Category: History

Posted on

WHAT’S GOING ON?

What’s Going On?

UPDATE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD: On 26 March 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Nicolas Maduro on charges of drug trafficking and narco-terrorism, and the Department of State offered a $15 million reward for information that helps ”bring him to justice”.

It’s an album title – prophetic in its way — by Marvin Gaye, who was shot and killed by his own father on April Fools Day, 1984. Marvin would have celebrated his 45th birthday the next day, April 2.

Spring was on its way; no one saw winter coming.

It seemed at first that a fight between his parents went terribly wrong. Relatives tell different versions. In the end, it went down like this: Marvin’s father, a Pentecostal Minister and Healer, shot Marvin in his heart with a .38 caliber pistol Marvin gave him for Christmas.

Left behind were an adopted son, two bio-children, two brothers, two sisters, a half-brother, and his parents.

What’s Going On?

His father, it turned out, suffered from an undiagnosed brain tumor located on his pituitary gland. It made him violent; it drove him crazy. He felt scared. He feared his son. He shot the boy-man that he told everyone who would listen he truly loved.

What’s Going On?

Marvin Gaye propelled the Motown sound into the stratosphere of American popular music during the 1960s. Like most gifted black men in those years, he was a traumatized human being. He made the best of it.

Albums like What’s Going On and songs like Sexual Healing brought reassurance and comfort to millions of folks who suffered the emotional stress of living inside but apart in apartheid and militarized America.

In those days, like today, America itched for a fight. It found a good fight in Vietnam; it would soon find many others – all pointless and needlessly wasteful of both national treasure and human life. Like Marvin’s dad, America shot its sons in their hearts. America wasted a generation, which it forced to choose between fighting war and fighting against war.

Father, father
We don’t need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some lovin’ here today, oh oh oh
Picket lines and picket signs
Don’t punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what’s going on…

A few souls managed to tightrope between the chasms of violence on both sides, but not many. Today, the United States is a couple of countries short of conquering the entire world.

Venezuela is one country among a dozen or so that sit at the top of a hit-list.

What will come next?

What’s Going On?

I’ve answered a lot of questions about Venezuela on Quora. I’ve never visited the country. I know almost nothing about it except what I’ve read in books and on Twitter by people who live there. Still, I have opinions. I’m not afraid to pontificate about the situation, because I’ve seen these coup-scenarios playout my entire life – seven decades and counting.

It’s like listening to a scratched record that constantly skips to play the same musical phrase; it’s like watching reruns of familiar shows like Leave it to Beaver and even the Twilight Zone. I can tell anyone how a show will end, because in their way all the old shows have the same predictable endings.

What’s happening in Venezuela and how it will end is both predictable and depressing. My standard of living and yours depend on what happens next. The security and safety of our Union depend on it.

The Russians and Cubans must lose. America must win.

Why?

We take the spoils, because if we miss our chance to seize the oil of Venezuela, over time the United States will slide into economic decline. Prosperity and the power of USA billionaires depend not only on free-trade and favorable trade agreements, but also on the resources they sequester; how much of the bounty of others they can steal.

It’s true.

What’s Going On?

TheBillyLeePontificator.com is now open for questions. What follows are answers. The most recent questions are first; the oldest are last.

1 – What’s happening in Venezuela right now?

Over the past several years the United States has been reestablishing its control over the countries of the western hemisphere, right? Dilma Rousseff of Brazil is a prominent example. Anyone who doesn’t know who she is — or her story — isn’t paying attention.

It won’t help to name others. People who know Ms. Rousseff need no explanation. For those who don’t, no explanation will suffice.

It’s easy for Americans to claim ignorance about what their country does to maintain its control over the resources and people of South and Central America. It’s not pretty. People are imprisoned and shot (murdered) to assert USA sovereignty.

Does anyone want to watch the processes by which the sausage they eat is manufactured? Of course not. No one wants to even think about it. The process is brutal and inhumane. It’s better not to know. All anyone really wants is for the sausage to taste good and not make them sick. No one prays for the safety of the pigs who give their lives so that people can enjoy their breakfasts.

It’s the same in Venezuela. The country has massive oil reserves. The leadership is allied with countries who exert their powers on the other side of the world. These countries are always making moves to gain a foothold on American turf. The result is turf wars, which is what Venezuela is.

The United States will kill and imprison as few Venezuelans as possible, hopefully, but it will prevail; it will secure Venezuela’s natural resources, including its oil, for the USA to use and buy from the billionaires who shape its vision.

2 – Considering that every superpower had its rise and fall, do you think that the US will ever drastically fall, and how far into the future do you think that will be?

Since World War II the USA has militarily attacked one-fourth of the world’s nation-states. Of the 195 countries in the world, the USA controls or “unduly influences” all but twenty-five, give or take — through treaties, alliances, trade agreements, and so on. The United Nations is located inside the United States for a reason.

The USA controls the entire western hemisphere and exercises its military dominance without much interference anytime it decides. The Pentagon is a big place. People underestimate its power, because the majority of its structure is not viewable — most of it is below-ground. The vast scale of US power is necessary to operate 800 military bases, which are located in every region of the world.

The financial system of the USA is a force-multiplier that enables the USA to quarantine with knee-bending sanctions both individuals and countries who oppose its goals. American financial leverage is legendary.

The United States is on a trajectory toward world domination that would make the Third Reich stand up and take notice. It is remarkable how US power has grown during my lifetime. The USA is always at war with somebody.

Except for the four years of the Carter administration, the killing and dying doesn’t stop. The numbers of murders has reached into the tens of millions since the end of the last world war.

I believe that the American empire will collapse when the Yellowstone Supervolcano erupts. It might be 500 years from now or next Tuesday. There is no way to know for sure.

3 – Are the recurring power outages in Venezuela due to US interference in their country?

The United States could easily send in technical experts to stand up Venezuela’s power grid. It chooses not to. Not only that, it refuses to provide any kind of aid at all by refusing to work with the elected representatives of that oil-rich country.

Worse, the United States is plotting to isolate and embargo Venezuela. The US president wants their oil; USA oligarchs are at war with socialism; the State Department is at war with Russia who is providing aid to the beleaguered President Maduro.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that the United States cares nothing for the ordinary people of Venezuela; it instead is destabilizing the country to secure its resources.

Securing resources in the western hemisphere is something the United States has done repeatedly since the end of World War II. Ask any bona-fide historian if I’m right. Its success is one reason why the United States has the highest standard of living of all other countries in its half of the world.

4 – Russia sends troops to Venezuela to give the United States a ”red line”. Should the United States be worried, and do you think this could start a war between the United States and Russia?

My answer is a guess based on no knowledge or evidence; here it is: the USA will not challenge Russia militarily as long as Trump is president. It’s not collusion; Mueller proved that our president is the most patriotic president that the USA has ever had (and will ever have since he is likely to be the last).

Every red-blooded gun-toting Christian in America knows that Russian oligarchs with the help of almighty God put Trump into power to kill us all for allowing gays to marry. It’s not hard to understand.

5 – What is Venezuela’s national anthem?



Glory to the Brave People

6 – Is it technically possible to sabotage a country’s electricity infrastructure using an electromagnetic attack, as Venezuelan president Maduro has claimed, as the cause of his country’s power failure?

Where were you during the Iraq War? Taking down Saddam Hussein’s electrical grid was a point of pride during that war. Our leaders bragged about it on the evening news.

USA’s ability to attack infra-structure is vastly improved today. Venezuela is the perfect place to conduct diabolical tests of new war-fighting techniques and coup protocols.

Why?

It’s the oil, stupid. (I’m using a popular expression for emphasis. It’s not meant to insult anyone’s point of view.)

Anyone who is knowledgeable about the post-world-war history of the western hemisphere knows that the USA has been or now is at war with every country. The United States runs things or makes those who oppose it miserable with sanctions, sabotage, and subversion.

It’s not something a reasonable person can argue against.

Said another way, only an ideologue or an apologist will deny the culpability of the USA for waging war against Venezuela. If the United States cared about Venezuela, it would help Maduro, not undercut him.

7 – Why do you think there is a nationwide power outage in Venezuela going on right now?

During the Iraq war, the USA took down Baghdad’s power grid. It’s something our country is good at. That this power outage occurred during destabilization efforts to install a new president doesn’t look good for the prime suspects.

8 – Where in the world is the next international war likely to break out?

First, it’s important for everyone to understand that major international conflicts are potential species-extinction events. Enough nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons are available to enough countries to threaten the survival of humankind — should humankind fall into the abyss of a conflagration like it did during the two previous world wars.

It’s true that the last world war ended almost 75 years ago, but insufficient time has passed to be convincing that another world war won’t occur, perhaps sooner than anyone imagines.

One important reason why world-war has not occurred is because the United States has spent the post-world-war years consolidating its grip on empire. The USA knows the names, phone numbers, and addresses of every world leader and their relatives. It has cruise missiles and bunker-busters with each leader and family member’s name on at least one of them.

It’s personal. The number of individuals we don’t like and have removed from power is large and growing yearly. Maduro of Venezuela is the latest name on the USA Naughty List, but so, recently, was Dilma Rousseff of Brazil as well as countless others around the world — especially in the Middle East.

According to who counts, 195 countries exist in the world. The USA has conducted military operations against one-fourth of them since the end of World War II. Many conflicts are state secrets not shared with the public.

Expect major changes in Africa soon, anyone who doesn’t believe it.
To my way of reasoning, the best way to determine where the next lit-match will ignite is to look to past conflagrations. Countries with a history of warlike behavior are more likely than countries that lack such a history to start the next major international conflict.

What countries might these be? I’m not going to name them, because why make enemies unnecessarily who might have reformed their ways? But anyone with a knowledge of history and current events can create their own list. It’s not hard to do.

9 – How much worse can it look for Maduro? Denying hungry and sick Venezuelans from free food and medicine with guns. Isn’t Maduro’s time up?

Anyone with any sense knows that the USA engineered this debacle, because it is at war with socialism.

We invaded Cuba after they threw out the mafia, for crying out loud. We preferred organized crime to socialism.

10 – What should everyone know about the current political crisis in Venezuela?

Venezuela lives and dies on the price of oil. Low oil prices brought Venezuela to the brink of collapse in the late 1990s and made Hugo Chavez’s rise possible. Maduro, his successor, is falling on the sword of collapsing oil prices.

What confuses people is why.

Is the USA manipulating the oil markets to take down Maduro? The US has a consistent record of overthrow attempts against leftist governments. With a billionaire oligarch leading the USA, it seems possible.

Why doesn’t the United States help Maduro stabilize his country, which would be the humanitarian path? No one is sure. Common sense seems to suggest that our leaders are looking for a way to make a socialist system fail. Why else back a 35-year-old nobody to run the country? Wouldn’t aid to the elected government be an easier way to bring relief?

The Russians are involved, which further complicates. It’s possible that DT works for their side — so this coup that’s been in the making by our side during the past five years or so is sure to fail now that DT is aware and getting involved.

Time will tell.

It’s a sad state of affairs, what’s going on right now.

11 – Will a civil war happen in Venezuela?

The US has been at war with Venezuela for a long time now. Hundreds of America’s brightest have been working in their Pentagon offices for years to make sure socialism doesn’t succeed in South America.

Our wealthy oligarchs don’t want anyone to believe that a system might work where they aren’t allowed to steal as much as they possibly can and still call it “free enterprise.”

It simple, really. They are looking for allies inside Venezuela who are willing to blame Maduro for what America is doing to undercut them behind the scenes.

This crap started in Guatemala in 1954; it never ends.

12 – Why is Venezuela’s military backing Maduro recently? Is it worth it?

Maduro is the elected president of Venezuela in the same way that Trump is the elected president of the United States. Was the US election fair? Ask Reality Winner who is serving a five-year prison term incommunicado, because she disclosed NSA info on voting fraud. You will find that you can’t interview her.

Reality Winner, incarcerated NSA whistle-blower who exposed voter fraud and tampering in the 2016 presidential election. She is serving a five-year prison sentence — incommunicado as are other whistleblowers like Daniel Hale of the NSA and Teri J. Albury of the FBI.

So good luck figuring out what the truth is.

The billionaires who milk America don’t like socialism, because it is a system where people cooperate to create wealth, which they then share. Sharing wealth is anathema to oligarchs and mob bosses.

So, the USA is pulling out a well-worn playbook to guide itself through the process of replacing the experienced and elected leaders of Venezuela with a 35-year-old kid who knows just enough to do what he’s told. The USA promises to make him president. He promises to serve. It’s a kind of tit-for-tat.

To increase urgency and hysteria the USA manipulates currency and oil prices while it builds a right-wing cartel of nations to do its bidding. All the leaders will get rich under the plan. No one seriously gives a hoot about what happens to the poor.

The biggest danger is civil war, which happens to be exactly the same danger facing the United States. What goes around comes around.

The USA would be doing the world a big favor by helping Maduro get his country on its feet. Low oil prices have been catastrophic for Venezuela. Why don’t we help instead of using a bad situation as an opportunity to set up a bunch of oligarchs who will march to our drumbeat instead of their own?

Why is economic diversity such a bad thing? Ted Kennedy said in his last book that tycoons like his legendary dad were afraid that if socialism succeeds anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, it might become a prairie fire that takes down their edifice of privileges.

No tycoon wants a prairie fire. Every wealthy person believes they are self-made and entitled to all the advantages that their money can buy.

Ordinary people have about the same power to control the circumstances of their lives as farm animals.

It’s pathetic, really.

13 – With a regime change impending, within the next 30-50 years, will Venezuela consider socialistic influences for governmental structure again?

The pending regime change that is coming will take place in the United States. Americans are sick of boorish elites who — under a GOP led by pig Trump — won’t be electable in 2020.

One-party-rule by progressive democrats will bring relief to average people — something they haven’t experienced since the early 1970s. Many young people have no idea what it’s like to live in country that limits what the wealthy can steal and works overtime to bring equity to working people.

14 – Do you agree that reducing imports from Venezuela by the United States is an adequate short-term answer for helping that country and its citizens?

The best thing the USA can do to help Venezuela is to end sanctions, embargos, destabilization by our intelligence forces, and the policy of strategic strangulation, which is killing people — especially the weak.

The next best thing is to organize an international effort to airdrop food aid into the country. Flood the country with rice, powdered milk, clean water, potatoes, corn, etc. Inexpensive food is easy to collect and distribute and will help to strengthen the elderly, children, the pregnant, and the sick.

Flood the country with medical supplies and doctors to help the sick. Start talks with Maduro to offer him all the assistance he needs to get his country on its feet again.

15 – Is the newly accepted Venezuelan government by the United States backed by the majority of people in Venezuela? Or is it propaganda?

Citgo, the Venezuelan oil company, ships 500,000 barrels of heavy crude into Texas refineries every day. The crude is used to make diesel fuel for trucks. Without cheap diesel America’s goods and services get expensive real fast.

America’s oligarchs hate socialist countries. Most people can understand why. The foreign policy of the United States is to destabilize and overthrow all socialist countries whenever possible. Venezuela is an easy mark, because their leaders do not seem to be sophisticated.

Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor, John R. Bolton, are leading a coalition of nations to inflict strategic strangulation on the Maduro administration. The government cannot access its gold reserves (held in British banks) and is fighting to maintain control of Citgo, which adds 10 billion dollars to the nation’s coffers each year.

The USA plans to divert as many assets as it can to the puppet government it is setting up under the auspices of a 35-year-old kid who no one ever heard of before about three days ago.

The process of destabilization has been accelerated under Trump, and the USA is now making its move.

The USA is hoping for military defections combined with public demonstrations to force a sham election in the next 30 days to oust the socialist government in Venezuela and legitimize a new government, which they will control behind the scenes. They hope to assassinate Maduro if they get the opportunity. The Russians are sending in a large security detail to protect the lives of the current group of leaders and help them hold onto power.

The country of Venezuela is polarized much like the USA. The elites want the USA to intervene; the poor want Madura and socialism. All sides want the USA led embargo, destabilization protocols, and strategic strangulation to stop ASAP.

16 – Will the Venezuelan military switch sides if they see the US military lining up for an invasion? Don’t they care mostly about how much they are paid? What good is an ousted Maduro?

Overthrowing elected socialist governments is a specialty of US foreign policy. The USA is good at it, but it doesn’t always work.

Even an intense strategic strangulation of Cuba (and an invasion to boot) was unable to break down the Cuban revolution.

The USA killed two million Vietnamese but failed miserably to prevent the unification of North and South.

Early successful overthrows such as those in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) have convinced policy makers that the odds are in their favor when they decide to decimate a particular country. They have a better than even chance to prevail, so why not take it?

The problem is that everyone now knows — after 79 years of messing with governments — that the USA cares almost exclusively about itself and the protection of its tycoons. Democracy, equality, and basic fairness mean nothing to the United States in its conduct of foreign policy.

Many policy makers disagree with my point of view, but they are in the habit of giving in to self-deception to make it possible for them to live inside themselves.

17 – What is the likelihood that the US will at some time become entangled in a coup in South America?

The USA has a history of involvement in the politics of South and Central American countries. Coups are part of the history. Where have you been?

Seriously.

Destabilizing socialist countries in our hemisphere is an important component of the foreign policy of the United States. Everyone knows. It’s not a well-kept secret.

The USA keeps track of what’s going on through agricultural programs, aid, and assistance. When it desires change, the USA generally tries diplomacy first. If it doesn’t work, more violent methods have been used, including assassinations, disappearances, and coups.

Under certain circumstances, it can be illegal to talk about what exactly our intelligence services do to keep the Americas safe for exploitation by our companies. The most famous company that the USA went to war for was the United Fruit Company during the Eisenhower years. The president’s secretary held a lot of the company’s stock.

Some countries have raw materials that are considered strategic assets. The USA or its surrogates operate mines and other facilities to secure these assets and to keep other competitor countries from access. Right?

The instability in South and Central America that has arisen since President Obama stepped down is probably the result of activities encouraged by the newest president. He has lots of precedents to justify himself, correct?

18 – Are Russia and China’s recent provocative military maneuvers a prelude to war with the United States?

My belief — based on no evidence I can recite — is that our president is a pacifist. He enjoys pretend violence, like pro-wrestling, but is repulsed by real violence. He likes to threaten, yell, call people names, sue people in court, etc., but he is uninterested in physically hurting someone. For him fake violence is a kind of game. Often, he forgives and makes up later.

His mistresses have all said, as far as I know, that he treated them with kindness; something that many philanderers are not known to do.

When he bombed an airstrip to retaliate against a Syrian chemical attack, he set up the targeting so that no one on-site would get hurt. Yes, an attack on another target killed a hundred or so Russian soldiers, but it was an unintended screw-up he’d probably like to have back.

Our president likes to huff and puff and make deals; it’s a harmless game for him that has no meaning except for the fun he gets each day trying to outwit his opponents who he calls “rats” or “crooked” or “lyin” or whatever fits. Hillary Clinton, in real life, is one of his best friends, for crying out loud.

Trump is a liberal at heart, but he pretends to be a racist monster to hold onto his base, which is, let’s face facts, hold-overs from the Confederacy of the Old South. Southern racists are dangerous when angry; otherwise, they are the dumbest, easiest-to-manipulate voters in the country. They are like lemmings — if Trump says, “run off a cliff”, they’ll do it and praise Jesus for the opportunity.

Trump will not go to war against China or Russia as long as he can play monopoly with their oligarchs. He’ll bluster and threaten. He won’t pull any triggers.

One very interesting thing happened the day he became president. A prominent drug lord from Mexico was arrested and disappeared into the New York City penal system. Within a few days the man’s family was rounded up. They haven’t been heard from since.

So, the president has power. His problem is that a component of his power comes from sympathetic mob bosses, often with dual-citizenship — almost always from Russia and Israel. These “friends” aren’t shy about taking care of business, so the president won’t have to.

19 – The US could lose a future war against Russia or China, a new report to Congress has suggested. Do you agree?

The United States completed a two-trillion-dollar upgrade to our nuclear missile inventories during the Obama administration. The USA built a doomsday matrix.

I’ve heard rumors that a certain country has built a doomsday bomb capable of destroying Earth were it ever detonated. Folks should know that there is no upper limit to the destructive power of hydrogen bombs. Countries can build them as big as they want. They can blow up Earth itself.

The USA might not be able to win a hot war, but we won’t lose it to others, either. A war to the death against Russia or China is a war to the death of the planet. If recovery is possible, it will take thousands of years, but climate changes and the loss of resources will mean that Earth will never be what it once was; humans will never be what they once were.

War by major powers against each other (a world-war) is something that can never be allowed to happen again. The next world-war will kill billions of people and unleash a pandora’s box of suffering on the few unfortunates who survive. Rich and poor alike who live will be traumatized to the end of their natural lives.

Hot war is suicide. The leaders of every nation-state must give their last ounce of courage to preserve the one place in the universe where people have the hope to survive and thrive.

20 – Why is Russia’s military so powerful despite the fact that they spend less on defense than the USA?

1 – The Russians pay lower salaries and have fewer military bases. (The USA maintains 800 bases in 70 countries.)

2 – Russia is more than twice the size of the United States.

3 – Russia has the world’s largest reserves of oil.

4 – Russians are more literate in science and engineering than Americans.

5 – Russia has developed dangerous (to us) technological advantages in missile technology. They have air-to-surface missiles that are stealthy and reach velocities close to three miles per second. The USA has nothing in its arsenal that can track and shoot them down, which means that we risk losing our entire fleet of navy ships in a hot war.

6 – Russia has a fleet of drone subs deployed off our coasts.

7 – Russia does not seem to the have rampant corruption and cost overruns in its manufacturing sector that the United States is known for and which drive up the price of everything the Pentagon buys.

8 – Russians build their vehicles, artillery, and guns to perform in off-road bad weather conditions. They design their equipment to be simple, reliable, and easy to fix.

9 – The USA is paying unreliable private companies to administer a big part of its military space program. The temptations that lead to profiteering and unrealistic assessments of effectiveness might rot the foundations of military readiness. It is a risk the Russians don’t take.

Having said all this, the fact is that the militaries of both countries are nightmarishly lethal. The side that attacks first in the next war will accrue big initial advantages that could make a counter-punch ineffective. An immediate imbalance of power could easily become permanent and lead to catastrophe for the country that takes the first hit.

Technologies of modern warfare are making the world less safe for war-makers.

Hope is when the generals and civilian leaders don’t feel safe that they will avoid all-out war.

Terror-in-the-gut starts when military planners understand that the other side will strike first.

Billy Lee

Random Reads:

EMERGENCY

Most people do not remember living in the United States when abortion was against the law. They are too young. ...>>

ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM

Americans live inside a psychotic bubble of evil. Some have lost the ability to assess realistic threats to the things they hold dear. ... >>

YEAR ONE

January 17, 2015 marks the first anniversary of the Billy Lee Pontificator. During the past year we published more than fifty essays. ...>>

SHOULD THIS BOOK BE FINISHED?

Writing "JOURNAL" has inflicted upon me a certain pain and anguish of mind and soul. Yes, I wrote it---secretly, furtively---in the sanatorium....>>

SENSING THE UNIVERSE

What is the universe? Sensing is seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting, right? These qualities don't exist in the universe. ...>>

WOLF'S DILEMMA

In a not-too-distant future, humans may find themselves in zoos entertaining conscious, living brains they once swore were merely machines. ...>> 

RELATED READS

Posted on

CONTRADICTIONS

The Bible says that all who call on the name of the LORD will be saved. Jesus said not so fast, that’s not quite right. Not everyone who says LORD, LORD will be saved, but only those who do the will of GOD.

Despite what 40,000 Christian denominations (and counting) teach their congregations, the Bible is full of contradictions. Worse for modern readers, it is full of scientific and historical nonsense.

The most compelling contradiction involves the subject of divorce. The Bible both forbids and permits it. Jesus said that the contradiction was intentional to accommodate the hardness of people’s hearts.

When Jesus says the Bible harbors contradictions, that kind of settles the matter, does it not?

It seems that for some, it doesn’t.

One New Testament writer asserts that all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching and instruction.  He doesn’t assert that everything written is contradiction-free.

For one thing, the Bible wasn’t anywhere near complete when he wrote his tract. There are other reasons. The ancients didn’t have the same ideas about evidence, science, proof, and logic that western modernity has. It’s not easy to accept, but almost everything that matters to us was different in the ancient world.

My experience with members of congregations from dozens of churches has taught me that many folks are drawn to religion because they want certainty.

The uncertainties of life scare them. They hate ambiguity and want their stupid notions about life confirmed. The easiest way is to group-think with like-minded believers.

All congregations teeter on the brink of madness. Cult culture is always lurking beneath the shadows of human weakness and fallibility.

It’s not difficult to understand that Jesus had a serious problem that could not easily be overcome. By modern standards, the brightest people of first-century Israel were hopelessly ignorant. A huge number suffered from illness, both physical and mental. They had no realistic understanding about why.

They knew not where the wind came nor what the stars were. Some thought, according to the screenwriters of the 1964 classic movie, Spartacus, that a giant lived in a cave with a young girl. He looked at her and sighed. From his breath the wind stirred.

As for stars, some thought they were the light of Heaven shining through tiny holes in a tarp that covered Earth at night like a tent.

If you were Jesus and encountered such ignorance, where would you start?  In those days, almost everything people believed was a lie.

A truth teller has no chance in the modern world. What chance would such a person have two-thousand years ago?

It is one of the great miracles of Jesus’s life that he was able to reach his mid-thirties before the leaders he challenged killed him.

Think about it. Life was cheap when the Romans used the cross to teach wayward people the lesson that rebels die hard. When wood was scarce, Romans nailed people to the sides of their houses. Non-citizens in occupied territories didn’t even get the benefit of a hearing more often than not.

From Jesus’s point of view, the most important problem people faced was not physical suffering or oppression but separation from God caused by their propensity to sin. Evil was the result of not knowing God and living life apart.

For Jesus, God is love. People who live outside the will and protection of love are certain to traumatize those they care about most — starting with themselves first, their own families, and moving inevitably outward like cancer into the organs of the people they hate, which for most people is everyone they meet.

The problem of hate and senseless cruelty is that it is not a respecter of persons, knowledge, wealth, or power. Hate and cruelty destroy lives whether people believe stars are pinholes or distant suns.

Jesus didn’t address the problem of human ignorance, because it is a problem that is always with us. Even the smartest people today can’t explain to anyone in a way that makes sense how it is that people got here. The best educated from the best schools talk crazy most of the time.

Instead of worrying about the minutiae of hermeneutics, Jesus said that Scripture is best summarized by two simple actions: loving God who gave us life, and loving the others who God also created and loves.

We do the will of God when we love and forgive. It’s simple. A child can understand.

Major portions of the Christian Bible weren’t written when Jesus walked the earth. It was hundreds of years after Christ’s death before a compilation of tracts were collected that were sensible and consistent enough that the scholars of the time felt confident to publish.

They published a handful of Bibles, because the printing press wouldn’t be invented for a thousand years more. Even then, the text wasn’t partitioned into chapters or verse; chapters and verses would be added later — hundreds of years into the future.

Jesus was well aware that most people wouldn’t be taught to read for a long, long time after he was gone. He knew that language and cultures change with time. No one has to be God to understand that translations of ancient languages are always a little unreliable — open to interpretation —  no matter how much scholarship is brought to bear.

It’s why Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would write the Words of God on human hearts; the words of God would guide believers until he returned to rescue the world someday.

Which day?

Jesus said he had no idea. All he knew was that he would return when humankind needed him most. It would be during a catastrophe; an extinction event the likes of which no one has ever seen; a time when the moon and stars disappear from view.

In a time of existential danger — a day that might never come — he promised to rescue us one last time.

Preachers have created a cottage industry out of the promise of a Second Coming.  Writers make a ton of money cashing in on people’s insatiable curiosity to understand the “end times.”

Who will be saved? Who will be thrown into the fires of Hell? 

Who will be awarded movie rights? Who will hold the copyrights to the greatest story ever told?

People demand that God be perfect. They insist that everything created by God be perfect. If things can’t be made perfect, they want nothing to do with God. Who needs a God who doesn’t live up to my high standards? some dare to reason.

God disagrees, of course. God said that he saw that the things he created were good, not perfect. A lot of people get that simple truth from the first book of the Bible completely wrong.

The first humans sinned and found themselves separated from God. The world they entered wasn’t good. It was bad. The reason, sadly, was because they made it bad.

It’s a subtle thought, but good versus bad is qualitatively different from perfect verses flawed. It has a different flavor that can make a difference in the way people view the wonder of God and what he has done.  It changes the texture of the relationship with our Maker in a way that when correctly understood is able to rekindle the embers of love that Jesus warned will (for most folks) grow cold.

We don’t want that, do we?  I don’t want it, and neither does God. God doesn’t demand perfection; he’s asking us to love and be good to ourselves and each other. We will make mistakes; we are not and never will be perfect; we can love and forgive each other our trespasses, as the oldest of Christ’s prayers says.

Forgiving each other erases the bad and releases the good in every person who is abundantly loved.  It’s a perfect system to restore wholesomeness; perfection itself is irrelevant — does anyone know? — and, anyway, it’s unachievable by both people and God.

Everything that was made was good; it wasn’t necessarily perfect. Let that sink in. Perfection turns us into automata; into machines of steel and hardened hearts; into measurers and comparators; into judges and executioners.

Only love is made perfect through the shed blood of Christ Jesus alone. It is the central mystery of the Bible — a stumbling block for many.

We are flesh and blood made in the image of God. Jesus commanded every person under Heaven to live life unafraid. We don’t fret if a hair is grey or out of place; we don’t worry about wrinkles or crooked teeth or brains that don’t function like we think they should.

We don’t worry about the clothes we wear or the food we eat. We don’t obsess on our health or our popularity. We don’t carry guns or live behind walls or fly drones over our neighbors’ yards; we don’t fear strangers; we love them and take them in.

Most of all we trust God to meet our needs — like the sparrow and the fox who God feeds and shelters and knows as intimately as ourselves, the people who worship the LORD with grateful hearts — because without God with us we are lost in a universe we will never understand.

Billy Lee

MESSAGE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD:  Once again Billy Lee has pontificated about religion without offering readers anything to back it up. We demanded that he quote something from Scripture.

He picked  1 John 4: 7-12:

”Dear friends: Let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.  […]  No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”

NOTES:

  1. τελεος – having reached its end; finished; complete —  Matthew 5: 48
  2. τετελεσται – it has been finished — John 19: 30

Random Reads:

LAMBERT W FUNCTION

The math behind the Lambert function is mind-bogglingly complicated to most people. …>>

ARMAGEDDON

''Minty" Ross Harriet Tubman will not appear on the $20 bill until 2026. Some say it could be later. The cynical say it will never happen. ... >>

FAKED LIFE

In a simulation, which of its fake creatures is able to determine how old is the authentic universe it will never see? …>>

KILLING FRENZY

Elites get to be elite through in-fighting, war, intrigue, and politics. They are, for the most part, desensitized to violence. ...>>

ILLUSIONS

ISIS was formed by Saddam's family and loyal remnants of his army who are trying to take back what they lost during the Bush presidency. ...>>

CONFORMAL EQUIVALENCE

At the termination of expansion, the metrics of spacetime become equivalent to a singularity …>>

RELATED READS

Posted on

YOU’RE FIRED!

The words “You’re fired!” are among the most painful I’ve ever heard.

I’ve lost a lot of jobs during my life, so the pain has accumulated to the point where I would rather die than re-live my life—unless I could arrange things so that no person would ever have the power to drive a stake into my heart, because that’s what being “let go” feels like.

I never followed Trump‘s television show The Apprentice because hearing the punch line “You’re Fired!” always felt like a hard slap to the face. Watching young men and women suck up to a powerful boss who gut-punches all but one was never harmless entertainment. Not for me, anyway.

The number of people fired during the Trump administration is staggering. How many of these 24 high-power individuals can anyone identify? They are the tip of a mammoth iceberg of graft, corruption, incompetence, ignorance, and suffering. Who disagrees?

I’ve fired people. I understand why our president won’t do it in real life. He always assigns the task to an underling, right? The White House employment line churns like a stormy ocean but the president stays above the froth.

Firing someone is more painful than being fired because it stays with you forever. It’s not something you can overcome by getting a better job, for example. You can’t take it back. I’ve always wondered whether I might have found a kinder way to address the problems I thought firing others solved.

Those who read my essays might remember that I managed some restaurants when I was in college. Back then finding good help was hard, because everyone worked.

I needed a cook really bad. A roly-poly guy with a sweet face applied for the job. He explained that he was a slow learner, but he would try to become the best cook he could.

After three days, I realized that he was slow, like he said. He would never be able to keep up; he lacked the intelligence to memorize the menu and prepare the food properly.

I called him into my office.

“Ruby,” I said. “I don’t see how we’re going to be able to make this work. I’m sorry, but I have to let you go.”

He said, “Mr. Lee, I understand. Uh, you gave me a chance. Uh… uh, it didn’t work out. It’s happened before. It’s not your fault.  Uh, don’t feel bad. I’m to blame. I’m slow, uh… that’s all.”

He offered his hand, pivoted, and walked out. He had obviously memorized his exit speech. I put my face in my hands and sobbed.

It was clear that Ruby suffered from a disability of some kind. My need for a cook blinded me. Until he recited his sentences, I didn’t see it. No matter how hard he tried he was never going to make it in a world that demanded quick wits and fast problem solving.

What made me cry was that he wasn’t going to give up. It seemed like no reversal mattered. Success would forever elude him, but he had just enough resources and determination to pick himself up, give his speech, shake hands, and strive to find the next opportunity.

Ruby was willing to fight against the odds to become a hamburger cook. He took great pains not to traumatize managers, including me, who inevitably would be forced to fire him to protect their bottom line. In his effort to spare my feelings he failed—like he probably failed at everything he tried.

I felt sick to my stomach. I felt remorse. Ruby gave everything he had. Nothing worked. Something wasn’t right. There was nothing I could do.

It’s been decades. My heart aches. I wonder if by some miracle Ruby ever made his dream come true. I’ll never know.

At the time, I managed two restaurants. Because I was a student at the university, assistant managers and other responsible employees helped me to keep operations running smooth.

At the second store a couple of waitresses complained that a busboy I hired was stealing tips.

I called the kid into my office. “Are you stealing?” I asked. The boy immediately began emptying his pockets. His pockets were deep. He dumped big handfuls of quarters and dimes on my desk. I didn’t say a word. When the last dime dropped, he ran out of the store. We never saw him again.

It felt good. The waitresses didn’t seem to mind either.

I hired a rather attractive waitress at the first store. She had the annoying habit of talking too much to other waitresses. She was loud, and it irritated me. After a couple of months, I started to hate her because she didn’t seem to feel an urgency to follow through on the things I asked. I felt disrespected.

One day she said something that rubbed me the wrong way. I called her back to my office and fired her in almost the same way Trump would years later on his TV show. I was cold and matter of fact. “You talk too much and don’t do what you’re told,” I said. “You’re fired!”

The girl broke down and began wailing. “How will I get money for my trip to Europe this summer?” she begged.

I would be in Italy that summer myself to visit family living in Naples at the time. I had no idea until that moment that her job was a means to an admirable end.

A wave of nausea swept over me. I was making a terrible mistake. It seemed somehow impossible to backtrack. I’d played my hand. From now on things could never be good between us. “It’s time to leave,” I told her.

She went to court over it, but the owners of the restaurant knew the judge, so nothing happened. I feel like a worm when I remember this act of needless cruelty.

Big Boy Restaurants were among the first in a wave of fast-food chains to capture the hearts and pocketbooks of a public too busy to cook home meals in the 1960s. The Big Boy Slim Jim sandwich remains one of my all-time favorites.

I hired a cook who caught on fast. “I’ve been been vacationing in Florida,” he answered when I asked about his tan.

After a few weeks the owner approached to tell me the cook had pulled him aside to explain that I was a terrible manager who should be fired. The cook expressed his belief that he was the best choice to replace me.

I said to the owner, “That’s interesting. He is a good cook and smart enough probably. Maybe he could help out at another store.”

The owner looked at me like I was crazy. “Are you out of your mind?” he said. “This guy is trying to get you fired so he can take your job in this store—a store you manage!  What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “Maybe I can start training him in other parts of the job and someday he will know enough to help us.”

“No!” the owner said. “You are going to fire that back-stabbing son-of-a-bitch. When I come in here next week, he’s gone, understand?”

When the new cook came in for his shift, I asked him to walk outside with me. I said, “The owner tells me you think I’m incompetent.”  The guy threw up his hands like he was being arrested for something and said, “I screwed up. You’re right. Fire me! No hard feelings, OK?” He wheeled around and disappeared down the street.

I felt surprise and relief. I didn’t fire him. He fired himself.  I think I remember someone telling me he hitchhiked back to Florida.

Well, this essay is supposed to be about me being fired, not me firing others so let’s get on with it.

I was an athlete in high school. I played football and baseball. I was an All Star third baseman. In football I played tight end. Because my dad was the commander of a Navy jet-helicopter squadron in Key West, we lived on the Florida island during my eighth-grade year and the first half of ninth grade.

Key West High School had a good reputation, because it graduated several big-time athletes back then—George Mira and Boog Powell are the two I remember because they had younger brothers who were close to me in age. We called Boog’s brother “Boob.” He took the joke with grace and good humor. Athletics was a big deal.

Toward the end of the fall season, our freshman football team lost an important game. In the locker room the coach dressed down the team to the point of being profane and abusive.

He was more than unfair. I felt degraded. We played our hearts out. I piped up to defend my friends, “Maybe if you knew how to coach, we would have won!”

The coach turned purple. “Billy Lee, you will never play sports again at Key West High School. You are done.”

I cried on the bus ride home. I reminded the coach about how good I was at baseball. He had seen me play during an All-Star contest between the civilian and Navy leagues. He knew I was good.

He remained stoic and unmoved. Fortunately for me, the Navy promoted my dad and we moved to Arlington, Virginia where he led some group at the Pentagon not known to the public. I would play sports again, after all.

More is under the Pentagon than above. It’s a big place, which I was fortunate to visit and tour—under supervision, of course. My dad worked several years within a labyrinth whose mission was to protect and defend the United States of America.

Unfortunately for me I missed out on a season of baseball. Ninth graders went to junior-high; my new school didn’t field a baseball team. When high school try-outs finally came, a year later, I made the JV team.

The suburban schools outside Washington DC were big.  A thousand tenth grade boys tried out. Eighteen made the cut. I thought, This is great. I’m back on track.

Then, disaster. It got cold in northern Virginia. I was used to playing in the heat of the deep south. My legs and arms seemed to stiffen-up in the frigid temperature, and I endured a terrible scrimmage. I made costly errors and went hitless. The coaches announced after practice that they had agreed to bring three varsity players down to JV to give them more playing time. Three JV players would be cut.

The names of the final “final roster” would be posted in the gym. Anyone whose name wasn’t on the list was cut. The decisions were final. There would be no discussions, no negotiations.

I must have looked at the roster a dozen times before I could accept that my name wasn’t on it. I told my dad on the ride home from practice. Visibly shaken, all he could manage was a barely audible, “oh.”

I experienced my first nervous breakdown. It lasted a few months. I told my mother that I was terrified all the time. It never stopped. She confessed that she had a breakdown when she was younger, but in time she got through it.

In ninth grade I lived in Key West, where my dad defended America against Soviet subs with a squadron of jet-helicopters during the Cuban Missile Crisis. My mother stands next to me. When my athletic dreams unraveled the following year, I had a nervous breakdown. Mom led me safely through to the other side of hell. After aging she suffered memory loss, but she remained a happy, optimistic person to the end of her life.

It made me feel good to know that my mother understood. I waited for healing. Eventually, I got better.

Dad was promoted again. The president sent him to Paris to represent the United States Navy at NATO.  The French planned to withdraw.  Dad tried but was unable to change their minds. A year later he would lead war games in the Mediterranean Sea for an ineffective coalition of nations called SEATO (now disbanded), and the family would follow him to Naples, Italy.

But my senior year would be spent in France. It would be a welcome change from the Washington DC suburbs, which to this day I associate with “fear and loathing“—bad mental health.

It’s hard to believe, but I did get fired from high school—in Paris of all places.

My girlfriend’s dad was Secretary of the Embassy in Paris. Sandy attended a French high school and spoke fluent French. It made getting around easy because not only was she connected and accepted everywhere, but she also made a gifted translator. I had no communication problems when we explored the twenty or so arrondissements together.

Because I went to the school for military-dependents (populated mostly by Army kids) I couldn’t invite Sandy to our senior prom. It was a school rule, a stupid rule, but that was the Army way in those days.

Someone got the bright idea to hook me up with the ranking General’s daughter—a sweet girl, but I didn’t know her. Because I already had a girlfriend who I sort of loved, I had no interest in the arrangement with the General’s daughter.

I made some stupid decisions that involved selling sleeping pills that were freely available (at nominal cost without a prescription) in the French drugstores (les pharmacies) near our house. I sold the pills to friends to raise money for Paris prom expenses, which I expected to be, well, excessive. It turned out that the pills were illegal on American military property, which included the high school.

A big kid I didn’t know bought three and started running around the campus yelling to everybody that he was high on LSD—a kind of joke, I guess. Anyway, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) locked down the school, did a sweep, and found discarded pill wrappers.

After a number of interrogations, they got to the truth and had to decide how to handle me and two other kids who had nothing to do with anything except that they “confessed” to buying one pill each.

One of the kids was the only black at the school. It didn’t help at all that his dad was an enlisted man—his dad was not, sadly, the highest-ranking Naval officer in Paris, like mine. He and his family were put on the first flight out of Paris. His family was uprooted over a sleeping pill. 

The verdict was that I would not attend the last week of classes but would receive a diploma and be allowed to go to the graduation ceremonies—including the after-party.

The senior prom was off-limits. It was my punishment. The Army would send a West Point cadet (from the academy famous for its overlook of the Hudson River fifty miles north of New York City) to accompany the General’s daughter.

For me, the punishment was a reward. Yes, I was expelled from high school, but I was going to graduate, and I didn’t have to hang around during the last week of classes. I was free.

Sandy’s civilian high school reserved the Eiffel Tower for their prom. No one had a problem with me being her guest. Yes, the tower was amazing.  After the celebration, we club-hopped through Paris night spots with the money I had made, which the DIA didn’t bother to confiscate.

As for my own high school graduation party, school-rules didn’t permit Sandy to be there.  It took place on a large estate, which was romantically lit and well-attended.

A beautiful girl I had seen at school but not yet met walked-up to introduce herself, and somehow, we found a way to make love behind a grove of trees in the backyard. Until then, I hadn’t understood how much comfort some women are able to provide to a man who seeks reassurance.

Sometimes I wish I’d run off with the girl like she said she wanted, but her dad was an enlisted man. I couldn’t see a way to make things work. In those days officer families and enlisted families didn’t mix. It was like segregation of the races, kind of.

Speaking of race, as I told readers, the Army sent the black kid who had nothin’ to do with nothin’ and his whole family back to the states on the first plane out of Paris. They forbade him to graduate or visit parties. I thought his punishment was outlandishly unfair, but it was the 1960s.  Most high-powered white people hated black people at the time. It’s the way things were back then.

It wasn’t possible for me to set things right.

This essay is getting kind of long, isn’t it?  Maybe I should write a Section-Deux someday to cover the horrors I suffered as an adult working at a dozen companies for 35 years.

No?

Ok.

Here is a summary, then:

After returning to the states and entering University I got myself fired from the Army Officer program (ROTC) a few weeks before I was scheduled to receive an officer’s commission.

My mistake was to speak a few lines over a microphone and loudspeakers to about 15,000 fellow college students who were protesting against the Vietnam War. Although I received a wild ovation (people jumped up and down, screamed in my ears, and hugged me) it didn’t go over well at headquarters. It ended my military career.

The Lieutenant Colonel who fired me was a good enough guy. He gave me a failing grade in Foreign Relations—the last class requirement for an officer’s commission. As a result, my military record was spotless. I was too dumb to be an infantry officer. That’s all.

After being released by the Army—like every other civilian guy—I became subject to the military draft.  It was a lottery system designed to determine who would be inducted.

I drew a low number, which the colonel must have known, because it was based on date-of-birth— information in my personnel file he possessed. A low draft number meant that I had no way out. A grunt tour in the agent-orange saturated undergrowth of Vietnam was certain.

Unknown to the colonel, a friend of mine sat on the draft board. By the grace of God and help from my friend (he was an uncle, actually), the Army never called.

After he retired the colonel became a player in township politics. By all accounts he did good things for his community. Years later I ran into him from time to time when shopping. He always smiled and asked how things were going. He seemed surprised to learn that things were going well.

I did get fired from my first three jobs out of college. One company told me to my face that they couldn’t retain employees who opposed the military, which is what a four week long investigation into my background by their crack investigators had uncovered.

Fortune 500 companies closed their doors to millions of young Americans whose crime was protesting an undeclared, genocidal war at the end of the world: the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese lost every battle and suffered millions of casualties. They won the war. Who can argue with success?  I often wonder how much better-off America and Vietnam would be if the people who were smart enough to resist a cruel and senseless war had been allowed to take their place in leadership when the fighting ended. No one will ever know. 

After three investigations and three firings by Fortune 500 companies over a short period of two years, I suffered catastrophic depression. I couldn’t muster the energy to look for work. I decided to return to the University to upgrade my skills, while I underwent counseling.

I took a part time job as a busboy for an upscale restaurant. The tips were fantastic. At a company Christmas party, my beautiful (and fearless) wife acted “inappropriately” according to a complaint by the owner’s wife; when I returned to work her husband fired me. In those days, men were responsible for the behavior of their wives.

I got a better job, and life went on.  I sharpened my skills, started a family, and garnered engineering-design experience. After several years, a packaging-machine builder hired me to investigate cost overruns on their flagship machine line.  I discovered a kick-back scheme by top execs that involved powerful suppliers. The CEO quit to avoid arrest, and I was fired to provide cover for those who had no intention of quitting.

The upside was that I received the most lucrative severance package of my career.

I don’t feel good about it, because justice wasn’t served. It rarely is, right?  I wanted to stay alive, protect my family, and not get blacklisted in my profession (engineering), which would render me unable to earn a living. My only option was cowardice, and that’s what I chose.

Life would continue, but I learned how power and fear twist justice in the world of plundering by civilians. It was an eye-opener, for sure.

The highest paid job I ever held required that I work seven days a week. I made a ridiculous amount of money, but under the pressure of too many hours and unreasonable demands from our biggest client, General Motors, my supervisor started drinking more than usual. I told him he was an alcoholic. We argued, and he fired me. He told me he couldn’t work with someone who thought he was a drunk.

The lowest paid job was Bible-study leader at church. It paid exactly nothing. I sat on a planning council with other leaders where we discussed things. The “elders” revealed that they intended to sever their ties to the national denomination, because they didn’t think the denominational leaders had punished sufficiently a pastor who had presided over his daughter’s wedding to her girlfriend.

The elders seemed to possess a morbid hatred of Christian heretics who favored gay people. They intended to join another, more conservative denomination to set things right.

I told the leaders they were stupid; it was a bad move that would have bad consequences. I was right, but the bad consequences were directed at me—personally. They disbanded my Bible group, barred me from leadership, and forced me to shut down my website for six weeks.

Eventually, many shunned me. I got a lucky opportunity to resign my membership without the misfortune of being excommunicated. It’s complicated, but the part of the story that I can repeat is told on this site. Click the link or look it up. I was able to leave in good standing, which was an answered prayer—in my grateful opinion.

The week after we decided to leave, my wife and I found a church with lovely people who were, many of them, crazy conservative, but we didn’t care. They talked to us and treated us nice. Nice goes a long way with us both. My wife made and continues to make a lot of new friends.

God does only good things, I learned.

It’s true.

My work experiences weren’t always negative. I cooperated with the FBI on some important investigations involving national security.  I invented or helped to invent products used by everyone everywhere—including the first tear-spout coffee lids and tamper-resistant caps for juice cartons (for which I received $1,000 and a patent).

I also helped design and tool the first generation of run-flat wheels used on Hummer combat vehicles. I kind of got trapped on that one. I vowed I would never apply my talents to warfare but I did—I was a single parent raising a family of kids at the time. For their sake I couldn’t quit. 

As the highest paid union worker at the factory, my career would be toast if I wasn’t on board.  I used state-of the-art design software to solve many production problems. Everything that anyone designed went through me for corrections and approvals.

Company executives invited the press and directed me to appear on a television news show to demonstrate an important production technique that made the wheels possible. The execs were soon in deep trouble with the FBI over what turned out to be a national security screw-up; the program was, after all, classified.

The damage was done, but the FBI didn’t interview me. The FBI didn’t want certain people to know, because I happened to be working with them on another more important investigation that they wanted to keep secret.

I was able to retire at age 60, which to my way of thinking wasn’t soon enough. In all the years I worked, I never spent more than five-and-a-half years at any one company.

I get called frequently with job offers, but I turn them down.  A few years ago a company I worked for early in my career called to offer a lucrative three-month assignment, which I accepted.

Once rehired they kept extending my quit date. I put my foot down and gave them a date certain. The company put a person near my office to facilitate my every move to make sure they got the last ounce of production from me before I returned to retired life.

On the last day, they honored me with a luncheon party.

I bought a lot of things with the money they paid me including a stair-climber for my wife, a new car, a garage rebuild, a new concrete driveway and sidewalks front and back, and landscaping. What my wife and I didn’t spend went in the bank. It is amazing what five months of work can buy, I thought when everything was finished.

I was glad I went back to work but decided I would never do it again. The time to pontificate would never be more right.

What is the lesson from all this self-disclosure?

As my hero Doug Flutie once said, “Each person makes their own way in this world.”  Who disagrees?

Anyone who can think understands that no life can be explained within an encyclopedia, nor a book—even a long one. People who think know that accomplished people are complex, but so are the less accomplished.

Even a simple dog or cat—a pet—has a complicated life, which becomes apparent to anyone who takes the time to write it all down. Try it, any skeptic who doubts the truth about the complexity of living beings.

Even after decades of blunders, any bloke who is able to hide beneath their thick skull an undamaged and flexible brain should be able—if they reflect on their experiences and are lucky, as I was—to make sense enough sometimes to pass on to others what they’ve learned, both good and bad.

My process is called PONTIFICATION. 

It’s what I do.  

The people I most want to rescue are the ones I love. True to those who pursue authentic lives passionately lived, these are the kind of folks who generally resist pontificators.

Oh, well.

My life unfolded for whatever reasons the way it did, and I’m OK with it.

What choices did I have? 

I ask those I’ve hurt to forgive me.

No one wants to die evil. With the help of Jesus, people can be forgiven, can’t they? Who believes it?

Despite all evidence to the contrary—may God help me—I always have.

In another life someone said, YOU’RE FIRED!  over and over. It gave me nightmares.

PTSD.

Hell, it was me who said it, sometimes.

…forgive them. They are clueless…  is what Christ said before they killed him. He held no grudges. He defended those who hurt him most. 

Billy Lee

NOTE FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD: 

Billy Lee’s account, You’re Fired! contains omissions of events, some of which are included in other essays on this site. A few details are arranged in non-sequential order.

The full story about Billy Lee’s separation from the army is known only to the author and the army; Billy Lee simplified the narrative. (No harm to truth intended or done.)

We advise readers to refer to other essays on this website to fill in gaps and resolve contradictions.

WE THE EDITORS changed some of the names to protect anonymity.

Random Reads:

FASTER THAN LIGHT COMMUNICATION

Communicating with distant spacecraft is cumbersome because the distances are huge; no one can send signals faster than light. ...>>

LAMBERT W FUNCTION

The math behind the Lambert function is mind-bogglingly complicated to most people. …>>

OCEAN WAR

In the 7 months since the inauguration of President Trump our Navy has suffered 4 accidents killing 17 sailors and injuring scores more. ... >>

CHOSEN

People chosen by Jesus don't rule; they give up everything they have to serve and love others. It's simple, really. ... >>

ONE STATE SOLUTION

It's not safe to challenge certain people. Bad people have no limits. It's one reason people fear them. They kill whoever is in the way and take whatever they want. What they seem to want most is to unleash hell. ...>>

GENERAL & SPECIAL RELATIVITY

Since Einstein said that E=mc2 , why does a massless photon have energy? >>

RELATED READS

Posted on

EMERGENCY

Talking heads on MSNBC are calling the latest political developments involving the president a national emergency.

What’s going on?

The president nominated and the GOP is about to confirm a young conservative judge to sit on the Supreme Court who will make abortion illegal in all fifty states.

Everyone knows it’s coming.

The man’s name is Brett Kavanaugh. He seems to be a partisan hack — an ideologue who lacks common sense — but he’s smart and highly educated in conservative jurisprudence. Everybody says so, right?

He worked hard for Kenneth Starr to impeach President Clinton for lying to Congress about what at the time seemed to be a consensual extra-marital affair. Does anyone remember?

Ok, so what?

Well, the president who nominated him is a nut-job himself who can’t tell the truth, because he doesn’t know right from wrong; he has a mental disorder that renders him delusional, paranoid, and vindictive.

It’s in all the latest books, right?  Trump’s First Year,  Fire and Fury,  Unhinged,  Fear,  The Truth About Trump,  etc. etc. — a bunch of best sellers published during the Donald’s first 595 days as president.

Trump sold folks a fiction that Barry Obama somehow misplaced his birth certificate — if found, it would prove he was a Kenyan usurper.  As a candidate for president, Donny said that he had hired investigators to find the missing piece of paper. To this day, the president suspects that the document found was a forgery.

But he’s moved on, he says. Why don’t we?

Ok. So what?

[Note from the Editorial Board: On 6 October 2018, Donald Trump signed-off on the Senate’s confirmation of Kavanaugh to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States of America.]

Trump introduced and elevated to super-stardom a very young man, Kim Jong-Un of North Korea. He enabled the kid to keep his atomic toys and to more effectively work to reunite his country with the south. The process of reunification is going on behind the scenes as I write.

Ok. So what?

A former CIA chief called the Korean summit, treasonous. The CIA chief no longer appears on TV. The president stripped his security clearance. He slapped him, somehow, off the public radar.

Ok. So what?

Some in the president’s inner circle have been indicted and pled guilty to more charges than anyone can name or count. The president replaces the unfaithful; turnover churns; life goes on.

Ok. So what?

A rotten, no-good coward — OK, someday they might make him/her a hero like they did John McCain — wrote an anonymous letter to the New York Times. The Times turned it into an “editorial”.  The mole (or lion) works with a cabal of fellow travelers (or saviors of the Republic) inside the White House to unravel the president and disable his agenda.

Who wants to bet it was his Chief of Staff, John Kelly?  Not me.

Ok. So what?

Christians meet daily to pray with the president to give him victory over his enemies, presumably. If the president falls, the vice-president Mike Pence will hold him up; he’ll carry-on the fight.

Ok. So what?

Tweeters, like myself, are being overrun by hoards of follower-bots.  They aren’t real.

I look at who they follow  — to make sure they are fake — then block them. (They seem to follow each other and a few other souls who actually are real — like me.)  If I didn’t block, I’d have thousands of fake followers.

Note from the Editorial Board:  No, the @BillyLeePontif on Twitter is not a hybrid form of artificial intelligence;  Billy Lee is not an “AI BOT”, nor was he created by us. He was never sort-of-fake nor will he ever be. The Editors

“They” plan to make me and others like me unwilling and unsuspecting nodes in a huge network, which will light-up like a wildfire of California Christmas trees before the midterms to sway public voting through intimidation, threats, false tweets, and fake activity orchestrated by who? — public relations firms?  — foreign governments?  — trumpletonian hate groups? — Christian evangelists?  — or all four groups working together (with Israel, of course) to finally conquer the world and secure the Holy Land for the Jewish refugees who still live there? 

Is there anyone in Hell who knows what is going on and wants to tell someone?

Does anyone care?

Ok. So what?

I can’t be rambling. I don’t want to sound like a badly coded bot . I’ll lose my audience, correct?

Let’s get to it.

What is this emergency I am writing about, anyway?

It’s abortion. Only white supremacists, sycophants. and clowns in the president’s follower-base will stay behind to give him the time of day if he turns his heels to support a woman’s right to end her pregnancy.  It’s that simple.

Can anyone make an argument for the president should he change his mind as he sometimes does to support the right of women to secure abortions?  — because legal, free, and safe abortion was his position for years. Does anyone remember?

Does his head of yellow straw lose its luster if he betrays his pledge to capture and kill pregnancy-options in the USA?

Who knows?

Ok. Probably not.

Time to move on.

My hunch is that most people reading this essay do not remember living in the United States when abortion was against the law. They are too young.

I remember.

I remember the first time the word “abortion” appeared in a nationally syndicated magazine. I was in seventh grade. The word, which snuck its way into an issue of LIFE Magazine, created a sensation. Flood gates opened. Every news-outlet covered the story. For months, it was the only subject sophisticated people talked about.

I didn’t learn what the word meant until I was older and found an unabridged dictionary that defined it. After reading the definition, I still didn’t understand the word. In the United States of the 1950s and 1960s, many subjects remained off-limits and off-airways. When it came to sex and abortion, they were mysteries to children, certainly, but also to adults.

After the cultural revolution of the 1960s (which changed everything), it seems impossible for young people to believe that their country could be as naive as the USA once was. Young folks can’t imagine that the United States was a nation of mostly sheep who believed everything they read in books and magazines and everything they heard on the radio and watched on television.

It was a country with a vigorous right-wing press, but progressive views were scrupulously suppressed. No one explained what communism or socialism was, except to say that they were bad systems which existed in countries that wanted to destroy us. It was a time when citizens took everything their leaders said as absolute truth.

Believe it.

In 1968,  I was a college sophomore who owned a convertible and a lot of spending money. At a party one night in early spring a beautiful girl I had met a few times came onto me. She boldly asked if I wanted to go upstairs and have sex with her.

I thought, I can’t make it with this beautiful girl unless I’m clean. I have to go back to the dorm and take a shower first. I told her, and she agreed to wait. After returning we went upstairs and made love.

I was slightly drunk and kind of scared — it seemed unnatural to be pursued by a pretty girl who had never shown interest in me before — but I went ahead and then it was over.  I drove home and forgot about it.

The next weekend Alexa (not her real name, of course) called on the phone to tell me she was pregnant. I thought, wow! — now I can marry a beautiful woman. That’s a good outcome!

I asked her not to be afraid. I would take care of everything. Of course I would marry her and we would raise the child together. She could finish her education; I’d pay for it, and then I’d finish school after — while she took her turn caring for our child.

Suddenly she started crying. ”Oh Billy Lee” she sobbed. ”You are so honest and so kind. I can’t lie to you — I just can’t.” 

”What are you talking about, Alexa?”

”The guy who made me pregnant is the drummer in the band at the club where I work. He hates me now and won’t speak to me.” 

”You work at a club? What club?”

Well, enough voyeurism. The short version is she worked at a strip club where she was a go-go dancer employed by the band.

Ok. So what?

Well, the reason I’m writing this essay is to give people a picture of what getting an abortion was like fifty years ago when terminating a pregnancy was a crime in every state. It’s not clear that abortions will work in exactly the same way next year when the country circles back to once again make abortions illegal.

Drugs are available today that weren’t before. For less than twenty dollars a pregnant girl can purchase pills on the internet that will end her pregnancy. She can use bit-coin or other underground currencies to completely hide the transaction forever behind the most sophisticated encryption that organized-crime can devise.

She can ask her boyfriend to watch certain videos on the dark web. Voila!  After an hour of viewing and the purchase of a few implements, he’s an abortion doctor.

When he’s ready, the termination of his girlfriend’s pregnancy will start its eternal journey down that rutted road to distant and forgotten memories.

In the 1960s, it was more difficult. Alexa set up a meeting with three doctors in an old house somewhere. She asked, and I tagged along. They signed some forms, which claimed that her life would be in danger if she carried her pregnancy to term.  I drove Alexa to Maryland where we spent a week at the house of one of my dad’s friends who was in Europe at the time.

Alexa made an appointment at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, which was known to be a safe place where the doctors performed the procedure for women whose lives were in danger. Yes, it was expensive.

Her friends chipped in $600 — about $3,000 in today’s money. Though the hospital accepted her as a patient, the problem was that they wanted Alexa to return in three months. The abortion scheduling was crowded — booked solid.  Alexa would be six months pregnant before it became her turn on the schedule.

Alexa and I decided to spend the week we had set aside for the hospital visit to go out each night to party in the Georgetown clubs in Washington DC — we ended up dancing and drinking away every dime of the money we had collected from her friends. Nightly, we returned to our borrowed house to make love with no worries about pregnancy.

It was liberating to love a beautiful woman unafraid of consequences.

I learned later that some in the neighborhood noticed the young couple coming and going at late hours from the house of their friend; they complained, but nothing came of it.

At week’s end we returned to our university where Alexa went to work on her friends to gather the money she needed for the final appointment. The school year would be over by then. Summer break was on its way.  When she left on her second trip to DC three months later, she took the bus.

She knew what to do. She no longer needed me. The dress rehearsal was over. It wasn’t necessary for anyone to accompany her, she said.

I guess I don’t blame her.

As it happened, I became one of eighteen young men at the university who the government accepted into the army-officer training program that year. Over five-thousand applied in a futile effort to stay in school after the government ended draft deferments for college students — to better supply warm bodies to the killing fields in southeast Asia.

The army scheduled my training to start that summer in Georgia at Fort Benning.  I couldn’t have been with Alexa, even if she wanted me, which she didn’t. In training, recruits were isolated in those days. Even a telephone call was impossible.

It turned out that it would be three-and-a-half years before I saw Alexa again. We ran into each other outside a steak house. She invited me to go inside and have something to eat.

She told me she owned a successful dance studio in Detroit. She looked amazing. She really did. She was happy. A good life lay ahead of her that would be full of all the good things that money from her business would buy.

I was dirty and unkempt. Again, I needed a shower, except worse. My clothes were rags, really.  I explained that my military training didn’t end well.  I became an anti-war protestor who spent maybe way too much time in the streets and the city parks. Someone put my car on blocks one night and stripped it of its MAG wheels and everything else of value.

I had no car.

I helped my friends organize demonstrations; I wrote unpaid copy for an anti-war newspaper.  After resigning a pending officer’s commission (with the full support and encouragement of the Army) I dropped out of the university to fight the good fight against the Vietnam war and racism. I bussed tables a few hours a week in the same restaurant I once managed. Financially, I wasn’t doing well.

Alexa interrupted; she touched me on the arm and leaned-in to thank me for helping her that one time years ago when she needed a friend she could trust.

I felt unworthy. I felt shame. She was too good for me. This time in her expensive clothes and me in my filthy jeans, it was obvious to us both.

She paid for my meal and said good-by for the last time.

My wonderful life would come later.

Billy Lee

Random Reads:

ILLUSIONS

ISIS was formed by Saddam's family and loyal remnants of his army who are trying to take back what they lost during the Bush presidency. ...>>

BOTSAI GARCHY 6

It's OK to surrender to a higher power in some worlds -- but who bows before a super intelligence that is not only artificial, it's not even conscious? >>

CHOSEN

People chosen by Jesus don't rule; they give up everything they have to serve and love others. It's simple, really. ... >>

SCALE

The visible universe is big. Most scientists believe the invisible universe -- the universe no one can see -- is really big. ...>>

NIGHTMARE

War resisters lost every fight; every argument; every skirmish; every battle. People still ridicule the baby boomers who said no to war. ...>>

OCEAN WAR

In the 7 months since the inauguration of President Trump our Navy has suffered 4 accidents killing 17 sailors and injuring scores more. ... >>

RELATED READS

Posted on

BALANCE

I grew up in a Navy family. Maybe it makes me a “Navy brat” to some.  I really don’t care. Military families pay a high price. They move frequently, for one thing. 

Dad was a naval aviator who, among other assignments, commanded in succession two squadrons of anti-submarine jet-helicopters — one squadron in Rhode Island, one in Key West. People who know me or who have read certain essays on this blog are aware.

Dad fought within and alongside the National Security Agency to defend our country. The United States created the NSA after World War II to monitor international shipping. The global fleet of tankers and cargo boats has grown to nearly 52,000. The USA is fortunate to possess high-tech sensors that can see nuclear bombs aboard ships. It’s one of many capabilities that keeps our country safe.

The NSA has been led by a succession of Navy Admirals, and Army and Air Force Generals. Today, the NSA is led by an Army General of Japanese descent. While others were interned, his dad worked for US intelligence during the last world war, it seems, so the president trusts him. He trusts him enough that in May 2018, he assigned him to lead the National Security Agency, the Central Security Service and the U.S. Cyber Command.

Now might be a good time to inform readers that I don’t now nor have I ever had a security clearance. I am a civilian pontificator who resigned (with a little help from an Army Lieutenant Colonel) a pending infantry officer’s commission decades ago, because I believed the Vietnam War was an atrocity. I had no appetite for the killing I would be ordered to perform to successfully engage in a war that for me at least made no sense.

What I have now is the experience of living with and around military and civilian intelligence officers during the first twenty-two years of my life. I lived near and was friends with the daughter of the man who discovered the missiles on Cuba that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. My dad became a significant player in that crisis. So I’m providing a unique perspective that other civilians might not have.

I suggested in a recent essay (47 TONS) that Japan is well on its way to becoming a threat to human survival should their chain of 6,852 remote islands fall into the hands of a cabal of wrong-headed leaders. The Japanese have accumulated 47 tons of bomb-grade plutonium from their fast-reactor programs. They are producing an additional eight tons per year.

A softball sized clump of about fourteen pounds is more than enough to make one unsophisticated atomic bomb. A state-of-the-art bomb can be made from a baseball sized clump weighing nine pounds.

Do the math.

The Japanese have other capabilities that should terrify anyone who might make the mistake to oppose them. They have a complex of labs they call RIKEN that span the islands. A deputy director hung himself at work a few years ago. The signs that something might be wrong at these labs are in plain view for anyone who bothers to look.

They have sophisticated missile and space programs called JAXA.  

To their credit, NHK television has complained to the American public about the challenges Japan suffers from possessing and producing too much plutonium. Right now the USA seems to be preoccupied with Russia, Korea, and China. Russia says they have stealthy, multi-warhead nuclear missiles that can hurtle through the atmosphere at almost three miles per second.

Moscow is about 5,000 miles from Washington DC, or 2,000 seconds away — 33 minutes. Thirty-three minutes seems like a long time, but some are forgetting about the 300,000 Russians who live in Cuba, most assigned to the submarine and air bases Russia built and maintains there.

Cuba is 1,100 miles from Washington DC, which is a seven minute trip should Russia position their missiles inside Cuba’s jungled mountains. Again, seven minutes seems like a lot of time. The problem is, the missiles are stealthy; we can’t see them; even if we could, the United States has nothing that can shoot them down. They fly too fast.

News reports are currently downplaying the importance and extent of Russian progress in missile technology. The expression on Trump’s face after he came out of his two hour meeting with Vladimir Putin spoke volumes. Our sophisticated media can’t conceal for long that our country is in a deep hole. The situation for our side isn’t good.

Hillary Clinton mentioned another threat from Russia during the 2016 presidential debates. Her revelation was a national security screw-up of ginormous proportions, which the press let slide.

Everyone remembers Clinton calling DT,  Putin’s Puppet. No one seems to remember her warning that unmanned Russian drones were sitting in the sands off our coasts.

US intelligence believes these drone submarines carry poisons — possibly plutonium, which will be released during a conflict.

I was living in Key West during the Cuban missile-crisis. My dad chased a nuclear-armed sub out of waters near Cuba. He almost started a war, but he spoke Russian and was able to make himself understood —  the USA meant business.

He thought, as did everyone at the time, that we had caught Russia in the middle of its first installation of nuclear missiles on the island. The missiles weren’t yet armed; they posed no immediate threat.

Years later the Russians revealed that the missiles seen in the CIA photo-shoot were second generation. The first generation stood already buried — locked and loaded. Had an incident ignited an exchange of fire, Florida and Cuba would be distant memories to this day.

The incident involving my dad is retold, with a few perhaps intentional mistakes to protect national security, by Oliver Stone in his remarkable book, The Untold History of the United States. Oliver Stone was a warrior — a veteran of the Vietnam war. He has credentials that go beyond his opus of award-winning films, screen-plays, and books.

I’m not going to name names, but USA companies have milked the defense department for decades. They’ve dragged their feet to keep projects funded and on-going — why don’t we all figure this out together? — to maximize profits and bonuses for executives who in turn give money to senators and congress-folks who …  well … only dummies are unable to figure it out, right?

Corruption is called corruption because it corrodes; what corrodes destroys. That’s the pickle-barrel the USA is in, and it could be the reason DT is kissing the behinds of the folks who developed high-speed, stealth missile technology, first.

Donald Trump might be trying to buy time for our side. In the meantime our leaders are playing parts in a charade of good cops / bad cops to de-escalate an existential threat to our country until balance can be restored.

To write it so a child can understand: the balance of power has shifted away from the United States. Our enemies are saying that the USA no longer holds the advantages we once enjoyed. If we mess-up, and even if we don’t, we could wake up one morning — those of us who survive — to see our country reduced to a smoking ruin of radioactive waste.

OK. That’s one view of what’s going on. It’s my personal view — at least today. No one else has said it, so that’s why I published. It’s something to consider. Maybe tomorrow, more information will come out. I’ll change my mind. Who knows?

There are other explanations for why DT  behaved in Singapore and Helsinki like a traitor according to one of our recent CIA chiefs, John O. Brennan.  By the way, I’m 70 years old — two years younger than DT.  I’ve never heard a CIA director call any president a traitor.

EDITORS NOTE: On August 15, 2018 the president announced that he had stripped Brennan of his security clearance on July 26. Like FBI Director Comey before him, Brennan learned his bad news from television reports. The man who served six presidents and gathered the intelligence to conduct the raid that took down Osama Bin Laden wasn’t offered the courtesy of an e-mail or phone call. Instead, DT called him ”erratic”and slandered him by insisting that he couldn’t be trusted with the nation’s secrets.  

Meanwhile, former senior advisor Omarosa Manigault called Donald Trump ”unhinged” and a ”racist.” Omarosa is married to Pastor John Allen Newman of Jacksonville, Florida and is herself a Baptist minister who served as a chaplain in the California State Military Reserve before joining the Trump Administration. 

I’m not sure, but I think I once witnessed a cartel of intelligence officers assassinate one of our presidents. They sat on the Warren Commission, if anyone is curious about who they were.

One of the members was a fired CIA chief with a grudge. I was a teenager then. What did I know? — only what the commission spoon-fed me and every other American. Enough said.

We’ll never know the truth about the Kennedy assassination. Most people in the intelligence community disliked him, but so did a lot of other people including Cubans, Russians, and organized crime. All the people who know the truth or think they do are now dead or dying.

So, to get back to other explanations:  Some think DT was groomed over decades by Russian oligarchs allied with Russia and Israel. To keep him in line they provided him with a wife who was born when he was a 24-year-old skirt-chaser. He had to wait, but the wait was worth it, for him at least.

She was the daughter of a member of the communist party from a region of Yugoslavia that would later be renamed, Slovenia. She was a model unafraid to pose nude. Who doesn’t know the story?

She Germanized her name to be more in line with DT, who came from a powerful family headed by a German billionaire. His dad was once reported by some in media to be the wealthiest American — at least for a few years. He’s notorious for building segregated housing in Queens with government money during the second world war. Enough said.

Is DT’s wife a Russian sleeper agent?  Of course not.  The thought alone is preposterous, right?

Another theory some have put forward to explain DT is that he is a racist and delusional old man in the beginning stages of bona-fide dementia; perhaps Alzheimer’s disease.  It’s a little early for dementia, but I knew a woman who was diagnosed in her thirties. It took two years for Alzheimer’s to claim her.

DT’s White House physician said no; the president will live to be 200 years old if he adjusts his eating habits a little. He’s as sharp as they come — a stable genius.

DT attended a private military academy during high school.  There were two reasons young men went to military academies in those days; I remember well. One was because they were either in trouble with the law or unmanageable at home. A private academy kept them out of the house and helped maintain a peaceful lifestyle for the parents. The other reason was to avoid going to integrated schools where blacks were beginning to be introduced into mainstream civilian life. 

A college suite-mate of mine bragged that he avoided school with Negroes by attending a private military academy. He also thought Martin Luther King was a communist. I’m sure readers know the type. He graduated in criminal justice and went on to become the head of a police department in a northern state.

We’ve all met people like him, whether we know it or don’t — tall, good-looking, and bad to the bone. The war-resisters, the fighters for racial justice, the men and women of conscience who cared about right and wrong were systematically identified by conservative corporate leaders and kept away from both power and the best jobs at Fortune 500 companies.

A major company in Milwaukee hired me after I graduated. They investigated and learned that I had resigned my officer’s commission to protest the Vietnam War. The background investigation took four weeks. When it was complete, their top investigator fired me.

It was my first job in industry. I learned quick to omit any mention about my anti-war past and to avoid companies that employed investigators. It seemed obvious to me that I would be unable to make a good living otherwise.

The hammer that hit me hits everyone who resists the bad people. It’s the price the poor sometimes pay for standing against the wealthy and speaking truth to power. It’s capitalism’s unseen collateral damage.

I fear for the young people starting their careers today. A trail of internet evidence exposes every free thinking American to the prejudices of the corporate elites who want docile employees who shut up and do what they’re told, no questions asked.

My regret is that, looking back, it seems like I might have had a lot to give, but nobody wanted it; no one felt they needed it.  If the truth is told, everyone is expendable and replaceable, right? How many times have the powerful said so to the powerless? 

The lives that matter are the lives of the billionaires who rule over us all and call it freedom. I learned that white supremacists (racists) in America can achieve the highest levels of success and be admired by almost everyone who knows them.

It’s true.

But back to the intelligence assessments: Today a Russian woman was arrested who is accused of having established a channel of communication with the GOP through the NRA (National Rifle Association). The Russians planned to launder money through the NRA, according to the allegation.

The Russian agent, Mariia Butina, is now being held without bond, because she is a flight risk. She was having an “affair” with  “U.S. Person 1” to gain access “to an extensive network of U.S. persons in positions to influence political activities in the United States” according to her indictment.

Why?

Well, it gets worse in the indictment, but I don’t want my essay to go off into the weeds. People will hear all about it soon enough. Take my word. It’s bad. Who knows what else the Russians planned to better enable them to manipulate hundreds-of-thousands of paranoid, Hillary-hating-Rambos who practice their shooting skills every week at firing ranges across America?

Use imagination for a moment.  Imagine that instead of Trump, it was Clinton who won the election. The “deplorables” were ready for revolution, weren’t they?  Remember how they attacked vote-counting centers after Al Gore carried Florida in the year 2000?

The GOP intimidated the Supreme Court to halt a constitutionally mandated recount of state voting that was beginning to turn against them. The Constitution of the United States makes voting the exclusive province of state governments, does it not? Look it up. The Supreme Court had no constitutional standing. It’s why the majority opinion took care to restrict its ruling; it was not to be used as precedent for any future rulings from any bench in America, ever.  Right?

Who knows better how to incite and fund revolutions than the KGB agents who took down the Russian state and now own and run it as a personal fiefdom?

Lock her up! Lock her up! GOP delegates screamed as they voted to make Donald Trump their standard bearer in 2016.

The citizens of the United States would have been in a second civil war right now, because the DT confederates were planning to insist that Hillary stole a rigged election, right?  Does anyone remember? DT was preparing to lead a revolution against America with Russian help. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

Maybe Russia planned only to destabilize America. Like the Japanese at Pearl Harbor they didn’t plan for a lopsided victory. The Japanese had no plan to occupy Hawaii. They ran like frightened sharks and hoped we wouldn’t catch them. It took four years, but eventually we came, we saw their lovely islands, and we conquered.

Veni, vidi, vici.

Japan will remain in our vise-grip until the end of time. That was the plan, anyway, when their leaders signed the terms of unconditional surrender in 1945.

Some say that DT harbors a secret desire to become a dictator. He admires strong men and wants to be one. He owned a professional wrestling league and a football team for a reason, maybe.

It’s counter-intuitive, but we might have lost our country to destabilization and revolution had Hillary won the Electoral College.  We have now a chance to save ourselves. We have to take that chance.

( Editors’ Note: Hillary garnered 65,853,516 popular votes to Trump’s 62,984,825.  ”Third party” candidates took  close to 8 million.  Ms. Clinton’s margin over Trump in the popular vote was 2,868,691. Hillary won the most votes of any candidate; Trump lost the popular contest by almost eleven million votes. He received 46% of the popular vote. Hillary and the third party candidates received 54% — a margin of 8%. )

People who played ball with the Russians (like the NRA) to take down the “deep state” might want to consider that they risk being arrested someday for treason, because they aided and abetted our enemies who attacked and continue to attack our elections, a foundation stone of American liberty.

The deplorables sometimes behave like fascist bullies, don’t they? They have pretty much proved who they are over the past two years, haven’t they? Read their twitter feeds, anyone who doesn’t believe it.

They claim to be Christians who love military assault rifles. How’s that for crazy? No one who survives being shot by an AR-15 ever fully recovers.

According to polls, deplorables seem to be about forty-percent of the voting population. It’s disgraceful what they post on social media. They’ve brought the USA into a bad place.

To any Trumpletonians who might be reading this essay, here are some things to learn and remember. There is no “deep state.” White supremacy is a lie. Muslims, Negros, Mexicans, gay men and women, and progressives are people who are owed respect, because they are made in the image of God, if for no other reason. They mean you no harm.

Walls make the best prisons.

Be kind to strangers, even on Twitter. You might be tweeting to angels, unawares.

DT will not be president forever.

It’s true.

Billy Lee

Random Reads:

RISK

Everyone wants to live as long as possible, right? Well, maybe not everyone. Far more people kill themselves than are killed by others. ...>>

WRITING FREE

I wrote my first big story in fourth grade. I called it, Adventures on the Amazon.  It's now lost to history, but I remember organizing it into chapters. Chapters were a big deal. ...

FLYING BLIND

Everyone flies blind except the pilot. He's trained. He knows what to do. With any luck at all, the pilot will land the plane -- safely. ...>>

47 TONS

Japan has harvested 47 tons (94,000 pounds) of high-grade plutonium from its nearly one-hundred or so nuclear power and processing plants, ...>>

ON THE VERY SMALL

No one can know by looking that solid objects are made of tiny molecules separated from each other by tiny gaps. Molecules are too small. ...>>

BOTSAI GARCHY 6

It's OK to surrender to a higher power in some worlds -- but who bows before a super intelligence that is not only artificial, it's not even conscious? >>

RELATED READS