This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

I was perusing through YouTube News reporting the offensive content. A See BS clip with an anchor reporting on Mr. Trump’s banning of CNN, MS Now and Politico from the White House caught my attention. The anchor calmly offered up “The news” just as sweetly as announcing the first day of the county fair. Calmly and paternalistically and with a complete sense of normalcy. The anchor was reporting on the banning of other news outlets, as if it could never happen to them.

I guess Mr. Trump just had to do it and he had no other choice. They forced Mr. Trump into doing it. And now, he’s had enough. Just as normal as Der Fuhrer ordering the arrest of the Jews. I guess he had to do it. They forced his hand into doing it. I guess being a Judas goat pays well enough, even if it makes it difficult to look at oneself in the mirror. When I grow up, I want to be a fucking liar and propagandist too! I want to normalize constitutional outrage and melt it into warm, soft slumber.

What Mr. Trump has done is clearly unconstitutional and comes from the desk of a petty tyrant. What’s next? Federal officials today raided the offices of CNN. Twenty-seven people were arrested for unnamed, but good-cause federal crimes. Also in the news; a farmer in Minnesota grew a nine-hundred pound pumpkin, just in time for Halloween. Aww, isn’t that cute? Normalizing ugliness and sugarcoating fascism. Every day or two, Mr. Trump announces the end of his Iran war again. And See BS and their ilk, dutifully report on it as if it couldn’t be anything but true.

A Houthi missile struck the Riyadh airport in Saudi Arabia yesterday. Sorry, no details or video available, just a column of black smoke rising into the horizon from ten or so miles away. Duh, media reported the Houthis had attacked ONE pumping station when it was actually THREE pumping stations. Duh, media reported the damage as moderate, as in moderately wiped off the face of the earth. Don’t worry, the damage will be repaired “soon.” The Saudis “voluntarily” shut down the pipeline in the same way New York officials voluntarily shut down the World Trade Center after 911.

With three pumping stations destroyed, the pipeline might as well not exist. Duh, media reports on Houthi advances without saying what those advances actually mean in the grand scheme of things. Officials say the World Trade Center will reopen…soon! The Houthis now control the entrance to the Red Sea, but promise not to attack any American shipping. Take three guesses how many US flagged oil tankers are transiting the Red Sea? Officials promise not to shoot any polar bears found in Miami.

Shipping in the Persian Gulf has largely come to a standstill, with only rogue tankers occasionally making a run for it. Do they tell you that on the news? Do they mention the coming oil shortage or prices without limits? Hell no! They don’t want to get banned from the White House. Do they mention the catastrophic effects on railroads, trucking or airlines? Everything is reported with omitted details or false equivalencies. Canada retaliated against American tariffs. Describing them with hard adjectives and describing us with soft adjectives. Leaving out all context of Mr. Trump’s unilateral tariffs starting a trade war or Canada only responding in kind.

Well, I suppose the Navy had every right to blow up that fishing boat and kill everyone on board because the ship was carrying drugs! How do we know? The Navy said so. They wouldn’t lie, would they? If it turned out to be just an innocent fishing boat, I’m certain the Navy would admit its error. The posse left town and hung the first cowboys they came across. Certain that they were cattle rustlers they’d been looking for. A trial? What for? They said they were the rustlers, what else do you really need to know? They have successfully hunted down and killed the criminal Montag!

This is what darkness looks like. The invertebrate media and democracy die in the darkness of billionaires’ pockets. The Sneaker of the House, Little Johnson, shut down the House of Representin. Your government, to avoid a vote on impeaching the incompetent Pete Hegseth. Did they tell you that, or did they just tell you the house will be in recess until after the midterm elections?

The president defect and his crooked council of cronies and thugs have successfully shut down all mention of the murdered Jeffrey Epstein. The largest sex scandal in American fucking history silenced. And firemen successfully rescued Mittens the frightened little kitten from the tall oak tree. Watergate? Huh? Never heard of it. What scandal? Oh, Richard Nixon would never do that!

Kindly old Mr. Trump only wants to renovate the Kennedy Center and modernize it. Is putting his name on the building too much to ask? Our gracious Fuhrer only wants to do good things! If he lies, he must have a pretty good reason.

“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.” ― John Steinbeck

The network news has become anything but news. It is a billionaire’s opinion of what is allowed to be told as news, filtered through a slow drip of a minders red pencil.  Xing out all unpleasant but pertinent details. There’s a reason Elon calls it X. Trumpzilla told Zelensky to stop attacking Russian oil refineries, blaming the high diesel prices on Ukraine. The next day, Ukraine destroyed another Russian refinery. But that’s not news, if they don’t report it.

If a tree falls in the forest, it wouldn’t make a sound if they didn’t want it to make a sound. They wouldn’t dare report that Mr. Trump was being disobeyed. Sock puppet, Shady Vance went to a small, tiny little room in Iowa where a small, tiny little contingent of happy farmers waited joyously. How do I know? Because they never showed the room on camera. The camera was focused only on Shady and only a few of the happy farmers. If the room had been overflowing, it would have been the lead story. “Huge crowds joyously greeted Vice-Rodent Vance in Iowa!”

“Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things than I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths.” ― Joseph Goebbels

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.” ― George Orwell,