to attack infra-structure is vastly improved today. Venezuela is the perfect place to conduct diabolical tests of new war-fighting techniques and coup protocols.

Why?

It’s the oil, stupid. (I’m using a popular expression for emphasis. It’s not meant to insult anyone’s point of view.)

Anyone who is knowledgeable about the post-world-war history of the western hemisphere knows that the USA has been or now is at war with every country. The United States runs things or makes those who oppose it miserable with sanctions, sabotage, and subversion.

It’s not something a reasonable person can argue against.

Said another way, only an ideologue or an apologist will deny the culpability of the USA for waging war against Venezuela. If the United States cared about Venezuela, it would help Maduro, not undercut him.

7 – Why do you think there is a nationwide power outage in Venezuela going on right now?

During the Iraq war, the USA took down Baghdad’s power grid. It’s something our country is good at. That this power outage occurred during destabilization efforts to install a new president doesn’t look good for the prime suspects.

8 – Where in the world is the next international war likely to break out?

First, it’s important for everyone to understand that major international conflicts are potential species-extinction events. Enough nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons are available to enough countries to threaten the survival of humankind — should humankind fall into the abyss of a conflagration like it did during the two previous world wars.

It’s true that the last world war ended almost 75 years ago, but insufficient time has passed to be convincing that another world war won’t occur, perhaps sooner than anyone imagines.

One important reason why world-war has not occurred is because the United States has spent the post-world-war years consolidating its grip on empire. The USA knows the names, phone numbers, and addresses of every world leader and their relatives. It has cruise missiles and bunker-busters with each leader and family member’s name on at least one of them.

It’s personal. The number of individuals we don’t like and have removed from power is large and growing yearly. Maduro of Venezuela is the latest name on the USA Naughty List, but so, recently, was Dilma Rousseff of Brazil as well as countless others around the world — especially in the Middle East.

According to who counts, 195 countries exist in the world. The USA has conducted military operations against one-fourth of them since the end of World War II. Many conflicts are state secrets not shared with the public.

Expect major changes in Africa soon, anyone who doesn’t believe it.
To my way of reasoning, the best way to determine where the next lit-match will ignite is to look to past conflagrations. Countries with a history of warlike behavior are more likely than countries that lack such a history to start the next major international conflict.

What countries might these be? I’m not going to name them, because why make enemies unnecessarily who might have reformed their ways? But anyone with a knowledge of history and current events can create their own list. It’s not hard to do.

9 – How much worse can it look for Maduro? Denying hungry and sick Venezuelans from free food and medicine with guns. Isn’t Maduro’s time up?

Anyone with any sense knows that the USA engineered this debacle, because it is at war with socialism.

We invaded Cuba after they threw out the mafia, for crying out loud. We preferred organized crime to socialism.

10 – What should everyone know about the current political crisis in Venezuela?

Venezuela lives and dies on the price of oil. Low oil prices brought Venezuela to the brink of collapse in the late 1990s and made Hugo Chavez’s rise possible. Maduro, his successor, is falling on the sword of collapsing oil prices.

What confuses people is why.

Is the USA manipulating the oil markets to take down Maduro? The US has a consistent record of overthrow attempts against leftist governments. With a billionaire oligarch leading the USA, it seems possible.

Why doesn’t the United States help Maduro stabilize his country, which would be the humanitarian path? No one is sure. Common sense seems to suggest that our leaders are looking for a way to make a socialist system fail. Why else back a 35-year-old nobody to run the country? Wouldn’t aid to the elected government be an easier way to bring relief?

The Russians are involved, which further complicates. It’s possible that DT works for their side — so this coup that’s been in the making by our side during the past five years or so is sure to fail now that DT is aware and getting involved.

Time will tell.

It’s a sad state of affairs, what’s going on right now.

11 – Will a civil war happen in Venezuela?

The US has been at war with Venezuela for a long time now. Hundreds of America’s brightest have been working in their Pentagon offices for years to make sure socialism doesn’t succeed in South America.

Our wealthy oligarchs don’t want anyone to believe that a system might work where they aren’t allowed to steal as much as they possibly can and still call it “free enterprise.”

It simple, really. They are looking for allies inside Venezuela who are willing to blame Maduro for what America is doing to undercut them behind the scenes.

This crap started in Guatemala in 1954; it never ends.

12 – Why is Venezuela’s military backing Maduro recently? Is it worth it?

Maduro is the elected president of Venezuela in the same way that Trump is the elected president of the United States. Was the US election fair? Ask Reality Winner who is serving a five-year prison term incommunicado, because she disclosed NSA info on voting fraud. You will find that you can’t interview her.

Reality Winner, incarcerated NSA whistle-blower who exposed voter fraud and tampering in the 2016 presidential election. She is serving a five-year prison sentence — incommunicado as are other whistleblowers like Daniel Hale of the NSA and Teri J. Albury of the FBI.

So good luck figuring out what the truth is.

The billionaires who milk America don’t like socialism, because it is a system where people cooperate to create wealth, which they then share. Sharing wealth is anathema to oligarchs and mob bosses.

So, the USA is pulling out a well-worn playbook to guide itself through the process of replacing the experienced and elected leaders of Venezuela with a 35-year-old kid who knows just enough to do what he’s told. The USA promises to make him president. He promises to serve. It’s a kind of tit-for-tat.

To increase urgency and hysteria the USA manipulates currency and oil prices while it builds a right-wing cartel of nations to do its bidding. All the leaders will get rich under the plan. No one seriously gives a hoot about what happens to the poor.

The biggest danger is civil war, which happens to be exactly the same danger facing the United States. What goes around comes around.

The USA would be doing the world a big favor by helping Maduro get his country on its feet. Low oil prices have been catastrophic for Venezuela. Why don’t we help instead of using a bad situation as an opportunity to set up a bunch of oligarchs who will march to our drumbeat instead of their own?

Why is economic diversity such a bad thing? Ted Kennedy said in his last book that tycoons like his legendary dad were afraid that if socialism succeeds anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, it might become a prairie fire that takes down their edifice of privileges.

No tycoon wants a prairie fire. Every wealthy person believes they are self-made and entitled to all the advantages that their money can buy.

Ordinary people have about the same power to control the circumstances of their lives as farm animals.

It’s pathetic, really.

13 – With a regime change impending, within the next 30-50 years, will Venezuela consider socialistic influences for governmental structure again?

The pending regime change that is coming will take place in the United States. Americans are sick of boorish elites who — under a GOP led by pig Trump — won’t be electable in 2020.

One-party-rule by progressive democrats will bring relief to average people — something they haven’t experienced since the early 1970s. Many young people have no idea what it’s like to live in country that limits what the wealthy can steal and works overtime to bring equity to working people.

14 – Do you agree that reducing imports from Venezuela by the United States is an adequate short-term answer for helping that country and its citizens?

The best thing the USA can do to help Venezuela is to end sanctions, embargos, destabilization by our intelligence forces, and the policy of strategic strangulation, which is killing people — especially the weak.

The next best thing is to organize an international effort to airdrop food aid into the country. Flood the country with rice, powdered milk, clean water, potatoes, corn, etc. Inexpensive food is easy to collect and distribute and will help to strengthen the elderly, children, the pregnant, and the sick.

Flood the country with medical supplies and doctors to help the sick. Start talks with Maduro to offer him all the assistance he needs to get his country on its feet again.

15 – Is the newly accepted Venezuelan government by the United States backed by the majority of people in Venezuela? Or is it propaganda?

Citgo, the Venezuelan oil company, ships 500,000 barrels of heavy crude into Texas refineries every day. The crude is used to make diesel fuel for trucks. Without cheap diesel America’s goods and services get expensive real fast.

America’s oligarchs hate socialist countries. Most people can understand why. The foreign policy of the United States is to destabilize and overthrow all socialist countries whenever possible. Venezuela is an easy mark, because their leaders do not seem to be sophisticated.

Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor, John R. Bolton, are leading a coalition of nations to inflict strategic strangulation on the Maduro administration. The government cannot access its gold reserves (held in British banks) and is fighting to maintain control of Citgo, which adds 10 billion dollars to the nation’s coffers each year.

The USA plans to divert as many assets as it can to the puppet government it is setting up under the auspices of a 35-year-old kid who no one ever heard of before about three days ago.

The process of destabilization has been accelerated under Trump, and the USA is now making its move.

The USA is hoping for military defections combined with public demonstrations to force a sham election in the next 30 days to oust the socialist government in Venezuela and legitimize a new government, which they will control behind the scenes. They hope to assassinate Maduro if they get the opportunity. The Russians are sending in a large security detail to protect the lives of the current group of leaders and help them hold onto power.

The country of Venezuela is polarized much like the USA. The elites want the USA to intervene; the poor want Madura and socialism. All sides want the USA led embargo, destabilization protocols, and strategic strangulation to stop ASAP.

16 – Will the Venezuelan military switch sides if they see the US military lining up for an invasion? Don’t they care mostly about how much they are paid? What good is an ousted Maduro?

Overthrowing elected socialist governments is a specialty of US foreign policy. The USA is good at it, but it doesn’t always work.

Even an intense strategic strangulation of Cuba (and an invasion to boot) was unable to break down the Cuban revolution.

The USA killed two million Vietnamese but failed miserably to prevent the unification of North and South.

Early successful overthrows such as those in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) have convinced policy makers that the odds are in their favor when they decide to decimate a particular country. They have a better than even chance to prevail, so why not take it?

The problem is that everyone now knows — after 79 years of messing with governments — that the USA cares almost exclusively about itself and the protection of its tycoons. Democracy, equality, and basic fairness mean nothing to the United States in its conduct of foreign policy.

Many policy makers disagree with my point of view, but they are in the habit of giving in to self-deception to make it possible for them to live inside themselves.

17 – What is the likelihood that the US will at some time become entangled in a coup in South America?

The USA has a history of involvement in the politics of South and Central American countries. Coups are part of the history. Where have you been?

Seriously.

Destabilizing socialist countries in our hemisphere is an important component of the foreign policy of the United States. Everyone knows. It’s not a well-kept secret.

The USA keeps track of what’s going on through agricultural programs, aid, and assistance. When it desires change, the USA generally tries diplomacy first. If it doesn’t work, more violent methods have been used, including assassinations, disappearances, and coups.

Under certain circumstances, it can be illegal to talk about what exactly our intelligence services do to keep the Americas safe for exploitation by our companies. The most famous company that the USA went to war for was the United Fruit Company during the Eisenhower years. The president’s secretary held a lot of the company’s stock.

Some countries have raw materials that are considered strategic assets. The USA or its surrogates operate mines and other facilities to secure these assets and to keep other competitor countries from access. Right?

The instability in South and Central America that has arisen since President Obama stepped down is probably the result of activities encouraged by the newest president. He has lots of precedents to justify himself, correct?

18 – Are Russia and China’s recent provocative military maneuvers a prelude to war with the United States?

My belief — based on no evidence I can recite — is that our president is a pacifist. He enjoys pretend violence, like pro-wrestling, but is repulsed by real violence. He likes to threaten, yell, call people names, sue people in court, etc., but he is uninterested in physically hurting someone. For him fake violence is a kind of game. Often, he forgives and makes up later.

His mistresses have all said, as far as I know, that he treated them with kindness; something that many philanderers are not known to do.

When he bombed an airstrip to retaliate against a Syrian chemical attack, he set up the targeting so that no one on-site would get hurt. Yes, an attack on another target killed a hundred or so Russian soldiers, but it was an unintended screw-up he’d probably like to have back.

Our president likes to huff and puff and make deals; it’s a harmless game for him that has no meaning except for the fun he gets each day trying to outwit his opponents who he calls “rats” or “crooked” or “lyin” or whatever fits. Hillary Clinton, in real life, is one of his best friends, for crying out loud.

Trump is a liberal at heart, but he pretends to be a racist monster to hold onto his base, which is, let’s face facts, hold-overs from the Confederacy of the Old South. Southern racists are dangerous when angry; otherwise, they are the dumbest, easiest-to-manipulate voters in the country. They are like lemmings — if Trump says, “run off a cliff”, they’ll do it and praise Jesus for the opportunity.

Trump will not go to war against China or Russia as long as he can play monopoly with their oligarchs. He’ll bluster and threaten. He won’t pull any triggers.

One very interesting thing happened the day he became president. A prominent drug lord from Mexico was arrested and disappeared into the New York City penal system. Within a few days the man’s family was rounded up. They haven’t been heard from since.

So, the president has power. His problem is that a component of his power comes from sympathetic mob bosses, often with dual-citizenship — almost always from Russia and Israel. These “friends” aren’t shy about taking care of business, so the president won’t have to.

19 – The US could lose a future war against Russia or China, a new report to Congress has suggested. Do you agree?

The United States completed a two-trillion-dollar upgrade to our nuclear missile inventories during the Obama administration. The USA built a doomsday matrix.

I’ve heard rumors that a certain country has built a doomsday bomb capable of destroying Earth were it ever detonated. Folks should know that there is no upper limit to the destructive power of hydrogen bombs. Countries can build them as big as they want. They can blow up Earth itself.

The USA might not be able to win a hot war, but we won’t lose it to others, either. A war to the death against Russia or China is a war to the death of the planet. If recovery is possible, it will take thousands of years, but climate changes and the loss of resources will mean that Earth will never be what it once was; humans will never be what they once were.

War by major powers against each other (a world-war) is something that can never be allowed to happen again. The next world-war will kill billions of people and unleash a pandora’s box of suffering on the few unfortunates who survive. Rich and poor alike who live will be traumatized to the end of their natural lives.

Hot war is suicide. The leaders of every nation-state must give their last ounce of courage to preserve the one place in the universe where people have the hope to survive and thrive.

20 – Why is Russia’s military so powerful despite the fact that they spend less on defense than the USA?

1 – The Russians pay lower salaries and have fewer military bases. (The USA maintains 800 bases in 70 countries.)

2 – Russia is more than twice the size of the United States.

3 – Russia has the world’s largest reserves of oil.

4 – Russians are more literate in science and engineering than Americans.

5 – Russia has developed dangerous (to us) technological advantages in missile technology. They have air-to-surface missiles that are stealthy and reach velocities close to three miles per second. The USA has nothing in its arsenal that can track and shoot them down, which means that we risk losing our entire fleet of navy ships in a hot war.

6 – Russia has a fleet of drone subs deployed off our coasts.

7 – Russia does not seem to the have rampant corruption and cost overruns in its manufacturing sector that the United States is known for and which drive up the price of everything the Pentagon buys.

8 – Russians build their vehicles, artillery, and guns to perform in off-road bad weather conditions. They design their equipment to be simple, reliable, and easy to fix.

9 – The USA is paying unreliable private companies to administer a big part of its military space program. The temptations that lead to profiteering and unrealistic assessments of effectiveness might rot the foundations of military readiness. It is a risk the Russians don’t take.

Having said all this, the fact is that the militaries of both countries are nightmarishly lethal. The side that attacks first in the next war will accrue big initial advantages that could make a counter-punch ineffective. An immediate imbalance of power could easily become permanent and lead to catastrophe for the country that takes the first hit.

Technologies of modern warfare are making the world less safe for war-makers.

Hope is when the generals and civilian leaders don’t feel safe that they will avoid all-out war.

Terror-in-the-gut starts when military planners understand that the other side will strike first.

Billy Lee

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YOU’RE FIRED!

The words “You’re fired!” are among the most painful I’ve ever heard.

I’ve lost a lot of jobs during my life, so the pain has accumulated to the point where I would rather die than re-live my life—unless I could arrange things so that no person would ever have the power to drive a stake into my heart, because that’s what being “let go” feels like.

I never followed Trump‘s television show The Apprentice because hearing the punch line “You’re Fired!” always felt like a hard slap to the face. Watching young men and women suck up to a powerful boss who gut-punches all but one was never harmless entertainment. Not for me, anyway.

The number of people fired during the Trump administration is staggering. How many of these 24 high-power individuals can anyone identify? They are the tip of a mammoth iceberg of graft, corruption, incompetence, ignorance, and suffering. Who disagrees?

I’ve fired people. I understand why our president won’t do it in real life. He always assigns the task to an underling, right? The White House employment line churns like a stormy ocean but the president stays above the froth.

Firing someone is more painful than being fired because it stays with you forever. It’s not something you can overcome by getting a better job, for example. You can’t take it back. I’ve always wondered whether I might have found a kinder way to address the problems I thought firing others solved.

Those who read my essays might remember that I managed some restaurants when I was in college. Back then finding good help was hard, because everyone worked.

I needed a cook really bad. A roly-poly guy with a sweet face applied for the job. He explained that he was a slow learner, but he would try to become the best cook he could.

After three days, I realized that he was slow, like he said. He would never be able to keep up; he lacked the intelligence to memorize the menu and prepare the food properly.

I called him into my office.

“Ruby,” I said. “I don’t see how we’re going to be able to make this work. I’m sorry, but I have to let you go.”

He said, “Mr. Lee, I understand. Uh, you gave me a chance. Uh… uh, it didn’t work out. It’s happened before. It’s not your fault.  Uh, don’t feel bad. I’m to blame. I’m slow, uh… that’s all.”

He offered his hand, pivoted, and walked out. He had obviously memorized his exit speech. I put my face in my hands and sobbed.

It was clear that Ruby suffered from a disability of some kind. My need for a cook blinded me. Until he recited his sentences, I didn’t see it. No matter how hard he tried he was never going to make it in a world that demanded quick wits and fast problem solving.

What made me cry was that he wasn’t going to give up. It seemed like no reversal mattered. Success would forever elude him, but he had just enough resources and determination to pick himself up, give his speech, shake hands, and strive to find the next opportunity.

Ruby was willing to fight against the odds to become a hamburger cook. He took great pains not to traumatize managers, including me, who inevitably would be forced to fire him to protect their bottom line. In his effort to spare my feelings he failed—like he probably failed at everything he tried.

I felt sick to my stomach. I felt remorse. Ruby gave everything he had. Nothing worked. Something wasn’t right. There was nothing I could do.

It’s been decades. My heart aches. I wonder if by some miracle Ruby ever made his dream come true. I’ll never know.

At the time, I managed two restaurants. Because I was a student at the university, assistant managers and other responsible employees helped me to keep operations running smooth.

At the second store a couple of waitresses complained that a busboy I hired was stealing tips.

I called the kid into my office. “Are you stealing?” I asked. The boy immediately began emptying his pockets. His pockets were deep. He dumped big handfuls of quarters and dimes on my desk. I didn’t say a word. When the last dime dropped, he ran out of the store. We never saw him again.

It felt good. The waitresses didn’t seem to mind either.

I hired a rather attractive waitress at the first store. She had the annoying habit of talking too much to other waitresses. She was loud, and it irritated me. After a couple of months, I started to hate her because she didn’t seem to feel an urgency to follow through on the things I asked. I felt disrespected.

One day she said something that rubbed me the wrong way. I called her back to my office and fired her in almost the same way Trump would years later on his TV show. I was cold and matter of fact. “You talk too much and don’t do what you’re told,” I said. “You’re fired!”

The girl broke down and began wailing. “How will I get money for my trip to Europe this summer?” she begged.

I would be in Italy that summer myself to visit family living in Naples at the time. I had no idea until that moment that her job was a means to an admirable end.

A wave of nausea swept over me. I was making a terrible mistake. It seemed somehow impossible to backtrack. I’d played my hand. From now on things could never be good between us. “It’s time to leave,” I told her.

She went to court over it, but the owners of the restaurant knew the judge, so nothing happened. I feel like a worm when I remember this act of needless cruelty.

Big Boy Restaurants were among the first in a wave of fast-food chains to capture the hearts and pocketbooks of a public too busy to cook home meals in the 1960s. The Big Boy Slim Jim sandwich remains one of my all-time favorites.

I hired a cook who caught on fast. “I’ve been been vacationing in Florida,” he answered when I asked about his tan.

After a few weeks the owner approached to tell me the cook had pulled him aside to explain that I was a terrible manager who should be fired. The cook expressed his belief that he was the best choice to replace me.

I said to the owner, “That’s interesting. He is a good cook and smart enough probably. Maybe he could help out at another store.”

The owner looked at me like I was crazy. “Are you out of your mind?” he said. “This guy is trying to get you fired so he can take your job in this store—a store you manage!  What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “Maybe I can start training him in other parts of the job and someday he will know enough to help us.”

“No!” the owner said. “You are going to fire that back-stabbing son-of-a-bitch. When I come in here next week, he’s gone, understand?”

When the new cook came in for his shift, I asked him to walk outside with me. I said, “The owner tells me you think I’m incompetent.”  The guy threw up his hands like he was being arrested for something and said, “I screwed up. You’re right. Fire me! No hard feelings, OK?” He wheeled around and disappeared down the street.

I felt surprise and relief. I didn’t fire him. He fired himself.  I think I remember someone telling me he hitchhiked back to Florida.

Well, this essay is supposed to be about me being fired, not me firing others so let’s get on with it.

I was an athlete in high school. I played football and baseball. I was an All Star third baseman. In football I played tight end. Because my dad was the commander of a Navy jet-helicopter squadron in Key West, we lived on the Florida island during my eighth-grade year and the first half of ninth grade.

Key West High School had a good reputation, because it graduated several big-time athletes back then—George Mira and Boog Powell are the two I remember because they had younger brothers who were close to me in age. We called Boog’s brother “Boob.” He took the joke with grace and good humor. Athletics was a big deal.

Toward the end of the fall season, our freshman football team lost an important game. In the locker room the coach dressed down the team to the point of being profane and abusive.

He was more than unfair. I felt degraded. We played our hearts out. I piped up to defend my friends, “Maybe if you knew how to coach, we would have won!”

The coach turned purple. “Billy Lee, you will never play sports again at Key West High School. You are done.”

I cried on the bus ride home. I reminded the coach about how good I was at baseball. He had seen me play during an All-Star contest between the civilian and Navy leagues. He knew I was good.

He remained stoic and unmoved. Fortunately for me, the Navy promoted my dad and we moved to Arlington, Virginia where he led some group at the Pentagon not known to the public. I would play sports again, after all.

More is under the Pentagon than above. It’s a big place, which I was fortunate to visit and tour—under supervision, of course. My dad worked several years within a labyrinth whose mission was to protect and defend the United States of America.

Unfortunately for me I missed out on a season of baseball. Ninth graders went to junior-high; my new school didn’t field a baseball team. When high school try-outs finally came, a year later, I made the JV team.

The suburban schools outside Washington DC were big.  A thousand tenth grade boys tried out. Eighteen made the cut. I thought, This is great. I’m back on track.

Then, disaster. It got cold in northern Virginia. I was used to playing in the heat of the deep south. My legs and arms seemed to stiffen-up in the frigid temperature, and I endured a terrible scrimmage. I made costly errors and went hitless. The coaches announced after practice that they had agreed to bring three varsity players down to JV to give them more playing time. Three JV players would be cut.

The names of the final “final roster” would be posted in the gym. Anyone whose name wasn’t on the list was cut. The decisions were final. There would be no discussions, no negotiations.

I must have looked at the roster a dozen times before I could accept that my name wasn’t on it. I told my dad on the ride home from practice. Visibly shaken, all he could manage was a barely audible, “oh.”

I experienced my first nervous breakdown. It lasted a few months. I told my mother that I was terrified all the time. It never stopped. She confessed that she had a breakdown when she was younger, but in time she got through it.

In ninth grade I lived in Key West, where my dad defended America against Soviet subs with a squadron of jet-helicopters during the Cuban Missile Crisis. My mother stands next to me. When my athletic dreams unraveled the following year, I had a nervous breakdown. Mom led me safely through to the other side of hell. After aging she suffered memory loss, but she remained a happy, optimistic person to the end of her life.

It made me feel good to know that my mother understood. I waited for healing. Eventually, I got better.

Dad was promoted again. The president sent him to Paris to represent the United States Navy at NATO.  The French planned to withdraw.  Dad tried but was unable to change their minds. A year later he would lead war games in the Mediterranean Sea for an ineffective coalition of nations called SEATO (now disbanded), and the family would follow him to Naples, Italy.

But my senior year would be spent in France. It would be a welcome change from the Washington DC suburbs, which to this day I associate with “fear and loathing“—bad mental health.

It’s hard to believe, but I did get fired from high school—in Paris of all places.

My girlfriend’s dad was Secretary of the Embassy in Paris. Sandy attended a French high school and spoke fluent French. It made getting around easy because not only was she connected and accepted everywhere, but she also made a gifted translator. I had no communication problems when we explored the twenty or so arrondissements together.

Because I went to the school for military-dependents (populated mostly by Army kids) I couldn’t invite Sandy to our senior prom. It was a school rule, a stupid rule, but that was the Army way in those days.

Someone got the bright idea to hook me up with the ranking General’s daughter—a sweet girl, but I didn’t know her. Because I already had a girlfriend who I sort of loved, I had no interest in the arrangement with the General’s daughter.

I made some stupid decisions that involved selling sleeping pills that were freely available (at nominal cost without a prescription) in the French drugstores (les pharmacies) near our house. I sold the pills to friends to raise money for Paris prom expenses, which I expected to be, well, excessive. It turned out that the pills were illegal on American military property, which included the high school.

A big kid I didn’t know bought three and started running around the campus yelling to everybody that he was high on LSD—a kind of joke, I guess. Anyway, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) locked down the school, did a sweep, and found discarded pill wrappers.

After a number of interrogations, they got to the truth and had to decide how to handle me and two other kids who had nothing to do with anything except that they “confessed” to buying one pill each.

One of the kids was the only black at the school. It didn’t help at all that his dad was an enlisted man—his dad was not, sadly, the highest-ranking Naval officer in Paris, like mine. He and his family were put on the first flight out of Paris. His family was uprooted over a sleeping pill. 

The verdict was that I would not attend the last week of classes but would receive a diploma and be allowed to go to the graduation ceremonies—including the after-party.

The senior prom was off-limits. It was my punishment. The Army would send a West Point cadet (from the academy famous for its overlook of the Hudson River fifty miles north of New York City) to accompany the General’s daughter.

For me, the punishment was a reward. Yes, I was expelled from high school, but I was going to graduate, and I didn’t have to hang around during the last week of classes. I was free.

Sandy’s civilian high school reserved the Eiffel Tower for their prom. No one had a problem with me being her guest. Yes, the tower was amazing.  After the celebration, we club-hopped through Paris night spots with the money I had made, which the DIA didn’t bother to confiscate.

As for my own high school graduation party, school-rules didn’t permit Sandy to be there.  It took place on a large estate, which was romantically lit and well-attended.

A beautiful girl I had seen at school but not yet met walked-up to introduce herself, and somehow, we found a way to make love behind a grove of trees in the backyard. Until then, I hadn’t understood how much comfort some women are able to provide to a man who seeks reassurance.

Sometimes I wish I’d run off with the girl like she said she wanted, but her dad was an enlisted man. I couldn’t see a way to make things work. In those days officer families and enlisted families didn’t mix. It was like segregation of the races, kind of.

Speaking of race, as I told readers, the Army sent the black kid who had nothin’ to do with nothin’ and his whole family back to the states on the first plane out of Paris. They forbade him to graduate or visit parties. I thought his punishment was outlandishly unfair, but it was the 1960s.  Most high-powered white people hated black people at the time. It’s the way things were back then.

It wasn’t possible for me to set things right.

This essay is getting kind of long, isn’t it?  Maybe I should write a Section-Deux someday to cover the horrors I suffered as an adult working at a dozen companies for 35 years.

No?

Ok.

Here is a summary, then:

After returning to the states and entering University I got myself fired from the Army Officer program (ROTC) a few weeks before I was scheduled to receive an officer’s commission.

My mistake was to speak a few lines over a microphone and loudspeakers to about 15,000 fellow college students who were protesting against the Vietnam War. Although I received a wild ovation (people jumped up and down, screamed in my ears, and hugged me) it didn’t go over well at headquarters. It ended my military career.

The Lieutenant Colonel who fired me was a good enough guy. He gave me a failing grade in Foreign Relations—the last class requirement for an officer’s commission. As a result, my military record was spotless. I was too dumb to be an infantry officer. That’s all.

After being released by the Army—like every other civilian guy—I became subject to the military draft.  It was a lottery system designed to determine who would be inducted.

I drew a low number, which the colonel must have known, because it was based on date-of-birth— information in my personnel file he possessed. A low draft number meant that I had no way out. A grunt tour in the agent-orange saturated undergrowth of Vietnam was certain.

Unknown to the colonel, a friend of mine sat on the draft board. By the grace of God and help from my friend (he was an uncle, actually), the Army never called.

After he retired the colonel became a player in township politics. By all accounts he did good things for his community. Years later I ran into him from time to time when shopping. He always smiled and asked how things were going. He seemed surprised to learn that things were going well.

I did get fired from my first three jobs out of college. One company told me to my face that they couldn’t retain employees who opposed the military, which is what a four week long investigation into my background by their crack investigators had uncovered.

Fortune 500 companies closed their doors to millions of young Americans whose crime was protesting an undeclared, genocidal war at the end of the world: the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese lost every battle and suffered millions of casualties. They won the war. Who can argue with success?  I often wonder how much better-off America and Vietnam would be if the people who were smart enough to resist a cruel and senseless war had been allowed to take their place in leadership when the fighting ended. No one will ever know. 

After three investigations and three firings by Fortune 500 companies over a short period of two years, I suffered catastrophic depression. I couldn’t muster the energy to look for work. I decided to return to the University to upgrade my skills, while I underwent counseling.

I took a part time job as a busboy for an upscale restaurant. The tips were fantastic. At a company Christmas party, my beautiful (and fearless) wife acted “inappropriately” according to a complaint by the owner’s wife; when I returned to work her husband fired me. In those days, men were responsible for the behavior of their wives.

I got a better job, and life went on.  I sharpened my skills, started a family, and garnered engineering-design experience. After several years, a packaging-machine builder hired me to investigate cost overruns on their flagship machine line.  I discovered a kick-back scheme by top execs that involved powerful suppliers. The CEO quit to avoid arrest, and I was fired to provide cover for those who had no intention of quitting.

The upside was that I received the most lucrative severance package of my career.

I don’t feel good about it, because justice wasn’t served. It rarely is, right?  I wanted to stay alive, protect my family, and not get blacklisted in my profession (engineering), which would render me unable to earn a living. My only option was cowardice, and that’s what I chose.

Life would continue, but I learned how power and fear twist justice in the world of plundering by civilians. It was an eye-opener, for sure.

The highest paid job I ever held required that I work seven days a week. I made a ridiculous amount of money, but under the pressure of too many hours and unreasonable demands from our biggest client, General Motors, my supervisor started drinking more than usual. I told him he was an alcoholic. We argued, and he fired me. He told me he couldn’t work with someone who thought he was a drunk.

The lowest paid job was Bible-study leader at church. It paid exactly nothing. I sat on a planning council with other leaders where we discussed things. The “elders” revealed that they intended to sever their ties to the national denomination, because they didn’t think the denominational leaders had punished sufficiently a pastor who had presided over his daughter’s wedding to her girlfriend.

The elders seemed to possess a morbid hatred of Christian heretics who favored gay people. They intended to join another, more conservative denomination to set things right.

I told the leaders they were stupid; it was a bad move that would have bad consequences. I was right, but the bad consequences were directed at me—personally. They disbanded my Bible group, barred me from leadership, and forced me to shut down my website for six weeks.

Eventually, many shunned me. I got a lucky opportunity to resign my membership without the misfortune of being excommunicated. It’s complicated, but the part of the story that I can repeat is told on this site. Click the link or look it up. I was able to leave in good standing, which was an answered prayer—in my grateful opinion.

The week after we decided to leave, my wife and I found a church with lovely people who were, many of them, crazy conservative, but we didn’t care. They talked to us and treated us nice. Nice goes a long way with us both. My wife made and continues to make a lot of new friends.

God does only good things, I learned.

It’s true.

My work experiences weren’t always negative. I cooperated with the FBI on some important investigations involving national security.  I invented or helped to invent products used by everyone everywhere—including the first tear-spout coffee lids and tamper-resistant caps for juice cartons (for which I received $1,000 and a patent).

I also helped design and tool the first generation of run-flat wheels used on Hummer combat vehicles. I kind of got trapped on that one. I vowed I would never apply my talents to warfare but I did—I was a single parent raising a family of kids at the time. For their sake I couldn’t quit. 

As the highest paid union worker at the factory, my career would be toast if I wasn’t on board.  I used state-of the-art design software to solve many production problems. Everything that anyone designed went through me for corrections and approvals.

Company executives invited the press and directed me to appear on a television news show to demonstrate an important production technique that made the wheels possible. The execs were soon in deep trouble with the FBI over what turned out to be a national security screw-up; the program was, after all, classified.

The damage was done, but the FBI didn’t interview me. The FBI didn’t want certain people to know, because I happened to be working with them on another more important investigation that they wanted to keep secret.

I was able to retire at age 60, which to my way of thinking wasn’t soon enough. In all the years I worked, I never spent more than five-and-a-half years at any one company.

I get called frequently with job offers, but I turn them down.  A few years ago a company I worked for early in my career called to offer a lucrative three-month assignment, which I accepted.

Once rehired they kept extending my quit date. I put my foot down and gave them a date certain. The company put a person near my office to facilitate my every move to make sure they got the last ounce of production from me before I returned to retired life.

On the last day, they honored me with a luncheon party.

I bought a lot of things with the money they paid me including a stair-climber for my wife, a new car, a garage rebuild, a new concrete driveway and sidewalks front and back, and landscaping. What my wife and I didn’t spend went in the bank. It is amazing what five months of work can buy, I thought when everything was finished.

I was glad I went back to work but decided I would never do it again. The time to pontificate would never be more right.

What is the lesson from all this self-disclosure?

As my hero Doug Flutie once said, “Each person makes their own way in this world.”  Who disagrees?

Anyone who can think understands that no life can be explained within an encyclopedia, nor a book—even a long one. People who think know that accomplished people are complex, but so are the less accomplished.

Even a simple dog or cat—a pet—has a complicated life, which becomes apparent to anyone who takes the time to write it all down. Try it, any skeptic who doubts the truth about the complexity of living beings.

Even after decades of blunders, any bloke who is able to hide beneath their thick skull an undamaged and flexible brain should be able—if they reflect on their experiences and are lucky, as I was—to make sense enough sometimes to pass on to others what they’ve learned, both good and bad.

My process is called PONTIFICATION. 

It’s what I do.  

The people I most want to rescue are the ones I love. True to those who pursue authentic lives passionately lived, these are the kind of folks who generally resist pontificators.

Oh, well.

My life unfolded for whatever reasons the way it did, and I’m OK with it.

What choices did I have? 

I ask those I’ve hurt to forgive me.

No one wants to die evil. With the help of Jesus, people can be forgiven, can’t they? Who believes it?

Despite all evidence to the contrary—may God help me—I always have.

In another life someone said, YOU’RE FIRED!  over and over. It gave me nightmares.

PTSD.

Hell, it was me who said it, sometimes.

…forgive them. They are clueless…  is what Christ said before they killed him. He held no grudges. He defended those who hurt him most. 

Billy Lee

NOTE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD: 

Billy Lee’s account, You’re Fired! contains omissions of events, some of which are included in other essays on this site. A few details are arranged in non-sequential order.

The full story about Billy Lee’s separation from the army is known only to the author and the army; Billy Lee simplified the narrative. (No harm to truth intended or done.)

We advise readers to refer to other essays on this website to fill in gaps and resolve contradictions.

WE THE EDITORS changed some of the names to protect anonymity.

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BALANCE

I grew up in a Navy family. Maybe it makes me a “Navy brat” to some.  I really don’t care. Military families pay a high price. They move frequently, for one thing. 

Dad was a naval aviator who, among other assignments, commanded in succession two squadrons of anti-submarine jet-helicopters — one squadron in Rhode Island, one in Key West. People who know me or who have read certain essays on this blog are aware.

Dad fought within and alongside the National Security Agency to defend our country. The United States created the NSA after World War II to monitor international shipping. The global fleet of tankers and cargo boats has grown to nearly 52,000. The USA is fortunate to possess high-tech sensors that can see nuclear bombs aboard ships. It’s one of many capabilities that keeps our country safe.

The NSA has been led by a succession of Navy Admirals, and Army and Air Force Generals. Today, the NSA is led by an Army General of Japanese descent. While others were interned, his dad worked for US intelligence during the last world war, it seems, so the president trusts him. He trusts him enough that in May 2018, he assigned him to lead the National Security Agency, the Central Security Service and the U.S. Cyber Command.

Now might be a good time to inform readers that I don’t now nor have I ever had a security clearance. I am a civilian pontificator who resigned (with a little help from an Army Lieutenant Colonel) a pending infantry officer’s commission decades ago, because I believed the Vietnam War was an atrocity. I had no appetite for the killing I would be ordered to perform to successfully engage in a war that for me at least made no sense.

What I have now is the experience of living with and around military and civilian intelligence officers during the first twenty-two years of my life. I lived near and was friends with the daughter of the man who discovered the missiles on Cuba that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. My dad became a significant player in that crisis. So I’m providing a unique perspective that other civilians might not have.

I suggested in a recent essay (47 TONS) that Japan is well on its way to becoming a threat to human survival should their chain of 6,852 remote islands fall into the hands of a cabal of wrong-headed leaders. The Japanese have accumulated 47 tons of bomb-grade plutonium from their fast-reactor programs. They are producing an additional eight tons per year.

A softball sized clump of about fourteen pounds is more than enough to make one unsophisticated atomic bomb. A state-of-the-art bomb can be made from a baseball sized clump weighing nine pounds.

Do the math.

The Japanese have other capabilities that should terrify anyone who might make the mistake to oppose them. They have a complex of labs they call RIKEN that span the islands. A deputy director hung himself at work a few years ago. The signs that something might be wrong at these labs are in plain view for anyone who bothers to look.

They have sophisticated missile and space programs called JAXA.  

To their credit, NHK television has complained to the American public about the challenges Japan suffers from possessing and producing too much plutonium. Right now the USA seems to be preoccupied with Russia, Korea, and China. Russia says they have stealthy, multi-warhead nuclear missiles that can hurtle through the atmosphere at almost three miles per second.

Moscow is about 5,000 miles from Washington DC, or 2,000 seconds away — 33 minutes. Thirty-three minutes seems like a long time, but some are forgetting about the 300,000 Russians who live in Cuba, most assigned to the submarine and air bases Russia built and maintains there.

Cuba is 1,100 miles from Washington DC, which is a seven minute trip should Russia position their missiles inside Cuba’s jungled mountains. Again, seven minutes seems like a lot of time. The problem is, the missiles are stealthy; we can’t see them; even if we could, the United States has nothing that can shoot them down. They fly too fast.

News reports are currently downplaying the importance and extent of Russian progress in missile technology. The expression on Trump’s face after he came out of his two hour meeting with Vladimir Putin spoke volumes. Our sophisticated media can’t conceal for long that our country is in a deep hole. The situation for our side isn’t good.

Hillary Clinton mentioned another threat from Russia during the 2016 presidential debates. Her revelation was a national security screw-up of ginormous proportions, which the press let slide.

Everyone remembers Clinton calling DT,  Putin’s Puppet. No one seems to remember her warning that unmanned Russian drones were sitting in the sands off our coasts.

US intelligence believes these drone submarines carry poisons — possibly plutonium, which will be released during a conflict.

I was living in Key West during the Cuban missile-crisis. My dad chased a nuclear-armed sub out of waters near Cuba. He almost started a war, but he spoke Russian and was able to make himself understood —  the USA meant business.

He thought, as did everyone at the time, that we had caught Russia in the middle of its first installation of nuclear missiles on the island. The missiles weren’t yet armed; they posed no immediate threat.

Years later the Russians revealed that the missiles seen in the CIA photo-shoot were second generation. The first generation stood already buried — locked and loaded. Had an incident ignited an exchange of fire, Florida and Cuba would be distant memories to this day.

The incident involving my dad is retold, with a few perhaps intentional mistakes to protect national security, by Oliver Stone in his remarkable book, The Untold History of the United States. Oliver Stone was a warrior — a veteran of the Vietnam war. He has credentials that go beyond his opus of award-winning films, screen-plays, and books.

I’m not going to name names, but USA companies have milked the defense department for decades. They’ve dragged their feet to keep projects funded and on-going — why don’t we all figure this out together? — to maximize profits and bonuses for executives who in turn give money to senators and congress-folks who …  well … only dummies are unable to figure it out, right?

Corruption is called corruption because it corrodes; what corrodes destroys. That’s the pickle-barrel the USA is in, and it could be the reason DT is kissing the behinds of the folks who developed high-speed, stealth missile technology, first.

Donald Trump might be trying to buy time for our side. In the meantime our leaders are playing parts in a charade of good cops / bad cops to de-escalate an existential threat to our country until balance can be restored.

To write it so a child can understand: the balance of power has shifted away from the United States. Our enemies are saying that the USA no longer holds the advantages we once enjoyed. If we mess-up, and even if we don’t, we could wake up one morning — those of us who survive — to see our country reduced to a smoking ruin of radioactive waste.

OK. That’s one view of what’s going on. It’s my personal view — at least today. No one else has said it, so that’s why I published. It’s something to consider. Maybe tomorrow, more information will come out. I’ll change my mind. Who knows?

There are other explanations for why DT  behaved in Singapore and Helsinki like a traitor according to one of our recent CIA chiefs, John O. Brennan.  By the way, I’m 70 years old — two years younger than DT.  I’ve never heard a CIA director call any president a traitor.

EDITORS NOTE: On August 15, 2018 the president announced that he had stripped Brennan of his security clearance on July 26. Like FBI Director Comey before him, Brennan learned his bad news from television reports. The man who served six presidents and gathered the intelligence to conduct the raid that took down Osama Bin Laden wasn’t offered the courtesy of an e-mail or phone call. Instead, DT called him ”erratic”and slandered him by insisting that he couldn’t be trusted with the nation’s secrets.  

Meanwhile, former senior advisor Omarosa Manigault called Donald Trump ”unhinged” and a ”racist.” Omarosa is married to Pastor John Allen Newman of Jacksonville, Florida and is herself a Baptist minister who served as a chaplain in the California State Military Reserve before joining the Trump Administration. 

I’m not sure, but I think I once witnessed a cartel of intelligence officers assassinate one of our presidents. They sat on the Warren Commission, if anyone is curious about who they were.

One of the members was a fired CIA chief with a grudge. I was a teenager then. What did I know? — only what the commission spoon-fed me and every other American. Enough said.

We’ll never know the truth about the Kennedy assassination. Most people in the intelligence community disliked him, but so did a lot of other people including Cubans, Russians, and organized crime. All the people who know the truth or think they do are now dead or dying.

So, to get back to other explanations:  Some think DT was groomed over decades by Russian oligarchs allied with Russia and Israel. To keep him in line they provided him with a wife who was born when he was a 24-year-old skirt-chaser. He had to wait, but the wait was worth it, for him at least.

She was the daughter of a member of the communist party from a region of Yugoslavia that would later be renamed, Slovenia. She was a model unafraid to pose nude. Who doesn’t know the story?

She Germanized her name to be more in line with DT, who came from a powerful family headed by a German billionaire. His dad was once reported by some in media to be the wealthiest American — at least for a few years. He’s notorious for building segregated housing in Queens with government money during the second world war. Enough said.

Is DT’s wife a Russian sleeper agent?  Of course not.  The thought alone is preposterous, right?

Another theory some have put forward to explain DT is that he is a racist and delusional old man in the beginning stages of bona-fide dementia; perhaps Alzheimer’s disease.  It’s a little early for dementia, but I knew a woman who was diagnosed in her thirties. It took two years for Alzheimer’s to claim her.

DT’s White House physician said no; the president will live to be 200 years old if he adjusts his eating habits a little. He’s as sharp as they come — a stable genius.

DT attended a private military academy during high school.  There were two reasons young men went to military academies in those days; I remember well. One was because they were either in trouble with the law or unmanageable at home. A private academy kept them out of the house and helped maintain a peaceful lifestyle for the parents. The other reason was to avoid going to integrated schools where blacks were beginning to be introduced into mainstream civilian life. 

A college suite-mate of mine bragged that he avoided school with Negroes by attending a private military academy. He also thought Martin Luther King was a communist. I’m sure readers know the type. He graduated in criminal justice and went on to become the head of a police department in a northern state.

We’ve all met people like him, whether we know it or don’t — tall, good-looking, and bad to the bone. The war-resisters, the fighters for racial justice, the men and women of conscience who cared about right and wrong were systematically identified by conservative corporate leaders and kept away from both power and the best jobs at Fortune 500 companies.

A major company in Milwaukee hired me after I graduated. They investigated and learned that I had resigned my officer’s commission to protest the Vietnam War. The background investigation took four weeks. When it was complete, their top investigator fired me.

It was my first job in industry. I learned quick to omit any mention about my anti-war past and to avoid companies that employed investigators. It seemed obvious to me that I would be unable to make a good living otherwise.

The hammer that hit me hits everyone who resists the bad people. It’s the price the poor sometimes pay for standing against the wealthy and speaking truth to power. It’s capitalism’s unseen collateral damage.

I fear for the young people starting their careers today. A trail of internet evidence exposes every free thinking American to the prejudices of the corporate elites who want docile employees who shut up and do what they’re told, no questions asked.

My regret is that, looking back, it seems like I might have had a lot to give, but nobody wanted it; no one felt they needed it.  If the truth is told, everyone is expendable and replaceable, right? How many times have the powerful said so to the powerless? 

The lives that matter are the lives of the billionaires who rule over us all and call it freedom. I learned that white supremacists (racists) in America can achieve the highest levels of success and be admired by almost everyone who knows them.

It’s true.

But back to the intelligence assessments: Today a Russian woman was arrested who is accused of having established a channel of communication with the GOP through the NRA (National Rifle Association). The Russians planned to launder money through the NRA, according to the allegation.

The Russian agent, Mariia Butina, is now being held without bond, because she is a flight risk. She was having an “affair” with  “U.S. Person 1” to gain access “to an extensive network of U.S. persons in positions to influence political activities in the United States” according to her indictment.

Why?

Well, it gets worse in the indictment, but I don’t want my essay to go off into the weeds. People will hear all about it soon enough. Take my word. It’s bad. Who knows what else the Russians planned to better enable them to manipulate hundreds-of-thousands of paranoid, Hillary-hating-Rambos who practice their shooting skills every week at firing ranges across America?

Use imagination for a moment.  Imagine that instead of Trump, it was Clinton who won the election. The “deplorables” were ready for revolution, weren’t they?  Remember how they attacked vote-counting centers after Al Gore carried Florida in the year 2000?

The GOP intimidated the Supreme Court to halt a constitutionally mandated recount of state voting that was beginning to turn against them. The Constitution of the United States makes voting the exclusive province of state governments, does it not? Look it up. The Supreme Court had no constitutional standing. It’s why the majority opinion took care to restrict its ruling; it was not to be used as precedent for any future rulings from any bench in America, ever.  Right?

Who knows better how to incite and fund revolutions than the KGB agents who took down the Russian state and now own and run it as a personal fiefdom?

Lock her up! Lock her up! GOP delegates screamed as they voted to make Donald Trump their standard bearer in 2016.

The citizens of the United States would have been in a second civil war right now, because the DT confederates were planning to insist that Hillary stole a rigged election, right?  Does anyone remember? DT was preparing to lead a revolution against America with Russian help. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

Maybe Russia planned only to destabilize America. Like the Japanese at Pearl Harbor they didn’t plan for a lopsided victory. The Japanese had no plan to occupy Hawaii. They ran like frightened sharks and hoped we wouldn’t catch them. It took four years, but eventually we came, we saw their lovely islands, and we conquered.

Veni, vidi, vici.

Japan will remain in our vise-grip until the end of time. That was the plan, anyway, when their leaders signed the terms of unconditional surrender in 1945.

Some say that DT harbors a secret desire to become a dictator. He admires strong men and wants to be one. He owned a professional wrestling league and a football team for a reason, maybe.

It’s counter-intuitive, but we might have lost our country to destabilization and revolution had Hillary won the Electoral College.  We have now a chance to save ourselves. We have to take that chance.

( Editors’ Note: Hillary garnered 65,853,516 popular votes to Trump’s 62,984,825.  ”Third party” candidates took  close to 8 million.  Ms. Clinton’s margin over Trump in the popular vote was 2,868,691. Hillary won the most votes of any candidate; Trump lost the popular contest by almost eleven million votes. He received 46% of the popular vote. Hillary and the third party candidates received 54% — a margin of 8%. )

People who played ball with the Russians (like the NRA) to take down the “deep state” might want to consider that they risk being arrested someday for treason, because they aided and abetted our enemies who attacked and continue to attack our elections, a foundation stone of American liberty.

The deplorables sometimes behave like fascist bullies, don’t they? They have pretty much proved who they are over the past two years, haven’t they? Read their twitter feeds, anyone who doesn’t believe it.

They claim to be Christians who love military assault rifles. How’s that for crazy? No one who survives being shot by an AR-15 ever fully recovers.

According to polls, deplorables seem to be about forty-percent of the voting population. It’s disgraceful what they post on social media. They’ve brought the USA into a bad place.

To any Trumpletonians who might be reading this essay, here are some things to learn and remember. There is no “deep state.” White supremacy is a lie. Muslims, Negros, Mexicans, gay men and women, and progressives are people who are owed respect, because they are made in the image of God, if for no other reason. They mean you no harm.

Walls make the best prisons.

Be kind to strangers, even on Twitter. You might be tweeting to angels, unawares.

DT will not be president forever.

It’s true.

Billy Lee

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#MKWA

People are trapped by delusional thinking. No argument or facts are going to change any minds. The United States has invested too much treasure on a captive population that has no way to grasp that everything they think they know for sure is fabrication.

It’s all lies.

Everything.

I’m going to tell the truth for the sake of history.  What happens next will vindicate me, said the late Fidel Castro.

Of course, it isn’t about vindicating me or even about vanquishing sociopaths when at last they self-identify so that everyone knows for sure — much like Joseph McCarthy, who identified himself decades ago on national television.

Is anyone old enough to remember? Has it occurred to anyone that McCarthy was right? The Russians are coming, he warned; Communists are at the gates; the trickle has become a flood.

Nikita Khrushchev bragged before the United Nations that Russians would bury us, even as McCarthy insisted that they already had; agents and sympathizers were infiltrating the State Department and the media in droves. 

Why do I suddenly feel like the chances are good that most folks reading this essay have never heard of any person I’ve mentioned so far? Am I talking (writing) (spitting) into the wind?  Is it only the old and discredited who enjoy the privilege to remember and learn from history?

Who knows anything for sure?

It can’t be all about justifying or humiliating anyone, because everyone on all sides is flawed. Everyone has short memories. Everyone hears what they want to hear and disregards the rest.  Right?

It’s an earworm from yesteryear that plays in the heads of everyone who is engaged and old enough to remember. The Boxer song by Roy Halee and friends means so much, even today, especially today. Does anyone agree?

I am just a poor boy though my story’s seldom told
I have squandered my resistance for a pocket full of mumbles,
such are promises
All lies and jest,
still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest, hmmmmm

more verses

In the clearing stands a boxer, and a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down or cut him
‘Til he cried out in his anger and his shame
”I am leaving, I am leaving,” but the fighter still remains… 

No one gets it right in this world. The leaders of nations —  isolated in bubbles of every hue — seem the most flawed. Nothing any of them does ever works. Leaders are isolated; pampered; entitled.  Most are proud; all are cruel, because they are human beings; humans have a dark side. It’s how they roll.

Everyone knows it’s true.

It’s been this way forever and always will be. It’s why we have religion — to dampen the desire in every heart to run toward darkness; to obliterate entirety; to destroy Earth and everything the hating person loves and holds dear.

The rage fascinates and enthralls. No news stories are more watched than those that show young men going berserk and shooting up a school; or of suicidal fanatics smashing airplanes into buildings.

It all comes from the same place deep inside the hearts of the humiliated and the despised. It’s a way of getting even that drives those ruined by the evil they endured to strike back hard.

The common people want kings, and they want them to simplify things. Make it all about good and evil; them verses us; religion against ideology; stupidity verses ignorance.

People want kings (not queens) who they will someday learn to hate. Yes, it’s counter-intuitive. Do folks ignore insults? Do they overlook humiliations and move on? Some do. Most dream of revolution and the day they hear the words, I’m sorry.

The Queen is naked!  a peasant lad screams at the passing royal parade. Burn her train! another shouts.

Suddenly, it’s a mob. Everyone yells. They stamp their feet and shake their fists. Lock her up! Lock her up!  USA! USA!! USA!!!

Men love to fight. They love to kill. They love to weep. They love to spiral into self-loathing depressions. They love to jump out of airplanes and climb mountains.

Boring is always fatal to a yearning soul. But so is tempting fate and doing bad things for fun. In the end, everyone — good or bad — dies.

Believing in death makes killing easier. Does it not?

What if everyone lives?

The idea seems absurd to those who are doused in the gasoline of evil. It seems paradoxical to those who admire themselves for their lack of faith. It’s why as a species, homo sapiens are doomed.

Even the most righteous are scum who hurt people on grand scales.

It’s true.

What? Must I name names?

Harry Truman; Curtis LeMay; George Wallace; Lyndon Johnson; Richard Nixon; Robert E. Lee; J. Robert Oppenheimer — the list of names is full of men and as long as history — every name on the list is an American mass murderer — psychopaths whose life work dehumanized and  killed men, women, children, and newborns on vast scales.

Many are heroes who Americans, men and women alike, look up to as paragons of virtue and honor.

So what about #MKWA?  By now some readers must have figured out the title, right?

How can anyone who can’t figure out an initialism (acronym) as easy as this one have any chance at all to anticipate and survive catastrophes? They can’t. Make Korea Whole Again.  MKWA. It’s what this essay is about.

This is the flag of a United Korea. Japan seized control of Korea in 1910 and ran it like a vassal state until the USSR and the USA liberated it in 1945 and divided it North and South. Attempts by the North to unite the country and secure sources of fresh water for everyone started the Korean War, which ended in a stalemate and the death of three million Koreans — two million burned alive by napalm during relentless USA aerial bombardments. 

Who understands that Korea is one country?

The USA and Russia divided it in half after World War II.

Curtis LeMay spent two years bombing North Korea back into the Stone Age during the Korean War. Air Force historians say he killed twenty percent of the population — about two million people, General LeMay bragged years later to Air Force historians. One of his aides said under oath that the bombing was the cruelest use of military force in the history of the world. It was worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

LeMay expressed no regrets.

In Japan it was his pilots, too, after all. He destroyed 67 cities in Japan. He burnt them to the ground with a fire-jelly called napalm. By the time he started on Korea, he was a bonafide expert.

Think about it.

Let the facts sink in. It will do you no harm.

I said facts weren’t going to matter. My purpose isn’t to rehash the history of Korea. Yes, the USA used bio-terrorism against the Chinese who rushed in to save North Korea from certain genocide. We “anthraxed” them.

Everyone in the world knows about it except Americans. Our leaders thought anthrax was more humane than radioactive bombs.

Yes, top generals in the USA advocated for nuclear strikes — as they did during the Vietnam War, as well. The history of every conflict turns on the capacity for barbarity by the parties who fight. I don’t want to make that argument. I don’t want to go into that dark forest. Not now.

I want to imagine the present and the future. We have two men, Trump and Kim Jong-un, who have found religion. They are, apparently, Christians looking for a way to do what’s right. Christ has changed their hearts. Both are puppets of countries run by bureaucracies entrenched by powerful elites. The president’s backers call the USA a “deep state.”  Kim calls his system the “generals.”

Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in celebrating the possibility for a United Korea.

Moon Jae-in is the South Korean president who replaced Park Geun-hye, the first female president in East Asia and a conservative — impeached by the National Assembly and removed from office last year. She is currently serving a 24-year prison sentence — incarcerated after her family ruled South Korea since 1961.

Forbes Magazine voted Park the most powerful woman in Asia more than once. Look it up.

Our president wants a Nobel Prize so that Obama will not one-up him.

What difference does it make what his reasons are, as long as they are sincere and strongly held?

Kim wants to create a perfect society, presumably, where people have fun and nothing but fun. No arguing allowed. 

Ok… It sounds like Woodstock — or maybe the pro basketball finals where Kim plays point guard for the champions of the world.

Does it really matter? 

Of course not.

I know that most Americans will not accept this notion, but our billionaires fear the idea that the communist way of producing wealth cooperatively and then sharing it equally might actually outperform a capitalist (slave) system; they fear the success of communism more than they fear nuclear war.

It’s true.

Who cares if no one believes it? 

Read Ted Kennedy’s book True Compass. He says plainly that men like his billionaire father feared the success of communism; they were obsessed by it.

Most people can understand why, right?

Can anyone name a billionaire who wants to forfeit their power and wealth so that a few guttersnipes can eat and go to school — or a few old-fogies can pay their own way and not beg their kids in old age?

Bill Gates, you say? His primary residence alone cost a half-billion dollars. And he’s the best billionaire we’ve got. He got his start through an under-the-table deal his mother struck with a fellow IBM board member and personal friend. The deal was not beneficial to IBM.

So Gate’s wealth came easier than for others who lied, murdered, and robbed to get theirs. Would anyone give up their advantages, if they were rich?  I don’t think so.

Voting patterns would be much different if people truly valued equality, right?

What’s the point?

Our billionaires don’t want Korea or Cuba or Venezuela or Brazil or any communist-flirting countries to succeed. The United States is at war 24/7 with both countries and leaders to lock down communism to a reputation for failure.

So far, so good.

North and South Korea want to unify. Families in both countries want to reunite before they are too old; before they die, frankly.

Click pic to enlarge in new window. SE direction on map is up. 

Korea must have nuclear weapons to deter Japan — which has the world’s largest stockpile of plutonium and the missiles to deliver it — and China who is already a nuclear and naval superpower.

Isn’t it obvious?

Korea, to survive, must have the means to deter the United States, which is smothering the Far East with its Navy of nuclear subs and aircraft super-carriers.

No one who possesses nuclear weapons uses them. After the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki no one ever will. The Koreans will never use their weapons, nor will we. It’s a non-issue except in the minds of the paranoid and the delusional and the lovers of genocidal war.

A unified nuclear-armed Korea will be a deterrent to nuclear war, at least in the short run. In the long run, people understand that every country must sequester and dismantle their nuclear arsenals. I don’t think it is technically possible, though — even if every country wants it. Pandora’s box has been opened and the demons of mass-suicide are loose and unstoppable, at least from my vantage point.

I pray that I’m wrong.

The tragedy is that smart humans have manufactured and sequestered vast tonnages of PU239, an isotope of plutonium that went extinct among the stars billions of years ago.

PU239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. The missiles and containment structures designed to hold this toxic element are going to rot. Earth will soak up this life-destroying poison like vinegar to a sponge, someday.

The sad reality that no one will admit is that humans have already destroyed the earth. Homo sapiens may go extinct in the next 500 years. It’s more than possible. Certain extinction is what risk modelers all say. But plutonium will live on until it erupts to kill every chipmunk, bunny, cat, dog, bird, and butterfly that people leave behind.

Earth is going dark whether humans survive or not. Most experts put the odds of extending human survival to a thousand years or more at absolute zero.

Since the planet is going to die, why not do something nice for once and leave the Koreans alone to work out their destiny?  If the United States gets out of the way and lets nature take its course, who knows what wonderful things might happen on the Korean peninsula? Who knows how many lives will be saved should everyone avoid war and set aside their fears and prejudices?

And truthfully, what is it that Korea has that we Americans want? The answer is: absolutely nothing. Except friendship.

Despite the dark picture drawn in this essay, people can change.

People do forgive. People do help. People do love.

It’s a fact of human nature that altruism and empathy are hard-wired into the human soul alongside its reptilian origins.

Why not be friends?

Why not organize an airlift led by the United States Air Force and Navy Marines to drop food and medicine to the starving innocents of North Korea who some say are eating bark and tree leaves to survive the blockade?

Why not send in French and Cuban doctors to administer to the sick and dying; to administer antibiotics and anti-parasitic medicines? 

Both groups would rush to join such an effort. Everyone knows they would help desperate Koreans in a heartbeat.

Someone once said that the way to lose an enemy is to make a friend.

Does anyone believe in love?

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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