BartBlog

On Sunday, December 14, 2014, we learned that members of the clergy in the Berkeley area were holding a Ferguson protest march. We went to cover the event and got a good shot. It showed a local clergyman holding a “Black Lives Matters” and due to the low angle it also included the Church belfry tower. We asked the minister his name and he declined to say and also added he did not think it would be a good photo to use. (Has he ever been a judge in the Greater Los Angeles Press Photographers’ monthly clip contest? We have.) We immediately had the thought that he might not want his congregation to know that he had participated in a protest to protect the rights of a wounded suspect to make a U-turn and charge at a pursuing police officer. We responded: “I can understand you wanting to disassociate yourself from this . . . (fill in the blank)______ .” You don’t have to ask twice to get the World’s Laziest Journalist to do less work. Unless you read the Revolution News, you won’t see any original material online about that particular protest in Berkeley.

On Saturday, the local NAACP leaders held a protest march in Oakland because they felt that the leadership of the Ferguson protests was being co-opted by white people in the Black Block movement, the anarchists and perhaps even the communists.

Also on Saturday a stunt at the University of California at Berkeley grabbed headlines by displaying large images of lynch mob victims with the sign reading: “I can’t breathe!” It was reported on Sunday on KCBS news radio that it was an art project created by some artists with African-American heritage.

Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton have arrived to garner their share of face time on the network evening news shows.

The chief of police for the Richmond CA Police Department made the news (at least locally) by showing up to a Ferguson protest in uniform and holding a “Black Lives Matter” sign. The Richmond Police promptly reminded the chief it is against department policy to participate in a political event while in uniform.

On Monday, December 15, 2014, protesters chained themselves together in Oakland and blocked roadways and entrances to the Oakland Police Headquarters. According to KCBS news radio it took “several hours” for the police to use bolt cutters to separate the protesters and then to arrest them.

Monday was also the 75^th anniversary of the premiere of the movie “Gone with the Wind.”

Could the Oakland Police have worked slowly to help the protesters make their point . . . Or . . . could they have worked slowly as a way to increase the commuters’ frustration level and thereby generate more animosity which would be directed at the supporters of the protest against police violence?

One protester was quoted on KCBS as saying (paraphrasing here) that if people weren’t part of the protest then they were part of the problem and deserved to be late for work.

On Monday afternoon Oakland students from various local high schools held a protest at the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station in West Oakland and disrupted some people’s afternoon commute. They then walked to Lake Merritt for a candle light vigil. Did that cause even more disruption of the evening commute?

Apparently some protest strategists believe in a paraphrase of the old Vietnam era maxim: “When you got them by the traffic jam, their hearts and minds will follow.” . . . or not.

On Tuesday, December 16, 2014, the Berkeley City Council was scheduled to hold a meeting at the Lincoln school because they wanted to use the auditorium to accommodate a crowd that was expected to be much larger than usual. Citizens wanted to sound-off about police conduct during recent protests.

A rally was scheduled to precede the meeting. About 3 p.m. it a rain downpour started (cue the British cliché about tall cow/flat rock) and we reassessed the need to fact check by attending the city council meeting. We assumed that Rev. Whatzizname from Sunday would question the need to attend the city council meeting and immediately concurred. So we heard reports on Tuesday night on KCBS news radio that the rain may have suppressed attendance at the meeting but that some citizens were taking advantage of the chance to express their criticism of the recent use of teargas for crowd control.

According to what we heard on KCBS, Mayor Tom Bates promised that the complaints wouldn’t be ignored. The Berkeley City council moved to devote a meeting in January to the problem. The precise political term for this legislative move is called: “Kicking the can down the road.”

On the pop culture beat, it is interesting to note that with all the criticism of white police officers, we have not yet heard the word “honky” used once. (Is using that word a hate crime?) This week the word “culture” was named the word of the year. Some wags use the word Berkland to designate the Berkeley/Oakland border area.

Students at Berkeley went home for the Christmas Holiday break and by Thursday, December 18, 2014, KCBS was reporting that a protest march in Oakland featured about fifty protesters.

Japanese Company, SONY, changed the game for Americans by capitulating to terrorists’ demands and invalidating the sacrifices that Americans have made to accommodate the new Homeland Security era. According to one comment we heard, SONY will be refunded all their production costs by an insurance company, and thus prove that it was worth the new danger level Americans will have to adopt because of their greed.

We heard an outrageous rumor that the bookshop/gift store at the Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory was going to offer T-shirts showing portraits of Pretty Boy Floyd, Clyde Barrow, and John Dillinger and the words “White Lives Matter.”

Nationally a great amount of attention was focused on the announcement this week that diplomatic relations would be restored between the USA and Cuba.

One of the minor effects of this bit of news is that suddenly a visit to Hemingway’s home near Havana had vaulted to the top of our bucketlist.

Perhaps we could visit Key West for Hemingway Days and then get a chance to take a short flight and scratch visiting Finca Vega off the bucketlist.

Didn’t Pan Am get started with a route from Miami to Havana? Won’t there be a new opportunity for a small airline to provide that same service next year?

Didn’t the CIA’s staff at the station assigned to monitor Cuba and the Cuban exiles in Miami move to Saigon in the mid Sixties?

For our closing quote, we’ll note that Hunter S. Thompson wrote: “I’d like to get hold of some priests’ robes. . . . They might come in handy in Las Vegas. But there were no costume stores open, and we weren’t up to burglarizing a church.” (Roger that, HST!)

Now the disk jockey will play Lenny Bruce’s “the Berkeley Concert” in its entirety, Stan Freberg’s “Green Christmas,” and Nathalie Cardone’s version of “Haste Siempre, Comandante” (AKA the Che Guevara song). We have to go reread Norman Mailer’s “Algiers Motel Incident.” Have a “buy the ticket; take the ride” type week.

We are currently in a totally unique period in the history of the human race. Seven billion people inhabit the planet right now — and a good many of those are now on the move — bumping around our world like glittering particles in a snow globe, shaken not stirred.

Back in paleolithic times, humans migrated out of Africa to every habitable corner of the world, sure, and of course for many centuries after 1492 there were boatloads of Europeans migrating off to the New World — but this current worldwide migration is happening on steroids compared to what happened back then.

Now, instead of a few hundred Homo sapiens taking centuries to move from Point A to Point B or thousands of Europeans sailing off over a span of centuries, we now have hundreds of millions of human beings packing their bags and moving across oceans and continents within the span of mere decades — or even within a few days.

It used to be that people lived in small communities of around 150 inhabitants — and almost none of them traveled further than 20 miles from their homes in the course of their entire lives. But now you find massive and disruptive diasporas happening everywhere you look.

In Berkeley, California, for instance, I recently went to a neighborhood potluck dinner — and there were at least six different languages spoken there (not counting English) by people from all over the world.

Check this out:

The African diaspora: Not caused this time by a forced migration of slaves but by the forced migration of natural resources. For instance, hundreds of residents from other parts of Africa stream over the border into South Africa daily from even as far away as Congo and Sudan, looking for safety. What drives this huge diaspora? The looting of Africa’s diamonds and oil by huge corporations. http://business-humanrights.org/en/eritrean-refugees-file-claim-in-canada-against-nevsun-over-allegations-of-forced-labour-at-bisha-mine-eritrea

The Middle Eastern diaspora: These days, all of Europe is being flooded with people from Yemen, Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, etc., mainly as a result of wars being started in their home countries by the American military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about. http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/48451-syrians-will-rebuild-aleppo.html

The new Israeli diaspora: Thousands of Israelis are now ending up in America (and Germany, Ukraine and Russia of all places too), desperately escaping from their so-called “land without people for a people without land”. http://www.haaretz.com/mobile/1.625058?v=01A73EFCBF9193D32E259E93F5A7766F

These displaced Israelis left because they resented being victims of the old bait-and-switch con game. They thought they were going off to live in a small safe haven on the peaceful shores of the Mediterranean — only to discover that their new country had been taken over by uber-fanatic settlers, hard-core neo-nazi military extremists and Likud’s dream of establishing a Netanyahu Caliphate from the Euphrates to the Nile. “Not what I signed up for,” these refugees lament.

The Latin American diaspora: Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador? Whole populations are now on the move from there — thanks to Reagan’s wars on Central America, Clinton’s NAFTA and the Bush-Obama “war on drugs”. And America’s support for the cruel junta now in power in Honduras has imitated a sad and tragic latter-day Children’s Crusade. http://www.cispes.org/blog/salvadorans-commemorate-25th-anniversary-jesuit-massacre/

The Asian diaspora: As a result of decades of American wars on Asia. In California alone we now have Little Cambodia, Little Vietnam, Little Laos and Little Seoul. I rest my case.

The Japanese diaspora: Fukushima happened and now suddenly all of Japan has become radioactive and folks there are constantly looking for a safe way out.

The Tibetan diaspora: When 1,200,000 of your closest friends and neighbors have been slaughtered by roving bands of Chinese Communist gangs, who could possibly blame you for thinking it might be time to move on to a safer ‘hood. http://www.namsebangdzo.com/Lord_of_the_Dance_p/11185.htm

Then there’s the Iranian and Russian diasporas — but those ones have been slowly drying up to a trickle as Russians and Iranians suddenly begin to realize there is no longer any better place to go. http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/12/butchers-of-langley/

But one of the strangest international migrations these days is the migration of the members of ISIS. These blood-thirsty pirates are now deliberately migrating toward danger spots, not away from them. And in large numbers too. Why? Who the freak knows. Like horses that refuse to leave a burning barn? Or like psychopaths driven mad by being tortured and held in captivity for too long? Or, more than likely, like mercenaries being paid big bucks by America, Turkey and the Saudis to wreck havoc on places containing natural resources and oil. http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2014/10/question-for-isis-whered-you-get-all.html

“But why exactly are there suddenly so many diaspora start-ups happening in this new 21st century? Why suddenly now?” you might ask.

Two reasons.

The first reason is that no matter where you go on earth today, the “haves” are busy stripping the “have-nots” of their treasures as fast as humanly possible — and so the “have-nots” are simply following the trail of their stolen treasures back to the lands of the “haves”.

The second reason can be explained in just one three-letter word: W-A-R. Brutal, heartless and unnecessary war. Neo-colonial wars for profit. Murderous wars based on shameless greed or racism or power. And the American military-industrial complex is clearly responsible for most of these wars, either overtly or covertly. http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/cruz-stop-blaming-bush-things

People all over the world are now running away from American war planes, American weapons, American “boots on the ground” and American drones. And, most recently, American paramilitary police. Sucks to be a powerless weaponless peon these days, right? http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/12/gov-tortured-killed-innocent-people-specific-purpose-producing-false-propaganda.html

“But what’s your point, Jane?”

I have several points to make. First, that the whole world has been agitated and shaken up — and like ants in an ant colony, people are running every which-way to get away from all the threats. Second, that all of this forced migration is not good — not good for children or any other living thing. Third: That, sadly, we Americans will also have to pay the price for all this destabilization someday soon too. And, fourth, that Americans should stop bitching about “illegal aliens” coming here following their treasures. If the American military-industrial complex hadn’t shaken our snow-globe, there wouldn’t be such a huge immigration problem in the first place.

PS: And then there’s always the ongoing diaspora to California. Sure, a few people do go off to live in the Red States — but who the freak wants to live in Mississippi when they can be living in San Francisco! And who would ever want to live in the frozen northern states under ten feet of climate-change-caused snow when the electricity goes off?

PPS: Now let’s talk about happiness — what most of these global refugees are pursuing. Happiness is a good thing, right? And what makes us happy? Kittens, puppies, money, new cars? Sex and love? Organic vegetables and Vitamin D? Friends?

Or is it war that makes us happy? With the American military-industrial complex’s incredibly strong record of starting and maintaining wars, one would think that, if war truly made us happy, Americans today would be the happiest people on earth! But we are not.

No matter how many “positive psychology” motivational speakers we worship or anti-depressants we take — or “wars” we start, Americans are just not all that happy. http://barbaraehrenreich.com/website/brightsided.htm. Take for instance all those nation-wide protests against Wall Street and police brutality. If Americans were really all that happy, would they be marching in the streets — for no matter what reason? And why aren’t all our homeless children and unemployed former members of our formerly-great middle class wearing smiles on their faces either?

PPPS: Economist Thomas Piketty states that, “The value of human capital is much higher than any other form of capital.” If this is true, then why is the American military-industrial complex happily engaged in killing off our most valuable and important form of capital both at home and abroad? That just doesn’t make sense.

The Internet seems to be resisting the postings of protest photos, so we’ll go with one at at time

This car was in a strange place (in front of a broken window) when the sun came up Monday.

So “they” don’t want you to see photos of protests, eh?

Another photo (we hope)

Author’s note: I haven’t had much to be grateful for this past Thanksgiving because I spent that time recovering from an operation that involved re-breaking my arm, realigning the bones in my left hand and having nine pins, a bone graft and a titanium plate installed. Ouch! So now I’m all busy trying to make up for lost time and dreaming up things to be thankful for. Here are a couple of items I’ve come up with (besides my wonderful family of course).

To paraphrase that song by Kermit the Frog, “It’s not easy being old.” There just aren’t that many perks involved. Your teeth fall out. Your joints freeze up. Say goodbye to your sex life, no matter what they claim about Viagra. Plus no one ever invites you to parties any more and you can no longer Twerk.

However, having enough money to make yourself comfortable in your old age can surely help alleviate all those various aches and pains associated with old age — unless of course you are an elderly widow living in Chicago and have 100K or more in your savings account. Because if that is you, then getting old is really really gonna to suck eggs.

“But, Jane,” you might ask, “why is that?” Let me tell you.

You’ve heard of ambulance-chasing lawyers before, right? Well, in Chicago they also have rich-widow-chasing lawyers. These heartless scoundrels actually go out and scour through various tax and real estate records until they find clues to locating financially-solvent yet vulnerable senior citizens, preferably rich widows. And then they move in for the kill.

The first thing they do is have their target victims declared incompetent — which is not all that hard to do when you have Chicago’s probate courts helping you out. Then they get themselves appointed Guardian ad Litems for these vulnerable wealthy elders. And then the fun part begins.

“First they pop these poor souls into rest homes where they are warehoused, starved, fed tranquilizers and ignored,” said one family member whose mother had been victimized in Chicago. “Then they sell their victim’s home, empty her bank accounts and pocket the profits — calling all these ill-begotten gains their ‘fees’ for services rendered. And then, when the victim has no more money left, they then throw her unceremoniously out of the rest home and onto the cold streets of Chicago — that is, if she is still alive.”

But there is hope. Some relatives of the victims and other conscientious local attorneys are starting to fight back. For instance, Joanne Denison, an honest Chicago attorney with a conscience, stumbled onto this racket about three years ago by accident and tried to do something to stop these malfesiants. “So what did she do?” you might ask. Denison started a blog. That’s all she did. She started a blog to try to expose some of these worst practices and blow the whistle on said legal vultures.

According to Denison’s blog, “40% of all psychotropic drugs are sold to nursing homes as illegal chemical restraints, and no one ever seems to do anything about it, even though they are deadly dangerous to most elders and the FDA says they are contra-indicated or not recommended for those under 20 or over 60.”

“So what happened to attorney Denison as a result?” you might ask next. What do you think happened to her? This is Chicago — not Utopia. Her attorney’s license has just been suspended for three years. http://marygsykes.com/2014/11/22/three-years-yeah-i-am-proud-to-annouce-that-the-ardc-says-i-am-suspended-for-3-years/

Now we all know that Rush Limbaugh and Fox News can tell any lie that they want over public airwaves and/or on the internet and get away with it, right? But if you ever dare to tell the truth and expose corruption in Chicago, you had better watch out.

And if you are a wealthy widow in Chicago, you had better really watch out!

So during this week after Thanksgiving I’m gonna be super-grateful for a lot of things — and one of those things is going to be that I’m not a widow, am not wealthy and don’t live in Chicago!

“What else are you going to be grateful for?” might be your next question.

“That I don’t live in Ukraine or Syria or any other foreign country that the US or NATO or BIBI has its eyes on.” If there’s just one take-away that I’ve learned after enduring all this pain in my left arm, it’s that injuries to our bodies can really really hurt, really hurt a lot. And that a human body will probably hurt even a hecka lot more if you are hit by a NATO smart-bomb in Ukraine or if an American-made cruise missile lands on you in Gaza or if you get gang-raped by American-funded ISIS in Syria — and have no pain-killers or hospitals or doctors to help you out like I did.

Do I think that the rich widows of Chicago have it bad? Yeah. But this sad injustice is almost minimal compared to having the vultures of Wall Street and War Street eying your assets and trying to steal them by torturing, raping and blowing up yourself and your kids.

At least the rich widows of Chicago don’t have to worry about getting hit with NATO smart bombs or having their heads chopped off! http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/katrina-vanden-heuvel-rethinking-the-cost-of-western-intervention-in-ukraine/2014/11/25/b92f8496-741a-11e4-9c9f-a37e29e80cd5_story.html

PS: Not really sure why I’m worried about getting old. It’s probably not gonna happen to any of us anyway — at least not while the deep-state neo-cons who now control America, Israel and NATO are all so bound and determined to try to pick a fight with Russia, China and Iran (one that they truly can’t win). http://fortruss.blogspot.it/2014/11/grandmaster-putins-golden-trap.html.

And if all this current saber-rattling foolishness doesn’t kill us all off in a mass wave of war-induced grim reaping, then don’t forget that climate-change-run-a-muck will be sending us off to the happy hunting ground soon too. http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2014/08/watch-book-trailer-changes-everything-capitalism-vs-climate

Have the oligarchs of DC and NATO and BIBI totally lost their minds — or do they just have a death wish for peons like you and me? Either way, these malfesiants now hold all the power and the rest of us are all screwed. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/war-in-ukraine-a-result-of-misunderstandings-between-europe-and-russia-a-1004706.html

But here is the good news.

Perhaps facing WW III and/or the coming climate apocalypse might end up being a good thing. “But how?” Because now we’re all going to have an air-tight excuse to run down to the mall, max out our credit cards and buy all kinds of new gear to wear to the show. https://hughw.net/h2o/texas-water-well-level-movie.html How’s that for positive thinking!

And here’s another positive thought. Extinction of the entire human race will surely mean that we won’t have to worry about who is gonna pay for our funeral — because there will be no one left alive to attend it! Sorry, guys, but there won’t be any “handsome corpses” on display at the local funeral chapel any more. Rats. I was really looking forward to that.

PPS: I am so freaking bored from sitting around doing nothing while waiting for my arm to heal that I actually checked Thomas Piketty’s new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” out from the library. If I’m going to be bored, I might as well be really bored. http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/sep/21/-sp-thomas-piketty-bestseller-why

“The main driver of inequality today [which appears to be wanky pseudo-capitalism run amuck] threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values,” sez the dust jacket. Just one more reason why I won’t have to worry about paying for my own funeral — I won’t be able to afford it. And neither will you.

“But if you’re so bored, then why don’t you just go see the film ‘Interstellar’ instead,” suggested one of my kids. Good idea. Now I can go watch our planet die on the big screen instead of having to wait to watch it die in real life.

Currently Republicans have their knickers all in a twist with regard to illegal immigration from Mexico, right? Well, I have the answer to that one. Let’s just grant dual citizenship to Mexicans. Then Mexicans in this country will no longer be illegal! Problem solved.

“But, Jane,” you might say, “if we do that, America will become overwhelmed and we will lose control of our country.” Yeah. That indeed could happen. Just look what happened when we granted dual citizenship to Israelis. They took over America quick as a wink. You might have a point there.

In 1967, Israeli leaders unilaterally gave the order to attack and destroy the USS Liberty — and our American leaders went along with that http://consortiumnews.com/2014/11/12/behind-the-uss-liberty-cover-up/. At least Mexico has never attacked a US warship. There’s that in Mexico’s favor, right?

Almost no member of Congress and President of the United States has ever been elected in the last several decades without the backing of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Imagine if Mexicans had their own AMPAC! Yikes. http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/us-media-erase-israeli-state-and-settler-violence

Israel put pressure on America to make the decision to go to war with Iraq — and we Americans are still paying for that mistake. And let’s also take a look at the Project for a New American Century, America’s current guidebook on how to screw up the Middle East. At least half the people who wrote that damning document possessed dual citizenship with Israel. And who benefited from all its resulting endless and bloody wars? It wasn’t us Americans, no no no. http://socialistworker.org/2014/11/19/israel-tightens-the-noose

“But Jane, undocumented Mexicans are taking our jobs!” Yeah well. But dual-citizen Israelis are also taking our jobs too. And our tax money. And our weapons industry. And our government positions. And our real estate agents too. Re-Max is now advertizing the sale of condos in the Occupied West Bank. But if we gave dual-citizenship to Mexico too, then Re-Max could be selling condos in Occupied Juarez as well! I’d buy one. Would you? http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/republicans-accuse-obama-of-treating-immigrants-like-humans?intcid=mod-most-popular

“But what about terrorists?” you might ask next. You’re right again. That too could be a problem. But it is also coming to light already that dual-citizen Israelis have been supporting the ISIS terrorist organization behind our backs all along. And they still support ISIS. http://news.antiwar.com/2014/11/17/mossad-backed-jundallah-pledges-support-for-isil/

So if Mexicans also had dual citizenship, then their ISIS-like drug lords might come with that package-deal too, which would not be a good thing. But surely an occasional drug-lord beheading south of the border can’t be as bad as the daily beheadings by ISIS, which are sponsored by the dual citizens of Mossad. http://www.globalresearch.ca/israeli-military-support-to-syria-al-qaeda-terrorists-operating-out-of-the-golan-hights/5369619

And then there are all those mass graves that have been recently discovered in Mexico. According to an article in “The Nation” with the hilarious title of “This Mass Grave isn’t the Mass Grave you have been looking for,” journalist Greg Grandin states, “There were at least 26,000 disappearances and 83,000 homicides” in Mexico. http://www.thenation.com/blog/190721/mass-grave-isnt-mass-grave-you-have-been-looking

109,000 dead in Mexico? That’s a mere drop in the bucket in relation to population percentages when compared to the number of Palestinians that have been butchered and/or “ethnically cleansed” by Israelis in the past 60-odd years — almost 80% of all Palestinians. http://www.democracynow.org/2014/11/19/palestinians_always_live_in_fear_jerusalem.

Mexican drug lords are almost puny when compared with Israeli warlords — who really think big. http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/ref-nakba.html

2,133 Palestinians were murdered in Gaza just this past summer alone. 750,000 Palestinians were either murdered or driven off their land back in 1948. At least 33 known mass grave sites of dead Palestinians have been found and there many more mass grave sites that are as yet unknown. Along with the American Indian holocaust, the German/Polish/French Jewish holocaust, various African holocausts over the centuries and the Holocaust in Tibet, this Palestinian holocaust is one of the largest and most tragic in history (so far).

What has happened and is still happening in Palestine is very much like that nightmarish WW II ethnic cleansing of Germany, France and Poland. And, like that earlier tragic time also, we hardly ever hear anything about this ethnic cleansing in the media either except from a few alarmists like me. All we ever hear about here in America is when a few Palestinians struggle to fight back to protect their families and land — and then they are instantly labeled “terrorists”. How come Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and Tibetans in Lhasa weren’t labeled “terrorists” too.

And how come no one in America ever hears about the Israeli Caliphate or the Israeli State in the Levant (ISIL) — like we constantly do about its nightmarish ISIS blowback.

All in all, I think that giving dual citizenship to Mexicans is a great idea. Just look how well it turned out when we gave dual citizenship to Israelis!

I just got back from attending BoucherCon, an important annual convention for murder-mystery writers and readers. This year it was held in Long Beach, CA and I got to stay on the HMS Queen Mary. And it was awesome. And I came back with about 50 free books and met so many fabulous authors that it was like a dream. Time well spent. You shoulda been there.

“But why do you like murder mysteries so much,” you might ask. “Don’t you ever find all that blood and death to be depressing?” No, not really. In fact, murder-mysteries actually give me hope and inspiration.

When writing about political stuff like I do, it is always so very discouraging to stand by and watch helplessly as greedy, corrupt and/or sadistic politicians always seem to win every time. Take that last election for instance. The Repubs won bigtime in the Red States — but only because they committed shameless election fraud http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/27009-voter-purges-alter-us-political-map. And now our Senate is going to be ruled by a bunch of greedy blood-thirsty morons — and the Blue States are gonna once again be frog-marched down the garden path to Hooverville as an illegally-elected minority once again forces us to pay for unnecessary wars and to give our natural resources away tax-free to right-wing billionaires. Yuck.

For the next two grim years, it’s gonna be Jim Crow, Dixiecrats and the Confederate secession all over again in America — except that apparently no one is going to stand up and fight for American democracy this time. You can just bet that no court in the land is going to be brave enough throw that fraudulent election out. Bye-bye to the Republic for which we stand. “Move along please. No Washingtons or Lincolns left to see here.”

Yes, the 2014 election was good for the wingnuts in the Red States — but bad for America. Virtue had failed to triumph once again. http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2014/11/heres-special-guest-blog-about-rigged.html

And this is exactly why I love murder mysteries so much. At the end of every single crime-fiction book that I read, justice always triumphs. Justice always triumphs. Never the bad guys. Not like in politics.

However, what I really want to write about here isn’t the grubbiness of today’s politics but rather about the grand and stately HMS Queen Mary, where I was lucky enough to stay at while I was in Long Beach last week. The City of Long Beach has totally restored this amazing ship and turned it into a hotel.

Little-known fact: The Queen Mary is actually bigger than the Titanic.

Sleeping aboard the Queen Mary was like reliving history. It was awesome. I expected the ghost of Winston Churchill to show up right there in my stateroom at any moment. And I think that he actually did. Late one night, the cabin lights flickered spookily, my stateroom suddenly turned all chillingly cold and I could even smell a strange whiff of cigar smoke. Plus (and this actually happened) the fire alarm suddenly went off and everyone on my floor had to leave the ship at 2:00 am. Thanks a lot, Winston.

I loved being completely enveloped in history like that. And I would do it again in a heartbeat. There is so much that we can learn from the past and even sometimes actually experience it ourselves.

Maybe I should try to go sleep in the Lincoln bedroom next!

But there is also a whole bunch of history now being repeated these days that is actually stupid and dumb and dumber. As mentioned above for instance, the American Red States are currently trying their best to drag America down to their own selfish, racist and greedy level — in a complete replay of 1860.

But despite all this current propaganda crap about the good old days of the antebellum South being pushed on us now, there really was nothing sweet or glamorous about the Ole South back in the first half of the 19th century. It was a culture based on human misery. And now the Southern good ol’ boys in Washington are trying to palm their love of human misery off onto the rest of us once again. History repeats itself.

History is also repeating itself in other ways too. For instance, the HMS Queen Mary was built between World War I and World War II http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/10/27/1918-when-war-ended-though-others-would-follow It was then used to be a troop ship back in World War II. And now our so-called grand leaders in Washington appear to be trying everything within their power to get us into World War III as well http://robinwestenra.blogspot.com/2014/11/more-on-mh17.html. And to also reenact their beloved Cold War too. What a waste of time and money — bringing out the worst in whatever America has ever done, the very worst in all of our past. Uggghhh.

However. Nobody here in America seems to be willing to recreate the awesome 1776 era of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitutional Convention of 1787 — or even our most creative times either. The sweet little Hudson River school of painting comes immediately to mind. Make art, not war!

And speaking of art, Her Majesty’s Ship the Queen Mary is also a work of art too — with miles of wood paneling and a tea room and powerful engines and a Queen’s Salon that made my heart sing. But Americans just spent eleven trillion dollars on war. War never makes anyone’s heart sing.

PS: HMS Queen Mary also had cable TV — and I got to watch Fox News for the first time in years. And was amazed. Talk about your history! All the commercials on Fox News were geared toward people over sixty. Hemorrhoid creams, joint pains, reverse mortgages, constipation preventives, well-preserved older couples playing on beaches with their grandchildren, sex enhancers, wheelchairs. Fox News is definitely living in the past too.

PPS: I’m about to go in for surgery on my left wrist because the bone didn’t set properly the first time I broke it back in July of 2013 and it still hurts a lot. Let us please hope that this “pretty big procedure” is not going to be a repeat of the great bone-break of 2013! Ouch.

The issue of legalizing pot (marijuana) is a topic that we have avoided because “we don’t have a dog in that fight.” Hence we have not been monitoring that debate. The World’s Laziest Journalist News Organization doesn’t get very many news tips and so when a discussion about pot included the information that pot is a very effective (perhaps the best) way for people to cope with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after being in combat. Then, we realized that one particular American Political Party may be hypocritical about their support for veterans.

If one political party is very enthusiastic about sending America’s younger generation off to any and all wars on God’s green earth, but then oppose making a very effective means of treating PTSD available to veterans, then, perhaps, those hypocrites should be called out for exemplifying the “alligator mouth-hummingbird ass” attitude. They promise all sorts of support for retuning vets but hen when they get a look at the amount that will be due on the bill, they balk.

Conservatives seem to be traumatized by pot itself.

Back in the Sixties, as we recall, a NYC newsman was arrested on air during a TV news broadcast for holding a “roach” (i.e. marijuana cigarette) up as a visual aid for his report on the devil weed. We never did learn how that worked out for that particular journalist.

At first it seems that an alliance between combat veterans and war protesting hippies is a oxymoron concept but as we were reminded this week whilst re-reading Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test:” the first rule of the bus (page 70) is: “All of us are beginning to do our thing, and we’re going to keep doing it, right out front, and none of us are going to deny what other people are doing.”

What next? Will today’s music fans make Mrele Haggard’s “Me and Wounded Vets” the new hippie anthem?

Conservatives must be alarmed by the fact that a California ballot measure retroactively changed the status of pot (AKA cannabis sativa) smoking to an infraction and at the same time a similar change was ordered in New York City.

Yikes! The next thing you know the pot smoking hippies will try to levitate the Pentagon.

If this trend continues the gateway to the future will be found in the best selling books from the Sixties!

It’s just like Ken Kesey said (on page 78): “Now, you’re either on the bus or off the bus. If you’re on the bus, and you get left behind, then you’ll find it again. If you are off the bus in the first place – then it won’t make a damn.”

So you either want to help those with PTSD or you want to make pot a felony.

Why would any legislator who voted to send kids off to war, want to deny the Vets something that helps them cope with PTSD?

Whatever happened to San Francisco’s Sixties Folk Hero, Sgt. Sunshine?

Things are getting more and more convoluted. (I.e. “It’s weird, man!”) A Democratic Senator from Louisiana helped the Democrats prevent funding for building the XL Pipeline; now she is urging passing the bill so she can get re-elected.

If the solution for the PTSD problem is to permit the vets access to pot, it will be an example of über-irony. The soldiers who went away to war will become pot smoking hippies while the anti-war protesters become supporters of proper treatment for the wounded warriors.

The pot smoking vets will, essentially, be getting on the bus a bit late but on the bus none the less.

Doing the fact checking to authenticate the assertion that pot is a very effective means of assuaging the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder would take a lot of work and so the World’s Laziest Journalist will leave the “heavy lifting” journalism work to the pros of the mainstream media and since the conservative media owners are not likely to want to aggravate other staunch Republicans, that means the Vets will have to wait until something better comes along.

Meanwhile, the Republicans who were always urging passage of funding for the XL Pipeline will be glad to see that the Dems, who have been left behind on the issue, have found their way back onto the bus and, next week, will be welcomed to get onboard the Pipeline bus, just like in the Biblical parable of the Prodigal Son.

[Note from the photo editor: Folks who read the newspapers will be hard pressed to find stories reporting that marijuana is an effective way to treat PTSD. We selected a photo taken in Culver City to run with this column. These days, there isn’t much in a newspaper that the conservative owners don’t want you to know. Such is life.

Various publications have a quote of the day, some a quote of the week. Why don’t the people who publish the Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations have an annual “Quote of the Year” award? If they did, our candidate would be the lead sentence from Maureen Dowd’s column for September 20, 2014: “WHEN Willie Nelson invites you to get high with him on his bus, you go.”

Now the disk jockey will play Peter, Paul, and Mary’s song “Puff the Magic Dragon,” the Beatles “I am the Walrus,” and Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow.” We have to go see if there will be a new “smoke-in” event anytime soon. Have a “fa-a-a-r OUT!” type week.

This week I am going down to Long Beach, CA, in order to attend the world-renowned BoucherCon, a fabulous annual convention for mystery book writers and readers You just gotta love BoucherCon. http://www.bouchercon2014.com/

At last year’s convention in Albany, NY, I scored 50 free books — but still haven’t finished reading them yet. However, it’s always reassuring to know that I’ll probably never run out of murder-mystery books to read ever again — especially since I’m about to score yet another 50 free books at this Long Beach convention. http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2013/09/albany-ny-solving-mystery-of-public.html

But the biggest mystery of all these days seems to be “Who, exactly, is actually running the American government?” Well, here’s a big clue: “It ain’t you or me.” The fact that we ourselves definitely do not run America was clearly demonstrated once again in this last election cycle — when a huge majority of Americans either voted against their own best self-interests or didn’t even vote at all. http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/country-wrong-track-say-people-vote

Apparently we Americans can just barely manage to keep the kids dressed, the dog washed, the bathroom stocked with toilet paper, the mortgage paid, the 401K alive and our own lives up and running — let alone keep a democracy alive and well. It’s definitely not like 1776 around here right now.

But not to worry. I myself have already solved the mystery of who actually does run America while most Americans are all busy doing something else.

According to political analyst Peter Dale Scott, America is actually run by a select group of people that he calls the “American Deep State”. And these guys are really bad-ass. They even have their own internet system — and probably even their own FaceBook apps too. And of course they also have their own bunkers, billionaire supporters, lobbyists and election fixers as well — and Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House all take orders from them. That’s totally scary! Makes those “October Surprise” Ebola and ISIS scares look like a walk in the park. http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/10/05/the-hidden-government-group-linking-jfk-watergate-iran-contra-and-911/

So. Why do I think that Peter Dale Scott is right? There just has to be a shadow government here in America — because what else could possibly explain why America continuously and consistently acts so strongly against its own best interests? http://3chicspolitico.com/2014/11/09/canadians-on-midterm-elections-you-americans-have-no-idea-just-how-good-you-have-it-with-obama/

“But Jane,” you might ask, “just exactly who are these underworld shadowy cartoonish characters that you’ve just described — and exactly what are they up to?” Well, from all my recent sleuthing around, I’ve discovered that this uber-shadow government, whoever it is composed of, obviously has a soft spot in its heart for starting wars, ruining economies, and disrupting countries, regions and even whole continents whenever they possibly can. No American in his or her right mind would ever want to do that.

“But, Jane,” you might ask next, “how can you actually prove all this? Sounds rather paranoid and conspiracy-theory-ish to me.” Hey, I’m on this like Sherlock Holmes!

But even though I can’t exactly sneak into these guys’ bunkers or onto their yachts or secretly listen in on their phone conversations, I can still easily see all the footprints these hoodlums have left behind in the snow. “Means, motive and opportunity,” as Holmes would say. Just get out your magnifying glass and look at these clues:

Footprint # 1: China and Korea. Before we even knew what hit us after WWII, suddenly China had been torn up in rebellion against our corrupt man in Peking, Chaing Kai Shek. And then the whole Korean peninsula blew up. Was the loss of China and the destruction of Korea in the average American’s best interests? Totally not. So who had the motive, means and opportunity here? You tell me.

Footprint # 2: Vietnam. The whole result of that “war” was to destabilize all of Southeast Asia. Okay. You got China, Korea and Southeast Asia destabilized now. And did it benefit the average American to have Asia so broken and hateful against us? It did not. But who did it benefit?

Footprint # 3: Mexico, Central America and South America. Do Americans really benefit from having death squads and drug lords on the rampage down there? What do you think? I think not. All we got out of this deal was a whole bunch of undocumented refugees coming up here in search of their lost treasures. But then who does benefit? Those shadowy guys behind the curtain who sell arms and own banks? Yeah.

Footprint # 4: Yugoslavia. The American Deep State picked at Yugoslavia and picked at Yugoslavia until it too finally fell apart. Balkanization. How could that have possibly been good for America? It wasn’t. But who did benefit from its fall? Wall Street and War Street. Of course.

Footprint # 5: The Middle East. What a freaking mess! And who made this mess? It wasn’t the American people. We had no dog in this fight. But the American Deep State both did then and does now. Libya, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Israel? Means, motive and opportunity to make a real mess. And, yes, Israel is a hot mess too. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/so-why-is-there-such-an-explosion-of-violence-across-the-middle-east-9831970.html?printService=print

Footprint # 6: Africa. Africa has been fried, poached and eaten whole by the American Deep State too. From apartheid South Africa and the bloody attacks on democratic Angola to the Ebola and HIV disasters, blood diamonds, IMF loans with never-ending interest payments and rape in the Congo, Africa is now a hot mess. And who exactly benefited from this scramble for Africa? Not you and me — or our children or our dogs either.

Footprint # 7: Ukraine: You have no idea what a broken egg Ukraine has become recently as neo-Nazis kill innocent civilians right and left. Their theme song seems to be, “Party like it’s Serbia in 1995!” Plus a German company, Telefunken Racoms, is actually selling these Ukrainian neo-Nazis their weapons. “Party like it’s Leningrad in 1942!” http://cyber-berkut.net/traitors/0024.php

But have any of us average Americans actually benefited from all this world-wide chaos? No, no, no and no. So who did? The American Deep State.

Footprint # 8: America. That’s us. It should come as no surprise to anyone even semi-conscious right now that our economy has tanked, we’re at each others’ throats and Corporations are now People. The propaganda machine that the Deep State now runs here would make Hitler proud! Or happily match up with George Orwell’s prescient observation that “War is Peace.” And this is all part of a plan to make Americans as dazed and confused as, say, Africans and the folks in the Middle East are now. But who the freak benefits from all this? Definitely not us. http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/26813-the-9-billion-witness

So then your next question should be, “How can we stop this, put an end to the American Deep State and return to being a democracy?” How can you even try to stop a shadow? It’s hard. But we could start by regulating Wall Street, limiting weapons manufacturers’ profits, making sure that our election laws never let anyone anywhere for any reason contribute more than $200 to any election campaign, having fact-checkers sort out all those blatant lies in campaign broadcasts, and fiercely guarding against election violations. Oh, and also get rid of all those Deep State bunkers, yachts and private internet rat-lines that we American taxpayers are paying for now.

Or perhaps we could just run a PowerBall lottery for every available position in Congress, on the Supreme Court and in the White House. Surely any random lottery winner would do a better job of resisting the American Deep State than those sorry wimps that we now have kissing the DS’s booties and being their gollums.

But however we go about it, we have just got to stop the American Deep State from murdering our democracy — before it’s too late and the corpse of our American dream arrives DOA at the morgue.

PS: See you at BoucherCon! It would be a mystery to me why anyone would not want to attend that.

Remember back in the day when Jesus walked the earth and said, “Thou shalt not kill”? He said this because He was obviously aware of the bad juju set off by either killing your neighbors or in the hand-to-hand combat of war — actions that would, sooner or later, drag each individual killer’s soul down into the lower depths of Hell or PTSD, whichever came first.

But Jesus was Old School about His approach to killing people, assuming that people would only kill other people with their spears, arrows or bare hands. Jesus clearly hadn’t anticipated the implications and potentialities of modern mass murder. Gunpowder hadn’t even been invented yet — let alone drones and AK-47s and concentration camps and nuclear weapons. But, rest assured, Jesus would have also hated all this modern-day mass murder in places like Hiroshima and Iraq and Auschwitz and Gaza and Sandy Hook. http://www.globalresearch.ca/isis-the-sand-pirates-the-islamic-states-paramilitary-americas-21st-century-terror-privateers/5411427

But with the recent release of the latest United Nations report on climate change, there is now a whole new and different reason, aside from Jesus telling us not to, why we should not kill.

Killing is bad for the air.

Yes, war is the top polluter and primal cause of climate change that there is today. http://www.projectcensored.org/2-us-department-of-defense-is-the-worst-polluter-on-the-planet/

“In the dialogue around stopping climate change, too much emphasis is being put on ethical consumerism [such as not driving our cars, refraining from flying whenever possible and spare-the-air days],” said Katherine Ball of Tools for Action. “Does it really matter if we try to fly less if the US Air Force continues to burn one-fourth of the world’s jet fuel? We have to address the systemic causes of climate change: the most eco-friendly thing you can do is be anti-war.” http://warisacrime.org/content/carbon-bomb-blows-near-west-point

“But Jane,” some of you Baby Boomers and members of the Greatest Generation might say, “we ourselves don’t need to worry about climate change killing us off because, 50 or so years from now, we will already be dead anyway.” Hey that used to be true. But according to the new UN report, the entire human race could be toast before you even get a chance to order your casket. http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/largest-climate-change-march-history-unlikely-convince-idiots?src=mp

According to a recent article in Mother Jones, “Keeping global warming below the internationally agreed upon 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (above pre-industrial levels) is going to be hard. To keep warming below this limit, our emissions need to be slashed dramatically. But at current rates, we’ll pump enough greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to sail past that critical level within the next 20 to 30 years, according to the [UN] report.” http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/08/un-ipcc-climate-change-synthesis-report

The UN report also noted that greenhouse gas emissions have ramped up particularly quickly after 2000. Of course they have. That was the year that Bush and Cheney stole their first presidential election and took America to war. “Full-Spectrum Dominance” became our battle-cry right around that time. And now it’s even worse than that — as the American military-industrial complex has begun practically salivating over a new Cold War with Russia and China, one that it is hoping will become a Hot War very soon. http://cluborlov.blogspot.ru/2014/10/putin-to-western-elites-play-time-is.html

So even though some of us Baby Boomers should be serenely going off in a rest home within the next 20 years — and even if none of us currently live or will ever live in a war zone — America’s senior citizens are all still gonna be toes-up long before our natural sell-by date arrives if all this over-the-top war-mongering keeps up. http://www.globalresearch.ca/obamas-plan-for-a-no-fly-zone-over-northeastern-syria-isis-was-a-window-dressing-for-the-real-war-against-the-syrian-government/5406117

All-too-many wonderful things here at home have been mercilessly sacrificed (jobs, schools, infrastructure, morals, whatever) so that over 60% of our national wealth could go to cover the cost of blowing people up on the other side of the world. http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2014/09/26/fighting-isil-is-a-smokescreen-for-us-mobilization-against-syria-and-iran.html

Fine. Whatever.

But we also need to be aware that the result of allowing the American military-industrial complex to happily play with their war toys for the last 14 years has been a sharp rise in greenhouse emissions too. “War is not good for children and other living things.” And it’s also not good for avoiding radical climate change either. http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/10/kobani-turkey-and-the-perfect-storm/

The war on Afghanistan, the war on Libya, the war on Iraq, the war on Syria, the war on Gaza, the war on Ukraine? All these endless and needless military adventures may have cost millions of lives in far-away places that don’t really matter to the powers that be — but they probably have shortened our own lives here at home by ten or twenty years too. http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-preparing-for-very-violent-war-against-hezbollah-tv-report-says/#ixzz3CddpWO00

Every time a deadly missile hit Gaza last summer — and thousands of them did — our atmosphere also took a direct hit. Every time the tanks and humvees rolled in Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Iraq, we lost yet another chunk of our hope of living a long and happy life in a non-desert. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/mapping-the-spread-of-drought-across-the-us.html?abt=0002&abg=0&_r=0

You gotta at least give those CIA-backed monsters in ISIS credit for one thing — their use of swords to behead people was very energy-efficient! Although, according to Information Clearinghouse, ISIS is just one more “rat-line” to get high-powered American weapons (and Toyotas) from Libya to Syria. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39603.htm

“But, Jane,” you might say next, “climate change is mainly caused by industrial pollution.” All too true. But where do you think that all these missiles, F-16s, RPGs and tanks come from in the first place? That they are created out of thin air by fairies and elves? No. Producing war toys like F-35s and drones and night-vision goggles is very big business these days. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/31/combat-terror-end-support-saudi-arabia-dictatorships-fundamentalism

PS: In Oakland, California, recently, there was a symposium called “Urban Shield,” which spoke to the topic of how to supply military weapons and vehicles to our own American law-enforcement agencies. Oh crap. That means that the gigantic military tanks and humvees driving down the streets of our own cities and towns are gonna escalate the production of greenhouse emissions even more. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/06/funny-or-die-cops-ferguson-militarized-police_n_5777074.html

“Urban Shield” organizers put out claims that this convention was paid for by Homeland Security. No, it was not. It was paid for by you and me. And it is you and me who, in the long run, will have to pay for it with our lives as well.

Every time police release tear gas in our neighborhoods or drive a tank down our streets, there goes the specter of climate change too. http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/united-states/140827/how-foreign-forces-and-american-police-departmen

PPS: OMG, Americans have just elected a whole new bunch of crazy war mongers to Congress! Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The far-right has just won all these new seats in Congress by use of their clever three-pronged strategy: Buy the elections with money, scare voters with nightmares of ISIS and Ebola, and commit such outrageous election fraud of such gigantic proportions that even I am amazed that no one is going to jail for this as a result. Not since Jim Crow days has election-rigging been this bad! http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/fox-news-ends-ebola-coverage-work-done

And now we have a Congress that plans to serve us Endless War and climate-change denial on a platter. “I’m lovin’ it!” they exclaim. So say goodbye to any chance of saving our atmosphere, saving our hope of living to a ripe old age and saving our world from becoming a desert. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120134/climate-change-denier-james-inhofe-lead-environment-committee

Jesus wept!

My neighbor Madame Jane is not only the world’s most accurate fortune-teller, she is also the most completely-ignored fortune-teller since the beginning of time — except perhaps for Cassandra. And there is a good reason for this too. Frankly, Madame Jane is just plain morose. Nobody wants to be told bad news constantly — even if it is true. Even I am getting tired of being haunted by Madame Jane’s sad tales of gloom and doom. And I’ve told her this time and again.

But, suddenly, at 6:00 am this morning, there was Madame Jane again, at my front door, banging fiercely away with her fists and shouting, “You need to wake up, dearie. Wake up! And it’s time for the whole world to wake up too!”

“Well, the whole world is going to have to wait,” I yelled back, “until after I’ve brushed my teeth.” Plus I’d just finished reading a book called “Fun Is Good” — and Madame Jane is definitely not fun.

But M.J. was having none of it. “Things are never going to get better in America,” she yelled through the door. “I have just returned from the future. Things are only going to get worse. And right now the only hope of changing this grim future is to band all Americans together as allies, working together in common cause.”

Read my lips. “I. Don’t. Care.”

“We need to stop anyone who tries to teach Americans to hate each other. We need to turn off all those attack-ads on TV — and then fight desperately like wolves in a pack so that, in the future, things perhaps might possibly remain the same as they are now and not get any worse.”

Madame Jane took a deep breath and adjusted her wig.

“The wealthy 1% are now shamelessly attacking black people, brown people, old people, children, Muslims, Native Americans, progressive white people, students and women. Separately these groups are all minorities. But united together they can all stand tall — like the strong and proud Americans they are. But will they actually even try to unite to protect themselves from these merciless attacks by the oligarchs? Not gonna happen.”

No, Madame Jane definitely does not have a fun outlook on life.

But then I suddenly remembered what Mahatma Gandhi used to say. “You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean. If a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the whole ocean does not have to become dirty.”

So I told that to M.J. — and she just humphed. “Mahatma Gandhi’s ocean never had to deal with Fukushima.”

“Okay, so the whole world is going to hell in a hand-basket,” I said. “But so what? Every human being has got to die sometime anyway and there is no escaping that fact — so what does it matter if our time comes sooner rather than later? Plus what the freak can I do about any of this freaking mess at freaking 6:00 am in the morning?”

But Madame Jane was completely undeterred. “You need a wake-up call!” she cried. No I don’t. I need coffee.

“You need to start reading up on what is really happening in the world right now, girly-girl — not just what they tell you on TV. And after that, you need to go get out in the world and start making some waves. And even if you are only one drop in an huge ocean, then you need to start making that one drop count. Because if you and all the other billions of little guys like you don’t do something to stop these dire predictions from happening, then who will? And then everything that I predict will come true.”

If we snooze, we lose. Got it. Now can I go back to bed?

“And America today currently has the most sadistic foreign policy since Genghis Klan — and I can clearly see that America’s foreign policy will be getting even more sadistic in the next 20 years. That is, if there still is any America left 20 years from now! With a foreign policy based on mass murder, who can tell how long America can still stay in business without pissing everyone off — including God, Allah, the Buddha and Jesus!” Yikes! Has Halloween already arrived? To stay forever? Apparently so.
http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2014/10/26/510924us-lawlessness-fuels-global-insecurity/

“And don’t even get me started on the Middle East situation.” Too late.

“All that horrible stuff happening in the Middle East today seems to boil down to just this,” Madame Jane said next. “Everyone in the Middle East is getting screwed — plus American and Israeli taxpayers are getting screwed too. And everyone in the Middle East knows who is doing the screwing — American, Saudi and Israeli neo-cons, none of whom even pay taxes.

“However, either no one in the Middle East knows how to stop getting screwed or else they just figure, ‘Since there is such a lot of screwing going on and no one knows how to stop it, I might as well help the ones doing the screwing rather than be a screwee.’” Sucks to be them.

“And then you add a bunch of psychopaths to the mix and also a bunch of eager weapons manufacturers looking for a killing — and what do you get? Adam and Eve getting thrown out of the Garden. Again.”

Does this mean that if you live in the Holy Land and Fertile Crescent, then knowledge of good and evil comes with the real estate deal? And just exactly how much evil can these poor Arab schmucks know before there is no one left to know it? http://journal-neo.org/2014/10/21/is-the-us-ready-to-trigger-wwiii/

Then Madame Jane muttered something under her breath about 9-11. Not being fully awake, I asked her to speak up. Which of course she did.

“9-11 was a very small terrorist attack. It only involved twenty Saudis with box cutters and a little help from some NORAD screw-ups. Only 2,996 Americans were killed.” Only? Hey, that’s a lot!

“But every single day of every single year, year in and year out since then, many more than 2,996 Americans are killed every day by the real terrorist attacks that we suffer, right here on our own American soil — attacks on our lives, our liberty and our pursuit of happiness. Terrorist attacks! Terrorist attacks!”

Hey, M.J., calm down. Blood pressure, remember?

“But sadly, nobody seems to notice about them like they did about 9-11.” What terrorist attacks?

“Terrorist attacks on our infrastructure, our food supply, our water supply, our agriculture, our veterans, our hospitals, our children, our Constitution, our economy, our…”

Oh. I get it. You’re referring to the Koch brothers, Congressional lobbyists, the military-industrial complex, Monsanto, Citibank, Morgan Stanley and those guys. Like what that French guy Piketty said, that the richest one percent are currently in possession of half the world’s assets — and the top 10% now own 87% of the world’s assets. And boy are the rest of us 99% gonna be pissed off when there is nothing left for us. Or, to quote Lynn Stuart Parramore, “In that case, fasten your seatbelts. This ride could get very rough.” http://stopmakingsense.org/2014/10/23/pikettys-prophecy-comes-true-the-planets-middle-class-is-rapidly-going-extinct/

“Getting pissed off is gonna do the 99% no good at this late date. They missed their chance to save themselves from serfdom way back in 2000, when they let G.W. Bush steal the presidential election. And now all they have to save themselves is, er, nothing. The oligarchs now have all the power — not to mention all the weapons. Sorry about that.” That’s harsh.

“And here’s another example for you,” said Madame Jane. “I just went to buy gas at the pump today.” Madame Jane drives a car? Now that’s scary. “And gas was up 50 cents more from the last time. Why? Because of all this ISIS craziness in the Middle East after Congress authorized spending billions of dollars on hiring ISIS pirates and thugs to slaughter women and children in Syria and Iraq in the first place. And all we Americans get out of it is this stinkin’ gasoline price-gouge T-shirt!” Madame Jane is an American? That’s scary too. https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=799887010073804&fref=nf

“Not to mention climate change that will put your grandchildren in the hospital with lung cancer and emphysema! If we even still have any hospitals left 30 years from now. And it would be so laughingly easy to put solar panels on top of all our homes and then run our electric cars off of that. But no. American neo-cons still force us to pollute and spend trillions on wars for oil.”

Good grief. So that is why we taxpayers are financing ISIS’s scorched-earth policy in Syria and Iraq — to drive up the price of oil. Now can I pleeeze have some coffee?

“These anti-American oligarch Wall Street terrorists need to leave America the freak alone and go back to where they came from — the Cayman Islands and Swiss bank vaults where they belong”

Then Madame Jane started to glare at me again — with those fierce and ancient dark gypsy eyes of hers. “And what exactly are you going to do to stop all this?” she snarled.

“Er, uh, sign a petition on the internet to save the dolphins?”

PS: I’m currently reading a book called “Social,” and the author claims that when our brains aren’t doing anything else, their default setting is to think about our interactions with others. That’s amazing. “After Christianity and Islam,” says the author, “Facebook is the third largest organization in the world,” because people just wanna be friends.

Hey, maybe Madame Jane can get on FB and then convince all our friendly brains to help save the world. Why not — if being BFFs with seven billion other people would give our brains something creative to do. After all, blowing people up and hoarding money are social activities that suck eggs.

If social interaction actually is the most important thing in the world for our brains, then the Pentagon and banksters are going about things all wrong.
http://news.yahoo.com/assads-warnings-start-ring-true-turkey-144516592.html

And this could also explain the behavior of ISIS. Because its members never really learned the niceties of genuine social interaction because they weren’t raised around women, the queens of social interaction and hot gossip, they never learned any real social skills. So apparently they think that beheading people is the best way to win friends and influence people? You guys are just gross!

On October 17, 2014, American journalist Serena Shim was beheaded — and “not with a sword but a cement truck,” to paraphrase T.S. Elliott.

Right before she lost her head in a brutal “accidental” collision with a cement truck the size of a freight train, Shim had reported that not only was Turkey supplying ISIS foreign fighters and terrorists from such places as Pakistan and Chechnya with weapons and material, but Turkey was also spiriting wounded ISIS terrorists back over the Syrian border into Turkey, hidden in NGO aid trucks, so they could be treated in Turkish hospitals. http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/21/the-death-of-a-reporter/

Turkish Intelligence is highly suspected of setting up this tragic hit on Shim, hoping to silence her — but its actions have backfired and all it has really accomplished is to make the whole world put Turkey under a microscope, asking questions about Shim’s bloody death and the role that the Turkish intelligence agency played in this beheading.

“Turkey. how could you have sunk so low?” the whole world now asks.

“Hey, it was easy,” Turkey replies. “What else could we do?” What else could Turkey do indeed — when the usual crew of polished and professional American and Israeli neo-con con-men (not to be mistaken for actual honest, hardworking and sorely hoodwinked Americans and Israelis) simply showed up at its doorstep, waved their magic wands over Turkish president Erdogan’s head and promised to get him the old Ottoman Empire back if only he would attack Syria. (Or else.)

And then with his eyes dazzled by dreams of glittering booty, Erdogan fell for the con — hook, line and sinker. Of course he did. And then he opened Pandora’s box and let ISIS in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Gioad9TG04

According to Middle East expert Judith Bello, the Washington Post published a map “of the flow of 15,000 fighters flowing into Syria from more than 80 nations, hardly the foot soldiers of a civil war. Most of these fighters have entered Syria through Turkey.” http://deconstructedglobe.com/wordpress/?p=1384

A sorry cancer-like epidemic of death, destruction and deceit has spread over the Middle East in the last few decades. And Turkey, the “Sick Man of Europe,” has been the latest nation to catch it.

Welcome to the cancer ward, President Erdogan.

On Thanksgiving this year, Turkey will obviously have nothing to be thankful for, what with ISIS sitting at its table and expecting its dinner — unless Turkey starts “chemotherapy” immediately. My prescription for Turkey? “Stop messing around with ISIS, stop believing the empty promises of American and Israeli neo-con-men, and start behaving in Turkey’s citizens’ best interests instead.”

Turkey has been trying to join the European Union for years now. But who wants a Turkey in the EU that has already proven itself to be just another Middle Eastern “soiled dove” for American and Israeli con-men? Erdogan has thrown the baby out with the bathwater here.

Just because Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Yemen, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have all been diagnosed with the kind of fuzzy thinking that can only be caused by cancer of the part of the brain that governs common sense and self-preservation, this doesn’t mean that Turkey has to waste away too. Beheading a journalist is common in these other neo-con infected countries. But one would expect that a sophisticated and modern country like Turkey, a potential member of the EU even, might be immune. But apparently not.

President Erdogan, what were you THINKING!

PS: Looks like the average American and Israeli isn’t immune from catching the cancer of stupid thinking either. If we aren’t a lot more careful and watchful and vigilant than we are right now, then we too may soon be contracting this Turkish and Middle Eastern disease — and then watch our own journalists get beheaded too. http://my.firedoglake.com/blog/2014/10/21/everything-wrong-with-liberalism-in-one-image-found-on-facebook/

When I saw the movie “Saving Mr. Banks” during one of my interminably-long plane rides back from Syria (http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2014/06/syria-iraq-captain-phillips-isis.html), I liked it so much that I actually went out and bought a copy of the 1964 “Mary Poppins” Disney classic it was based on — the one with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke frolicking across the rooftops of London.

And much to my surprise, I discovered that Mary Poppins might have been one of the world’s first hippies. Who woulda thought! And what was even more amazing is that Mary Poppins was one of the first people to warn us about the dangers and perfidy of big bankers and big banks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxyB29bDbBA

And fortunately for those of us living here in America one hundred years later, Elizabeth Warren has now become the new Mary Poppins — also warning us about the dangers and perfidy of big bankers and big banks.

If only Americans would start paying attention to Elizabeth Warren as much as they paid attention to Julie Andrews!

“Hey, Elizabeth!” I also want to shout on the rooftops like Dick VanDyke, “voters aren’t listening to you!” Maybe if Disney studios made a movie about you too? Then maybe voters would finally start to listen.

According to Warren, the American middle class has been absolutely decimated by the banking and credit-card lobbies. http://billmoyers.com/segment/elizabeth-warren-on-americas-invisible-crisis/

And yet voters still keep falling for all those glossy ads and happy lies that still keep getting pro-big-bank candidates elected to the White House and Congress even though voters can clearly see that they themselves are losing their jobs, having their homes repossessed, becoming slaves to their student loans and getting ripped off bigtime by credit-card debt. But then I guess that those syrupy ads actually do prove that “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down” after all.

In the heroic country of Iceland, their well-informed voters have vigorously fought back against bankster greed and have even re-written their constitution in order to make lending-bubbles and bank fraud illegal. http://guardianlv.com/2013/12/icelanders-overthrow-government-and-rewrite-constitution-after-banking-fraud-no-word-from-us-media/

But in America, the opposite happens. Here in America our very own government, the very one that bank lobbyists have chosen for us to elect, is handing over billions of our very own hard-earned dollars to big banks just as fast as it can. And Congress is always writing new bankruptcy laws that favor banksters over the middle class every time. Mary Poppins would be livid, of course, but nobody else seems to even notice these days — except for Elizabeth Warren.

And even the Federal Reserve is dancing over the rooftops in glee as it too gives away our money to the banksters just as fast as it possibly can, singing “Step in Time” as gleefully hands over giant bags of taxpayers’ money to Chase, Bank of America, CitiBank and Goldman Sachs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-b_GJ4ltk

And the Federal Reserve’s chim chem cher-ee chummy coverups are going through the roof too. http://www.propublica.org/article/carmen-segarras-secret-recordings-from-inside-new-york-fed

Plus the Senate just vetoed a bill that would have given students a break from paying up to 12% interest on their college loans too. According to Warren, “This isn’t complicated. It’s a choice – a choice that raises a fundamental question about who the United States Senate works for. Does it work for those who can hire armies of lawyers and lobbyists to protect tax loopholes for billionaires and profits for the big banks? Or does it work for those who work hard, play by the rules, and are trying to build a future for themselves and their families?”
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/26034-im-calling-their-bluff

Not to mention the hidden (and not-so-hidden) fees that banks gleefully charge us customers for no reason at all. http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2011/03/wells-fargos-illegal-overdraft.html

To try to completely understand how banksters and their toadies in Congress and the Department of Justice are robbing the rest of us blind, you just gotta watch this video of Bill Moyers interviewing bank-fraud expert Thomas K. Black. Seriously. You really should watch this: http://vimeo.com/107916659

In this video, Black describes how Obama was elected by the banking industry and how Obama has totally paid back his debt to the banksters by handing them all “get out of jail free” cards. Is being elected president really worth selling us Americans out to the banksters? Apparently so.

“There’s no threat to capitalism like capitalists,” continues Black. “They are destroying its underpinnings. And when dishonest people gain an advantage in the marketplace, bad ethics drive good ethics out. This is why we need the rule of law.” Doesn’t Thomas K. Black sound just like Dick VanDyke, er, I mean Burt the Chimney Sweep here — as Black proposes that it’s high time to sweep clean our banks.

And now let’s talk about America’s ratings on the so-called “Misery Index” http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/misery+index. Apparently America rates higher on the misery charts now than it ever has, even back in the Great Depression — and probably even as high as did Mary Poppins’s 1910 London. Thanks a lot, banksters.

Isn’t it time that American voters finally join up with Elizabeth Warren and Mary Poppins — and tell big banks and banksters to go “fly a kite!”

PS: Speaking of money, look how much of it is being spent in the Middle East — and not here at home where it is needed!

According to a recent blog-post at thehill.com, the first official estimates of the ISIS price tag from the Pentagon showed that, “the costs of intervention between mid-June and late-August was $7.5 million per day. At that rate, the U.S. has spent $850 million on operations against ISIS as of October 8, adding up to about $2.74 billion per year. The Pentagon has since revised the estimate up to as high as $10 million per day, or $3.65 billion per year. In reality, both of those numbers are quite likely to be underestimates of what’s to come.” http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/220152-america-deserves-to-know-the-price-tag-for-isis

Looks like the US military is just as bad as the US banksters when it comes to cleaning out America’s pocketbooks — after they both have put us to sleep with false promises and false news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZewopnA6H7E.

What we Americans really need to do these days is to once again take Mary Poppins’s advice and “Stay Awake”! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yC_voMY6kY