Degenerates
I'm going to do something unusual here, just writing from feelings, from impressions. This essay is the result of hearing for the past two days about America's newly discovered trauma of caring about Central American families, pulled apart by government agents, the children separated, put into detention facilities, given silvery blankets to wrap up in when they sleep, making them look like burritos served at a Mexican fast food joint.
Trump didn't invent this situation. America's exported drug war stirred things up in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, during the Obama administration. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's pivotal role in the 2009 coup in Honduras that put into power an authoritarian U.S.-friendly typical bastard has something to do with why Honduras is fucked up, and she knows it.
Clinton has been speechifying against Trump's policies of separating families at the border, although in fact, a bipartisan consensus led to that policy coming into being in 2005. The detention facility infrastructure used currently was constructed during the justly nicknamed Deporter-in-Chief Obama's time in office. Hillary Clinton said that anyone who has ever held a child in their hands must be heartbroken by these images coming from down South. In 2015, she told Christiane Amanpour of CNN in an interview that children coming from Latin America with or without their parents should be "given medical care and then get sent back."
Sent back to cities where gangs rule, drug war chaos permeates societies horrifically manipulated by U.S. foreign policy. The mere fact that refugees from these countries are coming to the U.S. is an indication of American Karma, and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are two of the key causes.
The Democratic Party leadership for decades has spoken, in politer language than Trump's blunt phrasings, of "sending a message" to Mexico and Latin America, regarding illegal immigration. Donald Trump follows in their footsteps--since he doesn't bother to disguise his brutality, the family separation practice carried out by the bipartisan-supported SS-like governmental organization, ICE, is now, in much of corporate news media, associated with his administration, even though persecuting brown, black, and red people is as old as Europeans in the Americas.
Meaning well, I guess, Mrs. Trump flew to McAllen, Texas, a border city with a detention center (child prison). Did she get a tour of the depressing rooms? I don't know, but I suspect everything looked and sounded really nice for her. Stephanie Grisham, Melania's spokeswoman, said, according to a CNN article, "She [Mrs. Trump] wants to see what's real."
Living in the White House with Donald Trump and Ivanka, I can understand that she would want to get a glimpse of reality now and then. Melania, boarding her plane for Texas, wore a "Zara" (who cares, CNN?) jacket with the following words written on the back in graffiti-like lettering: "I really don't care. Do U?"
When she got off the plane in Texas she was wearing something else, a tee shirt saying, "Which Way 2 the Slave Auction?"
I made the last part up, but it's a sign of the times that the first part is true. It could be that Melania, a Slovenian, had trouble deciphering the graffiti-like English lettering, because how could she wear such words on her back when she's about to embark on a journey the purpose of which is to demonstrate that she cares about desperate children?
I prefer the idea that she wore it because she really doesn't give a shit, anymore than she cares about Palestinians getting crippled in their thousands by Israeli snipers, or the genocide in the making in Yemen that the United States (and her husband) supports.
A photo op to go to a border town in place of her husband, though, must've seemed like an important thing to do. According to President Trump, his daughter Ivanka is concerned about what's going on at the border, too, but she also participated in a provocative embassy ceremony in Jerusalem while mass murder and mayhem were going on not far away, including the killing of a Palestinian baby. A baby is a child. A child is someone who can be held and treasured, as Clinton pointed out, but can also be used as a political pawn by everyone from Rachel Maddow, who got choked up on air (a performance, real or not, that will increase her Russiagate-sagging ratings) to Democratic politicians who pretend that this ongoing border strategy just came out of nowhere when Trump became president.
A degenerate, when a noun, means "an immoral or corrupt person."
Turn on corporate news media and you will see them in practically every broadcasted moment.
"Unruly" children in these child prisons, those who express a need to get away and be reunited with their parents (you know, crazy talk) are sometimes given psychotropic drugs to make them easier to handle. They have no say in the matter, it's forcible needle rape. If you've ever been injected with a drug against your will, as I have, you know how horrible and degrading that moment feels. I doubt that Trump's dipshit wife witnessed this practice while in McAllen, or was even informed about it.
From the CNN article: "The children are 'usually distraught' when they arrive, [Melania] Trump was told by officials [who incidentally have a vested interest in not seeming like monsters], but 'when they see the environment, they start relaxing.'"
Yes, this is America, 2018, sixteen years into the Forever War. Americans are not better human beings since September 11, 2001, we are worse.
The authors of this CNN article add, telegraphing what they're told by the officials: "Basic needs are taken care of--showers, clothing, food, medical care."
Not mentioned is their most obvious need: the direct presence of their loving mothers.
Think about it: they get showers, clothing, food, medical care. Inmates in German concentration camps in the 1930s and 1940s got the same. These authors, Kate Bennett and Betsy Klein, have lost their ability, if they ever had it, to convey heart in their writing. While they make sure to add the detail of how much Melania Trump's offensive jacket costs and which fashion designer made it, they lack the ability to analyze their own thoughts and words. How can a serious writer put down "showers, clothing, food, medical care," without pointing out that these children, refugees from countries disrupted by our racist drug war, are not deserving of imprisonment, or even of being paraded in front of a politician's wife to show that yes, everything actually is fine, it's kind of a tough situation but after a day or so they calm down.
And how do they calm down? Psychiatric wards have put into practice for many decades techniques of sapping the life energy out of patients, and according to the non-CNN reports Kate Bennett and Betsy Klein don't mention, at least some of these kids are drugged.
It's our evil, let's own it.
Vic Neptune
Thursday, June 21, 2018
Tuesday, June 19, 2018
MSNBC and Laura Bush Discover Pain
The United States practices a heavy-handed approach in attempting to deal with Central American refugees trying to cross into this country--they escape violence in their own countries, places like Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, nations screwed by U.S. foreign policy for many decades in the past.
On "liberal" news network MSNBC, the Trump administration side of this issue is held up for scrutiny and condemnation, while the behavior of the U.S. toward Latin America for about two centuries is ignored. Ronald Reagan's policy toward left wing movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador, for instance, are unmentioned, unmentionable to those who don't want to criticize systemic brutality directed at the poor of Latin America. Reagan's administration armed and encouraged death squads in El Salvador, armed and encouraged terrorists called Contras in Nicaragua, supported right wing military dictatorships in Guatemala responsible for the disappearances of thousands of citizens.
Now, Trump's "separation of children from their parents" at the Mexico-U.S. border earns a just condemnation from much of the U.S. press. Little children are currently kept in "detention centers"--they're actually, in effect, jails. This is supposedly done to protect them from having to go back to where they came from with their parents, who were, the reasoning goes, irresponsible in bringing them to America without the means (passports and worthwhileness as human beings) to get into this country.
These Latin American families flee chaos and violence at home, in countries that've been fucked with by the United States for decades. Drugs cartels are blamed for the violence, and although there's some truth to that, a drug cartel can best take root in a society where there's a vacuum in fair and just governmental order, order in these countries destroyed by U.S. foreign policy, by righteous bastards like Ronald Reagan who made a regular practice of punishing the people of Latin America for wanting change from vicious dictatorships supported by the United States.
Laura Bush, wife of George W., has offered her viewpoint in a published opinion piece. She's "heartbroken" at the sight of the little children separated from their parents.
Irony meter here is at ten.
Laura Bush, during the eight years of her husband's presidency, never once expressed sorrow and empathy for the countless thousands of children separated from their parents in Iraq and Afghanistan, parents killed by U.S. military might and by sectarian violence caused by her husband's decision to invade Iraq. She apparently has no idea that a hundred or more children in Yemen die every die because of Saudi Arabia's genocidal war there, a war supported by the United States. Laura Bush hasn't said a thing about Palestinian children who have recently lost their parents and siblings to Israeli snipers' gunfire.
Fuck you Laura Bush.
Her supposed humanity and compassion only get stirred when it's an issue involving the decisions of Donald Trump, a politician she and her in-laws are opposed to. This failure to see the whole picture extends, as well, to MSNBC and CNN commentators and anchors, and to those bosses of theirs who pull their strings. Chris Hayes of MSNBC compares this latest Trump outrage to the president's reaction to the White Supremacy rally in Charlottesville last year. He talks about a "pattern" in Trump's behavior. I see a pattern in Chris Hayes's behavior, an obsession with inconsequential bullshit: He doesn't seem to know that there's a country called Yemen, and his lack of awareness of Flint, Michigan, is truly remarkable, considering his friend and colleague, Rachel Maddow ("Number one in cable news") did a story a few years ago about Flint that garnered her deserved praise. She hasn't done anything else with the still relevant Flint story, having turned her attention almost entirely to Trump-bashing and Russiagate, two issues that will not win the presidency for the Democrats in 2020, but will continue to make Rachel Maddow a rich woman.
Both Hayes and Maddow didn't bother to report anything about the 2016-2017 Dakota Access Pipeline protests that involved mercenaries, state police behaving like stormtroopers, massive numbers of injuries including a woman whose arm was blown off.
But Trump! All of a sudden, because it fits with the line acceptable to the corporate powers that be, MSNBC and its toadies can get outraged about the children separated from their parents at the border, while continuing to ignore the plight of Yemeni children.
Sorry for sounding like such an asshole, but I'm simply asking the question, Suffering children are suffering children, no matter what their nationality, right? They should be helped entirely apart from the political and financial agendas of power brokers and newsmen and -women misrepresenting reality every minute of every day.
Vic Neptune
The United States practices a heavy-handed approach in attempting to deal with Central American refugees trying to cross into this country--they escape violence in their own countries, places like Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, nations screwed by U.S. foreign policy for many decades in the past.
On "liberal" news network MSNBC, the Trump administration side of this issue is held up for scrutiny and condemnation, while the behavior of the U.S. toward Latin America for about two centuries is ignored. Ronald Reagan's policy toward left wing movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador, for instance, are unmentioned, unmentionable to those who don't want to criticize systemic brutality directed at the poor of Latin America. Reagan's administration armed and encouraged death squads in El Salvador, armed and encouraged terrorists called Contras in Nicaragua, supported right wing military dictatorships in Guatemala responsible for the disappearances of thousands of citizens.
Now, Trump's "separation of children from their parents" at the Mexico-U.S. border earns a just condemnation from much of the U.S. press. Little children are currently kept in "detention centers"--they're actually, in effect, jails. This is supposedly done to protect them from having to go back to where they came from with their parents, who were, the reasoning goes, irresponsible in bringing them to America without the means (passports and worthwhileness as human beings) to get into this country.
These Latin American families flee chaos and violence at home, in countries that've been fucked with by the United States for decades. Drugs cartels are blamed for the violence, and although there's some truth to that, a drug cartel can best take root in a society where there's a vacuum in fair and just governmental order, order in these countries destroyed by U.S. foreign policy, by righteous bastards like Ronald Reagan who made a regular practice of punishing the people of Latin America for wanting change from vicious dictatorships supported by the United States.
Laura Bush, wife of George W., has offered her viewpoint in a published opinion piece. She's "heartbroken" at the sight of the little children separated from their parents.
Irony meter here is at ten.
Laura Bush, during the eight years of her husband's presidency, never once expressed sorrow and empathy for the countless thousands of children separated from their parents in Iraq and Afghanistan, parents killed by U.S. military might and by sectarian violence caused by her husband's decision to invade Iraq. She apparently has no idea that a hundred or more children in Yemen die every die because of Saudi Arabia's genocidal war there, a war supported by the United States. Laura Bush hasn't said a thing about Palestinian children who have recently lost their parents and siblings to Israeli snipers' gunfire.
Fuck you Laura Bush.
Her supposed humanity and compassion only get stirred when it's an issue involving the decisions of Donald Trump, a politician she and her in-laws are opposed to. This failure to see the whole picture extends, as well, to MSNBC and CNN commentators and anchors, and to those bosses of theirs who pull their strings. Chris Hayes of MSNBC compares this latest Trump outrage to the president's reaction to the White Supremacy rally in Charlottesville last year. He talks about a "pattern" in Trump's behavior. I see a pattern in Chris Hayes's behavior, an obsession with inconsequential bullshit: He doesn't seem to know that there's a country called Yemen, and his lack of awareness of Flint, Michigan, is truly remarkable, considering his friend and colleague, Rachel Maddow ("Number one in cable news") did a story a few years ago about Flint that garnered her deserved praise. She hasn't done anything else with the still relevant Flint story, having turned her attention almost entirely to Trump-bashing and Russiagate, two issues that will not win the presidency for the Democrats in 2020, but will continue to make Rachel Maddow a rich woman.
Both Hayes and Maddow didn't bother to report anything about the 2016-2017 Dakota Access Pipeline protests that involved mercenaries, state police behaving like stormtroopers, massive numbers of injuries including a woman whose arm was blown off.
But Trump! All of a sudden, because it fits with the line acceptable to the corporate powers that be, MSNBC and its toadies can get outraged about the children separated from their parents at the border, while continuing to ignore the plight of Yemeni children.
Sorry for sounding like such an asshole, but I'm simply asking the question, Suffering children are suffering children, no matter what their nationality, right? They should be helped entirely apart from the political and financial agendas of power brokers and newsmen and -women misrepresenting reality every minute of every day.
Vic Neptune
Monday, June 4, 2018
The Word Heard Around the World and How the Point Got Missed
Ivanka Trump's businesses in the People's Republic of China employ low wage laborers, many of them women. She wrote a book, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules of Success, published in 2017, the same year she assumed a non-paying advisory position in the White House. Women With Rich Fathers Who Provide Ample and Lucrative Work Opportunities For Their Daughters would've been a more apt title.
Her book has such lines as, "Cultivating authenticity is essential to creating strong bonds with your coworkers," and, "I believe that we each get one life--and it's up to us to live it to the fullest."
Working women, she writes, can relieve stress and attain balance by taking up calligraphy, chess, dancing.
Guess what? "Passion is what makes us feel most alive."
Ivanka Trump on the nature of time: "No matter your age, your background, your education, or your successes, we are all granted 168 hours a week."
She has something to say about communication: "It's easy to forget that communication is not just a means of relaying information but also a way of engaging with others socially."
Hey! Listen to this! "Success is a team sport."
Her husband, Jared Kushner (also a White House advisor, and, in his Dungeons and Dragons role, Peacebringer to the Middle East), "...loves to remind me that life is a marathon, not a sprint."
Note: I copied these quotes from among a far greater number in a Politico article by Annie Karni from May 3, 2017. My thanks to Ms. Karni.
Annie Karni titles her article, "The most revealingly unrevealing quotes from Ivanka Trump's new book".
I disagree that these quotes don't reveal Ivanka Trump's personality and depth of character. I get the following impression from only the ones I quoted above:
Ivanka Trump is shallow.
The line about how we're "all granted 168 hours a week" could be translated as "You gotta make do with the time you have."
"Success is a team sport" is another way of saying, "There is no I in team."
Jared "reminding" his wife that life is a marathon, not a sprint, also uses the type of sports-related cliche that politicians and journalists resort to when their imaginations and expressive use of vocabulary fail them, which is often.
Ivanka Trump's publisher apparently didn't care that his author has a writing style several degrees of competence below that of an unimaginative greeting card writer just going through the motions until retirement.
Ivanka Trump and her husband, the metaphorical marathon runner Jared, attended the U.S. embassy christening in Jerusalem, an event happening simultaneously with Israeli Defense Forces snipers wounding and murdering thousands of Palestinian protestors near the Gaza-Israel border.
No matter what your age [young and often shot at], background [Palestinian trapped his entire life in the Gaza Strip], education, [limited due to sadistic sanctions pushed by the United States and Israel], or your successes [proscribed due to U.S. and Israeli policies] we are all granted 168 hours a week [during which you can be bombed, threatened, shot or shot at, tear gassed, and misrepresented by the major news media of Israel and the U.S.].
We don't know what Ivanka Trump and her husband really thought of the massacre happening in Gaza while they enjoyed the embassy ceremony. Judging from their smiling faces, I suggest that they don't care. I suggest further that beautiful Ivanka is actually a callous piece of shit, just like her father. The lack of soul and original thinking undergirding the sentences and "ideas" in her book suggest further that there's nothing in her heart and mind except the profit motive, and looking after her family.
While professing to relate to "women who work," she gives advice about taking up chess and calligraphy. Why not the study of quantum physics? A Syrian woman who sells fruit to get by would benefit, according to Ivanka, by taking dancing classes, that is, if she can find a building still standing in her town. Almost every woman on the planet is not as fortunate as Ivanka Trump, who emerged from her rich mother already set up for life.
She is a legitimate target for satire, of course, but comedian Samantha Bee on her TBS show got into trouble for referring to Ivanka Trump as a "...feckless cunt."
In social media everybody heard "cunt," many felt outrage. This seemed a verbal assault, for some, on the dignity of women. Ivanka Trump, who, in her business dealings in China exploits poor women, received defenses from a broad political spectrum. Samantha Bee, feeling heat and probably thinking in terms mainly of saving her show, apologized, admitting wrongdoing.
What she didn't do was define the word feckless: lacking initiative or strength of character; irresponsible. Cunt, aside from being an extreme slur against a woman, or a word for her genitals, can also mean a contemptible person.
Ivanka Trump is full of initiative, but does she have a strong character? Does she stand up to her father's bad judgments? Is she just a lesser piece of shit than Donald Trump? Does her cliched writing style indicate there's a deep, thoughtful person there? Does a person with strong character say nothing about mass slaughter by the government that's invited her to attend a divisive ceremony establishing an embassy that will remain a sore spot in the Middle East for years to come? Is she irresponsible? Does a responsible business owner allow near-slave labor conditions in her factories? Is Ivanka Trump contemptible, another way of saying despicable?
All of this, in way too many words, is a way of saying that Ivanka Trump is a feckless cunt.
I'll close with one more book quote from her vacant mind:
"We often don't realize that while we're waiting for our lives to begin, they already have--and they're made up of all the decisions we make, big and small, conscious or not."
Karma.
Vic Neptune
Ivanka Trump's businesses in the People's Republic of China employ low wage laborers, many of them women. She wrote a book, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules of Success, published in 2017, the same year she assumed a non-paying advisory position in the White House. Women With Rich Fathers Who Provide Ample and Lucrative Work Opportunities For Their Daughters would've been a more apt title.
Her book has such lines as, "Cultivating authenticity is essential to creating strong bonds with your coworkers," and, "I believe that we each get one life--and it's up to us to live it to the fullest."
Working women, she writes, can relieve stress and attain balance by taking up calligraphy, chess, dancing.
Guess what? "Passion is what makes us feel most alive."
Ivanka Trump on the nature of time: "No matter your age, your background, your education, or your successes, we are all granted 168 hours a week."
She has something to say about communication: "It's easy to forget that communication is not just a means of relaying information but also a way of engaging with others socially."
Hey! Listen to this! "Success is a team sport."
Her husband, Jared Kushner (also a White House advisor, and, in his Dungeons and Dragons role, Peacebringer to the Middle East), "...loves to remind me that life is a marathon, not a sprint."
Note: I copied these quotes from among a far greater number in a Politico article by Annie Karni from May 3, 2017. My thanks to Ms. Karni.
Annie Karni titles her article, "The most revealingly unrevealing quotes from Ivanka Trump's new book".
I disagree that these quotes don't reveal Ivanka Trump's personality and depth of character. I get the following impression from only the ones I quoted above:
Ivanka Trump is shallow.
The line about how we're "all granted 168 hours a week" could be translated as "You gotta make do with the time you have."
"Success is a team sport" is another way of saying, "There is no I in team."
Jared "reminding" his wife that life is a marathon, not a sprint, also uses the type of sports-related cliche that politicians and journalists resort to when their imaginations and expressive use of vocabulary fail them, which is often.
Ivanka Trump's publisher apparently didn't care that his author has a writing style several degrees of competence below that of an unimaginative greeting card writer just going through the motions until retirement.
Ivanka Trump and her husband, the metaphorical marathon runner Jared, attended the U.S. embassy christening in Jerusalem, an event happening simultaneously with Israeli Defense Forces snipers wounding and murdering thousands of Palestinian protestors near the Gaza-Israel border.
No matter what your age [young and often shot at], background [Palestinian trapped his entire life in the Gaza Strip], education, [limited due to sadistic sanctions pushed by the United States and Israel], or your successes [proscribed due to U.S. and Israeli policies] we are all granted 168 hours a week [during which you can be bombed, threatened, shot or shot at, tear gassed, and misrepresented by the major news media of Israel and the U.S.].
We don't know what Ivanka Trump and her husband really thought of the massacre happening in Gaza while they enjoyed the embassy ceremony. Judging from their smiling faces, I suggest that they don't care. I suggest further that beautiful Ivanka is actually a callous piece of shit, just like her father. The lack of soul and original thinking undergirding the sentences and "ideas" in her book suggest further that there's nothing in her heart and mind except the profit motive, and looking after her family.
While professing to relate to "women who work," she gives advice about taking up chess and calligraphy. Why not the study of quantum physics? A Syrian woman who sells fruit to get by would benefit, according to Ivanka, by taking dancing classes, that is, if she can find a building still standing in her town. Almost every woman on the planet is not as fortunate as Ivanka Trump, who emerged from her rich mother already set up for life.
She is a legitimate target for satire, of course, but comedian Samantha Bee on her TBS show got into trouble for referring to Ivanka Trump as a "...feckless cunt."
In social media everybody heard "cunt," many felt outrage. This seemed a verbal assault, for some, on the dignity of women. Ivanka Trump, who, in her business dealings in China exploits poor women, received defenses from a broad political spectrum. Samantha Bee, feeling heat and probably thinking in terms mainly of saving her show, apologized, admitting wrongdoing.
What she didn't do was define the word feckless: lacking initiative or strength of character; irresponsible. Cunt, aside from being an extreme slur against a woman, or a word for her genitals, can also mean a contemptible person.
Ivanka Trump is full of initiative, but does she have a strong character? Does she stand up to her father's bad judgments? Is she just a lesser piece of shit than Donald Trump? Does her cliched writing style indicate there's a deep, thoughtful person there? Does a person with strong character say nothing about mass slaughter by the government that's invited her to attend a divisive ceremony establishing an embassy that will remain a sore spot in the Middle East for years to come? Is she irresponsible? Does a responsible business owner allow near-slave labor conditions in her factories? Is Ivanka Trump contemptible, another way of saying despicable?
All of this, in way too many words, is a way of saying that Ivanka Trump is a feckless cunt.
I'll close with one more book quote from her vacant mind:
"We often don't realize that while we're waiting for our lives to begin, they already have--and they're made up of all the decisions we make, big and small, conscious or not."
Karma.
Vic Neptune
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