Mirror, mirror. (American Revelation, Part Five.)

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. - Maya Angelou

As anybody who reads my blog or knows me in meat-space can tell you, I'm no fan of Fox News. This situation exists for a number of reasons, some rooted in deeply-held beliefs, others in simple dislike or outright hatred of an individual. I'm on record multiple times for publicly stating that Tucker Carlson is such a smarmy little fuck because he didn't get punched in the face enough times to learn to cut that shit out, for example.

But, fundamentally, it comes down to the simple fact that I used to be a conservative, and the kind of white trash-affirming racist trash-fire bullshit one constantly sees on that channel is not what I was taught. In point of fact, it's damned near the opposite. I'm a Democrat now for a reason.

It's Fox News that often makes me wonder what the hell kind of crazy Mirror-Universe I accidentally woke up in this morning.

That said, the other night at work I saw this, and my response was an audible "WHAT THE FUCK?!" while sitting in the break-room.

Why? Because this is what what's left of American Movement Conservatism:

Today, "Conservatism" is all about talk. You can basically say whatever dumb shit you want, and from there, you hope the mob picks it up and runs with it. Then you mail in more bullshit tomorrow, and every so often, just to gin up the rubes, you say some shit that on some level, you hope you never have to back up...but if it gets ratings, great! Conservatism is no longer about doing, it's about getting other people...many, if not most of whom, people you wouldn't piss on if they were on fire...to do for you.

These people (for example) hate the DACA kids, Dreamers, non-Cuban Latinos (and them too, if they're not Trump Supporters) in general and Mexican-Americans in particular with all the fiery energy of a thousands splendid suns. They especially hate people who want to come here and work hard or serve in the military or otherwise contribute to society. They hate most of all those immigrants (Latino or otherwise, legal or otherwise) who sign onto the idea of being an American and expect to be rewarded for it with their own small part of the American dream. As I've said before, right-wingers don't want to do anything...and they don't want anybody else to do anything either...

...But if a war with North Korea breaks out, they'll be happy to chuck as many of those people as possible into the meat grinder for Capitalism, God, Old Glory and most of all Donald Trump...just so long as when it's over those people go back to picking beans in the hot California sun and never have to be seen or thought of by White People ever again...unless they're seen briefly, hunched over in a field, from the windows of a shiny new gas-guzzling Lincoln Navigator.

Don't expect decent health care or veteran's benefits either, but here...here's this $5 lunch coupon and cheap hat and Thanks For Your Service (TM) as long as you agree to serve as a political prop for all type of shitty things you'd never personally agree to...

It's become the Crab Bucket fallacy on steroids. If I can't have it, neither can you. If I can't be a movie star or a singer or idly rich, you can't have anything at all. Many of today's "Conservatives" think they're all in the 1% or would be if it wasn't for "Those People" (a blame game that varies on an hourly basis, it seems) while the actual people who propagated this mentality (who wouldn't piss on a "White Working Class" conservative if he was on fire) and who mostly aren't actually all that conservative are currently taking 83% of any new wealth that is generated.

Meanwhile, the "Conservative" response is to give everything to Donald Trump, then kick back and wait for the big bucks to come rolling in. Never mind that Trump has to use it all to pay back the Russian mob bosses and oligarchs, lest some big bull-necked dude named Ivan Chekov show up and break his kneecaps and the Secret Service people conveniently all decide to go get a cup of coffee at that particular moment.

Conservatives, meanwhile, appear to be fine with this. Creationism, endless political partisanship and doubling down on white privilege have all reduced these people to the level of trusting children, so long as the "right" person is telling them what they want to hear, and while we're at it, apparently a 13-year-old Black kid is now considered an adult and a 28-year-old White House staffer doesn't have to have an adult level of judgement about anything...

Why? Because fuck you if you're not part of the club (and we're in denial about saying that, too.) That's why. BUILD THAT WALL!

Because God forbid people who aren't rich, White and the correct kind of Christian (or shitty atheistic Randian Granny Starver) Male (slight exception for women who are blonde and look like models or porn stars) with the right political views (...an ever-narrowing line that, currently, excludes even an ever-increasing number of white conservative Christians...) dare to expect the Constitutional and legal rights and most of all the respect that even conservative America promised them until recently.

No, that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. More to the point, the longer this goes on the worse the reckoning is going to be when it's over.

Case in point, when I say that an increasing number of white conservatives are *Also* being marginalized...by other white conservatives. This lady is a Redstate.com writer. It's worth noting that the Central Park Five case in particular was what cemented my hatred of Donald Trump, who was a Democrat, a nominal liberal, and yes, a racist at the time.

Now, look here, when I was coming up, conservatism was about actions at least as much as it was about what you said. Conservation and protecting the environment were part of the deal, because it was well understood that we've only got one Earth. You paid your bills, kept your word and said what you meant because it was also understood that somebody who doesn't keep their word ain't worth shit. You respected those who served...in any capacity, military or civilian...but you damned sure didn't fawn over them or heap fake admiration or praise on them as part of a political agenda. Also, war, particularly with another nuclear power...was generally considered a bad thing, and something to be avoided. The idea was "Peace through strength" projected with a quiet, businesslike certainty that apparently died alone and forgotten like one of Newt Gingrich's ex-wives, about 20 years ago.

While we're at it, if stuff needed to get done you got the most qualified person for the job. Their color didn't matter. When I registered to vote for the first time, in 1991, as a damn Republican, Black men like Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan figured prominently on my list of heroes. That we kicked Saddam's ass with a Black man in charge of the United States Army was something I never let myself forget. That one of my first introductions to the workings of politics was closely following the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas in print, on the radio and on TV for a government-class extra credit project is something I don't forget either. In this vein, if an athlete is skilled enough at their sport that they are qualified to join the United States Olympic Team, it's safe to say that they are among the best in the world at what they do. It's not even a question. If they're not a white person, or a straight person? SO THE FUCK WHAT!? It's none of your goddamned business what color they are. If they are there, if they have put in the blood, sweat, tears and mind-blowing exhausting goddamned Work that it takes to be a professional athlete and to fucking be there in the first place (because it takes some goddamned hard ass work to even get a shot at the US Olympic Team) and they make the cut, the proper thing to do is treat them with the respect that their efforts deserve and expect that they're just as capable of winning on their own merits as anybody else. If they weren't, they simply would not be there.

30 years ago, Republicans stood up in front of the entire world and demanded that walls be torn down. Ronald Reagan stood at the Bradenburg Gate in Berlin and demanded "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Tear down this wall!"

Mike Pence, on the other hand, refused to stand for the Unified Korea team, because god knows, what American conservatives and Donald Trump want is more important that what the actual Koreans want...especially if they want peace. Don't they know, War is peace! Now Mike is going to have to go back to the DMZ and mean mug in a northerly direction again, as if daring the Norks to challenge his Marlboro-Man manliness (and remember, this is a dude who calls his wife "Mother," what could be more manly than that?)

Let's get one thing straight here, respect is earned. Every action, every day, and this dude is disrespecting the Koreans at an event that, fundamentally, is about promoting peace. How do you think that's going to play with the rest of the world, really?

Pence has become known for disreputable political stunts, but ya know, unlike Trump (who does them mostly without thinking) Mike Pence seems to know what he's doing. If he thinks so poorly of the whole rest of the world...I'll give you three guesses how highly he thinks of you or me, but you'll probably only need one. (...And this guy is supposed to be the respectable one?)

Back in the day, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals alike (and in those days, not all Democrats were liberals and not all Republicans were conservatives) may have disagreed about how to get shit done, or what the best way was to make things better...but it was generally understood that both sides wanted to make things better. How, was something that would get hashed out in debate over the issues. Back in those days, military parades were something that happened in the Soviet Union. We laughed at the idea...

Now, Republicans regard the very idea of debate as a challenge to their authority and a threat to their manhood. Now, Republicans regard being laughed at as a greater threat than being shot at. At some point, Republicans stopped wanting a leader, and started wanting a mirror that reflected their biases and their bullshit and their old bitter-ass certainty that "If I can't have it, neither can you." Well, they got it, and it got elected. Please Clap.

This is who Donald Trump is, an old, fat, impotent yet penis-obsessed, ridiculously-coiffed silly man in the beginning stages of Dementia, who mocks the very Christians and conservatives who put him in power and is what and where he is because of the (as I outlined in my previous series of articles) intersection of capitalism and racism. He's sitting there and defending a fucking wife-beater. This, this Turducken of Treason-ception and late-stage capitalist reality show dumb shit, is who the Republicans have built their deck around. There's a picture I often see, a CNN screen shot of Trump mocking a disabled reporter. The caption provided is generally something along the lines of "I'll never understand how this wasn't the end of it." Well, on a basic level I can agree with that. There's only one problem, I've been following this asshole (whether I wanted to or not) since the 1980's and I've always been disgusted by him. When I was a conservative-leaning fifteen-year old whose big goal was getting his driver's license that November, Donald Trump the then-liberal Democrat published this in the New York Times:

"Bring Back the Death Penalty" and "Bring Back Our Police" all over five black and brown kids who would later be exonerated of the crimes they were accused of, tried for and convicted of. When called out on this bullshit, Trump doubled down.

As if his opinion, was somehow above reality itself.

As for me, I don't know how this wasn't the end of it, this right here, in *1989.*

And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held:

And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?

And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellow-servants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled. ~Revelation 6:9-11

That day is coming, and it's a failure of imagination on the part of American Christianity and Conservatism that they could never imagine they'd be the ones on the wrong side of it.

How many Black Christians do you suppose have been killed by American white racists? How many Black churches have been burned by them?

I get that the white folks thought that the black folks didn't count. What I don't get is why anyone thought God might feel the same way.

It doesn't seem the least bit radical to me, to think that the future might be more Black, or Brown, or Female, or Gay, or more diverse in general.  The day will come when this nation has its first Gay or first Mexican American or first Muslim president. It seems both foolish and radical to assume that a silly old white man represents the future, let alone the only future, the only option, the only way.

It seems better, in the long term, to accept being a part of diversity than to be opposed to it.

You want your way of life to survive, conservatives? Don't build a wall, build a more diverse conservatism.

The judgment is coming, Republicans. I hope you're looking at that Big Orange Mirror when it comes.

...And it will come.

American Revelation: Part Four

American Revelation (Part Four)

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. ~Revelation 6:7-8

From the moment I decided I wanted to do this series of articles, I new that the subject of death was going to come up. In fact, I suspected it was going to be a theme of the entire series, though I think I've done a decent job of not letting it run away with the script. 

The picture above is a picture from the Tuol Sleng Genocide museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The Cambodian Genocide was easily the most terrible chapter in a book full of them, begun by American involvement in Vietnam, concurrent with US support (including military support) for authoritarian regimes in Cambodia and Laos. Following "Peace with Honor" and American withdrawal from Vietnam achieved by Richard Nixon, the local forces struggled to contain the Communist insurgencies...and in the case of South Vietnam...a slow-motion military invasion. It all came crashing down in 1975, leading to additional American military action in the form of Operation Frequent Wind, the evacuation of Americans and other foreign nationals along with Vietnamese who had worked with the Americans in sensitive capacities. However, when the Cambodian government fell on April 17th of 1975, there was no comparable effort to that which was then ongoing in Vietnam, and the full extent of the resulting horrors would be known only when the Vietnamese Army invaded Cambodia (in response to Khmer Rouge attacks against their own country) in 1978 and especially after the conquest of the country by the Vietnamese People's Army in 1979. 

Skulls stacked on bookshelves in Cambodia...

Two million tons of bombs dropped on Laos from 1964 to 1972...

And for what??

That's the real question.

The Laotians, and whoever else will help them, are still dealing with UXO (Un-Exploded Ordinance) along the former Ho Chi Minh trail and on the Plain of Jars. Usually, it's in the form of cluster-bomb munitions...anyone care to speculate what a Mk. 20 Antipersonnel munition from a CBU-100 Rockeye Cluster Bomb can do to a human body? Even after it's been sitting there for 50 years?

Laos has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the world (73%) Even among literate Laotians, the idea of reading a book for enjoyment is something many people there don't understand. US-supported NGO's are trying to help with literacy issues there. Even so, the country's GDP is not that high, and it's place in the Human Development Index hangs onto the low end of medium.

These are the effects of war, and Cold War politics, even half a century later. 

I bring this up, because we've seen similar patterns in the continuing conflict with the Islamic State after the American withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, although the government there ultimately held, US forces returned in small numbers and Kurdish proxies helped to drive Daesh from Iraq. Also, no one with a brain in their head seriously expects that the corrupt, unstable government in Afghanistan will long survive after US and NATO forces leave...especially given that the Russians appear to now be backing their former enemies, the Taliban.

If there's anything we've learned...it's that this isn't over. In a lot of ways, it often seems like Americans haven't learned a damned thing since 1975...or 1968 for that matter. For fuck's sake, I'm not sure we've ever adequately dealt with the ramifications of 1863.

We're not off the hook domestically, either...and I'm not just talking about the Civil War. We have our own terrible history of ethnic cleansing, genocide and war...the The Trail of Tears, the various Indian Wars, the expulsion of African Americans from Forsyth County, Georgia. Lynching, Murder, Segregation, no, really, the Cambodians or for that matter the Germans don't have a damn thing on us. The terrible truth is, that when a certain part of Donald Trump's base says "Make America Great Again" that is exactly the kind of shit they're talking about.

It's still going on, in small numbers but with considerable media awareness in the form of police brutality against African Americans and the occasional white supremacy-fueled incident...and certainly more of those than there were before Trump.

That's not the only problem, as I've said before, we have around 30,000 firearms-related deaths in this country every year. The Opioid Epidemic kills around 60,000 people every year. As I said yesterday, just because you can't see it doesn't mean we don't have disease, starvation, and Third-World sanitation conditions right here in the United States of America.

...And we currently have leaders who see death as increasing their profits.

That is absolutely where health care cuts lead to.

That is absolutely the result of over-prescription of Opioids.

That is absolutely the result of prioritizing firearms-industry profits over the safety of the public...

It's also frequently the result of despair.

DEATH.

Let me ask you something...look in some depth at the current "Conservative" political and social program. Do you see any hope there? For anybody who doesn't make at least six figures, anyway?

I sure don't.

As a people, we don't reach for the stars anymore. Despite all the power and influence of the Trumpvangelicals...or more properly, probably because of it...religion is in decline, at least to my knowledge, and particularly among white people. Education is increasingly looked down upon at least among conservatives, the Coal industry isn't coming back, the outsourcing of manufacturing continues...

All we're being offered as compensation is racism, Trump's one-political party clown show, and the vague promise of hurting people...

Who exactly finds hope...or anything else worth having...in any of that, besides racists, I mean.

Believe me when I tell you, despair can lead to death.

Every time I happen to see FOX News on a TV somewhere, or am unlucky enough to see some conspiracy theory kark or when I find myself encountering some angry alt-right internet-Nazi who's never seen a naked woman outside of a porn video...I find myself wondering, how the hell do these people get up in the morning? Who in the hell really wants to live in that kind of world?

I'm divorced, trust me. I know from personal experience that there's limits to spite in that regard.

I don't find the idea of "The world is horrible, now go out there and be a terrible person before someone comes along and is terrible to you" to be a good program for...well, anything. Selling out your country and your religion and your soul for the sake of hate just seems like a terrible idea.

I see conservatism...and individual conservatives...spiraling off into hate and racism and some kind of bizarre social rage at the idea that anybody is doing better than they are, and I see only spiritual death.

I often think that these people don't want to accomplish anything...but they don't want anybody else to accomplish anything either.

People being so afraid of change or difference or The Other that they'd destroy the very civilization that sustains them...that's being spiritually dead, right there.

As an American, hell as a former conservative, who was taught what the ideals of America mean and why somebody would want to come here from a place like Afghanistan or El Salvador or Lebanon or Nigeria or Tonga and sign on to the ideal of being an American...I literally do not see the point of Building A Wall or trying to keep out any of those people...who historically want to come here and end up making America better...and I think anybody...anybody...who'd sell this great (for all its faults) country out to a Third-World shit-hole like Putin's Russia (for any reason) ought to have the last thing they see be the muzzle-flashes of a firing squad's rifles.

Death has a purpose, on occasion.

Death is, naturally, a part of life.

But 90,000 unnecessary deaths per year? That's not a part of life.

Death by despair and drug addiction and murder and war? That's not supposed to be part of life either.

A religion that nobody really believes, because in reality it's all dog-whistles for power and wealth, there's nothing life-affirming about that. The quoted Bible verse says "...And Hell followed with him" but many other translations will say "Hades" instead. Hades was a name for the Underworld, and for the god who controlled it. In the Ancient World, if you weren't righteous enough to go to whatever state of blessed afterlife, nor evil enough for your soul to be destroyed...you went to the Underworld. To me...that's what spiritual death means. Too often people get hung up on the issue of heaven or hell, but by design...there was always that third option....and it seems like it sucks.

George Orwell described fascism as "Imagine a boot, stomping on a human face, forever."

Do you know what I imagine the Underworld, in a modern context, would be like?

Imagine sitting in a recliner, with a beer in your hand, watching FOX News...forever.

Imagine having the choice between possibly knowing all the secrets of the universe, or sitting there and resenting the hell out of those who do.

The worst part is, there's people who will choose the latter, willingly.

That is spiritual death.

The truth is that the Judgement of the Black Horse and Death...and for that matter all of the other of the Four Horsemen...isn't dying, it isn't being killed in some horrible manner...It isn't war, famine, plague or some combination of them...the true Judgement is what comes after when we are judged for how we lived, for how we treated people, and the Earth, and all the other living things that inhabit it.

Death is only the beginning.

Live your life accordingly.

...And know that Ayn Rand was wrong, your self-satisfaction is not its purpose.

American Revelation (Part Three)

Mirror, Mirror (Part Five)

American Revelation (Part Three)

When he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” And I looked, and behold, a black horse! And its rider had a pair of scales in his hand. 6 And I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures, saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius, and do not harm the oil and wine!” ~Revelation 6:5 (ESV)

So, Paul Ryan (R-Galt's Gulch) posted a Tweet over the weekend lauding the fact that a high-school Secretary would get an additional $1.50 a week due to the Trump tax cut. He said this, as if it was some kind of a good thing....and the shitty little Ayn Rand-worshiping motherfucker promptly got dog-piled on by half of the internet for it, before deleting the Tweet. But, of course, the Internet never forgets. For example, there's this guy:

Of course, Randy Bryce AKA IronStache, is the Union Iron-worker who's running against Paul Ryan (or whoever, most likely Nazi Paul Nehlen, runs in his stead should he retire.) I'm just sayin' as the midterms get closer, I'm going to make the first time I actually make a monetary political donation in my life. (I did volunteer once, for the local county Republicans, way back, you know, when being a Republican still meant more than being a bigoted Nationalist and Trump apologist.) Never forget that at this point, despite Trump's big talk, it's Congressional Republicans that are effectively in charge. Trump provides no leadership (and he appears to be controlled by racist advisers) but is the "Circuses" part in the Republican Bread & Circuses agenda...except that most Congressional Republicans actually want to take away the bread, not to mention everybody's health care and social security for old people, as IronStache pointed out. Then there's the President weighing in:

Trump thinks people in the UK are protesting the NHS itself, whereas what's actually going on is that people are protesting the Tory funding cuts to the NHS. (This is why, as I pointed out in my last essay, it's good to have an understanding of the political situation in other countries, because Americans certainly will lie about them if you don't know.)

Now, a word about Linguistics (and why I chose the English Standard Version for the pull-quote instead of the King James, as would be customary. The reason is that I wanted to avoid confusion in this verse, which prophesies the judgement of Scarcity being inflicted upon the Earth. In Roman times, the amount of money paid to the average laborer for a day's work was called a Denarius. Basically what this verse is saying, is that the average people will be just barely making enough to survive, while the rich (as signified by Oil and Wine, symbols of wealth in ancient Israel) will prosper and not be harmed by the End Times events, at least not yet.

Hmm, kind of sounds like the average working American could argue we're there already, eh?

Take note of what people in other countries (in this case, Australia) think of our health care system...and keep in mind that Australia gets a lot of crap internationally for being a relatively conservative country.

Far from being "Great again" under the Republican program, we're a laughingstock, that is at the same time increasingly being seen as in some ways easily ignored, and in other ways, a threat. It's also worth noting that with the treasury running increasingly dry, we're set to borrow upwards of a trillion dollars, which is an 84% increase over last year.

You know, if the rest of the world was smart, at this point, they'd smack us upside the head and tell us no, start paying your own goddamned bills. Republicans historically like to spend money like drunken sailors on the things they want...but then they want to borrow money to pay (or cut) the things that they don't want...you know, the stuff that benefits average people like you or me, or the things we should damned well be paying for simply because they need to be done or because they involve taking care of their own people...you know...the people who ultimately generate the tax revenue that pays the nation's bills.

But of course that doesn't jibe with Paul Ryan's Ayn Randian economic platform, where the rich just take their ball and go home and wait for the world to collapse...except of course, they don't actually do that, do they? No, they use their tax savings primarily on financial speculation, which doesn't generate anything but more wealth for them personally.

Meanwhile, paying the actual bills that these motherfuckers should be paying gets punted to...at this point...generations down the road. I'm just saying, if I tried to live like that, I'd be out on my ear and no one would care. We don't tolerate a working person not paying their bills, so why do we allow half of the political class to buy into trickle-down economics and allow rich people to not pay their fair share of our nation's bills? In today's rapidly changing world, this could become a problem, real damned fast.

There are some places in this country, Arizona, California and Florida among them, that could literally run out of water. Of course Trump's solution to natural disasters (Half-ass preparation and response or worse, none at all) as shown by his administration's bungled responses to hurricanes in Texas and Puerto Rico is probably an even worse idea in these cases.

As for Florida, Capitalism seems to be a major driver of the problem. Now, one might ask, who tends to buy new houses in a place like Florida? The answer to that? Old people, retirees, the same motherfuckers whose lack of willingness to pay taxes (even as they themselves are hugely dependent on Federal government programs like Medicare and Social Security) has broken the state's politics for generations. What happens to those capitalists putting up new exurbs and subdivisions when retirees suddenly have trouble making their house payments, or rapidly end up underwater on their mortgages due to escalating health care costs or social security cuts?

Bankruptcy and a local repeat of the 2008 economic crisis, that's what. If people can't pay their bills or don't have money to spend on shit...much less the basic necessities of life...they you don't, you can't...have a capitalist economy. By hoarding money now (rather than keeping that money in the system in the long-term, where it generates more money for everybody including them) rich people ultimately harm even their own futures, and what happens when investments and speculation go bad? They end up in the same bread lines as the rest of us, or jump off of buildings or shoot themselves, and as they do it, they'll wonder what happened.

All this has happened before, and it will happen again. The only question is, when?

When, in Republican-land, you get an extra $1.50 a week and some rich dude gets $3,000, that doesn't work in the long term because there's more of you and me. We spend more money over all. We're the people who work for the companies that rich people own and we're the people who buy stuff from those companies as well. Invert the variables, give me the $3,000 and Paul Ryan the $1.50 and rich people will still have 90% of that money by the end of the week, because I have to pay my bills, I have things that I want, the ferrets need stuff, and so on and so forth. The only difference is, in going from point A to point B to point C that money is the grease that keeps the gears of our capitalistic system turning. That's how this country achieved the power and prosperity that Trump likes to hearken back to and that the Baby Boomers saw when they were little kids (and expected to have forever.) If you cut out the middle man, and the working man, and just give money to the rich straight up...it doesn't take that long and winding road first, it just ends up parked in some offshore account in the Cayman Islands and may not get to be a data point in the American economy at all.

Meanwhile, the elderly go hungry, kids go hungry and don't get an education, college students are saddled with debts enough to make their sacrifices to get those degrees questionable, and drug-fueled crises further fueled by despair, destruction of social fabric, lack of education, rage and social displacement (which people talk a lot about but don't do anything to address, rage on and on, and devastate mostly-conservative rural communities...that are already excessively dependent on Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and Welfare to begin with. (And what happens to those communities when those sources of income and support dry up?) We have, if you look at it not just in depressed rural regions like Appalachia but also among the urban poor and homeless, endemic problems of disease and hunger and lack of proper sanitation. Extreme capitalism has already destroyed much of the American social fabric...particularly among conservatives...and what are we left with as compensation? Trump's Nero-esque Bread and Circuses schtick.

Does watching all this dumb shit on TV pay your bills? Just curious...

Why, in this economic and political climate, if you work long and hard enough for economic and social justice...you could get co-opted and used to sell pickup trucks too!

I saw this early this morning, and I'm honestly to the point where I think, if there really is a God, then divine retribution against this country and its godless wealthy shitheads for their perversions should damned well be forthcoming. When I say perversion in this case...I'm not talking about homosexuality or anything like that, again, I'm talking about the perversion of life and the purpose of it. Martin Luther King Jr. would be against everything that America under Donald Trump stands for, and not just because racism is apparently a big issue again, either.

Decent educations and good jobs and investment in communities and people, living wages, national health care, hell even a strong national defense (and people being educated and healthy enough to serve in it) don't grow on trees. If we're going to have those things and keep having them, we've got to stop prioritizing giving rich people money. We've got to stop falling for it when these people, like shitty trailer-park Heroin dealers, offer people that first hit of the drug of racism for free. They're not doing that because they like you, or because they necessarily hate People of Color themselves. They know that this particular social herpes is...like Opioid addiction...a sometimes invisible cancer eating away at the body politic of the United States of America...and the first hit of the racism drug may be free, but you know that just like a trailer park drug dealer...these people will damned sure collect their debts, or just plain rob you blind while you're stoned on the couch...before circumstances force that cancer back into remission.

And what happens when the racism itself forces American farmers...often dependent on illegal immigrant labor...out of business? What happens when food costs go up, or worse, we become a net importer of food (which will cause costs to go up even more) and there are still cuts to social security and welfare? Because of low wages, there are a lot of working people who get food stamps. Hell, even gas stations and such advertise heavily that they take EBT cards now. Food stamps, along with fast food jobs and Wal-Mart, have become a bigger part of the American economy than they were ever supposed to, or capable of being in the long term. What happens to all that, if Paul Ryan gets his cuts? Health care, perhaps excessively at this point fueled by Medicaid and Medicare, is over 20% of our economy. Trump may not know or care to know this stuff, many Congressional Republicans may be dangerously out of touch, but you and I should damned well know it. Hell, this stuff should be evident to anybody who pays attention to advertising on the TV.

Perhaps more to the point...if Republicans get their way and America descends into Third World style autocracy, chaos, death and starvation...does anybody, including rich people, really think that the American Dollar will be worth anything or that this country's place in the world will not decrease accordingly?

Go ahead, think about it, take all the time you need.

American Revelation, Part Two.

American Revelation: Part Four

American Revelation (Part Two)

And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see.

And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword. ~Revelation 6:3-4

I ran into a friend of mine at work yesterday morning when I took the kitchen laundry over to the hotel, a lady I hadn't seen in awhile, and for that reason I'd wondered a bit if everything was OK. Her name is Virginia, she and her husband Henry have been very good friends of mine for years. They're immigrants. Henry is from Zimbabwe, Virginia (despite her strong African accent) is from the UK, though her father was a Black dude from South Africa. After the requisite couple minutes of small talk, I said "So, I've been wanting to talk to you, or Henry, about Zimbabwe, I saw that Robert Mugabe is gone. I watched the events of the Coup very closely...and I thought of Henry."

At that point, this old, chatty African lady exploded into joy. "Yes, Gone! It was beautiful. The best thing of all, no one died, there was no violence. Henry was very happy." I wholeheartedly agreed that it was a beautiful thing that all this happened without violence. I told her that I was just a little kid, not quite eight years old, when Mugabe became the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. Virginia replied that she had just graduated from high school the year before. We talked a bit about the situation, she said that international aid has increased, and some of the expropriated land has been returned to white Zimbabweans, which she believed will motivate foreign investors and bring in needed capital, which will decrease the need for aid and help get the country on its feet. Virginia isn't an economist or even management where I work, she's a housekeeper. We covered all this stuff in a conversation that lasted five, maybe six minutes, while me and another dude were unloading a couple hundred pounds of laundry. Then Virginia gave me a hug, we agreed we had to make arrangements to hang out and talk more about this stuff, and she went to punch in for her workday.

The other dude, John, who barely follows American politics or economic stuff, was dumbfounded. He said "You know a lot about politics, don't you? I couldn't even imagine following that stuff in another country." I laughed "You should, it certainly could affect you."

See, there's more ties between Zimbabwe...or more properly, Rhodesia, it's white-dominated predecessor...and the American far-right than one might think. The exact kind of nuts that are now Trump Supporters are the same people who went over and fought for the Rhodesian Army or engaged in sanctions-busting, or otherwise supported the white minority government in the 1970's at the height of the Rhodesian Bush War. I'm talking about people like this damned nut. I'm talking about people like Robin Moore, who wrote the book on which the John Wayne movie "The Green Berets" was based, I'm talking about the fact that the US government violated its own sanctions to buy ore from Rhodesia and I'm talking about Soldier Of Fortune magazine.

These are the people who thought Nixon didn't go far enough...who thought that the Vietnam War should have...or could have, or would have...ended with mushroom clouds over Hanoi. As if the Chinese or the Soviets...both of whom would have lost people in such an attack...would not have responded with a retaliatory strike of their own somewhere.

Hell, their only answer to Communism was massive, naked force as well. Their answer couldn't have been better ideas...because they didn't have any. For all their love of it, they don't understand war. War is not about destroying things...war is about making the enemy break before you do...otherwise there would be no battle cries or war dances. War isn't about just destroying or killing...it's about doing so effectively. Otherwise, well, you get Vietnam, or the Soviet or American misadventures in Afghanistan. In such cases, all the enemy has to do is hang on until the invader poisons local public opinion against themselves enough...

But that's not really what it's about. Get used to that idea, that it's never really about what these people say it's about.

Anti-Communism was often, among far-right types at least, a racist dog-whistle. The UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) government of Ian Smith, especially after they declared Rhodesia a Republic, cast themselves as the defenders of Christianity and Western Civilization, fighting against the hordes of Godless Communism. Sound familiar? Now, none of that is true, of course. Whether one sees it on Alt-right Nazi websites today or heard it from far-right politicians or the KKK back in the day, it's still bullshit. The Zimbabwean Nationalist rebels got a lot of help, training and weapons from the East Bloc, but that was who would help them. Funny thing but towards the end the Rhodesian government had no issues with buying Soviet-made T-55 Tanks from Poland, either, just like the Alt-right has no issues with accepting help from Russia now...even though Vladimir Putin was a KGB agent and steeped in "Godless Communism" himself.

The way this war worked, was that the Rhodesian Security Forces held the upper hand against Nationalist Guerrillas, while maintaining a reign of terror over the majority Black population, and the fighting was primarily rural. It went on this way from UDI in 1964 until the 1974 Carnation Revolution (a successful revolt by liberal-leaning NATO-trained military officers against Portugal's borderline fascist government following the death of dictator Antonio De Oliviera Salazar) led to the end of the war in Portugal's overseas colonies, including Mozambique. This deprived the Rhodesians of one of their two main sources of military supply and support (the other being South Africa) that was willing to break the arms embargo and it forced the government to start looking for a political solution to the war. Negotiations were somewhat successful, an internal settlement was reached, and a Black-majority government was installed, but the two main armed Nationalist groups were excluded...so they kept fighting and kept the pressure on. It worked, and after the Lancaster House agreement with the UK in 1979 the country reverted briefly to British rule and under the authority of (yes, Conservative) Margaret Thatcher's government...even though she personally sympathized with Rhodesian Whites...  which held to the stated policy of No Independence Before Majority African Rule) a more permanent solution was achieved. In 1980, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, and Robert Mugabe became its Prime Minister.

Despite his socialistic rhetoric and acceptance of Chinese and Soviet aid, Mugabe adhered to a largely-conservative program...but one that fully included the Black majority in all respects. Faced with competition, a lot of the whites left in gradually increasing numbers, and Mugabe's seizure of land owned by white farmers in 2000 caused still more to leave. None of that helped anything, and Mugabe himself spiraling off into autocracy and greed made matters much worse. In fact only agricultural assistance and equipment provided by China helped Zimbabwe to begin to redevelop the skills to use the land properly. In the meantime, Zimbabwe is still a net-importer of food (where food was once a major export) but as my friend said, things have improved a little bit in the meantime, and there is hope for more.

What does any of this have to do with anything? Well, during the conflict it was quite common to see Rhodesian housewives out and about carrying sub-machine guns and such (so, along the lines of "This is the future conservatives want" yet again...) and as I've said before those people's rhetoric and that of white American conservatives are pretty damned similar. The fact of a changing international situation is also broadly similar, although current environmental problems add a variable that didn't exist (at least not on this level) forty years ago.

But on some level...the conservatives? They're largely the same or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that they've begun to revert to the kind of bullshit they were known for in the 1950's. Of course, that too started with the National Rifle Association back in the 1990's. Ironically, much of the worst of it happened under Charlton Heston's leadership. Now how a guy goes from marching with Martin Luther King Jr. for civil rights and protesting segregation...to dog-whistle racism and waving a gun around, I'll never know...Neoconservative or not.

Fuck, *I* used to be a Neoconservative and I couldn't support that type of shit. I let my own NRA membership lapse in 2000 because I thought they'd become too political and that was never what I signed up for.

I'm glad now, that I left when I did because (even though the craziness actually died down during the Bush years) it's gotten much worse lately.

One gets the vibe that these people just can't wait to shoot it out with their fellow Americans. What makes people want to do stuff like that? I'd submit that in retrospect, it seems fairly obvious that the farther-right one gets, the more racism becomes part of the program. Whether people intended for that to be the case, or it just happened, doesn't matter. We're there now. We have people who'd rather have kids killing kids, or mass shootings with almost 600 total casualties, than take a chance that they might actually be fully equal to Black folks...rather than merely legally equal. After all, as conservatives themselves are so fond of telling people, just because one makes a law about something doesn't mean that people will obey. I guess they'd know. They don't have to arm themselves and organize and shoot it out with the rest of us, all they have to do is provide easy access to weapons, including providing them to crazy people, and watch as crazy and malicious and stupid people kill other people for all sorts of dumb reasons.

It's population control through murder and suicide, that's what it is.

How else would Dylan Roof, a goddamned racist nut with legal issues and a drug problem, and who owned a jacket with a Rhodesian flag on it, get the handgun he used to kill nine African Americans in a church? According to none other than then-FBI Director James Comey, the only reason Roof was able to purchase his Glock .45-caliber handgun was lapses in the NICS background-check system, which is operated by the FBI. You know who resists any attempt to make that system work better? The NRA. That's who.

From the beginning, capitalism and guns have been intertwined with racism...but even these fools know that if they just went out and started killing black people, or gay people, or Muslims or poor people or whatever they'd get taken out real quick, and whoever of them survived they'd be put on trial for ethnic cleansing, genocide, mass murder...you name it. But no...aim it at an average of 30,000 random people per year, then recast it as mere corporate profit, and package it up with a good corporate lobbying game and an action-movie star or two (and the NRA board is loaded with them) and it's not only perfectly legal, but likely to be resoundingly popular, at least among those who think they could or should have had a shot at being action movie stars.

They know that at least some of those 30,000 people are going to be the people they don't like. They know at least some of those people are going to be people they consider a drain on the system. They don't care about the collateral damage, as long as it isn't them.

It's the same thing with homophobia. I always said that homophobia got to be such a thing because it wasn't cool for people to be racist anymore...and there's the added bonus that people of color end up being LGBT at about the same rate as everybody else...so they got to hand onto a little of their hatred for everybody else, too.

Guns and hate go way back, too.

The fact that something like 80% of Americans including a lot of conservatives want better gun control? That just gets lost in the mix, because the American system is tilted towards handing a megaphone to the crazy, the rabid, and the salacious.

The fact that all African-Americans or most of the rest of us want is a fair shake? They don't care about that, either.

In fact, at this point I'd wager that any resolution to any situation that doesn't result in a firefight is a disappointment to the fucking NRA. When all you have is a hammer, sooner or later everything starts to look like a nail.

It doesn't hurt that guns fir well with their mentality of authoritarianism and life as a zero-sum game, either.

"Do what I say, because I've got a gun" ...only works for as long as the ammunition holds out.

I'm a gun owner, I grew up around guns, and I say this is ridiculous.

The only reason that the Right to Bear Arms is being pushed to the point of absolutism...is because it's the one most easily capable of being used as a club to beat on all of the other rights of their neighbors, citizens and otherwise, immigrant or native-born.

Then, of course, there's the American political class (Left or Right, it often seems) and corporations and their love of war, as my inclusion of the picture of Henry Kissenger was meant to suggest, but regarding that issue...which of course could be many more posts of its own...I think I'll just say that these days, I'm really feeling like a lot of why we get ourselves involved in places like Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam...is because if the people who really drive this problem actually chose to invade Chicago...which Trump was actually dumb enough to bring up...or Los Angeles, Americans might notice, and stand up and do something about them. Republicans want to bomb North Korea because they know if they bombed California, they'd have a civil war on their hands, that they'd more than likely lose.

And after all, as far as Republicans are concerned, what good is spending all that money on weapons (or anything else?) if it doesn't keep them in power?

Remember, that's what all this crazy bullshit is all about, power.

But remember, too, that there's another way...and that when I spoke about these issues with an immigrant...that was the first place her mind went, without having to exhaust other alternatives.

...And that, right there, is a threat to those who wish to hoard money and power, who'd happily retroactively throw out Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan for their liberal heresies (such as working with the existing systems in the context of their time and place even when it didn't favor them, or doing what a majority of the people wanted) and who want to throw out any aspect of our system...up to and including naturally conservative-leaning parts of it like the Federal Bureau of Investigation...because adherence to (and rule of) law is also a threat to that power.

Change is coming, and these people started it, or will make it worse, depending on one's point of view. Conservatism in America is at least as dead as Ronald Reagan is.

We...the rest of us...had best come up with something new fast, before people's worst impulses start filling the void.

American Revelation (Part One)

American Revelation (Part Three)

American Revelation (Part One)

Revelation 6 King James Version (KJV)

6 And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.

2 And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.

You know, I'm a former member of the End Times Prophecy Movement...and also a former conservative Baptist (but from back when that meant something other than "Fundamentalist nut) and I used to be a Republican. Over the last couple of years, I've watched with interest that has slowly ramped up to increasing horror over the almost-worship of a Man (and throwing away every value they've ever claimed in his service) by my former party and many of the very same people who have (or claim to have) the same background and life experience as I do, and who claim political or religious views that spring from the same wellspring of thought as what I used to believe.

In the Book of Revelation, none of the Beasts described as originating from the Seven Seals signifying the initial judgement of God are ever described as being good or worthy of following. But then, I see pictures like the one I posted above...and I can almost imagine the adoring fawning by Trump Supporters over a person such as the one seated on the White Horse. 

For those who don't know, the End Times nuts usually take the First Seal judgement as signifying the "Anti-Christ" of "pop-Christian" thought. Yet here we have an image of Donald Trump standing on an outdated M-1 Abrams tank...looks to be an original M-1 (driving out of the surf with no snorkel kit and a paint job that in the real world says "bust my chops") while holding an M-82 .50 Caliber anti-materiel rifle as an improbably-armed Bald Eagle and a Vietnam-era UH-1 Iroquois helicopter provide air support against unseen foes and (apparently) an Iowa-class Battleship waits offshore. Firstly, I quite suspect whoever made this has about as much exposure to the physics of modern firearms, the United States military, or riding on top of any kind of large vehicle in adverse terrain as John of Patmos had. Secondly, if they've read Revelation 6, they obviously didn't comprehend its meaning one damned bit.

Why? Because they basically just drew Trump as an over the top modern version of the Man On The White Horse.

For anybody who has familiarity with the Book of Revelation, this should be setting off alarm bells.

Let me help you out here. Words have meaning. Starting with the horse...white is often a color associated with peace. The crown signifies that the man is a ruler, obviously. However, no nation or region is named. Note that he is given a bow...but arrows are not mentioned. He is sent out conquering and to conquer...but there is no army and no strategy described. What this has been taken to mean is that a ruler (of one nation or more often some trans-national organization like the United Nations) will claim peace and seize power by threats of force or other nefarious means.

When you actually break it down, this could easily describe somebody like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. But back in the 1990's any Fundamentalist nut would have told you it signified some European secular liberal or United Nations secretary general Boutros Boutros Ghali. 

Here's the funny part...Secretary General Ghali was an Egyptian Coptic Christian (and his wife was a Catholic) and Boutros is Arabic for Peter. So his name means "Peter, son of Peter" and in his own country he was the son of a former Egyptian Prime Minister, a lawyer who served as the foreign affairs minister and thus to much of the world, he was a very respected diplomat and university professor, and the founding Secretary General of the La Francophonie, the international organization of French-speaking countries...a fitting end to the career of a guy who did all his post-graduate studies in France. He believed deeply in peace, yet his tenure was marked by conflict, particularly the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian War.

Fuck, it's almost like American Fundamentalist nuts are classless, tasteless idiots or something. I think anybody who's paid attention for the last couple of years probably can see where I'm going with that. This is a perfect example of white American right-wing anti-intellectualism and racism and these people's minds stopping with the idea that a person with a "non-white" name (even though his name's English version is pretty damned common) who happens to be an Arab and is from another country is somehow something something gazpacho up to no good by default. Also, at the time, plenty of liberals-especially late night comedians-mocked the dude's name and a second term was vetoes by the Clinton administration (much to the outrage of the rest of the world.) So it wasn't just the conservatives who were against him. But that aside, minus a few of the variables being different, it's the same bullshit these people kept trying to slime Barack Obama with and he was born here and was, I think, somebody that a majority of Americans could relate to. But of course, to the average white American racist, somebody not being white invalidates everything else about them. Judging from how these idiots treated Obama...and looking back...you could safely say that to them, apparently any non-white, not obviously-far-right political leader is potentially the Anti-Christ. This is White Supremacy, right here. Never mind that Ghali was, and Obama still is, a Christian.

Ghali's funeral (with military honors provided by the Egyptian Army) was officiated by the Coptic Pope and the dude is buried at a church.

Some Anti-Christ, that guy.

Yet the same people that spewed this kind of dumb shit will hold up the obviously-irreligious old racist white man as a paragon of "Christian" values?

Now, of course, to most thinking people this literally makes no damned sense, and well it shouldn't.

Now, I think this sums up what was going on back in the day:

Situational Ethics

noun

PHILOSOPHY

plural noun: situational ethics

1. the doctrine of flexibility in the application of moral laws according to circumstances.
2. 
   

It's actually, come to think of it, a term that should be familiar to any observer of Republican politics that hasn't spent the last few months curled up on the couch with a Fifth of Old Ocelot bourbon.

When the Republican Party has decided that conservatism is whatever Trump does and whatever Trump does is moral and they resolve to defend it...that's Moral Relativism and Situational Ethics.

For the record, Situational Ethics was a concept a lot of us on the Right back in the day got pretty worked up about, claiming that fixed values and a strong moral compass were a better idea...for reasons that seem all the more obvious now...except it's the Democrats and the liberals who seem to be the ones who have them. Damn it, I feel pretty stupid, looking back. It turns out that damned near everything we accused the Clinton Administration and the Democrats at the time of has been exceeded by Trump & Co. to the point of ridiculous.

Granted, I'm now a registered Democrat and I voted for Hillary Clinton, but still...

I re-registered and voted the way I did for the last decade, because of my fixed values, because I've always believed that racism is wrong, I've always believed in truth, I've never liked Trump and I...a descendant of immigrants...have always supported immigration. 

This Situational Ethics crap has other dimensions, too.

For example, When a person demands Truth in a religious context...but is fine with having political leaders who like to lie to them and tell them what their carnal flesh wants to hear (even if on some level they know it's wrong) that's...wait for it...moral relativism and situational ethics.

When a White person demands that People of Color follow every aspect of the law...especially when their legalism lacks any concept of context, justice or morality...but then they break the law and support politicians who do so as well? That's situational ethics.

I was taught that, hey, that kind of bullshit is wrong. If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. "Being White" doesn't count as something to stand for, and I'm GOD Damned sick of these motherfuckers lighting everything they've ever claimed to value on fire for Donald Trump, racism and tax cuts.

We're past the point of "Cut that shit out." I honestly feel like the next step is consequences.

...

The Ferret Post (Prequel to this series.)
Part Two

This web of life. (American Revelation, Prequel)

Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money. ~Alanis Obomsawin, Native American activist and filmmaker.

I'd like to take a bit of a break from my normal range of topics. Let's talk about ferrets for a bit. Meet Malik Daoud. His name is Arabic for King David, and he has that name because he was so small when I got him, and because I detest prejudice in all its forms and, at the time, an Arabic name seemed appropriate to make a statement about that. Ironically, Malik Daoud was also the nickname that the Iraqis applied to US Army General David Petraeus...so there was that element of irony as well.

The above photo was taken in December of 2015. I'd walked into the local pet store on a Wednesday morning, as I usually do (and have done for years) and they had two two new kits (baby ferrets) a Marked White Sprite (Spayed female) kit and this tiny little Cinnamon Gib (Neutered male) kit. Just a few minutes before this picture was taken, he was crawling around on the bottom of the ferret cage, pitifully crying for his Mommy, who I'm sure he was still missing after only a couple days of being in transit. I looked at his teeth...shockingly (although it is unfortunately fairly common to see this nowadays) the look of his short little baby-teeth suggested he was at most six weeks old. I decided to take a picture of him. The little dude fit in the palm of my hand, and used the opportunity of being left there to curl up and go to sleep. I carried him around that way for 20 minutes, before transferring him to the inside of my T-shirt. I wasn't looking to get another ferret that day, but I had the cash, and I couldn't leave him there. He didn't even need to go in the pet carrier. He slept curled up in my shirt all the way home. I would later have to give him his own food dish, with moistened kibble, which he attacked as if he had never seen food before.

There's a reason for that.

Malik is, as most pet store ferrets in the United States are, a Marshall ferret. Marshall farms is widely hated among knowledgeable ferret owners for a variety of reasons that could easily be a blog post of their own. But let's start with this: They produce (or have produced on their behalf) all sorts of ferret-related items, most of which are junk (although their hammocks and stuff are pretty decent) not least of all the food.

Don't believe what it says on the front of the bag. Trust me.

Marshall ferret food ranks solidly in the orange section on the More Dooks ferret food chart (you can Google this yourself or here's a link) meaning a ferret can live on it, but probably won't thrive. They sell basically everything to do with ferrets, and a good deal that has nothing more to do with ferrets than a picture of one on the container, and the food they put their name on is crap. Keep that in mind.

Also, keep in mind that none of this is the pet store's fault. The people who work there have mostly been good people, the animals they have are well cared for, the ferrets have a Ferret Nation cage, usually a good hammock or other thing to sleep on, the litter gets changed daily and the employees make sure they get out of the cage and are handled. That's the lap of luxury for a pet store ferret

I have 33 ferrets. Of those ferrets, 16 are owner-surrenders, rescues, re-homed or were sold to me by owners who no longer had time or the capability to care for them, but had the sense to know it. Of those ferrets, all but one are Marshall ferrets...as denoted by two green dots tattooed in their right ear. The other one was an owner-surrender via the same pet store who literally jumped into my arms and started dooking when I opened the cage.

Four of those Marshall ferrets have been less than eight weeks old and clearly not thriving at the time of sale. Ideally, baby ferrets should be with their mothers until at least eight weeks of age, though twelve weeks is better. Sometimes, as with several the pet store has had lately, the wee ones catch on quick, become socialized and do well. Sometimes, they don't.

Some people see a baby ferret as an adorable, furry little soul. Others see a baby ferret as $150 with fur on it.

I also have had two other ferrets that have died, Aella (3-year-old Dark-Eyed White Sprite and official Queen of All Ferrets, after a long struggle with ulcers and other stomach issues, topped off by the flu, and many vet bills) and Wulfgar (a very large Champagne Gib who died unexpectedly at 10 months of an undiagnosed heart condition according to his Necropsy. He was big, he was lazy, he only ever went to the vet for a checkup and we all missed checking for that.)

I feed my ferrets either Evo cat food (87% meat) Evo dog food (83% meat, but it's cheaper and they have bigger bags) or Orijen cat food (95% meat, but expensive) and I've tried them on Orijen dog food (85% meat, expensive, but cheaper than the cat food.) So, in all cases they eat very well. The "cheap" food (Evo dog food) is close to $70 for a 25-pound bag. That will last me about two weeks, and I keep a spare around.

A five pound bag of Marshall ferret kibble and a six pound bag of Evo dog food are the same price. You aren't saving anything by buying the bad food. There's no quality/quantity trade-off here. Marshall Farms just wants to stiff you on food that'll eventually kill your ferret, so that then you will go buy another one. This kind of "Company Store" bullshit in most other respects has been illegal since the Great Depression and the New Deal that resulted from it.

To me, and to most of my readers as well, especially those of us who live with this stuff...this is and should be nonsensical. It's a perversion of the purpose of life, really.

Also, a word about ferret foods in general...with the exception of Evo Ferret (discontinued) or Evanger's (wet food) most ferret foods are garbage. Ferrets are obligate carnivores and require meat or a meat based food...on the ingredients list, five of the first six ingredients should be meat, at minimum. Let me show you something:

Marshall ferret food is bad, but a ferret can live on it. Even if it'd be like a human living on mashed potatoes and gravy all their life. Do you see the problem here? "Fruit & Veggie Crunch Treat?" This stuff is poison and will kill a ferret dead dead. That is not a joke.

If you look at cat foods or dog foods, let alone ferret foods available at Wal-Mart (that's where this picture and the one of the Marshall kibble bag above were taken) most of them are horrible for your animals. This is a problem endemic to the pet food industry, which the FDA and USDA seem to consider an inconvenience to actually regulate.

...And that's when Republicans aren't in power. As we've seen lately, when Republicans are in power, they gut regulations, rape the earth, sell off federal lands, and promote the coal and oil industries...because that's who gives them money.

All people at my level get out of this, ever, is that Republicans promote racism and either passively or actively (under Trump) tolerate (or encourage) people being shitty racists.

Now, I have no idea who the owners of Marshall farms are or what their politics are...but as a ferret owner whose main contribution to this long-running struggle has been to save a few babies who never should have been there for me to buy in the first place, the only way to fix this problem is to elect Democrats or the rare Conservation-minded Republican and stay on them until they pass Federal laws that require decent conditions for commercially-raised animals, pet foods that the pets can actually eat, etc. nationwide.

...And some people don't understand why Republicans and their rich benefactors hate government so much on a conceptual level. The State, customarily backed by force of law, rule of law, and ultimately armed force...is the only power that can coerce decent behavior or obedience to laws and morals from rich people. The purpose of government is to protect the weak from the ruthless. Otherwise, what damned good is it?

Now, if you think Republicans or rich people have any better intentions for a human like me, who hangs on to the bottom rung of the Middle Class primarily due to the fact that I have a decent car and don't have any kids, than they do for ferrets...you have another thing coming. They want me to be poor, so that I have to devote even more of my income to basic survival, have less time to be aware and engaged with what's happening, and ultimately to price the few things (like ferrets) that make my life better out of my reach...because the only thing that makes a miserable bastard happy is making other people miserable. We've already had the experience of taking a dog-breeder approach to humanity. It was called Slavery and we fought a war to end it.

Hell, as my friend Aaron put it the other day, a big part of why Republicans and the wealthy have been able to hack away at the New Deal is because once racists couldn't deny the benefits of it to Black people, they basically decided they didn't want it anymore.

Now, if they really wanted to, for only a small increase in price, Marshall farms could keep kits with their Moms until they were 12 weeks old, they could make better food and not sell so much junk stuff that nobody needs, and they'd probably have a better reputation and, long-term, a more profitable business.

Just like the Republican Party, if it wanted to, or cared about its survival long term...could promote a more diverse, inclusive, tolerant form of conservatism, based around economics but also promoting religion in order to foster values and find a way to work for the greater good of everybody. Instead, no, they go for base greed, the path or least resistance, the short-term solution, the social heroin of fascism and racism, and whatever else will degrade this country, it's social fabric, and what have you especially if it will make money for their rich donors and keep their hateful, resentful followers pointed at whoever they don't like right now.

Take for example, the subject of immigration...which is, at this point, a necessity for this country if we want to continue to be able to pay Baby Boomers social security checks, much less continue to grow and innovate and be the powerful nation that we are. I've seen massive amounts of anti-immigration stuff posted by right-wingers on Twitter lately, and I think it's ridiculous. My Great Grandma Thompson was born in Norway in 1900. We're the world's melting pot, and diversity is...and always has been...our strength. People come from all over the world, and sign on to the idea of being an American. I don't think Trump and his supporters have a basic idea of immigration. I'm not sure they had the slightest idea what citizenship is. No, There is no American Volk, we don't share a common culture or language or religion or a thousand years of history. All we have is what we want to be.

Unfortunately some Americans want to be Nazis.

Some Americans think they'll profit from pain, and that justice will not come in this life or the next.

...And by profit, I mean they think they'll get money. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they cause far worse problems that cost far more than anyone earns or ever will. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are prime examples of this.

On a (usually) smaller scale, so are corporate abuses.

A ferret cannot help but be a ferret. They are literally incapable of being anything else.

But, it seems like if you wave a big enough wad of money under a human's nose, you can damned well get a human to not act like a human being.

Hell, you don't even have to go that far, sometimes, you can just tell them it's OK to hate somebody for no reason and some people will follow you straight to hell.

That's a hell of a way to run a railroad, it doesn't work long-term, and it's gone on far longer than it should have already. At this point, we can either hang together...or hang separately. If the rest of us hang together, we just might win.

Some days, you wonder how anybody can survive this insanity we've found ourselves in. I sometimes wonder if this country might come flying apart, and split into two or three smaller countries. But then, when you really look at it, there's more of us then there are of the assholes, and Trump doesn't have enough public support for his whole dictator schtick to take hold.

This little guy doesn't seem too worried. Of course he doesn't have any social media accounts or watch TV or deal with idiots all day.

This is Malik Daoud, today, fat, happy and healthy and part of a large, crazy family. I wonder sometimes if he even remembers where he came here from or how he got here. If he does, he doesn't seem too bothered by it.

But that's not the point, the point is we need to make it so that everybody has a shot at a decent life here...and it doesn't matter where they came from or how they got here. Everybody deserves to have a decent life...whether they walk on two legs or four. A human should not have to be born as the right color or the right station in life to live decently, a ferret should not have to hope that they luck into getting purchased by the right human. All that needs to happen to make things better for everybody is that those who already have too much learn to do with just a little bit less. You'd think people who have more money than they could ever spend wouldn't notice the difference.

"Make America Great Again" isn't a philosophy, it's a way to sell hats to morons. You want a philosophical data point to start with? I say, we need better justice.

Until we have better justice, economically, socially, and in terms of rule of law and even how we treat those who break it...the greatness of this country will not be fully realized.

We all come from the same Creator. Animals seem to understand this. We humans had better get with the program. If we don't, what are we even doing here?

Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. ~Chief Seattle.

Next up: American Revelation, Part 1