Happy Independence Day

Every powerful nation has committed their share of atrocities- you\’ve got that right. The Belgians get a free pass for wiping out 10.7 million Congolese, and the Brits get a free pass for killing probably around 100 million people since 1700 (They fellated Churchill recently in a lionizing biopic). America is an evil nation run by evil politicians voted into office by evil citizens. There\’s no denying it anymore, we are the bad guys, and we are the number 1 cause of climate change, which looks like it could wipe out a billion people.

Upwards of thirty-five million First Americans were put to the sword in the name of the jew christian muslim mormon dog in what we today think of as “America” alone, a genocide of perhaps a hundred million Humans Beings across the “western hemisphere”.

The tyranny of a minority, highly vocal masters of manipulation in a position to get away with it, imposed upon the majority, imposed upon the rest of us. There’s an amendment for that.

When the roaches write the next history of the world, it’ll be Religion, that wiped us out.

So be it.

The United States was conceived and born in Original Sin(s), namely the sins of Native American genocide and black chattel slavery, both of which were legacies of the British imperial project from which the Founders sought separation and independence to continue their own peculiar developments of those very sins without the interference of London. Genocide would not just continue but expand and sweep the continent. Slavery would be institutionalized and forcibly spread well beyond the borders of the Thirteen Colonies.

Those were major points of US independence. Those were primary “freedoms” demanded and fought for. Liberty to wipe out the Indians and steal their land, and liberty to hold property in human beings protected by government. Forever.

The tension between those foul principles of independence and the higher values that supposedly animate this nation, whether religious or secular, are on display daily. The legacies of the national Original Sins are still with us, but so is the urge for redemption.

The United States as a national enterprise is neither all good nor all bad, and its people likewise.

Our problem is that we don’t yet have the ability or the mechanisms to resolve the tension or to obtain redemption. The impulses to do good often backfire. The urge to be bad often seems stronger than ever.

Even with things as disjointed and out of whack as they are, the US will muddle through like much of the rest of the world. If we had several hundred more years to work on and rectify the problems the US is responsible for, perhaps we would come to some better place and become better people, but we don’t have hundreds more years to work these things out according to climate models. We’re in the midst of an existential crisis that we cannot resolve by main force but can only respond to reactively. The response so far has been dreadful and may lead to extinction both for the nation and the people. On the other hand, you never know.

So. Blackbird fly into the light of the dark black night…

This is called progress. This is not a fall from grace. It is grace.

America’s an open air, dilapidated concentration camp without fences or barbed wire.

Seattle is Dying but America is Dead

Well, speaking as White Trash myself, nothing I have ever done is as vile as the standard, exploitive practices of my wealthy superiors. After living in Mexico for decades, Joe Bageant said that the only gringos he ever met who noticed and cared about the local hyper-poor Mexicans were either hippies or working class folks. Fuck my supposed social superiors. Posing as the moral superiors of their victims is just one more example of their stinking lies.

Here’s a defense of the KOMO documentary from someone who works with the homeless. He should know considering he’s on the front lines. He doesn’t attack the messenger.

Why KOMO’s ‘Seattle is Dying’ Special Resonated

The Hinrichsen piece criticizes Seattle is Dying for looking at just one part of the homeless problem — the drug-addicted homeless on the streets — and ignoring the many other faces of the homeless who want help. It’s important to point out that Johnson’s special was the third part of a trilogy, and those other specials addressed the very points raised by Hinrichsen. The first, about the lives of the homeless in the words of the homeless, was titled There but for the Grace of God… and aired in 2016. Like his latest, it was not a show that jumps around to politicians, service providers and academics. It was about the homeless from their perspective. It was a yearlong project.

The second special, also a yearlong project, aired in early summer of 2017 and was called Demon at the Door: Our Heroin Crisis. “We’ve been in alleyways and homes and police cars and assorted incarnations of hell on earth,” Johnson said in the show’s intro. “We’ve peered into the darkness of heroin addiction, looking for answers, truth, and, yes, humanity.” Both specials won regional Emmys.

@450.org,

You must be descended from Rich White Cash . . . the class who made all the decisions and hired select White Trashmembers to enforce your White Cash class decisions for your special White Cash class benefit.
You wouldn’t speak that way about White Trash otherwise . . . would you?

I hope the White Trash can impose upon you more esthetic suffering and offense than you can possibly bear. And then impose even more esthetic suffering upon you.

If you are one of the people who voted for the Free Trade Conspiracy Traitor-against-America Clinton, all I can say is: you people have never paid for what you did to this country. You have not even begun to pay. But you will. You will pay. We will make you pay.

@ 450.org
From the John Carlson bio: He is a co-founder and former president of the Washington Policy Center in Seattle.

From sourcewatch:
The Washington Policy Center (WPC) is, in its own words, “a nonpartisan, free-market, state-based think tank in Seattle, Washington, that publishes studies, sponsors events and conferences, and educates citizens on public policy issues facing Washington state.”[1] In actuality the group advances a right wing agenda and is affiliated with organizations in the Koch Network.
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Washington_Policy_Center

As a big fan of tough love, I merely disagreed with the ‘100% are addicts enabled by 100% bleeding heart liberal elites’ tone. I know a few homeless personally, as well as a cousin who actually does work with them. I believe there is more to the story than Sinclair employee Johnson has implied.

The fact of the matter is, all publications that have any readership these days have an agenda and that agenda is tethered to the establishment in some way, shape or form. In this respect, it’s all Fake News to varying degrees and it’s up to us to separate the wheat from the obfuscatory propagandistic chaff.

You claim that it’s not accurate to assert 100% of the homeless living (if we can call it living) on the streets of Seattle are drug addicts. I agree, it’s probably not 100%, but so what? What if it’s 90% or 80% versus 100%? My guess is the majority, a significant majority, are drug-addicted. Does the percentage really make a fundamental difference in the unresolved predicament?

It certainly makes all the difference in the world in regard to a viable, effective solution if there is such a solution. Just calling it homelessness and treating it as such without getting to the root of it, will never result in a viable, effective solution if there is one.

One thing I did notice about Seattle’s homeless, most were white. Maybe that’s part of the problem in not finding a solution. White people are privileged according to people like Lisa Graves, so therefore they don’t need or deserve tough, compassionate intervention because their suffering is a form of reparations. In otherwords, they deserve it so they get tossed some new socks and a few cans of beans and fresh needles so they can continue to rot in undignified, inhumane perpetuity for the sin of being a privileged white trash bastard.

An excellent book by an author who’s parents chose homelessness is as follows. It’s an excellent book. A great read. It gives incredible insight into one pathway to homelessness for there are many, but addiction, to be sure, is a super highway to that ignominious living arrangement.

The Glass Castle

The warning is this: If you are going to become parents you must simply forego being bohemian. Otherwise your children might grow up to be super successful & you will end up eating trash off dark alleyways…

Peculiar upbringings are what memoirs are made of! We saw this in the Frank McCourt gray & sad “Angela’s Ashes” & even more so in any of the Augusten Burroughs books (mainly “Running with Scissors”). When memoirs are like this, invigoratingly Roald Dahlesque in painting pictures of past predicaments… and obviously the survival of the protagonist, the reader reads on. No matter how bad you have it, someone somewhere sometime probably had it worse.

The Walls children (3 of the 4, at least) become inspired by their nomadic parents, wanting to be so unlike their progenitors that they actually turn their lives around. Here is testament of someone living way under the poverty level in modern times & getting out alive & a smarter woman for it. That she appreciates it and maintains a smile is the very heart of this non-fic gem.

I once wrote a blog in a arranged debate on the American Revolution a dozen years or so ago; a friend took the side that it was a positive development in world history while I took the side it was a bad idea; that the US and the world would have been better off if we had gained independence the same way that Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and other British commonwealth nations did. It may have even been marginally better for the First Nations peoples and slavery might have been ended earlier (though the latter point is debatable; as given the size of eventual United States it could develop into the tail wagging the dog). Not perfect, mind you, as none of these countries close to perfect, but I think they are better off than we.

Like most other topics which possibly involve nationalistic jingoism, most Americans are badly informed about the American Revolution. One of the things that horrified George Washington as something beyond-the-pale was the British offering freedom for any slaves who fought for their side. Nor do people know the true antecedents of the crises nor do they know of the concessions the British made or discussed making, which included by the end seating the colonies in Parliament (so the ‘no taxation without representation’ bit would be satisfied). But the colonies didn’t want any of that; what they wanted was to get a free ride for British protection without paying a dime for it; even though the taxes paid by the average British subject in the UK was far higher than anything even asked of the colonists, even if the Stamp tax and the Tea tax and the other ‘onerous’ taxes had been successfully put in place and maintained. The fact that the British withdrew many of their taxes, when surprised by the extent of colonial opposition, does not square with the typical American narrative of George III determined to run roughshod over ‘American liberties”.

In short, there’s not a lot ‘noble’ about the American revolution. People have made the comparison of the American Revolution to the Vietnam war; there are similarities. In Vietnam and the colonies there was a civil war going on in addition to the external intervention; in both cases the ‘outsider’ (the British and US) armies won most head-to-head battles hands-down; in both cases the ‘outsider’ armies could take any territory they desired but only controlled the ground their troops stood on (the British took Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston but it didn’t do them any good), and in both cases the ‘outsider’ faced distractions both from the war being unpopular at home and involving interventions (and possible interventions) from competitors on the world stage. When the war ended, both wars produced “boat people” fleeing their homes–as I said, the Revolutionary War was a civil war too; and some 2 % of the US population fled the country fearing for their property and/or lives.

The biggest difference was that the Vietnamese, however, had a lot more legitimate complaints.

Just as stupid is as stupid does, white trash is as white trash does. If you don’t want to be white trash, then don’t be white trash. It’s as simple as that and yet so few whites fail to not be white trash. It’s a vicious, self-reinforcing cyclical loop that’s existed in North America even before America was truly America and gained its independence. The deplorables are the borderers and Trump’s their Manhattanite cavalier. The following article dissects the match-made-in-hell relationship.

Crackers & Cavaliers Go Together Like A Horse & Carriage

Since Albion’s Seed was written 18 years ago, a lot of writers have drawn on it to explain events in modern America (a tradition I plan to continue, in due time). It’s notable that the overwhelming majority of them seized on Fischer’s dissection of the Scots-Irish Borderers, pointing out that the rednecks, white trash, holy rollers, crackers, and other assorted lower-class yahoos that supported Bush have been with us from the beginning — and been nothing but trouble from then to now.

In the rush to blame the Borderers, though, this section on the Cavaliers has been almost entirely ignored. Yet I found it to be at least as powerful in its explanatory power. Because, as Dr. Robert Altemeyer’s work makes clear, authoritarianism is always a two-part problem. While the Borderers may supply more than their fair share of right-wing authoritarian followers, they’d go nowhere without a high-social-dominance authoritarian leadership to guide them. And in Fischer’s description of the Cavaliers, we see the early American prototype of that high-SDO authoritarianism.

Among Cavaliers and corporatists, there is no morality beyond might makes right. There is no law — and no honor — beyond their own desire to expand their own sphere of power. There is no equality, no justice, and no universal freedom as we understand it. Theirs is the ancient plantation mentality we Americans have spent over 220 hard, bloody years trying to put behind us. It’s an outdated social system that has no place in a modern technological society — yet, in almost every detail, it’s the very world our new corporate royalists want to drag us back to.

In the back of their minds, they’re just Virginia gentlemen, taking the liberties such gentlemen have always rightfully enjoyed at the expense of others. It’s true that we owe a handful of Cavalier gentlemen a tremendous debt for so clearly articulating the principles of American liberty during the Revolution. But we should also remember that when these first men asserted their God-given right to life, liberty, and happiness, they had no intention of sharing those blessings with anyone else.

Just as stupid is as stupid does, white trash is as white trash does. If you don’t want to be white trash, then don’t be white trash. It’s as simple as that and yet so few whites fail to not be white trash.

Magical thinking much? Wouldn’t it just be easier to go with the flow of basic human nature, temperamental variances and all?