The American Presidential election of 2000 was not decided by counting votes.  After election day the Republicans sent a gang of thugs down to Florida to physically intimidate the people who were actually counting votes, and then a couple of weeks later the Supreme Court ruled that it was not appropriate to count votes if it was going to interfere with the installation of their preferred candidate.  George Bush was selected, not elected.  And the participants in this charade knew it.  Bush spent those weeks, when the rest of us thought that the decision was hanging in the balance, choosing his cabinet and planning his move into the White House.  Al Gore spent those weeks meek as a lamb, protesting nothing, contesting nothing, speaking up about nothing, and mobilizing exactly nobody.  They knew, before the rest of us understood the grim truth, that Bush had been selected and that Gore was the Fall Guy.  (Gore actually has a bit of integrity, and it is more likely that he and his family were threatened into submission than that he was actually paid to take a fall.  But take a fall he did.)

This was all so brazen and obvious — no attempt was made to conceal the fact that the election had been stolen and that the loser was going to be installed — that most Americans simply couldn’t deal with it.  At the time we all knew that something truly horrible had happened to American democracy, but then most of us just fogged it over and went into denial, the way victims of abuse “forget” what happened to them.  And now, eleven years later, no one seems to remember at all.  They worry about the next election as if the winner hadn’t already been selected!

Look at it this way.  The election of 2000 was rigged.  We all know that, even if you would rather forget.  So what on earth could possibly make you think that the elections since, and the elections yet to come, could possibly be free and fair?

Democracy has presented a problem since the idea first occurred to people, and in modern America it can be stated like this:  There is simply too much money at stake for decisions to be made by the unpredictable and potentially leveling procedure of counting votes.  The billionaires who own and run the transnational corporations will not allow their wealth to be threatened by the vagaries of real democracy.  We the People might decide that they should actually pay taxes, or that corporations are not people, or that transnational corporations should be subject to government regulation.  Voters might conclude that corporations should have to obey environmental laws, or that their ability to fuel global warming should be curtailed.  Voting, democracy, counting votes, letting leaders get chosen by popular vote — all that is clearly bad for business, and is no longer permitted in this country.  The billionaires feel that they have a responsiblity to protect their wealth, so they let us have a charade of democracy but not the real thing.

Bush was installed to usher in the events of 9/11.  His job was to allow the “New Pearl Harbor” to take place so that civil liberties could be curtailed.  He also was instructed to pass a huge tax cut for the rich and start a couple of hugely profitable (if you own Raytheon or Halliburton) wars while the American public was too busy attaching plastic flags to their vehicles to notice what was being done to them.

But the erosion of civil liberties was the big deal — the wars were just business as usual — a few billion here, a few billion there, and the tax cut for the rich was a minor detail because the rich have never paid much in taxes anyway.  The important thing was to limit civil liberties and ratchet up the police state so that the next phase of the plan could be ushered in.

And what was that?  The next phase of “the plan?”

Perhaps you have missed the fact that the largest transfer of wealth in human history has taken place in the last couple of decades?  That trillions and trillions of dollars — no longer talking mere billions here — have left the bank accounts of the middle class and ended up in the pockets of the rich?  Nobody stole much from the poor — they don’t have much to steal — but the salaries, savings, and property values of the middle class have been severely degraded, and everything that corporations sell has become much more expensive.  Not just in America, but throughout the developed world, in Europe, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Latin America, etc.  The middle class has had their salaries cut, their benefits slashed, and their houses devalued, while the price of health care, education, and food has skyrocketed.  This is not a coincidence.  It is a conspiracy.  The rich have gotten richer and the rest of us have gotten poorer because the rich conspired to make it so.  It isn’t an Act of God — it’s an act of carefully thought-out theft.

And both democracy and civil liberties would have interfered with the plan, so they had to be sacrificed.  Too much money is at stake to let the whims of the people interfere.

Which brings us to your buddy Obama.  How is it that a very young, over-educated, relatively unknown, inexperienced, smooth-talking, allegedly left-leaning black man  from Chicago/Hawaii/Indonesia/Kenya with a distinctly un-American name was able to become president?  In a country that idolizes Ronald Reagan?  Sorry kids, but that didn’t just happen.

Obama was selected, not elected.  Bush was so unpopular by 2008 that it is possible that Obama actually won the popular vote, but we will never know, and it doesn’t matter.  Obama was groomed as a candidate precisely because his “election” would be so unlikely and remarkable that most Americans would be utterly distracted while the Great Theft was taking place.  He was chosen to quiet and confuse the liberals, calm and reassure African-Americans and other minorities, forestall the revolution that was brewing in the Bush years, and co-opt and divide the left.  His selection had the additional advantages that it would enrage and empower the right, and that, after Americans finally realized that the Great Theft had taken place, they would blame the black man from Chicago and not the billionaires who had told him what to do.

So don’t worry.  Obama will “win” the next election.  The Republican candidates are a charade, a joke, a comedy team, and they know it.  Obama has an eight year contract.  The dirty work he was selected to accomplish is not quite done yet.  He is the perfect tool for the billionaires (perhaps soon we will have to start calling them trillionaires) and they are not ready to discard him yet.  By 2016 America will be a wasteland of desperate hungry people scavenging a rusting swamp of crumbled infrastructure, too weary from raw survival and toxic exposure to notice politics or the relentless electronic eye of the police state hovering over them.  And Obama and Romney will be sharing caviar and champagne on some well-protected little Pacific island and chuckling about how well they acted out the game…

In Saudi Arabia on Monday a woman was beheaded for witchcraft.  You heard me right.  Beheaded.  For witchcraft!  I criticize America a lot, but it’s been 400 years since any witches were burned at the stake around here!  This is 2011.  Almost 2012.  They still believe in witchcraft?  They still believe in beheading people?  Elderly women?  Without a trial?  On a scale of 1 (worst) to 100 (best) I would give the government of Saudi Arabia about a 5.  (For comparison, I might give the American government a 25, and Israel could even get as high as 27 or 28.)  The Saudi Arabian government,and its “judicial” system, are beyond barbaric, beyond medieval, beyond corrupt, beyond unspeakable.  Disgusting might be a good word.  Unforgivable.  Deranged…

But there ain’t no place that’s any better.  In Pakistan on Tuesday police raided a school.  The rough equivalent of what Americans would call a school for troubled boys.  Most of the boys were kept in chains.  One, who apparently suffered from epilepsy, was beaten every day with sticks to “drive the demons out of him.”  I’m sure that is happening somewhere in America right now, as we speak — somebody trying to cure a kid of epilepsy by beating it out of him with a stick.  But this particular news story was from Pakistan.  Got to spread the blame evenly, because humans everywhere are equally depraved and deranged and defective…

In Belgium a couple of days ago some guy threw grenades onto a crowded city street, and then shot at the people as they ran.  Why?  It appears he was angry about something.

See what I mean?  There are sick people absolutely everywhere!  America and Israel don’t hold a monopoly on human misbehavior!  (I tend to criticize America a lot because I live here and am partly responsible for trying to make it better.  And I criticize Israel often because much of the evil that happens there is paid for with American dollars, so as an American citizen and a person with Jewish blood, I have a moral duty to try to change that situation as well.)  There are lunatics and monsters all over the planet – don’t think I don’t notice that…

In Florence, Italy a couple of days ago a racist thug shot some Senegalese people on the street.  It appears he didn’t like Africans.  And thought that entitled him to shoot a few…

In Berne, Switzerland the same day scientists announced that they had found the “God Particle.”  Supposedly they proved the existence of some kind of missing link in particle physics.  Now this sounds relatively harmless and benign compared to beatings and beheadings.  (Aside from the radiation and pollution released in the experiments and all the billions of dollars spent that could have been spent feeding hungry people.)  But somehow it struck me as further evidence of human derangement.  Humans love to speculate about, and twiddle around with, things they know very little about.  Sometimes that is harmless, but it is also the human attribute that has brought us nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, geoengineering, experimental psychopharmacology for profit, weapons in space, biological warfare, cloning, and several other spectacularly dreadful ideas.  The God Particle.  Sounds like it has the potential to be really bad news, no?

And in America the House of Representatives passed a law that will allow indefinite detention of American citizens, including those apprehended on American soil, without trial.  No trial, no sentence, no lawyer, no innocent until proven guilty, no habeas corpus, no due process, nothing.  Nothing at all left of what we used to call the “American Way.”  I’d score that Police State 1, Constitution 0.  Fascists win, people lose.  Lunatics take over, sane people cower and do nothing.  It’s like what happened in Germany in the early thirties as Hitler took power — the fascists are fearless and the regular people are terrified.  So they get what they want, and the rest of us lose everything.

Which is exactly my point.  Humans are really scary.  They seem to have an infinite capacity for doing the wrong thing.  And it’s the same everywhere — every country, every race, every religion seems to be equally defective.  In Burma they torture Buddhist monks.  In Japan they have the worst nuclear accident in history and try to cover it up.  In Russia the government steals another election.  In Syria the government attacks unarmed people with tanks.  In Egypt the military tries to maintain the same old dictatorship with a new face.  In France they continue to celebrate nuclear power, after Fukushima, as if they just didn’t notice.  In Afghanistan women who are raped are put in prison and/or forced to marry the rapist.  In Chile kids are blown off the streets with water cannon as punishment for wanting to go to college.  In parts of East Africa, being gay is a capital offense.  (And by the way, those East African gay-is-a-capital-offense laws are fairly new.  A recent development — not a traditional cultural thing, for those of you who were naive enough to still expect happy results from human evolution.)

The Chinese walk around Tibet thinking they are the Master Race.  India continues to do the wrong thing in Kashmir.  South Koreans have been brainwashed into thinking that North Korea has to be The Enemy.  North Koreans have been brainwashed into thinking that everybody is The Enemy.  The Americans perfect Lyme Disease as a bioweapon and then (accidentally?  intentionally?) spread it into the general population.  And meanwhile Iran is building nukes and Brazil is burning the rainforest and in Australia they treat kangaroos better than aborigines.

No place to run, no place to hide.  Humans are in trouble everywhere.  An objective observer from another planet really would conclude that human beings are in immediate danger of self-destruction.

But, sadly, I am an objective observer from this planet.  Which means I too will get swept away when everything goes down the tubes.  Because this isn’t just theoretical.  It’s real.  It’s not just bad news from elsewhere.  It’s here.  It affects all of us now.  Not only are people going berserk all over the planet, but it is directly going to destroy my life, and my health, and my happiness.  And it will destroy your life and your health and your happiness too.  Unless we can stop it.  Unless we can figure out how to make sane behavior contagious.  Unless we can educate people so that they figure out how to act in their own self-interest.  Yo — don’t go bleeping up the planet you live on, you dummies!  No sane healthy species bleeps where it eats!

So we have to change education and we have to change diet and we have to change the environment and we have to change healthcare.  Soon!  (And of course all that will require a totally new economy!)  We have to seize control of the mass media and use it as a force for sanity, not madness.  No one REALLY wants to destroy the planet.  They’re just confused.  Poisoned.  Misled.  Lied to.  Deprived. Improperly educated.  Abused.  Oppressed.  Repressed.  Polluted.  Irradiated.  Brainwashed.  And we wonder why they misbehave?

Want the punchline?  Click on share…

That always got a laugh, followed by a sick-looking expression on the listener’s face.  Many people suffer from pathological positivism, and it is always good to deflate the bubble a little bit, especially when you have an audience of thousands of people in New York’s Capital District.  I couldn’t resist.  I would roll on the studio floor from laughter…

But one day some regular listener called up and pointed out that I was not really telling the truth.  “You do have hope, he said.  It is just that you don’t have expectation…”

This incubated for a while in the back of my brain, and then hatched as true words of wisdom:  I do hope that things get better in this world.  I really do!  It’s just that I don’t expect that to be particularly likely…

I worry about things I have posted on this site — worry that people will misunderstand me.  So let me make myself clear:

I do hope that the Arab Spring will turn out well for all concerned.  I do hope that Obama gets re-elected and that he does a lot of wonderful things in his second term.  I do hope that Israel and the Palestinians make peace, and that Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan all become liberal tolerant peace-loving non-nuclear utopias.  I hope that the rich people will feel a twinge of guilt and actually pay some taxes, and I hope that people will stop killing and abusing animals everywhere.  Starting tonight!

Yes, this is your familiar host of Talkin’ Blues About The News.  The #1 most cynical, most jaded, most dark, most pessimistic commentator on the internet.  Talking about hope and peace and mushy pie-in-the-sky stuff like that?  Have I lost it?  Twisted up my meds somehow?  Missed my appointment?  Low blood pressure caused a cerebral collapse?

No.  I hope, but I do not have much in the way of expectations.  I hope that evolution will bring us kinder, gentler, wiser lifeforms.  Soon!  But I don’t think it is very likely.  I hope that Occupy Wall Street will non-violently pull the whole country, including that rabid right-winger Obama, to the left.  That we will start conserving energy and limiting global warming.  That we will close military bases worldwide and put the young people to work rebuilding this sadly trampled planet.  That no one will ever again keep chimpanzees in the dark for 30 years in the name of “scientific research.”  I hope for a planet where humans stop doing harm.  I have to maintain hope or I wouldn’t be able to keep going…

But what do I expect will happen?  Let me put it this way.  My wife and I live way out in the country.  Deep in the Great North Woods.  And we always keep about ninety bottles of fine French, Italian, and Spanish red wine stored in the basement…  Why?  Decades ago I had a dream.  I was up on the roof, watching the nuclear bombs explode over Albany, forty miles to the southwest.  A minute later the shock wave nearly blew me off the roof.  “Party Time,” I said to myself in the dream as I scampered down the suddenly warm shingles.  “Time to pop the cork.  We have enough bottles to keep us amused us right up until the radiation sickness takes over.  We’ll laugh just as if it was all a big joke…”

In Syria they are trying to get rid of Assad but what they have gotten so far is civil war, and what they might get next is global war fought on their territory.  Be careful what you wish for…

In Iran 32 years ago we were all hoping to see the fall of the Shah.  But what happened next?  The rule of the conservative clerics.  Bad to worse.  Be careful what you wish for…

In America in 2008 we all were hoping to see Obama beat Bush.  That happened.  But, unbelievably, most things have gotten worse and nothing much has gotten better.  The war in Iraq might (might!) be winding down, but the war in Afghanistan rages on, and Obama is setting up new wars in Yemen, Pakistan, and a dozen other places.  America still tortures prisoners.  Guantanamo is still open.  No bankers have gone to jail.  No members of the Bush administration have gone to jail.  Global warming is much worse.  The economy is much worse.  More illegal immigrants are getting deported.  More Predator drones are being unleashed against Pakistan.  (And now Yemen as well!)  Billionaires still don’t pay taxes.  Black and Hispanic people still get profiled and harassed (and beaten and shot!) by the police, and Obama says nothing.  The poor get poorer.  Millions of non-violent offenders are still in jail.  Unemployment is worse.  Marijuana dispensaries that are legal under state law still get busted by the Feds.  Oil companies are getting richer while alternative energy companies are going broke.  The Patriot Act is still on the books.  George Bush is still a free man.  Members of the military and members of congress are still the only people in America with affordable health insurance.  Endangered species are going extinct faster than ever.  What has gotten better?  Be careful what you wish for…

In Russia in 1917 everybody wanted to get rid of the Tsar.  That happened, and they got Lenin, who might have been marginally better.  But then they got Stalin, who was far worse than any Tsar.  They would have been better off with Ivan The Terrible…

In France in 1789 they got rid of the king and got The Terror and then Napoleon instead.  Was that an improvement?  Napoleon started wars that killed millions.  And afterwards, at the end, hardly anything had changed…

I have an old friend who loves Obama.  He thinks he is wonderful, the greatest president ever.  My friend and I are both white people who have been absolutely opposed to all forms of racism since we were children in the days of the civil rights movement, so we were both delighted to see an African-American in the White House.  But my friend still thinks Obama is a Savior, whereas the worst and most cynical doubts I felt before the election have all turned out to be true.  Want the punchline?  My friend who loves Obama is also a certified psychotic.  Clinical.  Nuts.  Does not live in the real world…

Here’s the sad truth:  Yes, we all want change.  But most humans are not very smart.  Most things that humans attempt turn out badly.  And most change is for the worse.  Be careful what you wish for…

Be careful.  Look slowly and thoughtfully at what has happened in Syria.  Look at Egypt.  The bad guys who run the world will not give up power easily.  (Think of Syria 2011!)  And when it appears that ”the people” have won, that is the time to be most careful.  (Consider the example of Egypt in 2011!)  This Is The War Of The Rich Against The Rest Of Us!  In Italy, in Ireland, in Iceland they understand.  In Greece, in Spain, in Detroit.  They understand.  The war of the rich against the rest of us.  It’s here…  Now…

Historically, being on the morally justified side of a conflict has never counted for much.  If you study history, many good people have fallen by the wayside.  The war of the rich against the rest of us started a long time ago.  And the rich have won most of the battles…

So my advice to all my brothers and sisters in the OWS movement is to be careful, to be invisible, to be absolutely non-violent, to win without confrontation, to find a peaceful resolution to this impasse.  Full frontal assault is always suicide.  There are ways we (the 99%) can improve our situation without turning America’s culture wars into actual conflict.  Nobody wants to see America become like Syria 2011.

Many people in America (I can’t speak for other countries, but I do see what is happening here) are confused and conflicted.  The right wingers have controlled the media and the schools since the days of Reagan, so millions of Americans are thoroughly mixed up in terms of what is happening in the world and who the real bad guys are.  But all we have to remedy that is conversation and education and good humor.  (Which might not work, but direct confrontation is always worse.)

Nobody should escalate this situation.  The whole planet is a tinderbox right now.  If all the OWS people start tangling with the police in the streets, everything will only get crazier.  We want to dampen down the situation right now, not crank it up.  There has to be a better way to get to what we all want, which is peace, economic justice, and environmental sanity.  If we state our case correctly, who will be able to argue?  Even the police want economic justice!  Nobody wants peace more than people who have been in the military!  And all of us breathe the air and drink the water, and many of us are smart enough to understand what that has to do with “environmental sanity…”

So there’s not really any argument here.  Even Rush Limbaugh breathes air and drinks water.  So does Michele Bachmann.  Let’s de-escalate.  Strategic retreat.  Peace feelers…  Nobody wants to see the rich people actually destroy the world.  Even rich people don’t want that, do they?  We don’t want war in Iran.  We don’t want war in America.  We don’t want global depression because the rich people have transferred all the wealth from us to them.  But global war would be even worse!  Number One Priority for everybody is to pull back from the brink.  Then we can start the conversation about what we’re going to do next.

Peace and love!

Suddenly it dawned on me — all of us living things share the same idea.  It is the essential creed of survival — leave me alone, let me live, don’t hurt me or my friends or the members of my family.

What struck me first was how clearly I had heard what the trees were saying.  Redwood trees are more or less fed up with humans bothering them and cutting them down.  I would feel the same way.  That’s natural enough…

Next I realized that I could tune in to what every living thing was saying, not just this clump of trees, and that it wasn’t too difficult, because they all had the same idea.  Don’t tread on me.  Let me live.  I am just trying to survive.  Don’t fuck with me, dammit…

And then all the sadness and injustice of the whole planet flooded over me, and I was overwhelmed with grief and pity and pathos.  If I tuned in to all the threatened creatures on the planet, whether plants or animals or humans, then the collective cry of agony would crush me.  It was clear that I had to block some of it out, or else I myself would not be able to survive.

And that led to a moment (a lifetime?) of enlightenment.  All living things are capable of tuning in to the feelings of all other living things.  We share a “collective mind,” even if you don’t believe in telepathy or any other kind of mumbo-jumbo, because we all are programmed with the exact same idea.  In order to survive, we all have to focus on survival.  Evolution only rewards those who protect themselves long enough to pass on surviving offspring.  So it is easy to know what others are feeling, whether they are humans or animals or plants, because they feel essentially the same things we do.

But this brings us to the contradiction, the cosmic joke we have to come to grips with in order to be enlightened:  All living things are capable of tuning in to the feelings of all other living things, but if you do too much of that, it will kill you.  We all can be aware, if we choose, that other living things have as much right to live as we do.  That is the essence of compassion — the Other is no different from me.  But at the same time we have to inhibit that awareness, that compassion, that Oneness, because we are programmed to eat and to survive.  We have to defend our genes or they will not be passed on.

Even vegans have to kill to eat, even if all they kill is plants.  We cannot walk without stepping on living things.  We cannot breathe without inhaling some poor little microorganisms that will be killed by saliva or by the immune system that protects the membranes in our lungs.  To live is to kill, to carve a path through the other living things, to value our own survival over that of others.

But we humans just can’t seem to get the balance right.  We are capable of extending our compassion and of transcending the illusory walls that make us seem separate, but we usually choose not to.  We concentrate on our own One Idea and choose to forget that all other living things have exactly the same idea.

Here’s the Einstein quote:  “A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.”

See what I mean?  He was talking about One Ideaism!  We humans are programmed to both compete and cooperate, by virtue of having had ancestors that survived long enough to reproduce and evolve.  We can compete, and focus on ourselves as something separate from the rest, in order to eat and survive and fight off all the other living things that want to feed on us.  But we can also cooperate, open the floodgates of compassion, and comprehend fully the needs and desires of others.  Do too much of the latter and you will stop eating and starve to death.  But if seven billion humans do too much of the former, the whole ecosystem will be destroyed along with all the living things in it.

The lesson for me is clear, as it was for Einstein:  We humans concentrate too much on our own immediate selfish survival and not enough on the needs, desires, and right to survive held by other living creatures.  We focus on our own One Idea, and inhibit all the evidence coming in to our senses that others might share the same One Idea!

No wonder that the majority of neurons in the human brain are inhibitory.  The torturer inhibits all perceptions that might suggest that the victim is suffering.  The meat-eater inhibits all thought of the fact that the animal does not want to be slaughtered.  The rapist chooses to forget that his target is a sentient being just like him.  The soldier dehumanizes the enemy and becomes convinced that “gooks” or “towel heads” do not feel pain or fear dying.  The tree cutter never stops to think that the tree shares his One Idea in every detail…

Inhibit your compassion too much and you join the forces of evil that are rapidly destroying our beautiful planet.  But if you indulge in too much compassion, you will lose your urge to live and will just shrivel up and blow away.

I know this last part is true because I am close to that point myself.  I am so filled with love and compassion for animals and plants and other humans that I am almost ready to stop eating and breathing.  There’s too much pain, too much sadness, too much suffering that I can no longer block out or inhibit…

It’s a good joke, isn’t it?  The one idea we all share is that we have to ignore the fact that everybody else shares the same idea…

In case you have forgotten, let me remind you — we don’t have elections in this country anymore.  We have selections.  Our leaders are chosen for us, and then we are told that they have won the “vote.”  Too much money is at stake to leave something so important to the vagaries of democracy.

And Obama has been selected to do two full terms.  Trust me.  Nobody is going to choose Herman Cain over Obama.  Nobody.  Much less Newt Gingrich.  (!)  Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann have already self-destructed.  (No surprise there — they were picked for their ability to fail.)  And when it comes to a choice between Romney and Obama, even Republicans will choose the “Muslim” over the Mormon.

The people who run the country will give Obama a second term because he has done everything they wanted him to do in his first term.  The digital voting machines will be manipulated if necessary, but it probably won’t be necessary.  The Republicans don’t have a candidate.  The current pack of clowns is just that — a pack of clowns, intended to persuade people like me, who truly despise Obama as a colossal traitor to everything we stand for (peace, economic justice, and environmental sanity) that we have to vote for him because the Republicans are even worse.  And it will work.  They are worse!  That’s why they were chosen for this charade!  Obama will get a second term, and will continue to reward the bankers and the insurance companies and the military contractors with our money, while the rest of us sink into incurable poverty.  The environmental destruction will continue unabated, the militaristic madness will flourish, the rich will get richer, and then in 2016 the Republicans will (magically!) pick a winner.  Trust me — I’ve seen the script.

Insane as this plan obviously is, we have to take it seriously because Israel has done this twice before with no significant repercussions.  In 1981 Israel bombed a nuclear facility in Iraq, and just a couple of years ago they bombed an alleged one in Syria.  Neither Iraq nor Syria was in a position to do much about it, so the Israeli aggression was perceived as successful, at least by the rabid lunatics that run Israel.

But I would be quite surprised if Iran passively accepted an Israeli attack the way Iraq and Syria did.  Iran has a very powerful military, with its own cabal of rabid lunatics in charge, and I believe them when they say that, if attacked, they would retaliate against Israel and against American facilities in the region.  They might defy the Israeli nuclear threat and unleash all of their conventional forces, gambling that Israel would hesitate to use nuclear weapons.  And in a massive air, ground, and naval confrontation between Iran and Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Egypt, and others might be unable to resist the urge to join the fight.

So what I see coming is this:  Israel will attack, inflated with unrealistic arrogant confidence because they have a nuclear deterrent, because they think America will protect them no matter what, and because they’ve been getting away with everything they have wanted to do for a long time with no real consequences.  They can bomb Iraq or Syria or Gaza, or invade Lebanon, or defy the UN and international law, or attack ships in international waters, and nobody stops them.  So it is likely that they have deceived themselves into thinking that they can attack Iran with impunity as well.

But I think that Iran and all its friends will fight back, and that’s when things could get ugly.  Israel will have bitten off more than it can chew, and it only has two things to fall back on — nuclear weapons, and American military assistance.

And yes, Obama is stupid enough to support Israel in such a situation.  In order to avoid the nuclear option, America would probably send massive conventional forces to help Israel destroy Iran.  And then the Mideast would probably erupt into the biggest war since WW II.

I don’t even see this chain of events as unlikely or as a hypothetical worst-case scenario — if Israel attacks Iran, massive escalation strikes me as inevitable.  America would almost definitely get involved, and there is a significant chance that nuclear weapons would be used by somebody.  Pakistan might try to use its nukes to defend Iran.  Russia or China might use the threat of their nukes to counter Israeli or American moves.  Or enraged terrorists could set off a few dirty bombs somewhere.

And think what all that would do for the economy, the environment, and global warming!  A major war, with or without nuclear weapons, would finish off what little chance America and Europe have of economic recovery.  Life would become immeasurably worse for everybody on the planet, probably for generations.

And all this because little Israel wants to be the baddest kid on the block.  Spoiled little Israel can’t stand the thought that any other country in the region might get the capability to defend itself from Israeli aggression.  Little Israel has to be Number One, and they are prepared to ruin the world to prove it.  And Obama, who should be forcing Israel to restrain its demonic belligerence, is instead encouraging them.  I see a really big war coming, and Netanyahu and Obama will go down in history as the arrogant fools who chose to start it.  For no good reason.

Why are they furious?  They had forgotten about democracy.  It never occurred to them that the people would actually get a chance to vote on all this…

I am no economist — just a taxpayer and a logician — but I understand perfectly well that the war of the rich against the rest of us is in full swing.  They think us poor folks have too much, and they want to take what little we still have.  So there is a global conspiracy afoot to steal from the poor and give to the rich.  They are cutting our salaries, trimming our pensions, busting our unions, eliminating the welfare and healthcare safety net, and putting everybody who doesn’t like it in prison.  They want us to starve quietly and peacefully and obediently, and then roll over and die.

And the leaders of this monstrous plot are now astonished and enraged, because the citizens of Greece are actually going to get an opportunity to say what they think of all this.  And we know what they think, because it is the exact same thing we think:  Would you vote to have your paycheck and pension and services cut while your taxes go up?  So the rich can get richer?  I don’t think so.

Lucky Greeks.  I wish we had gotten a chance to vote on our bailout here in America.  Obama gave a trillion of our tax dollars to the very same bankers who had caused the global financial crisis.  They speculated wildly until the inevitable crash, and then, instead of being indicted and incarcerated, they were rewarded with more of our hard-earned money!  And, even though we are supposed to live in a democracy, no one asked us Americans what we thought of all that.  Now Papandreao has given the Greek people a chance to express their disapproval.  Obviously they will vote a resounding NO, and, equally obviously, the rich will not give up and will send in the tanks if they have to.

So no good will come of this.  But still I am delighted to see Sarkozy and Merkel and their banker backers in a frenzy, sputtering with rage at the idea that democracy might be allowed to delay the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.  When thieves already have their hands on your wallet, it really annoys them when you object.  They want you to just raise your arms meekly and let them take all they want.  If you don’t, then they will use overwhelming force.

But at least somebody somewhere is complaining.  At least somebody somewhere is getting a chance to register a protest before they mow us all down.

Tepco (the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the masterminds behind the mass meltdowns at Fukushima) announced yesterday that there has “definitely” been nuclear fission occurring in the melted nuclear fuel at the bottom of reactor #2.  The fuel melted in March into a lump at the bottom of the containment vessel.  (This happened in reactors 1, 2, and 3.)  But the fuel at reactor #2 has since reached critical mass, and nuclear fission has been detected.  The radioactive fuel has been releasing neutrons that have been striking other nearby molecules of fuel and causing them to split, releasing more neutrons in a chain reaction.

Tepco injected boron into the reactor, because boron absorbs neutrons and should stop the spontaneous (and uncontrolled!) fission.  Problem solved?

Maybe.  Let’s hope so.  If they can get enough boron into the part of the reactor where the melted fuel is, and somehow keep it there, the chain reaction should wind down.  It may already have done so.

But if for some reason the boron does not get close enough, then several things could go wrong.  The fuel, already very hot, could get hot enough to boil off all the water they are adding, and resume the active meltdown that began in March.  The hot fuel could melt through the bottom of the containment vessel and enter the earth underneath the plant.  If that happens the entire load of radioactive material would be loose in the environment, unconfined and uncontrollable.  That would contaminate the groundwater and probably the nearby ocean as well.  And there would be a severe risk of a massive steam explosion, because the hot fuel would boil the groundwater, and the steam could build up pressure underground.  Worst case scenario?  The rock the plant is built on blows up from steam pressure, releasing all the radioactivity in all the reactors and spent fuel pools.

There isn’t much chance of the fission leading to a nuclear explosion.  (Even though one already occurred, at reactor #3 in March — see my recent story “Fukushima Prompt Criticality.”)  Many things would have to go wrong simultaneously for the chain reaction to speed up that much.  Probably the boron Tepco has added will dampen down the fission, at least for the time being.  And even if it doesn’t, the chain reaction is more likely to result in uncontrollable heat leading to further meltdown and the possible scenarios described above, rather than to an actual nuclear explosion.

But don’t underestimate these fools at Tepco.  Any group of people stupid enough to build six nuclear reactors on an active earthquake fault can not be trusted to clean up the mess they have created.  Mistakes have been made, mistakes are being made as we speak, and mistakes will continue to be made.  That’s what stupid people do.  So stay tuned to Talkin’ Blues About The News, because the worst nuclear disaster in history is not over — it is ongoing.  Multiple meltdowns are in progress, barely controlled and incompletely contained.  The fuel is hot and might be getting hotter.  A massive amount of radiation is escaping from the damaged reactors every night and every day, for almost eight months now.  (Just yesterday it was revealed that the total radiation released has been twenty times larger than what we had been told previously!)  The global epidemic of cancers and birth defects is just beginning.  And now things have gotten significantly worse…