Wise Up the Marks, as William S. Burroughs Put It

     I hate Paul Ryan more than I hate Donald Trump.  They're both loathsome, but one has become so familiar--Trump's grotesque personality splashed daily for many successive months across
news/entertainment mediascapes--that I regard him like I do a bunion; present and annoying but felt as an irritation that will someday go away.  Granted, Trump's self-profiting agendas are bad for the nation and for the world's peoples, but he fits in philosophically with the "muscular" Americanism plaguing the world for the years of this century and many of the previous--Hillary Clinton in that regard would have been no different.
     Domestically, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, represents a real, existential threat to millions of Americans.  His ideas on health care "reform," derived from his obsession with the Objectivist selfishness-based philosophy of Ayn Rand, an author whose nutty fantasies fit perfectly with the mindsets of sociopathic politicians crafting policies to fuck over and kill the poor, threaten the well-being and lives of millions, like myself, who have benefited from Obamacare, i.e., the Affordable Care Act.
     Ryan, like his Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives and the Senate, have long sought to repeal and "replace" the ACA, warning repeatedly of its alleged drain on the economy, of its inevitable "implosion."  They would have us believe that even a health care plan, crafted actually by the right wing think tank Heritage Foundation and put in place in 2010 by President Obama as a compromise--something to work on to make better in the future, but a relief for the time being to tens of millions of uninsured Americans--is a great trial for citizens, something to be reviled.
     Having the past seven years to come up with an alternative, Republicans, led by Big Pharmaceutical industry whores like Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have finally drafted a draconian plan revealing their true natures.  They call it the American Health Care Act.  Put the word "American" on it to bless something evil, a proposal that will, in the next decade, cause approximately twenty-four million Americans who now have health insurance--thanks to Obamacare--to not have health insurance.
     Republican politicians attending Town Hall meetings in their home districts have lately been jeered at, chanted at, and booed by constituents woken up to the fact that their representatives in Washington seek to weaken their health and kill them.  President Trump, in his recent budget proposal--a brutal document characterized by military spending increases while sacrificing funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, social programs for the elderly and poor, public television, and other things that make American lives better, but also sharp State Department cuts--didn't touch Medicare.  He knows to not fuck with Medicare.  The atmosphere of rebellion against horrible policies by shitty politicians grows in this country.  Feckless Democrats, though, obsessed, along with supposedly left wing news media, by Russia's allegedly effective tampering in the 2016 election, even though the FBI also tampered with it, and Hillary Clinton and the DNC also tampered with it by suppressing Bernie Sanders, don't present a convincing front of resistance to the Republicans led by Trump and Ryan.
     It's doubtful that Democrats will approve Ryan's "American" fuck you America health care plan, that it will actually pass into law as it is.  Trump has expressed his doubts about its success even while claiming to be its champion.  Typical Trump: say two or three different things on the same subject in the space of a day or two.  He is truly adept at using politics as a form of logrolling, shifting his weight back and forth on an unstable rolling platform, keeping his opponents glued to what he does and says.  Most of what he does and says isn't worth covering as news, anymore than it was when he ran for president or earlier when he would call into cable news programs to gripe about Rosie O'Donnell, who had the temerity to imitate him unflatteringly, incurring his eternal ire.
     As for Paul Ryan, who, had 2012 been different, would have become vice president, it remains to be seen as to how far he can shove Ayn Rand down America's throat.  There's a wising up going on, I think.  The politicians who say they care about the common man and woman are finding their masks aren't holding on tightly to their faces.  Curiously, Donald Trump got elected president because he spoke plainly.  He lacked Hillary Clinton's inability to speak like a normal person.  Because of his communication style, identical in many ways to what one hears in a bar at midnight, he convinced ordinary people to relate to him; a great con, of course, since he's a privileged rich fuck who's never done an honest day's work in his entire life.  But he is vulgar.  He reminds me of the supporting characters in Hieronymus Bosch paintings, grinning at the tormented Christ, eyes filled with avarice, and if we could hear them speak, their words would be idiotic and cruel.
     Ryan seems like a normal, civilized person, but his words are calculated, technocratic, designed to lay out plans of utter destruction for the lives of millions of Americans who rely on the gift of an albeit imperfect health care system that, in 2010, replaced a previous system of nothing that I, among many millions, had to suffer under.  Ryan's goal, like Trump's is to make rich people richer, for they supposedly, in Ayn Randian fashion, deserve more.  This deliberate push on Ryan's part shows him to be an evil man, and the news media drop the ball when they don't call him that.

                                                                              Vic Neptune
   

     Assange Aims a Flashlight at CIA Cockroaches

     Two days ago Wikileaks released a shitload of formerly secret CIA information, obtained, apparently, by an inside source.  A short time ago on MSNBC, Katy Tur (who spent a lot of time with Donald Trump during the past two years not pressing him on important issues) interviewed a security consultant about what Wikileaks just did.  He's concerned about how the released information may compromise U.S. intelligence operatives and others in that community.  He's not concerned, by his blank-faced omission, about the CIA turning television sets, smart phones, home computers, and automobiles into spy devices--cars potentially weaponized into assassination machines.  

     No, as Katy Tur blandly put it, "Some Americans are concerned about their TVs, for example, being used as surveillance equipment even when they're turned off." She didn't say that she herself is concerned about it.  Why would anyone have a problem with that?  You turn off your television set, you think it's off, but, like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it's following your actions, interpreting your words, putting the whole shebang into the mass databank that is the high tech realm of clusterfucked national security state mega-apparatus in and around Washington, D.C.  What's wrong with that?  Anything that would give J. Edgar Hoover a hard-on must be good, right?

     Of course, those who speak for intelligence are deeply miffed with Julian Assange.  He's exposed immoral behavior stamped with the word policy, the shit that our government's been doing all along.  During the 1980s when Reagan lied about illegally supplying the Contras with weaponry and technical training and assistance, the CIA was all over that, breaking U.S. law, aiding and abetting the mass murder of Nicaraguan civilians.  In the early 1960s, after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion--a CIA operation--members of the CIA, like later Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt (as he confessed to his son on his deathbed) participated in the plot to assassinate John Kennedy, whose animus toward the CIA was strong, having fired CIA Director Allen Dulles, who hated him in return.

     I realize I'm making declarative statements about the JFK assassination, but I'm hardly alone in thinking a group of determined, bad men wanted him dead and carried it out, with government and corporate news media consent after the fact.

     JFK himself had South Vietnam's leader, Diem, assassinated just a few weeks before he met his own end in Dallas, Texas.  Karma?  Beyond good and evil, I guess, the leaders of the world operate in morality free zones, and they don't like their secrets exposed; hence, Hillary Clinton during a State Department meeting seriously discussed launching a drone strike against Julian Assange.  He's a menace to those in power who can't handle what might happen if the public becomes informed about the evil shit they often do.  

     From about 1985, I began researching my government's covert and destructive activities toward other nations and towards its own people.  The kinds of information that compromised news media outlets and their propagandistic helpers in the military, security, and intelligence worlds don't want citizens to think about, are accessed easily in university and public libraries, and on the internet.  The information is there, waiting to be looked at, but often it's just ignored, because people rely too much on biased news organizations that censor simply by not paying attention to the nubs of important matters, like the real question inside the recent Assange revelations:

     Why should Americans pay, through their taxes, for secret operations carried out by an organization--the CIA--that is legally barred from conducting espionage within the United States?  Some say "Nine-Eleven changed everything," but that doesn't have to mean we forget how easy it is to let liars and tyrants tell us what they think is good for us to know, and not know.  

     Since Trump's presidency is still quite young, we must assume logically that much of this CIA creepy immorality has happened during the Obama and also perhaps the Bush years.  Yes, Obama, with his "transparent" administration, so see-through he couldn't handle the revelations about war crimes provided to the public by Private Manning (who was confined to a cell with the lights on full blast for years), or the Snowden revelations.

     War destroys and war-making corrupts.  We've been in this thing for fifteen years, we've surrendered our privacy for a war that's gained us nothing.  U.S. Marines now are deployed to Syria to help retake Raqqa from ISIS.  Would Hillary Clinton have not done that?  She was a hawk on Syria, as with Libya.  Like Trump, she would've blasted the shit out of people.  

     With the help of corporate news media, intelligence professionals and their spokespersons try to make us accept without question that Julian Assange is the problem; that the man pointing out the CIA's disgusting anti-democratic policies worthy of a totalitarian dictatorship is the actual concern we should have, not taxpayer-funded espionage against taxpayers.  

     Fuck.

                                                                                Vic Neptune     

     The Plan

     President Trump has accused former President Obama of "wiretapping" him last year.  As Malcolm Nance, an MSNBC contributor and retired U.S. Navy cryptologist and intelligence analyst (i.e. a spook employed by a major cable news network to shape narratives agreeable to certain factions in government and corporate power structures) said, "I wouldn't need to get into the building [Trump Tower] to do it [listen to Trump's communications]."
     Trump has outdated ideas about eavesdropping techniques.  Movies about mobsters, like Goodfellas and Donnie Brasco and Casino, depict the way official listening-in used to be done, before a monster like the NSA came along, a government agency with more invasive tentacles than an H.P. Lovecraft god-alien.
     Trump apparently hasn't learned from or listened to Edward Snowden's revelations and warnings about government overreach in modern communications. The president's use of the word, "wiretapped," makes him sound like the old geezer he really is.  When journalists on MSNBC use the same term they seem disingenuous.  So they ask of their guests, rhetorically, "Do you think President Obama wiretapped Donald Trump?"
     A stupid fucking question.  For one thing, as Malcolm Nance correctly pointed out, if anyone wished to spy on Trump's communications, entering Trump Tower, a la the kinds of activities engaged in by Nixon's Plumbers, wouldn't have been necessary.  Have these journalists asking this idiotic question heard of computers?  Hacking?  The era of communication satellites?  Instead, the journalists ask follow ups on the necessity of going through the FISA court to obtain wiretap permissions, as if U.S. intelligence agencies are law-abiding and honest organizations who never undercut anyone in their way, like President Trump, who is not well-liked by them.  I hate him, too, but I also don't favor intelligence agencies fucking with the democratic system of this or other countries, as they have done numerous times--IT'S ONE OF THEIR SPECIALTIES.
     We're in a time now when the Global War on Terror has reached a sickly middle age; lacking support from Americans and peoples of other countries across the world.  Our government nevertheless won't let it go, even as they explore other possibilities, the propaganda against Russia for its probable meddling in the 2016 election a clue as to where the intelligence apparatuses of the U.S. wish to take us, and the rest of the world.  I accept that Russian meddling in the election did occur, but there's no evidence I've seen, or that news media people can present, showing that their activities had anything to do with Hillary Clinton's embarrassing loss.
     The Democratic Party's government and corporate power structure (which influences and guides MSNBC, for instance) lost devastatingly this past November.  Committed to a candidate with no appeal to the working class, they pulled many strings to make her the nominee, screwing Bernie Sanders, workers, and the middle class, elevating Trump as Clinton's "ideal" opponent, the man she could surely defeat.  Wall Street's interests were protected with the Clinton elevation, and now with Trump, Wall Street eats its usual candy with its usual smug fuck grin.
     Meanwhile, in Somalia, a drought threatens famine, continuous fighting and warfare bring terrors and uncertainty, and Trump's Defense Department, following upon Obama's example, seeks to arm and train Somali "security forces" to combat terrorists there, in a country Obama had already started to bomb not long before he left office and flew to Palm Springs to play golf, fuck his wife, and ensure that his former labor secretary Tom Perez got picked as the new DNC chairman over the more Progressive Democrat (and Muslim) Keith Ellison.
     President Obama would not "wiretap" Trump, to use the journalists' contemptibly stupid phrasing, but, to ask it properly, "Did he have it done?" I don't know.  MSNBC personnel on camera have gotten into the easy habit of making fun of Trump, acting like they didn't have daily opportunities to express their contempt for him last year when it might have made a difference.  They, and CNN and Fox News, all gave that motherfucker far more camera and microphone time than anyone else running for president.  MSNBC gave his podium, with no one behind it before a Trump speech, more time than they gave some of the less popular candidates.  They let Trump call in regularly to their shows, speaking his usual blather, very rarely pressing him for clear information, letting him make outrageous statements without questioning him.  Now, he's a cute little clown still saying crazy-seeming shit that gets covered a great deal by MSNBC and the others.  He's doing the same thing he did last year: making broad accusations that cause journalists to cover his bullshit while the world continues to fall into its own asshole.
     Are U.S. intelligence agencies actively trying to overthrow Trump?  I think so.  Are they and some government policymakers interested in re-energizing the war machine?  I think so.  New conflicts and wars are the life's blood of war profiteers, big business, and career politicians, corporate news media people, arms manufacturers, security enterprises, and infrastructure builders (and re-builders after U.S. bombs and missiles take structures apart in other countries).
     Oh, and off the coast of Somalia, there's a large area of undeveloped oil fields below the waters.  Train those Contras--I mean, whatever they're called, the men who will fight al-Shabaab in Somalia!          Somalia will become Iraq in five years.
     Do we want Mike Pence to be president?  I don't.

                                                                                  Vic Neptune