Update: 7 February 2023 Tonight, President Joseph Biden established himself, at last, leader of the Free World. He serves at the hour of Earth’s greatest danger, its greatest need. Pray, those inclined, he gets everyone through unharmed. Speech starts at minute 26.
The Editors
The New York Times surprised some readers by refusing to include the name of Joe Biden (current president of the United States) even once in the first and second sections of its Sunday issue (24 April 2022).
38 silent pages.
Think.
On the second-to-last page of another section—the Sunday Review—Ross Douthat stepped up. He wrote an editorial with the word “Biden” in it.
Joe Biden doesn’t like oligarchs, and they don’t like him. They called him Communist when he first ran for elected office. Who remembers? It wasn’t true then and isn’t now. To my mind it had more to do with his Irish roots and connections to other prominent, unpopular Irish Americans like the Kennedy’s.
How about that?
Is hatred why Americans see Trump in their daily media feeds more than Biden?
Oligarchs own media, right? A half-dozen men, give or take, hold ultimate control over 90% of what Americans see and read. Billionaires have problems with Biden because they don’t control him. It’s why they ignore everything he says and does—when they can.
Jimmy Carter had the same problem. Who is old enough to remember? Carter holds historical honor for being the only U.S. president who served his term without murdering anyone. But that was then. This is now.
Is Joe benevolent?
I really don’t know.
The entitled rich hope Biden will go away and that others more favorable to wealth and its privileges will take his place. Media announced today that a rich man bought Twitter for 50 billion dollars, give or take. The man claims to be acting in good faith to bring freedoms of speech inspired by public forums of ancient Greece.
He calls it digital town square.
Everyone knows he will unleash dogs of Trump on vulnerable Americans who lack protections afforded by wealth and gated living. Who wants to argue loud in public spaces where monsters lurk to harm their families and friends off-line?
Does anyone believe free speech emanates from the enterprise of unstable manic-depressives accountable to no one?
Not to pick on any particular oligarch—all pose dangers—but Elon Musk didn’t become a U.S. citizen until age 30—a short 20 years ago. Despite tenuous ties to America, he manages to gather popular support. He plays Congress like a fiddle. Congressional appropriations flow like water. Clearly, he keeps more than a few Benjamins for himself.
It’s not right.
Our founding fathersbelieved that power corrupts those who wield it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s why we govern ourselves with three co-equal branches of government.
Checks and balances are fundamental to prevent fallible humans—whose success blinds them to their own flawed visions—from overwhelming the Constitutional freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights.
Who disagrees?
To cut to the chase, it is insane for civilized society to permit private individuals to accumulate the wealth and power of governments. What is the point of civilization if not to limit the horrors of jungle living?—to stanch suffering, which always follows when might makes right in those arenas where the strong disrespect and eat the weak.
Proud people create elected governance to protect their rights; they don’t hide behind private cartels who don’t really care about us,Michael Jackson warned.
Sergei Lavrov is one of Russia’s wealthiest men. Yesterday, this privileged strongman threatened nuclear war. He said, “…we must not underestimate it.”
It is never good to permit dictatorial power and nuclear weapons to mean-spirited bullies who intend to destroy civilization should they not get their way. The USA put leaders of Russia on notice that they will not outlive Ukraine.
Who is brave enough to acknowledge what everyone knows? Ordinary people are fed-up with oligarchs and dictators. People want to breathe free without fear.
Secretary of State Blinken said, “But we do know that a sovereign, independent Ukraine will be around a lot longer than Vladimir Putin is on the scene.“
The most notorious terrorist threatened by the USA was Osama Bin Laden. They fed him to sharks. Later, they killed unrepentant members of his family. Putin might be wise to apologize now and start nuclear disarmament talks. Then again, it might be too late.
Who believes he will take the opportunity? The chance to survive Hell is better, some advisors might argue.
The Russian “president” seems to think that because Bin Laden didn’t possess nuclear missiles or hypersonic technologies of war, he couldn’t win. Is it really possible that Bin Laden could have conquered Earth had he mastered the alchemies of the current crop of Russian leaders?
Who knows?
The international scene requires x-ray vision. One in five sanctioned oligarchs seem to be Israeli citizens—according to a recent analysis published in the Jerusalem Post. Say it isn’t true, Joe. Apparently, USA’s closest ally and friend is protecting powerful people who are entangled with Russian wise guys. It’s not a good look.
I’d say it’s terrifying. Who wouldn’t?
Kentucky politicians—readers, some of them, know who they are—sleep in the same bed as Russian oligarchs who control much of the world’s aluminum supply. Reports say they operate a manufacturing plant in Kentucky which employs thousands. Is there anyone who understands how difficult the situation becomes for countries where international thugs accumulate vast monies and political powers?
The mighty must know that with age comes loss. Everyone they love and know will die before them should they enjoy long life. What good does wealth and power do anyone who is confined to a wheel-chair unable to control even the beating of their own heart?
What chance is there that the powerful will give all they have to the poor to serve the cause of love for the unlovable, which is what most of 8 billion humans are. Will anyone say it out loud? Most people are unloved and uncared for by those who together have the resources to make a better world for everyone now living and for those who will come after.
It is incomprehensible to me that advantaged people would shell the shit out of people simply because they are in the way—through no fault of their own. Apart from the love of God, I don’t see how human civilization as we know it today will survive.
Perhaps the powerful have made a calculation that Earth is better off when humans are reduced to a few hundred million souls, not billions. They have the ability to minimize us all—to zero, I suppose.
The United States has the power and skills to get everyone through the current crisis unharmed.
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
I want to believe it’s true. I don’t know for sure.
Who will save us?
Joe Biden walks in the gap between civilization and Armageddon. He’s the last man standing able to rescue humanity from the slavery that follows the victory of totalitarianism.
Maybe it’s time to climb aboard his peace train while all sides still can.
Billy Lee
EDITORS NOTE: Added 8 May 2022: NYT Joe Biden blackout blooms. No mention of Joe Biden & family in Sunday Edition. In fairness, the Friday May 6 online newsletter published a briefing on page 10 titled, “Biden’s Unpopularity.”
During my high school years, I was an Explorer Scout. My troopmates were spelunkers.
On weekends the guys drove from Arlington, Virginia into the hills of West Virginia to look for hollows where the presence of solitary trees sometimes signaled the openings to caves. We off-roaded from whatever lonely lane we were on at the time to navigate through wild terrain where we parked our vehicles and equipment as close to the cave entrances as possible.
We used gray powder to light our headlamps. A water drip made the powder give off gas that burned bright, clean, and complete—no noxious residue.
After an hour or so the powder turned into lumpy, useless ash. To keep lamps burning while remaining oriented, every caver dumped their used-up powder on cave floors exactly where they stood before measuring a new charge.
We always looked for virgin caves that had never been explored. Little gray clumps of depleted calcium carbide cast onto floors created dead giveaways that someone had explored the cave before us.
A clean cave meant we were first; we were going to see things below that no humans had ever seen.
The risk of course was getting disoriented in a labyrinth that only we knew existed. In those days, cell phones were not invented. Calling 911 was not a thing. Should we get turned around—if we exhausted the calcium carbide supply—no outsider would learn we were lost, maybe for days.
Without the aid of an unseemly mix of water and gray powder to produce acetylene light, we risked being entombed alongside stalactites and stalagmites deep inside corridors of ruthless darkness that robbed the senses of time and place. No one would be alerting anyone at all about our predicament.
Families would have no idea where to start a rescue. West Virginia was a big place.
Think about it.
Until a search party discovers their cars, isn’t it reasonable to assume that the lost will quickly abandon hope that anyone will find the entrance to the labyrinth that ensnared them? If searchers got lucky and stumbled onto the hole, without lamps and experience how would they navigate a maze that might zig-zag for miles beneath the earth?
Only luck provides any chance at all that the lost will one day reunite with families and loved ones. The risk of dying—forever un-located within a chartless tangle of passages and dead-ends—is real.
As stupid luck would have it, during one adventure we lost our way. We crawled on our bellies for, I don’t know, 10 minutes or so before the cave floor opened beneath us and we were able to stand up enough to stoop.
Hunched over and bending forward we struggled to find openings, made selections, and for an hour picked our way though narrow forests of stalagmite columns and their shadows until we found the end, which was a concealed passage into a room; a large room that we nearly missed.
The scoutmaster pushed each scout into the passage one at a time. It wasn’t long before the entire troop was through and milling around inside the chamber.
A few minutes passed before the scoutmaster directed our attention upward. Everyone looked. In the lights and shades of bobbing headlamps, no one saw a ceiling.
The room was gargantuan.
Perhaps intimidated by its immensity, the scoutmaster decided it might be getting close to the time when the troop should pull back. The clock was ticking, after all.
We had explored a long time; the trek back to the entrance promised challenges. It is easier for a cavern to seduce a caver into its depths than for a caver to retrace their steps to make a happy extraction. For one thing, caves look different on the way out than they look on the way in. It is not unusual to become directionally untethered.
When the scoutmaster groped to locate the path we used to enter the orifice, he couldn’t find it. It turned out that dozens of unnoticed openings beckoned in the expanse of walls all around.
In the glare of dancing headlamps, the array of passages became tangled knots that no one could untie. The openings looked the same but each passage searched became disturbingly unfamiliar and unnavigable.
I began to panic.
The scoutmaster ordered everyone to return to the center of the chamber; to extinguish our headlamps to conserve carbide. He ordered everyone to calm down. He would pick a route at random to find the way out himself.
A lengthy search for the entrance might become necessary—I won’t be gone long, don’t worry, the scoutmaster said. …lots of unknowns…makes it hard to know exactly how long….
He clutched the troop’s bag of calcium carbide. He always carried it. It was his responsibility to keep the powder dry and safe; to prevent someone less careful, less experienced, from losing it.
With any luck at all he would return to rescue everyone before nightfall, he promised. The carbide in our lamps would last until he returned. Conserve it, he warned. Emergencies only!
The scoutmaster hugged me and a few others. He hurried some goodbyes and vanished—into the abyss.
He needn’t have worried. I was nearly out of carbide; we all were. The gray powder would become gold to be hoarded.
Darkness in a cave hundreds of feet below ground is nothing like what people experience above. My mother had read somewhere that spelunkers wear watches with radium dials that glow in the dark. I was wearing one she bought me as a gift for my trip.
“You will always know what time it is no matter how dark it gets in those cold caves,” she said. She wrapped her arms around me and rubbed my face with her cheek.
After the scoutmaster left and we extinguished all our lamps, I discovered that my timepiece didn’t work like it should. No one’s did. Not one scout could make out even the faintest trace of a glow on their dials.
An older guy said that caves suck light out of darkness like drains suck water out of bathtubs. He didn’t explain. We waved our hands before our faces but couldn’t see them.
Like an ocean wave, panic struck again; it almost knocked me off my feet.
I decided that the best way to escape fear was to sleep. I dropped to my hands and knees and slithered through the dark until I found folds in a wall. I curled my body like a snake against the hard surface.
The cave’s silence roared in my ears like a pounding train that quieted only when I started shaking like a branch in a storm and dropped somehow into a darker place.
My bones filled with ice; I slipped deeper. I wrapped myself in my arms as the floor of the cave pushed its full weight into me and in time crushed my soul.
My season stranded in hell lasted a year, it seems. The search crew didn’t find the scoutmaster. A few others were missing. Everyone must have died, they said, except me.
I was the last.
No one survived.
“A cave rat ate a few, bones and all,” one guy said.
Rescuers said terrible things. They sent me home to be with mother for what turned out to be a few days. I don’t remember any of it.
I don’t mind solitary confinement. I’ve been caged for 48 years.
I’m used to it. Somehow it doesn’t seem that long. Besides, food tastes better here than the rotten mess I ate in the cave to stay alive. It’s a taste and smell I don’t forget.
Someone put a bulb in the cell that can’t be switched off. It’s bright. The light drives me insane. It really does.
It’s protected by a metal cage. I feel its heat but can’t touch it because the sadistic bastards chained me to the floor—for screaming constantly, they said.
I so want to be with mother to tell her how enraged I am about the watch she gave that didn’t work. When I inform the staff, they refuse to look at me. For a year I didn’t know what time it was. I told them. I told them all. They know about it but don’t care. They say I’m crazy because of her.
Mother doesn’t visit. She never did. The staff said she died. They convinced me to believe unspeakable things.
“He did something wicked,” prosecutors said. “He used a bone-saw, for the love of God.”
Nothing they say is true. I know that now.
Not one word!
Who does bad things they don’t remember?
NO ONE!!!
Who believes it?
They make you hate. I see it on their faces.
I will snap these chains someday, I know it.
I have a plan.
A wonderful plan.
Guards help.
It happens on Halloween night.
They break the chains.
Put your light on.
Listen carefully….
Boots are shuffling on lawns like dead leaves falling on the wind…
studying doors…
searching for final solutions.
Smash the bulb!
You’ll see.
It hurts in the dark and the cold. People do things—terrible things—to make it stop.
They shake like branches in a storm. They fill bones with ice and push down to the darkest places.
They control what’s true.
They understand everything.
Soon, so will you.
Truth becomes the trap…
Spells enchant…
fragile hopes collapse…
They watch you rot in that cave where everyone dies but one…
…and laugh.
HaHahahaha…!
Slither to the walls like snakes and find the hard folds.
Pray for sleep that cannot come.
Control truth.
You’re one of us, now.
The truth couldn’t be more clear.
Hell is forever.
Billy Lee
NOTE FROM THE EDITORS: The essay, Halloween Revision, is a fictional work based on events experienced by Billy Lee—an Explorer Scout in a troop of spelunkers who got lost in a cave in West Virginia during the 1960s. The rescue is based on other events about which Billy Lee may or may not have direct knowledge. Billy Lee published a version of this story to answer the Quora question: Where in the world is it dark constantly?
November 1, 2019:Since this essay was first published 17 months ago, things have changed. We have a new attorney general who believes his job is to protect the president.
Democrats control the House of Representatives. The new Speaker Nancy Pelosi is methodically unfolding what will soon become articles of impeachment.
Michael Cohen, the president’s fixer, is in prison. Felix Sater, Cohen’s childhood friend, has disappeared off media radar screens.
Despite the rapid rate of change, Billy Lee’s essay has never been more timely. America is in a race against the clock. Trump and his allies are unraveling America at a frenetic pace. The clock is ticking, and time is running out.
The Editorial Board
Our president seems to be working against our country, not for it.
He started a trade war. He’s bullying our trading partners.
He insults our allies. He breaks treaties. He threatens fire and fury, then coddles our enemies.
Get out of the stock market ASAP, I’m thinking. Trump is going to trash the country and mess up the world for freedom lovers. Not much time before all illusions shatter, it feels like.
Don’t do denial. Don’t go there. It will do no one any harm to protect cash and property from those billionaires who are going to steal it anyway from anyone stupid enough to give them a vehicle.
Trade warscan and do work for business owners but no one else. They wipe out the little people by driving up prices and reducing goods and services. Don’t be a little person Billy Lee; not this time.
Greed-hogs root-snouted America’s financial institutions in 2008 and took a big chunk of the 401K money intended for ordinary people’s retirement.
Does anyone remember when the GOP spent vast sums on wars and drugs to help their friends in weapons manufacturing and pharmaceuticals? The GOP added fuel to the fire by reducing revenues too — they created tax loopholes for the wealthy. When markets went south, they emptied the nation’s retirement piggy-banks (called 401Ks) to cover their losses.
They did!
They crashed the United States of America like a plane into a skyscraper. The USA was hours away from becoming a third-world country when Congress approved a rescue that involved a massive transfer of wealth from the middle-class to the wealthiest families in America. It was called the Great Recession of 2007-2008.
Who says it can’t happen again?
Interest rates are sure to rise; the GOP will empty social security and Medicare. They have no choice, because the USA won’t have the tax revenues to cover high rates on the national debt. The Republicans passed another tax cut for oligarchs a few months ago.
Surely, someone remembers.
It’s not about making America great again. It’s about making America break again.
Why? Because they can.
Billionaires don’t really care about us. They never will. Michael Jackson wrote a song about it. They killed him.
Americans have to push the GOP (who are the defenders of billionaires) out of government ASAP. Everything about the future depends on it.
Republicans are afraid of Russian oligarchs — the ultimate mob bosses. Russian oligarchs are the richest men on the planet. They are intelligence agents who carved up the Russian corpse after Reagan drove their empire into bankruptcy.
Republicans are paralyzed by the fear of foreign mob bosses with Boris Yeltzin accents. They seem incapable of doing the heroic things that need doing to defend and save our country.
It’s true.
GOP leaders are holding onto hope that they can get their families through this takeover; things will be set right someday, somehow, by somebody. They are dead wrong.
If not them, who? If not now, when?
Remember Germany and World War II? The silent ones ended up cooked, eventually — poisoned by gas and shot in trenches, their bodies burned in ovens to hide the evidence.
This is no time for cowards. The time has arrived when everyone must let go of fear and act like the heroes we must become to protect everything and everyone we care about.
If they take away our right to vote by subverting it, we will deal with it then.
For now, it seems like we are able to vote and have our votes counted, at least somewhat accurately. Yes, the last national election showed evidence of voter suppression — and tampering with vote counts around the edges in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois.
The GOP stopped all the investigations into irregularities and statistical anomalies. No one seemed to care much.
Reality Winner, incarcerated NSA hero who exposed widespread voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election. She is being held without bail. NOTE by Editors: July 4, 2018 – Reality Winner has agreed to plead guilty. Her trial was scheduled for October, before the mid-term elections. She will accept a 5 year sentence plus 3 years strict probation. No electronic devices or communication with media is allowed. The NSA contractor revealed that certain voting-machine companies were compromised — raising the possibility that the 2016 outcome was rigged. Bad people who care nothing about democracy have silenced Reality Winner and driven her into anonymity.
Nevertheless, voting is what we have to do until we no longer can. It’s the only recourse. Everyone must pray for Reality Winner, the NSA heroine, who is rotting in jail with no prospect for bail, because she tried to alert Americans to the terrors that are coming with the sabotage of our elections and the loss of our freedoms.
If the day comes when America can’t save itself by voting, it will be impossible to avoid Civil War. The last war didn’t go well for anyone on either side. The difference this time is that foreign agents are crawling all over our institutions and media.
These agents don’t like us much. They want civil unrest. They want violence. Many play the role of patriots. They quote Bible passages — like Two Corinthians.
Don’t be fooled.
We have a lot to attend to, but the State Department and most other parts of government are being systematically dismantled. Here are three things among hundreds that must be looked after:
1 — China, Russia, and their allies are working furiously to overturn the global financial system. The plan is to leave the USA (and the EU and Israel) in the cold. It’s what bit-coin schemes, among other systems, are all about. Think about it. USA financial clout is scary. Certain state-actors want to make it impossible for the USA to extort their leaders financially through sanctions and trading bans.
2 — Japan is accumulating the world’s largest inventory of bomb-grade plutonium. It has the infra-structure to weaponize it. It has the modern missile systems to deliver it. Focusing on Korea’s nuclear weapons means next to nothing. Are Koreans buying fissile material from Japan? It takes ten pounds to make a bomb. Japan has forty-seven tons already and is adding eight tons per year. Does anyone know for sure what the hell is going on? Some samurai cult is making a killing.
3 — Russia has developed a new generation of high speed multiple-warhead missiles that no one can see or shoot down. They bragged about it on TV. What happens if we attack North Korea and Russia comes to their defense like they did the last time during the first Korean War? What if China joins in, like the last time? Read T. R. Fehrenbach’s book, This Kind of War. It could become a war where we get our pants handed to us — like last time.
The problems Russia presents go far beyond Korea; they extend to the Middle East certainly but also to the Americas where Russians have bases in Cuba and Venezuela. Our state and national elections are drowning in Russian interference according to every one of our intelligence agencies.
The media does not know how to protect our country. We cannot expect to look to the media, whether right or left, for guidance. The takedown is not going to be televised. Our military is led in many instances by good-ole-boys from the states of the Confederacy, like Louisiana and Mississippi. It’s not an ideal situation that is necessarily going to lead to unity.
Our leaders have proved to almost everyone but the hopelessly naive that they are haters. Many are white supremacists. The attorney general isn’t the only cabinet member with a reputation for racial bias. Many members of the current administration act like wolves in sheep’s clothing who hide their intentions between the covers of a Bible and the American flag.
Does it have to be this way?
Over the years, the USA has killed millions of Koreans, millions of Japanese, millions of Arabs, millions of south-east Asians, millions of Germans, Native Americans, and Africans. People around the world aren’t blind. They see our love affair with guns; the mass shootings of pre-schoolers; the extra-judicial executions of civilians by a militarized police force.
Rabid people like NRA gun nuts say the dead had it coming. Gun lovers have a duty to kill certain people to protect the world and our values. The way to stop a bad person with a gun is to give a good person a bigger gun. Some say the number of executions by USA military gun-toters exceeds sixty-five million souls during the modern era alone. The carnage that flows back to the eras of slavery and the Indian Wars is incalculable.
People fear our leaders, and they should. America is a handful of countries short of conquering the entire world. Under our new leadership the chances are good that every country will fall under our power sooner, not later.
Like ancient Rome, the United States has blood on its hands. We incarcerate millions of our own citizens in ratty prisons; tens-of-thousands rot in solitary confinement.
We have a moral obligation in victory to become better people as we rule the world and force our values on people who do not necessarily share all of them one-hundred percent.
We have unmatched power; America is on the cusp of living out its destiny in total victory, even as it dominates a world divided against itself, which is a road to ruin according to Christ Jesus — who all our political leaders say they worship — some at Congressional prayer breakfasts.
Yes, the president tried to get Speaker Ryan to fire the congressional chaplain. Yes, he canceled traditional Easter services at the White House. Well, they weren’t traditional. That black Muslim Obama started them. So it’s all good, right? Can we get an amen from the White House press corps? Why not!
Because the USA has unmatched power, the stable genius who leads may take it into World War III. The writer of his masterwork, Art of the Deal, said that if anyone starts a nuclear war, it will be the Donald.
Is anyone completely certain that when that war ends, it will be the USA who counts the bodies of the dead and writes their history? What if the other side counts our dead and writes our history? What then?
One thing about war is certain. The outcome is never certain. That chilling line from the screen play No Country for Old Men echoes in my head. In the contest between man and beast, the outcome is never certain. A rancher shot a cow with his rifle. The bullet ricocheted off its head and killed the rancher. The cow was fine.
In the end and over time, no one ever really wins at war. If history teaches anything, it teaches that war solves nothing. Yes the victor gets first dibs on the spoils, but in the war to come the spoils will be irradiated — poisoned by heavy metals.
Short of nuclear war, what can break America?
We have men on our side who are among the most powerful and dangerous who have ever walked on planet Earth. Imagine the scariest ISIS terrorist. We have men on our side who are scarier.
Felix Sater speaks fluent Russian, because he was born and raised in Moscow, Russia. He says that he and Michael Cohen became best friends after his sister and him were able to emigrate to America from Moscow via Israel when he was eight. During the process of switching countries Felix changed his Russian family name to Sater. Who knows why? Michael Cohen, by the way, is the president’s fixer and attorney, correct?
Felix Sater and the president are friends.
Felix changed his last name as a kind of joke, at least to my way of thinking. In the Kabbalah tradition, the Hebrew letters that spell Sater add to the number “666”. It’s the only Hebrew root word that adds to 666, so it’s easy to identify and remember.
It’s a word that means contrary, disheveled, or chaotic. It is a number made famous by the book of Revelation in the Christian Bible. Chaos is a sign of the anti-Christ.
666 Fifth Avenue is a property owned by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. He made the buy in 2007.
The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, bought the building “666 Fifth Avenue.” He and Sater thought it was funny, apparently. Maybe it is.
God doesn’t scare them. They’re bad boys, and they’ll mess up anyone who crosses them. It’s what they want everyone to think, anyway. When they hurt the little people, God looks the other way. They are sure of it.
Felix smashed a piece of cut glass into someone’s face during a bar-fight. He spent a year in prison for it. So yes, he is scary. He bilked investors out of forty-million dollars in Wall Street scams. I watched him apologize on national television to all those he ruined while insisting that today he loves and serves America. He is a changed man.
He might be. I’m not saying that he’s a liar, but when I listened to his explanation I was reminded of Michael Corleone in the movie, God Father Part Two, when he testified before a congressional committee.
Michael, some viewers might recall, was a Marine combat veteran, a defender of everything American, he told investigators. His reputation meant everything. Then again, he was a fictional character invented by the writer, Mario Puzo.
Sater is a close friend of the president. It’s true. The president has many powerful friends; some are family. His sister is a judge who sits on the second highest court in America — second only to the Supreme Court. His late uncle was an MIT professor.
NOTE BY EDITORS: In April 2019, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry retired from her position as a federal appellate judge for the state of New York.
In the 1960s and 1970s the government waged war against the Mafia in America. People got hurt. Many switched sides and made deals with the government to stay out of prison.
This cooperation started after Castro came to power in Cuba in the 1960s. The CIA teamed up with those Sicilian families who had lost their casinos in Cuba. The idea was to overthrow and assassinate Castro and the leaders of the Cuban revolution. The group had some successes.
The revolutionaries who were murdered are not known to most Americans, so I won’t identify any here. Readers can click on links at the end of this essay to learn more.
The CIA didn’t need the mafia to kill Che Guevara. They and the 1,800 special forces they trained in Guatemala were able to carry out that particular hit-job all by themselves with only the tiniest bit of encouragement from Rene Barrientos, the president of Bolivia where Che was found.
I’m not picking on Felix Sater. He didn’t start cooperating with the FBI until long after the war against the Sicilian mafia was mostly won. He has proved that he is untouchable and that he can engage and influence any power player anywhere on the world stage. But in a fight for the survival of our republic and the freedom that it promises ordinary people, are folks who seem to have no limits the best we have to defend us?
Are we truly defended, truly, for real, or are we undercut and subverted? Does right make might, or is it the other way around? I honestly don’t know. No one tells the truth about anything anymore, it seems.
Rome was an empire unchallenged for a thousand years. It’s in the history books, right? The empire fought its wars on its frontiers to protect its heart, as does the USA. In the end it fell, because a mob of barbarians walked into the capitol city with clubs and broom handles and the population hailed them as liberators.
The wealthy, most of them, lost everything, because the army that defended them ran like frightened rabbits from the conquering heroes who scared them with their hairy bodies, bad skin, and missing teeth. It took hundreds of years for the world to recover from that ancient catastrophe. Who knows if it’s true?
A catastrophe in the modern world with its biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons will be harder to endure. Does anyone agree?
I’m taking a knee, hands folded, head down. I’m believing that in the gut of every thinking person is the fear that no weapon in this world can protect any of us from what’s coming next.
Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, it’s moving fast. It’s strong. It’s scary. It makes the birds in the Sand Cherry trees outside the window chirp like monkeys.
It’s morning already. Bevy Mae is at the open window, She says the sun is shining. It was supposed to rain, according to Siri and Alexa.
How is it I haven’t slept and the time for sleeping is past?
Did you stay up all night again? Bevy Mae asks.
I feel good. I’m not tired. I reach for my wife. She pushes me away then tousles my hair. I see her Mona Lisa smile.
I read a report about the lunatic in Las Vegas; he was a multi-millionaire who owned nearly 50 high-powered guns plus a lot of other scary stuff. His dad graced the FBI’s ten most wanted list—ten years a fugitive.
These guns, which many civilians now own, were designed to shatter the bones and scramble the internal organs of victims—violating the spirit of international norms, agreements, and treaties agreed to by all countries before and after World War II.
These Geneva Convention prohibitions (and others) were crafted to make hollow-point style ammunition illegal. To evade these restrictions, US gun-makers designed weapons to fire high-velocity bullets that tumbled—to inflict crippling injuries with more ferocity than the banned hollow-points.
Billy Lee has never visited Las Vegas nor does he plan to. It was built as a stopover during WWII for GIs on route to the west coast, where they boarded ships to fight their way to Japan. According to legend, criminal syndicates built “Sin City”. People say the bad guys moved out. The president owns a hotel there. The Editorial Board
During combat officer training in the Vietnam era, I fired one of these weapons (an M16 rifle) at a bucket of water. The bullet went in clean but blew out the back. Shards of metal and water flew everywhere. The container exploded, basically.
Every massacre involving these weapons reaps what we sowed. The USA violated both the spirit of the international consensus and basic common sense nearly six decades ago. Our country put the lethality of heavy weapons into rifles that handled like toys. Weapon manufacturers created bone smashing ammo.
People shot by these guns don’t recover. Survivors carry their wounds to the grave.
Modern high-tech guns and ammunition are inhumane, lethal, and crippling. The military shouldn’t use them; neither should civilians; especially civilians who aren’t properly trained or supervised; some civilian gun owners have an unhealthy obsession with these kill-sticks; some are lunatics.
Flags are set at half-mast across the USA to honor the fallen in the Las Vegas attack. This pic was taken by Billy Lee in a Belle Tire parking lot. The Editorial Board
As for hollow-point ammo, police inside the United States ignore the international prohibitions. Many agencies use black-talon style hollow-points to reduce the penetrating power of tumbling slugs (that can kill bystanders) while dramatically increasing debilitation to the person shot.
Misunderstanding of the second amendment has put four million tumbling-slug killing tools into the hands of ordinary people who have no accountability and who are in some cases insane.
After all these years only God knows where these weapons are. What could possibly go wrong?
Despite being a pontificator who by definition lacks expertise, I don’t generally speculate about things I know nothing about. I really don’t. I try to not think about the hundreds of mass shootings that have taken place during past decades, because it is depressing and demoralizing (and scary) to believe that going to public venues is dangerous.
It’s hard to say who is worse off during these mass-casualty events, the dead or the wounded or those who witness the violence up close and personal. So many people are traumatized for no good reason. I suspect that even viewers of television coverage get a sick feeling in their stomachs when these horrors occur. I know I do.
The recent attack in Las Vegas was strange. A number of active duty U.S. military personnel — recently returned from Afghanistan, plus their wives and partners — attended the Route 91 Harvest country music festival. Daesh — called ISIS or ISIL in the U.S. — claimed that the shooter, Stephen Paddock, was a contractor who worked for them. He was a kind of highly-paid sleeper mercenary; he did what he was told when his time came apparently.
His handlers—who may have helped to set up the killing zone—occupied the hotel suite alongside him during the attack. They might have killed him to make it look like suicide and exited the building via a service elevator disguised as hotel workers—maybe. It’s possible.
Another disturbing possibility is that they let the shooter live expecting that he would escape and join them in another attack. He might have been disabled by gas — perhaps injected under the door by police. If so, he is now in custody.
Anything is possible, when conspiracy theories start percolating. The shooter might have been a kind of patsy, like Lee Harvey Oswald claimed to be (for those readers who have convinced themselves that Oswald did not conspire alone).
If the Las Vegas massacre was an ISIS attack (as ISIS claims) it’s not likely that the United States will give the group the satisfaction of an acknowledgment. Disclosure would undermine confidence in law enforcement’s capability to protect the public from terrorist attacks. [Editors Note: As of January 2018 the number of casualties stands at 58 killed and over 500 wounded.]
Agencies will instead work behind the scenes to uncover, debrief, and terminate with extreme prejudice all the players. Justice will be served. It will be methodical and relentless. It could take time — months or even years.
This vehicle is being tested for battle-worthiness.
Most Americans never fully understood the Iraq War that spawned ISIS and filled its ranks with experienced and ruthless fighters; nor have they grasped how powerful is Saddam Hussein’s family, his friends, and his army — once one of the world’s largest and most formidable. I’ve heard people say some dumb things about what all that fighting in the Middle East was about those many years ago.
Before the Iraq War Saddam’s family was one of the world’s wealthiest; they owned a lot of stuff — popular media and franchises, magazines and food networks, even sophisticated enterprises, some with international reach.
Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, second in command in Saddam’s Iraq and founder of ISIS.
Saddam’s closest advisor and deputy — who President Bush called the King of Clubs — was never apprehended. His name is Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri. Some believe he is the mastermind behind the formation of ISIS.
A few years ago reports appeared in the press that Ibrahim died during an attack on his security detail. But no one saw him die. No one attended his funeral. His body (including DNA evidence of his death) is missing.
Some say that ISIS agents planted these stories of al-Douri’s demise. Ibrahim faked his own death. Saddam’s allies own a significant chunk of the world’s media.
Who knows?
Anyway, my understanding is that ISIS was formed by members of Saddam’s family and loyal remnants of his army who are trying to take back what they lost during the Bush presidency. That’s how many see it, including reporters at Haaretz, an Israeli news organization.
When the USA conquered Iraq, Saddam’s army (and leadership) melted away, but they had billions of dollars stashed in banks, the walls of buildings, and in holes underground. They have not been afraid to spend it.
ISIS travels first class. It has the best of everything, including trucks, cars, weapons, and drones. It captured an astounding amount of USA war fighting machinery in fights with Iraqi Shiites (ISIS is Sunni) after the USA exited Iraq.
Some of the captured equipment included MRAPs (see earlier illustration). It seems unbelievable, but its true. (Note from theEditorial Board:Billy Lee helped design the run-flat wheel that permitted fighting vehicles in the Gulf wars to stay mobile after their tires were shredded, punctured, or shot through.)
Billy Lee helped develop for Chrysler the run-flat technology used by combat vehicles like this one. The Editorial Board
The way I understand the conflict, the Sunnis of Iraq could reasonably be compared in some ways to the southern whites who served the confederacy during America’s Civil War. The Shiites in this analogy would be the negro slaves.
Think about it. After the Iraq War, the downtrodden Shiites (with help from the USA) took control of Iraq from the entitled Sunnis, much like blacks took control of the southern states after the Civil War with help from the north’s military occupation (called Reconstruction).
Southern whites eventually wrested control from their former slaves, but it took twenty years of terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan to make it happen. A similar dynamic is underway in the Middle East today, it seems. The Sunnis are reestablishing their control through terror, for the most part.
Eventually the Sunnis might win — like the Ku Klux Klan won their fight. In the meantime, a lot of innocents are getting hurt and worse.
The territory that ISIS controls in the Middle East is vast. It is comparable in size to the country of Egypt. Yes, USA backed forces have recaptured some ISIS cities and towns in recent months, but the fights are costly in lives and treasure; the victories do not seem to have turned the tide of the war, at least not yet.
Every time the USA hits ISIS hard, as it has in recent months, ISIS seems to find a way to hit back. In the meantime, we destroy towns and cities in order to “save” them. The cities aren’t coming back — not for a long time.
It’s difficult (some would say, impossible) to defeat a determined foe in their own country. We learned this lesson in Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. The fight against ISIS is going to be a long one. Our country might go bankrupt before victory comes. It’s possible.
No one wants to admit it, but the USA is teetering on the edge of financial collapse right now, as this essay is being written. Our last president, Barack Hussein Obama, (now called Barry Obama by friends) worked out some fixes to stave off an economic crisis, but the current president seems hell-bent on bringing our country to ruin.
The president and his wealthy friends seem to want to eliminate the estate tax so that they can leave thousands of millions of dollars (they call them billions) to their crazy kids who can flee with our national treasure to whatever solvent country will welcome them after the dust settles.
I’m told that the people around the president are Christian patriots who are determined to prevent really big screw-ups from being implemented. The country is safe.
More importantly, Christians don’t do genocides. They don’t do mass killings of civilians like that lunatic in Las Vegas. Yes, Hitler said he was Christian, but history has judged him differently.
The Christian patriots in the White House won’t permit the president to first-strike North Korea, for example, with nuclear weapons. They won’t kill ten to twenty million people over a few missile tests, which many countries conduct without threat of retaliation, including the United States.
Atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll. Hydrogen bombs are much larger.
The USA dropped dozens of hydrogen bombs in the Pacific Ocean, remember, and no one did anything about it. Countries around the world have conducted 520 atmospheric nuclear explosions and 1,352 underground detonations. We aren’t going to exterminate an entire country like North Korea over a few low-level, underground atomic tests. No rational, humanity-loving civilization would even contemplate such an atrocity.
So far, so good, I guess. Yes, we are in good hands, I’m told. No one is insane — not here; not there.
In time, no one will remember the killings in Las Vegas, anyway. No illusions. Everyone knows the truth when they see it, right?
When given a choice, decent people do what’s right, don’t they? Of course, they do. They show mercy; it’s what the Bible says God wants.
I lived as a teenager and young adult during the 1960s in an America where abortion was illegal in every state. At least 10% of women and girls got abortions anyway, maybe more.
Who knows? The technology of abortion is not complicated; people performed them for pregnant girls and women, usually for small fees. Birth control was something new. Girls and young women, most of them, did not yet understand how it all worked. They suffered shame and ignorance. Many got “into trouble” who never imagined it could happen to them — learning about their pregnancies, some of them, long after their boyfriends had moved on.
In junior high — it was 1961 — I was thirteen. In those days, Thursday was Queers Day. Anyone who wore green was considered queer and could be harassed — no mercy.
God help the wearer of green on QueersDay. I had no idea what being queer meant. I knew it was bad. Queer folk went to prison, some of them. They couldn’t get security clearances in the military, not in the Navy, anyway.
Dad told me, so I knew it was true.
Blacks couldn’t vote until 1964. I was 16. Until the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, businesses like hotels, drugstores, theaters, and realtors could choose to not sell their products to anyone they hated — usually Negroes. Yes, a few companies sold to black people but not many. After Martin was murdered, 125 cities erupted into racial violence. Some say more. Congress, fearing the unraveling of America, passed the Fair Housing Act and other legislation to make racial discrimination by business owners illegal. I never saw a black face on television until 1965. I was 17. Black musicians and singers entertained on the radio and in night clubs in most large cities. On the radio it was not possible to know always if the singer was black.
Otis Redding released a hit song during Christmas of 1964. I loved it. When Otis died in 1967, I did not know what he looked like. I’d never seen a picture of one of the most popular American singers of all time. When I graduated from college, one thing I did know for sure was what all the many brands of cigarettes looked like. I knew Marlboro tastes good like a cigarette should.
The jingle burned my brain. I will never be rid of it. TV forced hundreds-of-millions in the USA and around the world to watch countless thousands of cigarette commercials.
Viewers back then couldn’t pause or mute programs. Remotes didn’t exist.
Of course, I smoked. Who can resist sophisticated advertising?
I can’t.
Back in the day, the one and only control anyone had over what they watched was the on-off switch. The “off” switch meant choosing to be lonely, sometimes.
On television news, I watched the USA fight genocidal war in Vietnam. I signed up to serve as an infantry officer, no less. I learned that war is bad — much worse than I imagined.
I protested, and the army stripped me of my pending commission. I was arrested at an antiwar demonstration and spent hours in jail before some good lawyers set me free. Historians have argued that sometime during 1952 (I was four) the USA dropped anthrax munitions on Chinese troops stationed in northern Korea. The act of bioterrorism was justified by the idea that the alternative was nuclear weapons, which everyone believed involved more risk.
When doing research, I learned that everyone in the world seemed to know about the anthrax attack except Americans.
In 1976, a “rogue” CIA employee blew up a commercial airplane carrying, among other folks, the Cuban Olympic fencing team. The bombing was the world’s first act of aviation terrorism — a form of warfare our enemies would one day turn against us.
A “rogue” CIA asset named Oswald assassinated President Kennedy in 1963. I was in high school. Back in the day, rogue actors seemed to show up from time to time in places where unusually catastrophic events erupted.
Wikipedia reports: According to a 1963 FBI memo that was released to the public in 2008, [former president] Ford was in contact with the FBI throughout his time on the Warren Commission and relayed information to the deputy director, Cartha DeLoach, about the panel’s activities.
I lived in America under President Nixon, the closest thing to a Nazi ever elected to the White House. I was 26 when Congress started the impeachment process against him, but Nixon chose to resign in exchange for a pardon by his vice-president turned president, Gerald Ford.
During high school, I lived in Virginia, where white people went “coon” hunting to find and execute random black people.
Government leaders lie. Many are hypocrites. It’s often not possible to know what’s true. A lot of people who wear suits and ties are haters and power-trippers.
Slavery was 100 years old in America when our nation established itself under a constitution in 1776 — it was 150 years old if indentured servants — who were white and European — are included. Two-thirds of whites came to America as slaves. True, they weren’t in chains, and their “contracts” expired after seven years. Slavery is the fertile soil out of which the thorn bush of capitalism spread its vile branches of greed and exclusion. The institution of bondage makes getting rich a lot easier for those who own slaves. Who doesn’t love the roses of capitalism? But its spines can grow long enough to wound and kill the unwary. Unlimited incomes and estate sizes turn capitalism into a predatory exercise; without limits people get hurt; democracy is devalued; economies stall; recession and depression follow. The disadvantaged poor are as often as not sent to war by the rich and powerful to further maximize their enormous advantages. Threatening war to take the oil of Iraq is an example — an idea recently floated by President Trump.
Since the beginning of empires, every thinking person has known that greed, unchecked and unrestrained, destroys civilizations. The Bible says that the love of money is the root of every kind of evil.
It’s true.
Almost everyone in the world today lives under authoritarian governments run by men who don’t give a damn about freedom. It’s always been this way.
Even in an America with its Statue of Liberty, its Bill of Rights, its wide-open spaces and fast cars, most people find themselves trapped in jobs they hate working for rich folks who can disrupt and sometimes ruin their lives with two words: You’re fired.
To put things into perspective: unless our new president decides to arrest and execute dissenters, or drops nuclear bombs, we will get through what seems to some like a living nightmare. It is not, not really, not yet. We’ve been down this nasty road before. It leads to upheaval, yes, but if my generation survived and prevailed, then our kids and grandkids have a chance to prevail as well. My advice is to be smart; dignity and love demand that each person resist evil as best they can. Unfortunately, my experience is that the brave who resist lose every battle.
Who can close their eyes? The USA targeted and killed resisters in both Asia and the United States during the Vietnam debacle, to cite one example out of many. War resisters lost every fight; every argument; every skirmish; every battle.
People still ridicule baby boomers who said no to war. Ads on TV make claim that many boomers suffer from hepatitis C. Imagine — the generation that said no to war is a leper colony according to pharma pigs, who always push imaginary cures. Like everything else billionaires tell us, it’s bullshit. I don’t know a single person from my generation who has hepatitis C. Yes, some boomers have hepatitis C; that much has to be true; it’s simple statistics; and, yes, some voters cheated during our recent presidential election. There are always some, always on both sides, it turns out.
Anything is possible.
Everything is possible.
Powerful people can paint the people they despise in any colors they want.
Crooked Hillary.
Lying Ted.
Sleepy Joe. Slander is not new. The 9th Commandment forbids it. No one cares. People increase their power by violating it. It’s the way power rolls.
It always will be. It’s why Jesus said that unless graced by a miracle by God, the wealthy have as much chance of getting into heaven as a camel squeezing through the eye of a needle. Despite the harm that billionaires do, they can’t change the reality that Martin Luther King Jr. described during his short life of suffering for the cause of freedom and equality:
The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
They murdered Dr. King when he was 39. He didn’t live long, but he changed the course of civilization on Earth for as long as civilization lasts.
We, every one of us, can share Martin’s hope: non-violent resistance is not futile. Not yet. Not ever. It only seems futile when we are tired and discouraged.
