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| Photo inside this photo by John Kopoulos |
And then from the back:
I found this with a bunch of Gramps's old Army pictures, so I can only assume he visited Warm Springs back then. But seeing it made me think about FDR.
In school we're taught about the men who conquered the known world (or even most of it) during their time. People like Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great. But they're small potatoes compared to the one man who conquered the world. The whole fucking thing. No "known" about it. That man was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
He was an absolute master at manipulation. Machiavelli would have been in awe of this wheelchair-bound man who contained more gumption than anyone who had ever lived. He was so good he essentially got Churchill to dismantle the last remnants of the British Empire. I like how Gore Vidal puts it. In his version, FDR tells Churchill that he must give up all the colonies around the world. "Even India?" an aghast Churchill asks. FDR nods and gives a serene smile. "Even India."
I have no idea why FDR conquered the world. I like to think that he was doing it to make a safe and prosperous world for the regular people, not just the elite. What can I say? I'm an optimist.
But we do know this: it's an old story going all the way back to Moses. The great man brings his people to great things only to never enter the promised land, himself. He did not get to enjoy the fruits of his labor because he died while siting for the portrait Gramps saw all those decades ago. Would he have been a benevolent ruler? I think so. He seemed to be an elite who turned against his own. I say that because of all the good he did with the New Deal, benefits that we're recklessly throwing away today.
So Truman was left with victory, and what the hell did he know about ruling the world? Practically nothing, so the power hungry fuckwads around him held dominion over our government. Vidal says dropping two atomic bombs on Japan wasn't about winning the war. It was about intimidating the Soviets. I agree. By the end of the war, Japan was practically begging for peace, and the USSR looked like just the nation to fill their shoes.
But now I wonder if maybe Vidal was thinking too small. I think those bombs were about intimidating EVERYONE. This is our world now. This is your notice. Your compliance is expected. More to follow.
[Pardon the interruption, but I wrote this on May 6. While I was rereading it to make sure it made sense, I realized that everything after this point sounds like anti-American ranting, and all appearances to the contrary, I love America. Not the crazy, stupid and greedy shit that we constantly do. I mean what we say America stands for, things like liberty, freedom, etc. I know in my heart of hearts that we don't mean it, but I want us to live up to the lofty promise of our myth. Am I a proud American? I lean towards Bill Hicks on that one: "My parents fucked there." It's hard to be proud of America at any fuckin' time, but goddammit, this place could be the greatest nation in the history of the planet. We just need to get our collective head out of our collective ass, see things the way they are, and FUCKING FIX THEM.
Because of this, I didn't post it. I had to think about it for a while because I spoke from my heart with what follows, but it is pretty over the top. I weighed just posting the above stuff and deleting everything after this, but the hell with it. There's a lot of truth here, I think, and maybe someone else could benefit from this. You don't have to keep reading if you don't want to.
But I know you will. No one has ever read that warning and decided, nope, that's enough for me.]
The world economy is beholden to the American dollar, meaning if you expect to do business with everyone else, you must first do business with someone who has access to dollars. That and that alone is enough evidence to prove that we've had a strangehold on the world ever since FDR won it in a war. But just in case you need more: Our lawmakers intimidated other countries to put some of our laws on their books so that our corporate overlords would become their corporate overlords, too. And because we're the world hub for the entire internet, we've had access to everyone's shit. As Edward Snowden revealed, we were spying on EVERYONE. Not just our own people. EVERYONE.
Our corporate overlords can brick your car remotely if they so desire. What's to stop them from bricking the internet in, say, England? They wouldn't do that?
Sounds pretty unfair for the rest of the world, right? For them, there is great news. America currently has a president bent on destroying the boot we've used to step on everyone else's throat for decades. That boot is rapidly dissolving. Trust is at an all time low. Other countries are forming coalitions to survive whatever fresh hell we're going to throw at them in the near future.
FDR conquered the world, and Trump is throwing it away like an empty can of Diet Coke from his car window.
The value of the dollar is dropping like crazy. Our debt is now greater than our GDP, which is a pretty horrific sign. Wall Street may be booming, but that shell game means nothing for most Americans. And it is a shell game. Our corporate overlords just keep passing money back and forth to each other while telling everyone else that the exact same money that's being passed around is possessed by all of them at once. And if you think AI is bad right now, just you wait. It's the only thing propping up the economy right now. When that falls apart, and it will since it has not earned a single penny back in return for the biggest investment in investment history, what do you think will happen to said economy?
Every country in the world is in debt, and the way it's set up is, that debt will never be paid, and it will never be defaulted. With the world economy needing a strong US dollar, I can't see why the central banks would let this continue unless there was something a lot more dire happening.
I know this sounds a bit out there, but it is my suspicion that Trump and his Dickless Brigade are tanking the dollar on purpose, and I think they mean to replace it with Bitcoin, most likely, or something similar. There must be a reason why they've decided, out of the blue, that Bitcoin was important enough to stockpile. I hope I'm wrong, but it makes sense to me. The only weakness in the theory is that the central banks would have no say in Bitcoin, unless that's going to change at some point. I'm not entirely sure I know how that works, though, so I might be talking out of my ass with that last sentence.
We live in dangerous times. Never put anything past the Dickless Brigade.
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