The Market Force of Love ( from the nytimes )

WEALTH MATTERS

Should You Get a Divorce  Now or Later? By PAUL SULLIVAN The new tax law may determine whether it’s better to complete a divorce by Dec. 31 or wait until next year.

Killing Thousands Is Less Criminal Than Contradicting The Official Line on the Holocaust

"There are many fine organizations the world over that focus on the free speech rights of writers, journalists, and dissidents. However, many of these organizations, including Amnesty International, actually favor imprisoning Holocaust 'revisionists.' Amnesty International has, by its own admission, lobbied governments to make Holocaust 'revisionist' books, speeches, and Internet postings illegal. Many other free speech organizations remain silent on the question of anti-revisionist laws.

"The Jews who were persecuted and killed by the Third Reich were victims of an authoritarian state that censored books and imprisoned authors. To censor books and imprison authors in the name of the victims of the Holocaust is a travesty. Employing fascist methods to honor the innocent victims of fascism is lunacy. Enacting fascistic laws in order to fight fascism is, by definition, self-defeating.

"The French government has found anti-revisionist laws quite useful in eliminating pesky political opponents. It is a crime in France to 'diminish' the Holocaust by not giving it the proper emphasis when speaking or writing about it. This ill-defined, subjective statute makes it easy to prosecute someone for the narrowest of reasons. Using this law, the French government has been able to prosecute political foes on the right (anti-immigrant politician Jean-Marie Le Pen), and the left (Ginette Skandrani, co-founder of France's Green Party).

"Advocates of anti-revisionist laws claim that these laws are needed in order to keep Holocaust skeptics from having an audience, yet in almost every case in which these laws have been enforced, they have only succeeded in giving the prosecuted revisionists a much greater audience than they otherwise would have had. Here is one example: 

"Chemist Germar Rudolf was an apolitical young doctoral student at the prestigious Max Planck Institute in Germany until, in 1993, he was hired by the defense team of a prosecuted German revisionist to prepare a chemical analysis report for the revisionist's upcoming trial. In retaliation, the German government arrested Rudolf, froze his assets, seized his books and computer, and sentenced him to fourteen months imprisonment. No longer able to finish his degree or find work as a chemist, and facing massive legal expenses for his upcoming trial, Rudolf was forced to rely on sympathetic revisionists to raise money. Rudolf became a full-time revisionist writer, arguably the most qualified scientific professional the revisionist community has. So what good did his prosecution accomplish, other than to drive a young would-be chemist directly into the arms of the aging revisionist community, giving them a new, young, energetic, and academically qualified spokesperson?

"The Germans are prosecuting Ernst Zundel for material he posted on his website while he was a legal resident of the United States. The German government's legal theory is that even though Zundel's writings were lawful in the country in which he was living, the fact that the Internet 'brought' Zundel's words into German 'territory' therefore gives Germany jurisdiction to imprison him. Amazingly, the governments of the U.S. and Canada have supported Germany's right to imprison Zundel for 'speech crimes' that were not committed in Germany, and that were not crimes in the country in which Zundel was living. This is an exceptionally dangerous precedent.

"It should be mentioned that Ernst Zundel faces up to ten years in prison (not counting the three years he's already served: two years in Canada, in solitary confinement in a six-by-ten foot cell, and one year in Germany awaiting trial). Germar Rudolf, currently awaiting sentencing in Germany as well, also faces up to ten years. To put these sentences in context, Mounir el Motassadeq, who was convicted in 2005 for his role in the Al Qaeda 'Hamburg cell' that carried out the 9/11 attacks, received only seven years.

"When writers whose only 'crimes' are Internet postings about history, controversial, offensive, or inaccurate they may be, face more prison time than a terrorist implicated in the murder of over three thousand people, something has gone terribly wrong."

-------------David Cole, Republican Party Animal, 2014 pps. 130-1

Surgical Sexist Birth Control: Abortion

Among the sins of the Trump era is the selection of a new supreme court judge which will, according to programmed hysterics, doom America beyond its present rapidly failing rule over a global capitalism becoming more deadly by the moment. Of course any court decision, like all others in our market culture of profit and loss, will benefit some at cost to others and that is true whoever sits in the powerful position of administering justice according to the laws of markets and private profit. Until we become an actual democracy and public benefit takes precedence over any private gain, that will be the case. But among the present motivations toward panic engineered by established power to keep decent people obsessed with an individual when a system threatens collapse on all our heads, to some the issue of legal abortion is deemed most critical to the survival of the species. Or a segment of our one race with two sexes: Women. Well at least a minority of women from the materially developed world since it should be understood that most women would not have an abortion if it were offered to them for free or even if they were paid for it, legally or not.

The breakthrough in seemingly gaining control over their bodies offered by the legalization of abortion was indeed a major benefit to many women but seen as an attack by many others, both on their morality and women’s bodies. Most important and too often not considered is the terrible state of birth control itself when women are forced to undergo surgical procedures which remove living substance from their bodies all because our system has been unwilling to create safe, efficient, affordable birth control to men. And it is men who, during fertile years, are able to provide life-creating seed every single moment of every single day of every single year, while women can only procreate during a few days out of every menstrual cycle. So who needs to wear an internal birth control device or even more profitably, take a pill every day? Guess? While men are still limited to what is called the barrier method, which translates to millions of condoms and billions of dollars, but also lots of pregnancies when mistakenly or incorrectly applied. This primitive technique may have been developed by cave men using animal membrane but while it is now a massive profit maker for pharmaceutical companies it isn’t nearly as effective as birth control pills, which sell and profit far more in that market but still occasionally fail and more important force women to take a drug almost every single un-fertile day of their lives. The real “barrier” is unfortunately lodged between our ears.

Wouldn’t it make sense to develop a birth control method for men at least as functional as the pill is for women? Given that fertile men are daily producers of the stuff of life while women remain so only for a few days a month, why haven’t we created such a method? We have, but it isn’t profitable enough so it isn’t on the market and women will have to continue to ultimately have a surgical procedure which removes living matter and future life from their bodies because selling tens of millions of pills makes more sense to investment capital than providing one injection a year to a man. How’s that? One shot a year, like a flu shot, for a man, and we could have it but for the market forces of private profit and the public good be damned.

Such a drug has been studied, worked on, developed and tested for many years, and a medical science laboratory has claimed full confidence in its safety and need but keeps running into more market demands, especially from big pharma, for more hundreds of millions of dollars spent on testing thus producing no chance of profit in our magical, sacred, and far more important than life marketplace. But isn’t the magic of the market what has brought so much progress, high tech, comfort, safety and security let alone excess wealth, to so many of us? Yes, while also bringing regress, low tech, discomfort, wars, menace and insecurity to even more others, with both lists producing private profit to investors in health, weapons, peace, food, shortage of food, shelter, lack of shelter, etc. Isn’t it wonderful?

But let’s just stick to the subject of alleged freedom for some women to pay the price in ending life long before it functions as conscious human by, formerly, scraping out their insides with surgical tools while now applying a vacuum cleaner that sucks out the unwanted zygote, or whatever our original form has evolved to by the time she is able to get to a doctor or facility or business to perform the “procedure”.

And in the 21^stcentury of scientific advances almost beyond credence for many of us, women are still not only subject to this primitive form of birth control after the fact of potential life creation, but socialized to see it as a freedom and form of liberation? Hello? Not to mention the socially divisive issue it has been and remains with people driven to extremes of fanatic violence, bigotry and contemptuous disrespect to make an already potentially painful experience that much more a producer of social animosity when we most need a coming together of humanity.

 Imagine what might happen if we put this issue to a vote, instead of relying, in usual American fashion, on minorities winning a court case and in the process displeasing and alienating the majority which never had any say in the matter? Women and men, not only in America but the world over, would vote for the once a year injection and probably in overwhelming numbers. To bring about this true liberation for women, and men as well, not just some individual judge but the market forces of capital will have to be replaced by the democratic forces of humanity. That obviously calls for changing something much larger than one or another representative of capital in a white house, before we reduce our planet to a massive global outhouse.

The New American Right

Former mental health crisis center atmosphere in D.C. sinks to near total dementia among rulers and their media-political servants after Trump blasphemes war god and neglects to spit in Putin’s face. 

The atmosphere among leadership of the New American Right – formerly Democratic Party liberals – is causing confusion among the few American Nazi Party members who are not FBI agents or employees of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Gerhard Pablo Von Akbar Levine, the State Department employee and a major stockholder in the SPLC who heads the twelve member Super Nazis of Tyrannia was almost at a loss for words during a hastily arranged press conference held by facetwitterbook. When asked if his group had a future now that a major party was beginning to sound more hysterical than the Old Demented Right, he stammered “What are we to do to come off as deranged as usual now that this new group has cornered the market on mental behavior warranting emergency brain treatment by a proctologist?”

As the press conference ended, the Committee to Preserve American Values of Warfare, Petcare and the Master Racism of Self Chosen People announced that Putin had been indicted and charged with sexual molestation of the world famous* Russian group, Pussy Power .

The United Nations General Assembly called a special meeting to discuss the crisis which has caused many in the international diplomatic corps to exclaim, in 145 different languages,

 “what the fuck are they putting in the taco pizza burgers these Americans have been eating?”

* well, at least in D.C, and parts of New York and California

Russia Accused of Interfering With Israeli Interference in American Democracy!

Russia Accused of Interfering With Israeli Interference in American Democracy

Shocking news from Paparazzi International claims Russians clogged toilets at Department of Injustice headquarters in Washington just before Israeli agents were to flush out secrets of American democracy previously kept hidden from legions of consumers and other intellectual shut-ins.

“This is the most shocking charge among the hundreds of shocking charges we’ve made that blame the Russians for everything from Clinton’s loss in the election to Lebron leaving Cleveland and Oprah refusing to run for president, said a Deep State representative unable to be identified at this time due to shocking conflicts with his/her/its parole officer.

The congressional mental health crisis center reported that it had received more shocking emergency calls than during the royal wedding in England as representatives, senators, aides, pimps, hoes and lobbyists all expressed shock at the anti-Semitic nature of this latest crime attributed to the evil capitalist conspiracy emanating from Russia, formerly the evil communist conspiracy which has become even worse since switching to private-profit-first economics.

This kind of anti-Semitic hatred will not be tolerated and congress, especially its liberal progressive sectors, will insist to end diplomatic relations with Russia, while more conservative sectors of corporate government indicate cutting back on some trade and immigration but continuing the import of Russian black bread and Russian caviar. Stay tuned for more revelations from Marvel Comics, CNN, Msnbc, Fox, the NYtimes and Washington post as the systemic situation further unravels and shocking cover stories are created by former advertising executives who have become trainees in creating news that’s even dumber than their previous ad campaigns.

Feminism, An Autopsy

". . . most obstacles for women have been removed by now. Women are allowed to go to college, to work in traditionally masculine fields, to speak in public, to run for office, to do whatever they want. The actual obstacles and inequalities that women face are mostly obstacles only for the poor - middle-class women and above can now buy their access to power and equality. The issues most pressing for lower income women, like affordable abortions, childcare, health insurance and health care, public housing, and so on, have slipped off the feminist radar. . . . Women are now judges and lawyers who put innocent men and women in jail, who exploit the poor, who support institutionalized racism. Women are now politicians who are rewarding the mega-rich with even more money at the expense of the poor. 

"When an industry has gone off the rails, like Wall Street or Silicon Valley, you hear this a lot:  'They just need more women. Women have more common sense, more empathy. It's just a boy's club run wild.' This is illogical. It's humans, not men, who are the problem here. 

"Now that women are raised with access to power, we will not see a more egalitarian world, but the same world, just with more women in it.

" . . . that feminism has been guilty throughout its history of rampant racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other failures of empathy, shows that the mainstream goal was always participation in the system, rather than its destruction." 

"When feminists decided to fight for the right to work, what they meant was the right to become doctors, lawyers, and so on. . . . Right from the beginning the assumption was that work was a good thing, a fulfilling thing, that we were missing out on. Not a soul and body-destroying thing that can kill you off young or make you wish it would.

"A true radical response is a lonely road, but it's super hip these days to think of yourself as a radical without doing anything to deserve it. To think that if you buy this special bag of tortilla chips with a pink ribbon on it, you are helping to cure cancer. That if you buy this album and wear a leather jacket, you are a true punk. And if you simply call yourself a feminist, you are a feminist. 

 "What there really should be is a discussion of how women less advantaged than us (or living in different countries or cultures) are oppressed by the things we think of as empowering."

-----Jessa Crispin, Why I Am Not a Feminist, A Feminist Manifesto

Think Global, Act Local, and Hurry.

“The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth”  Pope Francis, Laudato Si

The pope was referring to the physical garbage dump we have made of the planet but he might just as well have been speaking of the dominant western values which are the motivating factor in the creation of that filth. Our adherence to the market forces of capitalism has meant massive private profit in the creation of that “immense pile” which he criticized even if not using the C-word. And the supposed ethical or moral code that supports the system and enjoys a foundation built in part on diverse religious support is as much at fault as any political economic group which employs the professional government, media and religious workers that make its global reality accepted as the seemingly natural work of a market god.

The minority controlled systems that have dominated the world for centuries always created “immense piles of filth” while also allowing enough of their wealth to trickle down to make a professional servant class comfortable enough to maintain the system and control even larger suffering populations. This was and is done at the worst of times by killing people and at the best by clouding their minds with disinformation, legend and propaganda to make it seem that a better tomorrow was wishfully possible under the market divinity even if it wasn’t materially probable given reasonably enlightened thought.

The environmental destruction alternately blamed on climate change, alternative systems or an evil leader or CEO is the outcome of treating humanity and our earthly home as commodities in a vast market place where profit accruing to minorities is, according to religious belief, supposed to lead to a better world for everyone when it trickles down to a majority anxiously waiting, hoping and praying that it will fall on them with the nicest among that group hoping that maybe, someday, a little later on, it will fall on everyone else. A system born in the 19^thcentury, at least in its industrial form, which made a rich marketplace of some of the world while reducing most to poverty and degradation only known to its sufferers and tourists who made the wrong turn from their hotels and blundered into the ghetto, has become, at electronic speeds, visible and understandable to more people than ever before. 

The mind boggling personal wealth that has grown to the billions of dollars each for a relative handful of people has brought millions below them to a previously unknown comfort level but reduced hundreds of millions more to sinking economic status with poverty and material inequality figures higher than at any time since they began being recorded.

The unbearable stench and deadly quality of the physical and moral filth has become too much for humanity to bear and while not yet reaching the point of direct simultaneous experience, growing numbers of people the world over are rising to say we’ve seen, breathed and felt enough, we fear the future not only for ourselves but later generations and cannot tolerate the status quo any longer. Growing national movements are becoming global and the threat of humanity rising up against minority control in a way far beyond previous revolutionary movements which were limited to nations alone and easier to destroy is causing a reaction from dominators that threatens even more than past destructions to maintain their control.

Nuclear weapons that helped devastate Japan in the Second World War now menace the entire planet, and near madness prevails among hired warriors who actually think of using them and getting away with destroying others while somehow protecting themselves from nuclear retaliation in a world with many powers so armed.

Only democracy can bring the minority owners of the garbage dump filth under control of the majority, but that near fictional experience for most of humanity, always dangled in front of them as a possibility under cosmetic and drug facades that made eating regularly seem a luxury, still only seems possible to a minority. But without increasing debt, what passes for a shrinking middle class would be skipping  rent payments and even meals and as the threat grows greater, the need for a movement that demands equality is even more necessary lest the forces of fake news and phony individualism on which private profits before public good rely become dangerously stronger.

Present focus at the fading but still central office of global capital in America is on a president who represents newer dangers but only in style and hardly substance. The distractions that keep people’s minds on him and not the system of capitalism are part of what could bring it to a point at which he means as little as the rest of us facing war with nations or nature that could spell doom for humanity and not simply one or another identity group among our divided race. Those divisions, based on warping minds to not only believe disinformation news but that there is more than one human race, stand between unity that could bring about a better world for all of us, instead of the diminishing returns guaranteed in a market under minority control that will ultimately destroy the same group: all of us.

They may have dominated us into the creation of the pile of physical and moral filth the system has become but we are responsible for creating the democracy necessary to clean it up for ourselves and future generations. No matter how minority owned consciousness control works to make that seem impossible, truly social consciousness can and must prevail to make it not only believable but materially achievable. The old adage to think and act as a planetary member of the human race rather than some isolated individual or small group  was never more true, nor materially necessary, nor more possible. 

Listen Up Liberals: Anti-White Discrimination Key to Trump's Election (and Re-Election)

"White anxiety about antiwhite discrimination cuts across party lines. According to a 2016 Pew study, about half of Republicans believe there is a lot or some discrimination against whites, but so do nearly 30% of Democrats. . . . .There is in fact some justification for these feelings of white marginalization - at least among a certain segment of the white population. Poor and working-class whites have among the highest rates of unemployment and addiction. Life expectancy is declining for whites without a high school degree - something true of almost no other demographic, including high school dropouts from other racial groups. Educational prospects for poor white children are extremely bleak. Private tutors and one-thousand dollar SAT courses are completely cost prohibitive to poor or even working-class people - and poor whites don't benefit from affirmative action. Whereas most elite colleges do special outreach for racial minorities, they rarely send scouts to the backwoods of Kentucky. Out of roughly two hundred students in the Yale Law School class of 2019, there appears to be exactly one poor white - or three, if we include students from families living just above the federal poverty line. Administrators have described this class as the 'most diverse' in the school's history.

"It is simply a fact that the 'diversity' policies at the most selective American universities and in some sectors of the economy have had a disparate adverse impact on whites. Relative to their population percentage, working-class whites, and particularly white Christians from conservative states, are often the most underrepresented group at America's elite universities. White employees increasingly feel victimized by prodiversity promotion policies that they see as discriminating against them - and the United States Supreme Court has agreed, striking down as illegal a particularly bald-faced attempt by the city of New Haven, Connecticut, to invalidate promotions for white firefighters in order to promote more minorities.

"While whites generally are still extremely disproportionately represented in the U.S. Senate, the media, and the corporate world, working-class whites are decidedly not. Between 1999 and 2008, only 13 of the 783 members of Congress who served had spent more than a quarter of their adulthood in blue-collar jobs. As political scientist Nick Carnes writes, 'Although women and racial minorities were still underrepresented at the end of the twentieth century, their gains during the postwar period sharply contrasted [with] the stable underrepresentation of working-class people, who made up between 50% and 60% of the nation during the last hundred years but who constituted 2% or less of the legislators who served in each Congress during that time.'

"The result of all this is that working-class whites have among the lowest upward mobility rates in the nation. Not surprisingly, when surveyed about the prospects of children today, whites were overwhelmingly more pessimistic than Latinos and blacks. Just 24 percent of whites believed the next generation would be better off financially or the same as their parents, compared to 49 percent of blacks and 62 percent of Latinos. 

"Beyond their economic anxiety, many whites feel an intense cultural anxiety. America's culture wars are nothing if not a fight for the right to define our national identity - and it's a bitter, race-inflected battle. After Beyonceé channeled Black Lives Matter at the 2016 Super Bowl, half the country deified her while the other half accused her of 'cop killer entertainment.' At the 2017 Oscars, the question of whether Best Picture would go to La La Land (a throwback musical that some criticize for 'whitesplaining' jazz) or Moonlight seemed to have massive implications - as did the gaffe that initially gave the award to the former by mistake. White male heroes like John Wayne have given way to the clueless white male, who doesn't even know how racist he is, and is regularly made into television sport (as on Saturday Night Live). For tens of millions of white Americans today, mainstream popular culture displays an un-Christian, minority-glorifying LGBTQ America they can't and don't want to recognize as their country - an America that seems to exclude them, to treat them as the enemy."

------Amy Chua, Political Tribes, Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations