Those Who Serve (The Ruling Class) At the Top Get Their Reward

The way ex-Presidents of the U.S. see it, they who served the class interests of multimillionaire and billionaire corporate bosses and parasitic speculators deserve to be multimillionaires themselves. They sacrificed by going into “public service,” having to scrape by on six figure salaries year after year and free taxpayer-paid-for health care (and not that crappy Medicaid or Medicare either), and guaranteed pensions, and paid-for staff they can (illegally) use for personal errands and reelection campaign work on the side. Why, maybe they could have made hundreds of millions in “the private sector”!

Let’s hear a couple of them telling us how rough they had it. Here’s Bill Clinton, the mass murderer of Haiti, Rwanda, Sudan, and Waco, Texas, on the hardship he endured:

"I never had any money until I got out of the White House, you know, but I've done reasonably well since then." He never had ANY money his WHOLE LIFE until AFTER he was president. All those years spent in homeless shelters...it must have been tough. His wife also claims they were “dead broke” after “serving the nation,” as the cliche goes, for 8 years in Washington. (I sure hope they didn’t have to go on welfare, after Clinton gutted it.) [1]

Here’s a bit of what Clinton means by “I’ve done reasonably well since then:” $65 million just in speaking fees from 2001 to 2009. (Now the total is over $100 million.) Then there’s book income and etc. Oh, plus there’s hundreds of millions he’s raised for his “foundation,” which also supports him in his various vague endeavors and pays for his staff of lackeys and bag carriers. (Free bodyguards for life courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. The Secret Service does that. And his pensions from being president and from being governor of Arkansas- pocket change for a guy like him these days, but maybe just enough to keep him from having to sleep on park benches if he falls on hard times again. His wife is pulling in big bucks too. Maybe she can give him an allowance, if he’ll stop sleeping around.)

George W. Bush is another guy who sacrificed big time for us to be our (elected by stealing elections) president. Discussing his post-presidential plans, Bush described his urgent priority to “replenish the ol’ coffers.” With a reported net worth of a paltry $6.5 to $20 million* by the time he was done saving the nation from terrorists, Bush barely had two nickels to rub together. Fortunately the gentlemen who are the audiences on the corporate oligarchy rubber chicken circuit (more like a filet mignon circuit) have big hearts and are willing to cough up six figure “honoraria” to hear Bush stumble his way through his banal, canned speeches. As of Spring 2011, Bush managed to add a little something to his coffers; $15 million from speeches, plus his book deal, plus whatever secret Bush family schemes hidden in the background with the Saudis and rich Texans and whoever else. It’s not much, but at least it keeps the wolf from the door.

You must understand, presidents are forced to pay zero rent to live in the White House. They only get a six figure salary, and free health care for themselves and their families, and all-expenses-paid travel and lodgings, and paid-for staff. It gets mighty expensive living for free, so one can see how Bush’s coffers were drained by his eight years of sacrifice for us. YOU try living an all-expenses-paid existence some time! It’s harder than it sounds! (Well, maybe it isn’t, but don’t think about that. You’re not supposed to think about such things. Just drink the propaganda Kool-Aid.)

In a heartwarming development, Bush and Clinton have taken to doing speeches (for money, of course) together, sort of a politicians-cashing-in-together duet novelty act. Apparently their shared sacrifice created a bond, like men who have been in combat together. We should all be inspired by their example.

*U.S. financial disclosure forms required by law mandate very broad ranges only, to avoid, I don’t know, embarrassing our rich overlords? Violating their privacy? (They sure have no respect for OUR privacy.)

1] Hillary did manage to eke out a living after laying down her heavy burden of being “First Lady,” a “job” with no actual identifiable duties, running for president herself, and being Secretary of State in the regime of Barack “I’m Pretty Good At Killing” Obama, scraping together $5 million in “speaking fees” and a book “advance” (non-refundable to the publisher, a special privilege political poohbahs get, unlike ordinary writers who have to pay back whatever part of their advances they don’t earn back in royalties from sales) of $14 million. It was calculated that Simon & Schuster would need to sell the book for $70 a pop to recoup that. Obviously it’s really a bribe or payoff of some kind, for past or future favors. I’m talking about this year’s book deal. She had another book deal with S & S in 2000 for an $8 million advance. Hopefully that alleviated her dead brokeness.

S & S is owned by media conglomerate CBS, which is controlled by billionaire Sumner Wellstone, who also controls Viacom, another media goliath.

But then, why should poohbahs have to pay back their advances like ordinary writers? It’s not as if they actually write “their” books, anyway. [“Hillary Clinton: ‘We Came Out Of The White House Dead Broke.’” Of course, Diane Sawyer, who asked Hillary C. about this, is one to talk. Just once, I’d like to hear someone ask these multimillion-dollar-a-year TV teleprompter/script-reading propagandists about their incomes.]

  

Two smug bastards who know the

score. Be the manager of a global

system of exploitation enforced by

violence, cash in big afterwards for
services rendered.

Do UFO’s Exist?

A UFO is an Unidentified Flying Object. And they definitely exist. That is, pilots and people on the ground have often seen flying objects (or what appear to be objects, like blobs of light) in the sky. Pilots and others at times have reported these objects to change from a seemingly stationary state to moving at a very high rate of speed.

Now, most people automatically equate “UFO” with “flying saucer,” that is, an alien space ship. While it is undeniable that UFO’s exist, we can’t say that space craft from somewhere other than the earth have been here. But nor can we say definitely they have not. Here’s why:

Our star is called the “sun” (in English). Nine planets orbit it. Biological entities (life forms) exist on at least one of those planets.

The sun is one star in a galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy. There are billions of stars in this galaxy. Many of those stars also have planets orbiting them. A number of those planets have been identified by astronomers. So in the Milky Way, there must be billions of planets. (A billion is a thousand millions, by the way.)

The Milky Way, in turn, is only one of BILLIONS of GALAXIES. Each of those galaxies has billions of stars.

So in the universe there are billions TIMES billions of planets! You’ve got nine zeros for a billion. Multiply by billions is adding nine more zeros. So it’s a number with eighteen zeros- very huge, beyond everyday comprehension.) Maybe like, a number similar to all the grains of sand on all the beaches in the world?

Is it at all plausible that of all these planets, the only one on which life exists is THIS one?? I rather doubt it. That is, if one accepts a scientific explanation for the existence of life, a chemical, molecular, biological explanation.

If one is religious, which is to say, a mystic with a dogma, most of which posit the existence of supernatural, omnipotent beings that “made” the entire universe, and were apparently too lazy to create life on more than one of their planets, then one can argue, based on nothing but pure fantasy (aka “belief” or “faith”) that life exists only on earth. (I’m using “life” to refer to earthly organisms. Presumably the imaginary supernatural beings, the “gods,” are also alive.)

Rationally, it seems certain that life exists elsewhere in the universe.

The universe is currently dated at 13.8 billion years old. The earth is about 4.54 billion years- only about a third as old as the universe itself. The earliest possible date for life on earth is about 3.5 billion years ago.

There are older stars and planets in the universe than ours. Much older.

We have to assume that life has existed millions of years, and probably billions of years, earlier than on earth, somewhere in the universe.

Our species, which thinks itself so smart and “advanced,” is 160,000 years old, depending on how you define and date it. (That’s for “modern” homo sapiens. “Archaic” homo sapiens goes back about 300,000 years.)

It seems there must be some species of life out there very far ahead of us. Beyond our comprehension, in fact.

So is it possible that some of them are traveling through space in vehicles? Definitely.

Have any of them been to earth? We can’t rule it out definitively, it would seem.

So it’s possible that aliens (real aliens, not humans from another country) have been to earth.

HAVE they been? I cannot say.

The stories of “UFO abductees” have always struck me as implausible, for at least two reasons- the stories are always about the same, and there seems to be an obsession with our sex organs on the part of the aliens.

Maybe these are alien perverts? You know, like people who have sex with animals? Beings into some kind of extraterrestrial interspecies kinkiness? Maybe they got bored performing sex acts on other species on their own planets so they set off in search of new thrills? And these perverts from another planet don't seem very considerate of their kidnapped molestees. Do they even ask, when it's over, "Was it good for you too?"

But seriously, I suppose one explanation could be that the sexual examination part was most traumatic to the “abductees” and so that stuck most vividly in their minds. We do call our sex organs our “private parts.” We have a hard time accepting as natural and being comfortable with our sexuality. This seems due to the pathological (unhealthy and unnatural) nature of the societies and cultures we have evolved, our so-called “civilizations.” (I like Gandhi’s quip, when asked what he thought of Western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.” One could say the same of Indian civilization too.)

Note to future abductees: next time, take a cellphone pic of the aliens. And ask for their phone number.

Bad History: The Myth that the Versailles Treaty Caused Nazism and World War II

One of the pernicious myths of “history” as created by ideologues called historians is that the blame for the rise of Hitler and the ensuing Second World War is down to the “unjust” and “harsh and punitive” Treaty of Versailles. That is to say, when dealing with obvious criminal psychotics like the Germans, if you are only NICER to them, they’ll leave you alone.

But who made Germany attack an invade France in 1890? Who made the Germans ravage and lay waste to France from 1914-1918? They won the previous war with France, and got what they wanted. Wasn’t that “fair” and “generous” enough for them? No, they went on and did it again in 1914, on the pretext of some Austrian aristocrat getting bumped off by a Serb nationalist! (“Grand Duke Ferdinand,” was the puffed-up title of the imperialist parasite who bit the dust.)

Does appeasing aggressive psychopaths placate them? I think the evidence of concession after concession handed to Hitler disproves that. And the Germans only paid a small fraction of the reparations they agreed to pay for the destruction they wreaked when they signed the Treaty.

Remember that in World War I Germany invaded neutral Belgium, to carry out the Schlieffen plan, a grand flanking maneuver aimed at annihilating the French army. While in Belgium, they busied themselves committing atrocities, murdering civilians, and committing cultural genocide But the Germans were “provoked,” you see. The Belgian army had the effrontery to resist the invasion of their country. What arrogance! Why, the Germans HAD to kill Belgian civilians and burn a historic library down, destroying irreplaceable manuscripts, to teach the Belgians a lesson. The lesson being, don’t resist invasions by psychopaths.

The fact that British propagandists during the war invented fake atrocity stories has for years been trotted out by U.S. (and other) “historians” to discredit the FACT that Germany committed REAL atrocities in Belgium- not to mention the crime of aggression by invading a neutral country in the first place. This is mendacity disguised as history. People who do that should be called propagandists, NOT historians. When you deliberately falsify history to advance a covert political and ideological agenda, that makes you a propagandist, not a historian. Unfortunately, most well-known “historians” seem to fall into this camp to some degree. This creates a huge burden on people who want an accurate understanding of the world. You have to read so much, and study for years, just to find out more or less what really happened. Needless to say, the average person does not do this and is thus an easy mark for the professional brainwashers to dupe. And professional brainwashers are what propagandists really are.

And what about the Holocaust? Did the Treaty of Versailles cause the Holocaust? I guess the “historians” should say yes- although few seem to have the nerve to do so. But if the Treaty “caused” the rise of Hitler, and "caused" the Second World War, then it must follow that it is to blame for all of Hitler’s works, including the Holocaust. Now you truly enter the arena of ludicrousness.

But it has been in the interest of Zionists to lay the blame for the Holocaust on historical anti-Semitism (obviously appropriately, but that isn’t sufficient explanation by itself), and the Zionists have dibs on Holocaust-causation. And there’s the uncomfortable fact that the “Western democracies” barely lifted a finger to save Jews, and in fact blocked their escape from the Nazis’ clutches for the most part.

Now what was the motive for the distortion of history claiming Versailles as causative for World War II? It is to exonerate Germany, because Germany after World War II was part of the U.S.-bossed anti-Soviet bloc in Western Europe. The former German enemy had to have a heavy coating of ideological make-up applied to make it attractive to Western publics who had been put through two major, costly wars by Germany. (The Soviet Union, on the other hand, NEVER invaded Western Europe, NEVER declared war on the U.S. or bombed its ships at anchor as Japan did- another rehabilitated foe turned subaltern nation to the U.S. The Soviet Union was invaded by two dozen western nations right after the Bolshevik revolution, in a failed attempt to reverse that revolution. And of course Germany invaded in 1941 and caused horrendous carnage and wreckage. But the Soviet Union was the Bad Guy.)

The end of the Cold War has changed nothing, since now Russia is still viewed as an adversary- apparently because it won’t let itself to be so reduced in power that its influence ends at its own national boundaries. For this it is faulted for “behaving like the Soviet Union” and “restarting the Cold War” or “acting like the Cold War never ended.” (Hey, Western imperialist propagandists, would you like me to lend you a mirror?)

In fact, to accept the Versailles Treaty as leading to World War II, because it embittered fanatical German nationalists like Hitler, is to imply Germany had a legitimate grievance to start World War II.

Well then, given that Germany suffered far worse destruction in World War II (its cities weren’t systematically bombed into rubble in the First World War, nor was it occupied), plus Germany was shrunk in size, permanently lost Prussia (the heartland of its militarism), Danzig, and more, and the truncated remainder was divided into two, logically Germany had an even BIGGER grievance after World War II than after WW I. So they should have armed themselves with nuclear weapons and started World War III!

The thing is, taking the irrational grievances of fanatical German nationalists at face value is like taking their stated grievances against Jews as having “caused” the Holocaust. I don’t hear those historians who blame World War II on Versailles (because German fascists used it to rile people up) blaming the Jews for the Holocaust. But by the same logic, they could. The point is, Versailles was just an excuse, used as agitprop by the Nazis, the same way they used anti-Semitic propaganda as agitprop. Quite simply, the Germans (many or most of them) were pathological people with burning imperialist ambitions combined with a virulent sense of “racial” superiority. They dehumanized most of the rest of humanity and had no compunction about slaughtering and enslaving most everybody else on the planet. Versailles had NOTHING to do with it. If there had been NO Versailles Treaty, Hitler would STILL have risen to power, and STILL have started World War Two in Europe. It’s idiotic to argue otherwise if one has read deeply about Germany between the wars (as I have). Who could seriously believe that the Versailles Treaty made Germany invade Russia yet again, killing twenty million of the people there, with the intention to ultimately annihilated fully THREE QUARTERS of the “subhuman” Slavs and make slaves of the rest, working on giant German plantations? Russia didn’t impose the Versailles conditions on Germany. Germany defeated Russia in World War I, and imposed onerous peace terms on it! So by the logic of “Versailles made Germany do it,” the Soviet Union should have invaded Germany in World War II, not the other way around. After all, Germany imposed an unfair peace treaty on Russia. Whereas the Versailles Treaty was fair, and should have been enforced. Hitler should not have been allowed to break it by increasing the size of the German army and by remilitarizing the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty. [1]

No, the fault lay in the pathological German character. Thankfully that character has changed to a large degree, mainly in the younger generations.

1] World War I started in 1914. Russia was defeated in 1917. The U.S. then entered the war, because New York bankers fretted about getting their war loans to Britain and France repaid if Germany won. With fresh U.S. troops on the Western front, Germany sued for peace in fall 1918. The slimy and cowardly German general staff, headed by Field Marshals von Hindenberg (who appointed Hitler chancellor in 1933, opening the door to Nazi dictatordship) and von Ludendorff (who participated in the 1923 coup attempt by Hitler to overthrow the Weimar Republic government, for which he was not prosecuted for treason and subversion, not imprisoned or shot- as Hitler should have been) pulled the weaselly and cunning move of making civilians take the rap for the defeat, claiming the military was never really defeated and promulgating the “stab in the back” canard, that traitors at home (in a dictatorship- remember Germany was a monarchy headed by the Kaiser, or “king,”) made Germany surrender. The Nazis heaped a lot of the blame for the “betrayal” and “treason” on “the Jews.” In World War II this was a big factor in the Allies insistence on unconditional surrender, and occupation, so the Germans wouldn’t once again pretend that they weren’t actually defeated.

Governor Vetoes Gun Control Bill Because “Hey, I’m Running for President as a Republican!”

New Jersey Governor Chris “Bully-Boy” Christie quite predictably vetoed a state gun control bill that would have limited magazine capacities. Because of some blah-blah-blah bullshit excuse he offered. The real reason is in the facetious quote in the title.

“Catastrophic Decline In Human Rights in Egypt” says Amnesty International

Maybe the new boss isn’t the same as the old boss. Maybe he’s worse. That seems to be the judgment of Amnesty International. (The quote above is from the BBC.)

Amnesty International calculates that the number of people rounded up and imprisoned in political repression since the military coup one year ago, led by new dictator Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, overthrew Mohamed Morsi (the first democratically elected president in all the thousands of years of Egypt’s existence) is at least 16,000, of whom a minimum of 80 have died in prison.

Human rights in Egypt are now said to be as bad as during the worst of the Mubarak reign.

Not a problem for the U.S. and Israel. Both governments are secretly relieved to be rid of Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi. Indeed, Egyptian democracy is regarded by those governments as a threat. Because Israel isn’t popular with the Egyptian masses, and the Egyptian people have no reason to aid the repression of the Palestinians imprisoned in the Gaza open air concentration camp. So democracy in Egypt poses a threat to the Egyptian-Israeli de facto alliance, an alliance underwritten by billions of dollars in military equipment given to the Egyptian military every year by the U.S.

It's rather a shame that the U.S. doesn't use its immense power for the benefit of humanity. Of course, it acquired that power in the first place by being an enemy of humanity. But were it to be a leader in improving the level of global civilization, that would be a way for atoning for how it acquired its power. But its elites show no inclination to do any such thing. They are utterly lacking in moral and existential clarity, so they won't be doing that.

Homeless Man Murdered By New York City Government Was in Rigor Mortis

I’ve written earlier about this case. See “New York City Government Kills Man For Sleeping In Stairwell” to get up to speed. In brief, a homeless, mentally ill man was arrested for sleeping in a stairwell and thrown in jail to await trial (!) and since the solitary confinement cell he was dumped in was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (over 38 degrees Celsius) he died in the cell with nobody noticing.

Now to turns out that the victim was already in rigor mortis when his corpse was noticed in its cell. Rigor mortis generally doesn’t start to set in until several hours after death, taking 12-24 hours to set in fully, then reversing after 72 hours. (Rigor mortis is the condition in which the corpse becomes extremely stiff.) That means he may have been dead for longer before his demise was discovered than previously asserted by “the authorities” (the people in power).

Still not a peep from the local media- and not just the establishment media but, shamefully, the “alternative” media too [1]- about the culpability of police for arresting a helpless, destitute, mentally ill homeless man for the “crime” of sleeping in a stairwell of a public housing project (warehouse for poor people) instead of moving him along or taking him to a homeless shelter. Still not a peep about the even more culpable judge who set BAIL for the man, at $2,500, which was the same as setting no bail, meaning the judge effectively sentenced the man to an indeterminate jail time until the case would be resolved (which unless the man immediately pled guilty could drag on for months- there have been people imprisoned at Rikers Island, the city’s main jail complex, for years awaiting resolution of their cases). So the judge imposed a punishment on a defendant (whose crime was sleeping in a stairwell, officially “disorderly conduct,” a catch-all the police use to arrest people for anything they don’t like- absurdly, here sleep is “disorderly”) before any conviction. Imprisoned for sleeping where sleeping isn’t allowed. Well, that’ll teach the mentally ill to shape up and act right! Get a job and rent an exorbitantly expensive apartment, you bum!

The unrealism of the tacit demands placed on people, even mentally ill people, in the brutal, dog-eat-dog, winner-take-all economic system of the U.S., is matched by the cruelty revealed in this case. The cruelty is not an accidental byproduct, or an endless series of “lapses.” Nor it is merely an inevitable result of “human nature,” “man’s inhumanity to man,” the classic fallback alibi of cruel systems, in cluding the American one. Cruelty is in fact part of the structure of the social/political/economic structure. A ruthless economic system needs a callous and cruel enforcement system, which it has in spades. In a normal human society, sleeping wouldn’t be a crime just because someone is homeless and mentally ill. Police wouldn’t arrest people for such a “crime.” And a judge that threw a man in jail for such a “crime” would be removed from the bench.

In the U.S., none of this is even seen as unusual, much less wrong. The only issue here is why the man was allowed to die in his cell, and nobody noticed. Only the jail guards are subject to rebuke, for dereliction of duty. They allowed a public relations problem for their masters to arise.

Particular cases like this, which are NOT aberrations but rather ubiquitous and continuous, put the lie to U.S. propaganda that America is the “freest nation in the world.” This permanent propaganda campaign, a founding edifice of the U.S. ideological system going all the way back to the rebellion against the British crown, has been so effective that not only do most Americans believe it, but apparently people all over the world believe it. The facts belie it.

And even some people who should know better believe it. For example, Noam Chomsky, about as scathing a critic of U.S. imperialism (although he doesn’t use the word “imperialism,” generally) as there is, over the years has repeatedly asserted in speeches that the U.S. is “the freest country in the world.” It’s an assertion he makes without offering evidence- assertion without evidence being a practice he excoriates others for, ironically. (The speeches are on youtube.com.)

1] And the most prominent dissident American media organ, the television and Internet broadcaster Democracy Now! (democracynow.org), which does much excellent and vital work, is based in New York City. It reported the death in the same narrow framework as the ruling class media did.