The Thunderbolt 240919 - The Thunderbolt Strikes Again!
Dana Walker
The Thunderbolt
News
— Commentary — Calendar of Activist Events — Dumb Jokes
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The Thunderbolt Strikes Again!
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The Thunderbolt Strikes Again!
Hey, People! Surprise!
Yes, after eleven years of relentlessly publishing Thunderbolts nearly without fail every week, there have been none since November of 2023.
There were several personal reasons why I stopped publication of this newsletter and there are several personal reasons why I am temporarily resuming publication now.
I will admit that spending 1 ½ years having every aspect of my personal life under constant vicious attack over something that wasn’t even true to begin with and having my whole life destroyed by my supposed “allies” has seriously soured me on activism. A lot of people had my back during that ordeal – and for that I sincerely thank you - but a lot of other people who should have known better turned their backs - and I have trouble reconciling that.
As for the future, I am not going to say that this is going to be the last Thunderbolt - but I am not going to say it won't be either as I honestly don’t know. (Again - personal things…)
I understand that this sudden reappearance is likely to cause great consternation amongst Olympia’s infamous cancel culture since those folks so violently fear and loathe any criticism of any kind and will organize a mass-attack upon the personal lives of anyone who says anything that they don’t like. I’m sure that with the passing of Glen Anderson (more on that later) you thought you were now safe from having your BS exposed, eh?
Surprise!
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Free the Elephants!
So let us now continue with our time-honoured Thunderbolt tradition of keeping readers informed when it comes to important facts relevant to their lives: Those of you planning a family vacation to Ojai, California may want to alter your plans as it is illegal for your elephant to roller skate within the city limits of Ojai.
And as if that weren’t enough, Ojai's proscription is specie-ist in that it applies only to elephants. Dogs, giraffes, or even crocodiles are evidently free to roller skate to their heart's content.
(And if anyone now produces a Hollywood blockbuster featuring crocodiles on roller skates then I’m gonna want a cut…)
Yes, in Ojai, California only elephants face this frontal assault upon their personal freedom.
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Yes, I joke (another time-honoured Thunderbolt tradition) but the passage of this law was actually a BFD as this was the first time in American history wherein a city recognized the legal rights of a nonhuman animal – specifically the bodily rights of elephants. Thus, it is now illegal in Ojai to subject an elephant to the lack of personal freedom – including making elephants wear roller skates for entertainment purposes -- which evidently was indeed a thing in Ojai back in the day.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/ojai-elephants-rights
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Same Old Same Old Except Even More So
So – has anything interesting happened in politics over the last year?
Once again we are engaged in the great quadrennial farce wherein voters decide which of two lying corporate fascists Wall Street is going to install in the White House for the next four years. The Democrats say the Republicans pose an existential threat to the future of our world. The Republicans say the Democrats pose an existential threat to the future of our world.
On that one issue I am in complete bi-partisan agreement. We now live in an utterly corrupt oligarchy because that is what you get when all your public officials are for sale to the highest bidder.
For years I have been on a lonely one-man campaign to get everyone to abandon both political parties. It seemed as though I was peeing into the wind until this year, when suddenly my position has become so popular that the Media Machine was forced to invent a label for us – and while I hate that label (i.e. “double haters”) I am absolutely overjoyed over the fact that there are now so many of us that they had to do that.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties are utterly corrupt and wholly owned subsidiaries of the Wall Street war machine and they are all beholden to the same criminal gangs of mass-murdering psychopathic war profiteers. Yes, the Democrats have to pretend they support the ‘common man’ and so they allow a few more crumbs to fall from the table of the 0.1% than the Republicans do (though we usually need to jerk on that tablecloth pretty hard to get even those) and yes, the Democrats are better on all the social issues that Wall Street doesn’t care about – and that’s not nothing. On the other hand, the Democrats are just as bad when it comes to Wall Street corruption, with their frigging cancel culture the Dems have become worse than the Republicans at defending our basic civil liberties – which I consider to be a core issue because once you lose your civil liberties then you’ll soon be losing everything else – the Dems are just as bad on the Big Brother Surveillance Police State – and what really makes my head explode is that the Democrats have become the party of endless war whilst under Trump the Republicans are becoming the party of peace meaning the Democrats are now actually worse than the Republicans when it comes to all the never-ending interventionist wars all over the planet! As documented in The Thunderbolt back in November of 2020, almost everyone on Joe Biden’s team either spent the Trump years lobbying for war profiteers or working for think tanks funded by war profiteers
dana98501.wordpress.com/2020/11/25/tb-201125-the-warmongers-apotheosis/
(To give due credit, though, placing Deb Halland in charge of the Department of Interior and placing Lina Kahn in charge of the Federal Trade Commission were two surprisingly good picks – though I’m sure they were payback for a political constituency rather than any desire to do the right thing.) (Yes: When it comes to politics, I am a cynic.)
So what do the Democrats have now? Donald Trump! Donald Trump! Donald Trump! Trump bad! Trump racist! Trump misogynist! Trump criminal! Trump dictator! Trump threat to democracy!
Yes, yes, yes. All true. However, the current elephant in the room everyone seems content to try to dance around if not simply ignore (whether that elephant is wearing roller skates or not) is the fact that not only has the Democratic Party become the party of perpetual war, but they are currently funding and arming a genocide.
I'm sorry, but genocide is a big bright red line for me that I absolutely refuse to cross under any condition or under any circumstance of any kind whatsoever. Genocide is not something you negotiate or compromise. Genocide is not something you say, “yeah but” to, even if that “yeah but” is Donald Trump.
Donald Trump never funded and armed a genocide – though I’m sure he wouldn’t mind doing so. Donald Trump has, in fact, expressed many times distaste for foreign wars and Donald Trump was in fact the first president since Jimmy Carter who did not take the United States into a new war. In addition, at least with Republican politicians, what you see often closely resembles what you actually get (as reprehensible as that is) while the Democrats usually turn out to be the opposite – and at least the Republicans stand by their base whilst the Democrats usually urinate on theirs.
And now genocide – which has almost complete bi-partisan support in the government.
Genocide is the most heinous and holistically evil act that it is possible to commit. Period.
Yet most Democrats seem willing to look the other way. Their only argument is, “Donald Trump! Donald Trump!”
Choice? Yes, we have choice: Do you want the party of endless interventionist war and genocide or would you prefer a Nazi demagogue who has the worldview and the emotional maturity of a 12 year old schoolyard bully?
Your choice!
Frankly, I find this similar to being forced to choose between eating cat shit or dog shit.
Yes! We have choices: Do want to be clubbed on the head by the Republicans or would you prefer being stabbed in the back by the Democrats? Do you want a lying corporate war profiteer who wants to abolish gay marriage or would you prefer a lying corporate war profiteer who supports gay marriage?
If Americans are willing to accept genocide, then we deserve what’s probably going to happen to us.
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A Giant Falls
So – Glen Anderson passed, thus proving he was human after all. (With the seeming inhuman output Glen managed to produce for all those decades, it was sometimes hard to tell…)
Knowing Olympia, I’m sure there was a memorial service for Glen that filled the Capital Theater, and that a long parade of people listed most of Glen’s seemingly superhuman accomplishments so I won’t rehash that list here - but I have a couple of personal anecdotes about Glen that you may not know about. In addition, both anecdotes touch on bigger issues of wider public concern…
First of all, it may surprise some to know that Glen was a major fan and supporter of the Thunderbolt – which I think says good things about him. This was especially true during the Battle of Media Island as I believe Glen also ran afoul of the local cancel culturers at around that same time, albeit Glen’s clash was much less public than mine and a much less vicious than mine.
Another thing is that while Glen was hyper-critical of a lot of things that a lot of people do, he once told me that he always attacked what people did – never the people themselves. Glen believed that all people were good at heart but that some of them were simply misguided. I have always greatly admired Glen for this aspect of his activism, partly as someone who appreciates someone doing something that I am incapable of doing myself. (I often refer to war profiteers with terms such as “human-mutant hybrids”, for instance.)
I also recognized and appreciated the moral authority such a position gave to Glen in his activism.
Another Glen Anderson story I would like to share touches upon financial institutions and poor people…
I have always considered credit to be a trap, and I mostly succeeded throughout my life in avoiding it. However, once I started publishing The Thunderbolt I needed a dependable computer to do my job – and since computers tend to malfunction without warning and since an Apple laptop costs well over $1,000 these days and since I rarely have $1,000 worth of disposable income available at any given time, then three times during my 13 years in Olympia I purchased computers from Best Buy on credit – and I paid 0% interest on the loan on condition that I paid the loan off within a year – which I easily did all three times.
During the entire 13 years I was in Olympia I never once overdrew my credit union account, I never once went bankrupt, was never repossessed, was never evicted, and I was never even late paying any bills much less missing any.
In other words, I have a completely immaculate personal financial record.
However, the last time I went to purchase a computer, their algorithm said that since it had been six years since the last time I had purchased a computer and since I was now living on around half the income, then not only did I no longer qualify for the 0% interest for a year deal, but Best Buy wanted to charge me nearly 100% interest for a one-year loan to purchase a computer.
Such extortionist tactics are why the credit industry is so universally hated.
Such extortionist tactics are how the Machine makes sure that those who are on the bottom stay there.
I’m actually lucky: Had I been forced to use a payday loan company, I would have paid nearly 500% APR.
When I checked my own credit rating, it said “Not enough information”, which meant there was nothing there either good or bad – which they consider to be bad even though there is nothing there that actually is bad.
Anyway, Glen not only ended up loaning me $1,400 to purchase a new computer, but he said I didn’t need to pay him back. (This was in spring of 2023 – I don’t know if Glen had been diagnosed at that point or not.)
I paid him back anyway – in far less than a year – but I thought it was cool as hell that Glen would do that.
Rest in peace, brother.
It’s time to get to work…
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Bonus Tip of the Day:
Don’t accept the status quo.
Peace.
Dana
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