An audit of American Exceptionalism; what is real and what is a lie

Well, it is 2020, and America is in flames. This is both figuratively and literally. Yet, the mechanisms of power are still operating. They still crank out new laws and regulations, as well as bans. Taxes are still rising, and more and more people are unemployed to the point where the beginnings of starvation are starting to manifest. The government solution to all this is more international interventionism, higher taxes, more regulation, and more laws.

I know it’s an election year, but really!

One of the things that I am seeing is die-hard American supporters of the President are saying that it is God’s will that America rule over the rest of the world. That it is our “manifest destiny” and that is why America is so very exceptional. This kind of narrative and response to all things going on right now is worrisome. And perhaps an audit of what America is today is in order.

Because if America is actually “exceptional”, then by what measure of this quality would make the world a better, a safer, and a happier place?

Well…?

The following is an article titled “American Exceptionalism” written by Larry Romanoff on August 22, 2020 and edited to fit this venue. All credit to the original author.

American Exceptionalism

“Welcome to America, the Land of Freedom”, read the signs at Washington, DC’s international airport as you line up to have your fingerprints taken and your body cavities searched for mini nuclear devices.

I could have titled this article “Setting the Cat among the Pigeons”. In an attempt to forestall the expected avalanche of disagreement, I confirm my awareness of statistics produced by a wide range of individuals and institutions of widely-varying intent and ideology, and which can “prove” almost anything one cares to prove, GINI coefficients being one easy example. The statistics on which this article is based were not selected carelessly and are not invalidated by a reader’s disaffection.

The United States Is the Best Only at Being the Worst

Let’s look at the figures, shall we…

American Freedom

Money and Savings

The US today has the greatest income inequality of all Western nations[1][2], surpassing China and more than a few undeveloped nations as well.

From this, it has the lowest social mobility of most nations[3], meaning that improving one’s station in life is becoming increasingly impossible.

If your parents are not educated and wealthy, you will never be either, and the American Dream is dead.

The US today has the smallest middle class and the largest lower class of all major nations, the middle class having been mostly eviscerated in 2008, that process completing itself today, and will probably never now recover.

Americans carry the largest amount of personal debt among all nations[4], including credit card debt and increasingly unrepayable student loans, and the US now leads the world in personal bankruptcies[5].

Since 2008, according to the US government’s own statistics, the US has the lowest percentage of home ownership at 57%[6], ranked 43rd in the world, far below China at 90%[7].

Further, America now has a virtual epidemic of homelessness compared to most other nations, with untabulated millions of homeless families with children.

The poverty rate in the US is extraordinary, with official statistics placing this number at 13% but in reality with more than 25% of the population living below the poverty line, in most cases far below[8].

It also has the highest percentage of children living in poverty, and with almost a third of all US citizens dependent on food stamps and other government aid to survive[9].

Unemployment is also extraordinary. According to the government’s own statistics, fully 40% of working-age Americans have no job[10][11], with many of the rest under-employed, working only part-time.

It is only American cities or those in the most impoverished of nations that contain such vast areas of urban decay and desperate slums like those of Detroit and Chicago, where half of the areas are violent crime-ridden wastelands where no one goes.

Education

The US has the highest educational costs, and yet the poorest overall quality of education in the developed world and parts of the rest. Read this article[12]. It will open your eyes.

A few good schools or universities in an entire nation do not make it a world leader, the proof residing in the highest level of functional illiteracy of all major nations (25%) and a truly legendary level of ignorance[13].

The US is the only country in the world where, in repeated polls for the past 60 years, a full 75% of the adult and student populations cannot find their own country on a map of the world[14].

Healthcare

Compared to other nations, the US has the highest health care costs by a factor of two to ten, and yet has a surprisingly poor overall quality as well as the highest percentage of a population without health care[15].

The US has the highest infant mortality rate and the shortest life expectancy at birth of all major nations and far below many others[16][17], ranking around 50 in a list of countries.

The US has the highest obesity rate of all nations, with nearly half of the population being overweight[18].

America has one of the highest rates of sexually-transmitted diseases[19].

America has the highest rate of of anti-depressant drug use that increased by 65% in only 15 years[20].

America is in a national crisis in opioid drug use[21] and of depression.

America has the highest teen-age pregnancy and abortion rates of all developed nations[22].

America has one of the highest divorce rates[23][24].

Note that in many international studies US statistics aren’t collected because, as observers noted “The authors left out the US because the country is “an extreme outlier.” 

The US also has the largest number of one-person households (about 30%)[25][26], and the largest percentage of fatherless children (about 25%)[27].

Society

America is one of the two most racist countries in the world, where even the random and unprovoked killing of non-whites is not only permissible but usually meets with approval.

Americans are gun-crazy, owning more guns than the entire rest of the world combined, and more guns than all the world’s police and military. They carry their guns everywhere, and use them everywhere.

As a result, the US has the highest rates of gun shootings and murders of any nation, with more than 20 small children and more than 200 adults being sent each day to either the hospital or the cemetery.

Many small American cities, like the nation’s capital of Washington DC with only half a million people, or places like Detroit or Chicago, have more murders each year (by an order of magnitude) than does Shanghai with 25 million people.

The overall homicide rate for China is 0.6 and for Shanghai 0.2; that for the US is 4.0. The gun death rate for children in the US is 40 times higher than for any other nation in the world[28][29].

The US also has the highest number of crimes committed with firearms each year, a staggering total of a minimum confirmed of 500,000 and an estimated 3 million[30][31].

America also has the highest number of violent raids on private homes, with more than 80,000 instances per year of SWAT teams kicking in someone’s front door in the middle of the night, always terrorizing and sometimes killing the occupants, usually without identifying themselves and often attacking the wrong house.[32][33]

The US has the highest rate of cocaine and meth usage of any nation[34], thanks in large part to the CIA’s very successful war on drugs which permits that agency to import cocaine duty-free.

The US has the highest rate of gender inequality[35] among industrialized nations, far exceeding egalitarian nations like China (and formerly Iraq and Libya).

The US has the highest number of lawyers and lawsuits in the world, by orders of magnitude, a reflection of both natural belligerence and inborn greed, Americans spending twice as much on lawsuits each year as on new cars[36]. Japan has 14,000 lawyers, China 160,000, the US 1.35 million (11 per 100,000 for Japan and China compared to 300 per 100,000 for the US).

Americans surpass the entire world in their amount of useless consumption, having long passed the point where it can be deemed pathological. As one measure, that of shopping mall space per capita, Germany has 2.7 sq ft per person, Japan has 3.9 and the UK has 5. For every American shopper there are 24 sq ft of mall.

The US has by far the highest level of carbon emissions on a per-capita basis, thanks in no small part to General Motors who has repeatedly committed genocide on electric automobiles.

Military

Wars and violence are defining adjectives of America. The US as a nation is now, and has always been, intensely militaristic, inherently provocative, combative and violent. The US is by far the largest merchant of death in the world, being responsible for about 70% of total world arms sales. For comparison, Russia is second at 17%, while China is at 3%.

If we include everything, the US spends about twice as much on its military each year as the entire rest of the world combined, already well-documented by many authors at well in excess of $1 trillion.

America also has the world’s largest network of foreign military bases, with more than 1,000 such installations, including many that appear on no map.

America also has the world’s largest number of bio-weapons labs, with more than 400 outside the US.

America has launched the most wars of aggression in the history of the world and has been at war for 235 of its 243 years as a nation, all those wars unprovoked and unjustified, and none of which were either wars of ‘liberation’ or ‘to make the world safe for democracy’, but for colonisation and plunder.

The US is also outstanding in that it has assassinated more foreign world leaders and other officials (about 150)[37] than even Israel has done, and also operates the largest network of torture prisons that has ever existed in the history of the world.

The US also wins first prize for having some of the most bloodthirsty homicidal mass murderers and pathological killers in the history of the world, far exceeding our former heroes Stalin and Hitler. Kissinger, Albright and Curtis LeMay come immediately to mind, but there are more.

Crime

The US has by far the highest incarceration rate of all nations, with more than 25% of the world’s prisoners in its jails and with almost 35% of all adult Americans having a criminal record.

Alarmingly, the US has by far the highest number of internment camps – prison camps – in the world, all 800 fully-staffed but empty, waiting for Americans to dare launch another Occupy Wall Street or similar protest.

The US has the most militarised police forces of any nation, with frighteningly heavy-duty military hardware like MRAPs, APCs, drone aircraft and automatic weapons.

The police motto “To protect and serve” that was once plastered on every police car, has been amended. It now reads “To occupy and kill”. The US has by far the highest number of civilians killed each year by police (well over 1,000) of any nation in the world, even including rogue states and axis of evil members.

Americans have far more to fear from their local police than from terrorists. Police brutality in America is now legendary, so common as to be one of the nation’s defining adjectives, with beatings, shootings, harassment, false criminal charges reaching epidemic proportions and increasing.

America is the world’s only nation with a website named “Killed by Police.org” to document the epidemic of civilians killed by police, and the only nation where local newspapers have sections devoted to listing the number of daily killings in each neighborhood of the major cities to assist citizens in house purchases.

Violent crime rates in the US are at least an order of magnitude above those of China or Japan (and many other nations).

Corruption

The US also has one of the most corrupt police and judicial systems in the world.

No Western country is particularly free of this charge, but America excels. As one example, the US has by far the largest number in the world of citizens falsely convicted by fraudulent testimony, some 40,000 convictions caused by one fraudulent forensics lab alone.

And of course, the US has the world’s largest espionage network by orders of magnitude, with an ambition to steal every secret and to record and save every communication by every human on the planet.

Leadership Corruption

The author is getting a little bit "off the deep end" in his accusations here...

It is no longer a secret that American-style democracy has a few flaws, with extreme dysfunction and rampant corruption among the more visible, though looting the public trough would run a close second. The US also has the government most totally over-run with puppet-masters and controlled by parasitic aliens, having entirely lost control to its various lobbies and with all its elected officials having sworn allegiance to the Jews and Israel rather than to America.

The US has the highest number and percentage of Presidents, Secretaries of State and Defense Secretaries who were certifiable as criminally insane and who should have been given lobotomies and committed to institutions for life.

Too many names to list here. America is the one nation that has more or less institutionalised government corruption at virtually every level, extending deeply into the judiciary, the regulatory bodies and Congress, as well as local and state governments.

The US is well-known for compiling the most fraudulent economic statistics of all developed and undeveloped nations, including the hugely fictitious ‘average income’ of $45,000, and is one of the most indebted of all countries in the world today. I strongly suggest everyone read this short article on US economic statistics[38] and cease the rubbish about how China’s numbers can’t be trusted.

White Collar Crime

Not to be outdone, the US media are in a class by themselves in terms of dishonesty, bias, censorship, and petty opinion-based journalism. American journalists are mostly cut from the same cloth, displaying more or less the same malignancies.

The US has the most complete immunity for elite white-collar crime, prosecuting only its person-companies but never the persons. Americans boast of their transparent and corruption-free financial system, and the US media enjoys trashing China for what appears to be an occasional corporate fraud. But in the long list of the world’s largest corporate bankruptcies due to fraud and corruption, all but one occurred in the US. Ron Unz prepared a list that included Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Global Crossing, Adelphia, MF Global, Lehman, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia.

The US has also been home to the world’s largest Ponzi schemes like those of Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford, that resulted in almost $100 billion in public losses. It is the US, not China, that is the home to corporate fraud and deceit, while all but two of the largest corporate frauds in China in recent decades were committed by American firms, not Chinese.

A Hated Nation

To end our list of areas in which American Exceptionalism truly shines, the US has for years been deservedly voted the world’s most hated nation, is widely reviled as the world’s greatest bully, and judged by all peoples – including Americans – as the greatest threat to world peace.

Lest anyone think the above list is unfair or exaggerated, you can do a simple test by applying the items to other countries. Germany, for example, or China or Canada.

Certainly every nation has some deaths, crime, divorces, military spending and so on, but none of the items in this list can be applied to Germany, China or Canada, nor to any other nation. The US does have the greatest debt, highest military spending, racism, killings, guns, incarceration, torture prisons, initiated wars, and all the rest.

The records for inequality, obesity, consumption, personal debt, poverty, cocaine use, murders, all belong to America, with no other nation even in the running. The claim is as demonstrably true for ignorance and hypocrisy as it is for police brutality. As an accusation or an indictment, the list is 100% accurate, a factual description of America as it is today, seen without the propaganda and rose-colored glasses.

Treason

A complete list of areas of American Exceptionalism must include one other item: The most traitors. This unfortunate category exists on several levels, the first being the President and White House staff and the US Congress who, as we already know, have pledged allegiance to Israel rather than America.

The second is the foreign-owned US FED, criminally pursuing its own agenda while systematically destroying the economic fabric of America. The cadre of elite owners of most large US banks and multinationals fall into this category as well, pursuing their own private advantage while consciously gutting the economy of their own nation.

But there is a third, more pervasive level, a large cadre of educated Americans who are essentially compradors, traitors to most of their values and to their people, embedded in the system and dependent on it, participating fully in the destruction of their own country by acting as lieutenants for the officials of the secret government. These individuals are vital for the success of the transformation of the US to a fascist state, with the elites dependent upon them to execute their policies, yet they also profit from their positions in terms of attractive salaries and protection from much of the law.

These are the people who best know of all the crimes and social injustices, being in fact a willing part of their execution process, but least likely to blow the whistle for fear of damaging their careers. It is the middle level of educated executives, lawyers, accountants and managers in government, criminal corporations, Foundations, think tanks, the media, and so many others, who are directly responsible for knowingly inflicting the vast damage on their own people and nation. Like the CEOs of the banks and multinationals, these compradors seek only their own advantage, discarding their human values and blinding themselves to the harm they do.

The following bulleted list is for your ease in reading.

American Exceptionalism in listed format…

  • Greatest Income Inequality of major nations
  • Lowest social mobility
  • Smallest middle class and largest lower class of all major nations
  • Largest amount of personal debt
  • Highest percentage of university graduates with massive student-loan debts
  • Lowest percentage of home-owners of major nations
  • Highest number of homeless of major nations
  • Highest percentage of repossessed homes and autos in the world
  • Highest Poverty rate of major nations
  • Largest number of children in poverty and homeless children in major nations
  • Greatest slums and urban decay of any Western nation
  • Highest percentage of population receiving government food aid
  • Highest level of unemployed, under-employed, and part-time employed
  • The highest number of people aged 65 to 75 returning to the workforce to survive
  • Only nation with no mandated paid holidays or maternity leave
  • Highest educational costs
  • Highest functional illiteracy rate of all developed and semi-developed nations
  • Highest level of ignorance
  • Highest health care costs
  • Most people without health care
  • The only Western nation with high GM food content
  • Highest infant mortality rate
  • Highest obesity rate
  • Shortest life expectancy at birth
  • Highest rate of sexually-transmitted diseases
  • Greatest production and access of pornography
  • Highest anti-depressant drug use
  • Highest teen-age pregnancy and abortion rates among developed countries
  • Largest number of one-person households
  • Largest percentage of fatherless children
  • The most strident nationalism of all nations
  • Highest level of racism and race-related violence
  • Highest number and percentage of guns
  • Highest murder rate
  • Highest number of gun shootings
  • Largest number of firearms crimes per year
  • Highest cocaine and meth usage
  • Largest number of lawyers and lawsuits
  • Highest carbon emissions
  • Highest military spending
  • Highest arms sales
  • Largest network of foreign military bases (1,000) and foreign bio-weapons labs[400]
  • Most wars of aggression of any nation in the history of the world
  • Most governments destabilised and overthrown
  • Largest number of foreign leaders and officials assassinated
  • Longest-lasting genocide in the history of the world
  • Largest network of torture prisons – and prison ships – in the history of the world
  • Worst human rights record of all nations, possibly excepting Israel
  • Highest incarceration rate
  • Highest percentage of population with criminal records
  • Largest number of civilian internment camps
  • Most militarised civilian police force
  • Largest number of civilians killed by police
  • Highest number in the world of violent SWAT raids on civilian homes
  • The only nation with widespread civil forfeiture
  • Largest commercial and military espionage network
  • The government most over-run by parasitic aliens
  • Highest percentage of criminally-insane Presidents and officials in history
  • Most institutionalised government corruption
  • Most complete immunity for elite white-collar crime
  • Most and largest corporate bankruptcies due to fraud
  • Most fraudulent economic statistics of any major nation
  • Most biased and dishonest media and columnists
  • Most hypocritical of all nations
  • Most hated nation
  • World’s greatest bully
  • Greatest threat to world peace

The American Government

So what is in control of this entire mess? What person or persons oversee this “great land of exceptionalism”?

This is a government that, in conjunction with its corporate partners, views the citizenry as consumers and bits of data to be bought, sold and traded.

This is a government that spies on and treats its citizens as if they have no right to privacy, especially in their own homes.

This is a government that is laying the groundwork to weaponize the public’s biomedical data as a convenient means by which to penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors.

This is a government that subjects its people to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes.

This is a government that uses fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, to track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.

This is a government whose wall-to-wall surveillance has given rise to a suspect society in which the burden of proof has been reversed such that Americans are now assumed guilty until or unless they can prove their innocence.

This is a government that treats its people like second-class citizens who have no rights, and is working overtime to stigmatize and dehumanize any and all who do not fit with the government’s plans for this country.

This is a government that uses free speech zones, roving bubble zones and trespass laws to silence, censor and marginalize Americans and restrict their First Amendment right to speak truth to power. The kinds of speech the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation, prosecution and outright elimination include: hate speech, bullying speech, intolerant speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, incendiary speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, right-wing speech, left-wing speech, extremist speech, politically incorrect speech, etc.

This is a government that adopts laws that criminalize Americans for otherwise lawful activities such as holding religious studies at homegrowing vegetables in their yard, and collecting rainwater.

This is a government that persists in renewing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the president and the military to arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely.

This is a government that saddled us with the Patriot Act, which opened the door to all manner of government abuses and intrusions on our privacy.

This is a government that, in direct opposition to the dire warnings of those who founded our country, has allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to establish a standing army by way of programs that transfer surplus military hardware to local and state police.

This is a government that has militarized American’s domestic police, equipping them with military weapons such as “tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft,” in addition to armored vehicles, sound cannons and the like.

This is a government that has provided cover to police when they shoot and kill unarmed individuals just for standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.

This is a government that has allowed private corporations to get rich at taxpayer expense by locking people up in private prisons for non-violent crimes, while providing Corporate America with a source of cheap labor.

This is a government that has created a Constitution-free zone within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Incredibly, nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

This is a government that treats public school students as if they were prison inmates, enforcing zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, failing to teach them their rights under the Constitution, and indoctrinating them with teaching that emphasizes rote memorization and test-taking over learning, synthesizing and critical thinking.

This is a government that is operating in the negative on every front: it’s spending far more than what it makes (and takes from the American taxpayers) and it is borrowing heavily (from foreign governments and Social Security) to keep the government operating and keep funding its endless wars abroad. Meanwhile, the nation’s sorely neglected infrastructure—railroads, water pipelines, ports, dams, bridges, airports and roads—is rapidly deteriorating.

This is a government whose gun violence—inflicted on unarmed individuals by battlefield-trained SWAT teams, militarized police, and bureaucratic government agents trained to shoot first and ask questions later—poses a greater threat to the safety and security of the nation than any mass shooter. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines.

This is a government that has allowed the presidency to become a dictatorship operating above and beyond the law, regardless of which party is in power.

This is a government that treats dissidents, whistleblowers and freedom fighters as enemies of the state.

This is a government—a warring empire—that forces its taxpayers to pay for wars abroad that serve no other purpose except to expand the reach of the military industrial complex.

This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

This is a government that allows its agents to break laws with immunity while average Americans get the book thrown at them.

This is a government that speaks in a language of force. What is this language of force? Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.

This is a government that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security, national crises and national emergencies.

This is a government that exports violence worldwide, with one of this country’s most profitable exports being weapons. Indeed, the United States, the world’s largest exporter of arms, has been selling violence to the world in order to prop up the military industrial complex and maintain its endless wars abroad.

This is a government that is consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

This is a government that believes it has the authority to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation, the Constitution be damned.

In sum, this is a government that routinely undermines the Constitution and rides roughshod over the rights of the citizenry.

This is not a government that believes in, let alone upholds, freedom.

Notes

[1] Income inequality in the United States; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States

[2] US income inequality | US news | The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/us-income-inequality

[3] The Decline of Social Mobility in America – The Atlantic; https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-mobility-america/491240

[4] Total US household debt soars to record above $13 trillion; https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/13/total-us-household-debt-soars-to-record-above-13-trillion.html

[5] https://www.debt.org/bankruptcy/statistics

[6] October 29, 2019; https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf

[7] China Home Ownership Rate | 2019 | Data | Chart | https://tradingeconomics.com/china/home-ownership-rate

[8] The official U.S. poverty rate; https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/09/16/official-us-poverty-rate-is-based-hopelessly-out-of-date-metric/

[9] One-Third of US Population Gets Food Subsidies; https://www.newsmax.com/US/food-stamps-assistance-program/2013/07/08/id/513860

[10] The real jobs numbers: 41% of America unemployed, 1 in 3; https://www.rt.com/usa/jobs-us-employment-welfare-749

[11] Shocker: 40% of Workers Now Have ‘Contingent’ Jobs; https://www.forbes.com/sites/elainepofeldt/2015/05/25/shocker-40-of-workers-now-have-contingent-jobs-says-u-s-government/

[12] https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/substandard-education-in-america/

[13] https://www.globalresearch.ca/brief-look-substandard-education/5694267

[14] Ibid

[15] Americans without health insurance; https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/16/americans-without-health-insurance-up-more-than-3-million-under-trump.html

[16] Infant Mortality; http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/MaternalInfantHealth/InfantMortality.htm

[17] U.S. Infant Mortality Rate 1950-2019; https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/infant-mortality-rate

[18] Adult Obesity Facts; CDC; https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html

[19] America’s sexually transmitted disease rates are out of control; https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/americas-sexually-transmitted-disease-rates-are-out-of-control/ar-AAIAW4M

[20] U.S. Antidepressant Use Jumps 65 Percent in 15 Years; https://consumer.healthday.com/mental-health-information-25/antidepressants-news-723/u-s-antidepressant-use-jumps-65-percent-in-15-years-725586.html

[21] Opioid Crisis Statistics | HHS.gov; https://www.hhs.gov/opioids/about-the-epidemic/opioid-crisis-statistics

[22] Teen Pregnancy Rates Declined In Many Countries; https://www.guttmacher.org/news-release/2015/teen-pregnancy-rates-declined-many-countries-between-mid-1990s-and-2011

[23] Marriage and Divorce; https://www.census.gov/topics/families/marriage-and-divorce.html

[24] “Coming out of the penumbras: World culture and cross-national variation in divorce rates”, December 2018 issue of Social Forces. https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/97/2/675/5055442

[25] U.S.: Number of households 1960-2018; https://www.statista.com/statistics/183635/number-of-households-in-the-us/

[26] Single-person households United States 1960-2018; https://www.statista.com/statistics/242022/number-of-single-person-households-in-the-us/

[27] Fatherless Statistics for the United States; https://fatherhoodfactor.com/us-fatherless-statistics/

[28] Gun Violence in 2018; https://www.thetrace.org/2018/12/gun-violence-facts-statistics-2018

[29] Guns in the US: The statistics behind the violence – BBC News; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34996604

[30] CDC Study: Use of Firearms; https://www.cnsnews.com/…/cdc-study-use-firearms-self-defense-important-crime-deterrent

[31] CDC Asked About Defensive Gun Uses; https://www.forbes.com/…/2018/04/30/that-time-the-cdc-asked-about-defensive-gun-uses

[32] Speaking Truth to Empire: 80,000 Swat Team Raids Per Year; https://www.veteranstoday.com/2018/04/28/speaking-truth-to-empire-80000-swat-team-raids-per-year-in-usa-wtf/

[33] The Rutherford Institute :: Are Police in America Now a Military, Occupying Force? John W. Whitehead; August 05, 2013; https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/are_police_in_america_now_a_military_occupying_force

[34] What is the scope of cocaine use in the United States; https://www.drugabuse.gov/…/cocaine/what-scope-cocaine-use-in-united-states

[35] Gender equality stalls in the U.S., Stanford report finds; https://news.stanford.edu/2018/03/16/gender-equality-stalls-u-s-stanford-report-finds

[36] Issues of the Lawyer Population: Japan; http://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1614&context=jil

[37] https://www.globalresearch.ca/cia-us-government-assassinations/5693720

[38] https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/us-economic-statistics-unreliable-numbers/

Conclusion

The United States is a mess. While it was once an exceptional nation, now it is something else entirely.

  • You can either accept things as they are…
  • You can try to change it through available channels.
  • You can try to change it outside of regular channels…
  • You can leave it and sail far away and let it collapse in upon itself.

Your life is in your hands. What are you gonna do about it?

I bailed.

Here is downtown Shenzhen, China. This is the Nanshan district. The rest of world not only isn’t anything that resembles what the United States media says it is, but it’s actually far nicer than anything remaining inside of America today.

Downtown Shenzhen China. Movie of a typical Nanshan street.

Your life is in your hands.

What you do with the time you have will define the kind of life that you will live.

Do you want more?

Do you want to see similar posts?

I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…

SHTF Articles

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.

The Taxpayer (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury

This story was written by Ray Bradbury, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law. This is from the Martian Chronicles. Which is a great collection of stores about Mars.

Ray Bradbury is one of my personal heroes and his writings greatly influenced me in ways that I am only just now beginning to understand.

Here is a story that illustrates the frustration of American taxpayers that dutifully give away their hard-earned money to a government that squanders it with stupid abandon. How can we forget the seven billion dollars that Obama gave to South Africa to “improve their energy grid”, Heh heh… Or the millions to universities to study the endangered tiger-striped bo-bo fly? The emotions and feelings are real. And Ray Bradbury captures them perfectly.

I love the way that Ray Bradbury brings advanced concepts to the masses though his very (seemingly) simplistic stories.

Introduction

“There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go…” 
-R is for Rocket Ray Bradbury

For years I had amassed a well worn, and dusty collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks that I would pick up and read for pleasure and inspiration.  Later, when I left the United States, and moved to China, I had to leave my treasured books behind. Sigh.

Ray Bradberry book colleciton
A small collection of well worn, well read and well appreciated Ray Bradbury books. My collection looked a little something like this, only I think the books were a little more worn, and a little yellower.

It is very difficult to come across Ray Bradbury books in China. When ever I find one, I certainly snatch it up. Cost is no object when it comes to these masterpieces. At one time, I must have had five books containing this story.

I have found this version of the story on the Ray Bradbury library portal in Russia, and I have copied it here exactly as found. Credit to the wonderful people at the Ray Bradbury Library for posting it where a smuck like myself can read it within China. (Рэй Брэдбери .RU found at http://www.raybradbury.ru ) And, of course, credit to the great master; Ray Bradbury for providing this work of art for our inspiration and pleasure.

Martian ruins.
The book “The Martian Chronicles” discusses the planet Mars and the humans that try to visit it. It takes place around a fictional world where Mars has inhabitants and large cities and canals.

THE TAXPAYER

Ray Bradbury

He wanted to go to Mars on the rocket. He went down to the rocket field in the early morning and yelled in through the wire fence at the men in uniform that he wanted to go to Mars, He told them he was a taxpayer, his name was Pritchard, and he had a right to go to Mars. Wasn’t he born right here in Ohio? Wasn’t he a good citizen? Then why couldn’t he go to Mars? He shook his fists at them and told them that he wanted to get away from Earth; anybody with any sense wanted to get away from Earth. There was going to be a big atomic war on Earth in about two years, and he didn’t want to be here when it happened. He and thousands of others like him, if they had any sense, would go to Mars. See if they wouldn’t! To get away from wars and censorship and statism and conscription and government control of this and that, of art and science! You could have Earth! He was offering his good right hand, his heart, his head, for the opportunity to go to Mars! What did you have to do, what did you have to sign, whom did you have to know, to get on the rocket?

They laughed out through the wire screen at him. He didn’t want to go to Mars, they said. Didn’t he know that the First and Second  Expeditions had failed, had vanished; the men were probably dead?

But they couldn’t prove it, they didn’t know for sure, he said, clinging to the wire fence. Maybe it was a land of milk and honey up there, and Captain York and Captain Williams had just never bothered to come back. Now were they going to open the gate and let him in to board the Third Expeditionary Rocket, or was he going to have to kick it down?

They told him to shut up.

He saw the men walking out to the rocket.

Wait for me! he cried. Don’t leave me here on this terrible world, I’ve got to get away; there’s going to be an atom war! Don’t leave me on Earth!

They  dragged  him,  struggling,  away.  They  slammed the policewagon door and drove him off into the early morning, his face pressed to the rear window, and just before they sirened over a hill, he saw the red fire and heard the big sound and felt the huge tremor as the silver rocket shot up and left him behind on an ordinary Monday morning on the ordinary planet Earth.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
The Warning Signs
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Link
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Make America Great Again.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons
A polarized world.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.