The Part That Reveals The Whole

A Wisconsin disgrace has been in the news lately. On April 20 around 1,000 Protesters gathered at a  dog breeding farm near Blue Mounds, about 30 miles west of Madison, the state Capital, in an attempt to free an estimated 2,000 beagles that have been confined there. 

The dogs were bred to be subjects of research, both on the farm and through sale to university and other researchers. There have been reports for many years about the mistreatment of the dogs, from starvation, mutilation and surgery without anesthesia. Most egregious is the practice of "debarking," where dogs have their vocal chords removed in order to silence them. 

In typical fashion, protesters in April were tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, shot with rubber bullets and arrested by Dane County deputies. 

The dogs have now mostly been sold to rescue agencies, pending eventual adoption. The breeder, Ridglan Farms, suffered no criminal penalties, and remains in business. As long as animal testing in scientific research is legal there will be a market for live sentient beings. That includes humans, though not as zealously or ruthlessly as in times past. We now have the practice of informed consent, which, needless to say, didn't used to be the case.

I don’t see this as an isolated situation, confined to  industrialized cruelty to animals. We live in a mass system, a planetary glut of 8.2 billion people and counting. In order to accommodate such a vast number of people a method has developed that is known as industrialism. It began in the 18th century, when production shifted from small-scale, typically individual or family operations to mass production in factories and plantations.

Workers in the mass system are seen not as human beings, but as factors of production. They are components, and when combined with capital – tools, equipment, buildings - and land and management, goods can be made. When humans become no more than inputs to produce output they lose their humanity. At least to owners and managers.

This dehumanization in the mass system becomes generalized as we become more anonymous, mere faces in the crowd. Callousness ensues, and mass societies become indifferent to the lives and suffering of unknown others. In the industrial world just about anything goes in the drive for ever more goods and riches. The prospect of more keeps the system going, no matter the consequences.

The treatment of research beagles seems eerily similar to Homeland Security detention, where human beings are starved, crowded and mistreated in every way possible - similar to research animals. The brutalization and murder of protesters is similar to how the Ridglan protesters were treated.

We have nearly two million people incarcerated in this country. Officially there are 770,000 homeless people. 

Our foreign "policy" has been mass murderous since before WWII. Our latest adventure, at the behest of our client state Israel, is to surprise bomb Iran into submission. For some reason they chose not to submit. We are very slow learners.

A segment on my favorite radio show on public radio, Science Friday, offered some critical insight into this malaise. The guest interviewed was Daniel H. Wilson, scientist and science fiction writer, who also is a member of the Cherokee Nation. He offered this insight:

"So a common theme that was expressed by settlers whenever they came to North America, the first colonists, they looked out at these beautiful forests, and they compared them to the Garden of Eden. They were perfect. They were amazing. And it was clear that they were wasted on these primitive people that were actually living there.

And so I think that there’s a saying that’s appropriate here. Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I think that was the case for those settlers. They looked out at those forests and they saw magic, but what they were looking at was Indigenous technology. So the land had been manicured meticulously for hundreds or thousands of years using farming techniques, agroforestry techniques, and all of that stuff– I think that the key difference all of that stuff is not designed to scale up and out to feed an exponentially growing population. It was technology designed to create a sustainable balance.

And so I think to from a Western perspective, that just looks really inefficient, and that looks really primitive. And the reason is because they’re grading it on a different scale. How many millions of people will that feed? Well, it won't. It’s not designed to. It's designed to keep a certain number of people imbalanced to promote the long-term survival of that human population. And so I think that’s what defines Indigenous technology."

Therein lies the answer. Demass the system. Return to a human scale. Save the planet. This of course will not be easy, and will mean a lot fewer people. The population of the U.S. when I was born was approximately 139.9 million people. Today it is 348.8 million. But far fewer people is inevitable. Our mass, infinite growth productive system is doomed. World output is now $126 trillion. Using the rule of 72, output would be $252 trillion in 24 years if growth would continue at an annual rate of 3%. At a 2% growth rate it would double in 36 years. The system will demass whether we like it or not. 

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 Some elaboration on the treatment of protesters at the 18 event. Some more elaboration on the result of the effort to free the dogs. An interview with La Crosse County District Attorney Tim Gruenke, who was appointed to be the special prosecutor of Ridglan Farms.

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On the genocide front, Palestinians are routinely raped in Israeli prisons, some by dogs. This depredation is made possible by U.S. sponsorship - our Congress, president(s) and military industrial complex. 

I think the best way to understand genocide is as a path. Once you start on the path, you continue, going farther down the path until it ends. The Israeli genocide path will end, as do all paths. The sponsor - the U.S. - will end its sponsorship for one reason or another. We may run out of money and weapons. We may have different people in positions of power and wealth. Climate change may make sponsoring genocide the least of our proclivities. Israel, a rogue state, may collapse. The U.S., now a rogue state, may also collapse. 

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Here's a song. Alternate version. John Prine. Another from Merle Haggard. The Dillards. The Byrds. Brandon Rickman. Jerry Jeff Walker.
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Update, May 13:
Brown University Holocaust and Genocide Studies professor Omer Bartov was interviewed on the NPR radio show On Point today about his book Israel: What Went Wrong? The book is reviewed in a number of publications, such as The New York Times and The Guardian. He puts the Gaza genocide in historical and moral context, showing the roots of Zionism, the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the regression that culminated in the genocide we are now seeing. He predicts great difficulty in Israel as its reckoning approaches.

If you happened to watch the friendly interview with Benjamin Netanyahu on 60 Minutes this past Sunday, you might find this interesting.

Update, May 15:
I had forgotten a couple of experiences I had with animal research. In 1980 I was working as a patient transporter in the Radiation Therapy clinic at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor. It was an easy job, only about ten patients a day to bring to the clinic on stretchers (known as gurneys elsewhere) and return them afterwards. Down the hall was the animal research facility, and every time I passed the place there was a cacophony of dog barking, howling, whimpers and whines. They were the pleas of desperation. I wanted to set them free. My dad raised dogs as kind of a hobby and to have his own line of hunting dogs.

I had become a casual acquaintance of a guy about my age who worked in the animal clinic, having much free time to roam around the area. He was probably the most negative person I ever knew, routinely complaining about some general malaise in society, though never specific. The one complaint I remember he had was "Why do they always have to throw money at problems?" A complete nothing complaint. Looking back on those times it seems pretty clear that he was probably suffering from depression, and hated his job. I don't blame him. He was facilitating the wanton abuse of animals. Last year PETA ranked the University of Michigan as the fourth-worst violator of animal abuse regulations.

The other experience was in early 1977, also In Ann Arbor, when I was driving a taxi. The cab company I worked for had a contract with the University of Michigan to drive to the Detroit airport to pick up shipments of rats that were used for research. I was given the assignment one night bring a load of rats to the U of M hospital. I was told I could decline, that some drivers refused, but I did it anyway, not yet being troubled by animal research.

The rats came in a large box, about 3 feet long by 2 feet wide, a perfect fit for the back seat of a taxi. There must have been about 25 rats in the box, all squeaking and scurrying around in the box. I loaded them up and drove them to the drop-off point at the university hospital.

Looking back on it, during the drive to Ann Arbor I became attached to the rats. They seemed harmless and scared, and I was taking them to their death. They were my passengers, "fares" as they were known in the taxi business. An ethic sets in when you drive a taxicab, where you kind of unconsciously become dedicated to giving your passengers a comfortable and safe trip to where they are going. Even rats. I never did another rat run. I quit the job not long after this, being hired by the University Hospital for the first of several temporary jobs. It was handy, living in an ashram at the time, working to pay the rent.
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Update, May 16:

Democracy Now had an interview Thursday with Molly Crabapple, author of the book Here We Live Is Our Country. The book is about the origins of Zionism, and how it was opposed by the Jewish Labor Bund is Czarist Russia.

Israeli lawyer Ben Marmarelli is interviewed on Zeteo about how Palestinian prisoners have been raped in Israeli prisons since 1948, including by dogs.

Then, on Electronic Intifada, Adam Johnson is interviewed about his book How To Sell A Genocide, how mainstream U.S. media are complicit in giving Israel journalistic cover for its massive crimes against humanity. Here's the YouTube version.

Also from Electronic Intifada is a debunking of the reboot  of Israeli claims of massive Hamas rapes on October 7, 2023.

Identity Crisis

When I heard the news report that the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Congressional maps in Louisiana were unconstitutional due to racial bias, my first inclination was to be angry that it meant disenfranchisement for "black" voters. After a bit of pondering, though, I realized that I, believing there is no such thing as race, had no reason to be angry. Legislative maps that gerrymander to carve out "black" districts are based on the supposition that there is such a thing as a "black" voter.

I am old enough to remember when the term for people of African descent changed from "negro" to "black." It was in the early to mid 1960s, when politicians, journalists and various know-it-alls from the former colonies of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa referred to their indigenous subjects as "blacks." They didn’t need to refer to themselves as "whites" because they didn’t need to. They were the people who mattered, and the native people, the "blacks," didn’t matter, except as low-wage workers.

Then, as the Civil rights movement matured, more militant groups took up the mantle of "black" in a kind of reverse psychology, proudly expressing themselves as the embodiment of the most extreme skin tone – black. Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) comes to mind as the leader of this linguistic change. He started using the term Black Power to promote advancement of African Americans in business, government and society in general. This was a fundamental departure from the assimilationist approach of Martin Luther King. 

No one is black. Some people with third degree burns that char the skin might have the appearance of blackness until healing takes place, but even that doesn’t make them "black." It isn’t who they are. No one is their skin color. People whose ancestry is from the continent of Africa, parts of Asia and indigenous Australia have a wide variety of skin colors that range from dark brown to not brown at all. In the United States of America they are all called "black" for reasons of convenience, stupidity and social custom. We define people here by skin color, by ethnic background, by education, by intelligence, by income and wealth, and by social position. And by any characteristic we can come up with.

The easiest and laziest classification is by race. That doesn’t mean race exists, just that it is what we use. It is so embedded that hardly anyone questions whether such a thing as race is a meaningful and useful narrative. Except, of course, scientists. Geneticists concluded long ago that the sorting out of humans into races is arbitrary, not based on evidence, and is therefore inherently, duh, racist. To believe that race exists is to be a racist.

A perfect case in point is former president Barack Obama. When he was running for president in 2008 he avoided the question for a long time, then bluntly declared himself to be ""black." It was a political decision. He thought, correctly, that declaring himself black would attract enough voters who also thought of themselves as black to vote for him. His mother was "white." He could just as easily have declared himself "white," since in America you have to be something or other. He of course doesn’t look either black or white, so like all who identify with skin color, choosing one or the other is choosing something that doesn’t exist.

I, of Irish and Scot descent, would qualify as "white" by the usual mistaken identity. But just as no one is "black," no one is "white." Caucasian skin color is not white, but more of a "burlywood," "rosy brown," "tan," or "peru," and, like "black" skin, manifests in a wide variety of hues. Certainly not constituting a "race."

We also call other "people of color" brown and yellow. It all is so silly. I always bristled at the term “people of color.” First, because it defines people as “of” something, and then because the thing they are "of" is color. They are "of" their skin color. No matter that they exist in complete biological organisms. Skin color is all that matters as who they are.

Where this matters most is that by identifying other people by "race" means you also have to identify yourself by race. Identity, whether true or false, inevitably leads to the natural human tendency to find a way of feeling superior to those who identify differently. If through accident of history one identity becomes the one that dominates, other identities necessarily becomes the dominated. "Whites" dominate "blacks," "browns," and "yellows." And n’er the twain shall meet.

It is 2026. Racism, dominance and "othering" are the rule of the day. In what may be the saddest irony in human history, the "Jewish" state of "Israel," born as a gift in the wake of the worst "racist" mass murder campaign known to man, has devolved into a genocide state, and with full U.S. sponsorship. Politicians who vote repeatedly to fund Israel’s genocide couldn’t care less about Jews or the "Jewish state." They care about being reelected. By and large, they will vote for anything if it keeps them in office. Conforming with AIPAC keeps them in office.

So don’t be fooled by the hand-wringing among knee-jerk "leftists," "progressives," "liberals" and "Democrats." These are identities, not mutually exclusive, but conformist to the false ideology of "race." The sooner we give up on this bogus ideology, the sooner we can start healing our species of the division and hatred that plagues the entire planet. Gerrymandering by any political party is intended to keep incumbents in power, no matter the "race." Those who are divided among gerrymandered districts find themselves disenfranchised, and their skin can be "black," "white," "brown," "yellow" and any other color. One solution to this criminality is to amend the U.S. Constitution, making the gerrymandering of elections illegal.

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Here's a song. John Lennon. The Beatles. Bob Marley. Leadbelly. Koerner, Ray and Glover. Louis Armstrong. Gil Scott-Heron. Sam Cooke. Another from Sam Cooke. Another from Gil Scott-Heron. And another. Bob Dylan. Elton John. Bob Dylan.

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60 Minutes aired a segment titled "When the volunteer helping after a hurricane is a white nationalist," in which they reported on how "white" nationalists (Nazis of one stripe or another) are showing up after natural disasters to "help," more about polishing their images than lending meaningful assistance. 

I don't look at these people so much as ideologues as psychologically troubled. I was reminded of my years of substitute teaching. Every so often there would be a boy who didn't just misbehave, but was insolent and sometimes threatening. It could be in grades as low as seventh - 12 year-olds, but most often it was boys in 11th and 12th grade. They didn't mind being suspended from school, and that was often their goal. After troubled school lives they went on to troubled lives. Their personalities were like the "white" supremacists in the 60 Minutes segment.

Racism and Nazi-like identities fit their personalities, and in today's world of the Internet and easy communication they can easily find each other and organize into violent groups. They also are perfect recruits for ICE and other violence-prone law enforcement agencies. Belief in "white" supremacy - a belief in the dominance of something that doesn't exist - is a variation on what Marxists call false consciousness. I would place it on the low end of Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Another way of wasting your life.

Denouement

Robert Pape, University of Chicago political science professor, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times a few days ago, titled The War Is Turning Iran Into a Major World Power. Last month he told us about the Escalation Trap, the danger that leaders who start wars get drawn into expanding them as circumstances don't go according to plan. 

Today it is reported that China is sending weapons to Iran. The plot thickens. The game is afoot. Meanwhile, Trump's wife is "throwing him under the bus," reviving his likely reason for starting the war - the Epstein Files. Rex Huppke of USA Today pointed out that she only defends herself, not Donald. It could be that the rats are deserting the ship.

No one could have predicted that the American empire would end this way. It has been a long time coming, starting well before I was born, and accelerating during my nearly eighty-one years of life. For a little context, the words of former Marine General Smedley Butler explains amply in his landmark book War Is a Racket, published in 1935. Here's an excerpt:

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period, I spent most of my time I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical of everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Highly recommended reading on Smedley Butler’s life: The Plot to Seize the White House, by Jules Archer (out of print, but available in better public libraries).
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To show how successful empire propaganda is in the U.S., the "Democratic" governor of Wisconsin recently signed a bill making criticism of the state of Israel a crime. I wrote to the governor, Tony Evers, challenging his nasty decision. I haven't received a reply yet. Here' what I wrote:

From: John Hamilton
To: Governor Tony Evers (https://wi.accessgov.com/public/Forms/Edit/governor/879053df-1ad1-451e-b2fd-1932bcacb873/2)
Date: April 3, 2026
Subject: Wisconsin Act 143

Hello Governor Evers 

I voted for you twice, and wrote in praise of you a time or two, such as here.

I see you signed the Republican bill making criticism of Israel a crime. I hereby state that Israel is a genocide state, sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government, and now you. I am now a criminal, at least until this phony law is found to be unconstitutional by both the state and U.S. Supreme Courts. For you, of course, this will be a sad part of your legacy. For me, wartime veteran of the U.S. Army, saying a genocide state is a genocide state is part of my legacy. History will not remember me, but it will remember you.
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I had written the following to the state Senate in January, hoping it would deter them in their zeal to enact this phony law:

Wisconsin State Senate
P. O. BOX 7882, MADISON, WI 53707-7882

To The Entire Senate

Word has reached me that you are considering a bill to make "antisemitism" illegal. There are some things you might want to consider when studying this legislation. First, you might want to define what is meant by the word Semite. A definition from Wikipedia will suffice: Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group associated with people of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, Including Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians), Arabs, Arameans, Canaanites (Ammonites, Edomites, Israelites, Moabites, Phoenicians, and Philistines) and Habesha peoples. The terminology is now largely unused outside the grouping "Semitic languages" in linguistics. First used in the 1770s by members of the Göttingen school of history, this biblical terminology for race was derived from Shem (שֵׁם), one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis, together with the parallel terms Hamites and Japhetitites.

In archaeology, the term is sometimes used informally as "a kind of shorthand" for ancient Semitic-speaking peoples. Identification of pro-Caucasian racism has either partially or completely devalued the use of the term as a racial category, with the caveat that an inverse assessment would still be considered scientifically obsolete. Once you understand what is meant by Semite, you might also want to define what is meant by anti-Semite. It is a loaded term, but the legislation is intended to expand the meaning to criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the West Bank of Palestine. If you vote to enact such legislation you will make genocide the official policy of the State of Wisconsin.

John Hamilton
Madison
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Neil Young. Graham Nash. Eddie Vedder. Steve Miller. Liam Clancy. A song for Trump.
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Update, April 13:

As I have written before, the president of the United States is criminally insane.

 
There were some very pertinent discussions on public radio today, starting with this program on the constitutional powers of the president on Wisconsin Public Radio.

Then, on NPR and WBUR's On Point, a much needed discussion of the real cost of the war on Iran.

A show on PRX, The World, hosted a discussion of the necessity of negotiating experience with Wendy Sherman, chief negotiator for the Obama nuclear treaty. What we have now is incompetent J.D. Vance, for whom everything he touches turns to shit. 

Or, maybe Trump sabotaged the talks. With help from Benjamin Netanyahu.

Some genocide news. Israeli plans for Lebanon.

The U.S. State Department is pressuring the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to ignore Trump's extrajudicial killings of fishermen in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. I suspect that this will fail, as the planetary tide is turning against Donald Trump.

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Update, April 16:

PBS's Frontline aired a new documentary about the ICE rampage, titled Caught in the Crackdown. It reveals in panoramic detail what we already know, that the ICE campaign is a criminal operation. 

NPR's On Point raised some New Questions for the Epstein files investigation. It suggests the reason behind Melania Trump's press conference was to fend off revelations about her past. YouTube offers more perspective, here and here. 

 On the genocide front, Israel is doing the same thing in Lebanon as it is in Gaza.

And, a cop in Phoenix was placed on administrative leave for provoking high school students to assault him during an anti-ICE protest in January.

Hennepin County (Minneapolis) Minnesota prosecutor Mary Moriarty announced a felony  indictment of an ICE agent for pointing a gun gratuitously at a U.S. citizen. The Ramsey County (St. Paul) Minnesota state's attorney is investigating possible kidnapping charges against ICE agents.

As for who is running the U.S. "policy" on the war on Iran, it is Benjamin Netanyahu, who Trump and J.D. Vance report to daily. Even Newsweek has taken notice.

Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee and other prominent academicians are urgently appealing to congressional leaders to recognize that Donald Trump is psychologically unstable and dangerous, and that they invoke Section 24 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, as well as limit his powers to make war and use nuclear weapons.

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Update, April 21: 

There's a great interview on Dropsite News today, Diplomacy or Escalation? The Iran War at a Crossroads. Also on Dropsite, survivors of Trump/Hegseth boat strikes in the Pacific say they were kidnapped and tortured by U.S. forces.

Pete Hegseth is using a line from the movie Pulp Fiction in his pretense to biblical authority for his murderous campaigns around the world.

Hapless Trump, not knowing how to get out of his war with Iran, announced today that he is extending the "ceasefire."

Ms. Rachel is revealing that ICE is denying basic human rights to imprisoned children at the Dilley Detention Center in Texas. Learn more here.

 

Meanwhile, the genocide state of Israel marches on. No human standards. From The Guardian. More news from Gaza.

Al Jazeera reports that preliminary figures show 3,375 people dead in Iran, 2,294 dead in Lebanon, and 28 killed in Gulf states as a result of the US-Israeli war. American casualties are greatly understated, officially 13 killed, 380 wounded. Here's a list of those killed.

Moral Injury

Until now I have avoided using the word karma in writing about current events and concerns. Americans toss the word around carelessly, knowing nothing its roots or meaning. It is similar to how Americans carelessly apply the term Zen to any sense of calm or focus, knowing nothing about what Zen is, historically and in practice. It is all about the frivolous use of language, faking sophistication with cheap clichés.

Karma is a Sanskrit term, a spiritual concept that relates cause to effect, the principle that the existence of all beings functions in a dynamic relationship between action and consequence. It is comparable, but not the same, to the Christian belief that as you sow, so also must you reap. Judaism has the principle of midah k'neged midah, or measure for measure. In more familiar terms, what goes around comes around.

When I was involved with the Siddha Yoga organization I enrolled in a couple of courses they offered in various aspects of Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism. The section on Karma lasted a day or two. The main thing I remember that the teacher emphasized was that Karma is very mysterious. In other words, be wary of making casual statements about what fate is pending for oneself or others.

For me, at least, Karma is a good guide for behavior, free of judgement. Do good, don’t do evil, and trust that my existence will be as unencumbered as possible, maybe reaching a higher level of being. It is safe to say, without any prediction, that I am immensely thankful that I don’t carry the karmic burden of known purveyors of evil on this planet.

Donald Trump, 100% evil being, will be gone soon. He is a deranged criminal sociopath, a man totally without conscience, without self-control, and without discernment or competence. It would be a waste of time and energy to speculate of what fate will befall him. It is enough to be hugely thankful that I am not him. And a warning. He is one of the greatest examples in human history of how not to be, and here right now to give that warning.

The same goes for his many fellow-evilites. Putin, Netanyahu, Epstein and others pictured in my previous post Foulness of Being. They are riding high now, except for Epstein, but what goes up must come down, one way or another. Like Trump, all are more than adequate examples of how not to be.

What we should be concerned about, though, is the fate that is coming our way. It isn’t just the obvious – bullying and invading countries around the world, turning the U.S. government into a criminal operation, brutalizing citizens and immigrants, abandoning climate mitigation efforts, reveling in sexual misconduct, lying about everything all the time, indulging in boorish behavior. Donald Trump represents the entire country to the world. To a great degree, he is us and we are him. We will reap what he has sown. The mythical Jesus, or Yeshua, supposedly died for our sins. Donald Trump is the opposite, a true Antichrist. The world may die for his sins. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it, "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." (Notes on Virginia Query xviii. Manners)

Another way of looking at the situation is from a psychological perspective that was used to explain the prevalence of depression and suicides among returning veterans of the U.S. debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. The term Moral Injury was introduced in the 1990s to describe the psychic burden held by former combatants who committed acts that violated their sense of right and wrong. The assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq were wars against the civilian populations of these countries, and inevitably involved heinous acts of destruction, abuse and wanton killing. This concept can also apply to entire populations, whole nations. The United States has been the chief sponsor, in weapons and money, of the genocide in Gaza, and now in Lebanon and Iran. And who’s next? Anyone’s guess. Cuba. Greenland. Canada. Anyone who crosses Donald Trump. The governors of Minnesota, Illinois and California - and their citizens and legal immigrants. 

There is cause for optimism, though in an obtuse way. I turned on the TV Saturday afternoon, hoping to catch the PBS Weekend NewsHour. I was quickly reminded that the show has been cancelled, due to Trump’s funding cutback. Instead, a new show was on, Compass Points, pundits sitting around waxing knowledgeably about scenarios of the end of the war against Iran. These know-it-alls were doing what economists call comparative statics, pronouncing existing circumstances and offering a variety of likely consequences, depending on if this or that happens. Not one word was said of the morality of gratuitous war, of how a properly functioning civilization should behave. It was all in terms of U.S. "interests," and what can be gained from this decision or that, and completely superficial, reductionist ad nauseam. 

This is what our intelligentsia self-limits in thinking and talking about the realities we face. Amorality. Or really immorality disguised as objectivity. Empty of ethical principles. And as such, evil.

The reason I say this is cause for optimism is that when a civilization becomes comprehensively vapid and immoral, it is doomed. Doom is not a condition that lasts forever. Eventually it ends, one way or another. Israel is basically a state born in terrorism, theft and displacement, and is now a genocide state. We are its sponsor. A genocide state is a self-dooming state, and its sponsor is similarly doomed. In a perverse way Donald Trump, totally evil human being, is speeding up the process. Hard times are ahead, but what is on the way is inevitable. If we can accept the inevitable we will be better able to deal with it. We have abundant examples of how not to be.
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Here's a song. Here's another. Bob Dylan. Dave Mason. Pink Floyd. Billy Strings. Spirit. AC/DC. Connie Gordon. Chris Thile. Steve Earle. Patti Smith. Pearl Jam. Bob Dylan. John Prine. Israel Ka'ano'i Kamakawiwo'ole.
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R.I.P. Joe McDonald. This is his best-known song. This is my favorite.
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Update, March 21: On Fridays, PBS's NewsHour airs a segment with two pundits, Brooks and Capehart. David Brooks is the resident "Conservative," except he just spouts clichés and conventional wisdom. In yesterday's segment he outdid himself, praising Trump's invasion of Iran. I wondered about this, then realized he is a Zionist, through-and-through, and in the cult of Zionism Israel can do no wrong. As in other media, no mention of the morality of the invasion.

Doubts about dying for Israel are growing among members of the U.S. military.

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Update, March 23:  Alfred McCoy, History professor at the University of Wisconsin, has a great perspective on Trump's war on Iran in TomDispatch, titled Imperial Decline in the Straits of Hormuz. Iran is accusing Trump of manipulating the stock market by announcing fake peace talks. 

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Update, March 26: Donald Trump, dumb guy, deranged criminal sociopath, has walked into a trap of his own making, according to University of Chicago Political Science professor Robert Pape. He calls it the escalation trap. See and listen here. Or read about it here. An extended interview with Robert Pape can be seen here. A simpler way of looking at the escalation trap is as an exaggerated version of Muhammad Ali's Rope-a-dope. There has been no dope to rope in human history greater than Donald J. Trump. He is bringing a lot of sycophant dopes along with him.

The best analysis of what Israel is doing and planning to do on this planet can be seen in this interview with Palestinian Ambassador to the U.K. Husam Zomlot.

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Update, March 27: Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman writes that Trump engaged in treasonous insider trading in manipulating futures markets with his suspicious announcements about bombing or not bombing Iran.

And, Norman Soloman contends Democrats need to change their tune about Israel if the want to win in November. 

Foulness of Being

 

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  Here's a song. Here's another. Brewer and Shipley. A song for ICE. The variation was written by Carsie Blanton. Here's her version. Ben Grosscup again on his Martin D-18. The song is taken from an old song from the Irish War of Independence. Emma Revolution. A pertinent song from the Rolling Stones. Some encouragement from Chuck Mangione. A song about the Martin D-18.

A story about the most vile scumbags on Earth.

Courts have ruled that ICE illegally jailed people 4400 times since October.

Here's some news about Steve Bannon, pictured above.

Here's some Kristi Noem news. I had this response.

R.I.P. Jesse Jackson. He did this hilarious reading on SNL in 1991.

A guest column in Madison's Cap Times questions why the mainstream news media won't cover the obvious - that Trump is insane. I have been raising this question here for a long time. Maybe more will raise the question. Don't hold your breath with corporate media. They need him. He's "good copy" - meaning that he brings eyes to the TV, sells newspapers, is bait for clicks.