Let us remember Joe Biden, who now lingers on death’s door, sadly of the cancer he so long championed finding a cure for so as to free others from their suffering, in some ways symbolic of his life of service and its meaning for America as the neoliberal order he represents begins to fail, terminal stage capitalism tries to free itself from its host political system, and democracy falls.

     In the end he was able to save neither America nor himself from the mechanical failures of our internal contradictions and from capture by systems of oppression, but he tried with great courage and relentless bulldogedness to do so, if with flawed vision, ambiguous motives, and confused strategies like the rest of us.

     History will misconstrue him as The Last Good American or our first tyrant blind to his own complicity in the subversion of democracy and the abandonment of our universal human rights, but the processes of his canonization and demonization will begin only with his death, so I have chosen this moment to interrogate his meaning for us all. I believe it is of vital, crucial, importance for our future and the idea of America that we remember him as neither hero nor villain, but as one of us.

     His career of five decades of service to our nation reaching its crest as our President and champion in the Restoration of Democracy as he held back the tide of fascist tyranny and terror for long years during our time of greatest peril.

      Yet I cannot call him a good man, but like myself a bad man who was on our side as he saw it, though our ideas of America did not always align. I fought against his nomination as our candidate in 2020 by the Democratic Party of which I am a precinct captain, with everything at my disposal short of force as we needed a champion who could defeat Trump, and again in 2024 because if you support genocide I can not vote for you, and I must fight you.

      And there is so much more to this story. Because he wouldn’t get his lilly white hands dirty fighting for our liberty and our humanity in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Palestine, I did.  

     Its not how I would have chosen to live in my sixties,  but its where I was needed.

     He did try to kill me in a drone bombing of our positions in Yemen to enforce the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid we were counter blockading, the second president to try to kill me after then-Governor Reagan but the only one I voted for.

      Also chief silencer of womens voices in the Anita Hill trial, which delayed the #metoo moment for a generation and bequeathed us Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court Justice and arbiter of public virtue.

      And Biden was a major Bush partner in invading Iraq and subverting our liberty in the Patriot Act which placed us under de facto military law and began the counterinsurgency model of policing.

     Plus he began politics exactly like George Wallace leading antibussing white supremacists versus Bernie Sanders and the Freedom Riders.

       So yes, Biden was useful in countering Trump briefly to buy us time to organize Resistance, but he was no white hat nor even on our side, if by our side you mean AOC’s Green New Deal and Bernie’s universal free healthcare. In fact Biden’s Presidency was a firewall of conservative forces and the Collaborationist wing of the Democratic Party against Progressives, and this is what sabotaged the Restoration of America.

     Yet he was a man for all that, as the song written by Robert Burns in 1795 goes, neither good nor evil and in our broken world capable of acts which were both at once, relative to one’s angle of view.

“Is there, for honest poverty,

That hangs his head, and a’ that?

The coward slave, we pass him by,

We dare be poor for a’ that!

For a’ that, and a’ that,

Our toils obscure and a’ that,

The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,

The man’s the gowd for a’ that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,

Wear hoddin grey, and a’ that;

Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine,

A man’s a man for a’ that:

For a’ that, and a’ that,

Their tinsel shew, and a’ that,

The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,

Is king o’ men for a’ that.

Ye see yon birkie,[a] ca’d a lord,

Wha struts and stares and a’ that;

Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,

He’s but a coof[b] for a’ that:

For a’ that, and a’ that,

His ribband, star, and a’ that,

The man o’ independent mind,

He looks and laughs at a’ that.

A prince can make a belted knight,

A marquis, duke, and a’ that;

But an honest man’s aboon his might,[c]

Gude faith, he maunna fa’ that![d]

For a’ that, and a’ that,

Their dignities and a’ that;

The pith o’ sense, and pride o’ worth,

Are higher rank than a’ that.

Then let us pray that come it may,

As come it will, for a’ that,

That sense and worth, o’er a’ the earth,

May bear the gree,[e] and a’ that!

For a’ that, and a’ that,

It’s coming yet for a’ that,

That man to man, the warld o’er,

Shall brothers be for a’ that.

     As I wrote in my post of July 8 2024, A Tale of Two Bidens and Two Americas: Light and Darkness In A Titanic Struggle to Become Human Together; Of our truths, histories, memories, and identities, which we drag around behind us like an invisible reptilian tail; there are those which must be kept and those from which we must escape, and if we are very lucky, they are not always the same.

     Herein I interrogate the discontiguous boundaries and interfaces between realms of being represented by the two figural images of Biden which are now part of our historical memory and seared into our national identity like a living brand, a Janus-like chiaroscuro of darkness and light like America herself; one a ghost of his former glory as victorious liberty, an echo of sympatico, compassion, and embodied solidarity in revolutionary struggle who gathers into his protection the Wretched of the Earth and all her huddled masses yearning to be free, but now an illusion robbed of its substance, like humankind consumed by the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.

      Limned against this fallen greatness lies the chasms of darkness of an empire of conquest and dominion and a carceral state of force and control written in the blood of those whose lives we have fed into the machine of our wealth, power, and privilege, including the Native Americans whose nations we have assimilated as our own, the African slaves who created our wealth and power at our origins, and the colonized peoples whose labor and resources confer our dominion of the world principally through control of oil as a strategic resource.

      This is a map of the world and the limits of the human embodied in the figure of Genocide Joe who has made us all complicit in the Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians, crimes against humanity by our colony and proxy state Israel whose design and purpose is to divide the indigenous peoples of the region against themselves and secure our control of oil without which our civilization goes dark, resulting in the conflict now ongoing between the Arab-American Alliance and the Dominion of Iran which has become a theatre of World War Three as Iran’s ally Russia and America fight to the death through our proxies.

     In Joe Biden we are confronted by an image of America and of ourselves, in all our grandeur and terror. He is become a symbol of our historical duality as conservative and revolutionary forces bound together in one flesh and nation in titanic struggle to become human.

     First, the embrace of our darkness as we struggle to become human. Here we find the first Biden-Trump debate an echo and reflection of Biden’s appalling performances against his Democratic rivals during the selection trials and debates of 2019.

     As I wrote in my post of October 15 2019, America redefines itself: the Democratic Presidential debates round ad nauseum; As Biden goggles in stupefaction, coughing up platitudes and party boilerplate like hairballs, a guttering fire which dimly echoes the scripted glibness of his glory days as a diversionary talking head and apparatchik of hegemonic elites and the carceral state, the Warren-Sanders détente holds while the outliers swarm and hurl barbs at pack leader Elizabeth Warren.

     I’d love to have the Progressive alliance of the Elizabeth Warren-Bernie Sanders team as President and Vice President in either configuration of roles; and my wish for this election is for them to run together. The balance of Warren the conservative policy wonk and Beltway insider committed to salvaging capitalism from its death spiral of privatization and Sanders the Democratic Socialist and ideologue committed to revolution and social transformation achieves an ideal state of dynamically unstable forces able to adapt to changing conditions with agility and harness chaos as an engine of growth and life and as a lever of change.

     All living systems must have both a revolutionary and innovating force of adaptation through which to evolve and meet the challenge of new threats to our survival, and a conserving force which insulates meaning from change and ensures the survival of our values and principles such as those embodied in our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and of those traditions and anchorages which have allowed us to survive thus far. In both natural and cultural evolution, we need both forces working cooperatively to manage change and shape our future.

     The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our ideational form, the loss of our culture and traditions.

     The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values.

      For the origins of my idea of life as a game played by representatives of these shaping forces, I refer you to Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, and Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game.

     To return to the immediate subject of the debates, a brief summary:

     Joe Biden would have been a good news anchor, if someone else was writing his copy. I think he should run for President against Trump- but as a Republican.

     Biden’s handlers advise him to run on his record. I think he should too; the invasion of Iraq, the Anita Hill hearings, his opposition to desegregation. Whoever’s interests he represents, I do not believe that they are ours.

     Kamala Harris has changed the course of history in calling Biden out on his antibusing past, in which his hidden face as George Wallace is exposed, and we owe her a great debt. I hope this is the last we shall ever hear of Joe Biden; but I fear that systems of oppression and hegemonies of elite wealth, power, and privilege have already anointed him their figurehead as the President least likely to bring real and meaningful change or seizures of power by the people.  

     Harris is something quite different, and has spoken truth to power on behalf of us all, as she did when she defied the entire Democratic Party in California to outlaw capital punishment. She has established her role as a champion of the people unafraid to defy authority when it is wrong, and I hope she will continue to do so in whatever office she may hold. I am wondering now what form of co-optation they will offer her to silence her voice; perhaps the Vice Presidency as Biden’s performative minder?

     Beto O’Rourke has also championed the powerless, and has a lot of good things to say; I agree with his plan to tax churches which refuse to support gay marriage out of existence. Further, I hope we may one day tax all church properties and organizations of faith as authorized identities out of existence, for a state funded faith is inimical to democracy, and this is exactly what we have now with tax free church businesses and properties. He is a committed crusader against gun violence and racism. He’s also learning fast, and is another figure I expect to see in the future national political arena. Beto, we don’t need to confiscate people’s guns, just make the manufacture or sale of guns and ammunition a federal crime equal to murder and possession of a gun legal proof of intent to kill.

        Pete Buttigieg has great value as a figure of liberty, being a gay combat veteran with an Arabic name. We need more diversity in our representatives. In his own field of expertise he is unsurpassed among the candidates; in his lockup with Tulsi Gabbard over Syria he was absolutely right. He should be Bernie’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or National Security Advisor; just don’t loose him on any problem that can’t be fixed by breaking it with greater force.

     Amy Klobuchar threw groundless accusations at Elizabeth Warren, enacting Margaret Atwood’s analysis of seizures of power from the patriarchy resulting in female on female violence in a zero sum game for power rather than mutual support. I found this ugliness disturbing, enough to overcome the seductive effect of her voice as every time she speaks I see Mrs Maisel from the Prime Video series, and like Circe’s swine am bereft of all reason.

     Also the fish-eyed glassy stare of bewilderment as Castro discussed monopolies was that of someone who just isn’t smart enough to follow a high level conversation.

     Andrew Yang seems like a nice fellow with a single-issue candidacy, who is utterly clueless about human nature. His breathtaking vision to obsolesce labor in a universal socialist state where our machines do the hard and dirty work to free us to be Plato’s Philosopher-Kings and to dream, create, and invent is Utopian in the extreme, in the negative sense of the word as used by its Marxist critics. This kind of Techno-Anarchism has two problems; first, the technology to obsolesce labor does not yet exist and our sentient artificial intelligences which are the successor species to humankind will first replace human imagination and creativity and enslave us, second that this has been tried before as the New Soviet Man, who free from the profit motive should be without violence or unequal power relations, and we have seen how well that worked out. Give a hundred people a basic living stipend of one thousand dollars a month with no strings attached and 97 of them will refuse to work unless they are bribed, as was endemic and pervasive in the Soviet Union, and was also a contributing cause in the Fall of the Roman Empire. Many will simply go on a bender til the cash runs out. Of the other three, one will take that money out of circulation by ratholing it in savings or buried in the backyard due to the epigenetic trauma of poverty, one will spend it on shiny baubels, and one will squander it on unrealistic ventures and dreams they have no education or background to achieve. The achievement of that education must be primary, and I believe absolutely in universal lifelong free university education. The question is, how to free humankind without condemning us to our most self destructive impulses? Like the abandonment of social force and violence as police and armies, this requires rules about how freedom is used until we have grown beyond its need. Tie the Basic Living Stipend to a target behavior that will pay America forward, like meeting grade targets while enrolled at university or a trade apprenticeship program in critical fields, and we have a winnable plan; while avoiding the horrors of the workhouse and the labor camp. Work never was freedom. Keep trying, Andrew; you’ve got time to learn. I find your vision of an ideal society compelling, but forty years of revolutionary struggle have taught me that we are not yet ready for it.

     Would it surprise anyone to learn I’m still voting for Bernie Sanders?

     And for the Second Act of this play, witness now our light as we emerge from the shadows of our history. Herein we find echo and reflection of the 2020 First Presidential Biden-Trump Debate in Biden’s magnificent Madison Address to the Nation.

     As I wrote in my post of September 30 2020, Against the Monster Himself, Biden Becomes Magnificent: the First Presidential Debate; Biden tricked Trump into revealing his operational command and control of the Proud Boys and other forces of white supremacist terror and fascist aligned militias. And Trump never even noticed how he had been outwitted into a public confession of criminal complicity in racist violence and the disruption of Black Lives Matter protests for equality and justice by what has previously been deniable forces of repression acting in coordination with white supremacist infiltration agents within the police.

     Agile as a fox Biden was tonight, and he danced rings around the Clown of Terror. Trump spun nets of lies with which to snare the hearts of men, and Biden smote them asunder like Alexander cutting the Gordian Knot. Trump spat venom and Biden deflected and evaded and stopped his mouth of hate and fear with truths, counterattacking into the line of argumentation like a matador whose glittering rapier weaves through the horns of a raging beast’s charge.

     Trump knows but one game, rugby, and brought to this arena his arts of intimidation and the crush and maul of direct charge; but Biden is a master of the old Spanish swordsmanship of La Verdadera Destreza; timing, precision, evasion, encirclement and movement, angle of attack and absention of target, and the envelopment of opposition in counterattack, and tonight the brilliance of his skills was on full display against the rage and arrogance of Trump.

     Tonight Biden demonstrated his mastery of Trump as a matador masters a brute of monstrous power but limited understanding, thinking several steps ahead of Trump in multiple dimensions of possibilities like a chessmaster and marshalling layers of Jesuitical rhetoric along them all.

     This was a contest of vacuity and bluster against depth and guile, and of amoral greed and vanity against greatness of soul and compassion for others, and this the first Presidential debate of 2020 was a victory for Biden and America, for tonight we have begun to reclaim our heart.

       Here follows a history of the 2020 Democratic Party Presidential Debates.

     December 20 2019 the years final Democratic Presidential Campaign debate & a recap of those previous

     Bernie Sanders as always spoke with passion and vision and articulated clear plans and objectives in the restoration of America to her former glory. He is the only figure in politics today who operates from a coherent ideology which organizes all his policies, like Plato’s ideal of a philosopher-king.

      Elizabeth Warren, the genius of capitalism and chessmaster of the Beltway, was as always twelve moves ahead of her opponents and has read a dozen great books on any topic of policy you might name. Anyone who enters her arena ends up looking like Salieri to her Mozart. 

      Pete Buttigieg has during the course of this campaign been revealed as yet another wolf in Grandmother’s clothing, waiting to pounce when we are lulled off guard. I so wanted him to be as he represents himself, and not a carnival huckster and master of the bait and switch, sleight of hand, shell game, and the images of funhouse mirrors. He combines so many iconic dreams in his illusory presentation of self, all wrapped up with a pretty bow, yet every time he claims to agree with our goals and ideals he then proposes his own plan which will in fact sabotage all progress. There’s even video of him advocating for coal mining, a policy which for me places him beyond the boundary of ourselves and into the realm of otherness. Sadly, I must name Jiggy a conservative agent of infiltration and subversion. Perhaps his military background renders him unable to think outside of authoritarian structures and hierarchies; that’s the charitable version of why he has sought to deceive us.

     He could also be exactly as I see him, now that I realize why he seemed so familiar; for I saw him many times in the great play Angels in America, in his true form as Roy Cohn, former lawyer of Donald Trump. Watch Tony Kushner’s play if you need to confirm it for yourself; it’s the greatest work of twentieth century American theatre, so I can guarantee its worth your time. 

     Tom Steyer’s concluding sermon was magnificent; “Donald Trump is not against immigration from white people. He is against immigration from non-white people. That’s a racist argument from a racist President and it has led him to break the laws of humanity.”

      Amy Klobuchar kept her claws in this time and was funny, brilliant, fearless, and empathetic; every time she spoke I saw her as Mrs. Mazel. Seriously. In terms of performance of identity, tonight was a victory, perhaps one transformational to her political future.

     Andrew Yang launched a brilliant attack on the political consequences of economic inequality, “You know what you need to donate to political campaigns? Disposable income.” Recasting his looney Basic Living Stipend as reparations was a stroke of genius.

     Joe Biden just makes me want to puke.

     And now, a recap of my posts on the debates:

May 10 2019 Biden presided over America’s lost chance to defend women from sexual violence, harassment, and inequality at work and under the law

      Anita Hill calls out Joe Biden in The New York TImes; Biden presided over the Clarence Thomas hearings and America’s lost chance to defend women from sexual violence, harassment, and inequality at work and under the law.

     If Biden had used his opportunity differently, we could have launched our epochal #metoo reckoning and wave of social change nearly three decades earlier.

     Biden’s defense of the patriarchy is an unforgivable breach of public trust, but only the most visible reason he is unfit for public office. There is also the disturbing and outrageous story of his actions before he became a national political figure, marshalling white supremacists against school bussing and desegregation, exactly opposite the Freedom Riders and Bernie Sanders. Of the two, I know who represents me and who I prefer.

     We are presented with the spectacle of a misogynist and racist as a major Democratic Party presidential candidate; Biden is the poster boy for everything that is wrong with the leadership and collaborationist wing of the Democrats, who under their masks are little different from their Republican partners.

    I don’t want a choice of reactionary clowns for President. I think we deserve better.

    The vast political and financial machine of the Democratic Party is trying to anoint Biden as its chosen contender in the coming fight with Trump for the soul of America and the destiny of the world. This is nothing less than a campaign of repression against Progressive Democrats, which includes the stunning betrayal of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ Green New Deal and the sidelining of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All.

     We Progressives will be resisting and organizing for revolutionary transformation of our Party, that it may become reflective of its constituency and its principles. At the same time we are being pressured to unite against Trump and support whomever wins the Democratic primary and nomination, and we have a choice of policy to make which will greatly influence our future possibilities and set of choices.

     I counsel restraint in limiting ones’ options, caution against taking pre-emptive positions, making non-negotiable demands, unilateral decisions without communicating with ones’ partners, or taking actions which sabotage trust or compromise our principles and values.

    As much as I’d love to say we must defeat Trump and fascism by any means necessary, I cannot. Our first duty is to remain true to ourselves and each other; this is also the first principle of Resistance.

    Therefore I refuse to sign the Indivisibles 2020 Campaign Pledge to vote for whomever runs for President in the next election as a Democrat. We must define ourselves positively, by what we are for, as well as negatively, by what we are against.

     Whoever best represents my values and principles will merit my vote and support, and must at minimum be personally free of misogyny and racism. Thus far, I’m campaigning and voting for Bernie.

     And so I have my own campaign pledge, which I ask all of you to take with me:

     My America is a free society of equals, and I stand for the absolute legal and structural equality of all human beings.

     I will make no compromise with evil.

May 16 2019 the Democratic Party’s blacklist to repress dissent

    Yet again the leadership of the Democratic Party has taken steps to crush dissent within its ranks and marginalize the progressives and socialists who are challenging old ways with new ideas.

     For those of you who have trouble telling the American political parties apart, the Democrats are ostensibly the liberal partners and opposition of the ruling Republican conservatives.

     Let’s test that proposition, shall we? We have the betrayal of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ Green New Deal and the sidelining of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All, the timid waffling and deflection on calling for impeachment of the President, the support and pressure of others to support the campaign of racist and misogynist Joe Biden for President, and now this- a blacklist.

     Echoing the malign and nefarious Hollywood Blacklist and the political show trials of the McCarthy era, this damning piece of villainy has no place in a democratic society and for me proves a final argument that we must radically transform the Democratic Party as an equal goal of our revolution with thwarting and overthrowing the Republicans.

June 21 2019 Biden is Unfit to Represent America

    Racist, misogynist, dismissive of climate change and reluctant public supporter of womens reproductive rights; Biden is unfit to represent America and is a de facto Republican infiltration agent in the Democratic Party.

     With a successful career built on a persona which excuses and contextualizes his horrible actions as jokes, his glib manipulation is obvious to me as the telltale sign of a psychopath.

    What then disambiguates Biden from Trump? Only the facts that he is not a known foreign agent and traitor to the United States, and has no known history as a sex predator personally, though his record as an enabler during the Anita Hill hearings is indisputable.

    I don’t think that’s enough of a difference to vote for him for President, do you?

June 29 2019 The Presidential Debates Are Now a Referendum on the Democratic Party

       Kamala Harris became a celebrity Thursday night for calling out Biden and Trump on their record and for speaking with passion and vision; beyond modeling the target behavior of challenging authority which is the true calling of anyone who does not identify as conservative, she changed the fundamental nature of the debate.

      The presidential debates are now a referendum on the Democratic Party; what shall our values and direction for the future be?

     In what is now a clear contest between competing visions of the meaning and purpose of the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris acted as the picador of the Democratic Socialists and other Progressives, those who embrace egalitarian transformation of our society, sinking barbs into the Collaborationist wing of the party and their counterparts the Republicans.

     That the Beltway-centric political machine of the Democratic Party has sheltered a racist-misogynist agent of subversion and infiltration whose sympathies and true allegiance are with the Fascist-Gideonite alliance of the Republican Party which has conspired to overthrow global democracy with the aid of a foreign power in treasonous conspiracy sickens and disgusts me.

     But the depravity and unAmerican nature of the Republicans and their Collaborationist Democrat puppets and subsidiaries are not my subject today; today I wish to explore future possibilities and the ideals, values, and principles of an America which has reclaimed its heart.

     We face two great challenges today which will drive our range of choices for all our tomorrows; the extinction of humankind and the viability of Earth as an ark of life, and the fall of democracy and civilization.

      Democracy as a category subsumes most of the other great issues of our time; the four ideals of freedom, equality, truth, and justice, but also the causes of equality in the aspects of race, gender and sexual personae, religion, and other issues of diversity and inclusion, immigration which includes all of these intersectionally, the transition to a borderless state with virtual citizenship for all who so declare, universal safeguard of human rights and democracy everywhere on earth, freedom of the press and freedom from surveillance, education which is critical to citizenship and democracy, reform of our justice system and the goals of a noncoercive society in which there are no prisons and no police, reform of our security services with the goal of racial justice and equality including disarming and demilitarizing the police and the abolition of Homeland Security  and its subsidiaries ICE and the Border Patrol, universal healthcare and the decommodification of the medical industry, worker co ownership and the evolution to a postcapitalist society.

     We deserve a world free of need and free of fear, in which we all share our common resources and benefit from co ownership of our government in a free society of equals.

     There is much to be done; let us begin the rebirth and moral regeneration of our civilization.

July 24 2019 Joe Biden, Architect of Imperial Conquest In the Iraq Invasion and Of State Terror In the Patriot Act

       Hey America, if you’d like a version of Trump as our next President who’ll move the evils from the shop window to the back room just like the good old days, and think it would be grand fun and maybe profitable to start a war with Iran or just about anybody, Joe Biden is your guy.

     With a history as a segregationist, disbeliever in women’s claims of sexual victimization as the chief derailment officer in the Anita Hill hearings, whose reluctance in support of women’s reproductive rights makes his true position clear, Biden will keep all those different people out of the swimming pool.

     As a principal architect of the Iraq Invasion, we can count on him to feed our young hooligans into the war machine and convert them into profit, especially when there’s oil to be stolen.

     All joking aside, one of my nephews returned from service in Iraq as an oxycontin addict, originally prescribed in a military hospital, thinking he’s Jesus and wandering around the city giving sermons to pigeons. Every politician who voted for war is directly responsible for the terrible costs borne by countless veterans, sometimes as in World War Two for the survival and freedom of us all, sometimes merely for the profit of others.

     When our government is an edifice of lies, illusions, and swindles operated for the benefit of plutocrats, who can sort wars of survival from those of greed?

July 31 2019 the Democratic Presidential Debates

     Surprises in this last round of Democratic Presidential debates; at least

for those who were hoping the two leading Progressives would eliminate each other in a destructive fight.

     Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders teamed up to deliver a decisive rebuke to the collaborationist wing of the Democratic Party; I would dearly love to see them as President and Vice President lead us in reawakening America’s values.

     Especially fun was watching Biden, patriarch and racist warmonger that he is, flop about and gobble witlessly in fish-eyed stupefaction, caught flat footed and outshone by everybody, as if waiting for his party handlers to arrive and tell him what he stands for.

      He reminds me of a Dickens character named the Yob or Young Nob, a thief of cloak closet valuables who crashes posh parties and specializes in looking like he is lost and waiting for his butler to arrive and bring him to the party he is supposed to be at somewhere else, whose vacuity and greyness of forgettable personality are his great assets in this duplicity; not very promising when applied to politics, though.

      Tonight vision and passion triumphed over vacuity and image; I hope that this signifies the direction of the future of Democracy and of the Democratic Party.

September 14 2019 On the Third Democratic Presidential Debate

     Triumph of the Faceless Men; the candidates of the Third Democratic Presidential debate were led onstage with bags over their heads, shuffling in servile abjection after the power brokers of the Democratic National Committee, hellbent on foisting upon us a dissent-free monochrome and male campaign unable to challenge the power asymmetries which are driving our society to destruction, or interrupt the flow of bribes from the plutocrats who are breaking our economy and annihilating our future as a nation and a species, have whipped the candidates into line, who with glassy eyes and brute inarticulate sheeplike bleeting and grunts jumped through the hoops set out for them, avoiding unauthorized topics and playing their assigned roles, then except for Bernie Sanders sitting up to beg for their treats of blacklist restricted funding.

     Who spoke for the survival of the earth and of humanity, for the rights of self-ownership and the bodily autonomy of women, for the victims of the legacy of slavery and the genocidal campaign of racist state terror and crimes against humanity in the concentration camps at our border?

     Only Beto O’Rourke directly challenged the gun lobby, at a time when gun violence is our most immediate threat and inseparable from police and other white supremacist terror, and it is no longer safe to send our children to school or leave our homes to go shopping.

     I praise the candidates for returning civility to public discourse, for their display of unity on shared core values and principles; but America is fighting for its survival, beset by existential threats to democracy and to our lives, and we need leadership who will take the fight to the enemy and win back our liberty and our future.

     If the current factors of climate change and the extinction of living systems remain unaltered, we may have only three more elections before we are all dead.

     We may have less than that before we lose the vote, if we permit tyranny to go unchallenged, and look then to see policies of white supremacy make those of the Confederacy and the Nazis seem moderate, and inequalities of gender which return us to the Dark Ages of misogynist patriarchy.

    So no, there were no winners in this circus, and the American people were the real losers. This was a day of the Hollow Ones, who have been eaten by the political machine which has betrayed us yet again.

     May we all one day regain our fire and our defiance.

      And what did he do with his mandate for the Restoration of America during his Presidency? Here follows one of the major turning points in a Presidency that will be remembered for the abandonment of our universal human rights in Palestine and of Afghanistan, failure to confront Russia in the invasion of Ukraine, and failure to defend our democracy by purging Trump and his Insurrectionists from among us in exile and loss of citizenship.

February 4 2022 A Stain of Cruelty: the Assassination of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi

   To paraphrase the line from Hamlet and Star Trek in season one, episode 13, The Conscience of the King; There’s a stain of cruelty on your armor, President Biden.

    We have answered terror and death with terror and death, and this is both tragic and shameful. Force cannot answer force, nor heal the flaws of our humanity.

    As written for CNN by Barbara Starr, Oren Liebermann, Jeremy Herb and Eyad Kourdi; “It was the biggest US raid in the country since the 2019 operation that killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

     Biden spoke from the White House Thursday morning to announce that the operation had taken “a major terrorist leader off the battlefield.”

     “Thanks to the bravery of our troops, this horrible terrorist leader is no more,” Biden said from the Roosevelt Room. “Knowing that terrorist had chosen to surround himself with families, including children, we made a choice to pursue a Special Forces raid at a much a greater risk to our own people rather than targeting him with an airstrike.”

    Now and then Biden reminds us all that he was among the principal collaborators in Bush’s invasion of Iraq as imperial conquest and colonial plunder to seize the strategic resource of oil by which America maintains a global hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege, an addiction which will result in the extinction of humankind as a species, and in the authorization through the Patriot Act of a carceral state of brutal force and pervasive surveillance and thought control exceeded only by Xin Jinping’s holocaust of the Uighurs of Xinjiang, which has enabled the most massive theft of our freedoms in our history, including the McCarthy era, and the most bizarre and reprehensible regime of torture, most infamous in the crimes against humanity perpetrated at Guantanamo and other secret prisons for political enemies of the regime and its oligarchic, plutocratic, and corporate robber baron paymasters, including even the grisly hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials.

    Once again our heroes and champions are proven to have feet of clay, and I mourn the failure of moral vision and addiction to power and the use of force and violence of President Biden, our government, and America as a guarantor of universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.

    On this day and all too often, the Promethean Fire of the Torch of Liberty which illuminates the gates of our nation in New York Harbor did not reach across the wild seas to foreign shores. This is a great tragedy, and it is a tragedy which is ours and for which we must answer.

     The deaths of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi and his family as a consequence of America’s raid on his home, not an arrest for crimes provable in a court of law but political assassinations, are rightly being compared in the media to the assassination of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by Trump. This situates Biden and Trump on an equal level of criminal amorality and state terror.

    Before the stage of the world and history, it also generates moral equivalence between ISIS and America, as our enemies intend by their provocations as a strategy of delegitimation of a regime. I use this myself as a democracy activist, for the art of revolution is about claiming the moral high ground and the delegitimation of authority and seizing control of the narrative.

    Sending armies and police to enforce virtue through violence and repression is not only evil, it is also stupid; for it plays into the hands of the enemy. As Shakespeare teaches us in Henry V; “When lenity and cruelty play for kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.”

    There are still notable differences between Biden and Trump, and between the goals, values, and ideals of Democrats and Republicans, madness and treason among them. But today those differences became suddenly and horrifically more narrow, and I fear we will need more than the eye of a needle as a window to a better future.

    As written in my post of October 28 2019, Trump and al-Baghdadi: Parallel Lives and Reflections; The personal and historical forces which create tyrants and monsters among us have been a lifelong study of mine, aspects of a curiosity regarding the origins and nature of evil born of primary childhood traumas in the Bloody Thursday massacre ordered by Ronald Reagan against a student peace protest in Berkeley 1969 when I was nine and my near execution in Brazil at the age of fourteen defending street children from police bounty hunters, which echoes those of Maurice Blanchot in June 1944 by the Nazis and Dostoevsky’s in 1849 by Czarist police, informed by Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird and focused by the classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, both of which I read during high school. Thus I became fascinated by the intersections of literature, philosophy, history, and psychology, and chose the origins of evil as my lifelong field of study.

    As the world celebrates the death of al-Baghdadi, both tyrant and monster, and Trump claims credit in this the sole victory of his administration, as if for the trophy head of some dangerous beast shot by a guide while enjoying cocktails at the hunting camp, it may be interesting to compare the parallel lives, methods, and goals of Trump and al-Baghdadi.

      A full psychological and historical study of Trump and al-Baghdadi as figures of fascist terror and madness on a global political scale in the context of civilizational conflicts would require a book of Biblical proportions and thesis-level scholarship such as Waite’s brilliant work on Hitler. Here I note only some of the obvious alignments and congruences; both Trump and al-Baghdadi are megalomaniacs and psychopaths who seized power through manipulation of those who perceived themselves as victims and readily dehumanized others to change their status, using disruption of norms and a reimagination of reality through lies and misdirects to shape history, and enacted regimes of state terror and campaigns of religious and ethnic cleansing and of patriarchal misogyny and sexual violence against women.

     Of Trump we have a cornucopia of information; Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch and The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee are excellent resources, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.

      Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator. Trump cannot distinguish truth from lies and delusions; his madness and childlike feeble mindedness, the tantrums and psychotic rages, the bullying and narcissism of a spoiled brat, does not however absolve him of responsibility for his actions, or those of the treasonous cabal of sex predators and fascists he has gathered around him.

     How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights, his fragile ego,  identity confusion, and need for attention into a governance of Nuremberg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.

     Above all what unites Trump, Hitler, and al-Baghdadi, as monsters and tyrants who reflect one another and as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty and government as performance art.  

     For their performances of leadership as clowns of terror and madness provide mirror opposite images of the reign of the Roman Emperor described with wit and guile by Antonin Artaud in his great novel Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist, a figure who disrupted norms as an agent of change and chaos to transform an inert and ossified society, whereas Trump and al-Baghdadi have acted as partners in reaction to return us to a pre-democratic civilization.

      Trump claims to have killed his dark reflection and shadow self by his spurious arrogation of a victory won by our intelligence and military services; but history will always see this second face behind his mask, a secret twin he bears into eternity, a face of power and twisted desires unrestrained by the laws and values of a democratic civilization and a free society of equals: the face of Trump’s heart of darkness, al-Baghdadi.

    So I wrote on October 28 2019; and so I must write now of Biden’s secret face and heart of darkness, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, linked now for eternity as figures of terror, murderous retribution, and cruelty.

    State terror and imperialism has met sectarian terror as organizations of institutionalized violence and power; we can only hope now that they will recognize their twin image in the mirror of death which war and acts of force and violence confront us with, and walk away from the precipice which threatens to consume us all.

     As Ken Kesey said in his historic speech to a peace protest against the war in Vietnam recorded in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; “The way to end war is just walk away and say fuck it. Just walk away and say fuck it.”

    As I wrote in retrospective of the Biden Presidency and re-election campaign in my post of July 22 2024 Genocide Joe Purged From Democratic Party Re-Election Campaign, Not As A War Criminal But As An Imbecile

     As with us all, and as a defining characteristic of human being, darkness and light exist in equal measure in Joe Biden as a mirror and figure of America, revolutionary and conservative forces in which our lives are embedded as an imposed condition of struggle and an eternal war in the human heart which both destroys and creates us ceaselessly in processes of adaptation and change.

    Here too are our histories, memories, identities chosen or authorized, which we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail; both those we must keep and those we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.

    President Biden has withdrawn from the election campaign, not quite an abdication of power as he chose Kamala Harris as his successor who must now bear his vision of our nation as an inclusive and diverse free society of equals into the future as his and possibly our representative, and in many ways our avenger.

    So much remains to be done before the Restoration of America is complete, if such a thing can ever be; herein now I interrogate both the darkness and the light of Biden’s stewardship of America, for I write to you not to praise Caesar, but to bury him. Of his life work as part of the legacies of our history, what must we keep, and what must we escape? 

    As I wrote in my post of February 7 2023, How Is the Restoration of America Coming Along? Biden’s Second State of the Union Address; In his State of the Union address today Biden has roared defiance against fascist tyranny and terror, calling out the empires of Russia and China as well as the fascists of the January 6 Insurrection within the Republican Party as enemies of America and all humankind.

     A declaration of independence from fear and fascism, this speech; repeated endlessly throughout the world and human history by the magic of infinite lenses and a logosphere made of machines who remember ourselves and our world for us.

      How we reshape ourselves and our possible futures as a species of interdependent partners can be determined by such transforms of messages which order how we create human being, meaning, and value; and such systems of signs are a ground of struggle between falsification and those truths written in our flesh, for we wander lost in a wilderness of mirrors.

     Let us glory therefore in the ongoing Restoration of America, and Biden’s magnificent defiance of those who would enslave us, a wail of absurd hope echoing through chasms of darkness.

     Here following my journal of today as comparison is my post in reaction to last year’s State of the Union address, when before the Last Stand at Mariupol I believed peace was still possible, that democracy would triumph over tyranny, solidarity over division, truthtelling and the witness of history over falsification, that systemic and institutional patriarchy, racism, faith as state terror, and the commodification of exploitation capitalism could be reimagined and transformed as we progress toward a global United Humankind; though I yet dream of our species outgrowing states as embodied violence, narratives of identitarian nationalism, our addiction to power and subjugation by authority, and fear as the basis of human exchange, I now question whether we can find healing for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.

     At Mariupol I witnessed our most probable future unfolding as the realization of systemic dehumanization and a consequence of politics as the art of fear; utter destruction and ruin, and our degradation to atavisms of instinct and monstrosity beyond the limits of the human.

     To become human is a forlorn hope; yet hope is a power which cannot be taken from us when all else is lost. Like the refusal to submit to authority, which confers freedom as a primary human act of self-creation and self-ownership as seizures of power, to hope is to enact revolutionary struggle, possibly the first such act as a causal force of change and transformation.

     With hope we may claw our way out of the ruins of civilization and make yet another Last Stand, beyond possibility of victory or even survival.

     What else do we have to resist with, which is an intrinsic and defining human quality and cannot be taken from us by those who would enslave us and steal our souls?

     Love, which transcends the limits of our form and of our modern pathology of disconnectedness, and returns to us our true and best selves as we see this in each other. To love is to discover and create ourselves anew, and this too cannot be bought and sold, unstoppable as the tides.

     Faith in each other as solidarity and the praxis of our values in action; as the Oath of the Resistance ends; “to abandon not our fellows.” As the line in the film Oz goes; “Because if you believe, anything is possible.” A marvelous film, which calls each of us to become our own wizard and best selves in our stewardship of others.

      Hope as freedom, love as equality, and faith as solidarity of action; such is the dream of America and democracy as a free society of equals.   

     As I wrote in my post of March 2 2022, State of the Union: the Restoration of America, Democracy, and Western Civilization; In the State of the Union address we have witnessed the Restoration of America as the primary guarantor of global democracy and our universal human rights, and of western civilization as a free society of equals founded in the Forum of Athens as a self-critical system designed to question its own authority, to change and adapt through revolutionary innovation and discovery while protecting our four primary values and ideals; freedom, equality, truth, and justice. Of all this President Biden is our chosen and undisputable champion, of America and of all humankind.

    I would like to name and invoke another ideal, that of peace; but peace and the abandonment of the social use of force and violence is elusive. We forebear for now to send armies of Liberation to Ukraine; but I have found that the use of force is contingent on the level of threat and fear, and how long this will hold if Putin begins attacking NATO with nuclear weapons as he has declared his intent to do is a thing to ponder with great dread.

     Our possible futures hold many which are nothingness and the annihilation of humankind; and many more in which centuries of world war and an age of tyranny shape us to the monstrous purposes of authoritarian power and institutionalized violence, in which our dehumanization, falsification, and commodification by those who would enslave us and steal our souls impose degradation beyond the limits of the human, and we awake one day to a brave new world of posthuman species for whom we are the mythic demons who poisoned and destroyed the earth.

    Such is the vision of our possible futures I beheld in the moment of my Awakening, a term which enters popular culture from Buddhism, when I was hurled from my body by the pressure wave of a grenade thrown by a policeman into a crowd of protestors at the age of nine, during the Bloody Thursday Massacre, May 15 1969, People’s Park Berkeley, the most terrible incident of domestic state terror in American history.

    Myriads of possibilities of becoming human were impressed on the mind of a child as I stood outside of time and the limits of myself, like a seed of change and transformation, a moment from which alternate destinies and intentions unfold. In far too few of them, something like ourselves can look back across millennia at this time when liberty and tyranny hang in the balance.

     On this seventh day of the Invasion of Ukraine, as the UN and EU announce solidarity actions with Ukraine and resistance to Russia timed to coordinate with Biden’s State of the Union address, we fight for liberty versus tyranny in both Ukraine and Russia, and for the future of global democracy and the survival of humankind.

     In his historic speech last night, Joe Biden warned Vladimir Putin: ‘Freedom Will Always Triumph Over Tyranny’. It’s up to us now, to make it real.

    Lest all that we have ever dreamed and been or may ever be is lost.

     As written by Alan Moore in V For Vendetta; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”   

       In the balance against all of this glorious championing of democracy against Trump’s fascist capture of the state as a theocratic-patriarchal tyranny of Gideonite sexual terror and white supremacist terror, we have the abjection,  failure of empathy, and abandonment of the idea of universal human rights of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, in which Genocide Joe has made us all complicit. He several times sent war materiel to Israel, refused to enact  Boycott, Sanction, and Divestiture to silence the bombs and end the war, to bring Netanyahu to justice as a war criminal, or to join the civilized nations of the world in declaring the state of Israel a terrorist regime. Hence the chant of the Cheerleaders For Change; “Genocide Joe has got to go,” and now he has.

      For myself, Biden’s mental competence is irrelevant; if this were a bar for being a President, Trump would have never been one either. America is a geriocracy ruled by men whose ideas were formed fifty years ago. But genocide and crimes against humanity are a line we must not cross, not and remain human beings, and if you do such things I cannot vote for you, and I will fight you.

     Biden is the second American President to have tried to kill me personally, and the only one I voted for; the other being then-Governor Ronald Reagan when he ordered the police to open fire on the student Divest From Israel protesters at UC Berkeley in 1969 on Bloody Thursday, the most massive incident of state terror since the Civil War. Over fifty years later, Biden chose not to join our global sanction of Israeli war supply shipping or our counter-blockade of the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza, which a Fleet Carrier Group could have broken if necessary to deliver food and medicine to civilians, but to destroy our drone positions with his own drones.   

     As I wrote in my post of March 6 2024, Super Tuesday Confronts Us With A Grim Choice Of Futures, and We Must Change the Rules of the Game;  As I have often said since the October 7 terrorist attack which has upended the political landscape of America in our year of elections between tyranny and liberty, If you enable or enact genocide and crimes against humanity, I cannot vote for you, and I will fight you.

     Yet this election may decide the survival of democracy and humankind across the coming several centuries, and I now calculate our chances to escape an Age of Tyranny and wars of unimaginable horrors at less than two percent; I say again, I believe that in less than two possible futures out of every one hundred, something resembling ourselves can look at the ruins of our civilization and our species a millennium from now with questioning and wonder. With all of our technology and our understanding, why did we choose to annihilate ourselves?

     The dangers of ideological fracture and division cannot be overstated; the IWW global union movement self destructed over the issue of peace during World War One, as did the Social Democrats in Germany, removing our respective blocking forces for the rise of fascism and resulting in the Second World War; there are many other and more recent examples of movements for change and progress being shattered by forces of reaction and the state, but these two will serve to illustrate what will happen next if Trump once again captures the state.

     We must unite in solidarity together to confront this threat and drive fascist tyranny from the stage of history.

     Yet Biden’s massive and extralegal supply of Israel with war material while it is used to rain death of the people of Gaza, on the absurd pretext that the criminals who attacked Israel claim to act in their name as a strategy of subjugation of the Palestinians to their theocratic rule, such decisions by Biden personally have made all of us as Americans complicit in genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and other crimes against humanity.

      To this I say; Never Again!

      Our choice is now to abandon either democracy and all of our rights as citizens, or the idea of our universal human rights and our historic role as their guarantor throughout the world. I’d like to keep both democracy and human rights.

     How can we do this and win a future for humankind as a free society of equals who are guarantors of each other’s rights as citizens and as human beings?

     If this is our goal, and with the imposed conditions of struggle as they have resolved themselves on Super Tuesday wherein Trump and Biden will face off once again in the sudden death match of futures that is our Presidential election, only one course of action remains for us which bears any hope for the triumph of liberty over tyranny; change the rules of the game.

      I’m sure we can all think of many possibilities for bringing change with such a mission, but tonight I find myself enchanted with the idea of liberating Biden from Biden as articulated by Michael Moore. Who better to trust as our moral compass than the author of V For Vendetta, who wrote the immortal words; “Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.”

       Here are my thoughts on our elections in a less hopeful moment, in my post of January 4 2023, On America’s Complicity In Ethnic Cleansing and War Crimes In Gaza; Biden has made us all complicit in ethnic cleansing in Gaza, war crimes our taxes pay for. America has abandoned the idea of our universal human rights. Our nation has fallen, and with it global civilization based on humanist values and democracy.

     Nothing remains to be saved; maybe the Rights of Man and America as a free society of equals was always a performance, lies and illusions designed to distract us from the fact that we are all slaves of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, and the state merely institutions of force and control.

      Joe Biden has betrayed us, failed to place his life and ours in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and instead enabled and conspired in crimes against humanity with Netanyahu and the theocratic fascist settler regime and imperial conquest and dominion of the state of Israel, which learned the wrong lessons from the Nazis.

     And this we must resist, beyond hope of victory or survival, in solidarity as guarantors of each others humanity. To fascism of blood, faith, and soil and to state tyranny and terror regardless of where it surfaces or in whose interest it is perpetrated, we must give the only reply it merits; Never Again!                  

     To this my unfiltered reaction to a Joe Biden campaign fundraising post timed to leverage the despair and torment of others in service to power, a comment has articulated one of the primary arguments in the apologetics of power; that we cannot control our proxy state, and secondarily that the crimes against humanity of Israel have the mandate of popular support here in America which place us all with Biden in the fork of a dilemma.

     Here is the comment in question; “oh, come on. Dramatic much? Netanyahu is the criminal, Biden doesn’t control him, and cannot abandon our strongest ally in the region. Half the country wants to see Hamas wiped out, so what should Biden do? Listen just to this side? Get real.”

     To this I replied; Yes, Netanyahu is a war criminal, but Biden has not only refused to stop funding ethnic cleansing, but has sent military aid to Israel and made us all complicit. We have abandoned the idea of universal human rights in funding the random mass murders of civilians with our taxes, voting to block the UN from bringing Netanyahu to trial for war crimes, and refusal to use our powers of Boycott, Divest, and Sanction to stop the Gaza War and bring democracy to Israel with regime change and the reimagination and transformation of systems of unequal power and state tyranny and terror.

       Our nation has chosen to send warships to the perpetrator, and not humanitarian aid to the victims, when we could easily have broken the Israeli blockade of food, water, and medical relief with our immense Navy, and silenced the bombs. It is not only the humanity of the Palestinians which has been abrogated here, but of our own as well.

     In fact America does control Israel as a client state through our taxes and military support, but to what ends? Do we advance the cause of secular democracy or theocratic tyranny, of peace or war, liberty or submission to force and control, of our universal human rights or hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness based on divisions of race and faith?

     In a region of one people divided by history and in our own nation, are we building bridges or walls?

     Biden was elected to lead the Restoration of America after the loathsome regime of Traitor Trump, and has betrayed us. There is nothing left of us to save.

     America has fallen, both as a democracy due to the capture of the Republican Party by a fascist-theocratic Fourth Reich and the subversions of our institutions and ideals by the Trump regime of patriarchal sexual terror and white supremacist terror, and because of the Democratic Party’s refusal to confront evil and purge our destroyers from among us, both in our client state of Israel and here in America in the wake of the January 6 Insurrection. All of this generates from the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force; fear weaponized in service to power by those who would enslave us as divisions of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil.

     In Gaza we see the inevitable results of this process of dehumanization, for to make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence, and no matter where one begins with othering we always end up at the gates of Auschwitz. And this we must Resist.

      Why must we be each other’s jailors, and not each other’s liberators?

     Who do we want to become, we humans; masters and slaves, or a free society of equals?

    Get real, ends the apologetics of power, referencing the Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger used so infamously to authorize our imperial wars in Vietnam and Central America including the Mayan Genocide in Guatemala, the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile, and the massacres of the Suharto regime of Indonesia. A foreign policy modeled on Hitler’s dictum; “Who now remembers the extermination of the Armenians? The world respects only power” does not lead to a more humane future, nor to a United Humankind and a free society of equals.

     In this injunction to get real and its legacies of history bearing horrors, atrocities, and crimes against humanity as state policy and fear become an engine of destruction, there are embedded issues and forces central to the questions of our humanity and how we choose to be human together; what is truth, who is authorized to question it, and how can we engage in the sacred calling to pursue the truth without falsification by the lies and illusions of propaganda?

      We wander in a Wilderness of Mirrors, wherein all claims must be questioned, especially those of authorities who claim to speak and act for us as a strategy of subjugation and the manufacture of consent. To this I can but say, democracy requires an electorate able to perform the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.

    Get real, we are exhorted by those who wish to steal our power. In Gaza, real people are dying because we are willing to sacrifice their lives to our power.

      As I wrote in my post of January 24 2024 Now Begins the Last Stand Against Fascism In America: Our 2024 Presidential Election Campaign, and Why I Am Voting For Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez For President of the United States; “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler hand is the surest winner”; so wrote Shakespeare in Henry V, and for all of us, all who now live or ever will, in America and throughout the world, I hope this is still true.

    Next November, we will see.

    The test of the New Hampshire Primary has left only Biden and Trump on the field as contenders for the title, and I can vote for neither of them.

     Israel has unleashed The Nothing in Gaza, a rain of fire and death paid for with our taxes and enabled by Biden the Baby Killer who has made us all complicit in ethnic cleansing and genocide, and in so doing has abandoned our historic role as a guarantor of universal human rights.

     What are we, we Americans, if not a Band of Brothers who are guarantors of each other’s humanity?

     As I wrote to Biden in open letter here in October and have performed in organizing Resistance in Palestine and Israel, and in direct action in the counter-blockade of the Red Sea Campaign to break the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Palestine; If you commit genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity, I cannot vote for you, and I will fight you.

      On August 18 2020 I declared for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as President of the United States in the 2024 election, and subsequent history only confirms my decision.

      There are other issues I have with Biden remaining as the leader of the Restoration of America; first, he began his career occupying the space of George Wallace as a leader of white supremacists against school integration and bussing, exactly opposite Bernie Sanders, which tells me everything I need to know about a man and where his heart is. Second, he was with Bush an architect of the Iraq War, a vast war crime planned at Haliburton in Texas to seize oil fields for Bush’s patrons, and of the Patriot Act which placed America under martial law and militarized the police as an army of Occupation. Third, he acted as chief silencer of women’s voices in the Anita Hill trial which defended the patriarchal right of seigneur and left Justice Thomas in place to monkeywrench our democracy.

       For myself, the turning point in my understanding of Biden and his role as enforcer of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege rather than a liberator came with his assassination of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, which placed him in moral equivalence to Trump and the assassination of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

      As I wrote in my post of February 4 2022, A Stain of Cruelty: the Assassination of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi; To paraphrase the line from Hamlet and Star Trek in season one, episode 13, The Conscience of the King; There’s a stain of cruelty on your armor, President Biden.

    We have answered terror and death with terror and death, and this is both tragic and shameful. Force cannot answer force, nor heal the flaws of our humanity.

    As written for CNN by Barbara Starr, Oren Liebermann, Jeremy Herb and Eyad Kourdi; “It was the biggest US raid in the country since the 2019 operation that killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

     Biden spoke from the White House Thursday morning to announce that the operation had taken “a major terrorist leader off the battlefield.”

     “Thanks to the bravery of our troops, this horrible terrorist leader is no more,” Biden said from the Roosevelt Room. “Knowing that terrorist had chosen to surround himself with families, including children, we made a choice to pursue a Special Forces raid at a much a greater risk to our own people rather than targeting him with an airstrike.”

    Now and then Biden reminds us all that he was among the principal collaborators in Bush’s invasion of Iraq as imperial conquest and colonial plunder to seize the strategic resource of oil by which America maintains a global hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege, an addiction which will result in the extinction of humankind as a species, and in the authorization through the Patriot Act of a carceral state of brutal force and pervasive surveillance and thought control exceeded only by Xin Jinping’s holocaust of the Uighurs of Xinjiang, which has enabled the most massive theft of our freedoms in our history, including the McCarthy era, and the most bizarre and reprehensible regime of torture, most infamous in the crimes against humanity perpetrated at Guantanamo and other secret prisons for political enemies of the regime and its oligarchic, plutocratic, and corporate robber baron paymasters, including even the grisly hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials.

    Once again our heroes and champions are proven to have feet of clay, and I mourn the failure of moral vision and addiction to power and the use of force and violence of President Biden, our government, and America as a guarantor of universal human rights and a beacon of hope to the world.

    On this day and all too often, the Promethean Fire of the Torch of Liberty which illuminates the gates of our nation in New York Harbor did not reach across the wild seas to foreign shores. This is a great tragedy, and it is a tragedy which is ours and for which we must answer.

     The deaths of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi and his family as a consequence of America’s raid on his home, not an arrest for crimes provable in a court of law but political assassinations, are rightly being compared in the media to the assassination of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by Trump. This situates Biden and Trump on an equal level of criminal amorality and state terror.

    Before the stage of the world and history, it also generates moral equivalence between ISIS and America, as our enemies intend by their provocations as a strategy of delegitimation of a regime. I use this myself as a democracy activist, for the art of revolution is about claiming the moral high ground and the delegitimation of authority and seizing control of the narrative.

    Sending armies and police to enforce virtue through violence and repression is not only evil, it is also stupid; for it plays into the hands of the enemy. As Shakespeare teaches us in Henry V; “When lenity and cruelty play for kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.”

    There are still notable differences between Biden and Trump, and between the goals, values, and ideals of Democrats and Republicans, madness and treason among them. But today those differences became suddenly and horrifically more narrow, and I fear we will need more than the eye of a needle as a window to a better future.

     As written by Jonathan Cohn in The Guardian, in an article entitled How History Might Remember Joe Biden’s Presidency; “Millions of new jobs, many in a flourishing new American manufacturing sector geared toward clean energy.

     Higher prices at the grocery store, but also more dollars in paychecks.

     A record low in the number of Americans without health insurance, plus a historic — if fleeting — reduction in child poverty.

     Stronger international alliances, amid a bloody invasion of Ukraine and civilian catastrophe in the Middle East.

     These are among the major developments tied to policy initiatives of Joe Biden’s presidency — which, because of his decision not to seek reelection, will end one way or another by Jan. 20, 2025. By any reasonable standard, they add up to a tenure of enormous consequence.

     In less than four years, policy choices from the Biden administration have changed literally millions of lives in the U.S. and around the world, and maybe altered the course of climate change as well. It’s no exaggeration to say his record rivals that of any first-term president in the last half-century.

     Still, it’s early to render definitive judgments on his policy legacy. Too much depends on seeing how his initiatives and decisions play out over time, what precise effects they have and, most immediately, whether his accomplishments even outlast his time in the White House.

     If Donald Trump ends up winning in November, he’ll surely have something to say about that.

     A Signature Piece Of Legislation

     Biden’s signature achievement is the Inflation Reduction Act, the sweeping legislation that passed Congress on a party-line vote and that the president signed in August 2022. The name is misleading: Its central component is a massive federal investment in clean energy that, projections suggest, could add up to more than $1 trillion by the time all the money is accounted for.

     Together with a series of regulations that effectively reduce incentives to create carbon emissions, the law’s investments have spurred a boom in factory-building and manufacturing. The proof of the impact is in the solar arrays and wind turbines popping up all across the Southwest and the Great Plains, along with the electric vehicle plants rising in the Midwest and across a new “Battery Belt” in the South. These projects mean employment, and represent a significant chunk of the estimated 15 million jobs that the U.S. has created during Biden’s presidency.

     The other big piece of the Inflation Reduction Act — and one that, in spirit, hews closer to the name of the legislation — is a series of measures designed to reduce the price of health care, including pharmaceuticals.

     The Inflation Reduction Act allows the federal government to negotiate directly with manufacturers, imposes penalties for rapid price hikes, and imposes a $35 cap on insulin for seniors and people with disabilities. Most of the provisions affect only Medicare, and even then only some drugs. But the law gives the federal government authority that counterparts abroad have long had, and that U.S. lawmakers in the future can expand.

     Yet another Inflation Reduction Act provision offers extra financial assistance for individuals buying insurance through the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. These new subsidies can reduce the cost of insurance by hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year. They are a big reason the proportion of Americans without insurance fell to 7.7%, the lowest level ever.

     Action On Health Care, The Economy

     The other factor in bringing down the number of uninsured people was a temporary, pandemic-related prohibition on states reviewing and disenrolling people from Medicaid. That prohibition has ended, which means the uninsured rate is likely to creep up in the next year or two.

     The poverty level among children has already come back up, following a record-setting decline that was tied to yet another pandemic measure — namely, a set of tax breaks and direct cash payments in the American Rescue Plan, a Democratic bill that Biden signed shortly after taking office.

     Biden and Democratic leaders had hoped to make some of those relief measures permanent. Their efforts to round up the votes fell just short. But the American Rescue Plan did what it was supposed to do: It buoyed the economy and sustained tens of millions of American households, at a time when COVID-19 and the reaction to it threatened to plunge the nation into a full-blown depression.

     All policies have trade-offs, of course. The massive public expenditures behind those relief efforts likely contributed to inflation, which peaked at 9.1% in 2022. People felt it viscerally when they bought food or clothing, put gas in their car, or tried to buy a house. But inflation was a worldwide phenomenon, tied to supply chain problems and other pandemic-related factors.

     Inflation has since come back down, at least in the U.S., while wages are up and unemployment is hovering near 50-year lows. Analysts and leaders abroad have noticed, even if American voters haven’t, and editors at The Economist have been marveling at “America’s astonishing economic record.”

     Building an economy that can continue to thrive in the future has been a big focus of Biden’s, and led to the enactment of two other major laws: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which allocated more than $850 billion for everything from laying broadband lines to repairing dilapidated bridges, and the CHIPS and Science Act, which put nearly $300 billion into high-tech research and development. Both passed Congress with significant Republican votes, remarkable in itself given the polarization in U.S. politics.

     Issuing Regulations, Appointing Judges

     Biden didn’t achieve any of this alone. He worked closely with congressional leaders, as presidents always do. He also had the benefit of a (mostly) united Democratic caucus that, though smaller in size than its Obama-era counterpart, had a more liberal orientation with far fewer conservative dissenters.

     The dissenters still mattered, enough to kill what Biden had hoped would be another major achievement: historic investment in the care economy intended to raise wages of child care workers and home health aides, while making it easier for families to pay for those services.

     An attempt to pass bipartisan immigration reforms failed as well, leaving the Biden administration without the tools to address a surge in border crossings that has put a major and ongoing strain on city and state governments responsible for the migrants.

     But throughout his presidency, Biden used regulatory power to make incremental progress on long-sought goals he couldn’t achieve through legislation — by hiking the minimum wage for federal workers, for example, or forgiving college debt for targeted populations.

     Regulatory changes are easier than laws for subsequent administrations to reverse, and they can run into successful legal challenges. That’s especially true when lower courts heavily populated with Trump-appointed judges are applying principles handed down from a conservative Supreme Court majority hell-bent on scaling back federal regulatory authority.

     But Biden has done what he could to provide some ideological balance by putting more than 200 judges on the federal bench, more or less matching Trump’s rate for the same time span. That includes the appointment of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who in 2022 became the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

     Jackson is just 53 years old, which means she can keep writing opinions defending causes like reproductive rights for decades to come. And although today she’s stuck putting most of those arguments into dissents with her two fellow liberal justices, she might be around long enough to see the court’s majority evolve or change, so that it retreats from its decadeslong march to the right.

     Alliances, Wars And Diplomacy

     The other area where presidents have more authority to act on their own is foreign policy. And there, Biden has left some especially clear marks, though frequently in ways that were — and remain — controversial.

     He pulled American forces out of Afghanistan for good, a goal his predecessors and (according to polls) the public supported, and evacuated some 70,000 Afghan allies in the process. But 13 U.S. service members and dozens of civilians died in a bombing during the chaotic withdrawal, which ultimately left behind tens of thousands of Afghan allies hoping to escape — and left the Taliban once again in charge of the country.

     More recently, Biden has strongly backed Israel ever since Hamas militants attacked the country and massacred civilians on Oct. 7, 2023. Biden has pushed back only tepidly — and, by most accounts, ineffectively — against an Israeli response that has literally flattened much of Gaza, killing tens of thousands of people and leaving many more in dire, life-threatening humanitarian conditions.

     In both instances, it’s hard to know exactly what has happened, or what could have happened in alternative scenarios, given the factual ambiguities of armed conflict and the secretive nature of diplomacy. Biden’s handiwork and its impact are clearer when it comes to NATO, which, appropriately enough, held its 75th anniversary summit in Washington just a few weeks ago.

     Biden led efforts to expand the alliance with the addition of Finland and Sweden, and to strengthen it by drawing larger financial and troop contributions from member states. In 2022, Biden organized international backing for Ukraine following Russia’s invasion, providing diplomatic, financial and military support that are still propping up the country today.

     The Legacy At Stake In November

     America’s support of Ukraine could be one of the first things to go in a second Trump presidency. Trump, whose affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin is no secret, has pledged to demand a cessation of hostilities under terms most analysts think would be highly favorable to the Russians. Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who is now Trump’s running mate, has led calls in Congress for stopping Ukraine aid.

     But the list of Biden accomplishments that Trump could reverse doesn’t stop there.

     Trump has said he wants to take away the big push for clean energy, vowing to end what he calls the “electric vehicle mandate” on “day one.” He has said he still wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, just like he tried so desperately to do in 2017, posting on his Truth Social platform that “Obamacare sucks!” and promising the same mythical replacement he always touts but never specifies. Even if Trump decides against another run at full repeal, he seems unlikely to support renewal of Biden’s extra insurance subsidies, the funding for which runs out in 2025.

     It’s difficult to be certain exactly which of these priorities Trump might pursue or when, because he doesn’t make concrete policy commitments or issue detailed policy papers in the traditional way. But credible guides to his behavior are out there.

     In addition to documents like Project 2025, the right-wing governing agenda his current and former aides have put together, there’s the historical record from his last turn in office, when he signed legislation reopening the Arctic wildlife lands for drilling, undid new civil rights protections for the LGBTQ+ community, and reversed countless immigration directives.

     Biden on the campaign trail warned about the threat to his administration’s accomplishments, lamenting that all of his new laws and regulations — and their effects on daily life — haven’t gotten the attention they deserve. He had a point. Awareness of his accomplishments is so low that Republican lawmakers frequently felt comfortable taking credit for benefits in their districts or states, even when they had voted against them in Congress.

     History’s verdict is likely to be more accurate and more laudatory, because with time, it will be easier to take the full measure of what Biden has really done. But a lot depends on how many of his achievements survive. That’s why the best thing Biden may have done for his legacy is giving another, more capable Democrat a fighting chance to protect it.”

     As written by Martin Pengelly in The Guardian, in an article entitled The tragedy and resilience of Joe Biden: a look back at a life in politics: The oldest-ever American president’s political career began in 1972 and culminates as he yields to pressure to step aside; “Joe Biden’s historic decision on Sunday to step down as the Democratic nominee for president signals an imminent end to one of the most consequential American political careers.

     At 81, the oldest president ever sworn in has finally yielded to time – and his own party. Someone else, possibly the vice-president, Kamala Harris, will face Donald Trump in November.

     Biden, who endorsed Harris on Sunday, will remain in the White House until January. But Democrats and Republicans will soon survey something new: a political landscape without Biden at its centre.

     Born in Pennsylvania in 1942, Biden attended the University of Delaware and Syracuse law school, became a public defender, then entered politics. A natural campaigner, in 1972, at just 29, he ran for US Senate, scoring a huge upset over J Caleb Boggs, a two-term Republican more than twice his age.

     The same year, voters gave Richard Nixon a landslide win. Nixon was the 37th president. In 2021, Biden would become the 46th. In that 49-year span, as eight presidents came and went, Biden was a senator for 36 years, vice-president for eight.

     As a junior senator, Biden suffered his first, but not last, tragedy when a car crash killed his wife, Neilia Biden, and one-year-old daughter, Naomi, at Christmas in 1972. Biden became known for riding the rails, from Delaware to Washington DC and back, to care for his sons, Beau and Hunter, who survived the accident.

     He married his second wife, Jill Jacobs, in 1977, and their daughter, Ashley,  was born four years later.

     For 17 years, Biden was a ranking member or chair of the Senate judiciary committee. He led five supreme court confirmations. In 1991 the nominee, Clarence Thomas, was accused of sexual harassment and Biden was widely seen to have mishandled the hearings. In 2019, he said Thomas’s accuser, Anita Hill, “did not get treated well. I take responsibility for that.”

     Biden’s record on crime would also haunt him, particularly his support for a 1994 bill many say contributed to problems of mass incarceration and racial injustice. Another 1994 bill, banning assault weapons, remained a source of pride.

     For 11 years, Biden was chair or ranking member of the foreign relations committee. In 1991, he voted against the Gulf war. In 2002, after 9/11, he voted for the invasion of Iraq. He later said that vote was wrong.

     In 1987, Biden first ran for president. At 45, he sought comparison with John F Kennedy but as reported by Richard Ben Cramer in the campaign classic What It Takes, youth, ambition and drive were not enough to prevent embarrassing failure.

     Biden took to quoting Neil Kinnock, then Labour leader in Britain, about being the first member of his family to go to college. Unfortunately, Biden stopped saying he was quoting.

    Kinnock didn’t mind but the US press did. Biden’s freewheeling speaking style (and accompanying evocations of his Irish ancestry) often left him open to error. But he was undoubtedly an effective communicator, all the more remarkably so given he stammered as a child.

     Months after abandoning his presidential campaign, Biden suffered a brain aneurysm so severe a priest was called to administer last rites. Months later, he suffered another.

     He was nothing if not resilient. Twenty years later, he ran for president again. A great debate stage line, about a Republican rival, went down in history: “Rudy Giuliani, there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11.” But Biden soon dropped out.

    Barack Obama won the nomination. When the Illinois senator, 47, picked Biden, 66, as his running mate, the New York Times said Obama had acquired “a longtime Washington hand” who could “reassure voters” rather than “deliver a state or reinforce [a] message of change”.

     Biden spent eight years as vice-president, his working relationship with Obama, reporting suggested, not quite so close as it was often portrayed. Biden played key roles in successes including advancing LGBTQ+ rights, legislating to prevent violence against women and securing healthcare reform. A push for gun reform failed.

     Biden eyed a third presidential run but in 2015 the death of his son Beau from brain cancer took a terrible toll. Furthermore, Obama backed Hillary Clinton.

     Amid the chaos of the Trump years, Biden decided to run again. Significant support from Black voters propelled a primary win. In the year of Covid, campaign travel was limited. For a 77-year-old candidate, that wasn’t much of a problem. Come the election, Biden won by more than 7m votes and with electoral college ease.

     The first major book on 2020 was called Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency. Regardless, his campaign message about a “battle for the soul of America” fueled two productive years. With congressional Democrats, Biden secured major legislation, boosting the economy after Covid, securing infrastructure investment and funding the climate crisis fight.

     Trump had incited an attack on Congress, but Trumpism would not die. Republicans took back the House. Biden oversaw foreign policy disaster – the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan – and success, marshalling support for Ukraine against Russia.

     The dam could not hold. Questions about Biden’s age and fitness ran at a hum before the disastrous debate in Atlanta in June saw Democratic dissent burst through.

     At first, Biden displayed characteristic fire, blaming “elites” to which he never felt he belonged, vowing to fight on. But then Trump survived an assassination attempt and emerged seemingly stronger than ever.

     Democratic calls for Biden to quit grew louder. Eventually, he heard them.”

     Where does this leave us now? In a crisis of legitimacy within the Democratic Party as a united front of Resistance to Trump, the Party of Treason, and the capture of the state by the Fourth Reich.

    We have brought the Chaos, and created a space of free play in which anything is possible through delegitimation, fracture, and disruption of Biden’s regime of complicity in Israeli terror and tyranny; now we must act in Solidarity to utterly destroy and renounce as a nation the Republican Party and its subversion of democracy set forth in Project 2025, a blueprint for theocratic fascist tyranny.

      But we must also use this liminal time of chaotization to reimagine and transform our own vision of the future, and to make the Green New Deal, Universal Healthcare including access to abortion, and the liberation of Palestine and regime change in Israel intrinsic core policies of the Democratic Party platform and this November of America.

    Let us dream a better future than we have the past.

     As I wrote in my post of June 27 2024, This Is Bullshit: the First Biden-Trump Debate of the 2024 Presidential Election;  This is bullshit.

     Two antique visions of America battle for our future, Traitor Trump the fascist tyrant and Russian agent whose mission is to bring down democracy, versus Genocide Joe the neoliberal who made us complicit in crimes against humanity in Gaza and refuses to protect free speech and rights of protest at universities, abandoning both our rights as citizens and our universal human rights. Our choice of futures is now between a theocratic white supremacist patriarchy led by a rapist, and the Bill of Rights made meaningless. All other issues are misdirections and a Wilderness of Mirrors.

     A few short days ago, Biden set hero of the people Julian Assange free, a victory for the transparency of the state and our freedoms of information, speech, and press, but with conditions which echo those offered to the IWW unionists imprisoned by the state long ago for mobilizing against capital and the commodification and dehumanization of the working class. Biden has not championed our rights, but rid his regime of an embarrassing prisoner at the cost of our rights and in abandonment of the idea of journalism as a sacred calling to pursue of truth.

     Who thinks Biden is on the side of the people against tyranny, after this? Biden, who began his career leading white separatists against school integration, chief silencer of women’s witness in the Anita Hill trial which bequeathed us the kleptocratic grifter Clarence Thomas, architect of the invasion of Iraq to steal oil wells as a strategic resource of imperial dominion? And who has done nothing to disarm the police as institutional white supremacist terror, nothing to abolish racist terror at our border and replace ICE and Border Patrol with a mercy force to provide safe conduct for migrants, nothing to disarm Israel and end our complicity in genocide.

     There are vast differences between Biden and Trump, madness, treason, and fascism among them, but this does not make the Democratic Party’s soft tyranny less terrible than the Republican Party’s theocratic patriarchal sexual terror and Nazi white supremacist terror.

      There is but one path forward to a future free of both kinds of tyranny and terror; Let us bring the Chaos and transformative change, and create a true free society of equals and a United Humankind.

     Now is the time to reimagine and transform ourselves and our nation; there is no better time, and there may be no other time.

A Man’s a Man for a’ That sung by Maggie Drennon

Biden’s Madison Speech

What I see when Amy Klobuchar talks:

The Best of Mrs. Maisel’s Stand Up | The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel | Prime Video

    Herein my absurd desires signpost an important truth about our politics; we are offered Baudrillardian images which bypass reason to live among our vast sea of consciousness as liminal states, uncontrollable and bearing transformative power, and no two of us construe meaning in the same way. Our realities are personalized and a dark mirror of the source world beyond; this is why it is impossible to combat lies with truths, because they are all the same once they live within us.

Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist, by Antonin Artaud

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75887.Heliogabalus_or_the_Crowned_Anarchist?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=43LMkuZdON&rank=1

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7442.The_Electric_Kool_Aid_Acid_Test?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=BGXXOhalIV&rank=1

Henry V, by William Shakespeare Folger Edition

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37526.Henry_V?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=RwlhviEGRR&rank=1

Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, by Justin A. Frank

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39100294-trump-on-the-couch?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=2QHucbkEY5&rank=1

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, by Bandy X. Lee

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35343348-the-dangerous-case-of-donald-trump?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=J8FlESFK2A&rank=1

The Psychopathic God, by Robert G.L. Waite

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/500773.The_Psychopathic_God?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=V4TFratD9m&rank=1

The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosiński

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18452.The_Painted_Bird?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=cf8TGLavCb&rank=1

The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12505.The_Idiot?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=SPNNn3iKng&rank=1

The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, by Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/351381.The_Instant_of_My_Death_Demeure?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=uItZF7CCpD&rank=1

                     Biden in his glory:

Biden’s Democracy Versus Tyranny Speech on MSN

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/watch-president-joe-bidens-full-prime-time-address/vi-AA11nl2W?category=foryou

Joe Biden’s political career across the decades – in pictures

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/gallery/2024/jul/22/joe-bidens-political-career-across-the-decades-in-pictures?CMP=share_btn_link

The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, Franklin Foer

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/136342747-the-last-politician?ref=rae_2

Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption, Jules Witcover

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46178736-joe-biden?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=GEQJhTVl6R&rank=13

V For Vendetta film trailer

Darkest Hour: You cannot Reason With a Tiger When Your Head Is In Its Mouth

Oz the Great and Powerful trailer

https://www.amazon.com/vdp/8e361880fe0d489bbcb9450f65e99d7d

    I thought this was the Presidential debate; when they tell you the day of your deliverance is at hand, you should be running.

Masque of the Red Death full movie

The 48 hours that consigned Joe Biden’s 2024 candidacy to history

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/22/joe-biden-election-drops-out?CMP=share_btn_url

Full 2023 President Biden State of the Union annotated and fact-checked – CNN

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/02/annotated-fact-checked-president-biden-sotu/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-biden-state-of-the-union-ukraine_n_621ecbd8e4b0250871a72d05?utm_campaign=share_email&ncid=other_email_o63gt2jcad4

How History Might Remember Joe Biden’s Presidency

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-biden-policy-record-legacy_n_669986b2e4b086df0a294ab3?utm_campaign=share_facebook&ncid=engmodushpmg00000003&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3iTJ3CATr_9V4PNeCqzKDrq5vD7cum6JuHX_qKc8HtnKPjzU1FbFOlTJw_aem__pILm0P7IXq5cTvgsjjDWw

The tragedy and resilience of Joe Biden: a look back at a life in politics:

The oldest-ever American president’s political career began in 1972 and culminates as he yields to pressure to step aside

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/21/biden-steps-down-political-career?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR37WDA3MAw9Qp1uHF6HnN73r3huq9fl73FnUclLaHoGUuAoU1hgzi3L0_s_aem_d2KW26KhMLRjbP9Nln1Osg

Biden endorses Kamala Harris for president after dropping out of race

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/21/biden-kamala-harris?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0rp1e90JJRNSlIN5DXvTsIiDViYHDVfV0pDJDyCBJUm78VGVk9thQdubw_aem_ut7G6X40Ma2ir79AYt9NMA

Biden’s selfless decision to drop out sets stage for an entirely different election

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/21/biden-decision-drop-analysis?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1mCUJ9bsUGkbJFOWcgClN7HkzinD_skVBQcyRfcdMg2S8KmWPrtb_4NXY_aem_Pu_-TnB9skATSY_mccr9Tw

                      Songs of Light

August 12 2022  Hope For the Survival of Humankind: Biden’s Climate Bill

August 12 2022  Hope For the Survival of Humankind: Biden’s Climate Bill

July 8 2022 Biden Signs Order Protecting Women’s Rights of Reproduction and Bodily Autonomy

July 8 2022 Biden Signs Order Protecting Women’s Rights of Reproduction and Bodily Autonomy

January 12 2022 “The Battle for the Soul of America Is Not Over”; Biden Calls for the End of White Supremacist State Terror as Vote Suppression and the Theft of Black Citizenship

January 12 2022 “The Battle for the Soul of America Is Not Over”; Biden Calls for the End of White Supremacist State Terror as Vote Suppression and the Theft of Black Citizenship

December 11 2021 Biden’s Summit For Democracy: Who Do We Want to Become, and What Are We Willing to Do to Free Ourselves From Those Who Would Enslave Us?

December 11 2021 Biden’s Summit For Democracy: Who Do We Want to Become, and What Are We Willing to Do to Free Ourselves From Those Who Would Enslave Us?

November 9 2021 Restoring the Balance: Anniversary of Biden’s Historic Call For Unity “Let Us End This Grim Era Of Demonization”

November 9 2021 Restoring the Balance: Anniversary of Biden’s Historic Call For Unity “Let Us End This Grim Era Of Demonization”

April 19 2021 Biden Proclaims the End of America’s War in Afghanistan: Hooray, and Good Luck With That

April 19 2021 Biden Proclaims the End of America’s War in Afghanistan: Hooray, and Good Luck With That

March 12 2021 Triumph and Transformation in Biden’s Restoration of America: the American Rescue Plan

March 12 2021 Triumph and Transformation in Biden’s Restoration of America: the American Rescue Plan

                  Songs of Darkness

June 27 2024 This Is Bullshit: the First Biden-Trump Debate of the 2024 Presidential Election

June 27 2024 This Is Bullshit: the First Biden-Trump Debate of the 2024 Presidential Election

February 27 2024 Biden’s 2024 Electoral Campaign, A Referendum On the Idea and Meaning of Our Universal Human Rights and the Historic Role of America as Their Guarantor and a Beacon of Hope to the World: Case of the Uncommitted Protest Vote in the Michigan Primary

February 27 2024 Biden’s 2024 Electoral Campaign, A Referendum On the Idea and Meaning of Our Universal Human Rights and the Historic Role of America as Their Guarantor and a Beacon of Hope to the World: Case of the Uncommitted Protest Vote in the Michigan Primary

February 9 2024 Why Do I Write, and Why Am I Writing To All of You Here, in the Nakedness of my Life, my Voice, and my Truth, as America Begins Her Last Stand Against Fascism in the 2024 Elections

February 9 2024 Why Do I Write, and Why Am I Writing To All of You Here, in the Nakedness of my Life, my Voice, and my Truth, as America Begins Her Last Stand Against Fascism in the 2024 Elections

January 24 2024 Now Begins the Last Stand Against Fascism In America: Our 2024 Presidential Election Campaign, and Why I Am Voting For Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez For President of the United States

January 24 2024 Now Begins the Last Stand Against Fascism In America: Our 2024 Presidential Election Campaign, and Why I Am Voting For Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez For President of the United States

January 8 2024 We Descend Into the Maelstrom of World War Three, Having Abandoned Our Historic Misson As a Guarantor of Democracy and Our Universal Human Rights

January 8 2024 We Descend Into the Maelstrom of World War Three, Having Abandoned Our Historic Misson As a Guarantor of Democracy and Our Universal Human Rights

January 4 2024 On America’s Complicity In Ethnic Cleansing and War Crimes In Gaza

January 4 2024 On America’s Complicity In Ethnic Cleansing and War Crimes In Gaza

December 8 2023 The Fall of America as a Guarantor of Democracy and Human Rights

December 8 2023 The Fall of America as a Guarantor of Democracy and Human Rights