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“Present the Body” — Yes. Mayors, too

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

May 10th 2025

On his podcast the other day, a right winger calling himself “DC Draino” (his parents, somewhat more sane, named him Rogan O’Handley) urged Steve Bannon to consider that eventually Donald Trump would have to suspend habeas corpus. Bannon has no formal role in the Trump administration, but like so many ‘positions’ in the incoherent world of Donald Trump, title, or lack thereof, has little to do with power and influence in this junta. Bannon has considerable power and influence, and didn’t seem to find suspending habeas corpus objectionable.

Nor did the White House mouthpiece: “I have not heard such discussions take place, but I can assure you that the President and the entire administration are certainly open to all legal and constitutional remedies to ensure we can continue with the promise of deporting illegal criminals on our nation’s border,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Well, the ‘legal and constitutional remedies’ that Baghdad Barbie envisioned is mentioned in the Constitution, as follows: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” Since this appears in Article One, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives,” this is a power of Congress and not the administration.

The administration has proffered the fantasy that Venezuela is invading, or fostering an invasion of the United States through a criminal cartel called Tren de Aragua. A dozen courts have determined that this rationale has no basis in law or reality, but the Trump junta is still pushing it as ‘fact.’ Leavitt is lying.

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested for the crime of standing on public property outside of an ICE facility talking peacefully with two congressional representatives opposing the illegal incarceration of people in defiance of habeas corpus. They argued briefly with ICE thugs a few minutes earlier but had peacefully retreated. The mayor was singled out (a progressive Democrat, he had opposed the building of the facility on zoning issues and is running for Governor of New Jersey this fall). Nobody else was arrested or even asked to leave.

Trump’s gestapo may have realized they overstepped, and the mayor was released a couple of hours later, and he reported he was treated with respect during his incarceration although undeniably a prisoner.

Alina Habba, Trump’s personal mouthpiece and acting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, claimed Baraka “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. … He has been taken into custody.”

In true Pravda form, DHS flak Tricia McLaughlin said, “Today, as a bus of detainees was entering the security gate of Delaney Hall Detention Center, a group of protestors [sic], including two members of US Congress, stormed the gate and broke into the detention facility.” Video shows that the arrest was clearly made on public property, the mayor and his fellow Bastille-stormers having already obeyed warnings and backed off.

Apparently ICE is so fragile that two middle aged congressionals exchanging sharp words with heavily armed guards is considered a “storming.” God help the poor wee bastards if someone flips them the bird. Although if Congressionals were doing this storming, why did they arrest the mayor instead? Wasn’t his role more along the lines of a brief shower, rather than a storm?

Over 200 court decisions have found Trump’s executive orders pertaining to arrests of immigrants or firing of federal employees and cutting of allocated budgets to be illegal, or at the very least, overreach. He has, in total, five decisions that didn’t just slap him flat.

Trump is becoming more erratic and less coherent by the day. Any other president displaying the behavioral and cognitive symptoms Trump has would have either been convinced to step down or face a 25th Amendment process to remove him from office.

But Trump is just the puppet. It’s the powerful extremist movements backing him that are the real danger: the fascistic Heritage Foundation and its dream of corporate takeover of America, the racist and nationalist neo-Nazis like Steve Bannon, and the religious nutjobs who want a vicious theocracy. They are the ones behind this, and they are the ones pulling the strings of the increasingly befuddled and pathetic Trump. He doesn’t even know if he is supposed to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution.

We are now very rapidly approaching the point where the administration has become outlaw—it has already begun arresting judges and threatening members of congress for the crime of opposing them. It is ignoring, sometimes blatantly, 200 court decisions against it. And it is still quite literally tearing apart the fabric of USA governance, leaving the people with no representation and totally at the mercy of incredibly rapacious and corrupt criminals.

I still maintain hope of a peaceful and democratic solution to all this. Anything else will be a horror show. But we are now at the point where anyone who has taken an oath to obey the Constitution must oppose these people, and prepare for the eventuality that it may have to be “by any means necessary.”

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Donnie XOs the Constitution — His Mentis is non Compos

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

May 4th 2025

Donald Trump gave the clearest indication yet that he is totally unfit for office when asked by Kristen Welker on Meet the Press, “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States, Mr. President?” An obviously confused Trump replied, “I don’t know. I have to respond by saying again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.” Like any good mob boss, he’s going to refuse to answer under advice of counsel and in accordance with the fifth amendment.

The thing is that you don’t need a lawyer to determine this particular presidential duty. The Constitution mandates the oath of office, as follows:

“The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

As for the oath itself, it can’t possibly be clearer. “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Yup. That pretty much covers it. There are parts of the Constitution that are unclear, or at least open to interpretation, but this ain’t one of them. I went looking for cases involving the oath of office, and all I could find were some lower case decisions that allowed that a bible wasn’t required for the oath of office. Nobody has ever tried to contest that the oath was unclear or open to interpretation.

And it isn’t. And yes, Donnie has taken that oath. Twice.

He did show a few moments of mental clarity during the interview, admitting that the Constitution doesn’t permit him to run again after this term of office, and that invading Canada probably wasn’t a good idea.

But asked about the rights of immigrants he’s persecuting, he replied, “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the supreme court said. What you said is not what I heard the supreme court said. They have a different interpretation.” The decision was 9-0, which seems pretty clear. And this is the guy who wants to mandate that English be the official language of the United States. The court—even Slappy and little Scalia—admit that non-citizens have the right to due process. Again, per the Constitution:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

He’s still fantasizing about invading Greenland. Military invasion, at that. Well, Greenland only has about 56,000 people, about the size of Arcadia, California. Even with Elon Musk running the show, the mighty US military could probably invade Arcadia. Holding it might be another matter. The US spent nearly a quarter century in Afghanistan before writing it off as a bad job.

But Greenland has friends. It’s been a part of Denmark since 1814, and even though autonomous, is considered part of a NATO member. And NATO has one bedrock principle: attack any member nation, and it’s considered an act of war against all of them. That’s an area three times the size of the United States, with a combined $25 trillion economy, and a military budget about 65% of the US—and not as heavily afflicted with waste, fraud and abuse like the US one is. The US would be in the position of fighting Germany, only Germany would have the UK, France, and Canada on their side. Along with a bunch of other countries with a long history of FAFO.

So talk of invading Greenland is sheer lunacy.

Donald’s list of executive orders (which do NOT have the force of law, despite what Donnie thinks) are grandiose, ridiculous, incomprehensible and even cruel. One example is the one mandating English as the official language of the United States. Am I violating that directive by talking about Los Angeles? That’s Spanish. Terre Haute? (French). Illinois? (Illini tribe).

If I use the words color or honor in this essay, is that wrong? After all, the English spelling of those words is ‘colour’ and ‘honour.’ We would need a whole new set of characters for our numbers, because those are all Arabic. Would we have to write upper-case ‘q’ as ‘2’ like the English do? Pronounce the last letter of the alphabet as “Zed”?

If I get arrested and deported to President Bukkake’s Summertime Playground Gulag for the Woke and Non-white, is my lawyer in trouble for filing a writ of habeas corpus? That’s Latin, you know.

Most cookbooks would have to be banned.

We would have to throw out all our legal texts, and nearly all of our scientific and medical texts. (OK, Trump and his MAGAts would probably approve of that last bit.)

Finally, I would have to stop saying ‘finally.’ Usually the most welcome word in my essays according to readers, it happens to be French.

And on that note, I say, au revoir!

 

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Why Dictators Stop Being Great — They Fall; Hitler, Stalin…Trump

‪Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 27th 2025

“It’s easy to be cynical about public opinion, but scholars of authoritarianism are pretty clear that there’s a serious difference in what an autocrat polling at 80% and what one polling at 40% can do. Not obeying in advance includes not surrendering to specious narratives of omnipotence.”

Tim Marchman‬, ‪@timmarchman.bsky.social‬

Perhaps the most reassuring item in the news this week was that Trump is cratering in all the polls. Overall, his approval rating is minus 10 (45-55) and he’s underwater on all policy elements, including immigration. Apparently throwing out American toddlers with cancer is, even for the most rabid haters in MAGA, a bit much.

Marchman is absolutely correct about the role public opinion can play in the rise and fall of despots. People don’t like to admit it, but Hitler was immensely popular in the 1930s, not just in Germany, but in the United States as well.

In Germany, once he had established power, Hitler’s mesmeric sway over the German people was almost unbounded. The huge cheering crowds were totally unfeigned, and the girls blowing kisses and flowers at the fuhrer doubtlessly fantasied about having his babies. Absurd as it may seem, the brown-eyed mousy-haired little man, so similar to a famed American comedian of the time, was seen as the exemplar racialist dream. After all, he saved the economy. He beat inflation. He made Germany great again. He rid the country of enemies, foreign and domestic, real and imagined. (Does any of this sound familiar?)

It wasn’t until the tide turned against Germany following D-Day and the Russian resurgence that his popularity began to crack. Like all despots, he banned polls and independent news, but he couldn’t stop people from gossiping and whispering about the empty shelves, the strange lack of neighbors, the lack of any news from overseas, and of course the huge number of families with war dead.

Hitler knew the limits to his support, no matter how propped up it was by propaganda and news control. There was a reason all of his death camps were built outside of Germany and in the occupied territories. His work camps, hardly any less atrocious, were portrayed as happy, productive, genial places with smiling parents watching healthy children playing in the sun.

Hitler had extraordinary influence and popularity in the UK and the US prior to the start of the war. Ken Burns did a three part six-hour documentary about it in 2022, The US and the Holocaust. One example he noted was that after Charlie Chaplin did The Great Dictator, pressure from Germany ensured that America made no more films disparaging Germany and its fuhrer until hostilities actually broke out.

American plutocrats in 1933, envious of Germany’s apparent rise from the depths of the Great Depression and admiring of Hitler’s approach to undesirables, actually staged an abortive attempt to overthrow FDR and replace him with General Smedley Butler. It was aptly known as the Wall Street Putsch.

Despite the fact that Butler had voted for FDR and hated capitalism, American plutocrats, who were no smarter or more loyal than our present bunch, felt he would reverse all the proposed New Deal stuff and return America to the capitalist greatness that had ruined it in the first place. (Trump likes to rhapsodize about the “good old days” of the Gilded Age, from post-Civil War until Teddy Roosevelt, a “golden era” that saw two major depressions, thousands of bank failures, and an appalling standard of living for 95% of Americans.)

Accounts vary on how close the plotters (which included the same prominent families that support Trump today) came to actually pulling this off. Close enough that the NY Times tried to pretend it never happened, anyway. If there had been polls in those days, Hitler probably would have polled better than FDR, at least amongst people wealthy enough to have telephones. (A presidential preference poll a few years later proved catastrophically wrong because it solicited opinions only from those who had phones.)

People don’t like to admit it, but Stalin was also immensely popular in the USSR. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn has a passage in “The Gulag Archipelago” about how the inmates in the prison containing Solzhenitsyn erupted in an outpouring of utter grief at the loss of the leader and father of the working class. Most of those weeping had been unjustly imprisoned for anywhere from ten to twenty-five years by Stalin, for trivial or non-existent “Anti-Soviet Agitation” charges. One such mourner was a man who had been practicing his signature on a copy of Pravda and was impolitic enough to write one of his autographs across an image of Stalin. Ten years in the Gulag for that. Yes, he mourned the loss of his Great Leader.

But the USSR provides a perfect example of just how important the “consent of the governed” can be. It fell, in 1990, the most repressive and brutal regime in modern history, with nary a shot being fired. People were simply fed up, and en masse, the citizenry took away their support.

America has several advantages. First, the dictatorship of both Germany and the USSR arose at a time when both nations were in horrible condition, with widespread corruption, hunger, and humiliation. All the stuff Fox News likes to pretend America was suffering from under Joe Biden, only of course it wasn’t. Second, we have polls, and enough of a free press that we don’t have to take the word of Katherine Leavitt (Baghdad Barbie) as to how well-loved Trump is. And if Hitler and the Soviets were incompetent, capricious, and cruel, Trump is just as bad, only he lacks the wit to hide his mistakes. Finally, the same weakness that allowed Americans to stumble blindly into a Trump dictatorship is also their greatest strength: they have no history of living under dictatorial regimes, and even before it gets off the ground, a majority of Americans want to end it.

Trump wants to end Wikipedia. He is trying to end a free media. He is arresting judges. He doesn’t like stories about how he’s throwing American children with cancer into his El Salvador death camp.

But even if he manages to still those voices, people will talk. And notice the privations, the loss, the ‘disappeared’ and the vicious cruelty that dictatorial regimes always employ.

With a free press, the end will come quicker.

Stay informed.

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Is Life Older Than Dirt? — Mitochondrial DNA offers tantalizing hints

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 23rd 2025

www.zeppscommentaries.online

I sent a link to a recent Guardian article titled “‘It blew us away’: how an asteroid may have delivered the vital ingredients for life on Earth” to Peter Cawdron, the noted science fiction author who specializes in First Contact stories. I wrote in the post “The Panspermia theory, the idea that life, or at least the building blocks of life, piggybacked to Earth in an asteroid or comet, has been around since the 1960s. There was concern that OSIRIS-REx was contaminated to begin with with home-grown microbes, but this is solid evidence that backs Panspermia.”

Yes, I’m the sort who would try to explain long division to Isaac Newton. Why do you ask?

Cawdron, who describes himself as firmly in the Panspermia camp, sent back a link to a 2017 article of his on his website titled “Did Life Arise Before Earth Formed?” Cawdron based his article in large measure on a 2013 paper by Alexei A. Sharov and Richard Gordon titled “Life Before Earth” The paper is only 26 pages long, and doesn’t require a degree in molecular biology to follow. It focuses on the genes known as non-redundant functional nucleotides. These are the genes—some 16,000 in all—that all forms of life need to function as life. On this level, there is absolutely no difference between an amoeba and Liv Truss. All the other genes are just window dressing.

Sharov and Gordon examined the known increase in complexity of such genes and then, finding that they all correlated fairly closely to a logarithmic scale. Moore’s Law, that computers double in speed and complexity every twenty years, is a good example of a logarithmic scale.

Sharov and Gordon then extrapolated backwards to determine when these vital genes might have developed, and came up with a stunning answer: 9.7 billion years ago, give or take 2.5 billion.

That seems a rather long time to build a Liv Truss.

On the short end of that estimate, the Milky Way galaxy was just beginning to develop its current form. At the long end, the period of rapid expansion of the universe was ending and the first stars were igniting.

Then there’s the problem that the Earth itself is only about four and a half billion years old.

Straight line extrapolations make good indicators, but inevitably end in a logical flaw—the zero point. Track human population backwards, and statistically you end up with two humans, and the annoying question, “where did THEY come from?” We now suspect that humans came from several different lines of hominids who could interbreed, and being hominids, did.

The same theory pertains to Earth life. We suspect that the first prokaryotes not only appeared in various disparate parts of the planet, but did so over and over, most dying out, some not. That would suggest seeding as a possibility, wouldn’t it?

We’ve been able to trace life signs going back to a bit over three billion years ago. Cyanobacteria, a relatively advanced life form, turned up less than half a billion years later. As far as existing life was concerned, this new kid on the block wrecked the place, dumping out copious amounts of corrosive and poisonous oxygen with this newfangled photosynthesis. Most of Earth’s life retreated to below the surface, where to this day they make up the majority of life, in both mass and numbers.

They live in conditions we associate with other planets, such as immense pressure and heat, and with no oxygen or light. They are the original Earthlings, and we are the alien mutants.

Most anaerobic life, and even some surface forms, are exophiles, happy to live in temperatures far below freezing or hot enough to melt lead. Viruses can exist in vacuum and are unfazed by massive bursts of radiation. Life is incredibly adaptable.

We’ve known for some 50 years that the mass in the universe is mostly CHON—Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen. These are all elements that are of keen interest to all known life forms, as without them we couldn’t exist.

Between remote probes such as OSIRIS-REx and the array of space telescopes with their spectography, we have learned that the universe is rich in the constituent building blocks of life—amino acids, ammonia, formaldehyde and sodium carbonate compounds, which only form in brine.

“Scientists also described exceptionally high abundances of ammonia in the Bennu samples. Ammonia is important to biology because it can react with formaldehyde, which also was detected in the samples, to form complex molecules, such as amino acids – given the right conditions. When amino acids link up into long chains, they make proteins, which go on to power nearly every biological function–and all five nucleobases that life on Earth uses to store and transmit genetic instructions in more complex terrestrial biomolecules, such as DNA and RNA, including how to arrange amino acids into proteins.”

Reet Kaur at watchers.news reports just today that “A new study from the University of Oxford shows that Earth’s building blocks contained sufficient hydrogen to form water internally, challenging the prevalent theory that water was delivered mainly by asteroids or comets[…]A study published this month in Icarus, by researchers at the University of Oxford, identifies pyrrhotite, an iron sulfide mineral, as the primary host of hydrogen in enstatite chondrites (ECs).”

While water is present in asteroids, meteorites and comets, the ratio of deuterium (D20) to light water (H20) is not the same as what is found on Earth, further strengthening the notion that water—or at least hydrogen and oxygen–was present from the time of Earth’s original formation. We know Mars had and probably still has a lot of water, so it’s not too much of a stretch to assume that water—essential to all known life—is present in most, if not all rocky planets.

The James Webb telescope can analyze the atmospheric composition of planets in other star systems, and examined a red dwarf’s planet, K2-18b, some 124 light years away and discovered dimethyl sulfide, dimethyl disulfide, or a possible combination of the two. On Earth, these are only produced by life, particularly by marine microbes.

A few years back, methane pockets were observed on Mars. Methane can come from only two sources—tectonic activity, or microbial life. Mars doesn’t have a molten core, but it does have some very slight seismic activity due to tidal stresses. And on Mars, the environment at a kilometer below the surface, probably isn’t that much different from Earth at a kilometer below the surface. So there’s that.

This is all persuasive, but not compelling. The evidence, however, is mounting, and on a logarithmic scale.

Sharov and Gordon’s time scale of non-redundant functional nucleotides remains—for now—in the realm of conjecture. But I’m convinced that we will find proof of life outside of Earth, probably in this next decade, and when we do, we’ll find it’s related to us. And at that point, Panspermia will move solidly toward an equal footing in scientific lore with the evolution of Earthly life that ensued.

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After the Demonstrations — Ways to further block fascism

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 22nd, 2025

New York Times columnist David Brooks has called for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” to protest the Trump administration. Brooks, who has been with the Times since the invention of dirt, is the ultimate establishment ‘button-down’ conservative. When HE calls for a “comprehensive national civic uprising,” you know we’re well out of normal times.

I was at the local demonstration Saturday, and while the crowd was enthusiastic, it was about two-thirds the size of the rally held two weeks earlier. Part of that was because it was cooler and windier, and because it was on Easter weekend.

But it got me thinking. The 50501 “Hands Off” rallies, while terrific at galvanizing public opinion, aren’t going to be enough. Interest will wane, especially since it would become obvious it wasn’t slowing Trump’s fascist coup against America in the slightest.

Brooks is right; a civic uprising is needed. I’m not thinking peasants with pitchforks and blood in the streets; with a half-billion guns loose in the country, that’s the last thing we need. What we do need are national strikes. Yes, plural. Rolling strikes, areas hit once per week.

When you hear the word ‘strike’ you may think of workers walking off the job in protest. But this is America: only 3% of workers have union protection, and most unions are barred by law from having ‘wildcat’ strikes. And most states have what is laughingly referred to as “right-to-work” laws which generally translates to “at will” employment. You only have a job until the boss gets a bug up his ass, and you’re out the door, usually without so much as a day’s warning.

The fact is most American workers don’t have much more in the way of job security and rights than your typical wage slave in Bangladesh. Most people live paycheck to paycheck, and are perhaps two months away from homelessness. It’s a shit work culture, but it’s the result of 45 years of Reaganomics.

So a strike has to be something much more than workplace actions.

They may have coercive power over you on the job, but they can’t make you buy stuff. There have already been embargoes ranging from one day to one week against major retailers such as Amazon and Nestle, and boycotts against Target and similar outfits that have been ongoing, and they’ve been effective enough to cause worry in the right quarters. The Trump admin already floated the idea of a 5 year prison sentence for anyone demonstrating in front of a Tesla dealership. Elon Musk has already figured out that the widespread hatred caused by his rampage through most government programs isn’t going away, and he has already lost hundreds of billions and risks losing it all. He announced he’s getting out of politics by the end of May. Hopefully he’ll get the fuck out of the country.

But picture this: the manager at the local fast-food joint has already told his employees that if they so much as call in sick on the day of a scheduled strike, he’ll fire them. Yes, in much of the county, a shit boss like him can get away with that crap. Because we still have full employment, jobs are scarce, and he holds the whip.

But come the day of the strike, all the employees he coerced into showing up are standing around idle, because walk-in business has dropped 70%. He’ll send some of them home, of course, and if he’s a big enough a bastard, he might try telling them not to join any protests that might be going on.

If this happens once a week, he’s going to see that his profit margins—which in the fast-food industry are pretty thin—are vanishing. He can’t take a 10% overall loss in business.

And if he starts firing people, he may find he no longer has any control over them, and they may well be standing across the street from his business on days of the strike, adding to the pressure for people to stay away and urging employees to engage in malicious compliance.

What we need to do is set up five zones across the country, one for each workday, Monday through Friday. One day per week, we get as many people as possible to buy nothing (currently such actions exempt small, locally-owned businesses, and that’s a wise distinction to make). Nothing purchased on line, and skip lunch at the chain eatery. Don’t buy groceries that day. (It’s ok to stock up the day before if needed—the bosses will notice the one day slump a lot more than a smaller one-day bump in sales.)

And on those Zone days, everyone who can, protest. It can be as small as a bumper sticker, or a small flag, or even a prearranged dress code (for instance, everyone wear something red on the Zone Action Day.) If you can march and chant and ring cow bells, do so. Just…don’t let up.

And keep the pressure on elected officials. Republicans are already running scared, and they need to realize that Trump and his MAGAts are the lesser of two factions. They are between a rock and a hard place, and you are the hard place.

And talk to people. Persuade them that this is no longer just “politics”; it’s the survival of a free and open America. These aren’t disagreements over policy; this is a fight to stop a fascist coup against the United States, and if we don’t stop them now, then we may face a very bloody war as the final option. And nobody with any sense of decency or intelligence wants to go there.

We fight hard now, or we fight for our very lives later. There’s no point in asking nicely. The fascists aren’t going to simply go away.

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Trumpenomics — The best way to save money is to waste it

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 12th, 2025

G. Elliot Morris, formerly one of the guiding geniuses behind the late, lamented 538 website, came up with this tidbit today: “According to the Hamilton Project data, the U.S. government has spent $2.17 trillion as of April 10, 2025, at 7:00 p.m. ET (the data, which comes from the Treasury, is updated in near-real-time). That is just shy of a 6% increase over spending on the same date in 2024 when the feds had spent “just” $2.05 trillion at this point in the year. This puts the US federal government on track to spend $8 trillion this year, barring other budget changes…”

As odd as that stat is in light of ElonTrump’s chainsaw ‘cost-cutting’ measures, it only tells a small part of the tale. In fact, trillions of dollars have been lost over the past two months to waste, fraud and abuse, and even though Trump had to scurry back on his “Liberation Day” tariffs in light of a potential total economic collapse, the wholesale destruction will continue.

The slashes to government programs, big and small, have been capricious, arbitrary, and often cruel. Thousands of on-going projects have been stopped in their tracks, even though the money for them had already been allocated and spent, meaning that money—hundreds of billions—has been thrown away. Just the ongoing research programs that just got torched alone were in the billions.

They’ve gutted thousands of departments by taking a very systematic and subtle approach: just fire anybody who a) is on probationary status and b) has a vowel or a consonant in their name. This meant every promising new hire who hadn’t been there two years yet, all temporary employees, and anyone who had just been promoted for doing a superior job but whose promotion came with probationary status. With no regard to capabilities or functions.

Courts have ordered thousands of employees unfired, and many of those returned to find their chairs, their desks, and their computers all gone, either trashed or dumped at fire sale prices.

Many of the most important (and popular) government programs, including the Department of Education, NOAA, NASA, Department of the Interior and Social Security are being gutted. That last one, which makes up about 10% of national economic income for the general public, is teetering and in danger of collapse. They want to privatize the Post Office, which means thousands of non-profitable rural post offices will close even as the price of sending a letter explodes ten-fold.

I’ve actually had right wingers whine that we wouldn’t be complaining if a Democrat did to the government what Trump is doing. Typical of MAGAts—they love to howl about what victims they are as they rape and bully everyone around them.

Fact is, Democrats DID cut government spending, and even balanced the budget. This was in Bill Clinton’s second term, with vice President Al Gore overseeing the government efficiency task force. It was called “Reinventing Government” It eliminated what Elaine Kamarck, administrator of the program, said was “more than 400,000 federal positions between 1993 and 2000 through a combination of voluntary departures, attrition and a relatively small number of layoffs.”

Hundreds of departments were merged or eliminated, and the savings were so great that the Clinton administration had the first (and last) balanced budget since 1968. The day George Bush Jr took office, newspapers and economists where rhapsodizing about “surpluses as far as the eye can see” and there was serious talk of retiring the national debt by 2010. Of course, Republican fiscal fecklessness and greed, serving the notion that the national treasury should be the plaything of the very rich, eliminated the surpluses and instead created record floods of red ink, which their propagandists assured the public was the result of “Democrat spending.” It was a lie, but it was repeated endlessly.

And Reinventing Government slid into the memory hole, partly because it didn’t support the fascist narrative, and partly because it worked exactly the way government was supposed to work: democratically, with decision-making and responsibility shared between Congress and the executive, and with time taken to determine what jobs and projects served a good purpose and which were just accumulated fat. It worked so well hardly anybody even noticed it.

So the next time some wankers moan in self pity that people just hate right wingers, it isn’t politics or factionalism; it’s disgust for greed, incompetence, capriciousness and viciousness. The Democrats used competence, honesty, and good faith. The difference is night and day. People don’t hate Trump and Musk for “saving money”; they hate them because they are hateful people who are destroying the country and selling it off for parts and at our expense.

Even though Trump had to back off on his massive tariffs folly, the damage is already nearly unrecoverable. Not just the incredible waste and incompetence of his “cost-cutting”; the extraneous damage inflicted.

The bond market is teetering. US bonds are the “safe haven” for investors during market crashes, something that New Deal economics took out of our lives which Reaganomics restored. Stocks tank, you invest in bonds and wait it out.

But bonds depend entirely on “The Full Faith and Credit” of the United States, and under this administration, nobody trusts that government. As far as good credit goes, the US might as well be Zimbabwe. And the bond market—nearly $30 trillion in size—relies entirely on trust in the US government.

You hear a lot about China owning a chunk of that, and it does: about $1.8 trillion. About 6%, more or less. A small but significant share. (Most of the bond market is money the US owes to itself).

Trump is going out of his way to antagonize and even insult the Chinese with his mindless bluster. If China tanks the bond market, they will take great economic damage. But the US would be ruined. It would take decades for the nation to recover, and it wouldn’t look anything like the US that we all enjoyed in the 20th century.

It’s clear Trump isn’t running the show: his plutocrats, including Musk, are. But they aren’t noticeably smarter or more competent, and often mistake greed for wisdom. Most of them have the compassion and knowledge of Charles Montgomery Burns, Homer Simpson’s boss. Two words: Howard Lutnick. And he’s not even the worst one: far from it. Trump’s Secretary of Education is talking about using that thinking computer thingie for educating the kids, what was it she called it? Oh, yes, “A-One.”

Hope she didn’t pick Hewlett-Packard for the computers. Everyone knows HP and A One are competitors.

Sheesh.

 

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Trump America — Another business destined to fail

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 5th 2025

When the Dow drops 3,600 points—9% of its value—in just two days, it’s pretty safe to say market conditions are ‘unsettled’ in much the same way that Grindavik is unsettled.

My guess is we’ll see a partial recovery Monday, and then the slide will resume. It’s illegal to manipulate markets for a quick and dirty profit, but that’s hardly going to slow down Donald Trump, America’s most powerful con man. He’ll keep right on making announcements that will manipulate the market to his advantage.

The game has already begun. Erik the Moron piped up today, saying that the tariffs were “negotiable” and the first countries to negotiate would get the best deals.

While that made perfect sense to a dimwitted conman, it will also completely blows up the premise behind Trump’s tariffs. The stated reason is that it will force manufacturing to either move to America or start up there. But that means the tariffs have to be inflexible and permanent. Nobody is going to go to the trouble and expense of moving their operations stateside only to find the tariffs have been dropped or reduced and they find themselves competing with competitors back in their previous locales who didn’t move.

The sheer hucksterism of “move now because these deals won’t last” is pretty jawdropping.

Of course, to make a factory that was paying its employees $1.50 a day to set up shop in America means that to make it work, the have to slash pay scales and find a way to greatly reduce all other costs to match what they were paying in Vietnam or Laos or wherever. In other words, to make it worth the overhead of the tariffs, they would have to cut everything to third world levels: no OSHA, no FDA, no EPA, no minimum wage, nothing.

Donald, of course is working hard to get rid of all that crap. It’s patriotic to send your eight year old to work in a poisonous, dangerous place where they might live to be 12 if they’re lucky. Florida is already working on legislation to replace migrant labor with child labor. No, I’m not kidding.

Warren Buffet, who knows a thing or two about the markets, suggested that Trump also inflicted the incoherent tariffs in order to drive interest rates up, something that would also greatly profit the markets. That statement left Donald screaming in rage, which tells you that Buffet pretty much nailed it.

Trump is openly defying courts, ignoring direct orders not to send innocent people to his gulags, knowing that the five fascists on the supreme court will rule in his favor. It won’t be Donald who ends the United States: it will be Thomas, Kavanaugh, Alito, Gorsuch and Coney Barrett, none of whom seem to realize that once they’ve ended the country, they will no longer have any importance to anyone. Some of them are rich and will do OK in the new plutocracy, but lawn jockeys like Thomas and religious whack jobs like Coney Barret will find themselves on the outside looking in.

Basically, the plutocrats are working to parcel out the United States and make it an impoverished third-world nation while making off with tens of trillions in profits. It’s the biggest heist in history. Then they move on to the next prosperous zone and conduct a parasitic orgy there. China would be a sensible target since it’s already authoritarian. If they aren’t stopped, your life, and the life of your children, will be one of misery and deprivation.

Think Trump and his manipulators are not out to ruin your life and kill your children? Consider this Raw Story news article today: “A federal judge in Rhode Island accused the Trump administration of “covertly” withholding funds for Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief programs from states that didn’t vote for him, Courthouse News reported on Friday. In March, U.S. District Judge John McConnell issued a preliminary injunction in favor of 23 states that sued the government over its plan to implement a broad pause to state aid,” noted the report.”

A court finding is a bit more than a accusation. The reason McConnell ruled the way he did was because he had solid, incontrovertible evidence that Trump was deliberately cheating people for the crime of living in a state that didn’t vote for him.

Pussy Riot, indisputably the bravest rock group in the world, showed up in Manhattan today to urge Americans stand up for themselves against Trump’s planned tyranny. The cowardice of the Republicans is well documented. Democrats, as always, are divided on the notion of whether ‘tis nobler to be spineless, gutless, boot-licking cowards or not. Fortunately, most are not.

It’s the same as with the American public, where I’ve had people tell me they won’t come to today’s demonstrations because they want to keep their heads down and survive. Understandable, but I have to wonder what makes them think life outside of Trump’s gulags will be any improvement. He plans to leave you in poverty and squalor. That’s what’s in store. At least in prison you’ll get moldy bread and contaminated water, just like you would outside. And inside, nobody expects you to pretend to love Trump. Hopefully.

As most of you know, four American serviceman drowned in Lithuania in a motor vehicle mishap. Their bodies were eventually all recovered, and as the caskets were taken to the airport yesterday for the flight back to America, thousands of Lithuanians lined the streets to pay their respects.

The servicemen landed today, but Donald Trump wasn’t there.

He had a golf tournament to watch. That was more important than losers and suckers.

The rallies against Trump begin in an hour and a half (I’m finishing this at 7:25 PDT). I’m hoping nationwise five million will show up, but I think three million will get the point across. There may have do be more than one day of rallies, and widespread strikes and boycotts. But if we want our freedoms back, that’s what it’s going to take.

In a world of Cory Bookers, don’t be a Mike Johnson.

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Lost Signal — Even by Trump’s standards, this was dismal

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

March 27th 2025

The breaking story about the Signal chat group conversation leading up to the bombing of Houthis in Yemen was already one of the most egregious and bizarre in the annals of American history.

Accidentally inviting the top editor of one of America’s most renowned journalistic magazines, (Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, in case you’ve been on the far side of the Moon this past week) to a group chat about a pending military attack is a bit like being in an NFL team huddle and glancing up to see the stadium announcer is also in the huddle, holding a microphone, listening carefully to the play plan and nodding thoughtfully.

Of course, to stretch that simile further, in this particular huddle there’s no assurance that any of the guys wearing your uniform are actually on the same team. You already know the coach is working for the other guys, after all.

The participants, caught out, have been throwing excuses and lies around madly in all directions like custard pies in a Mack Sennet movie. They’ve tried claiming that the transcript was a hoax, that they didn’t discuss classified information, and that Goldberg made it up because he doesn’t like Trump.

Tulsi Gabbard doesn’t seem to know what country she was in during the discussion. Well, you know how it is: you see one Asian country, you’ve seen all of them. At least one participant was in Moscow during the chat.

Speaking of Moscow, it seems that the reason the Pentagon had issued a blanket order the week before to never use Signal for any official reasons was because Russia had successfully hacked the encryption of the app. And while the Russians may not have been involved with this particular breach, it seems that the names, phone numbers, emails and passwords of all the participants in the session were available online.

About the only people who didn’t know were the American public. But by inviting Goldberg, they got that covered.

To call this a clusterfuck is a bit like saying the Fyre Festival didn’t go well. It’s damning with faint praise.

National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, the man who somehow invited Goldberg to the chat room, claims he never met Goldberg and had no idea who he was. Evidence, including photographs, says otherwise. It’s not quite clear how inviting a total stranger to a top-secret national security chat is somehow better than inviting the editor of the Atlantic. Apparently one guy there was awaiting confirmation to his government post!

But never mind all that. One person was conspicuous by his absence: Le grand citrouille, King Pumpkin, the Donald.

You seen scenes where a major military operation is underway, and they release photos of the president and his cabinet all sitting around, looking tense and serious as they rescue hostages or grease bin Laden or whatever.

Not in this case. The closest to presidential leadership is when one of the participants says vaguely that he thinks Donald approves of what they’re doing here. Evidence suggests that Trump had no idea what was going on. To paraphrase the famous Watergate investigative question: “What did he know, and does he know that he knew it?” It seems pretty clear that the President of the United States was absent simply because he had nothing to offer.

Trump himself seems to have no idea what the scandal is about, and is mostly reduced to his boilerplate deflection and denial, some of which may actually be valid. It’s pretty clear he has no idea what Signal is, but having discerned that something called Signal was involved, he has declared it defective and wants people to look into it. After all, it let that Goldberg, who was mean to him in the past, in. Something must be wrong with Signal.

He’s variously tried claiming the transcript was a hoax (that backfired: Goldberg released more to show it wasn’t) and that the Democrats were to blame somehow, and that no secrets were discussed. (Several of the participants have tried making that claim, stopping just short of saying the dog ate their homework.) He is, in a word, clueless.

He doesn’t even have the wit to address the specifics, but is just generally doing The Donald, the things he always does when he’s feeling defensive. He’s the old guy with the cane batting at imaginary insects.

He finally realized that there was something to all this confusing ‘signal’ stuff and described the event as a ‘glitch’ and boasted that it was the first glitch in the two months of his administration. A sardonically amused Rachel Maddow that evening spent a full half hour running down the glitches so far. She didn’t pad it or speak slowly. It’s an impressive pile of glitches, worthy of Inspector Clouseau.

But no worries: Trump will have Clouseau’s real-life equivalent, Inspector Hegseth, in to determine what, if anything, happened.

In addition to the blatant incompetence, malice and possible treason, public discourse needs to include whether Trump has any control over this gang of fascists, crooks and subversives or is just their little smiley face for the public. Are the lights on? Is anybody home?

The next day we learned that a) four US soldiers were missing in Lithuania and b) nobody had bothered to tell Trump about it.

If you need more evidence of how feckless, reckless, and anti-American this junta is, consider the following exchange between Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut and alleged Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

HIMES: Do you think it’s responsible for you, as head of the intelligence community, to retweet posts from individuals affiliated with Russian state media?

GABBARD: That retweet came from my personal account.

HIMES: Personal account? You’re the Director of National Intelligence, not an Instagram influencer. There’s no such thing as “personal” when you’re elevating Kremlin propaganda.

GABBARD: I have the right to share information—

HIMES: Information? You mean Russian disinformation. You sit in high-level intelligence briefings, then turn around and boost the same narratives Moscow is pushing. Should we just CC the Kremlin on your next meeting and cut out the middleman?

GABBARD: This is just an attempt to smear me—

HIMES: Smear you? You lied under oath in a Senate hearing yesterday, claiming you knew nothing about classified information, while sitting in Signal chats where war plans were discussed. You retweet Kremlin-backed sources, then act shocked when people question your loyalties.

GABBARD: I’m focused on national security—

HIMES: National security? While pushing Russian propaganda and pretending you’re clueless about intelligence leaks? If a Democrat had done half of this, you’d be screaming treason on national TV.

GABBARD: This is about free speech—

HIMES: Free speech? You’re the President’s top intelligence advisor, not some random guy on Twitter. Every word you amplify has consequences. And right now, you’re handing America’s enemies exactly what they want—straight from your “personal account.”

https://x.com/Acyn/status/1904907517261705605

Speaking of Twitter, I’m a bit surprised Musk wasn’t one of the participants. I suppose he’s too busy destroying the United States, though. That can keep a man busy, you know.

Or maybe he’ll join the chat when they discuss bombing Toronto. Hopefully the Russians will leak that before it happens.

 

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Circles within Circles — The universe versus the heavens

Circles within Circles

The universe versus the heavens

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

March 20th 2025 Happy Equinox!

I just finished watching an anime series on Netflix called Orb. It’s 25 episodes, and is based on a highly fictionalized 14th and 15th century Europe, where a church, identified as “C” is fighting to preserve the biblical belief that Earth is the center of creation, and is the bedrock, immobile, and all other heavenly bodies rotate around it. A disparate group of sky watchers, some clergy and some not, dispute this view, arguing that the Earth actually goes around the sun. The church reacts with a vicious inquisition and with death by burning mandated for heliocentric heretics. It is basically a fictionalized account of the general tone of the 14th through 17th centuries.

I was going to do a review of the series upon its completion, but the fact of the matter is it isn’t very good. The characters are wooden and two dimensional, and while it shows charts showing the patent absurdity of the church’s beloved geocentric model, it doesn’t really explain why the far simpler and logical heliocentric model didn’t prevail. After all, it already did in such places as Japan, China, India, and the Middle East. (It was also known in parts of the Americas, but Europe didn’t know about the Americas at that point.) One of the rationales for the Crusades was that the ‘heathen Muslims’ believed the sun was the center of the universe.

It had its moments of absurdity, as in when one cleric found his faith in geocentrism shattered by finally observing Venus “in full phase.” Since Venus and Earth are on the same orbital plane, the only time Venus would be in full phase in relation to the Earth is when it is directly behind the sun from us. And finally, the ending of the series was nonsensical, abrupt, and confusing. Bit of a shame, really—it did start out promising, and at least some of the people involved did the homework. The casual background images of the sky, especially at night are amazing, accurate, and in a few sequences when the POV is over several minutes with stationary objects to the side, you can actually see rotational movement of the stars as they are occluded by the foreground object. That was impressive. As noted, someone put some real work into this.

I had recently encountered stats showing that a full 26% of American adults—over a quarter of the voting population—believe the sun goes around the Earth. A smaller but still statistically significant portion of the population believe the Earth is flat. I can’t even blame religion for this: America has a deep anti-intellectual, anti-science and unimaginative streak, one exemplified by the present administration. This is encouraged by industries that find scientific analysis of their products and emissions to be inconvenient and even expensive. Easier to dismiss science than it is to argue against it. I encounter victims of this on line, and sometimes I’ll actually engage with them. (As soon as religion or conspiracy theories show up, I just block them as a waste of carbon.) I like to challenge them to work out the math for a flight, using the Hohmann transfer trajectory, to get to Mars and back. I can do one good enough for nevermind, and I’ll bet there’s an app for my phone that could do it up to NASA or ESA requirements, too.

One of the more impressive elements of the series was the display of the movements of the planets. Astronomers of the era bent over backwards to display the elements of apparent planetary motion. The results usually look like they were done on a Spirograph. This is because the five inner planets as seen from Earth move backwards at regular intervals for varying amounts of time. It’s called retrograde motion, and it’s easily explained by the heliocentric model.

Think of it as a circular race course, with each planet in its own lane—Mercury on the innermost, Saturn on the outermost. Earth is in the center one. Mercury goes around every 88 days, Venus every 225 days, Earth every 365 days, Mars every 687 days, Jupiter every 4,333 days, and Saturn every 10,756 days. It makes for a very boring race, I agree.

In the middle track, Earth races ahead of the slower outer planets, passing them and making them appear to move backward compared to the fixed objects in the background—in this case, the stars. The two inner planets appear to move backward against the stars because when their orbits on are on the far side of the sun, they are. If we’re at 3 o’clock moving toward 2 o’clock (sorry but they move counterclockwise seen from above) then the two might be moving from 11 o’clock to 7 o’clock.

Heliocentrism explains that phenomenon without having to have a body stop dead in its tracks and then loop back on itself with grand disregard for inertia or common sense. Unfortunately, the religious fundamentalist mind tends to embrace the more convoluted and irrational explanation as evidence that God’s powers exist and are above the silly laws of the world.

Nonetheless, heliocentrism prevailed. Without math and scientific theory to support it, it was a competing opinion. But with math, it all adds up.

Let’s take a look at how that happened.

Per Wikipedia: “The first non-geocentric model of the universe was proposed by the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus (d. 390 BC), who taught that at the center of the universe was a ‘central fire’, around which the Earth, Sun, Moon and planets revolved in uniform circular motion. This system postulated the existence of a counter-earth collinear with the Earth .”

The heliocentric model, while much simpler than any Earth-centric model, lacked anything beyond Occam’s Razor to justify it. Without math to describe it, it was just another opinion. Copernicus started that route, stating that the orbits were circular, with a motionless sun at the center, and unvarying. All three statements were incorrect, and had no more empirical justification than any other theory, but it was a step in the right direction.

Kepler, between 1609 and 1619, devised his three laws that clarified the behavior of the solar system.

Kepler’s three laws state that:

  1. The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci.
  2. A line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.
  3. The square of a planet’s orbital period is proportional to the cube of the length of the semi-major axis of its orbit.

It wasn’t until Newton released his Principia in 1687 that he deduced the ratios of gravitational attraction.

He determined that the force of that attraction (F) was equivalent to the mass of the first object times the mass of the second object, divided by the distance between the centers of the two masses, squared.

Newton was flummoxed by his own discovery, writing “That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.”

Absurd or not, it was the death knell of theological objections to the heliocentric theory of the solar system.

The final nail in the coffin came over a century later, when Henry Cavendish devised the universal gravitational constant, which described the strength of the gravitational attraction (6.674 × 10−11m3⋅kg−1⋅s−2) which showed exactly why the planets moved the way they do.

With that, the last piece fell into place and heliocentrism was established theory, on par with evolution, gravity, and atomic theory. We have landed craft on Mars and Venus, and approached all the other planets, using the advances listed above to do so. You fling a craft at Mars, and you aim it while it’s still within a few thousand miles of Earth and it COASTS to its target, some 130 million miles away. Moving target. That’s one hell of a game of darts!

With fascists and religious fanatics clawing down every scientific and philosophical advance since the 14th century, it’s important that you stand for science and knowledge. But you need to know WHY you are standing for it, and have the tools you need to defend it, and the knowledge to explain it. You aren’t like those morons who take it on faith because god loves irrationality, or it’s a commie plot.

A lot of science is well beyond the ken of any normal person. Quantum physics, with indeterminacy, eigenstates and probability collapses, is confounding, especially since we live in an artificially stable world above a foundation of chaos and random chance. We don’t really know if the universe is expanding, contracting, or not doing anything at all. Or if it has edges. The cosmological constant provides us with the unsettling news that the density of the universe just happens, by chance, to exactly match the amount of dark energy (which seems to be decreasing) and without the match, we wouldn’t exist at all.

Fortunately, you don’t have to take any of that on faith. It reflects nothing but the current state of our knowledge, and we really are still seven blind men trying to describe an elephant. Upheavals in our apprehension of the universe are frequent. The wonder and strangeness of the universe will always far exceed our imaginations.

But in our quotidian lives, some things are infallible and constant. Among them: the Earth is an orb, and revolves around the Sun. The Sun revolves around the Milky Way core. In fact, it’s safe to say that in our universe, everything revolves around something else. With one possible but as yet unknown exception.

Don’t hesitate to slap down the flat Earthers. But do take the effort to understand WHY you are right and they are wrong. You owe that, not just to them, but to yourself.

 

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The Rise of Emperor Trump — After the Don, Darkness

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

March 16th, 2025

That Donald Trump is mad almost goes without saying. He has been a pathological malignant narcissist his entire life, going back to a loveless childhood with a cruel and vicious father, a wraith of a mother; no friends, not even pets.

Long before he entered politics, he was widely hated and despised for his cruelty, his dishonesty, his open contempt for women and his hatred of minorities. His wealth protected him from the consequences of his mental illness, but his history of civil suits tells a squalid tale of lust, greed, viciousness, and open thievery. He is and always has been a wastrel, a moral and ethical sewer of a man. Had he been born poor, I am certain he would have died in prison long before he reached thirty years of age.

His unrestrained presidency has been the absolute nightmare many of us feared, as he throws away an entire nation for his own aggrandizement. Manipulated by fascist billionaire scum, given a army of servile and ever-compliant underlings to wreak his will, Trump is rapidly tearing apart the fabric of society, replacing the United States with…

Well, history tells the tale. People may consider this time utterly insane, a time of nihilistic orgy and abandonment of human mores, but historians recognize this. Oh, yes, we’ve trodden this path before. I’ll give a few examples shortly.

I caught some of Trump’s characteristically windy speech at the Department of Justice the other day. It was the same as the SOTU and his stump speeches. People are stupid enough to let him mar memorial services and other solemn occasions with the same self-serving bullshit. The same litany of lies, defamations, whinging, racism, hatred of all who are different from him, and bellicosity. And I realized: that’s all he’s capable of doing any more.

We know that in his first term, “Doctor” Ronnie Jackson saw fit to administer the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test to Trump. It’s a simple fifteen minute test used to set benchmarks for onset or continuing development of dementia and/or Alzheimer’s. It’s not something a doctor would ask of a sitting President of the United States without a damned solid reason. I don’t know if they administered any such test to Reagan in his second term, when his mental decline was becoming evident, but he and his staff were together enough not to blurt it out to the public. Trump actually boasted about it, repeatedly, and never realized that just the fact that someone thought he needed to take such a test raised a whole host of questions.

Age-related dementia is progressive and irreversible. It progresses at various rates, even in individuals, and along with increasing loss of cognitive abilities, it can cause catastrophic personality changes. While it can take people who have been pleasant all their lives and turn them into utter horrid monsters, I’ve never heard of a case where a life-long jerk got compassionate or thoughtful.

Trump is well into dementia, and propped up by his toadies and never held to account, so he’s only going to get worse.

I suspect that’s why Elon Musk has effectively co-opted Trump’s office. He’s a young, vicious, soulless libertarian with his own set of mental problems, exactly what the fascists want, and he’s there to “be” Trump long after Trump has forgotten he’s president.

I repeat. It’s only going to get worse.

There isn’t a country in Europe or Asia that hasn’t seen a peaceful and beneficial land fall to madness and destruction. Indeed, Trump is just an example of such madness that is presently expanding globally: Russia, Iraq, Iran, Hungary, the Philippines, Brazil, the list is getting longer. Eventually fascists/theocrats collapse due to corruption, cruelty and incompetence, but they can cost millions and even tens of millions of lives in the process. Best to avoid it in the first place, but humanity is flawed. As history shows:

An excellent summation of History’s Nine Worst Leaders by Conner Brighton can be found here.

https://www.worldatlas.com/history/history-s-9-worst-leaders.html

I have made light edits for clarity in both excerpts.

Commodus was the son of the previous emperor Marcus Aurelius and had been groomed for the position his whole life. However, despite his father’s best efforts, it would seem as though Commodus was destined for a life of selfishness and cruelty.

From a young age, he was justly hated by those around him for his inflated ego and lack of honor. The resentment held towards Commodus only grew when Marcus Aurelius suddenly died in 180 AD and his son came to power.

At no point throughout his twelve-year reign did Commodus show any concern for the well-being of the empire. He was much too concerned with holding lavish festivals, gladiatorial games, and extravagant parties for himself and the few friends he had in the Roman senate.

Commodus was exceptionally paranoid and routinely had members of his court executed for treason without the smallest shred of evidence. He also built up an obsession with becoming a gladiator himself. Something that was considered unbelievably low class for any decent Roman, let alone an emperor.

He would hold “fights” against other gladiators in a vain effort to prove his combat ability. These contests would of course be rigged in his favor. He never did kill any of his opponents but he was known to slice off the odd ear or nose depending on his mood. Commodus would often claim that he was undefeated in the arena and that there was not a man alive who could beat him…

…Commodus was so bad that his rule would spark an end to the Roman golden age and almost prematurely destroyed the Roman Empire.

If that doesn’t bear a ton of similarities to the tale of Donald Trump, I don’t know what does. I could picture him employing AI to stage gladiator fights between himself and his enemies, real or imagined, with predictably vainglorious results. Or continue what he’s already doing now, which is forwarding the absurdly over-the-top tractor art of him riding a dragon or blessing Jesus or looking compassionate and heroic.

There’s a temptation to compare Trump to the even more notorious Caligula, but Trump seems to have stopped raping virgins, and while he’s sent many jackasses to the Senate, he’s never sent a horse.

Robert Mugabe

Almost as soon as Mugabe took power, the standard of living began to decline drastically [in Zimbabwe]. Access to education and healthcare took an immediate dive. Even access to clean food and drinking water became a struggle.

In 1987 Mugabe declared himself the first-ever executive president. This made Zimbabwe essentially a one-party state in all but name. There were plenty of elections held between 1987 and 2017 but all of them were plagued with accusations of Mugabe using violence and political pressure to rig elections and intimidate would-be opponents from running against him.

Aside from the endless examples of political violence at the hand of Mugabe, perhaps his biggest failure had to do with his handling of the economy. By the early 2000s, Zimbabwe’s once thriving agricultural sector of the 1970s was on life support. A series of droughts and decades-long mismanagement by inexperienced and corrupt officials led to massive food shortages.

By 2008 the nation’s economy was in total freefall with inflation reaching an unheard of 100,000%. Mass unemployment destroyed what was left of the middle class and thousands of Zimbabweans fled for greener pastures in neighboring countries.

Summary

Bad leaders come in all shapes and sizes. Mass killings and genocide are certainly good markers for an evil leader but a poor leader does not always need to be at the same level as Pol Pot or Joseph Stalin to be considered bad.

History is full of heads of state that were either way in over their heads or could simply not be bothered with the unique problems that their nations were dealing with. Perhaps through the study of history, we can spot similar patterns with our leaders in hopes of avoiding the same kinds of tragedies and mishaps in the future.

Connor Brighton July 30 2023 in History

That was just two examples. Monarchies often end up with a succession of bad or foolish leaders. Theocracies always turn awful because they all depend on the most talented snake-oil salesman convincing others that he knows what their silent and invisible god wants. It happens to Republics, of course. Some, like Germany or France, recover, usually at a ruinous cost. Some like Russia, just end up with a succession of bad rulers, no matter what they try. By Russian standards, Putin is actually somewhat benign, and believe me, that’s not saying much. On the rare occasions they get a competent and wise leader, such as Gorbachev, they promptly and utterly collapse despite that leader’s best efforts.

Americans have never been at this point before, and the fact that they have no real history of truly cruel and oppressive leaders makes them more vulnerable to this one. Americans used to see that lack as a strength and proof of the superiority of the Constitutional system. They had to do a lot of white washing to arrive at that conclusion, and America is known in Europe as a country that regrows its virginity on a regular basis. In truth, Americans are no better or no worse than the population of any other land, and like all the other nations that have been faced with imminent disastrous dictatorship, they will find they need to resist and fight the problem before it completely subsumes the land. If they don’t, they face decades of ruin and deprivation.

Will enough Americans see the danger in time?