I have not been in tip-top shape lately, which is one of the reasons for the dearth of posts. It certainly does not mean that I consider the news any less appalling. In the short term, however, I may try to get away with more extensive quotes from other people who are saying what needs to be said.

One such is from—of all places!—a sermon: "Living under Fasciscm," the link to which was sent by a friend. Davidson Loehr is the pastor of the First Unitarian-Universalist Church of Austin, Texas.

The sermon reviews material with which many of my readers are probably familiar—the 14 identifying characteristics of fascism by Dr. Lawrence Britt, the op-ed piece on fascism by Vice-President Henry Wallace in 1944, and the work of Katherine Yurica on Dominionism.

To this he has added his own predictions and concerns—

• The theft of all social security funds, to be transferred to those who control money, and the increasing destitution of all those dependent on social security and social welfare programs.
• Rising numbers of uninsured people in this country that already has the highest percentage of citizens without health insurance in the developed world.
• Increased loss of funding for public education combined with increased support for vouchers, urging Americans to entrust their children’s education to Christian schools.
• More restrictions on civil liberties as America is turned into the police state necessary for fascism to work
• Withdrawal of virtually all funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. At their best, these media sometimes encourage critical questioning, so they are correctly seen as enemies of the state’s official stories.
• The reinstatement of a draft, from which the children of privileged parents will again be mostly exempt, leaving our poorest children to fight and die in wars of imperialism and greed that could never benefit them anyway. (That was my one-sentence Veterans’ Day sermon for this year.)
• More imperialistic invasions: of Iran and others, and the construction of a huge permanent embassy in Iraq.
• More restrictions on speech, under the flag of national security.
• Control of the internet to remove or cripple it as an instrument of free communication that is exempt from government control. This will be presented as a necessary anti-terrorist measure.
• Efforts to remove the tax-exempt status of churches like this one, and to characterize them as anti-American.
• Tighter control of the editorial bias of almost all media, and demonization of the few media they are unable to control – the New York Times, for instance.
• Continued outsourcing of jobs, including more white-collar jobs, to produce greater profits for those who control the money and direct the society, while simultaneously reducing America’s workers to a more desperate and powerless status.
• Moves in the banking industry to make it impossible for an increasing number of Americans to own their homes. As they did in the 1930s, those who control the money know that it is to their advantage and profit to keep others renting rather than owning.
• Criminalization of those who protest, as un-American, with arrests, detentions and harassment increasing. We already have a higher percentage of our citizens in prison than any other country in the world. That percentage will increase.
• In the near future, it will be illegal or at least dangerous to say the things I have said here this morning. In the fascist story, these things are un-American. In the real history of a democratic America, they were seen as profoundly patriotic, as the kind of critical questions that kept the American spirit alive — the kind of questions, incidentally, that our media were supposed to be pressing.

And he also offers this advice from Michael C. Ruppert—

• First, he says you should get out of debt.
• Second is to spend your money and time on things that give you energy and provide you with useful information.
• Third is to stop spending a penny with major banks, news media and corporations that feed you lies and leave you angry and exhausted.
• And fourth is to learn how money works and use it like a (political) weapon — as he predicts the rest of the world will be doing against us.

[emphasis added]

Read it, O brothers and sisters, and be saved!