What the Democrats need to do!

Posted on by Opher

It’s simple!

The Democrats need to address the fears and concerns of the white males who have been beguiled by MAGA.

They need to address the issues.

  1. They need to come up with a viable plan to prevent mass uncontrolled illegal immigration.
  2. They need to find a way of providing unskilled work that pays well enough.
  3. They need to raise the poor out of poverty.
  4. They need to counter the scapegoating of immigrants and explain how it is the billionaires exploiting the poor that are the real problem.
  5. They need to address the fertility situation in the white population so that fear of replacement subsides. (two-pronged – educate blacks and browns to a higher level so they reduce fertility rates and provide good cheap child-care facilities so that women can pursue careers).
  6. They need to counter the conspiracy and disinformation and promote good science. Show that climate change is real and there is a bright future with green technology – jobs, wealth and prosperity + a better environment – win win.

They need to create a vision based on a positive message. A better future. They need to produce viably policies with real answers.

Until working white men realise that they will be better off with Democrat policies they support the simplistic nonsense of MAGA. At least Trump, snake-oil salesman that he is, is offering ‘solutions’ to their fears and concerns.

The Democrats offered nothing.

Where the Democrats went wrong!

Posted on by Opher

The Democrats ran a campaign that was basically anti-Trump and pro-Women. But it failed to answer the fears of the white working class.

Yes the white working class are basically illiterate (54% of the American people have poor literacy compared to 16.4% in the UK) but that does not mean that they do not have real fears.

a. They are terrified of becoming a minority in their own country (I know, they stole it from the Native Americans but they still think of it as their own) as the populations of black and brown people increase.

b. They are in a precarious work situation as their traditional jobs in oil, car manufacture, steel, coal and factories either is done by robots, has been shunted abroad to cheap labour, or is being shut down because it is outdated or polluting.

c. The new industries in green technology seems too sophisticated. They do not think they have the skills to change.

d. The agriculture industry takes in cheap labour from immigrants.

e. Education and careers for women reduces white fertility rates. Trump was offering to get women out of education and jobs and back into the home. Educated women are threatening.

f. Their incomes have dropped and they are living in poverty.

g. They are worried about immigrants flooding in, taking their jobs and displacing them.

The Democrats simply ignored all these fears. Wrote them off as racist. Offered no solutions and failed to address the issues.

Trump, MAGA, the Evangelical Right and all their billionaire sponsors – 183 of them – addressed these issues head on.

a. They focused on building a wall to keep immigrants out.

b. They promised to deport millions.

c. They promised to scrap all the green energy. Spread conspiracy about climate change. Undermined science. Spread disinformation and promised to bring back coal, oil and fracking, protect the old jobs.

d. They promised to bung tariffs on all imports and force companies back to the US to keep jobs.

e. They promised to reduce income tax and give people more money in their pockets (the fact that this vastly favoured the wealthy and destroys schools, police, health and infrastructure was glossed over).

f. They made a huge fuss about abortion and contraception (go forth and multiply) playing to the extreme right Christian Evangelists.

g. They want to dumb down schools for the poor (the wealthy can go private) so that the populace can’t think, girls get pregnant and don’t get careers. The fertility rate rockets. They will not be replaced.

The poor whites thought this addressed all their concerns:

a. Mass immigration would be stopped.

b. The black/brown population would be reduced by mass deportation.

c. Their old jobs would be revived.

d. They would not be as poor.

e. They would not be replaced and become a minority.

Trump and Maga offered them a vision of a positive future.

The fact that this is all short-term bullshit was irrelevant, very expensive and highly unfeasible it might be but it seemed to tackle the issues. The fact that the old industries were defunct and well past their sell-by date; the new green industries were the future whether they liked it or not; that the tax cuts merely put billions in the pockets of the wealthy and gave next to nothing in their own; the decline of schools, health, infrastructure and policing was a future disaster waiting to happen; the wall was massively expensive and doomed to failure; the policies would add trillions to the national debt. The tariffs would promote trade wars and plunge the world into a disastrous slump.

They weren’t clever enough, educated enough or farsighted enough to see this. They could not see the flaws only the simplistic vision. They could not see they were being played by the billionaires who were going to make a killing.

MAGA and Trump offered a bright future, a vision, that they bought into without seeing the maggots in the apple.

The Democrats did not even address the issues!

‘We Will Not Be Replaced!’

Posted on by Opher

This was the mantra that was being chanted by the fascist white power loonies in Charlottesville. This mantra contains a host of issues that feed into MAGA and Project 2025. It was what Trump tapped into.

a. The intrinsic fear is that the black and brown populations are increasing and will soon become a majority.

b. The white population fertility is dropping and whites will soon become a minority.

For the poor whites this creates a paranoid fear. They think they are being displaced in their own country (I know – they stole it from the Native Americans but they believe it’s theirs).

There is a backlash about this displacement that has many implications. It was seized upon by Trump, MAGA, the fanatical Right-Wing Evangelicals and the shady billionaires who run the movement. It manifested itself in many ways in Project 2025:

  1. They want to stop all immigration – keep more brown people out and deport ones who are here. Hence the wall and mass deportation.
  2. They want to increase white fertility levels. Hence the laws on abortion, contraception and sex ed.
  3. They want to suppress female education – educated women have less children.
  4. They want to suppress women going into careers. Career women have less children. Hence, women should stay at home, look after the house, pop out babies and support their man. The more extreme are even suggesting that women shouldn’t have the vote.

The attitudes towards women’s rights, dumbing down and defunding of education, and immigration policies stream directly out of the paranoia of white, working Americans. They are afraid to become a minority. They are terrified of the increasing black and brown populations. Trump, MAGA and the Fascist white supremacists directly address their fears. They are deeply afraid of being replaced!

Poetry – Servants of the People

Posted on by Opher

Servants of the People

It’s never the people who create war,

                They just die for the cause.

It’s the leaders who serve the people

                Who take the applause.

Protectors of the nation,

                                They give their orders loud and clear

                For us to die for our country

                                No price is too dear.

Psychotic, paranoid narcissists;

                They prepare the people well.

Ratcheting up fear and propaganda

                Before blowing them to hell.

They are supposed to be our servants,

                Though you’d never guess.

They think they are superior

                But we clear up their mess.

These grandiose leaders

                Live in their opulent bubble.

Inflated opinions of themselves

                With us to sort the trouble.

It’s never the people who create war,

                They just die for the cause.

It’s the leaders who serve the people

                Who take the applause.

Opher – 3.5.2022

Standing for high office – it’s rarely the ‘normal’ folk. It’s people with big egos, narcissists with no doubts, psychotics and sociopaths who simply do not care and paranoid maniacs who are prepared to sacrifice the world.

Why can’t we be led by people who have compassion, who really do care, who are not drunk on power or lining their own pockets. Wouldn’t the world be a lot saner and better for everyone?

No. It never is.

They believe themselves superior. They think we deserve to be where we are. They are privileged; we should be humble and know our place. They know better than us.

They think they can exploit and manipulate us. They can give us as little as possible while taking for themselves and their chums. They think they can tell us what to believe.

Their arrogance and entitlement is sickening.

Yet we elect them, support them and help inflate their egos.

That’s why the world’s a mess. That’s why there’s war.

Poetry – Refugees and Ruins

Posted on by Opher

Refugees and Ruins

Millions of refugees

                Desperately flee

                                On foot,

                                                By train, bus and car.

Escaping

                Vengeance

                                Of Russia’s

                                                Despotic Cazar.

They leave mass graves

                In their wake.

While maimed and broken

                In basements quake.

The Russian cannons roar

                And tenements crumble.

The voice of reason

                Lost in war’s evil rumble.

Putin and his Generals

                Should be in the front line.

If they were all wiped out

                Things might work out fine.

Millions of refugees

                Desperately flee

                                On foot,

                                                By train, bus and car.

Escaping

                Vengeance

                                Of Russia’s

                                                Despotic Cazar.

Opher -22.4.2022

It is almost inconceivable to me that in this modern age an army could invade another country and systematically reduce its cities to rubble, terrify millions and execute hundreds of thousands.

It is shocking to see the schools and hospitals deliberately targeted, the people hunted down, raped and coldly executed.

It is wicked to see the civilian houses intentionally destroyed.

What is worse is to hear the propaganda pouring out to justify this invasion with its wanton destruction and genocide.

The lies are the worst, poisoning minds, generating hatred and resulting in atrocities.

War reveals the worst of human nature.

We are the most depraved and vicious animals.

Poetry – Nineteen Fourteen

Posted on by Opher

Nineteen Fourteen

It is twenty twenty-two

                But in Ukraine

                                It is nineteen fourteen.

Russia has unleashed

                A reign of terror

                                Like we have rarely seen.

In Chechnya and Syria

                They practiced

                                Their Evil art.

Firing shells and missiles

                To blow

                                The cities apart.

They are digging trenches

                One again

In European cities civilisation

                Is down the drain.

Putin is gaily singing

                Death’s refrain.

It is twenty twenty-two

                But in Ukraine

                                It is nineteen fourteen.

Russia has unleashed

                A reign of terror

                                Like we have rarely seen.

Opher 22.4.2022

We like to think of ourselves as civilised – but we’re not.

We like to think we are intelligent – but we’re not.

We like to think that human civilisation has become advanced – but it hasn’t.

We like to think we have become wise and sophisticated – but we haven’t.

We’re still the same aggressive, violent, stupid, greedy, paranoid apes we’ve always been. We’re still the short-sighted idiots who fight.

Everything is a thin veneer.

Poetry – One Day

Posted on by Opher

One Day

One day life was normal.

                The next flung into fear.

One day our houses full

                Of things we hold dear.

Now the towns are scenes of death.

Invaders seek to steal our breath.

Our cities pounded into heaps of rubble.

We huddle in basements safe within our bubble.

One day life was normal.

Once we had a home.

Once our lives had meaning

Sweet as any poem.

One day life was normal.

                The next flung into fear.

One day our houses full

                Of things we hold dear.

It will rise again,

                Out of the ashes.

                                We will build again

                                                And heal the hideous gashes.

Opher – 21.4.2022

I’ve spent the whole of my life in the modern world without being touched by the terror of war.

The wars seemed to happen in other countries far away, to people who were not like me.

War seemed primitive, a relic of the past.

It felt that we had been up trade and relationship to such a level that war was inconceivable.

Then the Ukraine happened.

Vladimir Putin – Dreams of a mad Megalomaniac!

Posted on by Opher

Megalomaniacs are never realistic. They surround themselves with yes-men and so never receive sound advice.

He’s overstepped. Ukraine is showing up Russia for the wet paper bag it is. Putin and the oligarchs have drained it dry. All they have are the goons of the police state.

Time those parasites were kicked out and the wealth of the people put where it belongs.

Ukraine – not going so well!!

Posted on by Opher

With threats of nuclear war Putin descends into paranoid hell. It’s down to the Russian soldiers and public now. Are they going to continue to support this tyrant or will they find a moral backbone and turn. They deserve better!!

Putin’s mental state!

Posted on by Opher

John Peachey sent me this article. I’m not sure where it’s from but it is very good.

Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a catastrophic new European war, combined with the sheer weirdness of his recent public appearances, has raised questions in western capitals about the mental stability of the leader of a country with 6,000 nuclear warheads.

They worry about a 69-year-old man whose tendency towards insularity has been amplified by his precautions against Covid, leaving him surrounded by an ever-shrinking coterie of fearful obedient courtiers. He appears increasingly uncoupled from the contemporary world, preferring to burrow deep into history and a personal quest for greatness.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, is well-placed to analyse changes to Putin’s demeanour. Macron once drove a cooperative, if self-conscious, Putin round the gardens of the palace of Versailles in a tiny electric golf cart in the summer of 2017 and welcomed him to his holiday residence at a fortress on the Mediterranean coast the following summer, where Putin descended from a helicopter carrying a bunch of flowers and complimented the Macrons on their tans.

After Macron held five hours of talks with the Russian leader in Moscow at opposite ends of a 15-metre table, he told reporters on the return flight that “the tension was palpable”. This was not the same Putin he had last met at the Elysée palace in December 2019, Macron said. He was “more rigid, more isolated” and was off on an “ideological and security drift”.

Following Putin’s speech on Monday, an Elysée official made an unusually bold assessment that the speech was “paranoid”. Bernard Guetta, a member of the European parliament for Macron’s grouping, told France Inter radio on Thursday morning, after military invasion began: “I think this man is losing his sense of reality, to say it politely.” Asked by the interviewer if that meant he thought Putin had gone mad, he said “yes”.

Guetta is not alone. Milos Zeman, the Czech president and long one of Vlaldimir Putin’s staunchest supporters, denounced Putin a “madman” after the invasion.

“All our Russia-watchers, watching his press conferences, think that he’s descending even more into a despotic mindset,” another European diplomat said.

Vladimir Ashurkov, a close aide of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most prominent opponent who is now in a penal colony, described Monday’s rambling speech by the Russian president about Ukraine as “really bizarre”.

“It’s unprecedented in the rhetoric of world leaders, but also for Russia. It’s quite strange,” said Ashurkov, who is executive director of Navalny Anti-Corruption Foundation, and lives in exile.

“Why would you spend so much time, you know, looking back into the past, when we now live in the 21st century? We should be looking into the future. It puzzles me as to what audience is intended for such a speech, because it’s not going to resonate with Russians and it’s rubbish for an international audience.”

“I think he’s in some sort of self-induced concept of reality based in the past, and in the trauma of the dissolution of Soviet Union,” he said. “Frankly speaking, we are in a situation where the leader of a major nuclear country is living in his own world.”

According to an estimate by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), Russia has 5,977 nuclear warheads, even more than the US, its own rival in that field.

Putin frequently refers to that huge arsenal, and made a thinly veiled reference to them when he launched the war on Ukraine.

He said: “Whoever would try to stop us and further create threats to our country, to our people, should know that Russia’s response will be immediate and lead you to such consequences that you have never faced in your history. We are ready for any outcome.”

Nato’s North Atlantic Council responded with similar open-ended language, saying: “We have increased the readiness of our forces to respond to all contingencies.”

In a crisis, it would be very much up to Putin how to react and whether to escalate. Like a US president, he has access to a nuclear briefcase, the Chegets, with nuclear launch code. 

“Nuclear weapons are an interesting exception to the general rule that the psychology of world leaders is less important than the systems they work in,” Foley said. “Don’t assume that this could proceed in an orderly fashion. It could spin out of control very easily.”