Do You Kuru?

I haven't heard much about Hillary Clinton lately. Maybe she's had something to say from time to time, but she's certainly not front and center in the news anymore. This doesn't alarm me all that much. She's kind of old-school. She's one of those traditional politicians who, when they lose an election, accept the result graciously and fade into the background. As we now know, there is no reason to concede an election, no matter what, but that's a recent discovery.

So maybe I was never going to be the first to notice that she no longer exists at all. Thanks to Q-Anon, who unlike Hillary totally exists, we know that Hillary Clinton was executed following a tribunal some three years ago. It's the kind of thing you'd think would make the news cycle, at least if it didn't drop on a Friday night, but that's the thing about tribunals: they're super duper secret. A properly done tribunal and execution should produce no evident body. Have you seen a body? You have not. So there: ipso fucto. Tribunal. Execution.

I'm still a little suspicious, and so is Cirsten Weldon, the actress famous for playing the agent's girlfriend in a thirty-year-old film called "Hard To Die," so she should know. She does agree that HIllary Clinton is dead but says it happened more recently, when she died of Stage Four Kuru. Kuru is a very rare brain-wasting disease but the famous have ways of getting things that regular people can't. Basically, you have to eat infected people's brains, so if that isn't elitist, I don't know what is. The last time anyone was known to have contracted kuru was ten years ago when a bunch of people in Papua New Guinea got it from eating the brains of dead people. So cannibalism is definitely involved, which lends the entire story a lot more credence than that tribunal bullshit.

Because, after all, it is already widely accepted in certain unvaccinated sectors that Hilary is among a cabal of liberals who run a child-molestation ring out of a pizza parlor, and pedophilia, especially if enhanced with pizza, is well-known to be a gateway disorder to cannibalism. You're going to want to examine those toppings very carefully. So all of this rings true already, but there's the added information that Clinton and her cronies have been eating children for a while now as a Satanic ritual. She's eaten lots of children. You can tell because they went straight to her ankles. 

 

Supposedly this is a way of harvesting adrenochrome, a magic substance that can keep you young. Liberals will do anything, including affecting ponytails and advancing socialism and otherwise caring about humanity, to stay young. Adrenochrome is produced in terrified children, so you could torture them and scoop it from their pituitary glands or their blood if you don't want to eat them. The Jews have been doing just that for generations, while keeping Kosher, in case you have any lingering doubts about the practice. There's not a story out there so outlandish that it doesn't get more true-ish by being Jewish.

Anyway, that's why no one has seen Hillary Clinton lately, and also her friend Huma Abedin, and also John Podesta, and also James Comey, and also George Soros. And if anyone claims to have seen any of these people, ask yourself: would a known torturer and cannibal stop short of lying? That's rich. If you think you have seen them, they are clones. Clones created at or near the time of their own birth, in Hillary's case 1947, so they're the right age and everything. You need to be super smart and devious to think that far ahead. You probably need to be Jewish.

What's clear is that there is now an epidemic of brain-wasting disease. And that Original Hillary no longer exists.

Her emails, now, they're around here somewhere.

Battle Lines

I'm a 2016 American just like all the rest. I have my opinions, you have yours, and unless yours and mine are the same, you have your head up your ass.

I'm sorry it has to be this way, but about twenty years ago someone set up a propaganda machine and funneled oodles of money into it, and it really took off. Things had started to go south for a lot of us during the Reagan years, what with the changes in laws and relaxing of regulations which allowed a new financial sector to blossom and dominate the economy. And corporations dismantled the unions, and jettisoned pension plans, and encouraged employees to gamble with their money in the guise of freedom; and people were just plain not doing as well as they had been, and they were feeling everything slip away.

All they knew was something had been taken away from them, and they were right. The money didn't disappear, but it did get siphoned uphill, and the folks uphill preferred that nobody notice. So they funded the propaganda machine and trotted out a new News Station and stocked it with interchangeable gals with stiff yellow hair, and they began churning out News about all the people the middle class really should be upset at. Your gays, your Muslims, your Mexicans, both of your anti-Christmas people, your union members for sure--all of them were taking stuff away from good Americans. It was all pretty clearly bullshit, a sophisticated shell game, but there's nothing anxious people like better than someone to blame stuff on.

So what happened is we ended up with two sides of the country operating on entirely different information and inclined to point fingers and double down, and now we're not talking to each other anymore. Why bother? A person is free to dislike the president's policies, but when he's on the social media all day talking about the Kenyan Muslim president and his bitch Killary, what have we got to work with? You're kind of left with "Let's agree to disagree," or "Die soon."

Which means we have a problem, and it isn't going to go away if we dodge the fat orange bullet. Because there is a faction in this country that isn't going to consider that result legitimate. Even if a comfortable majority of American citizens cast ballots for Clinton, a large number of people are going to see her election as proof that the system is rigged and democracy is dead, because their votes didn't count hard enough. And this is not a universal reaction across the political spectrum: this is special.

See here: sixteen years ago, the Supreme Court tipped the election to George W. Bush over Al Gore in what a whole lot of us thought was an egregious miscarriage of justice. And we were outraged, and we complained bitterly, and we wrote heated and well-constructed letters to the editor, and maybe we drank a little, and then we moved on, because we have a grounding in civics and a certain amount of faith in the system.

But others don't. Lincoln may have thought he freed the slaves, but the side that lost the war never accepted that, and they steadily resisted, and wrote their own laws, and terrorized a whole population, until the former slaves were once again no longer free. They re-fought the Civil War until they'd won it. They ignored the law of the land and substituted their own, and they used their guns to do it.

And there are still citizens of this country who will not accept a democratic result they don't agree with, and their numbers are growing, and they're still armed, and they're still dangerous, and they've been told exactly who the enemies are, and they're ready to take their country back, from...well. From the rest of us.

Yee-haw, darlings. Buckle up and hang on tight. Remember we're supposed to be the home of the brave.

D.I.Y. Propaganda

In Oregon, the earth pooted out volcanoes every other Sunday for a long time. Mountains of all shapes jut into the sky. We were hiking amongst them, and one of them looked newer than the others: a nice, smooth, uneroded cone with some snow on it. It got me thinking about kids, and how they draw.

Kids teach themselves how to draw in such predictable ways that you can tell a seven-year-old's drawing from an eight-year-old's. Right around age ten, some kids work out how to draw more realistically. Then they enjoy drawing for the rest of their lives. The rest of the kids don't figure out the trick, and they get discouraged and give up. If cajoled into drawing as adults, they will produce the same drawings they'd have made at age ten. They draw symbols of things instead of the things they're looking at. For example, they'll look right at a nice scraggly mountain, and they'll draw an inverted cone with a blob of snow on it. That represents "mountain."

I'd managed to snag a little internet before we set out on the hike, just enough to know that my piece about Hillary Clinton had left many readers baffled and appalled. I'd thought I'd written it to be so completely over the top that it was clear I was spoofing. I even said she eats children, although I'm pretty sure she doesn't. I was troubled. How could anyone have failed to detect that I was making fun of all those awful things she gets accused of?

Well, because you read that stuff every day. People across the political spectrum wallpaper their Facebook pages with memes accusing all kinds of people of all kinds of things, and that's meant to stand in for reasonable discourse. Our digital presence is slathered in self-curated bumper stickers. If I had gone even further, and said that Hillary Clinton eats children-nuggets wrapped in corporate cash, fried in tar-sands oil, and dipped in genetically modified Bundy-Ranch dressing every fracking day of her life, a certain percentage of readers would put it on a poster and send it all over the world. Click.

Everybody's doing it. Everybody finds some clever piece of crap that's been written about someone they hate, and out it goes to all and sundry, attached to an unflattering picture of the villain in question, whether or not any of it is true. I was disturbed by some of the anti-Hillary stuff coming in from the left this year. There was one meme that declared a vote for HRC was a vote for fracking. Now when it comes to fossil fuels, I'm a leave-it-in-the-ground kind of gal, so I decided to look into it. It contained a germ of truth. I preferred Bernie's nice tidy answer to whether he would support fracking: NO. But Clinton's position was thoughtful, strategic, and honest, and included consideration of real political/economic conditions that pertain across the globe. As much as I cheered Bernie, Hillary's position was probably more likely to get us where we need to be. Not soon enough, probably not even for her--but that's a lost dream.

So at the least, this trash-talk about HRC misrepresents her. It's designed to. We are in a golden age of propaganda, begun the old-fashioned way by the establishment of fake news organizations funded by a plutocracy, but now, individuals on all sides of an issue bite off chunks of propaganda and disseminate it themselves, for free. Here are your facks, folks: we've made it simple for you, no need to look any further. The real Hillary Clinton is a mountain. The Hillary meme you're gleefully sending out to the world is a cone with a blob of snow on it. Hey, close enough, right?

So I was thinking about all this while I was hiking, and it was a happy diversion when I heard a cool noise and stopped under a tree to investigate. It sounded like a baby bird. Low, rhythmic, weeka weeka weeka. Flickers make a similar noise but never so quietly. I was sure there was a nest of hatchlings above my head. But they refused to repeat the noise, because they're cautious about my kind. I walked on.

But there it was again! I stopped again and stared up into a tree.  Go on, make that noise again. I'll find you this time. Sometimes adult birds tweet out a version of their song but use their indoor voice. Their bedroom voice. They're communicating with their honeys and they don't want anyone else to hear. Sure enough, they stopped when I did.

I went on. Fifteen feet later, after I ran through some more possibilities, I stopped one more time, determined to find the little bugger. It stopped too. Took me all that time to realize my new pack was squeaking as I walked. Weeka weeka weeka.

Sometimes you need to be very still and let all the squeaking around you die down before you can figure out the truth.

It's My Party And I'll Cry If I Want To

The Democratic nomination process is either over, or it's not, or it never will be, and now everyone's barking on the internet. I've got my hands over my ears, begging mommy to make it stop. I'm used to Our Side fighting the Other Side, but people? This is making me nuts.

Last fall I watched five Democratic candidates for president in a debate. They each made a lot of sense and I'd be happy voting for any one of them. They were respectful of each other, too.

Now there's talk of rigged elections. When I look at the evidence, it seems heavy on anecdotes and entrenched suspicion. Voter fraud or rigging must be investigated, but I'm not taking anyone's "bad feeling about something" to the bank. I know how this works. As soon as you decide "they" are out to get you, you will see evidence of it everywhere. We are a most suggestible species, even more so now that every odd notion that shows up can be disseminated worldwide before anyone has time to check the math.

And this was also the year we all apparently learned how the parties nominate their candidates. Horrors. Superdelegates, caucuses in the laundromat, winner-take-all, reading chicken guts under a full moon, whatever--they've done it for years; it's their club and they can write the rules however they want to. But you can join the club and get active and try to change them if you want to. It's never been one-person-one-vote. If this was all a surprise, consider yourself educated, but not cheated.

Here's what I've noticed. All you have to do now to work up a righteous froth is comb through the conspiracy theories and curate your own dudgeon. Take what works, discard the rest. It's easy.

That's how we know Hillary Clinton is the most loathsome candidate in the race. My goodness, but she is awful. People are torn over whether she should be in jail or in Hell. You actually go back and check her positions on things, and her votes in the Senate, and her accomplishments, they're pretty solidly left of center. It's a mixed bag: strong on abortion rights, disappointing on the environment and warmongering. But evidently, as well as being a fictional murderer and a symbol of corruption, she stands for everything else we revile. She murders Muslims and can't frack fast enough and used her own email servers so she could put LOLs on State Department business and did something-or-other in Benghazi and holy cow there's a forty-year-old video of her doing an embarrassingly bad MLK accent.

What she is, of course, is a moderate-to-left pragmatic politician with a stout record of accomplishment who has been praised by members of both major parties for her ability to get some things done, because she is willing to horse-trade a little and make progress in increments rather than make none. That's sort of the way things used to be done, before things quit being done at all. She's taken a bunch of money from Wall Street, like every single other political figure out there on both sides except Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, but there's no good evidence she's in their pocket.

As I recall, it was she who first pushed for universal healthcare twenty years ago, for which she was accused of not knowing her place, or having fat ankles, or treason, or something. She got in a ton of trouble for speaking dismissively about baking cookies right around the same time. Oh, and using her maiden name in a subordinate role. And murdering her close friend. All of a piece. Just today I read that she's been "wrong about everything since she was a Goldwater girl." That would be 52 years ago. Remind me not to run for office.

I don't even know how she's able to stand upright at all after forty years of this shit. She is incredibly tough, smart, and resilient. Those are traits we might want to see in a President if it weren't, you know...if it were someone else. But we can't stand her, because she's only mostly right. And we lefties--we're like Megachurch Dads, now. We're demanding a Pledge of Purity.

Well, I get it. My go-to-the-mat issues are so dire--climate change, extinction, unsustainable growth, and the obliteration of basically everything--that "incremental" doesn't work for me, either. Change simply can't come fast enough, and we're probably already screwed.

But we keep trying. So you bet I voted for Bernie. Yes I did: I voted for all of them. Howard Dean. John Anderson. Canvassed for Clean Gene McCarthy before I was old enough to vote. When I was growing up, I knew we were Adlai Stevenson people before I knew my own phone number. I associated it in my mind with the fact that we used a push mower and had a compost pile and an old car, too. Rumor had it Daddy briefly signed up with the Communist Party in college. This apple thunked straight down from the tree. And when you vote for idealists, you take your losses hard.

I voted for them to declare my conscience even though none of them would ever have been able to push through the reforms they wanted. And that was even before the opposition party abandoned the truth altogether in favor of the sour victory of deadlock and destruction. No one figurehead will be able to do what needs to be done to address the financial sector, the carbon bomb, or our obscene income inequality (formerly known as piracy), until people stand up and demand it. A lot of people. And they have to keep standing up. It will be hard work, and frankly, there aren't enough of us. Most of us are watching Netflix.

But right now we have a strong, smart, tough candidate on the right side of most issues running against a cartoon character. The Republican brain trust knew long ago that the only way they could get their big orange toddler elected would be to divide the opposition. Instead of accusing Hillary of murder or lack of femininity, which doesn't work so well on lefties, accuse her of personally corrupting the election process, or being in the pocket of Big Oil or Wall Street. Slide that propaganda into the social media, and plenty of people who get their information from memes and posters will buy it. I'm concerned about these things too, so I looked into it. It doesn't hold up.

But I do know that the entire Republican platform can be found on Satan's private email server in Hell. So ease up on Hillary. She can take it--how, I don't know--but I can't.