The Devil has the best tunes.

It’s reported that William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, and his followers deliberately set gospel songs to popular tunes of the day to reach working-class audiences.

But this is not about the Salvation army, although it is about the salvation of reason, purpose, and self-esteem on Planet Earth. Specifically, it’s about how the Wrong Wing Extremists are constantly letting us know through their powerful mass media and their connections with NGO’s, the UN, the EU, and other powerful ruling class institutions, that the Devil has a new name. It’s no longer Satan, Beelzebub, or Baphomet. It’s now the (play spooky music here…) the Right Wing.

Often it’s the extremists of the Right Wing, or Hard Right makers of public statements, or those political parties in what used to be called the “Free World” who represent popular sentiment. That’s right. the Right-Wing political parties, such as Marine LePen’s Rassemblement National (RN), known in English as the National Rally; or Germany’s AfD.

We are living in an era exactly the opposite of that in which William Booth established the Salvation Army, when the Devil had all the best tunes. Now the Devil (The Right, the Right Wing, the Hard-Right Extremists of the right-wing political parties) doesn’t have all the best tunes, or in modern social media terms, the best messaging. In spite of earnest attempts to change things, the Right-Wing has either the worst messaging, or no messaging at all.

That has got to change, or we are doomed.

First of all, we have to understand what it means to be “Right-Wing.”

Fortunately, the English language has given us an easy way to explain it: “right” in English is the opposite of “wrong.”

The best definition of the political Right that I can come up with is the opposite of the political Hard-Wrong.

But hey, doesn’t that make Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Juan Perón, and Nick Fuentes good guys? After all they were (or are) “right-wing?”

Well, yes, but no. They got the name right-wing because of a technicality of French history, specifically something called the French National Assembly of 1789, where the defenders of the old tyranny sat on the right side of the hall, and the critics of the old tyranny sat on the left. Ever since, “Left” took on the meaning of the good guys, and “Right” meant the bad guys.

But let’s face it folks, the French Revolution is over, at least for the most part, given the exceptions: 1) the “Left is the good guys” ghost is still haunting Planet Earth; and 2) the fact that the tyrants are still around.

The Wrong Wing, the con artists formerly know as the Left Wing, are now the diabolical force which does have the best tunes, that is, the best messaging.

Why is that?

The simple answer to the “why” question is that the Right is now very confused. The Right has an identity crisis.

“Who are we?” is what the Right is asking themselves.

Even if those on the Right have decided firmly that they don’t represent Franco, or Mussolini, or (perish forbid) Adolf Schicklgruber Hitler, whom do they represent?

The “Left” during the French Revolution were decidedly anti-Christian, so does today’s Right now define itself as Christian? If so, which Christians? The Catholics? Which Catholics? Which Pope? Which language for the Mass? The Byzantine Empire? The Russian Orthodox Church? The Coptic churches?

The Protestants? Which Protestants? The Mormons? The Pentacostals?

And what about Jesus? Which Jesus? The “turn the other cheek” guy or the one throwing over the tables in the Temple?

And what about Jews? Which Jews? The ones fighting Hamas and Hezbollah? The ones voting for Zohran Mamdani in New York?

But let’s make it clear, religion is not dead yet. Christianity is still around, as is Judaism, as is Hinduism, Buddhism, and… hmmm… hey, who else is there religion-wise?

So the new messaging of the Right can neither exclude religion, nor can it define itself by picking one religion above the others as its essence, although, by golly, they will try.

There are principles which go beyond religion. The Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome defined them as four virtues:

1. Reason

2. Courage

3. Justice

4. Temperance

That’s a good start, but it’s just that. A start.

Reason?

What is reasonable? Certainly not the idea that there is no such thing as the truth. As the French philosopher Lyotard declared, “there are no grand narratives,” but thanks to social media we are now up to our ears in grand narratives, with new ones coming out every day.

Courage?

They say that Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO.) Does that mean that Trump lacks courage? Seriously?

Justice?

You mean social justice? Or is that just a way to “justify” robbing Peter (that’s you and me) to pay Paul (that’s the Hard-Wrong Extremists.)

Temperance?

Yes, there was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which allegedly led to Prohibition, which allegedly led to bootlegging, which allegedly made certain bad guys great again.

But to me, temperance is just another version of the Goldilocks story. The porridge can be too cold, too hot, or just right.

A temperate Right Wing can, and must decide what to do with people who cut the throats of girls on the subway? Let them roam loose to kill again, because social justice, or draw and quarter them on the public square, because they maybe deserve it, or perhaps something which Goldilocks might consider just right?

Yes, you folks who, like me, are strongly opposed to the Wrong Wing Extremists, you must also, like me, start thinking about your messaging.

This Substack post is my first offering, but to quote Churchill, who said in the face of the Wrong Wing Extremists of his day, who gleefully called themselves “Right-Wing:”

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho! Western Civ has got to go!

Who remembers that? I did, but I forgot when and where, so I looked it up. It seemed to be a protest chant demanding the end of Western Civilization, and I looked it up because I had just published a Substack post in which I had asserted…

The high ground now is the universities and the mass media, still held by the enemies of, not only the USA, but the whole of Western Civilization.

I had put that idea out there, that the university and the mass media were enemies of Western Civilization, but was I talking through my hat, (you know the red one, with a slogan which says something about America becoming great again)?

So what did I find out about the Hey, Ho? Was a university really out to end Western Civilization?

Really?

What I did find out was that the year of the Hey, Ho was 1987; it was January, a Martin Luther King Day, and the political celebrity Jesse Jackson was there. The place was Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and the event was a so-called rally and march. It was the ralliers and marchers who were chanting the Hey, Ho, presumably not Jesse Jackson himself, and they, according to reports from the time, were really asserting the premise that “Western Civ” had to go.

But what did they mean by that? A website called “Inside Higher Education” purports to answer that question.

What the website tells us is that neither the poor maligned Jesse Jackson, nor the ralliers and marchers were demanding the end of Western Civilization itself, but merely the revision of a required course being taught at Stanford, a course whose title was Western Culture.

What was being taught in that course?

It seems Stanford introduced its year-long required freshman “Western Culture” course in 1980 that shared a core list of 15 works, mostly by European or Western male authors:

• Hebrew Bible (Genesis)

• Homer (Iliad or Odyssey selections)

• Greek tragedy

• Plato (Republic)

• New Testament selections

• Augustine

• Dante or Chaucer

• Machiavelli

• Luther or Descartes

• Shakespeare or Cervantes

• Hobbes or Locke

• Voltaire or Rousseau

• Marx/Engels

• Freud or Nietzsche

• Darwin or other moderns (exact list varied slightly by source but emphasized foundational Western texts).

So, what was wrong with that? Why did it have to go?

Well, in any case it actually did go the following year after the Hey, Ho rally and march. The word “Western” was removed from the title, which became “Cultures, Ideas, and Values.” Following a transitional year, a core list of thematic tracks was to be added, requiring:

• Works by women, minorities, and persons of color.

• Works addressing issues of race, gender, and class.

• Works of non-European provenance (from cultures in the Near East, Africa, the Americas, and Asia that influenced contemporary American culture).

• Emphasis on cultural diversity, interaction between cultures, and the influence of non-traditional groups on Western ideas.

But what about the original Hey, Ho rally and march? Was this really a frontal attack on Western culture? If not, what? Who led it? What were their demands?

Yes, Jesse Jackson was there, representing his Rainbow Coalition and something known as the Rainbow Agenda. This rainbow was not the Rainbow Flag of LGBTQ+ pride, and identity, but represented all the human colors, not just “white.”

The march was not led by professors, scholars or academics, but by an unusual woman named Amanda Kemp, a playwright and performer, creator of the touring show Show Me the Franklins: Remembering the Ancestors, Slavery & Benjamin Franklin, which was first performed in January 2009 in Washington, D.C., as part of Obama inauguration events.

Dr. Kemp, who earned a PhD from Northwestern University in Performance Studies, uses the name Aminata Desert Rose Plant Walker Fire Woman as her spiritual/ancestral name on her website, which appears to be a self-help community.

So, is there really evidence that, as I stated, the universities and the mass media are targeting Western Civilization? Was the Hey, Ho rally and march nothing more than spirited student hi-jinks led by a performing artist?

Well, it was definitely spirited, and involved student hi-jinks, and was indeed led by a performing artist, even if she is also credited as being an “activist.”

But there’s more to the story. A lot more. I’ll be adding the “lot more” in future Substack posts.

As an American old-timer who was born and who grew up in the mid-Twentieth Century, I’d heard a lot about Iwo Jima. It was an island, a famous battle of the Second World War, and a monumental reminder of heroism, and of an America that didn’t have to be made great again, because she was always great.

Here are the key points about Iwo Jima, the island, the battle, and the monument:

1. The island was essential to Imperial Japan’s defenses against US forces due to its location and Japanese air bases.

2. The capture of the island was necessary for the USA to win the war.

3. The Japanese defenses included fortifications, radar stations, but above all, a volcanic peak, Mt. Suribachi, the high ground which the USA had to capture if it had any chance of winning the war.

4. On February 23, 1945, the USA did in fact plant the US flag on the peak of Mt. Suribachi, and suffered 26,000-28700 casualties by the time the entire island was secured.

5. A photographer, Joe Rosenthal, took a photo of a second flag-raising, which became famous in the US press (which was pro-American back then) and was later the inspiration for a colossal bronze statue in Arlington National Cemetery, which was dedicated on November 10, 1954, the 179th anniversary of the Marine Corps.

That was then. Now, the enemy is not Japan, but the enemy still holds the high ground.

The high ground is not Mt. Suribachi, or in fact any actual geographic feature on Planet Earth.

The high ground now is the universities and the mass media, still held by the enemies of, not only the USA, but the whole of Western Civilization.

The US Marines alone, or even with the help of the rest of the Western military forces, cannot defeat that enemy.

Throughout the entire history of warfare, enemies have always sought out and exploited the weakness of those whom they would conquer. One way is to exploit local resentments.

A good example is the Muslim conquest of Egypt, which they had totally completed by the year 646 CE (AD.) At the time of the conquest Egypt was actually a Christian nation, but ruled by outsiders, the Byzantines.

Many Coptic Christians (the native majority) actually viewed the Arabs more favorably than Byzantine overlords due to religious tolerance policies. The Byzantines had split with the Copts over doctrine concerning the nature of Christ. The Muslims temporarily protected Coptic churches and did not impose the jizya tax (for Christians and Jews) until 641, by which time the conquest was a done deal.

This is how the enemies of Western Civilization can exploit local resentments and how they conquered the high ground of the universities and the mass media.

The two big issues dividing the USA during the mid-Twentieth Century were racial segregation and the Vietnam War.

The racial segregation issue was a relic of the Civil War, in which the South, losers of that war, were allowed to get away with outrageous exploitation of the former slaves and their descendants, then called “Negroes,” by Ku Klux Klan violence including lynchings, and a transparently outrageous “separate but equal” justification for inequality.

The Vietnam War was a relic of two things: the Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union and its proxies, and the failure of France to hold onto its colonies in Indochina. Like racial segregation, it was a catastrophic policy for the USA, and the haters of the USA took advantage of it.

On May 7, 1954, a Vietnamese military force, which was founded by Ho Chi Minh in 1941 to resist French occupation, defeated the French Army at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. Though initially only nominally communist, by 1950, the Soviet Union had become a major sponsor.

Caught in the middle of the racial segregation battle and the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who inherited the White House when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, did his best to balance both sides.

On the racial segregation front he pushed the “civil rights” movement. On the Vietnam front, he sent American draftees to fight there on behalf of a rather shady and unpopular series of “allies” who were considered anti-Communist,

How did this affect the universities? One thing I remember clearly at the time was that a college student could get exempted from the draft by pursuing a career in academia.

As the New York Times suggested,

In practice, a political science academic might secure a deferment by having their department affirm their role in essential education/research, especially if it supported government training or policy. This was part of the “manpower channeling” that treated certain civilian careers as equivalent to military service for national security purposes.

Journalism education fell under higher education teaching. A full-time journalism professor or instructor could argue their role was essential—training journalists, supporting media literacy, or contributing to public information/government relations. Universities often assisted with certification letters from deans or department heads, similar to other academic fields.

The universities and the mass media dominated by the enemies of Western Civilization now hold the high ground of the digital Mount Suribachi.

It’s time to plant some Western Civilization flags there again. But how?

That’s a subject for another time.

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
— Steve Jobs, 1997

Every year for decades I’d look forward to the keynote speech at Apple’s WWDC (world-wide developer’s conference) but this year’s version left me with a huge feeling of disappointment.

Why?

Okay. There’s the usual Woke bullshit. Let’s get that out of the way so we can move on to more important stuff.

As usual, Tim Cook was standing in front of that rainbow arch sculpture thing. Hubba hubba. Tim is said to be “gay” and the rainbow is all about being a homosexual, even if it wasn’t in Genesis 9:16, which says “The rainbow shall be in the cloud, and I will look on it to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.”

And, is it just my imagination (I don’t think so) that they are checking boxes by a steady parade of folks from various ends of the earth so as to make it crystal clear that Apple is not just about white guys from Alabama who happen to have enjoyed sex with their fellow man?

Okay. I got that Woke stuff out of my system. Now let’s move on. Let’s talk about changing the world.

Is Apple still changing the world?

When I was growing up, there was Westinghouse, General Electric, RCA, and other electric companies who made stuff before the Japanese, and then the Koreans and Chinese took over the electric appliance industry. Has Apple become the new General Electric? Is that it? They go out, not in a blaze of glory, not in a bang, but a whimper.

There’s a lot of criticism of the fancy-shmancy icon thing, with transparent icons— what do they call it?— Liquid Glass. Me, I thought it was cool when they started it, though there was a huge outpouring of hatred which followed. Apple’s most recent annnouncement is that you’ll be able to set your own desired level of glassiness, that is, transparency, when the new update comes out “This Fall.”

So, is that it? Transparent icons, with user-defined degree of transparency. Is that what Steve Jobs meant by “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules?” The rule, apparently, was that icons must never be transparent. And now the world has changed.

Well, technically, that’s true. Icons never were transparent, and now they can be, if that’s the way you want them. The world has indeed been changed. Not a big change, but a change.

But what if Apple really was a misfit, a rebel, a troublemaker? Then what would they be doing? That’s the 64 trillion dollar question for late spring 2026.

No, I don’t work for Apple. I was born in the USA. I don’t have an engineering degree. So what gives me the chutzpah to imagine Apple doing something to change the world again? Maybe being born in the USA has something to do with it, although Elon Musk wasn’t born in the USA and he has chutzpah too.

What does the world need to be changed? Right off the bat I can think of one thing. Human beings normally speak to each other face to face, or via other customary established devices such as lecterns, pulpits, judicial benches, and throne rooms. Now they don’t maintain the face-to-face thing any more. It gets interrupted by the smartphone screen, with or without beeps and boops from Notifications.

Nope. The smartphone ban doesn’t work. If you really want your smartphone banned, you’ve got to commit some kind of crime and get yourself locked up in jail. Otherwise, the phone is going to be there. With satellite bandwidth everyone on the planet will have one except for people in jail. In the most remote deserts, islands, and mountain hideaways the locals will have smartphones. I’m old enough to remember when such people were called “naked savages.” Now there’s no such thing as a naked savage. There’s just remotely located smartphone users who prefer to avoid overdressing.

So, Apple, how about it? How about a device which allows people to talk face to face again without either being interrupted by beeps and boops and having to look at the phone screen?

No Apple, not VisionPro. Not “smart” glasses. Just good old-fashioned human interaction, with all the goodies available to all participants. Zoom and whatnot, while chatting with whomever. Watching TikTok together on a date before leaning in for a kiss. And so forth,

I know you can do it, Apple. You gave me the MacBook Air upon which I’m typing this. You gave me great cameras on a gadget which I can swagger around with in a cross-body thingie. Even a build-in flash instead of bulbs that had to be gathered up after a single use.

Yes, you can do it. Change the world. Be a peg. Square or round, or whatever. Triangular. You can do it, Apple.

Think different.

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
— Steve Jobs, 1997

Every year for decades I’d look forward to the keynote speech at Apple’s WWDC (world-wide developer’s conference) but this year’s version left me with a huge feeling of disappointment.

Why?

Okay. There’s the usual Woke bullshit. Let’s get that out of the way so we can move on to more important stuff.

As usual, Tim Cook was standing in front of that rainbow arch sculpture thing. Hubba hubba. Tim is saiid to be “gay” and the rainbow is all about being a homosexual, even if it wasn’t in Genesis 9:16, which says And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.

And, is it just may imagination (I don’t think so) that they are checking boxes by a steady parade of folks from various ends of the earth so as to make it crystal clear that Apple is not just about white guys from Alabama who happen to have enjoyed sex with their fellow man?

Okay. I got that Woke stuff out of my system. Now let’s move on. Let’s talk about changing the world.

Is Apple still changing the world?

When I was growing up, there was Westinghouse, General Electric, RCA, and other electric companies who made stuff before the Japanese, and then the Koreans and Chinese took over the electric appliance industry. Has Apple become the new General Electric? Is that it? They go out, not in a blaze of glory, not in a bang, but a whimper.

There’s a lot of criticism of the fancy-shmancy icon thing, with transparent icons— what do they call it?— Liquid Glass. Me, I thought it was cool when they started it, though there was a huge outpouring of hatred which followed. Apple’s most recent annnouncement is that you’ll be able to set your own desired level of glassiness, that is, transparency, when the new update comes out “This Fall.”

So, is that it? Transparent icons, with user-defined degree of transparency. Is that what Steve Jobs meant by “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules?” The rule, apparently, was that icons must never be transparent. And now the world has changed.

Well, technically, that’s true. Icons never were transparent, and now they can be, if that’s the way you want them. The world has indeed been changed. Not a big change, but a change.

But what if Apple really was a misfit, a rebel, a troublemaker? Then what would they be doing? That’s the 64 trillion dollar question for late spring 2026.

No, I don’t work for Apple. I was born in the USA. I don’t have an engineering degree. So what gives me the chutzpah to imagine Apple doing something to change the world again? Maybe being born in the USA has something to do with it, although Elon Musk wasn’t born in the USA and he has chutzpah too.

What does the world need to be changed? Right off the bat I can think of one thing. Human beings normally speak to each other face to face, or via other customary established devices such as lecterns, pulpits, judicial benches, and throne rooms. Now they don’t maintain the face-to-face thing any more. It gets interrupted by the smartphone screen, with or out beeps and boops from Notifications.

Nope. The smartphone ban doesn’t work. If you really want your smartphone banned, you’ve got to commit some kind of crime and get yourself locked up in jail. Otherwise, the phone is going to be there. With satellite bandwidth everyone on the planet will have one except for people in jail. In the most remote deserts, islands, and mountain hideaways the locals will have smartphones. I’m old enough to remember when such people were called “naked savages.” Now there’s no such thing as a naked savage. There’s just remotely located smartphone users who prefer to avoid overdressing.

So, Apple, how about it? How about a device which allows people to talk face to face again without either being interrupted by beeps and boops and having to look at the phone screen?

No Apple, not VisionPro. Not “smart” glasses. Just good old-fashioned human interaction, with all the goodies available to all participants. Zoom and whatnot, while chatting with whomever. Watching TikTok together on a date before leaning in for a kiss. And so forth,

I know you can do it, Apple. You gave me the MacBook Air upon which I’m typing this. You gave me great cameras on a gadget which I can swagger around with in a cross-body thingie. Even a build-in flash instead of bulbs that had to be gathered up after a single use.

Yes, you can do it. Change the world. Be a peg. Square or round, or whatever. Triangular. You can do it, Apple.

Think different.

We all know about the Religion of Peace, right? Well, I’m not writing about that today; if you want to read about the Religion of Peace, you can find all kinds of other source material about it. Today, I’m writing about the Religion of Ignorance.

“What’s that?” you might ask, and indeed you should ask. If you don’t know what the Religion of Ignorance is, you have already taken the first step into the Religion of Ignorance, because there is something you don’t know, and that is what the Religion of Ignorance is all about. It is all about not knowing things.

Now you might think that the Religion of Ignorance is some tiny obscure sect of one of the Abrahamic cults, or something from India or a Pacific Island. No. It is not. To the contrary, the Religion of Ignorance is something you already know about in great detail, because it is all around us; the Internet reports the doctrine of the Religion of Ignorance all the time, day after day. In doing so, they keep you ignorant, because they never, never, ever, mention the name of the Religion of Ignorance.

But now it’s time to break the silence. There are in fact, many names for the Religion of Ignorance. It’s just that, since the basic creed of the Religion of Ignorance is that there are some things you are not supposed to know, there is no agreement on a name for the religion.

A good starting point, however, is Wokeness.

In more than one way, Wokeness is very much like obscenity. In a very famous Supreme Court case known as Jacobellis v. Ohio, Justice Potter Stewart defined obscenity by declaring “I know it when I see it.” Well, we all know Wokeness when we see it, in spite of lack of a precise definition.

What is the connection between Wokeness and ignorance? Lots of things. The “Democrats” are Woke. Woke as hell. They’d have you believe that they oppose racism. Anyone they don’t like, they call a “racist.” But there are certain things that you must not know. For example, that the folks who shipped most of the Indians to Oklahoma were “Democrats.” The supporters of slavery were “Democrats.” Jim Crow laws and that whole racial segregation thing was a “Democrat” scheme. Lynchings were a “Democrat” thing. But you are not supposed to know that. If you even give a glimmer of a thought of a suspicion that “Democrats” had anything to do with racism, then you already know too much, which means, within the creed of the Religion of Ignorance you are a heretic. They won’t call you a heretic, though. They will call you a “racist.”

Then there is that laptop thing. You know. Hunter’s laptop. (Uh-oh. I said “you know.” Them’s fightin’ words for the Religion of Ignorance.) Anyhow, the laptop.

Yes, there was one. The laptop was Hunter Biden’s, its contents were largely real, and the initial dismissal/suppression was a major media/tech story in itself. The story was heavily censored: Twitter blocked links to the Post article, citing “hacked materials.” Fifty-one former intelligence officials signed a letter suggesting it had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” — though they admitted they had no evidence of Russian involvement and hadn’t seen the materials. This was promoted by the Biden campaign.

Yup. Ignorance. A laptop, about which you were not supposed to know, according to the religion that dare not speak its name. What could it’s name be?

Well, clearly the “Democrats” are acolytes of the Religion of Ignorance. Does that mean that the true name of the religion is democracy? No. Because there actually is something called “democracy” which goes back to ancient Athens. The “Democrats” have nothing to do whatsoever with democracy. They rig elections. We all know that.

There are other possible names for the Religion of Ignorance. One of them is Liberalism. The “Democrats” used to call themselves “Liberals.” I think now they call themselves “Progressives,” except in New York City, where they call themselves “Communists.”

But there are all kinds of Liberalisms. There is Classical Liberalism, which emphasizes individual freedom, limited government, and the protection of natural rights as the foundation of a just society. Heavens to Betsy! If you are a “Democrat” that is the last thing you are supposed to know. It’s heretical. In fact, it’s… wait for it… racist.

But of course, there’s Neoliberalism. I actually don’t know what that is. I am ignorant of what Neoliberalism actually is. Perhaps that makes me a Neoliberal.

What I imagine that Neoliberalism is, is that it has something to do with Freedom of Lunch. A Classical Liberal would say. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” But a Neoliberal (possibly) might believe in the Four Freedoms. What’s that? Here’s a Wikipedia link. Hey, if ignorance is your thing, then look stuff up in Wikipedia. Anyhow, the Four Freedoms are…

• Freedom of speech and expression

• Freedom of worship

• Freedom from want

• Freedom from fear

No, Freedom of Lunch is not listed specifically. But what if what you want is lunch? Then you are covered by Freedom Number 3.

It gets worse. Up to now I’ve been addressing USA stuff, but there’s the EU, and the UN, and the ICC and the UK.

And that raises a significant philosophical question. How much do I want to know about the EU, and the UN, and the ICC and the UK? Do I want to know anything more about them than I already know?

The philosophical question is this:

If I don’t want to know anything more about the EU, and the UN, and the ICC and the UK, am I already on the path to salvation in the Religion of Ignorance?

Or am I merely taking rational measures to protect my mental health?

Is that a problem? Leisure? Should you feel threatened by it?

Well, no… but yes. Although the no part might be obvious, I think it’s important to communicate about the yes part, because leisure is about to come galloping down the road in your direction like a herd of elephants, and you’d better be ready for it.

How do I know about leisure galloping down the road in your direction like a herd of elephants? A combination of personal experience and willingness to confront the facts of life in the third decade of the Twenty-First Century.

The personal experience part is easy: I’m retired, and therefore have lots of leisure time on my hands, time enough to write this Substack stuff. Yes, COVID had a role in my retirement, but that’s a topic for some other time, or never.

So, what do I mean by the facts of life in the third decade of the Twenty-First Century part?

I’ll start by dropping a name: Elon Musk.

In my never-humble opinion, if you want to learn something about the facts of life in the third decade of the Twenty-First Century, start with Elon Musk. We all know who he is: the Tesla guy, the X (formerly known as Twitter) guy, the white South African, the rocket guy (the other one, not Kim “Rocketman” Jong-Un), the Grok AI guru, the Boring Company tunnel digger, the Starlink Wi-Fi-on-a-plane guy, etc.

I wrote about Elon Musk before , and called him a real-live superhero. Yes, this “leisure” thing is going to make him way faster than a speeding bullet because… because he is building humanoid robots, which we are going to be seeing in the flesh (well, not flesh, but you know what I mean) in the next few years.

Really?

Do I really think so? Humanoid robots? Robots that sort of look like people?

Yes, I think so.

Not too long ago, I asked Grok (that’s Elon Musk’s robot mind that answers questions online) why the robots are going to resemble people, rather than Star Wars-style “droids” like R2D2 and C3PO. The answer was interesting and convincing: the environment we live in was modified for human beings (streets and roads and buildings and kitchens and stairways, etc.), so a practical, functional robot should be able to master that environment.

Yes, it would be nice to have a robot that buses the dirty dishes and runs the dishwasher, but what Elon Musk tells us is much more powerful. The leisure thing.

How, one might well ask, would humanoid robots offer us leisure besides busing the dirty dishes?

Elon Musk has the answer: buckle up for the ride. Whereas machine learning (so-called AI) replaces human beings stuck with boring, repetitive mental jobs, humanoid robots, once there are enough of them, will replace humans stuck with boring, exhausting, and dangerous physical jobs.

And who is going to manufacture all of those humanoid robots replacing humans? Well, humanoid robots, of course.

And where is the power (electrical mostly, but also fossil fuel and geothermal, etc.) coming from to power all of these future humanoid robots and the machines they make? That question is where Elon Musk kicks it up a notch: the power will come from the sun, and with no clouds to get in the way, the power can be generated by satellites in Earth orbit and beyond. Mr. Musk talks about something called the Kardashev II-level civilization fully capable of using solar energy for human needs.

Science fiction now, perhaps, but, as I wrote earlier, “galloping down the road in our direction like a herd of elephants.” Really? I think so. You might feel free to disagree. The result, of course, is that we humans will have so much done for us by the humanoid robots and the abundant electrical energy, that our leisure dreams will become a reality.

That, of course, opens the door to the next question: is so much leisure a good thing, a bad thing, or both? That points to the “should we be threatened” question I asked in today’s opening paragraph.

A good start is a quote from a fellow named Jerome of Stridon, who died in the year 419 or 420 in the little town of Bethlehem. He was canonized as a Christian saint around that time by popular decree. The quote: Fac et aliquid operis, ut semper te diabolus inveniat occupatum. English translation: “Do some kind of occupation so that the Devil finds you’re busy.”

Yes, it’s Latin. St. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, by the way, and once the humanoid robots bring you all that leisure you’re going to have, you can study Latin too. If you want.

But why should the Devil find you’re busy? Because idleness is the Devil’s workshop, as we all know, and leisure will create all that idleness.

In my never-humble opinion: leisure is a reciope for three things: anxiety, depression, and aggression. Yes, mental health problems. Bad mental health problems. Work distracts from feeling nervous about all the things to be nervous about, and it makes you feel important (sometimes, hopefully) so you don’t get down in the dumps about how unimportant you are, and work (sometimes, hopefully) gets in the way of becoming, as the song puts it, lonesome, ornery, and mean.

So, yes, feel threatened. If you want. It’s still a free country, or used to be until recently. If you feel really threatened, and you’re not retired or unemployed, take heart in that job you have that you probably think is so lame: it keeps you out of the Devil’s workshop.

And if you have more leisure time than you can handle, take heart from me: you can always post something on Substack, or some other social medium. Will posting on Substack prevent you from feeling lonesome, ornery, and mean?

Of course not. But it will put you in touch with other folks who are feeling just as lonesome, ornery, and mean as you are.

Techno-Adam? Who’s that? And why would you care?

Who’s that? Take a look in the mirror. You’re looking at either Techno-Eve or Techno-Adam. I looked in the mirror earlier today and also saw Techno-Adam.

We (that is, we the people, the live human beings, not we the starfish or we the zombies) are all Techno-Adam, part animal and part tool, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that the tool part is growing much faster than the animal part.

Am I talking about AI? Of course I am. Who isn’t, these days? Yes, I am saying that AI is a tool, just as the stone axe, the pliers, and the pickaxe are tools. Very few, if any, non-human animals have and use tools that are not body parts they have grown. Some apes use straw to dig ants out of ant-holes. A tool? Maybe, but not as impressive as, say, the steam locomotive or the robotaxi.

The important thing about Techno-Eve is that she (OK, she can have babies too) can not only invent tools and use them, that she herself is part tool. She might, have, say, dental crowns or titanium hip joints. Very likely she uses eyeglasses, which are not part of her body, nor are contact lenses, but close. Most importantly, she probably has some kind of smartphone and spends many of her waking hours doomscrolling and communicating with other humans and with non-human entities such as AI’s and social media bots.

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and human beings gotta invent stuff and make use of things human beings have invented. It’s part of nature, human nature, Mother nature.

So what? That’s the second question I asked earlier. Why would you care?

We must care because it is much too dangerous to ignore this fundamental fact of human nature.

And this is a good time to introduce my old imaginary mentor, the Toronto-based media guru Marshall McLuhan, who wrote a great deal about something he called the extensions of man.

Extensions of man? What’s that? You want a link. Okay. Here’s a link. Did you click it? If and when you click it you will have seen an excellent example of an extension of man. The link, the screen on which you are reading the media, the device on which the screen is located, and the eyeglasses or contact lenses you are wearing: they are all extensions of man.

But, you might ask, do we really need all of these extensions of man? Can’t we go back to when life was simpler? No doomscrolling? No Facebook? No Amazon? No Starbucks?

How far back do you want to go? No fire? Eat your berries cold, if you can find berries? Eat bugs? Where have we heard that recommendation lately? No stone axes, no blades with which humans can chop each other? Just rocks to throw and pound each other? That far back? Or maybe the Middle Ages? The 1950’s?

Or, as I am claiming now, in the sacred name of Marshall McLuhan, it’s too late. No way to put AI back in Pandora’s Box. Nor Amazon, nor drones, nor constellations of satellites, nor electric cars, nor those bots trolling your posts on social media.

It’s too late. We must make the best of it.

As that French intellectual who was killed in a car collision with a tree back in 1960, put it, “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.“

That French guy’s name was Albert Camus, but who was that Sisyphus guy?

Okay, here’s another link, but I’m going to tell you here and now: Sisyphus was a character in an ancient Greek legend who was punished for arrogance by being forced to push a heavy boulder up a hill every day, at the end of which, it would roll down the hill, and the next morning he’d have to start all over again.

You and I, being human, are not only Techno-Adam of Techno-Eve, we are Sisyphus too. Every day we roll the boulder up… we go to work, or deal with the tax entities; we doomscroll looking for some good news, which is far exceeded by the bad news, and we worry whether we are eating too much sodium or seed oils. We finally get to sleep, with or without the help of pharmaceuticals, and start rolling the boulder up the hill again the next day.

Yet, as I believe, along with the late Albert Camus, we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Besides inventing things, humans want to be happy. As Cyndi Lauper once sang in 1979, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” That’s something that we humans have in common with the other animals. Lions want to sink their teeth into a nice fat zebra, and zebras want to run with the rest of the herd in the middle, where there are fewer lion attacks.

But what about the cyborgs? Why do I even mention cyborgs? Cyborg is an old-fashioned name for what I am calling Techno-Eve and Techno-Adam: a hybrid of human and machine. Yes, we are all cyborgs. For you cultural history buffs, the word cyborg was first published in 1960 by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in an article called Cyborgs and Space. In the introduction, they said,

Artifact-organism systems which would
extend man’s unconscious, self-regulatory controls are one possibility.

So, for those of you who have actually read this Substack post to the end, bear in mind that the next link you click will enable you to extend your unconscious, self-regulatory controls.

And don’t forget to have fun.

Well, I’ve never been to Spain
But I kinda like the music
Say the ladies are insane there
And they sure know how to use it
— Hoyt Axton

Actually, I have been to Spain, but not to the part where the best music comes from: Seville, and that formerly Moorish area called Andalucia. The best music, of course is flamenco.

But this is not about the music, or whether the ladies are insane, like Noelia Castillo Ramos, a 25-year-old from Barcelona, who said she was gang-raped by some mysterious (wink, wink) men, jumped off a balcony, became paralyzed after the fall, and finally got the Spanish government to finish off her suicide against the strong objection of her father.

What I am writing about today is that very same Spanish government, not only the present one, but those of the past.

Where to start, where to start? Francisco Franco? Queen Isabella of Castile, kicker out of Spain’s Jews and Columbus funder?

Maybe best to focus on the folks who did get out of Spain, along with those who tried.

The ones who tried? The folks in Catalonia and the Basque country. They keep trying and trying, but they just somehow never make escape velocity.

On the other hand, if we want to see the folks who did escape that Spanish government, we don’t need to look very far. We Yanks are quite familiar with a place called Texas, which escaped the Mexican government, which in turn escaped the Spanish government with the help of one Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla in 1810 and, later, Napoleon. There is a rumor that Texas doesn’t like to be messed with, but somehow, the messing has never stopped up to the very day I’m writing this.

But let me get back to that government back in Spain that so many folks want to escape from…

In March, 2026, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez addressed the issue in Spain’s Congress of Deputies, stating: “We have denied the United States the use of the Rota and Morón bases for this illegal war. All flight plans involving operations in Iran have been rejected. All of them, including those for refueling aircraft.” He described the conflict as “illegal, reckless, and unjust.

But, although I’m listing a whole bunch of bad guys in this piece of writing, I want to be sure to let you know that there are good guys too in Spain. One Santiago Abascal Conde is an example:

Born April 14, 1976, in Bilbao, Spain, Abascal Conde is a Spanish politician and the founder and longtime president of Vox, the national-conservative political party. According to the Jerusalem Post, Abascal Conde has expressed unreserved support for Israel’s war goals: the elimination of Hamas and the return of the hostages.

But let’s take a look at the history of that Spanish government that Abascal Conde wants to reform. Way back in history.

In 409 CE (AD) the Iberian Peninsula was invaded and largely overrun by three barbarian groups crossing the frozen Rhine: the Vandals (Hasdingi and Silingi branches), the Alans (an Iranian people), and the Suebi (a Germanic people). These groups carved out territories and caused the collapse of effective Roman control in most of Hispania, the Roman name for Spain. (Like “hispanic,” get it?)

Beginning in 416 Western Roman Emperor Honorius enlisted the Visigoths, acting as Roman allies, campaigning in Hispania and inflicted heavy defeats on the invaders. The Visigoths did not conquer a unified “Spain” from the Romans in one go. Instead, they were initially invited in by Rome to fight the 409 invaders, then progressively took control through a mix of warfare, settlement, and political maneuvering.

The Visigothic religious policies evolved dramatically over the roughly 300 years of their rule in Hispania (roughly 418–711 CE). They shifted from relative tolerance under Arian Christianity to aggressive Catholic uniformity after 589, with increasingly harsh measures against religious minorities—especially Jews.

Interestingly, the name Gonzalez, recognizably Spanish, actually comes from the Visigothic name Gundesaelf, meaning “battle elf.” Those elves are another bunch of folks that’s it’s hard to get away from.

Enough about Spain? Maybe…

Maybe back to Hoyt Axton, and his song?

Well, I’ve never been to heaven
But I’ve been to Oklahoma
Oh, they tell me I was born there
But I really don’t remember

Oklahoma, that state with the long panhandle due north of Texas, where most of the “Indians” were relocated on the Trail of Tears; and where it was said in that 1943 musical that stayed on Broadway for five years, that they know they belong to the land, and the land they belong to is grand.

What does Oklahoma have to do with Spain?

Heaven?

One Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (1541–1542), while searching for the legendary golden city of Quivira, Coronado led a large expedition that crossed the Oklahoma Panhandle and possibly parts of western Oklahoma.

The Adams–Onís Treaty (1819) between the United States and Spain was particularly important. It defined the boundary between U.S. territory (after the Louisiana Purchase) and Spanish territory.

It seems that more negotiation between the USA and Spain might have to happen, and soon, for example, the Morón Air Base, approximately 8 miles northwest of the town of Morón de la Frontera and “less than an hour away from Seville, a city of almost one million people famous for its flamenco shows”.

What goes around comes around, it seems.

By the way, that’s the Morón Air Base, with an accent on the second syllable. It has nothing to do with the Greek-derived word moron, meaning “a person who is considered foolish or stupid.”

You know. Like Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. — Jonah 1:2

If you know any Bible stories at all, you probably know the one about Jonah and the whale, in which Jonah is trying his best to avoid going to a place called Nineveh, gets thrown into the water by sailors, and gets swallowed by a big fish.

What I am writing today is not about Jonah, nor the whale, but about Nineveh, the place where he ended up, the place the Bible mentions for wickedness.

Nineveh was a capital of an ancient empire, an empire that no longer exists. Historians call that empire the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and tell us that it existed from 911–609 BCE.

So why mention an empire that reportedly ended in 609 BCE? Well, it turns out that it’s back, under another name, ruled by another group of people. The return of the Neo-Assyrian Empire has taken the form of something called the Islamic “Republic” of Iran.

You will note that I put the word Republic in quotes, because the Islamic “Republic” of Iran is no republic.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines republic as A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them.

And, as everyone knows, the Iranian theocracy is ruled by a Supreme Leader, an ayatollah, even though quite recently, they have had to replace a deceased ayatollah with his son.

But why on earth bother to dig back in time to the Neo-Assyrian Empire?

It started with an accident. I was curious about empires in decline, since some say (I don’t agree) that the USA is an empire in decline. I started to do research on empires, remembering that the Assyrian Empire is often considered the first. My research led to an astonishing finding:

In essence, the Assyrian Empire operated on a theocratic-military-imperial system where religion justified unlimited expansion and coercion: the king, as Ashur’s agent, waged holy war, used terror to enforce obedience, deported populations to secure control, and extracted resources to sustain the cycle. Unlike the Roman emphasis on ancestral custom or the British focus on commerce/civilization, Assyria’s ideology was more overtly theocentric and coercive—the empire existed to glorify Ashur through the king’s victories and the submission of all peoples. Source.

Theocentric? Coercive? That immediately brought to mind the Islamic so-called Republic of Iran, whose Supreme Leader, as the self-declared agent of Allah (nobody worships Ashur anymore)…

1. Wages holy war

2. Uses terror to enforce obedience

3. Deports populations (Afghans) to secure control

4. Extracts resources to sustain the cycle (uranium.)

Wow. How many years is it between 609 BCE and 2026 CE?

2634 years. A long time. No improvement, except, of course, for their race to get nuclear weapons, whereas the Neo-Assyrians had to rely on iron swords, spears, javelins, bows and arrows, slings, battering rams and ladders.

Nuclear weapons for a theocentric, coercive empire that wages holy war, and uses terror to enforce obedience? Kind of scary, in my never-humble opinion.

So what are we going to do about it?

Question Number One: Is the Islamic “Republic” of Iran really an empire in decline?

I say yes. Even before Trump ordered the bombing of the Fordow nuclear facility on June 22, 2025, the population of that empire rose up in a massive popular revolt, which was countered by a massive slaughter of many tens of thousands of humans by the theocrats.

Question Number Two: who cares?

Now, of course, there is an ongoing operation in which both the USA and Israel are involved, to (I certainly hope) speed up that imperial decline.

Does this mean that the USA, who is often accused of being another empire in decline, should take over Iran? Of course not. I wrote about that here.

But, hey, let’s do whatever we can to stop that theocentric, coercive facsimile of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from getting those nuclear weapons.

Even if it takes a guy with an orange comb-over who indulges in mean tweets, while inappropriately capitalizing nouns in his announcements.

Why him?

Because nobody else is going to do it.

Not the UN, not the European Union, not Spain, not France, not the UK, not China, not Russia.

Israel?

Well, I’ll wrap this up with another quote from the Bible and leave it at that:

And he said unto them, I am an Hebrew; and I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, which hath made the sea and the dry land — Jonah 1.9.

But that’s just a story. That uranium really exists.

What does the Declaration of Independence say about regime change?

This:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

What does it not say?

It does not say, “It is the duty of the United States of America to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government.”

What it does say is, “It is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government.”

So, what does this have to do with Iran?

Everything.

When it comes to regime change in Iran, it is the right of the Iranian people to alter or abolish the old government and to institute new Government.

But, of course, we don’t trust them to do a good job, right? So we either have to do it with our own blood and treasure, or do nothing at all to prevent the existing government in Iran from doing the unacceptable.

Did President Trump say he was joining Israel in using bombs, torpedoes, drones, and other military force to change Iran’s regime?

Actually, he never did. He did say he hoped that Iran would change its regime, but that the current attacks were to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

Of course, since the USA has been involved for centuries in changing other regimes around the planet, it’s unsurprising that there is worldwide skepticism about Trump’s sincerity about letting Iran change its own regime.

For example, according to the New York Post, UK Prime Minister Starmer said, “The UK does not believe in regime change from the skies.”

But what if… President Trump doesn’t believe in regime change from the skies either? Is that impossible?

I actually think that it is possible, and here’s why.

Trump stands out as the first president whose primary pre-presidency career was modern commercial real estate development, with no prior elected office or military service. His pre-election projects were quite ambitious, and quite successful: skyscrapers, luxury properties, branding developments in urban settings like New York.

Real estate developers like Trump don’t get distracted or involved in regime change schemes. They only get the minimum amount of regime cooperation necessary to get the project done, and secure possession of the property.

President Donald Trump (through the Trump Organization, which he owns) still owns significant portions of Trump Tower in New York City, including the retail and commercial spaces that serve as the headquarters of the Trump Organization, as well as his personal penthouse residence there.

And what is the current “regime” in New York City? Well, let’s just stipulate that the mayor is Zohran Mandami, with all that implies, and leave further discussion for another time.

So, now, let’s talk about Iran.

Let’s talk about three Iranian regime changes, starting with my nominee for the bronze medal for Iranian regime change. In 1953, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the CIA and British intelligence, primarily due to his nationalization of Iran’s oil industry, which threatened Western interests. How did that work out?

For a while, Iran had a little golden age, about which any expatriate Iranian living in Los Angeles or anywhere else will tell you. However, for good reason, not all of them are fans of the Shah, who was placed on the throne by the CIA and MI-5.

And that brings us to my nominee for the silver medal for regime change in Iran, which occurred in 1979: the theocracy which calls itself the Islamic Republic of Iran, and which, until very, very recently, was ruled by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

They want to get nuclear weapons. Why? They want to get rid of their one-bomb enemy, the Little Satan, Israel. What about the Great Satan, you know, the USA? Do the silver medal winners want to (eventually) nuke the Great Satan? Maybe not.

Or maybe.

But who, in my never-humble opinion, deserves the gold medal for Iranian regime change? Well, folks, that happened a long time ago, specifically, 330 BCE, when Alexander the Great, a Macedonian Greek, defeated Darius III and took control of the Achaemenid Empire.

Why the gold medal for Alexander and not for the 1979 Islamic Republic?

Because we need to go all the way back to Alexander to understand what we can expect concerning the real estate market in Iran.

Since Alexander’s conquest of Iran, there have been twelve (twelve, count ‘em) regime changes in Iran. The first, when Alexander died in his twenties, was the Seleucid Empire, when his general Seleucus took over. Following that regime change, a bunch of outsiders, the Parthians, took over, toughening the regime up to the point that even the Roman Empire couldn’t impose a regime change of their own, and the Romans, as everyone knows, were very talented at regime changes.

But in 224 CE (that’s AD to you Christians out there) the Sasanians defeated the Parthians. They sought to revive Persian culture and Zoroastrianism, making it the state religion. They positioned themselves as successors to the Achaemenid Empire (the one that Alexander conquered), emphasizing their connection to ancient Persian heritage.

Persia for the Persians! Imagine that?

Well, in the year 651 CE, about nineteen years after the death of Mohammad, an Islamic imperial force called the Rashidun Caliphate brought about the next regime change, and since then Iran has been more or less Islamic.

I won’t go over all the rest of the regime changes, because now I want to focus on the next one. That’s right, the regime change that is not going to happen because of bombing. At least, not because of bombing alone.

Will the current, or next, Iranian regime get nuclear weapons? Probably not. I believe that Trump, mean tweets and outrageous punctuation and all, really won’t let that happen. I, rightly or wrongly, am convinced that real estate developers don’t like what thermonuclear devices can do to real estate. After Trump, who knows?

Well, for the Israelis, and for the non-Jews living in Israel, the idea of Iran getting nukes is an “over my dead body” issue. Literally. Very few Israelis are willing to let that happen. Maybe zero.

Iran has patched together regimes since Alexander and will continue to do so. On their own schedule. Maybe soon. Maybe not. Will the Ayatollahs manage to replace Ali Khamenei successfully? Probably not. After the horrendous massacres of so many Iranians, that regime is not exactly popular any more. Who will replace it? Turks, all the colors of the rainbow, including Azeris and Erdoganists? Maybe. What about actual Persians? Hey, that’s an idea.

American Neocon types? Been there, done that. Very likely not.

But not Donald Trump. Hey, if they’ll let his guys build Trump Tower Tehran, that’s as good as it can get.

I’ll start with two quotes from very famous documents, and then I’ll tell you a story. Yes, a story, a very personal story, a story that happened today just within the last few hours.

Here’s the first quote:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

And here’s the second:

But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.

If you aren’t enough of a Bible buff to recognize that quote, it’s Leviticus 19:34, King James version. (I grew up, a long while back, accustomed to the KJV, even in my secular public school classroom.)

And that actually, is the beginning of the story, so let’s continue…

Today an outdoor public worship service took place in Times Square, New York City. It was a Muslim service. There was a call to prayer, and the congregants knelt and began the service.

It was crystal clear that a message was being sent, and the message was received by the people I follow, and who follow me, on Substack. What was the message?

I recalled a similar message that I’d heard back in 1990 by a gay rights group called Queer Nation. The message that I remembered was…

We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re in your face.

(As it turns out, Queer Nation said “Get used to it,” and not “in your face,” but it was an “in your face” version that I remembered from back in 1990.)

So, the message, that I was getting from the Times Square Muslim worship service was the same, with “Muslim” substituted for “queer.”

And that’s where the dog thing came in. Americans, recalling that Islam allegedly considers dogs too unclean to have as house-pets, declared a dog-friendly festival to compete with the Muslim worship service, calling it a “Pawty,” and I re-stacked it with the comment, “New York isn’t dead yet.”

The time came for the service, I watched a few moments on it via YouTube, and after a search for the dogs, there were none. No dogs, just worshipers in the dusk bathed in the eerie pink glow.

I was initially disappointed.

Why was I disappointed?

There is a Jewish idea, derived from the Bible, the story of Noah and the flood, called the yetser ha-Ra: the “evil inclination” or “evil impulse” — humankind’s innate, congenital drive toward “self-serving behaviors, desires, pleasures, ambitions, and survival instincts that can lead to sin or wrongdoing if left unchecked.”

My yetser ha-Ra wanted dogs, and (at least at the time I’m writing this) there were none.

So I was disappointed, until my yetser ha-Tov kicked in: that’s right, my inclination towards good. I realized that it was in fact a very good thing that no dogs showed up at the Muslim worship service, even if the service had taken place at Times Square, and even if the service was sending a message.

And that’s where I started thinking of the very first quote with which I began this Substack post, which, of course, is part of the text to the First Amendment to the US Constitution. No law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.

And yes, I love dogs, and yes, I grew up with a dog, a cocker spaniel, and yes I loved that dog, and yes I was heartbroken when he died, and yes, I’m sad if it’s true that Muslim children don’t get to have a dog like I did.

But no, I don’t want dogs growling or snapping or barking at Muslim worshipers in Times Square, even if some, or maybe most, or maybe all of those worshipers want to convert all of us Americans, dog-lovers or otherwise, to hard-core jihadist Islam. After all, if my very shaky knowledge of Arabic is correct, the word muslim means one who submits.

We Americans are not really big on submission. Ask any Canadian, or for that matter, any immigrant, legal or otherwise. People don’t hack their way through the Darien jungle so that they can submit if and when they finally arrive in the USA.

But we Americans do respect the rights of others; at least we know we are supposed to.

Here’s another quote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…

You know where that comes from, right? If not, look it up.

Before writing this, I thought about the Golden Rule, often quoted as…

“Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

That’s also from the Bible. It refers to Jesus, from the Sermon on the Mount. Luke 6:31. It’s been called the Golden Rule, but it actually goes back to the ancient Egyptians, in 2040–1650 BCE in something called The Eloquent Peasant, or so I’m told.

And so, in America, even an American city whose mayor is one Zohran Mamdani, Muslims have the right to worship, even outdoors, even in Times Square, without being harassed by dogs. That’s what my yetser ha-Tov tells me, and I believe my yetser ha-Tov.

So, what about the Golden Rule? Where does that fit into this story?

Well, here’s an interesting bit of news from the Jerusalem Post:

In an effort to ease potential tensions in 1967, the government made a decision that while Jews could visit the site (the Al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount), they could not pray, dance, or engage in any other religious activity.

As part of the deal, while Muslim prayer is permitted in the area, and hundreds of thousands go there to pray during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan (see box), Jewish prayer was not permitted.

But now it seems, Jews are being allowed to worship there. In a limited way, it seems, but they are, causing me to wonder;

Do Muslims have their own version of the yetser ha-Tov?

I’ll leave it to Muslims to answer that question.

In March of 2023, I began a Substack series called “When the Left Goes Rogue,” whose fifth part was published last September. Today I am continuing the series with a somewhat different perspective. Previously, I wrote about the horrors and the hypocrisy of the rogue “Left,” as encapsulated by originally their friends, and later, their enemies, under the term “Woke.” Now, I’d like to take a deep dive into the history of the “Left,” going back to its ideological birthplace, the French Revolution, which, in my never-humble opinion, was never all bad. What did maker it bad, however, was whenever the revolutionaries, the so-called “Left,” went rogue, which they did early and often, and still do, up until the day I am writing this, and very likely until the day you are reading this.

Specifically, I wish to document how the “Left” came into existence, and give a long, detailed account of both how it went rogue, and how the revolutionaries tried to keep from going rogue (and still do, frankly.)

Since this is a history thing, I suppose we should start with dates; here are two:

1. July 14, 1789

2. September 11, 1789

The first date was the first act of roguery on the part of the revolutionaries in France: the Storming of the Bastille. I capitalize the description of the event because it deserves a proper name; it was a profound iconic event in world history. Like July 4, 1776, when the thirteen American colonies declared independence, July 14, 1789 became a national holiday, and still is, for France. The first of these events was a signed piece of paper; the second was, to borrow a recently popular term, an insurrection.

What exactly did those stormers do, when they stormed the Bastille?

A crowd of around 600-1,000 revolutionaries, , assembled outside the Bastille fortress in Paris, seeking arms and gunpowder, motivated by rumors of royal troops preparing to suppress the revolution.

A negotiation with the prison governor failed and around noon, the revolutionaries started climbing walls and cutting chains on the drawbridge. The prison governor then ordered his military garrison to fire cannons and muskets into the crowd, killing around 98 insurrectionists and wounding many more.

By mid-afternoon, the insurrectionists managed to get over the drawbridge and into the Bastille fortress, helped by some defecting soldiers from the prison garrison. who turned cannons toward the prison and fired. The insurrectionists soon seized the prison governor, executed him, and put his head on a pike.

Thus, on the day whose anniversary is still celebrated with much pomp and pride in France, one might say that the “Left” went rogue before it even existed.

Before it even existed? Yes.

On July 14, 1789 the word left referred only to one of the two hands on the human body and the relative direction of that hand. It had not yet become a political term.

Today, the Left, and leftists appears every day in multiple thousands or maybe even millions of media and social media opinions in the 2020’s.

So when did the term “Left” become a darling of the media?

In a newspaper called the Courrier de Provence, dated August 5–7, 1789, the term “du côté gauche de l’Assemblée constituante” (of the left side of the National Assembly) is used to describe the seating of certain deputies. By late August and into September, the Courrier de Provence and other periodicals increasingly referred to the “côté gauche de la salle” (left side of the hall) to denote the “Revolutionary” party.

But something special happened on the eleventh of September of that year, 1789. No, nothing to do with jihad. That came to France much later. What happened on September 11, 1789, was the beginning of the “No Kings” movement in France.

Now, in the same year, on on March 4, 1789, after nine American states ratified it, the U.S Constitution officially took effect. The people of the United States of America had decided there would be no kings in the USA. That was a done deal, way back then, no matter whatever the rogue Woke folks try to convince you about the title of their arch-enemy and bogeyman, Donald Trump. He is only President, not a monarch, limited by checks and balances which still have teeth, even of he tests those limits.

In France, however, the “No Kings” movement began a little over 190 days after the American Constitution, when the French National Assembly voted 673 to 325 in favor of granting the king a suspensive veto, a political compromise between an absolute Royal Veto and no veto at all. This centrist compromise prevailed. His Majesty could temporarily block legislation with a time-limited veto. It was the French equivalent of a low-tech filibuster.

More important than the veto thing was this: The debate and vote solidified the physical and ideological seating arrangements in the assembly hall: deputies opposing an absolute veto (reformers and radicals favoring limits on royal power) clustered on the president’s left, while those supporting stronger monarchical powers (loyalists and conservatives) sat on the right. This accidental division—initially practical but stark during the September 11 vote—gave rise to the modern political terms “left” and “right.”

What came after, concerning the No Kings phhenomenon, broke down into three factions: the No Kings folks like us Americans, the Constitutional Monarchs, like that Charles guy in the UK, and the Absolute Monarchs.

Absolute monarchs? Are there any left on Planet Earth?

As it turns out, there are absolute monarchs, including none other than the King of our partner for peace Saudi Arabia, whose name is Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. There is also a place called Eswatini which has an absolute monarch; it seems the others prefer titles such as Sultan and, according to that bastion of political objectivity, Wikipedia, Pope.

However, kings, sultans, and popes to the contrary notwithstanding, the vote for suspended veto in France will live in history, and perhaps even in infamy because…

There will always be a “Left,” which in and of itself, is not necessarily be a bad thing (more about that in a future Substack post), but that “Left” for as long as it lasts, which might be forever, will always go rogue.

I just asked Siri to play something I’d like. She actually did play a lot of songs I like, and just a few minutes ago she played Send in the Clowns, the 1970’s Judy Collins version, which I remember from back then. When she sang the line, “Don’t bother, they’re here,” I realized that the songwriter, one Stephen Sondheim, had stumbled across a five-word abbreviation for everything that is going on in January of 2026, on the planet we call Earth.

Curious where the song came from, it turns out it was a Broadway musical called A Little Night Music, based on Smiles of a Summer Night, a film by Ingmar Bergman. I had never heard of the musical, and I never saw the film, but clowns, yes. I knew all about clowns, and I knew that indeed, they were already here.

The thing about clowns is that they’re supposed to be funny. You’re supposed to laugh at them. The kind of clowns that are already here are not easy to laugh at. Hamas being blown away if it does not disarm? That’s what the President of the United States of America is promising, according to the Saudi Arabian state-owned international Arabic-language television news channel Al Arabiya. Ha, ha. Greenland? Need I post links? It’s not easy being green. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

But before I start getting serious about the clowns, I’ll tell two jokes. One is Jewish, the other Soviet Russian. Jews and Soviet Russians are very good at laughing at the kind of clowns that aren’t really funny.

1. An old Jewish grandma is watching her infant grandson crawling on the beach when a rogue wave sweeps over him and carries him off to sea. Terrified, the old lady looks to the heaven and utters, “Dear God, I haven’t been very loyal to you over the years, I know, but now I need your help. I’m begging you with all my heart, please return my grandson to me.” There is a sudden eerie stillness, and after a pause, another wave sweeps up in the beach, bearing the grandson, laughing and crawling along the sand. Another pause, and again the old lady turns her eyes heavenward, and whispers, “He had a hat.”

Did you like that one? Are you ready for the Soviet Russian joke?

1. Two Soviet Russians have been waiting in line for hours at the government-run meat market for their weekly allotment of ground chuck. One of them suddenly explodes in rage: “That’s it! I can’t take this any more. I’m going to shoot Stalin!” He runs off, but fifteen minutes later, he returns to the meat market line. “What happened?” He answers: “That line was even longer than this one.”

Okay, enough laughs for now. Let’s get serious about the clowns already being here.

It has to do with technology. Specifically, thermonuclear weapons, social media, and machine learning, which is normally repackaged as “artificial intelligence.”

Back in the 20th Century, if you were a nation with a nuclear arsenal, you could threaten, at the very worst, “mutually assured destruction.” Do what we say, or we will destroy all life on earth.

By the time that social media became available, the world realized that “mutually assured destruction” wasn’t very cool, so they came up with tweets and memes and fact checkers and blocking and banning so that human beings could blow off steam while their governments and NGO’s and International Communities and New World Orders and People’s Democratic Republics, and Islamic Republics could still throw their weight around without being quite as scary as, say, a Cuban Missile Crisis.

That worked for a while, but AI souped it all up. Social Media on steroids, essentially. Not real steroids. Worse. Fake steroids, delivering fake news: deepfakes, hyperreality, the Blue Pill. The PlanScamDemic.

That’s when the clown car rolls into the main ring of a three-ring circus. However, the Big Top with AI-driven social media is not limited to three rings: it’s an n-ring circus, where n is a number the crowd picks. Or better yet, it’s an x-ring circus, where x is the unknown number. (It’s also the name of a social media platform. Ha, ha.)

And that’s where the President of the United States of American enters the picture. Adolf Hitler? Winston Churchill? Julius Caesar? The Prince of Darkness?

None of the above. Donald Trump is the Great Ringmaster of the Circus of Planet Earth.

Let me ask Grok what a ringmaster actually does in a circus… I haven’t done that yet. How far off the mark am I?

Primary Role: The ringmaster’s main job is to introduce each act to the audience with energy and flair, building excitement and guiding the crowd’s attention. They announce performers, describe upcoming spectacles (often in dramatic, hype-building language), and keep the show flowing smoothly from one act to the next.

In short: the ringmaster is the voice, energy, and personality of the circus — part announcer, part hype-person, part conductor of wonder. They’re there to make sure the magic feels seamless and unforgettable! 🎪

Now, how are things going in Davos?

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha…

On March 20, 2003, the President of the Republic of Iraq, one Saddam Hussein, was believed by the CIA to be at a site called Dora Farms. US President George W. Bush ordered a Tomahawk missile attack on that site. The site was attacked, but Saddam, in fact, was not there.

The regime change did not occur until the 9th of the following month, when Saddam’s statue was pulled down in Baghdad’s Firdos Square. Saddam himself survived for a few years until he was executed by hanging on December 30, 2006 on orders of the new US-backed Iraqi government.

Critics of the Bush Presidency, and there has been no shortage of them, have sneered that the whole military operation was actually about access to petroleum resources, and to American desire to gain control of them via regime change.

In 2003, Saudi Arabia had the control over the largest quantity of petroleum resources, with Iran at number two, and Iraq at number three. President Bush, for reasons known to him, and subject to educated guesswork for the rest of us, obviously picked number three on the list as his target for regime change.

But why bring up old memories of old wars? Why? Because a well-know Jewish holiday is coming up at sundown on December 14, 2025, which really is about oil and regime change in the Middle East.

Does this mean that I equate Hanukkah with the Bush presidency and the Bush foreign policy? Heavens, no! Quite the opposite. My point here is that even though President Bush may have stirred up a Neocon hornet’s nest, there have been times when it was necessary to fight a war for Oil and Regime Change in the Middle East. I look forward to celebrating Hanukkah and urge everyone, Jewish and otherwise, to join in on the celebration.

Let’s start with the oil, and then move on to the regime change. The oil which is celebrated during the eight days of Hanukkah is not petroleum or any of its byproducts, but olive oil.

The reason that olive oil is important to Jews and Christians is that in the Bible, Exodus 25 contains God’s instructions to Moses for constructing the Tabernacle furnishings, with verses 31–40 specifically describing the menorah (lampstand or candelabrum). The ancient Temple Menorah (and early Hanukkah lights) exclusively used olive oil lamps with wicks, as described in biblical sources (e.g., Exodus 25) and the Hanukkah miracle itself.

The miracle celebrated at Hanukkah was that only a one-day supply of oil had been found in the Temple after the regime change, yet it burned in the Menorah for eight days.

But what about the regime change, and why was it needed? Like all regime changes, it’s complicated, but I hereby endeavor boldly to unravel it.

After Alexander the Great conquered the old Persian Empire, Greek culture ruled the Middle East, with the land of Israel at a pivotal point near the middle, north of Egypt, and one-third of the way east from Greece to India. Centuries after Alexander, the descendants of his generals still ruled what remained of his vast Hellenized empire.

The recapture of Jerusalem by the Maccabees and the rededication of the Second Temple took place in December 164 BCE (on the 25th of Kislev in the Hebrew calendar, corresponding to the origin of Hanukkah, which in fact, means dedication, and is closely related to the modern Hebrew word hinukh, חִנּוּךְ meaning education.)

What led the Maccabees to change the regime? Two factors, it seems. The first was that the Greek leader was nervous, impulsive, and made bad decisions, gaining him the reputation for being unsound of mind.

The second is more pertinent to the world in December of 2025: the urge, on the part of some corrupt individuals, to foist a single culture upon all inhabitants of the known world, and to eliminate all the others.

At the time, the Jews of Israel had a mixed culture, part Jewish and part Greek. The Maccabees themselves didn’t speak Hebrew, except for religious rituals, but Aramaic, the same language spoken by Jesus 170 years later. The corrupt “globalist” manipulators, including some Jews, convinced the reigning Greek leader to force everyone to conform to the local version of Greek culture, with naked sports events in gymnasiums. This plan went over the top when the Jewish High Priest of the Temple, one Jason, approved the worship of Zeus in the temple, and the sacrifice of pigs. That’s pork, folks, and it’s not kosher. Even Muslims don’t eat it.

The unexpected, but now celebrated result: regime change.

Having been born and raised in the United States of America, I am a fan of another regime change which began on July 4, 1776, and became decisive on October 19, 1781 with the British surrender at the Battle of Yorktown.

Back on the first Hanukkah, the Maccabees had no idea of a revolution on the American continent, or even the existence of an American continent, but they did know the Bible, that is the Old Testament, in which Leviticus 25:10 reads, in English translation:

And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.

As old-time Americans like me know, part of that Bible passage was inscribed on a bell known as the Liberty Bell, which is still there, in Philadelphia.

Happy Hanukkah!

My favorite robot just told me…

When people say something “violates the Geneva Convention,” they almost always mean the 1949 Conventions + 1977 Protocols, especially the rules on civilians, prisoners, or prohibited weapons/methods (e.g., no torture, no targeting hospitals, no starvation as a method of warfare). In short: The Geneva Conventions are the world’s most successful attempt to put moral and legal limits on how brutally humans are allowed to treat one another even during war — and remarkably, they are almost universally accepted.

Why did I ask? Very recently there was a big political kerfuffle about attacks on an allegedly drug-running “fast boat” from Venezuela, as to whether it was moral and or legal to attack the boat, and to attack it and/or its crew more than once. Ultimately, the question, at least in my mind, was whether the nature of the attack and the attacked seagoing vessel violated the Geneva Convention.

Now without question, the attack on the alleged drug-running boat from Venezuela might have or might have not been what is now called “kinetic warfare,” also known as “killing people and breaking things.” Yes, it was kinetic, but was it warfare or just law enforcement?

The good folks in Hiroshima, Dresden, and Volgograd (formerly known as Stalingrad) can tell you all about kinetic warfare.

But let’s face it, although kinetic warfare is the only kind that breaks things and kills people, in the month and year that I am writing this, Planet Earth is involved in a kind of warfare which dwarfs kinetic operations. It is going on 24/7 and what you are reading right now, if you are reading it online, is brought to you by one of the big guns of the Propaganda war: social media.

The same robot pal o’ mine that I mentioned earlier told me this just now:

The term “propaganda war” first appeared in print in English in 1918, during the final year of World War I. This timing aligns with the wartime explosion in awareness and discussion of systematic propaganda efforts by all belligerents (especially after the U.S. entered the war in 1917 and created bodies like the Committee on Public Information).

However, in 2025, the Propaganda War is global— essentially World War Three— whereas the kinetic operations of that war are localized to places like Gaza, Ukraine, and wherever Antifa hangs its hoodie.

And so, I hereby proclaim (you read the title, right?) we need A Geneva Convention for Propaganda Warfare: to be precise, a successful attempt to put moral and legal limits on how brutally humans are allowed to treat one another even during Propaganda War.

The debates about such a hypothetical “Geneva Convention” are actually going on right now.

There are those, for example, who debate the morality and legality of propaganda which besmirches the reputation of certain historical figures revered by religions. Is it okay, for example, to say nasty things about Jesus of Nazareth? How about Siddharta Gautama, known to some as the Buddha? But there are folks who worship Satan? Can their deity be bad-mouthed without violating the terms of the new, updated Geneva Convention? And, of course, there’s that middle-eastern prophet— what was his name? It begins with an M, I think. The folks at the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in Denmark can fill you in on the details.

And then, of course, there’s the Freedom of Speech thing. Very American, ‘tis said. If the new Geneva Convention for Propaganda Warfare permits freedom of speech, than everything that is speech falls within the moral and legal limits on how brutally humans are allowed to treat one another during Propaganda War. Go ahead— call Donald Trump a fascist. Go ahead— let Elon Musk post whatever he wants on X in the EU without being fined a penny.

How about Jew-bashing? How about posting the entire Protocols of the Elders of Zion on The Bulwark? That’s freedom of speech, isn’t it? (Have they done that yet? I don’t have a Bulwark account.)

And then, there’s the issue of exactly what is speech. Sure, if you say it with your mouth, then it’s definitely speech. Let’s say, you’re in a bar, and there’s a big drunk sitting on the next stool being obnoxious, so you tell him to engage in a loving sexual embrace with his mother. You have the right to do that in the USA, guaranteed by the First Amendment, and he does not have the right to lay his hands or feet on your person or on your bar stool. That’s right. Freedom of Speech.

However, once your opinion comes expressed, not by your mouth, but by some kind of electronic medium, is that still speech? The EU, of course, would say no, so it seems, but Europe never believed in Freedom of Speech anyhow. Or did they?

I have it on good authority that in 1789 France, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Article 11, proclaimed: “The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom...” So, I assume, anyone in Paris can communicate criticism of that aforesaid middle-eastern prophet M and be protected with the full force of the gendarmerie of the République.

What what about the USA? Does the First Amendment allow the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces to call Somalis “garbage?” Sure, in Djibouti or Eritrea, have at it. Knock yourself out. But what if you’re the President of the United States of America, and you make it clear that not all Somalis are garbage, just the ones who marry their brother and then get put on Congress by “Democrats,” are you still covered by the First Amendment?

Obviously such issues will have to be hammered out at the first meeting of the Geneva Convention for Propaganda Warfare. As chairman of that meeting, I now declare it open. On social media, of course.

The very first order of business is the question of who will be allowed to attend the new Convention. You might respond with comments, but be aware that I will maintain the highest level of decorum. If you insult me, I will mute you. I might even block you.

Yes.

Block you.

Why do we feel so bad? There’s no kinetic world war, for most humans food is abundant, and we can raise our children and grandchildren with some kind of access to education. Nevertheless, the sense of disaster is everywhere.

Why?

Is it technology? Is living off the grid the answer? Discarding all out electronic devices?

I say no. I say the problem is something I call the information tsunami.

Tsunami, being a Japanese word, refers to the threat of a huge ocean wave destroying life on the edge of an island. Japan, being a nation of islanders, feels the threat of being overwhelmed by such waves, and had the compelling need to create a word which has now been absorbed into the Global Village vocabulary.

But the waves which overwhelm us are not waves of water but another thing essential to human life: information.

What’s changed? From word of mouth, to “jungle” drums (the original wireless) to written messages to radio, television, and social media, humans are constantly improving their methods of communicating information.

Improving? That’s what I just wrote. Improving in the sense of more and faster.

But as Goldilocks might tell us, sometimes the porridge is too hot, and we are certainly now writhing painfully in a cauldron of much-too-hot information porridge.

Why does it feel too hot? As an old-timer I think it’s obvious. I remember when we could get the news from newspapers, radios, and TV’s, and then decide whether the news we’d get was believeable or not. We’d shrug and get ready for the next day or whatever was coming before bedtime.

Now the information comes so fast that there’s hardly enough time to decide for ourselves. Is the information we are getting true? Is there really such a thing as truth? Is the information based on scientific fact? But if there is no such thing as truth how can there be scientific fact? That would not be logical. But is logic a deceptive weapon deployed by toxic patriarchal males?

And now we consider the colors. How blue is the latest piece of information? How red? How green?

Think of red, blue, and green. When I was a kid, those were fun colors. I had red, blue, and green crayons. In fact, I had crayons all the colors of the rainbow.

Now, think of something red; something blue; something that’s green; something that’s not green; all the colors of the rainbow; a flag that’s all the colors of the rainbow.

Are you feeling nausea yet? Maybe you want to throw up.

And it’s just colors.

Yes, colors now make us sick.

And speaking of sickness, there was that bat virus that came from the wet market. Or was it pangolins? And it was deadly, killing millions (was it billions?) of humans until they came up with the vaccines that saved humanity, except maybe they didn’t actually work, but no problem because masks worked, or maybe two masks, but not cloth masks, N-95, or maybe masks don’t work at all because the particles are too small.

Information tsunami. Now that COVID is over (or not), there are other threats. Mpox? Worse! ICE. Right-wing extremists. Jews. Elon Musk. Christian nationalists. Nick Fuentes. Incels. Toxic masculinity. That frog… what’s its name? They keep changing the frog name.

Trigger warning: this Substack post could make you sick. Yes, I should have put it at the beginning of the article, but then maybe nobody would have read it.

Maybe nobody will read it anyhow.

And then there’s AI, which I consider to be a technology of mechanical parrots. Some parrots say they want a cracker. Others spout profanity. Others have hallucinations. Some do all three.

So what do we do about it? Get rid of our technology? Well, if we did that, we’d get rid of how we can find out what we can do about it.

My answer to the what do we do about it question is hygiene. It doesn’t take money or genius to have hygiene. Your cat has hygiene. Your cat knows what to lick and when to lick and how long to lick.

In this case, what is needed is informational hygiene. It’s also about licking, but mostly about what not to lick and when not to lick it. When not to lap it up. When not to suck, if you don’t want to get played for a sucker. Especially don’t suck up anything that sucks.

I know, it’s hard. “Democrats” are good, right? Adlai Stevenson? Barack Hussein Obama? Joe Biden? For some of us it’s hard to step away and be cancelled for being a right-wing extremist or a racist or a Trump supporter or someone who bought a Tesla after Bill Gates decided that Global Warming is not such a threat after all.

Yes, life is still hard. It always was. In the past, it was mostly about having to use muscle. For many of us (actually still a minority) it’s not muscle any more. It’s brains. Use it or lose it.

Today happens to be election day. Much is going to be revealed today, when it comes to the brain:

Specifically, who has used it, and who has lost it.

Note: it’s not Election Day any more when this got published. Oh, well.

How much have you read lately about the Global Jew-Hatred Alliance? A lot, probably. In fact, most of the so-called international political news is all about the Global Jew-Hatred Alliance. However, when you read the so-called international political news the chances are almost zero that the name of the Global Jew-Hatred Alliance is actually mentioned. Why? Because you’re not supposed to think about the fact that it’s global, that it is based on Jew-Hatred, or that it’s actually an alliance. What you are supposed to think about is that there is some kind of “international community” which is an oh-so-wonderful wave of the future, and that you, like everyone else on Planet Earth, are supposed to love that “international community.”

So, let’s start with the global thing. It’s all about the “globe,” the beautiful spinning blue ball on which we humans all live. Globe is good. And what, then, is bad? Nations are bad, you see. Why are nations bad? Because they divide up the globe. Now some nations are badder than others; Hungary and Argentina, for example are very bad. Afghanistan under the Taliban, and that “nation” known as the Palestinian State are not so bad as nations go. (Yes, I know that the so-called Palestinian State doesn’t exist, but existence or nonexistence is so old-think.)

In any case, there is one nation that you are supposed to think is the baddest of them all. I’ll get to that later.

So, globe is good, nation is bad, then let’s move on to Jew-Hatred. Jew-Hatred? What’s that? Well, you can read about it in a very long Wikipedia article, but be aware that it’s now called “antisemitism,” which is very unfair to the Semites who live in Semitic language-speaking countries. The most widely spoken Semitic language, by the way, is Arabic. After all, Semites are allowed to hate Jews too. Even Jewish Semites are allowed to hate Jews.

I know it’s a side issue, but why do Jew-Haters get called “antisemites?” It goes back to Adolf Hitler and his race theories. He believed that Jews belonged to a bad-guy race, which were the Semites, whereas he, Adolf, came from a good-guy race called Aryans, which, by the way, was the same race as the Iranians. Do Iranians hate Arabs, considering them a race of bad people? That’s a good question, but I won’t try to answer it today.

So now we get to the Alliance. Who are the allies in this alliance? Well, in this particular alliance we already know that they are for the Globe and against nations, and that they hate Jews. Is there something else we should know about this alliance?

I think there is. It goes back to what I wrote earlier about the badness of nations, and one nation in particular, which is the baddest of them all. That nation, the baddest of them all, is supposed to be the United States of America. That’s right. The good old USA. The good old USA is actually the bad old USA.

Why is that? If you’ve been reading the Mainstream Media lately, you already know: the USA is, of course, racist. And imperialist. And, the worst of all, capitalist.

Does a nation which is not only racist and imperialist, but also {shudder!} capitalist deserve to live on our allied Jew-hating globe? Of course not.

And that is where we get the Death to America movement named in the title of this Substack piece.

Yes, America must die.

Now, me, I disagree with all of that, and by some miracle, I am still allowed to say so on Substack. No, I don’t think America must die. No, I don’t hate Jews. No, I am not allied at all with the Death to America/Global Jew-Hatred Alliance/International Community. I am allied with other folks out there who actually like the USA (not necessarily all the things the USA has done) and who actually don’t hate Jews and who, while respecting the fact that Planet Earth has the right amount of gravity and oxygen in the atmosphere, and a nice temperature in some places during much of the year, Planet Earth is not ready for an alliance of Jew-Haters who hate nations, especially the USA.

Therefore, when it comes to the Global Jew-Hatred Alliance, whom the Mainstream Media call the “International Community,” I say this:

And when I say this, I am going to use the F-word. I know it’s fashionable to use the F-word, but it’s also crude and vulgar to use the F-word, especially in the presence of children, who should be protected from such things as the F-word and Drag Queen Story Hour.

So, here it goes, F-word and all:

Fie upon the Global Jew-Hatred Alliance and the Death to America Movement and the International Community!

No more Mr. Nice Guy. The gloves are off.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk by an apparent love-lorn homosexual who turned his back on his Mormon Utah parents, decided to go full Trantifa rogue, and shot Charlie in the neck, made sure that the whole world would change. Turning Point indeed. Yes, it was a turning point.

But what does this happen to do with Hamburg, a German port city, which was destroyed in July-August 1943 by Allied bombing in an operation named after the fire and brimstone of the Biblical Gomorrah?

Everything.

Human beings have bickered since even before the Old Stone Age about how much revenge is the right amount of revenge.

Jesus, dying in agony on the Cross, apparently prayed, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”

But the Nazis apparently knew exactly what they were doing in July and August of 1943. Hamburg was a key industrial center, with factories producing armaments, machinery, and chemicals essential for the Nazi war machine. It housed facilities for oil refining, metalworking, and aircraft production, contributing significantly to Germany’s military capabilities.

And so, the name Operation Gomorrah was chosen by Air Marshal Arthur Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command, reflecting the intended scale of destruction and the moral judgment the Allies placed on Nazi Germany’s actions. The term evoked the idea of a cataclysmic, purifying fire, aligning with the operation’s goal of obliterating Hamburg’s infrastructure and morale through overwhelming force.

Or as we say a lot these days, F. A. F. O., which means, “fool around and find out,” or something like that.

But why you and me? Why are we all Hamburg now?

When Charlie Kirk was still alive, there was this “high road, low road thing.” People who called themselves “conservatives” didn’t want to stoop to the level of the “Progressives.” They preferred to invoke the “forgive them” prayer of the dying Jesus of Nazareth nailed to his Roman torture rack.

Well, that horse is out of the barn now. It’s “Operation Gomorrah” all the way down. You know. Like turtles.

So people who cheered the death of Charlie Kirk are getting fired. Some of them, that is. Oh, my! What is this world coming to?

But, of course, there is no guarantee that the ultra-pragmatist Donald Trump and his successors will be in power forever. After all, midterms, like “winter” in the Game of Thrones series, are coming. The Zohran Mamdani posse could get their mitts on the Nuclear Football. Then what?

Then we are all Hamburg, which is why I gave this Substack piece that title. Which is like saying we are all hamburger. Ground meat. Brought to American shores by Germans who sailed from Hamburg, first featured in fancy restaurants like Delmonicos as “Hamburger Steak,” then came the bun, and then the cheese, and then McDonald’s.

But are we ground meat? Will the haters enact yet one more apocalyptic act of revenge upon us poor Americans who would be great again? Wasn’t the so-called “election” of 2020 enough? Trump impeached twice, lawfared, and shot through the ear? Ashli Babbitt gunned down for crawling through a window?

Of course, they will try. They always do. And they might get away with more of their “democracy,” which is what “Democrats” and their pals in the European Union, and Hamas, and the “International Court of Justice” call it when they enact their own version of “Death to America.”

But we’ve been there before. We’ve been there at Valley Forge. We’ve been there at Antietam, and at Ford’s Theater, and at the Battle of the Bulge, and at Okinawa.

So, if we must all be Hamburg now, let’s put some special sauce on it.

I’m told that Joan Baez released her song La Llorona (The Weeping Woman) in 1974. That, by the way, was the year I got married. When I first heard the Weeping Woman song it haunted me; I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I still can’t, which is why I’m writing about it. It’s all about haunting, actually. I’m also writing about it because I’m beginning to believe that some version of La Llorona (the woman; not the song) is the Number 2 propaganda tool of the Wrong-Wing Extremists. The Number 1 Propaganda Tool of the Wrong-Wing Extremists is, as everyone reading this knows, is Trump Derangement Syndrome.

So who or what is this Llorona, where did she come from, and where is she going?

I can start by quoting the lyrics from an old, traditional version of the song, first in Spanish, then in English translation:

La pena y lo que no es pena, Llorona,
Todo es pena para mí,
La pena y lo que no es pena, Llorona,
Todo es pena para mí;

Pain, and that which isn’t pain, Llorona
For me everything is pain;
Pain, and that which isn’t pain, Llorona
For me everything is pain.

Wikipedia tells us, “La Llorona of the song drowned her children in a river in a rage at her unfaithful husband. As a spirit, she was condemned to wander the shores of the river forever searching for her dead children.”

Drowning her children in a river of rage… What kind of people would do something like that?

Although the Llorona of Joan Baez' song has an origin in Mexico, where her legend has apparently really caught on in the local culture where cartels and torture are still said to go on unchecked, the myth of a rageful, revengeful, child-murdering woman has roots in all cultures, including, of course, the antiheroine of Greek Tragedy, Medea.

Let us now fast forward to the second decade of the 21st Century, where La Llorona has made her death-dealing reappearance: first, the tears; then the revenge.

Why the tears? I was born male and will always remain a man in this life, so I can’t answer for women. At best as a father of two girls I can say that girls have to go through some very scary life changes. Of course, boys do too, such as (back in my youth) being drafted into military service; and still do in other parts of the world.

These days, as I understand it, girls are not drafted into military service, unless they are Israeli. But that’s another subject for another time.

The Wrong-Wing Extremists, however, have a handy list of reasons why girls and women should be crying, a list which I will abbreviate here:

1. Toxic masculinity

2. Patriarchy (rule by Daddies)

3. Men, lucky them, can’t have babies

4. Men have stronger upper bodies, which is no reason to keep them out of women’s sports or bathrooms if they change pronouns

5. Men are taught as boys not to cry even when they want to cry, which makes them bad people who hide their feelings

So, since we are all now swimming in a huge ocean of propaganda, propaganda of all kinds coming from all directions, what is the role of this Llorona propaganda?

For one thing, it might be especially effective with women, because it taps into any bad experiences they might have had with fathers, brothers, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, and husbands.

Secondly, it is the backup plan to the OrangeMan Bad TDS propaganda backbone of the Wrong-Wing Extremists, as more and more of the world’s individuals experience painful shocks of their own and realize that Mr. Trump by comparison is not really a threat, but in fact, a life raft in a stormy sea.

Thirdly, it deliberately degrades, defames, and demoralizes men and boys, which serves the purpose of weakening the formerly powerful West, including the American West, including Americans in general. (Of course, in lands where Sharia Law prevails, men and boys are not degraded, defamed, or demoralized, are they?)

But beyond that, let us not forget that the Llorona, in Mexican folklore as well as the tradition of Greek Tragedy and beyond (In Hindu tradition there is a Queen Ganga who drowns each of her seven babies one at a time) preaches another doctrine, the doctrine of antinatalism.

There are many versions of antinatalism. Perhaps the most prevalent in today’s media is the idea that there are too many people on Planet Earth. Yes, human habitats do compete with other animals, and with plants. Yes, human technology releases plastic and other chemical products into the waters. But the antinatalists propose radically anti-human solutions to such challenges.

And then, the Weeping Woman is given another reason to weep: in some places there are legal restrictions on her right to end her unwanted pregnancies, whatever their cause.

And there is, of course, some version of eugenics, a social movement to improve the quality of future humans by eliminating the undesirables and deplorables. In the early Twentieth Century, that meant the disabled, the “Negroes,” and (in Germany and German-occupied territory such as France and Poland) the Jews. In some places it still means the “Negroes” and the Jews.

Speaking of deplorables, my inner nerd wants to mention an interesting discovery in the land of word origins. There is a Latin word plorare meaning to cry over, to cry out loud, to lament, or to weep. Hillary Clinton’s notorious Basket of Deplorables remark, which she tried to walk back, revealed the true feelings of her political advocates concerning the supporters of Mr. Trump.

But, as my inner nerd is screaming to tell you, the Latin word plorare becomes in French, pleurer, meaning to cry; and in Spanish, llorar, also meaning to cry.

And that where La Llorona gets her name, and that’s why it’s high time to for us Deplorables to cry out and deplore all of that that Llorona propaganda.