perfidy, or, late-stage america

It's time for yet another essay by yours truly. I apologize in advance for the total lack of direction on this site, but so many things have happened that it would take a therapist and a lot of alcohol to even achieve any modicum of reflection in that area. For now I will confine myself to the problems of the day, and, at least, on this page, problems that are quite literally centered around sociopolitical scenes.

For the last two months and change, and counting, at least past the publication date of this article, the selected leader of the Occupied Territories and his lackeys, who include a bunch of teenagers under the axis of a certain paper-wealthy individual, have decided to tear out the walls and the cables that the System had in place for millions of people. The System itself, to be blunt, is not very kind - it is oppressive, unimaginably drab, and based around exploitation. However, within it are programs and things that everyone from researchers to teachers and the retired - use on a daily basis. Weather reports, farm subsidies, infrastructure investment, foreign aid - have a mollifying and ultimately necessary use-case, because if we can't predict the weather, we can't effectively grow crops. If infrastructure isn't funded, it will fall apart. Nobody will repair it until there's investment, manpower, direction and vision. Foreign aid assures that, while the Occupied Territories were not super popular, their aid could at least be relied on in the more impoverished corners of the world. |

A lot of people have flagrantly suggested that privatizing anything, and everything, is somehow the way to go. Denigrating the OT's method of welfare payments and disability checks, hoping that some charity will take over - is the wrong method. Charity is, by and large, a tacit admission of the failure of government to do what is socially and ethically approved. Charities, for the most part, are inefficient, or at worst, self-aggrandizing paid spokespeople who draw a sinecure. Capitalism does indeed produce its own grave-diggers, and that is a fact. But the Occupied Territories are absolutely staffed with the worst types of people one could ever hope to come across: Most of them are billionaires who were selected to either dismantle, whittle down, or make a political mouthpiece out of their selections. No sane individual, if there are any left, would have deigned to choose billionaires, cronies, friends of the president to staff virtually all facets of government.

That is, unless you're the Heritage Foundation. America failed an open-book test somehow, and for all the publicity Project 2025 garnered, it should have failed, miserably. The Heritage Foundation, and some of its writers, are part of the staff of the government of the Occupied Territories. They wrote it. They believe in what they've written. And they're enacting it, bit by bit. At the time of this writing, there's a supposed bipartisan bill to rework, or delete, Section 230. One says it's to protect the children, the other says "our conservative viewpoints are unpopular". George Carlin said: There's three things conservatives will hide behind: The flag, the Bible, and children. The first mission of these conservatives is to make women second-class again, by weaponizing civil rights gains against people who erroneously feel that they've been marginalized by the government for being white. The selected President passed numerous executive orders banning trans people from serving in the military, calling them essentially unworthy liars and traitors. Another executive order that legislated an idea, based on culture-war fanatics screeching like disaffected liberals, that there were only two sexes. The selected President then decided to form a task force centered around "Christian oppression", all while ordering that the federal government, the military, and its organs, root out "DEI policies".

Some organizations have, unfortunately, complied in advance with the wishes of the selected President and his toadies. Hospitals, threatened with an EO that would pull their funding for gender-affirming care, stopped for a time, until courts issued an injunction. Some have returned to established practice. The selected President's war path has been nothing but disastrous. He has:
1) Called to annex Canada and Greenland
2) He has made deals with the right-wing authoritarian Bukele to sell migrants illegally to El Salvador without any due process for the purposes of slave labor
3) He's made pathetic overtures to Russia, and Putin in particular, while shutting down the Voice of America, and letting Putin do whatever he wishes
4) He's made a pathetic attempt to end the Department of Education, by enlisting Linda McMahon
5) Suggested that vandalism of Tesla vehicles is 'terrorism', to be punished by being sent to El Salvador, in contravention of the Constitution