Democracy's Long Vacation

     Why did the fishermen, brothers Simon and Andrew, accept Jesus's offer to join him when he, a stranger, said, "I will make you fishers of men."?
     Because they were sick of their jobs.
     Career switches aren't easy to accomplish.  A lot of thought can go into it preceding the actual switch.  Simon (before he was Peter) and Andrew appear to have made a snap decision based on the persuasiveness of a man claiming to be a divine emanation.
     This emanation managed to get himself conceived, gestated, and born without the help of a human sperm donor.  The emanation, after he died on a cross, came back to life.  He asked his disciple Thomas to put his hand into his side to prove his actual presence, even though putting one's hand into a living body, were it possible, would cause a physical and distressing reaction.  This risen Jesus was obviously not human, if he ever was.
     These "events" are accepted as established fact, meaning that millions of living human beings set aside, when it comes to Jesus, their natural ability to doubt and question the made up shit that Christian religious institutions have been pushing on people for hundreds of years.  Getting people to believe fiction as if it's fact is a long-established art.
     Jim Morrison was arrested in Miami during a concert for flashing his penis at the audience, or so some believed they had witnessed.  Cops accepted this alleged lewd moment as fact.  Ray Manzarek, The Doors' keyboardist, said years later that Morrison's "flashing" moment seemed simulated to him.
     "Perception," it's said by people who like to utter cliches, "is everything."  Yes, and it's flawed.
     Today, while sitting on my porch, my eyes noticed a fly on the sidewalk.  I kept looking at the fly because it wasn't moving; it was taking a break, perhaps, or sniffing the air.  A black ant roughly the same size as the fly walked past the winged insect at a distance of about five ant lengths.  The fly launched upward like someone on a trampoline and landed again, oriented about 180 degrees from its previous position, apparently to monitor the ant continuing its rapid walk.  The ant did not notice the fly, or just didn't care.  The fly saw the ant and reacted defensively and instantly.  Fly perception and ant perception are as different as the perceptions of two different people.
     Americans, generally speaking, exist in a perception bubble that includes the idea that we're the greatest fucking thing that ever happened.  Questioning this belief is like saying to a Christian that Jesus was probably just a man who had strong insights into the human condition, that Jesus was of his time, that the legendary and mythological qualities of his character were added decades and even centuries after he lived, meaning the traditional Catholic Jesus spiel is a collection of ideas thought up and envisioned by men using their imaginations long after Jesus was dead.
     Orthodox ideas about America are like religious doctrine.  I read an interview on the Bloomberg website from June 2018 with former National Intelligence Director James Clapper (who has the same initials as Jesus).  To an interviewer who didn't push back on any of Clapper's bullshit, the distinguished man said this:

     "...through our [U.S.] history, when we tried to manipulate or influence elections or even overturned governments, it was done with the best interests of the people in that country in mind--given the traditional reverence for human rights."

     Read that statement again.  In his new book, he cites a recent study, concluding that the U.S. has manipulated and/or influenced eighty-one elections from 1946 to 2000, with Russia and the Soviet Union in the same period doing the same thirty-six times.  Clapper is fully aware of the difference between Russian election interference and American election interference, but, in true religious fanatic form, this immoral and criminal activity has "...the best interests of the people in that country in mind--given the traditional reverence for human rights."
     Traditional reverence for human rights, apparently, includes the forced rectal feeding of prisoners in CIA black sites on foreign soil and the kidnapping and renditioning of President Aristide of Haiti.  Examples of American reverence for human rights are multitudinous and sickening.  I'd have to turn this into a multivolume epic tens of thousands of pages long to research and list them all.
     James Clapper is a respected voice on MSNBC.  He's part of the #resistance against Donald Trump, earning him the right to propagandize for the interests of the Intelligence Community he still serves.  A month ago, a Bloomberg journalist interviewed him and didn't do a spit take when Clapper said the quote above with a straight face.  It would've been appropriate if the Bloomberg journalist had been a vampire with some blood still in his mouth from a recent feeding.  The spit take would've splattered Clapper's face with blood representing rivers of wasted life essence from the eighty-one and more countries the United States has fucked with since 1946.
     Clapper, as he vigorously pushes the Russiagate narrative, along with his fellow Intelligence ghouls feeding on gullibility, reminds me of what it might have been like to listen to Heinrich Himmler reaffirm Ludendorff's made-up "Germany was stabbed in the back" theory to explain that country's loss in the Great War.
     James Clapper, like most assholes in government, switched his career from behind the scenes intelligence chief to pundit, adding his lies to the news media, infecting those who believe his claptrap statements; justifications of the same processes leading to election thievery and regime changes he claims are done on behalf of "the best interests" of foreign victims of U.S. policies dreamed up and practiced mostly by officials unelected by and unaccountable to the American people.

                                                                             Vic Neptune