BartBlog

While walking down a busy street in Philadelphia the other day after attending the Netroots Nation convention, I rounded a corner and there was Bernie Sanders — giving a speech to a crowd of protestors who were angry because their only accessible hospital was being torn down by a Los Angeles developer in order to make way for said developer’s upscale condominium project. “800 pregnant women are going to have no place to give birth,” said Bernie. And cancer patients who are in the middle of receiving their chemo treatments will be thrown out on the street, death swirling around their poor sweet hairless heads. Yikes!

At the Netroots Nation convention itself, I had a wonderful time, learned a lot about politics and even came back home with a bunch of free ballpoint pens. What’s not to like! I even got to hear Senator Warren, Governor Inslee, Mayor Castro, Senator Gillibrand and most of “The Squad” speak (AOC couldn’t make it). And I’m here to tell you that Ilhan Omar can really walk fast. She covered the space between the speakers’ platform and the elevator in an even shorter time than it takes The Donald to tweet out yet another blatant hit on our morality and our paychecks.

I also went to a Netroots symposium put on by the LGBTQ community — wherein I learned just how nice, vulnerable, friendly and well-informed that Queers can be. They took me under their wings, opened my eyes, gave me a glimpse into how life in the Gay Lane can be — and even provided free lunch. Philly cheese steaks. Never had it before. Never want to have it again. Shredded beef slathered with Velveeta? No thank you. Even if it is free.

I was also lucky enough to hear Ilhan Omar speak to a small roomful of conference attendees and then take questions after. I, of course, just had to ask a question too. But which one? There are so many questions these days. Death in the Middle East, death in the gulags at our southern border, death in our homeless encampments, death by fire and flood due to climate emergencies….

I got up to the mic, cleared my throat and said, “700 billion dollars a year to the Pentagon. Seven billion people on Earth. Do the math. Let’s give each and every one of us a thousand dollars per year instead of wasting all that money on murder and bombs! Every single year. 1,000 dollars in our pockets. Then and only then will America be safe!” Who would want to harm the goose that is laying all these golden eggs for everyone?

But was that an actual question?

C’mon, Jane. Think of an actual question. Ilhan Omar herself is listening! But I was drawing a blank. Finally I just blurted out, “The Syrian people love President Assad because he kept their country from becoming another Libya!” Now where did that come from? Then I turned to the room and cried “He-e-e-e-e-l-p!!” Help us, Netroots Nation. Help us, Rep. Omar. Help us, all you moral Americans and moral people of the world who are kind people and have good hearts. Help us from being destroyed by greedy billionaires, condo developers, racists and murderous war mongers who just love to create collateral damage.

But then at least I didn’t totally embarrass myself by screaming “Blue Meanies!”

After my impassioned plea, however, someone came up to me later and started ranting that Assad was a dictator who bombed a million of his own people. No, he didn’t. America, the Zionists and the Saudis did that — with a little help from their “rebel” friends in al Qaeda. “It’s well-documented,” I added. Boy, did that piss this person off. Wrong answer. I finally managed to escape to the restroom to lick my (psychological) wounds. https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-waiting-for-new-idlib-offensive-us-continues-to-provide-syria-rebels-with-weapons-and-military-supplies/5683916

Later, in downtown Philly, I got to chatting with a young U.S. Marine. “I will be deploying to Syria in August,” he said. What? See? I was right! It is those pesky Americans who are causing trouble in Syria. I rest my case! But at least he doesn’t have to worry about being bombarded with Philly cheese steaks over there. They don’t have cheese steaks in Syria! Yet. But let’s just wait and see what else the Blue Meanies are gonna be up to after August.

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Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you’re at it, please buy my books. https://www.amazon.com/Jane-Stillwater/e/B00IW6O1RM

Wait, what? Pharmaceutical companies now have vaccine commercials running on our TVs — right next to all those other phony drug propaganda campaigns? “Ask your doctor if this vaccine is right for your child….” Except now there’s another weird twist to their game.

At the end of all those other drug commercials that we are forced to watch, there comes a point where some trust-worthy-sounding voice-over guy is spozed to tell us what the side-effects are. You know what I’m talking about, right? And yet what actually follows in Big Pharma’s new vaccine commercials is just dead airtime. Total silence. What? No side effects are even mentioned? No side-effects even exist? Nothing could ever possibly go wrong? Really? Not even an “Ouch” from your baby? How can that possibly be?

It’s because our very own CDC has actually passed a law telling us that vaccines never have to list their side-effects. Never. Huh? https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article24913978.html

But does objecting to all this new false reality automatically make me one of those ostracized media-lepers with the dread label of “Anti-Vaxxer”? No, no, no and no. Truth be told, I actually sort of like vaccines.

So many horrible and deadly diseases have been prevented due to the wonderful invention of vaccines. If they had been around at the time of Columbus, for instance, approximately 20 million “New World” natives wouldn’t have died painfully from small pox.

And just imagine how different medieval Europe would have been if GlaxoSmithKline, Merck or Pfizer had just come up with a vaccine against Black Plague back in the day.

And the reason that I myself haven’t spent most of my life vegetating in some gross Iron Lung or limping around with a withered arm or shrunken leg is because someone invented a polio vaccine.

However, my own polio vaccine was administered orally. And my small pox vaccine was administered topically. But that was old-school For most vaccines nowadays you get shots — shots that go directly into your bloodstream. 72 different doses of injected vaccines are currently required for our babies and little kids alone. 72 doses going directly into their cute little bloodstreams, each one swimming in a preservative usually consisting of aluminum, formaldehyde and one of the main ingredients in “Round Up”.

That’s gotta hurt.

But, wait. That’s not even anywhere near the end of us getting shot up. There’s even more shots to come! Now the pharmaceutical industry informs us that we also gotta have a measles booster every five years and a flu shot every winter for the rest of our lives.

None of that bothers me however. I’ve already been given the polio vaccine and the small pox vaccine. And I’ve already actually had the mumps, chicken pox and measles. I don’t need flu shots because I never get the flu. I’m good. I never have to be injected with sleazy vaccine fillers and preservatives for the rest of my life. The pharmaceutical industry hates people like me. We are not their gift that keeps on giving.

But our children and grandchildren are.

And apparently Americans can live with that.

But suppose — just suppose — that those gross fillers and preservatives in vaccines do cause autism, altzheimers, eczema, multiple sclerosis, androgyny, Parkinson’s, ADHD, increased auto-immune diseases, the sudden and weird increase in “childhood cancer” and a whole list of other health issues that have cropped up so heavily since 1989, the year that Congress allowed vaccine manufacturers to become far less regulated and leashed. Shouldn’t we be just a little bit upset that no research is being done on possible side effects? That we just take Big Pharma at its word? Seriously? https://thevaccinereaction.org/2019/06/a-nation-where-half-of-the-children-become-autistic/

Everyone gets their knickers all in a twist because certain breakfast cereals may contain a Round-Up ingredient — yet no one seems to care when we pump this same dangerous ingredient into our babies’ bloodstreams? What’s up with that? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/glyphosate-breakfast-cereal-still-contains-roundup-ingredient-study-finds/

And we are all sternly warned not to cook with aluminum foil due to health risks — and yet aluminum is still a major preservative in those vaccines that are shot right into our helpless babies’ veins on the very day they are born and then for the rest of their lives — but nobody seems to mind about that either? We live in a very strange world. https://www.healthyandnaturalworld.com/aluminum-foil-risks/

But even if Congress actually did force Big Pharma to finally allow science to actually do any research on the side-effects of vaccines’ preservatives — and even if this research did prove that Round-Up, aluminum and formaldehyde actually did have side-effects when shot directly into the human bloodstream, none of this research would effect me. I’m safe. Your babies aren’t safe. You yourself aren’t safe. But I am. I’ll never be required to get another shot. Or be guilt-tripped, shamed or brainwashed into getting any more shots either.

Vaccine fillers and preservatives are truly the gifts that keep on giving — to Big Pharma only, over 60 billion dollars in profits recently. But all we get are…shot.

Shouldn’t we be doing something about this disaster? If nothing else, for instance, let’s demand that pharmaceutical companies invent vaccines we can swallow instead of getting shot with. Chocolate flavored vaccines? Sure, why not.

PS: Let’s suppose, just suppose for one minute, that the rapid increases in all these miserable diseases that currently effect us actually are the result of all those yucky fillers and preservatives gleefully administered to you in a constant life-long parade of vaccine shots? Drug companies would be (and are) totally delighted with that situation too. Now almost every single red-blooded American in this great land will now constantly require ADHD medications, eczema creams, Alzheimer pills, heart medications and on and on and on. Endlessly. Drug profits through the roof! Better run out and buy stock.

PPS: I actually have done some of my own personal (sort of) scientific research on this subject. For instance, one of my daughters received the MMR vaccine and immediately developed eczema — which she still has to this day, 30 years later. Yuck. https://thevaccinereaction.org/2019/06/another-mmr-failure-with-mumps-outbreak-in-florida/

Further personal research:  I also gotta confess that I actually did get vaccinated a few more times — with disastrous results.  When I went into the Peace Corps back in 2009, they forced me to get a whole bunch of shots. “Either that or you go home.” Oh. Okay. Just like all those thousands of American soldiers who were forced to get all kinds of shots during Bush Senior’s dirty little Gulf “war” — and who later got all kinds of horrible life-long reactions as a result.

The good news? Thanks to the Peace Corps I am now theoretically protected from catching rabies, hepatitis A and B, meningitis, diphtheria and tetanus — plus I also shot up with vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella and polio (which I’d already had) for good measure. The bad news? I passed out cold after each shot — and then became so disoriented over the next few months that they had to ship me back home anyway.  It was almost like having Altzheimers — or being autistic.

I was mindlessly channel-surfing through a bunch of TV stations the other day when suddenly there was this rabid televangelist sternly haranguing me about the holy sanctity of life before birth and also the holy sanctity of life once we get too old to do anything else but just lie around in a coma. “Abortions and do-not-resuscitate directives are anathema,” he screamed at me. But all the rest of us between birth and the ICU are fair game? Apparently so.

Drop bombs on us, ambush us on school playgrounds, make our food radioactive, drown us with floods and tornadoes and sea-level rises, drive our veterans to mass suicide, frack our water supply, starve our children, deprive us of life-saving healthcare — hey, that’s okay. Just as long as nonviable fetuses and comatose elders are safe.

Why do so many Americans think like that today? That the teachings of Jesus strictly apply to the unborn and the undead — but not to the rest of us?

And while we still are on this unpleasant topic, let’s also talk about the word “abortion”. That is such an ugly and heartless word. Let’s give it another, kinder, gentler, more humane name. Let’s call it “Reproductive Freedom” instead.

For my grandmother’s generation, there was no reproductive freedom at all. No choices other than a diaphragm or a condom, both of which were hard to get. Or a coat hanger. Or being forced to raise a dozen unwanted children and then finally die in childbirth. Or die trying to avoid it. “Keep them barefoot and pregnant.” My grandmother herself ended up having a “nervous breakdown” after her husband died in a flash flood and she was left with three young children to raise all by herself.

And also there’s the sad case of my great-grandmother who had given birth to ten children by the age of 36. I have a photograph of her and eight of her kids (more to come, unfortunately). And she already looks like hell, frankly — a haunted and scary hell. Old beyond her years. No facelifts for her!

I myself had never planned to have children. After graduating from college, I went into the Peace Corps and then planned to attend graduate school after that. But with no easy access to birth control…. “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hKSXqefccg

But that was then. Not now. Yet. Back to the future. Let’s take a closer look at all those present-day guys who are working so hard to eliminate reproductive freedom for women — men like the above-named televangelist. Those very same guys who fight so hard to protect their own freedoms? Freedom to use our beloved flag as an excuse to throw helpless babies into concentration camps? Freedom to demand open-carry of semi-automatic weapons? Freedom to get all pissed off if they might be deprived of their right to bomb Iran and start World War 3? https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/448248-texas-city-council-unanimously-votes-to-ban-abortions-become-first

And yet these very same grumpy old men are absolutely the first ones to deny us women of our own right to freedom. “No reproductive freedom for you!” They want all us women to look like my great-grandmother — before we even reach age 40? So they can have the freedom to dump us and go hunt for a new trophy wife?

That sucks eggs.

     I’m sincerely hoping that my favorite presidential candidates will all be speaking at the convention — just to make W.C. Fields jealous.  Tulsi Gabbard is my favorite candidate. She is totally pro-peace and would make a great soldier-president.  The prez we have now avoided the draft.  Tulsi served her country and is still serving in the national Guard.  https://www.tulsi2020.com/about

     And speaking of presidents and changing the tropes that we call stuff by, I.C.E’s ghastly holding pens for babies and children at our southern border have gone far beyond just labeling them “concentration camps” — and even past calling them “Gulags”.  No, it’s gone beyond that.  We can now officially call it “Genocide”.  According to the UN Genocide Convention, “When one group forcibly transfers the children of one group to another group” and/or practices “institutionalized neglect,” that group is deliberately committing genocide.  https://www.eater.com/2019/6/28/19154181/migrant-children-detention-centers-border-texas-food-water

     It’s time to stop all this horror.  Americans need to stop acting like Nazis — where only the unborn are safe.  https://www.businessinsider.com/detained-kids-could-live-in-trump-hotel-suite-for-less-than-tent-city-2018-6

 

Here’s something I didn’t actually realize until I was actually inside of the National 9-11 museum in Lower Manhattan — that this impressive new museum is actually built on the actual site of this dreadful catastrophe. It’s an extremely well-designed museum that will overpower your heart with sad emotions and make even the most veriest skeptic start to tear up.

But despite all its profound emotion-generating capabilities, the museum itself fails to answer my most basic question. “Where is all the melted stuff?”

I saw battered stuff, broken stuff, blown up stuff, tragic stuff and awe-inspiringly heroic stuff — but nothing that was actually melted.

We Americans have been told again and again and again that the burning fuel from the jet planes caused a whole bunch of six-inch-thick steel girders to melt from the heat, thus causing both towers to collapse.

Inside the museum, they showed us lots of steel girders. They showed us lots of huge steel beams and lots of gigantic steel pillars. And I looked very closely at each and every one of them. No sign of melting at all. Where was the wax-candle effect that we’ve been told about constantly for the last 19 years? Coulda fooled me.

Maybe it was just me but the entire museum seemed to be designed and constructed to un-intentionally refute everything that we had been told for so long about all that melted steel. The museum’s exhibits themselves seemed to be working very hard to convince us that our leaders’ national narrative about what happened on September 11, 2001 was only a construct, a mythology solely designed to drag America into 19 gruesome years of Endless War (so far) — and thus fleece our pockets. “Mission accomplished”.

Surely I couldn’t be the only one who happened to notice the extreme lack of melted stuff at this museum? Apparently I am.

But with regard to our great sorrow for the victims of this terrible catastrophe that was generated by all the individual photos of the victims and by a Vietnam-memorial-style wall listing all of their names? That was so tragically real. We were all crying by the time we left the museum. It had been clearly designed to create those sad emotions. Deliberately mis-directing our anger away from reality and off into sadness? You be the judge. https://unac.notowar.net/2019/05/13/why-the-powerful-always-paint-their-side-as-the-victims/

But after having visited this museum, I now have no problem imagining the bottomless sorrow that millions of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Gaza, Libya, etc. must be feeling as well. They too have suffered their own 9-11s, almost daily — thanks to us.

PS: How many and various false-flag “wars” have been shoved down our patriotic American throats over the years? Let me count the ways. “Remember the Maine.” And just who exactly really started that brutal war on Korea? Huge lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident? Add that to the list.

Bin Laden in Afghanistan. WMDs in Iraq. Libya needed to be rescued for “Humanitarian Reasons” and now it too is a failed state. “Rebels” in Syria who are actually al Qaeda operatives who get paid by the Saudis and weaponized by NATO. Occupied Gaza sent firecrackers over the Zionist border — which we are told were practically ICBM missiles and so Gaza must be taught a lesson by raining thousands of tons of white phosphorus down on its hospitals and schools. Yemen’s on fire because of…I forget what. So Wall Street can sell more weapons to the Saudis? “Duh, yeah.” https://www.globalresearch.ca/saudi-led-air-strikes-destroyed-nearly-400-hospitals-yemen/5679511

And now there’s this new mysterious drone strike on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. Wait, what? Which country routinely uses drones? Hint: It’s not Iran. But, hey. America got its dirty little war after the USS Maine lie. America got its dirty little war after the Tonkin lie. America got its dirty little war after the WMD lie. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But do the rest of us want a dirty little war on Iran too? Hopefully not. https://theintercept.com/2019/06/19/donald-trump-iran-and-the-gulf-of-tonkin-redux/

Most of us here in the USA are finally starting to realize (I hope) that American troops and resources are already stretched too thin. Thousands of our troops are currently stationed next to Venezuela and inside Syria, Afghanistan and about 800 other places around the world, including our own southern border. Geez Louise. Exactly how many sons and daughter do we even have left to send off to “war” on Iran too?
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/04/30/pat_buchanan_on_iran_bibi_has_been_crying_wolf_for_decades.html

Maybe it’s time that we ourselves start protecting both our own sons and daughters and everybody else’s sons and daughters from being victims of future 9-11s all over the world. Because Wall Street and War Street sure aren’t gonna do it for us. Let’s start by voting for pro-peace candidates like Tulsi Gabbard. https://www.votetulsi.com/node/33249

After my recent visit to Ellis Island, I sometimes find myself actually starting to feel jealous of all those poor downtrodden immigrants coming to America — both in days gone by and right now. From yesterday’s Ellis Island to today’s southern border, these hopeful immigrants have all arrived here either by escaping from horrid 19th-century shtetls and 20th-century concentration camps in Europe, from that modern-day American-made nightmare in Honduras or from the squalid ICE-run concentration camps of Texas, Oklahoma or Mississippi. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/06/12/sick-horror-trump-administration-plans-detain-migrant-children-former-japanese?cd-origin

Why? Why should I envy them? The poorest of the poor? The very meekest on earth?

Why? Because these poor, tattered and vulnerable immigrants living at the very bottom of humanity’s social scale all possess something precious that the rest of us either don’t have or have lost long ago: A reason, a purpose, a destination for their lives — and it’s not just to buy the latest iPhone or to make the next trip to Walmart or to spend hours online hating on anyone who doesn’t look exactly like them. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/matthew-bowen-border-patrol-trial-847878/

These immigrants have true grit — they are not just dogs in a manger, stuck in some rut where materialism is God, sucking up to their bosses, happily throwing the teaching of Jesus or even basic morality out the window if it causes even the slightest blister in their shoes — souls filled with xenophobia, parroting every racist or corporatist lie they hear on TV, becoming mere dollar-store imitations of real men and women with actual beating hearts.

Like their European, Afghan, Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian, Palestinian, Yemeni, African and American Indian counterparts before them, these modern-day immigrants from Honduras have been forced the hard way to know what is true and what’s not. To quote the indomitable Mma Ramotswe, “They have a point to their lives.” What is our point? We can only make Endless War for so long — before the entire world falls apart. Is that our point? https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/06/iran-decided-to-put-maximum-pressure-on-trump-here-is-how-it-will-do-it.html

Americans blindly look backwards to the imaginary wonderland of the 1950s, back when so many of us had been disingeniously rubber-stamped into an assembly-line conformity dominated by the Cold War and Joe McCarthy constantly telling us to “keep your mouth shut.”

Immigrants from Honduras are on the move today, looking northward in search of the ideals of American “Democracy” and American “Freedom” that they have been constantly told about — while most Americans who are already supposed to be living the dream are now all looking backward toward a dream that never was. Looking back to the days when their financial security came at a very steep price — the price of Freedom and Democracy. “Keep your nose to the grindstone and your mouths shut.” https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-09/zuesse-force-ending-freedom

Americans have come to believe their own myths. Instead of the truth. This is never a good thing.

But now it’s time for us too, like the Hondurans and all the other immigrants to America before them, to throw everything that we can, especially “our lives our fortunes and our sacred honor,” into also seeking true democracy. True freedom. Can Hondurans find this heroic Declaration of Independence hidden away in some American concentration camp on our southern border? Maybe. Can we ourselves find it in Washington DC or at Walmart? Definitely not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMYjroVIDLA

Americans can never ever experience a true democracy or live in true freedom — not in a country where we have concentration camps at our southern borders, where any kind of planned parenthood is not allowed, where we are constantly being mugged and frisked by the new income tax laws, where voter suppression is rampant, where we go into individual bankruptcy because we believe that TV commercials are more important than the Eye of a Needle and into national bankruptcy because our imperialistic military machine is stretched too thin because all our savings and future hopes and dreams are swallowed up by Death Eaters waging “Endless War” and where we all know for sure that the NSA is reading our mail. https://www.thenation.com/article/amy-kaplan-our-american-israel-book-review/

Both our Honduran asylum-seekers of today and the ghosts of our Ellis Island survivors back in the day have one thing in common. They have nothing to lose — and yet they still have hope. I’m so jealous of that. But we Americans? We have already lost all that — and yet we don’t even know that it’s gone.
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Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you’re at it, please buy my books. https://www.amazon.com/Jane-Stillwater/e/B00IW6O1RM

 

When I visited Ellis Island recently, there was a huge sign over the main exhibit hall telling me that their featured permanent exhibit was entitled “The Peopling of America”. Think about that for a minute. “The Peopling of America.” Who could possibly resist visiting an exhibit where the word “People” is used as a verb? Certainly not me.

Only a tiny first part of this gigantic exhibit even causally mentioned that perhaps there might have been a few indigenous people who happened to live here before the settlers from Europe showed up and murdered most of them. But then the extensive exhibit got down to brass tacks and began to tell us the story of how the real “Peopling” of America began — once those pesky Indians had been shoved out of the way. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/an-american-genocide-benjamin-madley/1122747231#/

Since Columbus arrived, according to this exhibit, the “Peopling of America” had been a good thing. Even all those poor tired unwashed non-English-speaking 19th-century immigrants yearning to breathe free who had landed on Ellis Island with their hearts in their throats had been a good thing — even though the settlers already here clearly didn’t think so.

But now, apparently, the “Peopling of America” is over. According to Washington DC, I.C.E. and the U.S. Border Patrol, America has now become all “Peopled” up. No more room at the inn. No vacancy. Sorry. Go away. Or die.

As far as I can tell, this is why the current Euro-centric “People” of America today seem to be so terribly afraid of our new immigrants — that maybe karma really indeed is a bitch. They’re afraid that what goes around comes around. That just as their ancestors had “Peopled” the American Indian to near extinction? They are now afraid that their own Euro-centric arses are gonna also get “Peopled” to near extinction too by this next wave of immigrants from Latin America — immigrants who are only following the trail of their stolen treasures back to the very thieves who stole them. And that would be us.

And now we are seeing a whole new set of Ellis-Island clones springing up all along America’s southern borders — but these new ones are far more crueler and meaner and low-spirited than the original Ellis Island ever was. Not just facilities for clearing new immigrants but actual concentration camps.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Americans do not need to behave like Nazis. It doesn’t have to be “us verses them”. All humans are valuable. Did not Jesus teach us that? These asylum-seekers at our southern border need to be viewed as resources, as gifts — not just another new wave of greedy settlers come to “People” over us too just like our murderous ancestors brutally “Peopled” over the American Indians back in the day.

Let’s finally change history, make amends, welcome these new immigrants, start a new trend — and do the courageous things now that our ancestors were too set on genocide to even consider.

PS: I gotta admit that the Ellis Island cafeteria did serve an excellent old-fashioned roast beef dinner — and it was cheap too. Plus the ferry ride over from lower Manhattan was totally fun.

I clearly love everything about books — so imagine my delight when someone told me about the historic Morgan Library in midtown Manhattan. I was there in a flash. And it was awesomely beautiful too. Just imagine a vaulted sanctuary such as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel — only also lined with tiers and tiers of bookcases stuffed with rare and beautiful leather-bound books containing all the wisdom of the ages. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” I was in hog heaven! https://www.themorgan.org/

“But….” And, yes, there’s always gotta be a but….

At the very back of my consciousness, I kept hearing a niggling small voice that kept telling me, “You know, of course, that all this fabulous splendor was built upon the backs of the misery, starvation and death of thousands of 19th-century American workers who were impoverished and practically enslaved by J.P. Morgan, the Robber Baron himself, right?”

“Oh shut up Jiminy Cricket and just let me enjoy the moment.” But my conscience just wouldn’t shut up.

Another one of the many other fabulous things to do in New York City is to walk the High Line, an amazing park-in-the-sky lovingly created by local volunteers who have turned some old elevated train tracks into a tree-lined pathway from 14th Street up to 34th Street. I went there next. Trees are beautiful too, right? https://www.thehighline.org/visit/

“But….” And, yes, there’s always gotta be a but.

At the end of the High Line I also discovered the luxurious Hudson Yards office-complex-and-mall. Another thing of great beauty. And the “Stores at the Yard” were all selling beautiful high-end stuff like Chanel, Cartier, Rolex, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany, Gucci, Coach and Dior. Who the freak can even afford to buy stuff like that? Certainly not me. I shop at free boxes, flea markets and the Goodwill. But somebody must be doing their shopping there. I couldn’t even imagine who.

And another thing about the Hudson Yards that just screamed out “Conspicuous Consumption” was the huge amounts of wasted space there. Atriums and terraces and vaulted corridors were everywhere, right there on prime-time mid-Manhattan real estate — real estate worth hundreds of dollars a foot. Real estate that could have housed hundreds if not thousands of tents for the myriad homeless families of New York.

Jiminy Cricket then went on to underscore his point. “Back in the 19th century, robber barons like Morgan and Rockefeller and Carnegie created their castles of dreams on the backs of starving and dying American workers like our great-grandfathers. And now it is clear that, here in the 21st century, there is a whole new set of robber barons who are creating all this insane wealth as well — only this time these castles of dreams like the Hudson Yards are being created over the dead bodies of murdered babies in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.” http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c2f801b9772ae6d89f7eb45/t/5cf63af897a71f00013ca94b/1559640825016/Update_Peter+Ford_4+June+2019.pdf

Yep, my conscience is right. What good is awesome and extreme beauty if its very roots lie in the extreme swamps of inhuman heartlessness and greed? The one cancels out the other. How can anyone with any good conscience at all shop at the Hudson Yards, knowing that their extreme wealth mostly derives from manufacturing and selling deadly weapons of mass destruction — to be used to massacre babies in far-away places like Yemen and Gaza and Syria and Iraq? How can these people even sleep at night? https://www.globalresearch.ca/saudi-led-air-strikes-destroyed-nearly-400-hospitals-yemen/5679511

And how can we Americans continue to let them?

To quote Dwight D. Eisenhower, “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.” Let’s do whatever we can to stop our leaders from continuing to trudge down their current sad, immoral and decadent path to a beautiful future for them — at the price of a living Hell for the rest of us.

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Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you’re at it, please buy my books. https://www.amazon.com/Jane-Stillwater/e/B00IW6O1RM

How many times have you been told straight-up lies to your face? Been told them so many times that you actually start to believe them? “Yes, Santa Claus will bring you lots of presents down the chimney, kid. Now shut up and put out those damn cookies and milk.”

I had that very same experience a few days ago — right in front of the United Nations building in New York. I saw a small group of people standing in front of the iconic UN building and waving a huge Syrian flag. “Those are my kind of people!” I thought. Having been to Syria and having kept up with all the lies we’ve been fed about their president being a bad guy, I was delighted to see protestors who were actually and finally bringing Truth to Power. http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2014/06/not-another-article-on-syria-well-yeah.html

Boy was I wrong!

Those people were paid protestors, hired by Lord-Knows-Who to spread lies about Syria’s President Assad. “Assad is a baby-killer!” They screamed. Er, no. Americans are the ones who have been murdering babies-for-oil in Syria since 2011, and in the whole Middle East for decades as well.

“But Assad is a hero in Syria!” I told them. “They love him there — because Assad has kept Syria from becoming another Libya.” But the protestors just shoved an obviously-Photo-Shopped leaflet in my hand and that was that. How can I even begin to fight propaganda like that? I mean — seriously? PhotoShop? Me? I can barely figure out how to turn off and on my computer let alone turn out professional-quality stuff like that. This was CIA-quality stuff!

Sadly, I just shook my head and went back into the UN gift shop. What else could I do?

I know! I’ll go over to the Syrian ambassador’s office and try to cheer him up! Good idea — except the ambassador wasn’t home. But I did talk to one of his aides. “I’m so sorry that Syria has to go through all this,” I told him, “just because nobody here believes that this whole tragedy is simply a result of American corporations being greedy for yet more oil.” Yet again. Remember when they lied like a rug to us about Iraq?
http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2014/06/press-release-un-blocks-syrian.html

And remember when Trump ordered the bombing of Damascus in retaliation to the Douma chemical attack, supposedly ordered by Assad? Well, it turns out that America’s “rebels” (aka al Qaeda) were the ones responsible, not Syria. “I apologize on behalf of my country,” I told the aide. https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/douma-syria-opcw-chemical-weapons-chlorine-gas-video-conspiracy-theory-russia-a8927116.html

By this time I had tears in my eyes at the thought of all those dead Syrian babies — murdered by us, not them. And the aide almost had tears in his eyes too. But what could we do? For eight long bloody years now, Syria’s ambassador has gotten up in front of United Nations delegates regularly and begged them to stop America, ISIS, Turkey, the Zionists and the Saudis from destroying his country — looking like poor Haile Selassie back in 1936, futilely begging the League of Nations for help that would never come. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyX2kXeFUlo

I guess that all I can do now is to just to keep on keeping on — keep on refusing to eat all the lies we are constantly being fed. A buffet of lies. A smorgasbord of lies. A bistro full of lies. A lie-filled comida. And to stop digesting all those other multi-lingual lies we are constantly being served up by our global corporate minders like they were milk and cookies. Sigh.

Who knew that America’s Red States would stay so doggedly attached to their jankity old Jim Crow laws? “Nothing to see here, folks. Time to move on.” But apparently that’s never gonna happen. That sort of retro mentality below the Mason-Dixon line should have ended for good after the Great Migration left much of the South without skilled labor and the freedom struggles of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement gave Blacks in the Deep South the courage to stand up for their own rights, right? “No more Jim Crow for us!” they cried. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/190696/the-warmth-of-other-suns-by-isabel-wilkerson/9780679763888/

But apparently Jim Crow isn’t dead in the Ol’ South quite yet.

Apparently Southern radicals just couldn’t bear to leave it like that. “What would Jesus do? He’d look around for another vulnerable group to oppress!” their pastors shouted heretically from the pulpit. And Southern Man, bless his heart, became so bereft of people to look down his nose at that he started searching for yet another defenseless group of victims to feel superior to, stereotype and abuse. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/alabama-abortion-ban-disaster-for-republicans.html

It used to be Black people at the very bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder south of the Mason-Dixon line — but now the new Untouchables in the Cotton Belt are…wait for it…women!

And so now another Great Migration has also begun in the American South. Southern Belles by the hundreds are currently packing up their hoop skirts and contraceptives and moving up to the Blue States.

Pretty soon the new Alabama will become like the new China — resembling those parts of the Flowery Kingdom today where the ratio of men to women is 100 to one, and Chinese wannabee grooms are being forced to buy brides from Thailand, Myanmar and Pakistan. What? Southern men are soon going to be forced to import their brides from Honduras?

Pretty soon we are going to discover that Southern female asylum-seekers have absolutely flooded New York and Chicago. And California will once again become known as a Sanctuary State — but this time for giving refuge to fleeing Steel Magnolias. And Alabama will have to beg President Trump to build them a Wall too — just to keep their Crimson-Tide ladies from rolling away.

On the night of September 7, 1940, the Nazi Luftwaffe began a inhumanly murderous bombing blitz on the helpless city of London. For the next eight terror-filled months, death from the skies continued to rain down on heroic British citizens every single night, night after horrific night — and yet the plucky British still managed to keep a stiff upper lip and even go on about their business during daylight hours, each one knowing full well that each day could be their very last.

Archibald Macleish wrote a tribute to Edward R. Murrow, the gutsy American reporter who broadcasted from London to America, on the radio night after night, making the horrors of what the Nazis were doing to London vividly known to the American people. “You have destroyed the superstition that what is done beyond 3000 miles of water is not really done at all,” wrote Macleish. https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062436665/the-american-agent/

Night after night, month after month, Winston Churchill and the people of London endured Hitler’s terrible and deadly bombing raids. Americans held their breath. Would the valiant and defenseless Londoners even survive yet another night of these brutal attacks?

But how come the citizens of London during Hitler’s horrific blitz of monstrous destruction are such gritty and stoic heroes — and yet the citizens of Yemen and Gaza are not?

And then there came Pearl Harbor — and Americans suddenly knew first-hand what such horrors were actually like. On just one sunny Sunday morning in lovely Hawaii, 2403 Americans were murdered in cold blood by yet another evil blitzkrieg from the skies. Americans went into paroxysms of indignation and and outrage and grief. “Stop this horror!” they cried.

And yet heroic Yemeni have endured this very same type of nightmare blitzkrieg from the Saudis night after night for years now. And the citizens of Gaza have too. Yet where are America’s modern-day Edward R. Murrows? And where is America’s indignation and outrage and grief for this heinous slaughter? “Oh. Them. They are only Muslims. They can’t be heroes, They can’t feel pain. They don’t count.” And the lethal and cruel bombs that are dropped on Yemen and Gaza each horrific night are not being manufactured and supplied by Tojo or Hitler — but by the good old USA. https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/05/israel-again-bombs-gaza-but-is-it-in-response.html

That’s just evil, cold-hearted and mean.

And anyone who has ever survived the ruthless attacks on London and Pearl Harbor will have to agree that the people of Yemen and Gaza are being heroic as well — to endure the exact same torture night after night. To quote Edward R. Murrow himself, “How long these people will stand up to this sort of thing I don’t know, but tonight they’re magnificent.” https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/260953-2019-05-09-what-i-saw-in-gaza-changed-me-forever.htm

The very same thing can be said about the heroic men, women and children of Gaza and Yemen. And we Americans? The same thing can be said about us that was said about Hitler and Tojo. Do we really want to be linked with these two evil and greedy colonialist monsters in future history books as well? If not, then perhaps it’s time to pull the plug on our own evil Luftwaffe and our own greedy blitzkrieg on defenseless civilians “beyond 3000 miles away”. https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/05/14/gabbard-says-shed-drop-all-charges-against-assange-and-snowden/

PS: John Bolton is currently acting like he seriously wants to become the next Hermann Goering. Let us just hope that Philadelphia and Charleston don’t also become the next Dresden too — or the next Hiroshima.
__________________________________________

Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you’re at it, please buy my books. https://www.amazon.com/Jane-Stillwater/e/B00IW6O1RM

Many years ago I visited Zacatecas, an old colonial silver-mining town in northern Mexico with lots of historic architecture and stuff. And a strange thing happened to me back in Zacatecas as well. I met a young Mexican man named Vicente who belonged to some unpronounceable Native American tribe up near the US-Mexico border.

I had forgotten all about Vicente and my experiences in Zacatecas until the other day when I found an old wooden box containing my photos from back then. Here is the story of my encounters with Vicente. How could I possibly have forgotten about this!

Vicente was selling small bead-work craft items on the street in front of my guest house when I met him. “I’m on my way to the Feria de San Marcos in Aguascalientes,” he said, “to sell toad venom gathered by mis amigos in the northern desert.” Yuck! “Would you like to try some? It will change your world.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmwfylNDOlU

Change my world? Who could possibly resist such an offer. “Sure.”

You gotta remember that I was a young beatnik back then, it was a different time, LSD was still legal in the United States, there were no iPhones to distract folks with cat videos — and I was pretty much up for anything that might make me spiritual and wise. I inhaled the venom. I passed out cold. I saw visions. I was floating. I became an angel, a goddess. I saw colors and rainbows and stars. I loved this stuff!

I found out later that toad venom is called the “God Molecule” — clearly for a good reason.
https://michaelpollan.com/books/how-to-change-your-mind/

That whole experience took about 45 minutes and then I was once again suddenly back on planet Earth — and equipped with the firm realization that my life was going in the right direction, that things were lovely and that I needed to keep up working for Peace on Earth. “Let’s do this again!”

Then there was the second time that I took toad venom. A totally different story altogether. It was like a dress rehearsal for Death. The best way to explain this experience was through the acronym P.A.N.D.A.

First I was physically Paralyzed. Couldn’t move a muscle. Just laid there. My brain was fully engaged but nothing else worked.

Second, I was given the clear realization that I was all Alone in this world. Period. No backup. No friendly friends, no family — just me.

Third, it became crystal-clear that I had No future. “Not even any?” I asked the toad. Nope. None.

Fourth, I was visited by Death itself. And death was a good thing, absolutely nothing to be afraid of. And on the other side of Death there lay a beautiful magical kingdom, Heaven, the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the Pure Land. “Wow!”

And, last, I found myself floating up through the stars, At one with the universe.

A half-hour later, I was back on this planet — and much, much, much wiser. “But Vicente,” I asked. “Isn’t all this exactly what a toad might want me to think — right before it eats me? Paralyzed, alone, with no future, not afraid of Death?”

Vicente just laughed and thought I was cute. He went back on the road to the fair and I went back to the Lower East Side where I was living at the time — feeling both more spiritual and a little bit wiser.

Maybe it’s time that we also gave our current government leaders in Washington some toad venom as well. It could either make them more spiritual and wiser — or else toads might come and eat them up too. P.A.N.D.A. But this would be a fate they totally deserve for being so ugly, greedy and evil — for starting all those endless and stupid “wars” for fun and profit, lying about almost everything and stealing food out of our babies’ mouths. Yep, let’s do it. The God Molecule don’t like ugly!

PS: Things have changed a lot since rmy trip to Zacatecas. No one in America today seems to be even the slightest bit interested in becoming either more spiritual or wiser. And for those of us who do try our best to become more like Christ or Buddha? We have no media megaphone at all — and in fact the screws on us are getting tighter and tighter. All too many of us are ending up in jail just for speaking the truth.

I just heard a talk by an author who, in desperation, had to turn to comic books and graphic novels to get his point across to Americans — that we are being used and abused by the non-spiritual and definitely un-wise dolts in DC who are currently at the top of their wicked pyramid scheme to steal our country’s wealth. The other author on the platform talked about weaving her heroine’s fight against disaster capitalism into her romance novels. Harlequin Romances goes rogue? Apparently so.

Perhaps they should also start making wiser and more spiritual cat videos too!
__________________________________________

Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you’re at it, please buy my books. https://www.amazon.com/Jane-Stillwater/e/B00IW6O1RM

Just like we’ve had no new major political assassinations since MLK involuntarily bought the farm in 1968, there’s been no new 9-11 attacks in America since 2001 either. Do you ever ask yourself why? It’s because there’s really no need for bad guys to actually murder good guys in order to create chaos in America any more. Terrorism and assassinations used to create chaos back in the day but now bad guys can simply poison good guys’ lamb chops, plant drugs or call-girls in their hotel suites or help them jump out a window. Gets the job done — with no inconvenient fact-finding commissions involved or citizen-sleuths always screaming “fraud”.

Nowadays bad guys can just simply ruin good guys’ reputations — and it’s far more effective. Just look at Julian Assange. Or the infamous “Dean Scream”. Or Bernie Sanders being called that dread word “Socialist”. The bad guys falsely claim that AOC is nuts and that Omar sympathizes with terrorists. Character assassination? Gets the job done.

And on the level of foreign policy? Same rules apply. Character assassination gets the job done here as well. Just look at the ongoing media crucifixion of Russia — rabidly accused of crimes that the Zionists and Saudis have committed daily for decades (and still do). And how about all those horrible things the media is saying about Syria, Cuba and Venezuela? None of them true. Watching the news today is like watching a freaking telenovela! https://israelpalestinenews.org/julian-assange-exposed-the-crimes-of-powerful-actors-including-israel/

Yep, the powers-that-be clearly no longer need to set off “terrorist” bombs or assassinate progressives these days. When they really want to get America’s knickers in a twist, blowing up the Twin Towers has totally become old-school. To create chaos in America today, all the powers-that-be have to do is, er, create chaos. http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

Encouraging racial bigotry, kidnapping children at the border, fomenting riots over abortion, closing down the government, yelling “Second Amendment Rights” in a crowded theater — any of that shite. And then, BOOM! America is suddenly in chaos — and no tall buildings were even hurt during the filming. Genius! Gotta hand it to them (whoever they are). https://www.sevenstories.com/books/4097-giants

These powers-that-be own something like 99% of the media, 99% of America’s wealth and 99% of our propaganda. And they use all this power to mislead, misdirect and misinform. Why do Americans put up with this craziness? Generalized chaos weakens each of us individually. We are no longer a community. It is our Kryptonite. The powers that be know this. “Divide and conquer.” Why the freak don’t we know it too.
pic.twitter.com/9i6ZrRPs1B

The answer? Let’s fight back. The very first step in “tidying up” America’s chaos? Let’s each of us take someone we think is definitely “The Other” out to lunch next week. A homeless guy. A redneck. A bankster, a cop, someone on food stamps, an undocumented alien, a Native, a Black person, an Asian, an oligarch, a Muslim or Christian or Jew, a homosexual, a woman. Whatever it is that you are not. And then listen to their story. And tell them yours too.

We are all Americans. We must all work to prevent the powers-that-be from creating even more chaos — both at home and abroad. In a supposedly-civilized country such as ours, is this really too big of an ask?

“Love your hat!” I said to the grey-bearded Hasidic rabbi next to me as we stood in front of the White House the other day. We were both preparing to march up New York Avenue to the DC Convention Center where members of the American Israel Public Affairs Action Committee (AIPAC) were happily doing brunch and getting ready to listen to their hero Bibi Netanyahu spew out his favorite brand of nationalism and hate. https://mondoweiss.net/2019/04/why-glad-netanyahu/

“My father died in a Nazi concentration camp,” said the old rabbi, “and we Jews all vowed ‘never again’. And yet here we are, 75 years later, and now it is Zionists instead of Nazis who are running concentration camps.” The old rabbi sighed. “But what is even worse,” he continued, ” is that when people on the street see me in my traditional Hasidic garments, they frown and avoid me because they think that I myself support Zionist atrocities — but the Zionists, the real troublemakers, are all wearing suits and trying to fit in. And the irony of this is that these Zionists don’t even represent Judaism at all.”

Netanyahu wears thousand-dollar designer suits while Gaza children wear rags. Netanyahu supports the Saudis, who are slowly turning Yemen into Auschwitz. Netanyahu supports American fascism which in turn supports all kinds of murder both at home and abroad. Ten Commandments? The Torah? Mere propaganda tools. https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-admits-supplying-saudis-with-white-phosphorus-munitions/220553/

And America’s so-called Christians aren’t doing much better at representing Jesus either. “Sanctuary Cities.” OMG, that’s what America’s current shamelessly un-Christian regime is now calling all those miserable concentration camps for kidnapped babies which now fester away at our southern border like open sores. That’s just like, back in the day, when Nazis declared that Theresienstadt, their fake “Model Town” concentration camp for Jewish artists and musicians, was a “cultural center” — just before sending these same talented Jews off to the ovens, playing their violins as they went. https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/donald-trump-civil-war-in-yemen-libya-forgotten-wars/

Recently I joined some Palestinian genocide survivors, some actually-moral Americans and a bunch of Hasidic Jews as we met near the White House, marched up New York Avenue and picketed AIPAC’s annual convention — filled with Zionists who have been influencing our federal elections ever since before Eisenhower and Johnson.

And please don’t try to accuse me of anti-Semitism either. As the old rabbi pointed out, real Jews try to obey the Ten Commandments. Real Jews try to seek justice. And real Jews don’t run concentration camps like Gaza — just like real Christians don’t run concentration camps like the one in Tomillo, Texas.

“Over the centuries,” the Hasidic rabbi said, ” Anti-Semitism has caused much bloodshed and right-thinking people recognize how tragic it is. But the term is often used incorrectly today — abused to promote people’s agendas. Zionism isn’t Judaism. It’s nationalism.” And the absolutely worst sort of nationalism too. Colonialism, power grabs, brutality, really bad stuff. Not religious at all. https://mondoweiss.net/2019/04/approached-resolution-settlements/

“Encouraging the conflation of Zionism with Judaism also encourages hatred toward the innocent — and the result is that real Jews end up being the target of anger over actions perpetrated by Zionists, supposedly in the name of Jews.”  That’s so unjust.  For 75 years now, Zionists have been violently stirring up hatred for Palestinian Christians and Muslims.  The result?  Zionist “settlers” feel free to murder and plunder at will.  And after 75 years of Zionists trumpeting hate speech, the whole Middle East is now in flames — and domestic terrorists also run wild in the United States.  The hate that Zionists give screws up all of us.

“And this is why we are marching here today.” Go, you! Justice is always a good thing.

“But, Jane, why are you being so especially hard on the Zionists,” you might ask. No. It’s not just them that I’m being hard on. I also resent all those un-Christians in Europe and America who pretend to worship Jesus and yet murder and torture others in Jesus’ name. Or those un-Muslim Saudis who finance ISIS and fire-bomb babies in Yemen. Mohammad (PBUH) would never approve of that. So why should I give un-Jews a pass just because they brutally colonized Jerusalem? Obviously I don’t.

How to fix this problem? The problem of false propaganda turning religions into tools to gain power and greed? Easy. Demagogues and power-hungry Calf-worshiping blasphemers need to reassess both their methods and their goals. When a group’s goal is to dominate the world and make everyone else suffer, they really do need to stop calling themselves “religious”. https://www.salon.com/2019/04/21/reporter-sharmine-narwani-on-the-secret-history-of-americas-defeat-in-syria/

The real goal of truly religious people is to be kind, loving, compassionate and helpful. But Zionists and un-Jews, just like their counterparts the un-Christians and un-Muslims, simply aren’t any fun.

To quote Gloria Steinem, “Whenever one person stands up and says: ‘Wait a minute. This is wrong,’ it helps other people do the same.” I stood up with the Hasidic Jews and the Palestinians on that march — and had fun doing it too. Plus it’s gonna be really hard to accuse these Hasidic Jews, marching in full regalia down New York Avenue, of being anti-Semitic or even self-hating — but I imagine that Netanyahu and AIPAC will find some way to do it anyway. But the friendly grey-bearded Hasidic rabbi I marched next to sure didn’t look like an anti-Semitic self-hating Jew to me.

PS: “Why do religions even have such strong laws to support ethics?” asks author Barbara Ehrenreich. “Because humans need some sort of ethics touchstone in order to survive.” If only bullies, corporate shills, armed forces and corrupt regimes rule the world, then the human race is doomed. Hence guidelines like the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule are necessary — unless of course you relish the idea of becoming toast. Which I don’t. http://barbaraehrenreich.com/living-with-a-wild-god/

So. If our leaders are liars, cheats, torturers and bullies, then it’s time for us all to stand up and have our objections counted — or else go down with their sinking ship.

How the freak did I end up totally lost and stranded in the sub-sub-basement of the Rayburn office building in Washington DC last week? Long story. I was actually trying to find the offices of Congressional Representatives Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar so I could shake their hands and tell them how wonderful they were — but got seriously distracted by the temptation of gluten-free pizza on offer in the congressional cafeteria instead. Unlimited toppings! Yummers!

While waiting for my order to finish baking, I asked several pizza-eating Congressional aides for directions regarding how to get to AOC’s and Omar’s offices, and one of them told me to take an elevator down to the connecting tunnels that run beneath the Rayburn, Cannon and Longworth buildings — but I must have pushed the wrong button because I ended up lost in some dark spooky narrow sub-sub-basement hallway littered with unwanted office furniture and black garbage bags. But that was okay because I still had my pizza-to-go so I wouldn’t starve before someone found me months later.

Seeing that I was buried in the bowels of Congress already, it seemed appropriate to start contemplating the actual underground nature of our government and its tenancy to bury inconvenient facts and hide corruption (as well as unwanted furniture) out of sight of us taxpayers — stuff like how lobbyists run Congress, how the Pentagon “misplaced” 21 trillion bucks but wasn’t even investigated and how Zionists and Saudis are the real powers behind the throne in America these days. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/04/18/nearly-100000-pentagon-whistleblower-complaints-have-been-silenced

But then a middle-aged bureaucrat in a grey flannel suit wandered by and showed me the light — down four corridors, up three staircases, through two doors marked “employees only” and onto an elevator going to the second floor of Longworth. Or was it Cannon?

In any case, I found Rep. Omar’s office first and shook her aide’s hand, shook her other aide’s hand and also signed the guestbook. “Keep up the good work!” Top government officials who happily commit genocide for fun and profit need to get a reality check every so often, but that clearly hasn’t happened in DC since before the Korean and Vietnam “wars,” back in the dark ages when America really was truly “great” — at mass murder. But Omar is definitely calling their bluff now. No wonder the powers-that-be hate her.  https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/rep-tulsi-gabbard-eviscerates-trump-saudi-arabia-s-bitch-n939011

Then I visited AOC’s office too. What a delight! One entire wall in front of her office was covered with post-it notes saying, “We love you, AOC!” or words to that effect. Lots of stars and hearts too. And inside her office was another entire wall with hundreds of post-it notes saying basically the same thing.

“Can I sign a post-it note too?” I asked.

“Sorry, we’ve run out.” So I signed the guest book instead. Yay! I also love Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez! We need far more ex-waitresses like her in Congress. And also a lot of former bus-drivers and teachers and farmers and all other kinds of salt-of-the-earth types as well.

Then, feeling a bit like that guy in Dante’s Inferno, I descended back down into the Congressional tunnels and trudged off to the Library of Congress to explore its amazing resources (and restrooms). Gotta love touring Washington DC.

“You absolutely must go visit Frederick Douglass’s house while you’re here,” said the friend I was staying with in Washington DC. “They’ve turned it into a museum. It’s totally amazing.” http://www.frederick-douglass-heritage.org/cedar-hill-house/

“Define amazing,” I replied. “Amazing like a baby’s first steps? Amazing like America’s brutal and un-Christian foreign policy? Or amazing like Captain Marvel?”

“More like Captain Marvel,” replied my friend Wow! Sign me up!

So I took the Metro to Anacosta, trudged through yet another of Washington’s rapidly-gentrifying ghettos and finally found Frederick Douglass’s old-fashioned home perched high on a hill overlooking DC. “Douglass was born a slave,” said our tour guide. “His mother had been sold down-river. He was whipped and beaten and starved as a child; overburdened and overworked. His back was covered with deep scars from the lashes. He stole food scraps from the Big House’s garbage just to stay alive, was given one gunny-sack a year for clothing. No one taught him to read.” Huddled naked and alone.

And yet this poor abused and tortured slave child grew up to be one of the finest orators and statesmen in America. Sounds like a Marvel to me!

I looked at Douglass’s original piano, his original writing desk, his parlor and his bedroom. I saw the exact spot where he suddenly collapsed of a heart attack and died at age 74. (Good grief how I hate it when people use that phony term “passed away” like somehow death doesn’t really exist if you only stop using the “D’ word. But everybody dies. Stop trying to sugar-coat it. When I die, I wanna be D.E.A.D. — not just “passed”)

Douglass died an honorable death after living an honorable life. “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong,” he said.

Our little tour group tromped up Douglass’s back stairs and then down his front ones. “How the freak did he do it?” I asked our guide with tears in my eyes. “How did he even survive being a slave — let alone become an advisor to presidents, an ambassador to Haiti and one of the greatest men of the 19th Century?” The guy must really have possessed superpowers.

And Douglass was also the first Freedom Rider. For over 60 years he constantly fought against Jim Crow laws in the brutally-segregated and un-Christian South. “Dozens of times he would buy first-class tickets on railroads, attempt to take his seat and then be cruelly beaten, spit upon, handcuffed and/or jailed every single time.” Can Captain Marvel do that?

On the very day that he died, America’s real Captain Marvel gave a young Black man some very good advice. “Wherever you see injustice happening, then agitate. Agitate. Agitate.” And, boy howdy, do we have a hecka lot of injustice in America right now too. And Douglass’s most prescient advice to those of us today who also love justice? “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”. It’s time that we too demand justice as well. Jesus did it. Nathan Hale did it. Crazy Horse did it. Douglass did it. Julian Assange did it. A.O.C. does it. We can too. “Agitate. Agitate. Agitate.” https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/55991-rsn-the-julian-assange-case-revealing-war-crimes-is-not-a-crime

Right now America desperately needs heroic men and women who will stand up for justice like Douglass did in the past. We need them now more than ever. Will another Captain Marvel like our own Frederick Douglass please stand up? Yes, I am talking about you — and, yes, I am even talking about me. https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Eleven-year-old-ordered-deported-without-her-13760566.php

“You absolutely must go see Frederick Douglass’s house while you’re here,” said a friend I was staying with in Washington DC recently. “They’ve turned it into a museum. It’s totally amazing.” http://www.frederick-douglass-heritage.org/cedar-hill-house/

“Define amazing,” I replied. “Amazing like a baby’s first steps? Amazing like America’s brutal and un-Christian foreign policy? Or amazing like Captain Marvel?”

“More like Captain Marvel,” replied my friend Wow! Sign me up!

So I took the Metro to the Anacosta station, trudged through yet another of Washington’s rapidly-gentrifying ghettos and finally found Frederick Douglass’s old-fashioned home perched high up on a hill overlooking DC. “Douglass was born a slave,” said our tour guide. “His mother had been sold down-river. He was whipped and beaten and starved; overburdened and overworked. His back was covered with deep scars from the lashes. He stole food scraps from the Big House’s garbage just to stay alive, was given one gunny-sack a year for clothing. No one taught him to read.” Huddled naked and alone.

And yet this poor abused and tortured slave child grew up to be one of the finest orators and statesmen in America. Sounds like a Marvel to me!

I looked at Douglass’s original piano, his original writing desk, his parlor and his bedroom. I saw the exact spot where he suddenly collapsed of a heart attack and died at age 74. (Good grief how I hate it when people use that phony term “passed away” like somehow death doesn’t really exist if you only stop using the “D’ word. But everybody dies. Stop trying to sugar-coat it. When I die, I wanna be D.E.A.D. — not just “passed”)

Douglass died an honorable death after living an honorable life. “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong,” he said.

Our little tour group tromped up Douglass’s back stairs and back down his front ones. “How the freak did he do it?” I asked our guide with tears in my eyes. “How did he even survive being a slave — let alone become an advisor to presidents, an ambassador to Haiti and one of the greatest men of the 19th Century?” The guy must really have possessed superpowers.

And Douglass was also the first Freedom Rider. For over 60 years he constantly fought against Jim Crow laws in the brutally-segregated and un-Christian South. “Dozens of times he would buy first-class tickets on railroads, attempt to take his seat and then be cruelly beaten, spit upon, handcuffed and/or jailed every single time.” Can Captain Marvel do that?

On the very day that he died, America’s real Captain Marvel gave a young Black man some very good advice. “Wherever you see injustice happening, then agitate. Agitate. Agitate.” And, boy howdy, do we have a hecka lot of injustice in America right now too. And Douglass’s most prescient advice to those of us today who also love justice? “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”. It’s time that we too demand justice as well. Jesus did it. Nathan Hale did it. Crazy Horse did it. Douglass did it. Julian Assange did it. A.O.C. does it. We can too. “Agitate. Agitate. Agitate.” https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/55991-rsn-the-julian-assange-case-revealing-war-crimes-is-not-a-crime

Right now America desperately needs heroic men and women who will stand up for justice like Douglass did.  We need them now more than ever.  Will another Captain Marvel like our own Frederick Douglass please stand up?  Yes, I am talking about you — and, yes, I am even talking about me.  https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Eleven-year-old-ordered-deported-without-her-13760566.php