Nine terrifying words

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Reagan laughed and quipped — but it has come true under our CEO

President Reagan thought he was joking when he spoke to a 1980s political rally: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” Many people in this cruel world of America in 2025 are “most” terrified when CEO Donald Trump sends Secretary Krazy Kristi Noem of Homeland Security and ICE forces out to “help,” they’ll pick up 3,000 of the following people: members of the LBGTQUIA+ community, transgender folk in military service, Never Trumpers in elected office and government jobs, pregnant women, undocumented immigrants, people on food stamps, tan and brown people on street corners waiting for job pickups, Black drivers stopped on a side street, caregivers helping the elderly, people picking fruit on a farm, students at Los Angeles high school, an old couple waiting for a church door to open — or chasing, catching and beating a Hispanic landscaper wielding a grass trimmer who is also the father of three United States Marines. At least the SS and Gestapo didn’t wear masks, wore uniforms and name tags, drove military vehicles and carried identification.

Are we traveling from Lilliput to Brobingnag to Laputa to Houyhnhnm?

Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift published “Gulliver’s Travels”in 1726 to examine what the politicians were doing to English politics through the amusing actions of Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon and sea captain who travels to four countries in remote regions of the world. In his first adventure, Gulliver, the only survivor of a shipwreck, swims to Lilliput, lands where people are only six inches high.

Conservatives wear high-heeled shoes and liberals wear low ones. They spend most of their legislative time arguing about the height of heels. The best rope jumpers in Lilliput are nominated for lifetime judgeships. Lilliput goes to a terrible war with Blefusco over which end of an egg should be broken. Gulliver captures Blefusco’s naval fleet and is celebrated for putting out a fire in the royal palace by urinating on it. But he quickly loses public support and is sentenced to be blinded and starved. He steals a Blefusco ship and returns alone to England.

Gulliver’s second voyage takes him to Brobdingnag, a land of giants. A farmer grabs him and charges cash to see “the little guy.” The queen buys him from the farmer and he becomes a somewhat favorite at court. Gulliver describes England to the king, who then determines the English must be a race of “odious vermin.” Gulliver is then picked up by a big eagle and dropped in the sea. He is rescued at sea by normal people.

This third voyage takes him to the poor country of Laputa where scientists work on impractical subjects such as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. Gulliver visits Glubbdubadrib, where he interviews great men of the past who teach him all the lies in history. He escapes and sails to Japan and then England.

His fourth voyage is to the land of the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses who are cleaner and more rational, communal and benevolent. Their language has no words for “deception” or “evil.” The humanoid race in this land is the brutish, foolish, filthy, greedy and degenerate Yahoos, some of whom they have trained. After Gulliver describes the English to the Houyhnhnm leader, the leader compares the English to the Yahoos. Gulliver leaves under his own power, returns to England and decides to live with intelligent horses instead of just horse’s asses and converses with them instead of humans. Swift, with his deadly satire, is telling 18th Century Irish and English parliaments “QUIT SCREWING AROUND AIMLESSLY AND GOVERN PEOPLE AND COUNTRIES!”

Answers to why the mighty Roman Empire took 1,500 years to fail

The 18th century English historian Edward Gibbons took about a dozen years and half a dozen books about the years 98 to 1590 to reveal why the mightiest empire in the world declined and fell in his great work “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” He published his history books between 1776 and 1789.

Those dates sound familiar. The American Revolution of ”the British are coming” started in 1776 and the French Revolution of “let them eat cake” started in 1789.

Actually, two sentences he wrote among many thousands give the answer to his query: “The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressures of its own weight.”

Of course, if a country has some historians, new theories about the decline and fall are being taught in the 21st century. Classics Professor Kyle Harper at the University of Oklahoma (a very red state) offers a somewhat different point of view from Gibbons.

“The fate of Rome was played out by emperors and barbarians, senators and generals, soldiers and slaves,” said Harper. “But it was equally decided by bacteria and viruses, volcanos and solar cycles. Humanity and the environment cannot be separated.”

Other historians and scientists have determined that climatology and epidemiology have opened new windows in the study of the past. As an example, climatologists have proven that Rome had very stable years for growing agricultural products from about 500 BC to 150 AD. Rainfall was more frequent than it is today. Even North Africa had vast arable lands before turning into deserts. The world is growing old. Scientists have discovered that the earth has tilted slightly since the Third Century, thus impacting rainfall in various sections of the world.

There is little doubt that our future success or failure depends upon how our “Great Leaders,” presidents or kings — and new barbarians, senators and generals (and moral billionaires, soldiers and slaves — and private militias or posse comitatus sheriffs) govern America. Watching the short-handed weather forecasters that predict more than 100 million Americans will suffer from heat, floods, winds, tornadoes, landslides, hurricanes, fires and smoke is rapidly becoming a survival mode.

When the Gulf of Mexico is a hot tub, one can expect horrific storms from Louisiana to upstate New York when that cool air from the Rockies hits hot air from New Orleans. Experts are estimating 19 Atlantic hurricanes this season, with at least five classified as E-5s (winds at more than 160 mph). What will Mar-a-Loco in Palm Beach look like if hit by an E5? It will not look like a “hoax.” The number of E-5s has been increasing for the last decade.

An interesting fact: during the Depression (when I was born!), President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued 99 executive orders in his first 100 days trying to lessen the economic damage. Working with Congress, not against, he succeeded in passing 80 of those executive orders into law. When assuming the Oval Office. The Chosen One, elected by racist evangelical and fundamentalist Christians along with conservative Roman Catholics, issued 130 executive orders in his first 100 days.

Only five have been passed into law by an anti-science “Know-Nothing/Do-Nothing” Trumplican Party in Congress. Two orders destroy environmental regulations and protections that have been around for decades. I wonder if the Penn U. and Wharton School graduate who founded Trump University has ever studied Nero and his reign of Rome. The man who burned Rome was also a sexual predator, malignant narcissist and socio-psychopath. Will someone please reveal his college transcripts?

MAGA has made America great so MAWF will make it white forever

Former press secretary and advisor to LBJ Bill Moyers died weeks ago, but he has had anti-vaccine Donald Trump nailed and diagnosed for years. “America died on November 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide,” he wrote in 2016. “We the people chose a man who has shredded our values, our morals, our compassion, our tolerance, our decency, our sense of common purpose, our very identity — all the things that, however tenuously, made a nation out of a country.”

To cut it short: Charles Darwin was basically right about evolution. Facts gathered by scientists from the continents have overwhelmed the sermons coming from altars, the sounds coming from drums and gongs of brass, the snakes wrapped around necks, the smoke coming out of pipestone, the tongues wagging mysterious sounds and the voodoo of believers and miscreants.

There is only one race in spite of our differences. There is only one human species. We have evolved to Homo sapiens. Yes, we have different colors, physical attributes, hair, blood types, but all blood is red. We do live in different cultures. But none of these differences are significant enough to divide Homo sapiens into separate biological races or species.

Hitler’s goal for the Third Reich: all people are white blond Aryans

Adolf Hitler’s Brownshirts, SS and Gestapo, fully identified by uniforms, swastikas, flags and rank symbols, had the task of rounding up all the Jews, Roma, physically handicapped, mentally handicapped, homosexuals, and anybody else who didn’t look like white, well-nourished Aryans. Then they were marched to the train depots, loaded into boxcars, transported to Auschwitz or a dozen other death camps where they were gassed to death or forced into slavery until death. Adolf Eichmann, a member of the Final Solution committee, was responsible for keeping the trains on time.

Every time I see Stephen Miller, Trump’s main advisor on immigration policy, I think of Adolf Eichmann, who escaped to Argentina for seven years until the Mossad kidnapped him and brought him back to Israel for trial. The Nazis did not want marginalized non-Aryans to participate in the “beautiful” thousand-year Third Reich.

CEO Donald Trump of the USA Corporation insists that the principles of DEI be banned in all aspects of the American White culture of his new Make America White Forever (MAWF) cult. Stephen Miller, like Eichmann and his trains, will keep the planes flying the “vermin” undocumented to various “shitholes” around the world. He doesn’t want Black and brown people, the LBGTQUIA+ community, the physically and mentally handicapped and atheists to have any role in the White Nationalist culture that will be called Trumpistan forever.