Trump and RFK Jr. sneak attack underway to kill Obamacare

 https://peoplesworld.org/article/trump-and-rfk-jr-sneak-attack-underway-to-kill-obamacare/?emci=7cdb93cc-ec79-f011-b481-6045bdfe8e9c&emdi=5206ef00-ff79-f011-b481-6045bdfe8e9c&ceid=5664095

~~ recommended by loren bliss ~~

SitRep: Biden/Harris? Just More "Change We Can Believe In" ~~ Loren Bliss

SitRep: Biden/Harris? Just More "Change We Can Believe In"

MY APOLOGY FOR Dispatches' long silence.

Convinced there is no way to defeat our Neoliberal (Neonazi) Masters save by doing whataver may be necessary to survive their ongoing campaigns of exterminate-the-Working-Class ecogenocide -- the murderously weaponized profiteering by which they are replacing us with slaves and robots -- I have been trying since last November to find some new pathway for this blog. At that I may have succeeded; my new approach might be termed "speculative futurism" -- that is, if by some miracle we have any future at all. But its launch -- at present a collection of handwritten notes that fill two legal pads -- has been repeatedly delayed by the need to complete several more mundane projects I trust will be infinitely more useful to those who inherit my few possessions.

And now our relentlessly Neoliberal (Neonazi) politics, in the form of six exceptionally disturbing reports in the daily horror show of local, state, federal and global news, has added its own depressing taint: 

The Republican Party has Turned Fascist and is Now the Most Dangerous Threat in the World
So triumphs the (mostly clandestine) termination of USian democratic process our Masters began with the Wall Street Bankers' (quickly forgiven and forgotten) Plot c. 1929-1934 to turn the U.S. into an ally -- and more likely a colony -- of Nazi Germany.  

Supreme Court Rules Against Union Recruiting on California Farms
This completes the methodical murder of the USian labor movement begun by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1974.

With support of Biden, federal court backs Trump’s police-state assault on peaceful protests in Lafayette Square
A horror story accurately summarized by its headline.

Time to Say "You're Fired" to Merrick Garland?
See obvious reasons above.

Military Document Puts (All) Socialists in League With Neo-Nazis
In other words, any form of socialist organizing is to be made illegal.

Appearance Versus Essence: Biden is Stabilizing, Not Ending, Neoliberalism
As predicted, the "Democratic" (sic) Party is again functioning as the Republican Fifth Column.

Indeed the news has become so incessantly horrific, I -- a near-lifelong journalist -- radically reduced my reading of it after by some miracle (thank you Goddess!) we managed to get the Hitler-wannabe Trump and the WitchFinder-General-wannabe Pence at least temporarily out of the federal executive branch.

But since that deceptive "victory," it has become painfully obvious nothing of substance will change under the new regime -- that in hideous truth the only "change we can believe in" (exactly as under Barack the Betrayer) -- is that our Masters will continue to worsen our lives. 

And now we know the Democrats will do as they did before 2018 -- that is, everything possible to ensure the overt Nazis take full power in 2024.

*****

BECAUSE I AM fervently committed to de-politicizing Dispatches, I am also publishing here today a commentary from earlier this month, originally intended as the beginning of a preface to an introduction of the new Dispatches, but now revised for presentation here as what I hope will by my last purely political commentary ever. For when truth is shrunken to pearls before swine, when our Masters' Moronic Majority has been permanently conditioned to such moral imbecility it reflexively applauds atrocities as victories, then journalism is reduced to utter pointlessness, to naught but (another) exercise in skull-versus-boulder futility.  

Initially what I wrote was in favorable response to "A Kinder, Gentler US Empire Is Not Possible"; I sought to employ this exceptionally thought-provoking column by Caitlin Johnstone as the peg upon which to hang my withdrawal from political journalism. 

While I wholeheartedly agree with Ms. Johnstone’s hypothesis and salute her courage for daring express it,  I soon realized I must also respectfully suggest she has not taken it to it’s ultimately unavoidable conclusion, to wit: whether our Neoliberal (Neonazi) Masters have revealed themselves to be the sadistic moral imbeciles they truly are or remain closeted as Democrats and other pseudo-humanitarians, the ultimate lesson of human history is that all genuinely progressive movements -- that is, any truly humanitarian movement -- will be methodically destroyed at birth or as soon as possible afterward.

Note I am 81 years old, a near-lifelong Marxian formerly self-disguised by sometimes award-winning journalistic necessity, first as a "liberal Democrat" (until arson, almost certainly by federal agents, destroyed all my life's work in 1983); next as a "democratic socialist" (until the forcible retirement imposed by the ecogenocidal profiteering of '08-'09 cost me everything save a miserly Social Security pension and damned me to ever-deadlier poverty).  I am also a seasoned veteran of defeat: the (failed) post-Sputnik campaign to make USian K-12 brainwashing more like Euro/Soviet education and thus far less hostile to science, mathematics, the humanities and original thinking in general; the (failed) Civil Rights Movement; the (failed) Anti-Southeast Asian War Movement, which despite its innumerable lies to the contrary was pathetically immaterial to Vietnamese victory, won solely by the infinite courage of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese People's Liberation Army;  the (failed) Back-to-the-Land Movement; the (failed) Alternative Press Movement; and the (repeatedly failed) Labor Movement.

Though I voted for Obama twice -- votes I considered meaningless apart from their function in preserving the franchise -- by  2011 I had dubbed him "Barack the Betrayer" and had recognized his “change we can believe in” as the greatest Big Lie of political betrayal in USian presidential history; during that same period of enlightenment I was repeatedly booted in the metaphorical gonads by the irrefutable and therefore terrifying technological truth our ever-worsening circumstances are now so universal they have become inescapable save by death -- precisely as our Masters intend.

Thus, recognizing I truly had nothing left to lose, I joined the earliest Tacoma-activist ranks of the (failed) Occupy uprising, at the same time publicly acknowledging the Communist-at-heart I had secretly been at least since the murderous aftermath of the coup of 22 November 1963 proved to me our species' one and only genuinely humanitarian alternative was a definitively transitional Dictatorship by the Proletariat -- a true reformation now rendered forever impossible by the defeat of the Soviet Union.  

I was also an early activist in the (failed) Tacoma $15 Now Movement, though worsening health forced me to drop out several months before its defeat by the already reliably subjugated voters.

Yet even then I moronically retained just a bit of hopefulness.

But now after living through the cunningly disguised but effectively genocidal Neoliberal weaponization of the first 18 or so months of the Covid-19 pandemic, I can no longer doubt all is lost, certainly for modern society. In which context the entire global space-race becomes nothing more than an all-time epic of colossal propaganda and obscenely costly psychological warfare intended to maintain the cult of compulsory optimism. How? By distracting us from the ever-more-undeniable reality of an apocalypse already well underway – and most likely fatal to our entire species.

Why – or perhaps how – have I at last achieved some semblance of intellectual realism?

More appropriately, what enabled me to escape what Chris Hedges aptly terms the "curse" of optimism?

I escaped because anyone who recognizes the terminal magnitude of patriarchal technology also understands there is no power on this planet capable of overcoming our Masters' wealth-sustained (and therefore eternally unbreakable) monopolies on the technologies of universal surveillance and thermonuclear terror.

In societal reaction to which – or so I strongly suspect – our burgeoning belief in “space aliens” is most likely nothing more than the military-technology-fostered 21st Century reinforcement of our self-destructive dependence on adult versions of the Santa-Claus myth, specifically the variously named patriarchal god of both the socioeconomically suicidal belief in the biological absurdity called “eternal life” and the maximized ecogenocidal malevolence of a misogyny that in its apocalyptic ejaculations of clitoris-envy damns all femaleness from our Mother Earth’s to that of our planet’s smallest distinctively gendered creatures.

It is a bit of an aside, but in psychological truth the Christmas Santa is our starter-god; he introduces us to the same terror that defines not only the globally dominant patriarchal god Yahweh/Jesu/Allah, but also all the planet’s governments assembled – whether knowingly or not – using the YJA biblical Erector-set: “he sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake; he knows if you’ve been bad or good; obey or burn at the stake.” In other words, it’s the same enslave-the-Working-Class scam whether invoked as Santa or Jesus or any other allegedly “divine” (and therefore “infallible”) would-be “savior.”

If space aliens exist, our own species' history should tell us they are undoubtedly here as conquerors – which perhaps in our species’ final moments will end forever the greatest deception of all human history, the ultimate Big Lie “the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.” To those of us who actually know history, the truth is of course the diametrical opposite: if there is any moral arc at all, what it bends toward is ever-more-technologically enhanced – and therefore ever more inescapable – ecogenocidal tyranny.

Proof? Look how our capitalist Masters warred against the Soviet Union until it was finally destroyed by the dark undertow of the very Russian history it had sought so fervently to transform. Yet even now 64 percent of the former Soviet population tells pollsters their lives were far better when they were governed by Marxism. Ditto for the former East Germans. (Note that Foreign Policy is a Ruling Class publication, hence -- because our Masters require accurate intelligence if they are to maintain their methods of oppression at peak efficiency -- it is allowed to be a  bit more truthful in its [still-obviously biased] reporting.)

In any case, what our Masters did to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its Warsaw Pact allies proves that if any genuine (i.e. truly ecohumanitarian) revolution were to occur anywhere, it will be crushed. Remember not just the murdered Karen Silkwood but the murdered Kennedy brothers and the government-murdered victims at Chicago (Fred Hampton and Mark Clark); at Kent State University (Allison Beth Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, William Knox Schroeder and let us not forget Dean Kahler, whose life was destroyed by the  permanent paralysis inflicted by a single round of .30-caliber M2 Ball through the spine); and at Jackson State College (Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green).

But those atrocities only hint at the horrors of our now inevitable future. For had the Soviet revolutionaries been long-term disciplined enough to perpetuate their ideology not only by successfully resisting invasion, infiltration and  disinformation, but by defeating co-optation and its backup SOPs (standing operating procedures) of arrest, torture, murder and political assassination of all true progressives -- our Masters’ new Final Solution was already in their arsenals. This is the Neutron Bomb, designed specifically to exterminate hostile or rebellious populations without damaging infrastructure (gold teeth included) or reducing its post-holocaust value as loot – ever the material wealth of capitalism and its euphemism-cloaked empires.

As to the too-rapidly mutating Covid-19, I must confess it increasingly seems to me its three most plausibly deniable alternatives are (1)--the Jackson Browne/Gaia Hypothesis alternative, the punitive anger of our Mother Earth, let us hope not (yet) in terminal fulfillment of JB’s ever-more-obviously prophetic vision of “the magnitude of her fury in the final hour”; (2)--the Biblical alternative, i.e., self-imposed apocalypse by deliberate or (allegedly) accidental release and/or by any and all of the (other) diabolical forms divinely imaginable; or (3)--the space-alien bio-weapon hypothesis many humans sense but too few of us dare speak aloud, certainly not as fact but just as certainly, given UFOs, as another intuitively obvious possibility we must therefore publicly consider.

Whatever obtains, it is scarcely more than a distraction now that our downward momentum has become irreversible. Whether in service to their own moral imbecility, as puppets of extraterrestrial conquerors or in some unspeakably repugnant combination of both evils, our Neoliberal Masters have already created the intentionally addictive technologies of tyranny that doom us all, exactly as prophesied by the darkest science fiction. Worse, they have weaponized their technology into the instrument of our ultimate self-betrayal, the now-inescapable shackles of limitless surveillance falsely peddled and gullibly embraced as a technology of human bonding. With the flawed but nevertheless Working-Class-exemplary Soviet Union gone forever and China permanently reduced to a slave-state capitalism indistinguishable in its ecogenocidal sadism from that of the avowed Neoliberalism that rules the rest of this planet, I cannot doubt all is truly lost.

Yet resistance remains vital to ourselves and to our offspring and to theirs and thus to the sustenance of human spirit, yes even and most especially now when any hope for betterment or promise of rescue is banished by our ever-more-obvious subjugation, and the sci-fi prophecy of "resistance is futile” has in fearsome fact become the one pivotal truth of all our lives -- which means survival itself may soon be our sole remaining possibility for revolutionary defiance.

LB/14-23 June 2021

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Backstabber Biden Denying At Least 30 Million Desperately Poor Pensioners Our Promised $1400 Stipends, Confirming Democrats' Continued Function as Republican Fifth Column

In Yet Another Epic Betrayal, Forcible-Disarmament-Fanatic Joe Has Sneakily Renewed His Opposition to Legalized Marijuana -- Probably to Radically Intensify Prosecutions of Otherwise Lawful Gun Owners 

THANKS TO A pair of sources --  The Stand, Washington State Labor Council's excellent on-line daily, plus a much-appreciated news tip from fellow journalist William Boardman -- we now have our clearest-yet sense of the hatred and contempt that unites the "Democratic" (sic) and Republican parties in the ecogenocidal solidarity of their Neoliberal (Neonazi) war against U.S. Working Families and the global Working Class in general:  

• The Stand tells us President Joseph Biden's ongoing "bipartisan" collaboration with the Trumpists who have sabotaged the Social Security Administration and the VA is the reason at least 40 million of us may not get our $1400 "stimulus" checks until 31 December -- if even then.  
• And Mr. Boardman's tip -- for which again my gratitude --  tells us the Biden Regime is already betraying the huge majorities of the imperial homeland's adult citizens who stupidly believed the Democrats' Big Lie a Biden/Harris victory would legalize marijuana.

These are among the most damning proofs yet the "Democratic" (sic) Party has reverted to its post-JFK function as  the Republican Party's Neoliberal (Neonazi) Fifth Column.

And, of course,  the Mainstream Media Propaganda Machine, the world's first privately owned, for-profit version of Josef Goebbels' infamous Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, is protecting the Democrats by suppressing the story --  or at the very least, sugar-coating it with the nauseatingly fecal propaganda routinely excreted in service to the Moronic Majority's cult of mandatory optimism.

Again demonstrating our fatal lack of a genuine Left, nearly all the so-called "alternative" media is doing likewise.

Hence our two courageous sources have provided genuinely revealing information:

Firstly. as you probably know, many Republicans and at least a few of their "Democratic" (sic) Fifth Column co-conspirators sadistically wanted to  deny -- say again DENY-- stimulus checks to any of us whose sole sources of income are the murderously miserly welfare, Social Security or veterans' stipends that define us as unexploitable for profit, too impoverished to be liable for income taxes and therefore -- in the merciless Ayn Randified eyes of our Neoliberal Masters -- as "life unworthy of life."¹

Why withhold the money? Obviously, it's another aspect of our Masters' Final Solution to the problem of overpopulation by those of us who are hopelessly poor: the longer we are denied our $1400, the more acute our anxiety. More of us will therefore sicken and die -- which of course leaves more money for the Empire's  Neoliberal (Neonazi)  owners and their political marionettes. 

Moreover the Democrats and their Republican co-conspirators have sneakily given the SS and VA bureaucracies until 31 December 2021 to make the payments² -- obviously to further  maximize the Covid19 death toll.³

Secondly, apropos  the "Democratic" (sic) Party's resumption of opposition to legalized marijuana, as an analytically minded  member of the Second Amendment community's hard-Left faction, I saw this coming years ago. The fact marijuana is legal prescription medicine in a growing number of states is federally meaningless -- and as Biden now demonstrates, so it shall remain.

Why? Because any firearms owner who merely draws a breath of air containing marijuana smoke will urine-test positive for drug use and is therefore subject not only to confiscatory forcible disarmament, but to ten years' slave labor on the for-profit prisoner plantations that despite Biden's deceptions continue to expand, amassing profits comparable to those extracted by antebellum slave owners.

Hence anyone who believed Biden/Harris would legalize pot or end for-profit prison slavery was either hopelessly naive or more typically a member of the Moronic Majority, a useful idiot brainwarped by the Ruling Class and thus totally oblivious to the fact our Masters intend to completely disarm us -- to reduce us literally to mandatory pacifism and compulsory victimhood -- the latest expression of their fear our hopelessly dumbed-down brains might someday figure out how to foment a (real) revolution.

Doubt me? Note that some forcible-disarmament fanatics are already calling for mandatory monthly drug tests and annual psych evaluations for all firearms owners -- millions more dollars for the for-profit medical predators, with firearms ownership by us poor folk permanently prohibited by these proposed additional costs.

Thirdly, behind his cloak of Big Lies, disinformation and euphemisms,  Biden is obviously just another example of "change we can believe in,"  different from the Trumpite version mainly in the extent to which Biden hides Neoliberalism's Neonazi agenda -- Trump's premature disclosures of which separated our Masters into at least two mutually hostile factions and ensured Trump's loss in last November's election.⁵

How then did the "Democratic" (sic) Party become the Republican Fifth Column it is today? My journalistic guess is the Democrats were terminally compromised by their collaboration with the Republicans in the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the still furiously controversial deceptions necessary to hide the Ruling Class coup of 22 November 1963 -- its reality since proven by the now-irremediable (boiled-frog) imposition of Neoliberal Neonazism.⁴

Perhaps the most pivotal lesson I've been taught by Moron Nation is that investigative journalism is utterly pointless -- that too many of whatever small percentage of the population has retained the ability to read with comprehension has also been reduced to such submissive moral imbecility they are genetically incapable of feeling the empathy or concerns essential to humanitarian action.

In other words, in the psychological sense -- regardless of race or gender -- they are already naught but slaves.

All of which thrusts me ever closer to concluding there truly is no hope for us -- not for ourselves, our nation, our species, our Mother Earth.
___________________________

¹"Life Unworthy of Life" is the English translation of the phrase by which the German Nazis condemned elderly or disabled people to death for being unprofitable -- an ultimate example of the criminalization of poverty that has become so popular amongst U.S. politicians.

²HR1319, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, is among the most infuriatingly censored legislative packages ever enacted by Congress, which is why most of us remain unaware its Ayn-Rand-minded authors gave the federal bureaucracy nearly a year -- specifically until 31 December 2021 -- to send us our $1400 relief payments. Scroll to Page 137, "Timing and Manner of Payments...No refund or credit shall be made or allowed under this subsection after December 31, 2021." This is the most outrageously tolerant approval of bureaucratic obstructionism I have ever encountered.  

³Apropos the viciously extended disbursement deadline, I turn 81 on 30 March; even fully vaccinated -- I go off quarantine at midnight --  my comorbidities may not let me live long enough to see the now indefinitely delayed $1400 -- and the same applies to anyone like me. Obviously, this is no accident; its potentially deadly anxieties are precisely what our Masters intend -- another atrocity in their ever-more-lethal criminalization of poverty.

⁴Though it is seldom recognized as such, neoliberalism is the most toxic variant of Nazism to emerge thus far. Note the identical, might-makes-right ethos of absolute moral imbecility promulgated both by Hitler in Mein Kampf and by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged. Indeed, Neoliberalism's submit-to-capitalism-or-die mandate expresses the same submit-to-the-übermenschen-or-die ruthlessness of Nazism's German founders; the differences between the two are thus more illusory than real. Rather than requiring an individual tyrant, Neoliberalism crowns the corporate aristocracy  as our species' divinely ordained, absolute-power ruler; building on Josef Goebbels' methodological foundation, it achieves its intended tyrannies by the most compelling psychological warfare ever unleashed against our species and  -- cunningly exploiting the induced ignorance of Moron Nation -- by other methods far more readily concealable than the German Nazi agenda of military conquests, death camps and Zyklon B. It does so by glorifying Ayn Rand's sociopathy and by weaponizing disaster, pollution and disease to eradicate the few remnants of democratic process and reduce the Working Class to inescapable forms of modern slavery. Given the many variants of fascism that have reduced what was originally a proper noun to a lower-case generic, I propose doing likewise with Nazism. This gives us neonazism (or nazism) as more emotionally accurate description of what we now label "fascism," its lower-case forms the correct spelling for all "nazi" references save to the Third Reich's N.S.D.A.P., the original Nazi Party, which should of course still be capitalized accordingly.

⁵Is Trump down for the proverbial count? I fear not. I have no doubt whatever non-nazified historians might abide in the future -- that is, if we somehow manage to seize ourselves a future -- will define the nazis' 6 January 2021 uprising as eerily equivalent to Hitler's 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch. Obviously I cannot predict what measures the U.S. nazis will next attempt. But I am absolutely certain we the people of these helplessly (dis)United States no longer collectively possess the empathy, integrity, knowledge, skill, determination, solidarity-- and most of all the titanium-ovaried, brass-testicled courage -- necessary to defeat (any) nazi onslaught. We saw these requisites demonstrated by the Soviet people, as many as 43 million of whom died saving us all from Hitler and his allies, but alas I cannot imagine such capability in the present-day United States. Goddess grant this time my usually accurate pessimism is flat out wrong.  

LB/27 March 2021

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Lerro on the Need for Ritual: a Pivotal Work, Dare We Heed It ~~ Loren Bliss

By LOREN BLISS
Dispatches from Dystopia

FAR MORE SUCCINCTLY than I have ever seen it explained elsewhere¹, Bruce Lerro has described in an exceptionally thought-provoking, unusually well-crafted² essay just how it is we might recapture and wield -- this time for the preservation of our species and the protection of our Mother Earth -- the psychologically transformative  power inherent in ritual. 

His point is that if we are to transcend our self-inflicted apocalypse, we must rediscover and reclaim that power for ourselves, thus giving ourselves psychological-warfare weaponry at least as potent as the psywar weapons our enemies now routinely wield against us. 

The piece in question is entitled "The Power of Magick: Why Materialists, Atheists and Marxists Need It." It was originally published Thursday (28 January 2021) on Mr. Lerro's website, Beyond Capitalism, then republished Sunday (31 January) by LA Progressive here, which is where I first read it.

I am embarrassed to say I had not explored Beyond Capitalism until now.

While the title of Mr. Lerro's  newest essay  is self-explanatory, the text also clearly describes -- in patently secular terms -- how and why what he labels "magick" actually works, its real-world psycho-dynamics perhaps best summarized in what seems to me his most telling paragraph:

"Magick is the art and science of altering states of consciousness at will through the use of imagination, the senses, the emotions through the arts. The techniques can be used for good or for bad purposes. The entire field of advertising is an industry in the use of black magick. Often the association with changing states of consciousness is that it is some kind of secular, recreational escape from reality. Of course, some of that is true, but my reasons for arguing for altered states of consciousness are dead serious. People alter their states of consciousness primarily for social and personal needs, not just for fun." (Italics as in original; boldface added for emphasis.)

Thus I cite Mr. Lerro's essay here both for its thought-provoking nature and for the vital support it provides those of us who clamor for broadening the accessibility of Marxian source-documents as well as techniques of socialist propagation and consciousness-raising in general, all of which suffer  unprecedented obscurity thanks to deliberately paralytic isolation in the academic prisons maintained by Neoliberal fundamentalism.

__________________
¹My arson-doomed "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer" addressed this topic at length, mostly with examples from  the re-popularization of  traditional balladry c. 1930s-1950s.. The backbone of my entire manuscript, these examples  illustrated  how the behavioral dynamic Bruce Lerro defines as "magick" was evident in the Folk Renaissance, which boosted a long-simmering, profoundly iconoclastic but hitherto relatively obscure art movement into unprecedented popularity and so birthed the 1960s Counterculture.  Despite its seemingly irremediable  political, racial and socioeconomic divisions, the Counterculture was potentially unified by a unique aesthetic solidarity -- the mostly  unexplored  bond evident in the music and art shared by feminists, environmentalists, back-to-the-landers, anti-war activists and urban communards alike. (Its unity was momentarily evident even amongst the hopelessly Ayn Randified legions of bourgeois faddists who later became the postwar generation's New-Deal-destroying Moronic Majority -- i.e.,  the  class-and/or-race-privileged moral imbeciles whose craven embrace of the Neoliberal brand of Nazism now gets them rightfully damned as "Boomers," a subconsciously apt pejorative implicitly expressing the thermonuclear-caliber devastation inflicted on human society by their self-obsessed ).  Indeed it was probably my photographically illustrated examples of the Counterculture's potentially revolutionary aesthetic  solidarity that provoked the destruction of "Dancer" and all the rest of my life's work, the main thrust of which was to resurrect the Counterculture from  the conceptual tomb in which our Oppressors hope to bury forever its significance as the first undeniably popular wave of consciously anti-apocalyptic (and therefore implicitly anti-patriarchal) revolution.  Even so, Mr. Lerro has stated in a relatively few paragraphs what over 24 years (1959-1983)  I wrote and discarded probably a half-dozen 150,000-word drafts to explain, with my extensively footnoted analysis derived mostly from Jungian sources and the works of Marshall McLuhan. Thus I cannot but hail the succinctness of Mr. Lerro's thinking, particularly in transforming the illusive notion of "sacred mysteries" into operational examples of secular psycho-dynamics. Obviously, both of us reason from mutual  recognition of paganism as perhaps our most effective tool for rediscovery and recovery of the self-empowerment prerequisite to community empowerment. In this context, Colin Wilson's disclosure in The Occult (Random House: 1971) -- that British Intelligence contacted the  Britannic witch covens and asked then to hex Hitler and especially his Luftwaffe  -- becomes a telling revelation of Ruling Class comprehension of magick's reality and power. 

²The only truly glaring error I as a member of the working press  -- a former editor-in-chief whose 30-year newspaper and magazine career climbed the proverbial ladder from copyboy to reporter/photographer and thence thru sports, city, news and picture editorships --  have found in Mr. Lerro's "The Power of Magick" is in the section entitled "The Catholic Church as closeted black magickians."The mistake is not in Mr. Lerro's conclusions, which I know from my own parochial school years to be true, but in his faulty grammar: he wrote, "When I was a boy my grandmother would go with my parents and I," demonstrating the ever-more-commonplace confusion of  the nominative (subjective) case with the objective case. It is an error  for which the blame goes neither to the writer  nor to the editor who failed to snag this particular foul ball, but (as with so much else that afflicts us), to the Oppressors who are methodically dumbing us down to functional illiteracy as part of their much broader psychological-warfare effort to render us unable to even conceptualize liberation.  For the multitudes who've been denied proper education in English grammar -- that is,  in the vital physics and chemistry of our language -- the proper form is "with my parents and me"; "I" is the subjective personal pronoun, in other words the actor; "me" is its objective form, here specifically among the objects of the preposition "with" and therefore denoting that which is acted upon. To observe the increasing frequency of such vexatious errors invariably saddens me,  particularly since  they cannot bur distract from both the credibility and the long-term accessibility of the texts in question.

LB/31 January-1 February 2021.

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