EDITOR’S NOTE: OK, admittedly it’s not a very original title, but it IS accurate. William C. Henry is better known to me as ‘Uncle Bill.’ He’s always been a man of strong opinions and a persuasive argument-maker, but I was a little surprised to learn — after re-connecting with him after a prolonged period of radio silence — that his current perspective so closely mirrors that of Phawker. Which is refreshing, to say the least, since most (white) people seem to turn into Fox News zombies when they get to be his age (early 70s, FYI). Not Uncle Bill. It is often said that Democrats — including our president — need to grow a spine. Well, Uncle Bill is spine incarnate. He’s not afraid to go full Shatner and rock the ALL CAPS. Although he does bleep out his own F-bombs, because he’s old school, and that’s how people used to curse back in the day. Be that as it may, I’ve invited him to weigh in from time to time, a la Lewis Black, on whatever is getting his goat at the moment. Without further ado, we bring you the latest installment of SHIT MY UNCLE SAYS.
Arguably (though not by much) the three most disgusting judicial news stories of the past 25 years:
–A Los Angeles jury finding the scumbag O. J. Simpson “not guilty” of barbarically butchering his wife Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman.
–A “diplomatically correct” America lacking the cojones to not take no for an answer in telling Argentina to extradite the fugitive pathological liar and cold-blooded murderer Kurt Sonnenfeld or he will be removed by force … and consequently doing so.
–The confirmation that at least four current members (often five) of the Supreme Court of the United States are entirely too stupid, too stuck in the 18th century, too inherently plutocratic, too brazenly indifferent or too all of the above to see American law as serving the fairest, best twenty-first century interests of the vast majority of the American people.
Arguably the three most disgusting political news stories of the past 25 years:
–A spiteful, racist Republican party throwing an entire nation under the bus for eight years in order to obstruct the beneficial policies of the nation’s first black President.
–The inability of the Republican party to come up with a single individual within its ranks with the brains, temperament, integrity and common decency to be a viable candidate for President of the United States.
–On June 20, 2016, Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, and his merry band of Republican moral degenerates once again displayed their fealty to the NRA by voting 
down (again) no fewer than four different proposals to regulate the sale of military-style high-capacity combat type weaponry. It was as though they were offering up a “21 middle-fingered salute” to the memory of the 49 innocent young men and women who had just been brutally shot to smithereens in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida (and the hundreds of other recent innocent victims on the dozens of other American killing grounds) by a psycho, never quite normal, radicalized Muslim — using just such a weapon — who had previously been investigated by the FBI on at least two occasions both of which were subsequently abandoned citing a lack of any evidence that he was likely capable of doing such a thing (apparently they felt confident in skipping over his completely off-the-charts childhood and adulthood).
Arguably (not really) the two most disgusting military news stories of the past 25 years:
–The dearth of news about ANY serious efforts by Congress and the Department of Defense to do ANYTHING about the unconscionably deliberate TRILLION$ in congressionally complicit waste, fraud, abuse and corruption 
endemic in the defense budget of the United States.
–In late 2002 and early 2003 the acting American President, George “dubya” Bush, and the real American President, Dick Cheney, clearly outright lied their way into taking the nation to war with Iraq.FOUR THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED TWO brave young American men and women were butchered in the aftermath. Thousands upon thousands were seriously maimed. To this day Bush and Cheney are still smiling from the OUTSIDE of prison walls.
The most disgusting religious news (NOT arguable) of the past 25 years:
–Some thirty years ago reports began to circulate regarding extensive pedophilia within the priesthood of the Catholic church. 
Subsequently those reports developed into one of the most despicable and far reaching sexual abuse exposés in history. For decades the Catholic church did its damnedest to lie about, cover up, obfuscate, and deny its existence. Bit by bit it became UNDENIABLY evident that the church had not only been aware of the scourge ALL ALONG but had, in fact, aided and abetted its continuance by legerdemainly transferring (multiple times in multiple cases) the pedophile priests and bishops to other dioceses around the country or secretly shuffling them off to retirement purgatory. The vast majority have never, nor will ever, be punished in any way whatsoever.
The most disgusting business/economic news (NOT arguable) of the past 25 years:
–Eight years ago big bank and Wall Street investment executives perpetrated the greatest criminal fraud in the history of the nation. It 
very nearly brought about the collapse of America’s (and the world’s) entire financial system. Hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their life savings. American taxpayers were called upon to bail out the criminals to a net cost of some $66.1 BILLION (the government had deemed them “too big to fail”). Not a single one of the slimeballs has ever spent so much as a day behind bars. Today they are all richer, just as duplicitous, and still as unregulated as ever.
The “not even close to arguable” two most disgusting social news stories of the past 25 years:
–United Nations reporting that 65 MILLION human beings were displaced by war and persecution in 2015.
–There are 10 countries in the world where homosexuality is punishable by death: Yemen, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan (that’s right, the very same country where TWO THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-TWO brave young American men and women made the ultimate sacrifice in order to “save” it), Somalia, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates.
Arguably (perhaps) the most disgusting foreign news of the past 25 years:
–To this day the United States continues to support Israel’s pogrom against the Palestinian people (contrary to the current administration’s overt frustration). Treated like 
usurpers in THEIR OWN homeland, the Palestinian people languish in Israeli designated concentration camps such as the Gaza strip (around which the Israelis are currently digging a continuous tunnel to make sure the inmates can’t sneak out under ground) and portions of the West Bank. Under the protection of American financed weaponry Israel continues to illegally and inhumanely sanction, build and populate settlements on what little if any so-called Palestinian land remains. The Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, ignores all pleas domestic and foreign to seriously negotiate a “fair” (a term which apparently doesn’t translate into Yiddish) solution to this atrocious travesty.
Arguably (actually, no it’s not) the most disgusting environmental news of the past 25 years:
–Back in December of 1997 most of the intelligent countries of the world got together in Kyoto, Japan, to adopt what has come to be known as the Kyoto Protocol. It was perhaps the first really grand attempt to actually DO something 
about human-caused climate destruction/global warming. Suffice to say it could have been one of the truly monumental environmental happenings ever … except for one thing. Guess who refused to ratify the treaty? Yep, the very guys responsible for generating the second greatest amount of pollutants on earth, the good old USA! Bill Clinton thought it was a pretty good idea so he signed it. But, then, shortly thereafter along came an empty ten gallon dunce hat by the name of Georgeyboy Bush (you remember him from before, right?). Claiming to know more about the whys and wherefores of climate change than 97% of the world’s foremost climate science experts, “dubya” nixed the deal completely. So much for science … and intelligence.
POST SCRIPT: And suddenly I felt as if a teeny-tiny speck of kinship with Philip Roth had entered into my existence: “Very little truthfulness anywhere, antagonism everywhere, so much calculated to disgust, the gigantic hypocrisies, no holding fierce passions at bay, the ordinary viciousness you can see just by pressing the remote, explosive weapons in the hands of creeps, the gloomy tabulation of unspeakable violent events, the unceasing despoliation of the biosphere for profit, surveillance overkill that will come back to haunt us, great concentrations of wealth financing the most undemocratic malevolents around, science illiterates still fighting the Scopes trial 89 years on, economic inequities the size of the Ritz, indebtedness on everyone’s tail, families not knowing how bad things can get, money being squeezed out of every last thing — that frenzy — and (by no means new) government hardly by the people through representative democracy but rather by the great financial interests, the old American plutocracy worse than ever.”