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This excerpt from an interview with Marc Steiner from Real News –
Noam Chomsky: Well, I’m old enough to remember, as a child, listening to Hitler’s speeches over the radio at the Nuremberg rallies. I couldn’t understand the words when I was six years old, but I could easily understand the mood. And it was frightening, the adoration of the screaming crowds, the ranting, and also seeing what was beginning to happen in the ’30s as fascism began to spread, and it seemed inexorably over much of the world with these hideous leaders in charge. And these memories do come to mind when I listened to one of Trump’s rallies, for example. There’s some similarity, the worship of the crowds, his very effective use of techniques of manipulation. So for example, the constant flood of lies and self contradictions and so on, which is very well designed to undermine the very notion of truth. It disappears, so you just listen to the great leader.
He’s doing very much the same, I presume, consciously, with regard to the coronavirus. If you look over his statements since January, they range all over the map, “It’s just the flu, don’t worry about it. It’s a terrible pandemic, and I was the first person ever to notice it,” and anything else. That’s a great technique. It assures that he’ll be vindicated. Whatever happens, you’ll find some statements he made that was accurate. When you shoot arrows at random, something’s going to hit the target. And when you have adoring crowds who grasp any word of the leader, when you have an echo chamber called Fox News, where they loyally repeat every bit of nonsense that he’s saying, then it’s a terrific technique of domination and control.
But before, there were people, including good scholars of fascism like Robert Paxton, who argue that we may be in danger of coming to something like fascism. Well there’s something to that. I think we should be reserved about it. Fascism was an ideology. It wasn’t just screaming and ranting at a door in crowds. It was an ideology of state takeover and domination and control of everything, of course, labor unions and so on, but also state control of business. [inaudible 00:04:49], it was called. That’s almost the opposite of what we have now. We have business-control of the state, under Trump, deepening. His primary constituency is wealth and corporate power, and he lavishes gifts for them. It was very striking at the Davos meetings in January, you know the meetings of the masters of the universe? They, very much, dislike him. The corporate executives, they didn’t like his style or anything else about him. He gave the leading speech. They liked it because he talked about his tax cut, a huge gift to the wealthy and the corporate sector, stabbing everyone else in the back. Yeah, they thought that was great.
So he understands how to serve is primary masters, how to keep the adoring crowds under control, but there’s no ideology. The ideology is simply, “Me. I’m a megalomaniac psychopath, and I just want what’s good for me.” That’s not fascism. It’s something pretty awful, but not fascism. With the coronavirus, it’s very important to… It’s a terrible crisis. We’ll recover from it at, maybe, horrible cost, but we will recover. And there are two things that are important to keep in mind. One is, there’s going to be more of these crises. Now this particular one has been predicted for 10 or 15 years, ever since the SARS epidemic, since there were corona viruses. So it was predicted, it was understood that something would come. Steps weren’t taken. It’s very interesting to look at how that works. If there’s time, I could talk about it. But it was understood that something was underway.
If we don’t look at the roots of this crisis and deal with them, there’ll be others and they’ll be worse ones because they’ll be compounded with something else that’s happening. This crisis, we will recover from. We’re not going to recover from the melting of the polar ice caps, and the other very significant impacts of the global warming crisis, which Trump is trying hard to exacerbate right into the middle of this crisis. While people are worried about getting by, he’s continuing on his relentless drive to destroy organized human life on earth. So on February 10th, well the pandemic was spreading over the US Trump, then Trump came out. Trump and his courtiers, it’s not just him. They came out with their budget proposals for next year. A lot of it was predictable, continued increasing cutbacks of every health related aspect of the government. He’s been doing that for years, so let’s continue to wipe out the health system and response system. Okay. That’s expected. Huge expenses for the bloated military and his ‘great wall’. Yeah. We expect that.
Anything that has anything of any use to human beings, we cut. But what was interesting is that he included subsidies for the fossil fuel industry to try to make the major crisis worse to furthermore his new EPA, which is corporate run. As you know, just a couple of days ago, announced the cutbacks in regulations for auto emissions that’ll have the welcomed effect of killing a lot more people from pollution, which is a major killer, but more important, expanding the race to the abyss with coming environmental crises. Now these are things we have to pay attention to. We have to think about the words of this [inaudible 00:09:12]. Now what can be done to prevent the next one? Which, very likely, will probably be worse.
Now we have to ask ourselves what we’re going to do about the truly existential crisis which is going to destroy human civilization? Not just my view, incidentally, a very interesting memo from JPMorgan Chase, the biggest American bank. The memo was quite interesting. It said that, their phrase, the survival of humanity is at risk if we continue on our present course, including the virtually genocidal commitments of the bank, his bank, their bank, to fund fossil fuels. It’s understood that the Davos men, they understand, the masters of the world understand it very well. We should understand it. We should not mince words. When I say genocidal, it’s correct. There is time. There’s not much, but there is time to deal with the crisis, even without a radical change of institutions. There are ways to do it, but not much time. Every day, every year we waste, it gets worse.
Every year we allow Trump and his accolades to expand the crisis, to accelerate it, it gets harder to deal with. If he gets reelected, I won’t say it’s a death knell for the species, but it’s a very severe blow. All of this should be right in the front of our minds as we’re thinking about this crisis. And we should recognize that it is in the front of the minds of the criminal class, the ones who are taking advantage of this crisis to ram through their programs of destruction and devastation, which, in their little sociopathic minds, are evidently dedicated to. These are not exaggerations, incidentally.
If we look at the Republican Party, we even know why they’re doing it. You go back about 10 years, John McCain running for president. Now he had the climate-change element in his platform. The Republican Congress was beginning to think about small ways to deal with the growing climate crisis, which of course they knew was coming. What happened? The Coke energy machine which had been working for years to try to keep the Republican Party on course, of supporting fossil fuels, went into motion, launched a juggernaut of bribing senators and intimidating them with threats to run alternative candidates, huge lobbying efforts, AstroTurf campaigns. They all [inaudible 00:12:30] in a moment. Ever since then, they’ve been deniers. That’s the world we’re living with. Now that has an effect. Now people listen to Fox News, which echoes what’s coming from the wealthy and powerful and their spokespersons in Washington.
The end result is, if you take a look at Republicans, its main source of information, so called, is Fox News, and about 25% of them think that it’s a serious problem, and it’s about the same number who think that humans are probably involved. This is a major crisis for the world, on that we’re right at the heart of it. Now there are things we have to do. You can learn a lot just by looking at the details of how this crisis arose. Back in 2003, it was understood by scientists that another epic pandemic, and probably a coronavirus pandemic, is not unlikely. There were things that could have been done and some things began to be done. So Obama did contract with a small company in California to produce high quality, low cost ventilators. That’s the bottleneck in the system right now, the reason why nurses have to decide who they’re going to kill. He did make the contract.
The company was quickly bought up by a large corporation, Covidien, which makes high cost ventilators. They sidetracked the project, probably because they didn’t want competition with their high cost ventilators. And pretty soon, they told the government they wanted to get out of the contract because it wasn’t profitable enough to produce what is desperately needed. It’s profitable, but you can make more money with fossil fuels. Same thing’s going with the fossil fuel companies and sustainable energy, they make profit from the sustainable energy corporations, but you make much more profit from destroying the world, so they killed this project. That’s called capitalism, and it’s particularly savage variant called neoliberalism, what we’ve been suffering from since Reagan. It has very harmful consequences.
So we come up to the present, let’s say last October, there was a high level simulation of a coronavirus pandemic showing how awful it would be. That was October. In December, China notified the World Health Organization that they were finding pneumonia-like symptoms with unknown etiology. On January 7th, they informed the World Health Organization that they, Chinese scientists, had identified the source as a coronavirus, had identified the virus, sequenced it, provided the information to the entire world. The US Intelligence knew. In January and February, they were the pounding on the doors of the White House, trying to get someone to pay attention. As one intelligence official put it, they couldn’t get Trump’s ear. For him, it was just a minor flu, “Don’t worry about it.” Finally, it comes, the recognition that it’s a big problem, so of course, he’s the first person who ever knew it was a pandemic, we go into that routine. And that’s where we are now.
It’s the epicenter of the crisis. The only major country in the world, the only one, that is so dysfunctional that it cannot even provide data to the World Health Organization on the number of possible cases. Every other major country can. Now that’s what we’re living with. Now we’re going to make a decision pretty soon as to whether to continue with it, or get rid of it and try to move back to some level of sanity. I should say, this is not the only case for worry. You mentioned the doomsday clock. It’s been moving towards midnight ever since Trump was nominated. This year, broke all records, the analysts abandoned minutes, turned to seconds, a hundred seconds to midnight.
One reason is what we’ve just been talking about, but there’s another one which nobody seems to want to talk about. Trump is tearing to shreds the last parts of the arms control agreement, which go back to Reagan and Eisenhower that have helped maintain the virtual miracle that there hasn’t been a nuclear war yet. Not only doing that, but doing it very blatantly, virtually appealing to other countries, Russia in particular, to find ways to destroy us. So last August, Trump, as you know, abandoned the Reagan Gorbachev INF Treaty, which had significantly reduced the threat of war. He abandoned it, but went beyond, immediately after abandoning it, the US launched a missile, violating the treaty. That’s virtually pleading with adversaries, “Okay. Try to develop means to destroy us as fast as you can.” Great for military industry. They were exalting huge new contracts to develop the new ways to destroy everything. And as they pointed out, down the road, there’ll be even bigger contracts to try to find some hopeless way to defend against the destructive systems that were now developing.
So for them, it’s wonderful. And for the rest of us, saying, “Yeah, we’re toast. They want to kill us all.” Now that’s the meaning of the decisions that are being taken about arms control. And the Russians have been calling for continuing the next major treaty, the New START Treaty. They say, “Let’s just continue it.” The US won’t respond. They don’t say anything. The time is getting short. Very little time for negotiations. That one will probably go. Also facing the ax is the Open Skies Treaty, which was suggested by Eisenhower. That’s under the ax. So anything you can think of that can harm people and destroy civilization, that’s a high priority. Is that an exaggeration? Unfortunately not. Is this the most dangerous administration and party in human history? I’m afraid so. It’s not an exaggeration when you think of the consequences. Those are the issues that we should be thinking about just as the gang of criminals is.
The interview is long and well worth a full read.
Micheal Klare examines the effect of the changing environment on potential pandemic breeding grounds. His essay is about not strictly about the current pandemic, but rather humanity’s affect on the limited resources and carrying capacity of our world.
“Climate Change and Pandemics
Back in 2014, the IPCC did not identify human pandemics among potential climate-induced tipping points, but it did provide plenty of evidence that climate change would increase the risk of such catastrophes. This is true for several reasons. First, warmer temperatures and more moisture are conducive to the accelerated reproduction of mosquitoes, including those carrying malaria, the zika virus, and other highly infectious diseases. Such conditions were once largely confined to the tropics, but as a result of global warming, formerly temperate areas are now experiencing more tropical conditions, resulting in the territorial expansion of mosquito breeding grounds. Accordingly, malaria and zika are on the rise in areas that never previously experienced such diseases. Similarly, dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease that infects millions of people every year, is spreading especially quickly due to rising world temperatures.
Combined with mechanized agriculture and deforestation, climate change is also undermining subsistence farming and indigenous lifestyles in many parts of the world, driving millions of impoverished people to already crowded urban centers, where health facilities are often overburdened and the risk of contagion ever greater. “Virtually all the projected growth in populations will occur in urban agglomerations,” the IPCC noted then. Adequate sanitation is lacking in many of these cities, particularly in the densely populated shantytowns that often surround them. “About 150 million people currently live in cities affected by chronic water shortages, and by 2050, unless there are rapid improvements in urban environments, the number will rise to almost a billion.”
Such newly settled urban dwellers often retain strong ties to family members still in the countryside who, in turn, may come in contact with wild animals carrying deadly viruses. This appears to have been the origin of the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014-2016, which affected tens of thousands of people in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Scientists believe that the Ebola virus (like the coronavirus) originated in bats and was then transmitted to gorillas and other wild animals that coexist with people living on the fringes of tropical forests. Somehow, a human or humans contracted the disease from exposure to such creatures and then transmitted it to visitors from the city who, upon their return, infected many others.
The coronavirus appears to have had somewhat similar origins. In recent years, hundreds of millions of once impoverished rural families moved to burgeoning industrial cities in central and coastal China, including places like Wuhan. Although modern in so many respects, with its subways, skyscrapers, and superhighways, Wuhan also retained vestiges of the countryside, including markets selling wild animals still considered by some inhabitants to be normal parts of their diet. Many of those animals were trucked in from semi-rural areas hosting large numbers of bats, the apparent source of both the coronavirus and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, outbreak of 2013, which also arose in China. Scientific research suggests that breeding grounds for bats, like mosquitoes, are expanding significantly as a result of rising world temperatures.
The global coronavirus pandemic is the product of a staggering multitude of factors, including the air links connecting every corner of the planet so intimately and the failure of government officials to move swiftly enough to sever those links. But underlying all of that is the virus itself. Are we, in fact, facilitating the emergence and spread of deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus, SARS, and the coronavirus through deforestation, haphazard urbanization, and the ongoing warming of the planet? It may be too early to answer such a question unequivocally, but the evidence is growing that this is the case. If so, we had better take heed.”
This is one of the “i told you so’s” that I hope does not come fruition.
I’m disappointed that Bernie Sanders did not get the Democratic nomination. I suspect the only way he will ever get into the race proper is if he runs as an independent. The structural opposition within the Democratic party is just too strong to overcome currently. I hope that Chomsky’s observations are correct and the political movements that have started now, remain active and continue to grow, allowing them to influence public policy in the future.
“AMY GOODMAN: Before we go to break, on Wednesday, just before Bernie Sanders announced, but it did look like he was about to pull out of the presidential race, I asked political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky about his assessment of the Bernie Sanders campaign in this time of the coronavirus pandemic.
NOAM CHOMSKY: If Trump is reelected, it’s a indescribable disaster. It means that the policies of the past four years, which have been extremely destructive to the American population, to the world, will be continued and probably accelerated. What this is going to mean for health is bad enough. I just mentioned the Lancet figures. It will get worse. What this means for the environment or the threat of nuclear war, which no one is talking about but is extremely serious, is indescribable.
Suppose Biden is elected. I would anticipate it would be essentially a continuation of Obama — nothing very great, but at least not totally destructive, and opportunities for an organized public to change what is being done, to impose pressures.
It’s common to say now that the Sanders campaign failed. I think that’s a mistake. I think it was an extraordinary success, completely shifted the arena of debate and discussion. Issues that were unthinkable a couple years ago are now right in the middle of attention.
The worst crime he committed, in the eyes of the establishment, is not the policy he’s proposing; it’s the fact that he was able to inspire popular movements, which had already been developing — Occupy, Black Lives Matter, many others — and turn them into an activist movement, which doesn’t just show up every couple years to push a leader and then go home, but applies constant pressure, constant activism and so on. That could affect a Biden administration.”
It’s Time to Reimagine America
“Here’s the one thing about major disruptions to normalcy: they can create opportunities for dramatic change. (Disaster capitalists know this, too, unfortunately.) President Franklin Roosevelt recognized this in the 1930s and orchestrated his New Deal to revive the economy and put Americans like my dad back to work.
In 2001, the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney capitalized on the shock-and-awe disruption of the 9/11 attacks to inflict on the world their vision of a Pax Americana, effectively a militarized imperium justified (falsely) as enabling greater freedom for all. The inherent contradiction in such a dreamscape was so absurd as to make future calamity inevitable. Recall what an aide to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld scribbled down, only hours after the attack on the Pentagon and the collapse of the Twin Towers, as his boss’s instructions (especially when it came to looking for evidence of Iraqi involvement): “Go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.” And indeed they would do just that, with an emphasis on the “not,” including, of course, the calamitous invasion of Iraq in 2003.
To progressive-minded people thinking about this moment of crisis, what kind of opportunities might open to us when (or rather if) Donald Trump is gone from the White House? Perhaps this coronaviral moment is the perfect time to consider what it would mean for us to go truly big, but without the usual hubris or those disastrous invasions of foreign countries. To respond to COVID-19, climate change, and the staggering wealth inequities in this country that, when combined, will cause unbelievable levels of needless suffering, what’s needed is a drastic reordering of our national priorities.
Remember, the Fed’s first move was to inject $1.5 trillion into the stock market. (That would have been enough to forgive all current student debt.) The Trump administration has also promised to help airlines, hotels, and above all oil companies and the fracking industry, a perfect storm when it comes to trying to sustain and enrich those upholding a kleptocratic and amoral status quo.
This should be a time for a genuinely new approach, one fit for a world of rising disruption and disaster, one that would define a new, more democratic, less bellicose America. To that end, here are seven suggestions, focusing — since I’m a retired military officer — mainly on the U.S. military, a subject that continues to preoccupy me, especially since, at present, that military and the rest of the national security state swallow up roughly 60% of federal discretionary spending:
1. If ever there was a time to reduce our massive and wasteful military spending, this is it. There was never, for example, any sense in investing up to $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years to “modernize” America’s nuclear arsenal. (Why are new weapons needed to exterminate humanity when the “old” ones still work just fine?) Hundreds of stealth fighters and bombers — it’s estimated that Lockheed Martin’s disappointing F-35 jet fighter alone will cost $1.5 trillion over its life span — do nothing to secure us from pandemics, the devastating effects of climate change, or other all-too-pressing threats. Such weaponry only emboldens a militaristic and chauvinistic foreign policy that will facilitate yet more wars and blowback problems of every sort. And speaking of wars, isn’t it finally time to end U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan? More than $6 trillion has already been wasted on those wars and, in this time of global peril, even more is being wasted on this country’s forever conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa. (Roughly $4 billion a month continues to be spent on Afghanistan alone, despite all the talk about “peace” there.)
2. Along with ending profligate weapons programs and quagmire wars, isn’t it time for the U.S. to begin dramatically reducing its military “footprint” on this planet? Roughly 800 U.S. military bases circle the globe in a historically unprecedented fashion at a yearly cost somewhere north of $100 billion. Cutting such numbers in half over the next decade would be a more than achievable goal. Permanently cutting provocative “war games” in South Korea, Europe, and elsewhere would be no less sensible. Are North Korea and Russia truly deterred by such dramatic displays of destructive military might?
3. Come to think of it, why does the U.S. need the immediate military capacity to fight two major foreign wars simultaneously, as the Pentagon continues to insist we do and plan for, in the name of “defending” our country? Here’s a radical proposal: if you add 70,000 Special Operations forces to 186,000 Marine Corps personnel, the U.S. already possesses a potent quick-strike force of roughly 250,000 troops. Now, add in the Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions and the 10th Mountain Division. What you have is more than enough military power to provide for America’s actual national security. All other Army divisions could be reduced to cadres, expandable only if our borders are directly threatened by war. Similarly, restructure the Air Force and Navy to de-emphasize the present “global strike” vision of those services, while getting rid of Donald Trump’s newest service, the Space Force, and the absurdist idea of taking war into low earth orbit. Doesn’t America already have enough war here on this small planet of ours?
4. Bring back the draft, just not for military purposes. Make it part of a national service program for improving America. It’s time for a new Civilian Conservation Corps focused on fostering a Green New Deal. It’s time for a new Works Progress Administration to rebuild America’s infrastructure and reinvigorate our culture, as that organization did in the Great Depression years. It’s time to engage young people in service to this country. Tackling COVID-19 or future pandemics would be far easier if there were quickly trained medical aides who could help free doctors and nurses to focus on the more difficult cases. Tackling climate change will likely require more young men and women fighting forest fires on the west coast, as my dad did while in the CCC — and in a climate-changing world there will be no shortage of other necessary projects to save our planet. Isn’t it time America’s youth answered a call to service? Better yet, isn’t it time we offered them the opportunity to truly put America, rather than themselves, first?
5. And speaking of “America First,” that eternal Trumpian catch-phrase, isn’t it time for all Americans to recognize that global pandemics and climate change make a mockery of walls and go-it-alone nationalism, not to speak of politics that divide, distract, and keep so many down? President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said that only Americans can truly hurt America, but there’s a corollary to that: only Americans can truly save America — by uniting, focusing on our common problems, and uplifting one another. To do so, it’s vitally necessary to put an end to fear-mongering (and warmongering). As President Roosevelt famously said in his first inaugural address in the depths of the Great Depression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear inhibits our ability to think clearly, to cooperate fully, to change things radically as a community.
6. To cite Yoda, the Jedi master, we must unlearn what we have learned. For example, America’s real heroes shouldn’t be “warriors” who kill or sports stars who throw footballs and dunk basketballs. We’re witnessing our true heroes in action right now: our doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel, together with our first responders, and those workers who stay in grocery stores, pharmacies, and the like and continue to serve us all despite the danger of contracting the coronavirus from customers. They are all selflessly resisting a threat too many of us either didn’t foresee or refused to treat seriously, most notably, of course, President Donald Trump: a pandemic that transcends borders and boundaries. But can Americans transcend the increasingly harsh and divisive borders and boundaries of our own minds? Can we come to work selflessly to save and improve the lives of others? Can we become, in a sense, lovers of humanity?
7. Finally, we must extend our love to encompass nature, our planet. For if we keep treating our lands, our waters, and our skies like a set of trash cans and garbage bins, our children and their children will inherit far harder times than the present moment, hard as it may be.
What these seven suggestions really amount to is rejecting a militarized mindset of aggression and a corporate mindset of exploitation for one that sees humanity and this planet more holistically. Isn’t it time to regain that vision of the earth we shared collectively during the Apollo moon missions: a fragile blue sanctuary floating in the velvety darkness of space, an irreplaceable home to be cared for and respected since there’s no other place for us to go? Otherwise, I fear that my father’s prediction will come true not just for me, but for generations to come and in ways that even he couldn’t have imagined.”
Paul Edwards has a entertaining style of apocalyptic prose. He writes this screedy piece in Counterpunch, but you can feel his frustration directed toward a political system engineered to maintain the plutocratic status-quo.
“Well, partly, yes. Hillary, for what she’s worth, swore nobody liked him or wanted to work with him. Bernie, in spite of his age, is not a Santa figure, not a holly, jolly old Burl Ives hologram. He wouldn’t appear beaming from a Norman Rockwell print. He’s got crust; sober sincerity; little humor and a load of gravitas, none of which infantile America–addled with toon bunnies, ninja turtles, and cuddly bears selling shit–can love. He wants you to think, and act on your self-interest, and you don’t want to do that, most of you.
After generations of skewed, bent political indoctrination, and relentless propagandizing by the poisonous, amoral Capitalist schlockmeisters who own this country and the world, most Democrats have accepted the fact that others–smarter, richer, higher up–should make their key decisions.
The hold of that induced ignorance and cognitive paralysis is greatest on those subjected to it longest: the over-60s, retired, and aged, who matured before cracks yawned in The Empire’s catechism during Watergate to show the sleazy thugs blighting American lives behind the official bullshit curtain. These are the political Walking Dead, The Impenetrables, Old Believers who carry in their DNA the incurable virus of pre-Vietnam Exceptionalism, and who will go to their graves rigid with mummified Democrat orthodoxy.
Then there’s the mass of middle-aged Democrat faithful, that slow-witted, moderate, mushy center, native home of Mr. Jones who, as Grace Slick sang, knew something was happening but didn’t know what it was. These are the passive ones–American “Good Germans”–who have punched in, consumed, and looked away as the US War Machine blew up and bled the backward, baffled Muslim world in its lust for oil, gas and brute hegemony. They are uneasy with suppressed guilt, fearful of any real aspirations, and they yearn for the safety of braindead serfdom under lullabying masters.
Then, bafflingly, comes the bulk of black Democrats, a category truly hard to fathom. Of course, it’s clear that black misleadership in Congress is just a whoring toy of the DNC. They hold their Uncle Tom forts by piously bullshitting their own abused people while betraying them, complicit with the likes of Biden, whose Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act fueled the lethal racism of our black stalag system. The notion that blacks have a true friend in the Senator from MBNA, the very cartoon of a phony, smarmy, jive honky liberal, is sadly mistaken but, pathetically, the hustled line up time and again to be crassly sold this evil, cynical screw job. As with organized Labor, Dems feel no obligation to black Americans. They count them a captive race who demand no reward for slavish loyalty.
For these sets of stagnant souls, the wonder is that the roaring wildfire of damning fact lit by the courage of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, that incinerated the camouflage of this utterly corrupt, incorrigibly vicious Empire has sparked no fury in their calcified hearts.
And so the grotesque Marche Slave winds on its lugubrious, pathetic way toward the funeral pyre of its own making, while the Dem engineers of this self-immolation bask in idiot bliss. They truly believe they’ve won; that in eliminating Sanders and his sane, humane goals, and annointing the vacuous, amoral, cognitively impaired charlatan, Biden, they’ll flush the detested Sick Beast from his lair and control the National Security State alone again. It’s a deep collective delusion founded on balked egos, impotent fury, and wilful blindness to all that the time requires.
But, then, when were Democrats ever proactive for what American people needed? Even in the halcyon days of FDR, that humane conservative–for such he truly was–had to urge Berle, Ickes and Tugwell to “make me do it” before pushing his great socio-economic measures through Congress for the sustaining benefit of working Americans that made him a political giant.
In this perilous hour for the country, for Democrats to pawn off on their bedrock faithful–indoctrinated, automatistic, and hoodwinked as they are–a mediocre, ditzy, blithering, old Cold Warrior as the gladiator who will face and take out The Beast is bald lunacy and surefire political seppuku.”
I want to discuss UN Women and the hypocrisy that is scattered all over their website and within their principles….
The UK is not going to change the Gender Recognition Act!
The tide of gender ideology may just have broken. Finally some good news for women. Now in Canada we have to get after Bill C-16 and get it changed stat, because both gender and sex cannot be protected characteristics under the law.
“The law on women-only spaces also needs clarity. Some of this will take time — you can’t grow healthcare and support capacity overnight, but I think all sides of the debate will be reassured when the consultation results are published.”
At present NHS rules enable children to start gender transition treatment before puberty without their parents’ support. Children unhappy with their birth gender can begin treatment after as few as three therapeutic assessments. They can discuss treatments separately from their parents and are encouraged to self-define their status and to develop “autonomy” in decision-making. Interventions include hormone blockers to suppress puberty and, later, cross-sex hormone therapy. The average age at which children begin such treatments is 14, but some are as young as 12.
NHS England has ordered an independent review into the use of puberty suppressant drugs and cross-sex hormones. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), which is responsible for clinical practice guidelines in England and Wales, has also been asked to develop guidance for the first time about referring children to gender identity services.
Existing NHS treatment draws heavily on international guidelines that recommend approaches in care for gender dysphoria.
An NHS contract with the Tavistock & Portman Trust, issued in 2016, says that it will “conform” or “broadly conform” to standards of care issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) in 2012. These say that they reflect the best available science and “professional consensus”. The Tavistock Trust works with children and young people with gender identity issues.
However, Gene Feder, professor of primary care at the University of Bristol and an expert in clinical guidelines, said that these fell far below the benchmark for British healthcare guidelines used by Nice and that he would not recommend their use.”
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…