Category: American Psyche

Posted on

Solstice 2024 — Expiry dates and the Cassandra Effect

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December 21st, 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

www.zeppjamiesonfiction.online

Science may not have a hard-and-fast rule that stipulates when hominids became truly human, but if it was up to me, I would say it was the first a hominid raised his fists in the air and shouted, “We are all DOOMED!” Now, granted, science may find that a bit unhelpful, since nobody can say when the first doom-shouter arose, but they have been an inextricable part of humanity since it became overcooked apes.

“The end is nigh” may be a popular pastime with us somewhat-evolved monkeys, and the real allure lies in the fact that if you shout it long enough, you’ll eventually be right. All things end. Look upon my works and despair. We are but mortal. Even the Universe has an expiry date.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with doom-shouting, of course. Oh, you won’t get invited to many parties and your kids will tell you the music in your day was also crap, but often such shouts warn of clear, present, and avoidable dangers. Things such as overpopulation, climate change, nuclear proliferation and pandemics are very real and even existential threats.

One drawback to doom-shouting is that the shouter will encounter the Cassandra effect. Cassandra was an ancient Greek soothsayer who was always right, but cursed because nobody ever believed her. Part of it is because most people are at least mildly optimistic. There are the incurable Panglossians, (aka “idiots”) who see everything through rose-coloured lenses, and the deterministic optimists (my group) who acknowledge the dangers and threats but think we can work our way through them. We’re also idiots, but a good deal less starry-eyed about it.

Most doom shouters are full of crap, of course. Humanity did not end because of cats, communists, Elvis, or rap music. Religious texts are big on “End of Days,” leading to endless trouble because of nitwits who interpret it to mean it is Divine Will they bring about the End of Days, but those texts are uniformly a load of crap, too. Too many people believe if you pile bullshit high enough, it becomes worthy of worship. Another sign of humanity, I suppose.

Which brings us to the here-and-now. America has willingly swallowed poison, and we’re all waiting to see if it was a lethal dose, or if America will end up puking it up and feeling really bad for a long time after.

For those of us currently living in the US who aren’t part of the One Percent, we’re in for hard times. There’s a very real possibility that America as we know it won’t exist by Solstice 2025. Class-based coups are always ugly, and those staged by the aristocracy tend to be even crueler and bloodier, and often throw the host nation into third-world poverty. And that, in a nutshell, is what has happened in America.

My brand of optimism doesn’t believe that the course of human events is on an inevitably downward path. If that were true, I believe history would have come to a close at the gates of Auschwitz.
No human force is truly inexorable, no matter how powerful it seems. The USSR was one of the most brutal and pervasive regimes in history, but when the government lost even the passive consensual support of the people, it collapsed relatively bloodlessly in a matter of weeks. It wasn’t a one-off. Ask Assad—his mail is being forwarded to Moscow now.

Our would-be masters, no matter how arrogant or brutal, absolutely depend upon our support. Without it, they will fall. Remember that. A national strike and millions in the streets peacefully protesting, can end them. It’s up to us. It is always up to us. Be prepared to resist.

How will the world do? We seem to be undergoing a world-wide convulsion and shifting, one that seems to happen every ninety years or so (the 1930s, the 1840s, the 1760s). Each brought about strife, loss, and bloodshed, but in the end the overall lot of humanity improved. That’s important to remember—the next decade might be fairly crappy, but history suggests a better life for the survivors.

The existential threats I mention above will still be with us. They are, after all, reiterations of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Nothing new under our sun. And while its possible that one or more of them may raise up to decimate us, I doubt any will end us. For all that we seem hell-bent on self-obliteration, there’s always some sort of built-in override that causes enough of us to dig in our heels and save us from ourselves. Overall, pollution isn’t as bad as it was fifty years ago. A lower percentage of people died in warfare in the 20th century than in any century going back to the 14th century. (Admittedly, those are low bars.)

We’ve managed to live under the nuclear threat for eighty years now. We aren’t likely to see a pandemic that will kill off a third of us like the one in the 17th century. Over-population was seen as an intractable and inevitable doom fifty years ago. But our birthrate is declining world wide. (Due, in part, to the aforementioned pollution. Details, details.)

Even climate change may encounter built-in natural governors of the sort that prevented Earth in the past from becoming another Venus, or allowed it to come back at least three times from a state of “Snowball Earth.”

How will we fare? Um, well, let’s just say the Earth is considerably more durable than we are. But existential threats mean existential reckonings. We may yet find ways to avoid the worst of the consequences we’ve laid out for ourselves.

I believe, and will always believe, that we will somehow muddle through, and even prevail.

Why would we persevere, if not for the fact that most of us believe that?

It’s Winter Solstice 2024.

The wolf didn’t eat the sun. It will return.

Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.

Posted on

Overall Sickness — More poison is the only cure, Trump thinks

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December 18th, 2024

“The shocking assassination of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO on a New York City sidewalk earlier this month is viewed as “acceptable” by four in 10 young adults, an Emerson College poll found.

“The survey concluded that 41 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 – a percentage that far exceeds any other age group – found the shooting to be either “somewhat” or “completely” acceptable.

“Additionally, 23 percent of adults in their 30s thought the shooting was acceptable, along with 13 percent of adults in their 40s, 8 percent in their 50s and 10 percent in their 60s and 70s.”

–Raw Story

Donald Trump (R-Rich White Trash) weighed in, saying, “I think it’s really terrible that some people seem to admire him (Luigi Mangione), like him. And I was happy to see that it wasn’t specific to this gentleman that was killed. It’s just an overall sickness, as opposed to a specific sickness. That was a terrible thing. It was cold-blooded. Just a cold-blooded, horrible killing. And how people can like this guy is — that’s a sickness, actually.”

As usual, Trump got it completely wrong. It was specific, if not to Brian Thompson personally, to his role in the medical coverage system. Pretending it was result of of “overall sickness” is just giving protection to our screwed-up medical system.

That America has an overall sickness is beyond dispute. Just the other day we had another school shooting, three dead including the shooter, a 15 year-old girl. Just as I was responding to a gun nut on Facebook who called me “evil” for advocating for gun licenses. (Haven’t heard back from him.)

And of course, the fact that Trump got elected is proof that a plurality of voters have lost their minds and their sense of decency.

But Trump’s personal contributions to that “overall sickness” could fill volumes. He swears he’s going to issue a blanket pardon to all the rioters jailed in the wake of the January 6th insurrection, quite a few of whom are violent, unrepentant criminal filth. He wants to try members of the J6 Congressional committee for treason, apparently unaware that quite aside from the fact that they were committing the opposite of treason, the Constitution explicitly protects members of Congress for anything said in the chambers while in session. Doesn’t matter, I suppose: none of Trump’s supporters care what the Constitution says.

He hasn’t hesitated to call for the execution of protesters—yes, including peaceful protest—who didn’t riot on his behalf. Death is cheap under Trump; he has a long list of people who he thinks should be executed or thrown in prison for life. He very avidly wants to execute people, and has stuff the once-proud Supreme Court who have allowed executions to proceed, even when the prosecutors and the family of the victims begged them not to. He has proudly posed with the likes of Daniel Penny and Kyle Rittenhouse. Both indisputably killed people, but got off in court. More of that overall sickness, I suppose.

But then, we’ve established that under fascist rule, you don’t have to actually be guilty of any crime in order to justify being executed by the state. Trump has made that clear. His criminals get pardons, of course.

Sebastrian Gorka, who looks and sounds like an extra from a film about Stalin’s Politburo, came out the other day and said that anyone who expresses approval of the slaying of Brian Thompson should be executed. Gorka may sound like the dreary, bitter old drunk at the end of the bar whom everyone hope will pass out soon, but he is slated to serve as deputy assistant to the president and serve as senior director for counterterrorism in the NSC.

Gorka is probably something of a pretend intellectual and self-styled political scientist, but even he ought to be aware that while advocating for someone’s murder is a criminal act (as well it should be), expressing approval that someone died is not. “They ought to shoot so-and-so” can get you arrested and possibly convicted. “That son-of-a-bitch had it coming” is not a crime. It’s just an opinion.

But Gorka is more interested, like his empty, vainglorious master, in causing suppression and fear, and has no use for any moral niceties that may be involved.

But he likes history, so he should be aware of a saying about powerful leaders that has applied everywhere throughout history: “When you make dissent impossible, you make revolution inevitable.”

I doubt Gorka or Trump possess the wisdom to know when to slip the iron fist back into the velvet glove. Meanwhile, the new regime will add me to their list, if I’m not already there.

Posted on

The Thompson Shooting — He wasn’t the real target

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December 8th 2024

There was something different about the Brian Thompson shooting. Assassinations (and this almost certainly was an assassination rather than a typical random murder) are not usually an accepted part of American life, even when the victims were wildly polarizing figures such as Huey Long, George Wallace, Ronald Reagan or Robert Kennedy. (The two exceptions were Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy, whose deaths were widely cheered in the South.)

There have been the deaths of foreign leaders that met with widespread approval from the American public: Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin come to mind.

Fame or infamy played a major role in such incidents, of course. But with Brian Thompson, fame wasn’t a factor. Perhaps 1 in 20 Americans had even heard of the man before he got shot. Take the top 100 corporations in America, and the average person might be able to name five of the CEOs on that list.

The corporation he ran, United Health Care, was the most notorious of the so-called “health care providers” (they provide exactly no health care, but are simply a bridge troll between people and a human right), one with the highest denial of coverage rate in the country (32%, nearly a third of all cases they supposedly covered) and we knew it was widely hated, not just by its victims, but by friends, relatives and co-workers of those millions who suffered.

UnitedHealth Group, an umbrella corporation that includes United Health Care, made $22 billion in profits in 2023. Revenues were $371.6 billion. United Health Care was roughly a quarter of that gaudy total. Remember, “profits” don’t include salaries (Thompson alone got over $10 million a year plus perks) or money spent fighting claims for denial of coverage and overcharging.

Nobody makes $22 billion “serving the public.” The only way to make that kind of money is by robbing the public blind. In a vital and necessary public need like health care, a certain amount of viciousness is required. Denying claims supposedly reduces costs, but I can’t help but wonder how much was spent on lawyers and lawgivers in order to fight resistance to those often-frivolous denials of necessary care. What is the ratio between pennies saved and costs of screwing the clients?

Remember, in most countries, access to health care is considered a human right! Canadians complain about the cost and inefficiency of their system, but the per capita cost is about 62% of what Americans pay, and not only is it 100% coverage for everyone, but includes dental and vision and some mental health care.

Actual medical providers—you know, doctors, nurses, clinics, hospitals, rather than bridge trolls—report that up to 40% of their expenses related to patient care come from filling out the endless and endlessly varying insurance forms and requirements, nearly all unique to each of the hundreds of bridge trolls, big and small, that stand between patients and care with their hands out.

“Profits” also doesn’t include the billions spent on lobbying against any sort of universal health care program, and paying to ensure that the legislatures are stuffed with well-paid toadies and cryptofascists dedicated to a land by the corporations, for the corporations, and of the corporations. The billions spent on advertising, lying to the people about how they only exist to help, are also deductible.

Lying and cheating are standard business costs, you know. Thank lobbyists and Citizens United for that.

Even with the improvements we saw under Obama and Biden, health care access in America is the worst in the developed world. Trump is vowing to eliminate Obamacare and Medicaid and Medicare, and if he pulls any of that off, health care in America will plummet below that in basket-case countries such as Somalia or Haiti.

I can’t help but wonder how many voters voted for Trump, aware he wanted to get rid of the ACA and the government providers, but thought to themselves “It will save money and my health insurance will protect me.” Ho, boy, are they in for a surprise.

It’s bad, and it’s going to get much worse, and most people are uneasily aware of that.

Which brings us back to Thompson. Now, for all I know, he was a fine family man, a good neighbor, and supported the local little league team and donated to the Salvation Army. Nearly all people have at least some redeeming features, after all. But he was solidly behind the most loathsome policies in an industry widely despised for such policies. He didn’t inherit UHC’s appalling numbers—he created them, indeed, was on his way to a meeting to boast about them to inspire more of the same when he got shot.

The media reacted with shock and outrage, and we heard the usual mewlings about the streets flooded with guns and random nuts and lack of Christianity that are always heard when someone gets shot in a newsworthy fashion (less than 1% of all shootings, granted). But that died away quickly when the response on social media made itself evident.

The vast majority of reactions ranged between satisfaction to outright glee. UHC posted the usual “shock and sorrow” notice on Facebook, and within 24 hours had 55,000 “laughing” emojis—some 98% of the total responses. Hundreds of thousands of “denied coverage” jokes flew around the blogosphere. The national consensus amounted to “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” There have been celebrity deaths that drew elements of derision and pleasure—Michael Jackson, Andrew Breitbart, Antonin Scalia—but they were famous in their own right. Brian Thompson was a relatively unknown personage. His death was cheered, not because of his individual presence, but because he represented what is arguably the most hated business sector in America. And that hatred is overwhelmingly widespread.

Should Donald Trump’s years of bad living catch up to him and they drag him away, face down, off the Fourth Green, millions will be dancing in the streets. Thompson’s family should know he wasn’t hated for the person he was like Trump is.

But this Thompson shooting incident feels much less like another sad tale in gun-ridden American than it does what those in power most fear—it felt like a SPARK.

Posted on

Scientific Kattenstoet — When madness organizes

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 19th 2024

Going clear back to the 1980s, the scientific community and millions of other educated people have been warning about global warming and its knock-on effects. For decades, people in the know have advised us that among many other things, warmer ocean temperatures combined with warmer air would result in bigger and far more destructive hurricanes.

Despite the gravity of the looming catastrophe, most people chose to simply ignore the warnings, a sense of denial bolstered by a coalition of filthy-fuel corporations and their fascist enablers in right-wing media, who assured their panting morons that “climate change” was just a conspiracy theory fostered by people who wanted us all to live in caves and hate capitalism.

To say that this caused a lot of frustration among sane people is an understatement.

An unforgettable example of this occurred as hurricane Milton was approaching Tampa Bay about a month ago. A Miami TV weatherman, John Morales, saw the numbers that suggested that the storm was undergoing “bombogenesis”–a sudden and large intensification. The phenomenon, not widely known twenty years ago, is a major factor in estimating the power and destructiveness of an approaching hurricane. Normally, a drop of 25mb in the central eye pressure in 24 hours indicates such a phenomenon is taking place. Milton dropped FIFTY millibars in that period, and Morales understood—and dreaded—the implications. He burst into tears over the damage to come.

Global warming means bigger, stronger storms. And a host of even more serious problems, but that was probably the easiest one to predict decades ago. And the American South has always been the area most vulnerable to landfalls from such storms.

So while Helene and Milton this year may have caused despair among climate scientists, they certainly did not cause surprise. And they’ll be the first to say it’s only going to get worse.

In fact, here in northern California, it’s just starting to snow this morning. A system is approaching the Oregon coast, and while not a hurricane, is developing similar intensity. The central pressure is expected to plunge about 40mb today, with central winds over 90 mph and waves in some areas 60 feet high. I’m 100 miles inland and at 3,300 elevation, and expect heavy snow for three days, and heavy rain after that. Nothing too extraordinary for us, but along the coast from the Bay area northward, it could have storm-of-the decade elements. Climate change didn’t cause the storm, but it does influence its power.

It’s not surprising that climate denialism—the refusal to accept that human emissions are having a major effect on climate world-wide—is losing popularity. When you get several storms-of-the-century or drought of a lifetime in the past decade, there is a dawning awareness that Something Is Going On Here.

Of course, this is the age of Trump, and so there’s no reason to suppose that dawning awareness is going to be constructive, or even sane.

Enter Veterans on Patrol (VOP). This outfit apparently actually did start out as a veterans advocacy group, but like so many elements in American life, it has been taken over by heavily-armed howling nuts from the far right.

Now, normal people, and by ‘normal’ I mean ‘not in the terminal stages of tertiary syphilis or convinced that their cat is telling them to assassinate Taylor Swift,’ actual normal people might assume that Helene was a pretty clear consequence of a hurricane supercharged by several trillion tons of greenhouse gases which might go where hurricanes frequently go and cause more damage than usual. Normal people might think that because, you know, normal.

But not our demented heroes of the VOP. A sample of their email conversations was in the Guardian today, and it read like this: “The US Military destroyed multiple communities and murdered hundreds by steering Weather Weapon Helene into Appalachia country, what should we do?” The answers offered were “Target military equipment and destroy the [directed energy weapons] easily accessible by the public”; “Destroy power and water lines that feed military bases”; “Locate all Top Brass bold enough to walk in public and detain them for murder”; “ALL 3 ABOVE”.

Well, that seems reasonable. After all, we all know from bad movies on the SciFi channel that one mad general, armed only with a black box the size of a shoe box and powered by a single D cell battery can steer a storm system 500 miles across and containing between 5 to 20×1013 watts of energy (200,000,000,000,000 watts) like it was a Hot Wheels toy and send it a thousand miles inland to strike Moscow.

Rather than accept that what happened is exactly what every climate scientist in the world has been warning will happen for debates, it’s easier to believe something that is nefarious, evil, sinister, and utterly demented.

But VOP has a constructive answer to this: “VOP News is openly requesting the public to provide the locations of all USMIC equipment used to control the weather. We intend to destroy this equipment in order to save lives.”

Yes, and Taylor Swift will be safe just as soon as we round up and kill any and all cats using mind control who don’t like Taylor Swift. What could be easier?

VOP is far from alone in this steadfast lunacy. Millions of Americans believe nonsense like this, and even zanier shit.

It’s not limited to America, or the twenty first century. In Europe in the thirteenth century, the Church hit on the notion that cats were evil and needed to be killed (“Kattenstoet”). The idea caught on, and most of Europe’s cat population was massacred. This allowed the rodent population, a favorite vector for the fleas that cause the plague, to explode.

There probably isn’t a culture on Earth without similar tales of mass idiocy, usually conducted with horrible consequences in their past and even their present.

Humans are all too frequently subject to conspiracy theories and similar idiocies. An uncharitable person might call them gullible, and I’m not feeling particularly charitable. They are gullible, and a lot of them are also mean and destructive and delight in the damage they cause.

The only solution is time, and sometimes even that doesn’t work. Ypres, Belgium, still celebrates Kattenstoet, although in a major victory for humanity and sanity, they now only throw plush toy cats off the belfry. See? Progress is possible, even if humans are involved.

But the madness will continue as America continues to lose its way. Climate scientists and even TV weather presenters get death threats from people who believe they are so intellectually superior they can envision D cell batteries steering hurricanes.

Oddly enough, no matter how many people they round up, the hurricanes will just keep on getting worse.

Obviously, Taylor Swift and the cats are behind that. Right?

Posted on

“Medals for Everyone!” — A guide to understanding Trumpenstein II

“Medals for Everyone!”

A guide to understanding Trumpenstein II

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 17th 2024

If you haven’t seen the 1933 Marx Brothers classic “Duck Soup,” now might be a good time to do so. Raucous and absurd, it’s also a fairly handy guide to what Americans might expect over this coming year.

In the movie, a rich plutocrat (Gloria Teasdale, played by Margaret Dumont) with more money than common sense makes the nation of Freedonia an offer it can’t refuse. $20 million in US dollars (worth nearly $500 million today) but there’s a catch: she gets to appoint the next leader of Freedonia. She has someone in particular in mind: Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx).

Rufus is erratic, egotistical verging on monomaniacal, impetuous and basically a force of chaos. Without the intervention of moronic money, he would never have gotten within a time zone of the levers of power.

Freedonia falls into corrupt paralysis and eventually ends up at war with its neighboring country. Freedonia collapses, and the enemy troops find Rufus and his rich sponsor, toss them in stocks and pelt them with fruit.

This being a Marx brothers movie and not the country you grew up in, it’s all very hilarious.

Thanks in large part to the power of propaganda, a majority of American voters felt liberated to be complete, vicious, selfish shits and elect a hateful nut as President. If you think of the coalition of plutocrats and corporations that promoted this (the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues, and yes, I’m going to keep right on calling them that until they throw me in the camps) as the Teasdale coalition, and Donald J. Trump as Rufus T. Firefly, then suddenly Duck Soup stops looking like an amusing, if dated parody and instead, becomes our future.

I won’t bother discussing the start of our new era. The headlines speak for themselves. Not only is it as bad a start as we can imagine, but it’s a worse start than we could imagine. Andy Borowitz caught the spirit of this new world order with a picture of Matt Gaetz and the caption: “Maybe this is what QAnon meant when they talked about bringing pedophiles to Justice.”

Our only real hope is that the new regime, like that of Rufus T. Firefly’s, will be so corrupt and incompetent that it will simply collapse before it has a chance to utterly destroy the nation. What such a collapse might entail I can’t really imagine. But it has already begun.

We’re already hearing reports of a incandescently angry Trump screaming at aides over leaks, mostly because the leaks tend to be true. We’re seeing flat-out lies already, and repression is rapidly spreading. I know that for some time the earth sciences have been moving data and access to data out of the country, a stream that has become a flood since the 5th of November. I imagine a lot of other disciplines that fall under the tent of “woke” or “bad for business” or which contradicts holy script are all doing the same thing. We’re not going to get out of this without falling into a mini-dark age at the very least.

Fortunately, most of the world’s library is on-line and safely abroad. They can ban all the books they want, but as long as people can log on overseas (magic words: Tor Browser and a virtual private network) access to knowledge and wisdom will remain.

Another reason to believe that the age of Trump might be short-lived: his policies (tariffs, deconstruction of nearly the entire federal government, deporting nearly half of the agricultural labor force) are going to be catastrophic for the economy, and no matter how much his regime tries to hide it, the same plutocrats who made Trump possible (the top ten richest Americans added $68 billion to their wealth in the DAY after Trump as elected) are going to start seeing immense losses.

Social unrest will probably rise to levels unseen since 1933. Trump wants to respond to protest violently, which is the surest path to cause discontent to blaze into full rebellion. Trump and his motley crew are probably too arrogant and too stupid to realize it, but they are creating what will become a social tsunami. It won’t be pretty.

And remember: Trump already has dementia, and is in terrible physical condition. He personally will not last, and knowing his management style, his death will create a bloodbath in every organization he heads, including the United States.

The next few years are not going to be pretty. I haven’t even discussed what America’s abdication from the world stage is going to mean, except that under the very best possible scenarios, America will no longer be the strongest nation in the world. It may not even be in the top ten.

But hang in there. History shows that things like this don’t last long unless folk like you give up. Be prepared to resist.

Posted on

The Dark Age — Once again, dear friends…

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 6th 2024

First, I want to apologize to my readers. I really blew it on my forecast on how this election was going to turn out. I’m especially sorry to those who took my forecast in good faith—I’m sure it added to the pain you are feeling now, and I deeply regret that.

I’ve been contemplating overnight and this morning over how I—and others, including the Harris campaign—so totally got it wrong.

I don’t have any real answers and indeed, more questions than I began with. How could such a large number of Hispanics support Trump? He’s made it clear that they are one of his target groups; when he says “illegal immigrants” he’s including Hispanics born here, or naturalized. They’re part of the twenty-two million people he wants to mass deport. He isn’t doing it to “save the economy.” He’s doing it because he’s a bigot, pandering to other bigots.

I don’t understand the self-professed Christians who supported him. He is the antithesis of everything they supposedly stand for.

And most of all, I don’t understand the women who voted for Trump. In seven states, freedom of reproductive choice was on the ballot, and many women in those states voted for reproductive freedom and then went ahead and voted for the man who destroyed that right in the first place!

I underestimated the power of the aggrieved anger that the right wing media—mostly run by plutocrats who wanted to use the mob to destroy the safeguards the constitution has to protect that same mob—and there was one thing I did get right; the economy is extremely strong, but it hasn’t really reached the lower middle class and the poor, even as conditions were beginning to improve.

A friend of mine once told me that revolution and revolt was most likely, not when things were at their bleakest, but when things were starting to improve. He told me that some forty years ago, and a close look at major upheavals throughout history confirms this to be true. Not always, but usually.

I have friends in the scientific community, so I was already aware of an on-going effort to save and secure date In The Event Of. Efforts will be redoubled; some of the incoming administration regard such data as either blasphemous or economically inconvenient.

America is heading for a scientific dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

The Ukraine will be on their own now, along with the states surrounding the genocidal Netanyahu. Trump wants to end NATO, which will give his buddy Putin license to invade much of eastern Europe, and he won’t stop there. The NATO nations need to start gearing up for a war footing NOW. There may be a general war in Europe within two years. The middle east will become a sea of flames, and before his mad reign ends, Netanyahu will have slaughtered millions. Other major nations currently not involved, such as Canada, Japan, India and China—may step in.

America is heading for a geopolitical dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Project 2025 is alive and well, with all its draconian plans. I was compiling data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics today for a Trump-loving client, and it occurred to me to advise him that when this annual task comes due next year, neither I nor the BLS may be around.

America is heading for a governance dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Putting tariffs on most foreign imports and deliberately destroying over half the agricultural production force isn’t going to lower costs or put food on the table. Destroying nearly all federal jobs is going to create a huge labor surplus. States attempting to fill the huge gaps left will have to double, triple, quadruple taxes.

America is heading for an economic dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Trump will pursue his mad aim to encourage profligate use of fossil fuels, dooming the already inadequate efforts to mitigate climate change. The world has already entered a catastrophic zone: America is now a major part of the problem.

America is heading for an environmental dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

With the Department of Education gone, public schools will fall prey to the same people who have already benefited from spreading misinformation, disinformation, and slowing the spread of scientific and historical knowledge. Thousands of books will be banned “for the children” and eventually, movies and other forms of communication. Literacy will fall, both by design and through sheer incompetence.

America is heading for an educational dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Rights will rapidly contract and then vanish altogether. People will be told that the era between 1865 and 2025 was an aberration in American culture, and that life under our caring despots who safeguard our morals and thoughts is what the Founders really intended.

America is heading for a humanitarian dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Here in California, and other deep blue states, talk of secession is mounting rapidly. It may, in the end, be the only way we can protect ourselves from the libertarian and fundamentalist quagmire that Trump plans. It would mean dissolution of America, and/or civil war. A peaceful way back may not be possible.

America is heading for a dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

To the rest of the world: help us where you can, but remember our leaders will be inimical, and this sort of madness can be contagious.

We’re on our own.

Posted on

Decision Day 2024 — House and Senate up for grabs, along with our future

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 4th 2024

Kamala Harris is going to win. And fairly substantially. She will be our next president and with any luck at all, by next March Donald Trump will be just a bad memory.

But if you can vote, do so. Especially if you are in a state or a Congressional district that is even remotely close. Harris won’t be able to put many of her campaign promises into effect if Republicans control either House. At this point, I think the Dems have a good chance of taking the House back, but I’m not so sure about the Senate. Even with Mitch McConnell shuffling off to well-deserved obscurity, I expect whoever replaces him will be just as obstructionist and possibly a crazy MAGAt.

Some of the smaller polls are producing startling results. Texas might just dump Ted Cruz, and may even break for Harris, despite the best efforts of the fascist government in Texas to skewer and interfere with the vote there. North Carolina may go for Harris: a lot of voters there heard Trump’s claims of no government assistance in the wake of the hurricanes, looked around, and realized that Trump was lying. Many realized that the future will bring more natural disasters, and they need a government that won’t base assistance on how you voted in the last election. Harris is leading in solidly red Iowa by two points.

America needs a government that is competent, clean, and works on behalf of everyone in the country, and not just people waving Trump flags. Unless Democrats take the White House and BOTH the House and the Senate, that’s not going to happen.

Imagine a future where the news of the governance of the nation isn’t dominated by Marjorie Taylor-Green, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Mike Johnson, Elise Stefanik, Joni Ernst, Rick Scott, or any of the other nutball rabble that infest our governance these days. Yes, many of them will be re-elected or didn’t have to run this time, but if they are in the minority, it will put an end to the endless kangaroo court hearings, and Congress might actually become useful again. Instead of clownish hearings about impeaching Biden or punishing family members of his, we may instead hear about debate over housing assistance for young adults entering the workplace, expanded Medicare, and further efforts to rein in the corporations.

Fascist plutocrats like Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, and the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues will continue to poison the well, of course, and they will have the usual clown shows where some attention seeker in the GOP ranks will call for Harris’ impeachment three days after she takes office. That won’t change. But at least a solid win for the Dems will set them back, and reduce the threat they pose to our freedoms.

I expect that MAGA and QAnon will disintegrate after the inauguration. Trump won’t be their figurehead any more; at the very least he will have lost his clout, and in all likelihood he’ll be in prison or a rest home. Yes, America, like everywhere, will always have a significant population of nasty right wing nuts—bigots, greedheads, haters—but without the cult leader, they will crawl back to under the rocks where they belong.

Most importantly, control of court appointments must be taken back. Trump appointed three disgraces to the Supreme Court, and he’s even on record suggesting that his District Attorney (appointed, because there isn’t a prayer the Senate would confirm her) would be his pet corrupt Florida judge, Aileen Cannon. He’s also said he will make the loony Robert F. Kennedy Junior the nation’s ‘health czar’ and put the eerie Reinhard Heydrich clone Steven Miller in charge of immigration. Yesterday, he proposed to put the nation’s missile defense in the hands of noted rocket scientist Herschel Walker! Trump probably would like to have Mafia-type rule, but what he would achieve to control our lives would be an extremely malignant and incompetent idiocracy.

Last week Joe Biden made an ambiguous statement that interpreted one way, suggested he called Trump supporters at large “trash.” There was a lot of outrage over that, of course, but it’s significant that the outrage didn’t spread much outside of Trump’s most devoted followers. Many people who have known Joe Biden for years don’t believe he meant it that way (the remark, Biden says, was aimed at some of the trash who spoke at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally) and among those who did, there was considerable doubt that the supposed judgment was particularly harsh. It’s hard to give people the benefit of the doubt when they shout that liberals are communists, Democrats are scum, and want to impose their church doctrines on us all, not to mention nutball opinions about vaccines, reading material, women’s right to vote, eugenics, and “race science.” Some of these flat-earth nuts want us to doubt the Moon landings took place.

It’s time to put this idiocy back in its place. People have an absolute right to wrong-headed and illogical opinions, but they don’t have the right to impose them upon the rest of us. And yes, this includes religious-based opinions. Robert Heinlein once wrote “One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.” And a meme popular on social media states, “America is not a Christian nation. It is a nation in which you are free to be a Christian.”

So do vote. Even if you are in a state that is solidly blue or red, your vote could tip the balance in the House and Senate, and ensure that America remains America, and doesn’t become a corrupt and evil kleptocracy.

Posted on

Three Days To Go — Tension is actually decreasing

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 2nd 2024

This is probably the next-to-last piece I’ll write before election day, and believe me, I’m really looking forward to having things to write about other than American politics. For one thing, once the election is settled, I can sit down and consider my Solstice essay. It’ll probably be a doozy this year. Something about addled old farts who use words like “doozy”, perhaps.

With the election just three days away, I’m feeling considerable optimism. Trump’s campaign behavior is part of it; he’s acting like he’s already lost, and boy, does he know it. He was supposed to attend last night’s Penn State football game in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, and abruptly canceled that. This is the campaign equivalent of spitting on babies and waving a Soviet flag.

His rhetoric is getting increasingly unhinged and violent, and he keeps saying things that would be political suicide for any candidate who isn’t a cult leader. As women arise en masse to protest the Dobbs decision, he’s prattling on about how he will protect women “whether they like it or not.” He’s still loudly fantasizing about shooting opponents, particularly former members of his own administration.

The voting patterns show considerable reason for optimism. It’s startling enough that over 62 million Americans have already cast ballots. (And of that 62 million, less than a dozen were cast by non-Americans, if previous voting patterns hold true). But of that 62 million, 56% were women.

It reflects a trend of new voter registrations over the past year, where over 55% of registrants were female.

In an absolute genius move, the Harris campaign ran an ad letting women know that their vote is absolutely secret, and not only do they have no obligation to vote as their husbands demand, but they have the right to lie about how they voted. Apparently Republicans really hate the idea that women can have a secret ballot too, and Newt Gingrich stood up to huff loudly that Harris was encouraging women to lie to their husbands. Newt Gingrich. You remember old Nootie, of course. Played a seminal role in turning the once-proud GOP into mindless obstructionists for corporation, now on his fourth wife, cheated on one wife while she was dying of cancer. Outside of Trump himself, about the last person on Earth to be lecturing women on marital fidelity and lying to their spouses. It’s a bit like being lectured on diplomacy by Triumph the Insult Dog.

In Pennsylvania, the state whose number one football team Donald just pissed on, new voter registrations ran nearly 3-1 for Democrats, and independents got more new registrations than Republicans.

The unedited version of the “grab them by the pussy’ tape from the 2016 election showed up on TikTok, and millions of users too young or too disengaged in 2016 are seeing it for the very first time. Chris Hayes thoughtfully played the entire tape on his MSNBC show last night, and it’s every bit as appalling as the edited excerpts we’d all heard before suggested. I imagine it’s wildfiring through the rest of social media now.

Two of Trump’s campaign stunts, both on the level of Mike-Dukakis-in-the-tank, backfired. There’s a meme rocketing around social media now that show Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sitting together, laughing their heads off. The captions read [Joe] “I made him drive a garbage truck!” [Kamala] “I made him work at a McDonalds!” I posted a image of Trump in the garbage truck and labeled it “From the Department of Repetitive Redundancy Department.” It failed to impress Trump supporters, I’m sorry to say.

Mainstream media are still playing the silly horserace game, of course. CNN and the NY Times played up a weak jobs report from yesterday as a “devastating blow” to Harris, apparently unaware of the fact that it normally takes about six months for changes in the economy to seep into the public consciousness, and longer if the economy is doing well and people only know what Fox News tells them. The gain of “only” 22,000 jobs for the month will have absolutely no effect on the vote.

The plutocrat press is learning that making newspapers into rich man’s toys isn’t working out: the Bezos-owned Washington Post has lost over 300,000 subscribers over their public self-neutering, and the LA Times, with a much smaller circulation, has lost some 50,000.

Even the Supreme Court, resolutely fascist, has backed away from further opportunities to tamper with the election. They denied cert on several GOP-backed suits following the Virginia case.

I suspect that a lot of Republicans are not going to vote for Trump, and many will vote for Harris. Millions, perhaps. Enough to seriously tilt the scales. It helps that over 600 Republicans of note, including some 200 from the Trump administration, over 100 retired line officers, and dozens of retired Congressionals, have all come out for Harris, including the Cheneys and Schwarzenegger. Harris has gotten endorsements from such Republican bastions as the Economist and the Houston Chronicle.

It’s important to remember that a lot of the Republican disaffection stems from the fact that Trump himself is an incompetent, addled, vicious and dishonest pig. That may or may not affect their votes down ticket, depending on how closely aligned with Trump the candidates are. Congressional votes may hinge, not on never-Trumpers, but on discouraged voters. And, of course, the millions of women voting to take their rights back. They don’t see old “grab them by the pussy” as their preferred protector, it seems.

Finally, a lot of self-identified Christian voters have finally realized that Trump is not a divine test of godliness or whatever the fuck, and are going with the candidate who isn’t a serial adulterer, rapist, con artist, liar and dementia patient. It’s a good look on them.

It’s too early to be complacent, mind you. Trump will challenge the results and put up a huge fight to try to de-legitimize the vote. He’s already said he would. Just like he did in 2020. So expect a battle.

But Trump isn’t fighting for you. He’s fighting for himself. And he knows he has everything to lose.

 

Posted on

The Poison of the Plutocracy — America falling to the social evil it rebelled against

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 26th, 2024

 

In the past week, billionaire owners of two of America’s leading newspapers, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, forbade their respective editorial staffs from endorsing a candidate for President. Both publications have a long history of doing just that. If either owner hoped to avoid controversy, they were in for a rude shock.

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the South African-born billionaire owner of the Times, tried to explain his decision to Spectrum News, saying, “I think my fear is, if we chose either one, that it would just add to the division.” According to the Guardian, this “prompted the public resignations of multiple editorial writers, including a recent Pulitzer prize winner, Robert Greene, and the section’s widely respected editor, Mariel Garza, who said: ‘I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent.’

It also prompted the beginnings of a revolt among the paper’s subscribers, with nearly 2,000 of them cancelling their subscriptions for ‘editorial content’ reasons on Tuesday and Wednesday alone.”

And then two days later, Jeff Bezos did very nearly exactly the same thing with the Washington Post. While Bezos had maintained a general “hands-off” approach to the editorial stance of his newspaper, this move was widely seen as an indication that Bezos, whose other endeavors such as Blue Origin and Amazon, are heavily dependent on a good working relationship with the government, was acting out of fear of a possible Trump return. If, indeed, he did think that this move might curry favor with the erratic and vindictive Trump, he showed appallingly bad judgment. Former managing editor Martin Baron wrote of the decision, “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,[…] Trump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others).”

I suggested the Washington Post change its Bezos-generated motto from “Democracy Dies in the Darkness” to “I For One Welcome Our New Galactic Overlords.” [Kent Brockman, news anchor in “The Simpsons” during an invasion of galactic overlords]

They aren’t alone, of course. Australian fascist Rupert Murdoch has been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into poisoning the well of American political discourse for five decades now. Canada recognized the danger of this vast right wing conspiracy machine and kicked him out, with the result that Canada isn’t in the terrible mess the US is today. And yes, much of our current trouble can be laid directly at the feet of Fox News.

Elon Musk bought up Twitter with the sole objective of having a platform for his crack-brained, erratic and irresponsible “philosophy” which is a poisonous blend of Ayn Rand, QAnon, MAGA, and Vladimir Putin.

It came to light this week, he had been having nice friendly secret phone conversations with Vladimir Putin, just as it’s come to light Donald Trump was. I can’t say I’m surprised. As with Trump, Elon, through SpaceX and Starlink, has a large number of defense and national-security contracts, and, as with Trump, I doubt Putin was calling just to discuss the differences between Russian and American heroic literature.

Indeed, we may have a new Axis power we have to fight. If it was Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo in the 1940s, it’s Putin, Trump and Musk now.

Imagine it’s 1938, and you’ve just learned that William Randolph Hearst and Henry Ford had been calling Hitler regularly for ‘friendly chats.’ See a possible problem there?

Billionaires, many far less visible than Bezos or Soon-Shiong, have been buying up media big and small for a couple of decades now, with devastating results. Many parts of America are in “news deserts” where local papers have vanished or been converted to local advertising sheets. Much of the radio is in the hands of repressive and even fascistic outfits like Clear Channel or Sinclair. All the major networks are mere appendages of massive international corporations who consider the news branch as mere items for generating profits and or creating a favorable political atmosphere for expansion of said profits.

We need to bring back the laws limiting the reach and scope of individuals over our media. Anti-trust laws need to break up the vast corporate conglomerates that control 95% of everything we hear, see, and believe.

And we need not-for-profit publicly owned corporations like the BBC and the CBC to provide us with news that isn’t designed to fit the preferences of billionaires. Because no matter how nice and democratic any given plutocrat might be as an individual, there inevitable comes a time when the needs of the plutocrat are no longer aligned with the needs of the rest of us, and that’s when we learn that plutocrats are not our friends.

America was founded on the notion that the people should be self-governing and free of the excesses of the churches and the aristocracy. It was a great idea. Time to return to that.

Posted on

The Future History of MAGA — Operation Hummingbird

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 22nd 2024

Let’s suppose Trump attains the Presidency next January. It’s not out of the question. At this point, I fully expect Kamala Harris to win by some 10 million votes, but we all know the opinions of the lowly American voters may not be the determining factor, given the groups of eager little fascists who will be counting and certifying the votes, the ignorant morons in Congress who were only stopped last time by Mike Pence, and the five and dime toadies on the courts. Trump may be President again no matter what the American people want.

What Trump wants may also not be a factor. His obvious dementia is worsening by the day, and if he even knows he’s President, he may not be able to rise above the level of Rufus T. Firefly (“Medals for Everyone!”). But the sleek vicious people backing and propping up Trump know exactly what they want, and they are operating on the same game plan that brought Trump this far.

Their position is going to be very precarious. Much of America is going to be shocked, and then angry. Donald’s been threatening to send out the military and the national guard to “deal with” protesters, and I can’t feel certain that they won’t open fire on unarmed American protesters. That almost certainly will not pacify the population.

Some of Donald’s most fervent supporters, the ones in the red caps and flag-bedecked clothes, are going to start fulfilling some of their sick fantasies. They have people they want to round up and deal with. Gays, ‘immigrants’ (pretty much anyone with dark skin or an accent), Blacks, infidels and drag queens will all be at risk. Even though the party line is staunchly pro-Israel, Jews will be on the list.

The Trump cabal know it will be hard enough to quell a popular uprising without the aggravating factor of the MAGAts, who will be proudly noisy and public in the persecution of their perceived enemies. They will be seen as loose cannons, and worse than loose cannons.

We’ve been here before, in history. Just 90 years ago, in fact.

It’s been called the Röhm purge, or Operation Hummingbird, but it’s best known around the world as The Night of the Long Knives.

Adolf Hitler rose to power in part through the street violence, real and implied, of the SA, the Sturmabteilung. This was just a collection of thugs, loonies, stilyagi, and militia types, disaffected, resentful and alienated males who felt dispossessed and deprived and had long lists of villains and “types” to blame for that. Then, as now, they were fertile ground for a demagogue seeking street power. Then, as now, they were more than willing to step into a new role that made them feel empowered and part of something greater than themselves. They would cheerfully loom threateningly at political rallies of opponents, lurk armed near polling places, and just generally give Hitler street muscle.

After he became Chancellor, Hitler quickly realized that the untrained and undisciplined thugs, the Brownshirts, as they were known, would be a massively destabilizing feature of his still-precarious regime. They needed to be brought to heel.

He couldn’t just shoot the lot of them, of course. They numbered in the millions, and people would talk. But Hitler understood that the bellicosity and bluster of those people was mostly for show, and they could be brought to heel.

Hitler had two other paramilitary groups at hand—the Schutzstaffel (SS) under Himmler, and the Gestapo, under Heydrich. Both were better trained, better disciplined, and critically kept a much lower profile during Hitler’s rise to power. They were designed to be his agencies of vengeance, persecution and suppression after he attained power. Eventually, they would be the backbone of Hitler’s “Final Solution” that sent twelve million people to their deaths in his camps.

On the night of June 30, 1934, Hitler had them strike against the Brownshirts. In one of those supreme strokes of irony that only utter despots can come up with, the purge was justified on the grounds that the Brownshirts were agents of a group of immigrants intent on overthrowing the new order—about the only ‘crime’ they weren’t guilty of.

The purge was over by July 3rd, and while the official number of extrajudicial executions was only 85, the number killed is estimated at being between 700 and 1000. While the purge was aimed at the Brownshirts, a large number of other Germans wound up as collateral damage—traditional conservatives, trade unionists, members of the Reichstag, including former Chancellors and cabinet members.

It would be pretty easy to extrapolate current day equivalents, in additions to the red-capped loudmouths who hate libruls and “illegals”; people like Mike Pence, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, Mike Johnson, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Laura Loomer. Yes, some of those are staunch Trump supporters who, once he’s back in office, will no longer be of any use, but would still be loud embarassments, disappointments, and so on. His opponents will go, of course.

Most of the Brownshirts survived the Night, of course. Many wound up in the SS or the Gestapo, a sleeker, darker, disciplined and vicious army designed to kill and terrify. Those less morally and politically nimble wound up in the army, or the camps. In the end, none of them did well in Hitler’s doomed Reich.

So if you’re a member of MAGA, and you are envisioning a bright future where an avuncular Trump beams at you as you kick liberals to death in the streets or rape the daughters of immigrants or cut the beards off rabbis, read your history and ponder this:

After he takes power, Trump (or the people propping him up) is going to look at you. And he isn’t going to see a brave patriot who sacrificed for the cause. He’s going to see an uncontrolled and unkempt loudmouth who already betrayed his country once.

He won’t like you. He won’t trust you.

You might even wind up in the camps before I do.

error

Enjoy Zepps Commentaries? Please spread the word :)