Category: American Psyche

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Crux – Nation may finally reach tipping point on gun violence

August 5th 2019

Of course, Trump tried to blame it on video games and television shows. It’s an excuse easily discredited by noting that many other nations have television and video games, but don’t routinely have mass shootings, or even the background hum of some 25,000 gun deaths every year.

Trump passed along his condolences to Toledo, which the town no doubt appreciated, although they were probably a bit perplexed; the recent mass shooting in Ohio was in Dayton, not Toledo. Nor was it in Bowling Green, another Ohio town cited by this administration for a terrorist attack that never actually happened.

OK, Trump is insincere and an idiot, and a patsy to the gun industry, but we all knew that already. It says it all, really that he’s going to El Paso, winner of the mass murder of the week award, against the wishes of the community. It’s bad enough that a lot of people in El Paso believe that Trump’s hateful rhetoric against ‘invaders’ directly led to this week’s Walmart shooting, but Trump had been there several months earlier for an anti-immigrant rally, ironic enough, but then he turned around and stiffed the city for $470,000 in security costs.

Think about that: he went to El Paso to inveigh against people who resembled 80% of the population of that town, ripped them off on the costs of protecting his sorry ass, provoked this mass shooting, and now wants to come and do them the favor of telling them, “Toledo, we stand behind you!”

Nearly lost in the glare of the two latest mass murders were two ones earlier in the week: In northern Mississippi, a shooter shot up a Walmart, killing two employees and wounding a cop. Walmart has already announced that their policy of gleefully selling weapons of mass destruction to lunatics and Nazis will not be interrupted by these little setbacks.

Then some clown shot up the Gilroy Garlic Festival. I’ve been to (and greatly enjoyed) the Garlic Fest. Not only that, but just a couple of days earlier I went to a Logging Heritage festival in my town, and it looked just like the Gilroy affair; tents and pavilions and happy people in bright summer wear in the blazing sun, having a great time. The shadow of a gunsel darkened that happy memory.

Still, as horrible as this past week has been, some sort of seismic shift has occurred in the country.

The media is openly referring to the attack in El Paso as a terrorist attack by the greatest security threat America faces: white nationalists and Nazis. The three other attacks, not ideologically or racially motivated, demonstrate the massive problem America has with guns. We have 219 mass shootings (three or more casualties in one incident) this year, the highest rate ever.

America is finally calling the problems what they are: weapons of mass destruction being sold to lunatics and Nazis. The Gilroy shooter was brought down by police in a minute; the shooter in El Paso in less than three minutes; the shooter in Dayton in 31 seconds. Less than five minutes aggregate, and at least 34 dead, over 60 injured. The El Paso shooter faced a mall full of people, many of whom practiced open carry. Didn’t help. It took the police to take him down. If any of the John Wayne wannabees took any action to defend their friends and loved ones, nobody else noticed. In Dayton, despite the incredibly fast response of police, the reason the death toll wasn’t much higher was because one very brave man, apparently a bouncer for the Ned Peppers bar, wrested the long gun from the shooter’s hands and stalled him long enough for cops to shoot the gunsel. Reports differ on whether the bouncer was killed by the shooter or simply injured by shrapnel when the cops shot the bastard. But between him and the fact that cops were nearby and reacted with unbelievable speed, hundreds of lives may have been saved. The shooter had multiple 100 round clips of .223s, a jolly little projectile that turns about a cubic foot of a human body into hamburger on impact and even a shot to an arm or leg can kill due to hydrostatic shock. They have one purpose—to kill humans. Although the Nazis who own so many of them prefer to think of their targets as subhumans.

But it’s changing. Oh, the vast majority of Republicans still cower in steaming puddles of their own moral cowardice, but some are finally standing up and saying, “This must end.” And Democrats and the media are calling the mass shootings what they are: terrorism. Even the non-ideological shooters, like the piece of shit in Dayton, are trying to send a message to the public and instill a culture of fear.

Even if the message is “I’m an alienated loser, a sexual cripple and a religious nut, but I can still scare you with my guns,” it’s terrorism. And it’s a far bigger problem than Islamic radicals. Or refugees from torn lands and their children.

The media, and the Democrats, are no making no bones about it. Republicans have tried to defuse it, blaming everything but the guns and nuts, and are openly being called out on the whorish cowardice that underlies their blind defense of the NRA and the murderous clowns who amass large arsenals against what they see as the coming Great Racial Holy War.

People are tired of sacrificing their right to go to the movies, the local fair, their church, the local Walmart, or just out on the street to these vicious little sociopaths who, minus their weapons of war, would be nothing more than noisy nuisances.

You can feel it. It ends here.

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Atrocities – A sure-fire way to bring atrocities about

July 13th, 2019

François-Marie Arouet, aka ‘Voltaire’ once famously said, ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.’

The other day, Mike Pence, trumpenfuhrer toadie, visited a couple of the concentration camps America is running along the border. One was a model camp, where the inmates were reasonably clean and fed, although forced to sleep on child-size nap mats with only foil covering. Pence said the detainees appeared “well cared for,” something that reminded me unpleasantly of the Third Reich propaganda films that showed happy Jewish children playing in the sun and singing songs while German matrons watched, beaming approvingly. The Germans got the kids to go along by telling them if they did, they would see their parents again. None of them did, of course. Most of them were dead within weeks. Those who weren’t made sex slaves for the country’s elite, that is.

The second visit was to a much more typical American concentration camp, one where hundreds of men were jammed into hideously overcrowded pens without room for them all to lie down at once, and not given access to showers or any other elements of basic hygiene, and the toilets were little more than open pits. Many had been there for 40 days or more. Guards wore masks to keep the stench out. The only things missing were the German slogans and the Strauss waltzes being piped in over loudspeakers.

Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post wrote: “VP [Pence} saw 384 men sleeping inside fences, on concrete w[ith] no pillows or mats. They said they hadn’t showered in weeks, wanted toothbrushes, food. Stench was overwhelming. [Customs and Border Protection] said they were fed regularly, could brush [their teeth] daily [and] recently got access to shower (many hadn’t for 10-20 days).”

Even Pence was taken aback, saying “This is tough stuff.” But of course Pence is and always has been a loathsome coward, so instead of calling for the immediate release of the inmates—most of whom have committed no crime—he blamed Democrats in Congress, condemning them for not passing a $4.6 billion “humanitarian relief bill” to build many more concentration camps (and eventually death camps). In fact, the House passed the bill several days earlier.

A word about Pence: he exemplifies the pseudo-Christian fundamentalist filth, the Dominionists, who are working to take over the country entirely. Once they accomplish that, the death toll from their efforts to purify us all will soar, and only violent revolution or complete social collapse will get their boots off our necks.

Let me tell you a disturbing truth about Hitler. From the time he became Chancellor right up to the point where the utter defeat and ruin of Germany could no longer be denied, he was immensely popular. Children begged to be allowed to climb in his lap, women swooned, men waved at his parades and rallies, unfeigned tears of joy and pride running down their cheeks. Hitler was loved, and it was easy, in the face of such adoration, to pretend that the work camps really did house people who meant Germany harm. Hitler was wise. He wouldn’t allow harm to come to innocents.

Trump is every bit as vicious and vile as Hitler. Our only real hope is that he is not as smart as Hitler was, not as charismatic, and no orator.

Even Hitler knew to conceal the death camps outside of Germany in the captive lands, knowing there was a limit to what the German people would stand for, but as long as people only entertained horrid suspicions rather than grim certainties, he could get away with what he was doing.

The reason he lies so blatantly and so frequently is to help prevent horrid suspicions from become grim certainties. You can’t commit atrocities without absurdities.

To that end, he used endless streams of propaganda. I suspect if Facebook was around in 1939, most of us would be speaking German now and the rest of us would be dead.

The American right, aided and abetted by Vladimir Putin, who knows how pernicious and enervating the far right can be to a society, have also been unleashing endless propaganda.

For example, a message, almost certainly a concern troll, showed up in a liberal group on Facebook—indeed, it probably showed up in dozens for such groups. It was a query for information about liberal views and values, asked by “Kathy Aston, Iowa farm wife.” It’s very unlikely “Kathy” actually exists, being a reassuring figleaf pumped out by the actual authors of the hit piece, whether 4Chan, Breitbart, or the Russians. While an obvious troll, her sentiments are all ones I’ve seen kool-aide drinkers from the far right earnestly state as truths.

The message read:

Hi. Ok. I’m not a liberal. Please help me understand a few things that has us scratching our heads. I will be polite as possible, but these things are what is told to us, that makes us think you are a special kind of stupid. I’m not good at PC speech. Just cant say what I mean in your language. I really want to know!

#1. Killing newborn babies and calling it abortion. Why not adopt them out? Infanticide is really unnecessary. 

#2 welcoming invaders that overwhelm the country’s resources. One of the oldest war tactics on record. Calif is starting to yell for help, and we just shake our heads in wonder at the lack of smarts in your people.

#3. Welcoming in the enemy of our country that openly states they will overthrow us, rape our women, children, and kill all who will not believe their way. Also openly hostile to gay people, as in throwing them off rooftops.(last we knew, you guys really love your alphabet people.- LGBTP). Also stoning, beheading, and other barbaric behavior… Huh??? You really want this Sharia stuff??? Don’t you realize they will kill or gang rape you too??

#4. Freedom of religion, or none, if you wish. You already have it! Why the fuss?

#5. Women’s rights. Totally incompatable with #3 Islam gives no rights to women. They are puppet slaves to the males. A piece of property, worth less than an animal. Again, you really WANT this?

#6. What the heck is a “theybe”???? Medically, there are 3 sexes. Born with a penis, born without, and those who are born with both, a Hermaphrodite. We understand what it is to be gay.

Finally….black people. My favorite boyfriend was a huge black guy with such a gentle disposition. He did not worry about slavery. Or being recompensed for it. No one alive has been a slave, or has owned a slave. You are smart and have all opportunities to be anything you wish! Why keep the shame of the South alive?

Let’s run down this classic propaganda piece briefly:

#1. Blood libel. Liberals do not commit infanticide. The hideous belief that Jews drink the blood of Christian babies goes back to the middle ages, but Hitler and Trump flogged it endlessly to stir up hatred. I’ve been saying for years that some of the far-right trash in this country use the word “liberal” but they really mean “Jew.”

#2 “Invaders that overwhelm the country” –- Most of Germany’s Jews had lived there for generations, just as many of America’s Hispanics date back to the 17th century. But when you can lump them in with non-existent invaders, it makes it so much easier to stir people into a murderous rage against them.

#3 “Enemy of our country”. In Germany, that meant Gypsies, Slavs, and of course “Semites.” They are THEM. Please feel free to hate them.

#4 Freedom of religion, in the eyes of the Kathies of the world, is the freedom to place their religious boots on my neck. We wouldn’t be free to believe, but we would be free to believe what Kathy believes. It’s a stance that has informed the bloodiest pages in history.

#5 Womens’ rights. Frankly, I don’t give a shit what the governments of Iran or Saudi Arabia think as far as womens rights go here, not as an excuse to ignore them here. I just note that there is no difference in the attitude towards womens’ rights between fundamentalist Moslems, Jews, or Christians. They all hate and fear women. Trump’s role model from 1942 forced abortions for women deemed ‘impure’ while putting to death women who were pure, but got abortions, since ‘pure’ is a very slippery word.

#6 Sex isn’t just the plumbing. The main sex organ is the brain. Kathy would understand that if she actually had a brain. But death camps welcome “deviants,” too.

“Finally…black people.” That says it all right there, even if Kathy had a big, black, strapping young buck as a boyfriend. Batteries not included. We should forget all about slavery, just as Kathy no doubt hopes we’ll forget all those lessons we learned from Hitler.

About 30% of the country avidly swallows the nonsense promulgated by the Kathies of the far right, and tell themselves Trump and Pence are godly and good men, just as Germans told themselves the same about Hitler, and crying Russians in the camps in Russia did about “Uncle Joe” Stalin.

‘Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.’

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Milling Time – First Doubt, Then Resolve

July 4th 2019

I was watching a video on YouTube, made by the Truckee Police Department, called Wildfire 2.0 . If you live in an area susceptible to wildfires (which is some 150 million people in North America) then it’s important viewing.

But it gave a name to a phenomenon that I had not only seen many times before, but have experienced personally. There comes a time during a major, rapidly evolving emergency such as a wildfire or a tornado or a volcanic eruption where authorities or neighbors or someone approaches you and tells you you have to get the hell out, now. The danger is immediate, it is real. You can’t save your home and your belongings, just what you have in the car. Any pets you can’t find are on their own. (And boy, is that a soul-ripping decision to make!). You may perhaps be in your car already, and a cop or firefighter comes up to you and tells you the roads are blocked, just get out and run for it.

But your car can go zero-to-sixty in five seconds. You know you can outrun the fire. On foot…? Abandon the car and everything in it? You have to think about that.

Or you know the cat has to be hiding in the bushes out back. Yeah, it’s only a cat, but you’ve had that cat for ten years and the kids love it.

You hesitate. You dither. You’re not ready to commit.

All your neighbors are in the same circumstances, and they’re all doing the same thing.

Evacuation experts and emergency personnel have a name for that: Milling Time. People are in shock. They are numb, confused. Some become angry. Some panic. Some cry. Some just stare blankly. All are normal human reactions to a shocking and sudden emergency.

Fiction writers like to dwell on the deniers, the people who resolutely believe the fire will miss them, the tornado will disperse before it reaches them, the mountain will settle down, or they’ve seen dozens of hurricanes as bad as this one. These literary redshirts make for good drama, but the reality is the deniers don’t die in numbers anything like the loss of life caused by Milling Time. “He who hesitates is lost.”

Emergency evacuation personnel would love to come up with a way of eliminating or lessening Milling Time, but they haven’t had much luck. It’s just a part of human nature, and the best they can do is include it in their plans and train for it, so they don’t themselves experience Milling Time while trying to deal with it in an emergency. Yes, the guys with badges can experience doubt and confusion, too.

As we slog through what might be the most grotesque Fourth of July in the history of the United States, the country at large is experiencing Milling Time. People are facing a surreal situation in which everything they thought they knew about themselves and their country are under sudden threat. The Land of the Free has concentration camps housing thousands of innocent children. Some of those children are dying. Possibly even worse, family members and others who they once liked and respected are growling that those kids got what was coming to them. The president, and guys with badges, joke about the kids in concentration camps.

The government, once the champion of human rights and freedoms, suddenly is at war with both. Scientists are being expelled from the centers of power and sent to the hinterlands, the equivalent of Stalin sending intellectuals to Mongolia. Indeed, the president recently sent an aide who fell out of favor to Mongolia. Apparently he has read up on Stalin, along with Hitler.

There are tanks in the street in Washington, and while the turrets aren’t pointed at anyone, most people have realized that this president wouldn’t hesitate to give the order to aim if annoyed enough. Millions of Americans who used to watch the Washington Fourth of July celebrations are turning their backs this year, sickened by the lurid partisan spectacle promised by the president.

One vignette that tells it all, the corruption and disregard for American values. The president promised the biggest fireworks show ever, and he may get it. When he slapped his tariffs on China, he had a curious exemption: fireworks. China’s biggest fireworks manufacturer showed its gratitude for this display of favoritism by donating $755,000 worth of fireworks to the trumpaganza.

A furious judge discovered yesterday that this president wants to defy the Supreme Court and explicit language in the Constitution in order to further his low and thuggish bigotry against non-white Americans and residents and tried to unilaterally rescind a direct ruling by the SC on the census.

The VP, himself a bible-pounding monster, did a strange pirouette, supposedly leaving for a symposium in New Hampshire, then coming back for an emergency. Or maybe he didn’t go, there was no emergency, and the administration will tell us what happened in a few weeks. This opaque and corrupt government has turned us all into a nation of Kremlin Watchers, desperately scanning for clues as to the intent of these dangerous autocrats.

Concentration camps. Deep corruption. An outlaw president.

Milling Time does resolve, one of three ways. Either the danger engulfs us and we are lost, or we panic.

Or we realize, “Oh, fuck, that’s not going to miss me!” or see the numb fear on the faces of the people around us, and something clicks in our heads.

And the doubt and confusion vanishes, replaced by steely resolve.

We will live to fight another day. We will come back and vanquish the threat. We will prevail.

Americans have been in Milling Time, threatened by the shocking rise of fascism and neo-Nazism in the country they love and thought they knew.

But there’s no longer any doubt the danger is real. It won’t miss us. We talk to others, facing the same threats. Even the deniers are starting to admit it isn’t just a fabrication by fake news.

Now, Americans have three choices: they can succumb, they can panic.

Or they can fight for their country.

It’s time for resolve.

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Munch versus Mad Bum – You’ve got a really dirty mind, you know.

June 15th, 2019

Y’know, I don’t want to write about fucking Trump. I’m tired of typing with the taste of whatever I ate several hours earlier in the back of my throat. The man is a disgrace, and he makes me sick.

So let’s talk about baseball for a bit. Fun stuff, not scores and stats. The stuff that makes baseball goofy and endearing.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. I want to put Trump on a batter’s tee in Oracle field in San Francisco, and have the biggest, meanest hitter in baseball—Cody Bellinger, say, or maybe Mike Trout—Barry Bonds Trump’s ass right into McCovey Cove.

Well, I’m not going to do that. For one thing, simple physics shows the sheer ridiculousness of this suggestion. Even Babe Ruth at his prime didn’t have the bat speed needed to propel a 239* pound mass 355 feet in order to land with a splash in McCovey Cove. Also, these are twitchy and paranoid times, and talk of hitting the president with a baseball bat could result in a less-than-friendly visit from the Secret Service.

So let me be clear: I do not advocate hitting Donald Trump with a baseball bat. Don’t do it. Not a good idea. No, not even with an aluminum bat! There’s a fad breaking out of pegging politicians with milkshakes, and while that would be a soul-satisfying event, as mentioned these are twitchy and paranoid times, and the Secret Service would probably pump 250 rounds into you before Trump could figure out what flavor shake you hit him with. If you want to keep Trump twitchy and paranoid, just shout “Impeach!” at him everywhere he goes.

So: cute baseball story.

Oddly enough, it actually does involve Oracle Park and McCovey Cove.

If you’re not a baseball fan and are somehow still reading this, Oracle Park, sometimes known as Corporate-Sponsor-of-the-Month Park, sits right at the juncture of Mission Creek and the San Francisco Bay. It forms a little basin within the Bay that is officially called China Basin but which fans nicknamed McCovey Cove in honor of the famed Giants slugger. It became famous during the splendid but suspicious late-career power surge Barry Bonds enjoyed, when he deposited dozens of balls in the water, where an armada of fans in kayaks and canoes jostled in hopes of catching one of his record-setting homers.

Balls still plonk into the Cove on a regular basis to this day, but to the disgust of the local fans, a large majority of those balls are hit by the opposing team. The Giants are rebuilding, glory days in the past.

They should talk to the Dodgers. They’ve been rebuilding since 1988, and have gotten really good at it.

But the Dodgers and Giants have the most famous rivalry in baseball, so naturally, the Dodgers were the visiting team in this story. And that’s part of the mix. If the Giants had been playing the San Diego Who Deys or the Cincinnati They Still Have a Team?, things might have been different.

The Dodger batter was named Max (“Munch”) Muncy, who kind of exemplifies Dodger luck. Muncy spent his first two years with the Oakland A’s, and he hit .196 (that’s really not good) and hit a total of five home runs, a total most team mascots could match. With a sigh, Oakland released him, and the Dodgers signed him, dirt cheap. In 165 games since, he’s hit 51 homers, hitting a respectable .269. For the Dodgers, it was a bit like ordering a Ford Focus and getting a Ford GT due to a mixup at the dealership. Team management blinked in disbelief but didn’t complain.

As you may have surmised, it was this self-same Max Muncy who hit a ball into McCovey Cove.

Now, the Giant’s pitcher was a fellow named Madison Bumgarner (“Mad Bum”). Thus the title of this piece. For those who were expecting some sleazy anal porn, I’m sorry, and Xhamster is that way. Enjoy.

Now, I know nothing about Bumgarner as a person. For all I know, he’s genial and even jovial, fun at parties, the sort of guy you like to have a beer with. But when he’s on the mound, he pitches with an emotional state that psychiatrists call “Having a large stick up his ass.” (OK, maybe a LITTLE anal porn…). He’s uptight, and a bit too tetchy for his own good.

A few years back, he had a verbal exchange with then-Dodger Yasiel Puig when he thought Puig’s bat flip following a moon shot was a bit too enthusiastic, and called him up on it. The Cuban Puig didn’t speak much English then, but picked up on the tone and gargled a couple of quarts of florid Spanish back at him. And it was ON, baby!

Puig probably wasn’t the best choice with whom to start a feud; he has made a cottage industry of trolling uptight pitchers, and from then on, whenever he faced Bumgarner, he did so with an amazing display of twerking, tongue flicking, bat licking and suggestive waggling of the eyebrows. Bumgarner, who really should have known better, was visibly seething at times. Dodger fans were delighted, Giants fans found their liberal values tested.

So when Muncy hit a Bumgarner pitch into the cove, it was probably his first opportunity to achiev that particular feat. He took a couple of moments to admire the flight of the ball. Bumgarner was unamused.

Muncy related after the game, “I hit the ball and then he yelled at me. [Bumgarner] said, ‘Don’t watch the ball, you run.’ I just responded back, ‘If you don’t want me to watch the ball, you can go get it out of the ocean.’”

As far as trolling goes, this was Harvard Lampoon level pitcher-baiting. “Go Get It Out Of The Ocean” was an instant classic. T-shirts were made, in Pantone 294 and with the word “Ocean” in Dodger script. Several Dodgers, including Muncy, gleefully wore the shirts during practice.

There is an unconfirmed report that Puig, now with the Cincinnati They Still Have a Team?, got a T-shirt and sent it to Bumgarner, but not before signing it, “From your good friend Puig. I like you.”

So this week the Dodgers and the Giants play again, this time in Dodger Stadium. The good news is that there are no large bodies of water near the park, and in fact nobody has ever actually hit a baseball out of the park. Maybe if the hitters imagined Trump’s face on the baseball…nah. I’m already in it deep enough, thanks.

Several outfits are selling variations on the “Go Get it out of the Ocean” Tees, and they are flying off the shelves. It seems very likely selling the Tees will be a major, if brief industry in the huge Dodger Stadium parking lots before each of the games, especially the one Mad Bum is pitching.

Now there’s two ways Mad Bum could bring this all to a grinding halt. One way is to go out and pitch a perfect game. Given that perfect games happen about once every 10,000 games, and Bumgarner isn’t as overpowering as he used to be, we’ll call that ‘Plan B.’

The other is for him to show up on the field pre-game wearing one of those shirts. Ideally, he would be wearing the very shirt Puig sent him, assuming a) that such a shirt actually exists and b) Puig didn’t taunt him by sending a shirt that is three sizes too small. Made sure the media notice. Maybe do an interview with a Dodger announcer while wearing it.

It would be self-deprecating and endearing. It would be bad for the T-shirt vendors, but good for Bumgarner and the Giants. It would nullify the original troll, and put Mad Bum up one.

Or he could go whack, um, somebody with a baseball bat. That would be a crowd-pleaser, too.

Nah. I would hate to see Mad Bum get shot. It would be superfluous. Muncy already nailed him.

 

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Treason – Trump crosses the line—twice

Treason

Trump crosses the line—twice

June 13th 2019

In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Trump said, “I think you might want to listen, there isn’t anything wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country, Norway, [and said] ‘we have information on your opponent’ oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”

An incredulous Stephanopoulos then asked what Trump would do is the country in question was China or Russia. Would he take the information, or call the FBI? Trump blandly replied, “I think maybe you do both. It’s not an interference, they have information – I think I’d take it. If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI… but when somebody comes up with ‘oppo research’, right, they come up with oppo research, ‘oh let’s call the FBI.’”

The President of the United States just announced that he would be happy to let a hostile foreign power directly interfere with an American election. This despite the fact that he is very strongly suspected of having done exactly that during the 2016 campaign and is in an ever-deepening morass of investigation and scandal as a result.

He’s already been driven to claim executive privilege over documents already made public, ordered people to ignore subpoenas, and even tried to get the Supreme Court to rule that Congress could not investigate him.

It’s already far deeper and darker than Watergate ever was, and he’s learned nothing from it. He just announced to the world that he would do it again, and suborn his own country in order to get dirt on a possible opposition candidate.

We already know that Rudy Guiliani was planning to go to the Ukraine in order to get dirt, not on Joe Biden, but his son Hunter, to use as kompromat against Biden.

It’s obvious this sort of filthy and unpatriotic behavior is his game plan for the upcoming election.

Remarkably, some alleged Americans are already trying to excuse this. One guy on one of the cable yammerfests last night was arguing that proving intent was key to a successful prosecution of Trump, and that all his actions since 2015 didn’t include strong evidence that he maliciously intended to violate the law.

I hope the guy was talking about the conspiracy charges, where intent is key, since conspiracy by its nature usually involves criminal activity that hasn’t happened yet, or cover up actions that might be embarrassing. If he was talking about the crimes that Trump has openly and blatantly committed, then it shows how corrupt and morally dissolute some in the legal profession have become. It would show the chasm between justice for the rich (“Prove he intended to do any harm when he broke the law”) and justice for the poor (“Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”).

It came on the heels of something that was, if anything, even viler. His love affair with Kim Jong Un, the vicious despot running North Korea, is well known. I guess it’s part of some addle-pated effort to show that he has tamed Kim, and now that Kim is belled and leashed, they’re best of buddies. It’s not a very convincing performance, a middle-school performance by an alleged grown-up.

Back in 2017, Kim had his half-brother murdered in a Thai airport by two women who sprayed VX compound in his face. It was both grotesque and ludicrous. Two years later, it emerged that Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother, was on his way to meet with a CIA operative, and in fact was secretly reporting to the CIA.

For a President who welcomes interference by a hostile foreign power in US government, Trump was appalled that the US might interfere with North Korea’s government. When a reporter asked him about the reports that Kim Jong Nam was working for the CIA, Trump appeared to be caught flat-footed. “I don’t know, I have not heard about that.”

Then he said, “I saw the information about the CIA with respect to his brother or half brother, and I would tell him that would not happen under my auspices, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t let that happen under my auspices.”

Apparently shaken by this horrid example of American perfidy, Trump continued, “I just received a beautiful letter from Kim Jong Un. I can’t show you the letter, obviously, but it was very personal, very warm, very nice letter. North Korea, under his leadership, has great potential,”

It’s difficult to gauge if Trump really wants to prevent US espionage against North Korea. He lies about everything, so there’s no particular reason to suppose he’s telling the truth now. But we can’t really know. He’s too random.

But for North Korea, his words provided considerable aid and comfort.

Now, here’s the thing. Back in 1950, when North Korea attacked South Korea, the two halves of the country promptly declared war on each other. The US came in on S. Korea’s side, as the Soviet Union and later China came in on N. Korea’s side. The US involvement was fig-leafed as being a part of a United Nations action. Since the UN Charter forbade the organization from waging war, they called it a “Police Action” instead. The death toll from this “Police Action” both civilian and military, all sides, came to well over two million people. So let’s not be stupid: it was a war. Period.

It ended with a cease-fire armistice in 1953, but there never was a peace treaty. South and North Korea are still at war, and the US, by terms of their own treaty with S. Korea, are at war with N. Korea as well. North Korea is considered an enemy regime.

The Constitution defines treason thusly: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

I’m pretty sure more than two people saw Trump prattle on about his good buddy Kim Jong Un and promise to never let the US conduct intelligence operations against him. Given his feckless disregard for American security and willingness to shaft his own people, I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if Trump revealed the identity of the CIA people Kim Jong Nam was reporting to. You know he’s capable of doing such a thing. After all, he sent his thugish lawyer to the Ukraine to dig up dirt on a family member of a opposition candidate, called his own appointee to head the FBI a liar, and grandly announced he would commit the same felonies again in the next election. It’s no outside the realm of possibility.

But Congress can stop this traitor. They can do it right now, by opening formal impeachment hearings and putting the evidence of Trump’s disloyalty and criminality out where Faux News can’t sweep it under their carpet.

But they must act quickly. There was already a serious incident in the Gulf yesterday, two tankers attacked and set ablaze. Iran will certainly be blamed, and it was most likely the US was actually behind the attacks. Oil prices are plunging, and Trump desperately needs a big war in order to distract and exploit the American tendancy to rally round the flag when war breaks out.

Trump is not interested in America, and won’t mind seeing millions of Americans risk their lives so he can avoid prison.

Trump is a traitor. He needs to be tried for treason now.

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The Big Lie – How the Right Wing Controls Millions

June 1st, 2019

Robert Mueller appeared on TV and told the nation “If we had had confidence the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

Watching it live, I didn’t think there was anything unusual in that quote. After all, he says the same thing directly in his report. Anyone who read the report…oh, right. Most of the members of Congress haven’t read the report. And they’re the ones responsible for acting on the information it contains. It’s a sign of the times when the best thing you can say about your Congressional representative is that he is too lazy and illiterate to function. But Mueller really didn’t say anything that wasn’t in the redacted version of his report. I’m amazed how many people didn’t know that.

One Republican did read the report, a Republican from Michigan named Justin Amash. He immediately declared that Trump should be impeached, becoming the first Republican to favor impeachment. He held a town hall in his district to inform his constituents of why he reached the decision he did, and to defend it. Not your typical Republican, most of whom avoid their constituents these days. He wound up getting a standing ovation from an initially hostile crowd when he laid out his case.

According to Brad Reed over at Raw Story;

In an interview with NBC News, Michigan Trump voter Cathy Garnaat said that she went to Rep. Justin Amash’s (R-MI) town hall this week to challenge his view that Trump should be impeached — and she got caught off guard when he directly quoted from the Mueller report to justify his views.

“I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump,” she admitted. “I hadn’t heard that before.”

Garnaat went on to explain that none of the news shows she watches or listens to have ever gone into depth about the contents of the Mueller report.

“I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report and President Trump has been exonerated,” she explained.

In an earlier incident of truth meeting conservatives, Bernie Sanders went into the lion’s den, a town hall on Faux News, and laid out his case for universal health care, a high minimum wage, free college, and a system of not-for-profit banks through the Post Office. Serenely confident that Sanders had only made the case that he was an American-hating Commie, the host asked the audience to indicate their displeasure with Sanders. They gave him a standing ovation.

Don’t be surprised.

The vast right wing conspiracy has been working for decades to section off a segment of the American population and essentially turn them into a cult, suspicious and disdainful of any outside information. In fact, the morning Mueller made his announcement, so damning to Trump, I was curious and looked to see how Faux News was playing it. Their header was “ “Special counsel makes rare public statement to resign, says team was unable to charge Trump” No mention of the reason why he didn’t charge Trump. Faux News viewers are ignorant, and Faux News spends a lot of time and money to keep them that way.

While Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has always presented a grave danger to western democracies, and is inimical to freedom and the non-wealthy, Murdoch is hardly functioning in a vacuum. For years, a nest of think tanks, blogs, radio networks, trash political “Christian” televangelists, along with corporations snapping up local newspapers, radio and television, have devoted themselves to being one seamless propaganda machine.

One favored way is social media memes. Prior to that, they were mimeographs and copies in their twentieth generation, passed around at bars and water coolers and in chain letters.

The method of transmission has gotten more sophisticated, but the propaganda tactics remain about the same.

I got one passed along to me the other day, and in a time when the Republicans are working to lie their way to success, it seems a really good example of the messaging used by them.

This one (replicated in full below) is putatively written by a family mother who is distraught because her children are supposedly being driven out of California by draconian policies promoted by Gavin Newsom, the rookie governor of the state.

I’m not worried about copyright infringement. It’s anonymous, which is an odd thing for a public letter to a political figure, and its actual provenance is open to considerable speculation. It may have been written by one of the stable of writers they keep at Heritage Foundation, or Regnery Press, or perhaps somewhere in Russia. It’s so ham-fisted I think it could be a Russian troll outfit.

I doubt very much the actual authors are going to step forward and demand credit.

The opening lines are unalloyed pathos: “The boxes are filled. The bags are packed. The hearts are breaking. My family is about to be divided, separated, perhaps forever. I wish you cared.” Oh, the heartbreak! Did any family ever suffer so? Why, this is as bad as the Trail of Tears, or the railroads to Auschwitz!

But it gets worse: these innocents, driven from California by the cruel whips of Governor Gavin, are just one of millions, perhaps even billions, being driven from California!

But there is hope! They are leaving the foul pestilence of the Golden State and headed for a shining beacon of hope: “The Real America”. She doesn’t describe this real America, but I have the impression it’s something like Pleasantville before the colored folks showed up and ruined it. It is, however, in a “southern state” where people show their patriotism by flying the Confederate flag. Apparently it differs from all of California in that it doesn’t have dog feces and hypodermic needles on the sidewalks. That right there eliminates most southern states.

The author cites a rise in communicable diseases, which while unfortunately true, isn’t climbing as steeply in California as it is in the south (CDC). Children are at grave risk, it seems, but again, the South, which the Polly Klaas Institute identifies as having 38% of non-family/kidnapping child abductions) has a far higher rate than the West (28%). It would seem our refugees are leaping from the frying pan and into the fire.

The author concludes the first litany of grievances by telling the governor, who had nothing to do with the imaginary complains, that “[Y]ou’re concerned that I might ask for a plastic straw.” Overuse and misuse of plastics is a growing crisis, one that will eventually kill more people than kidnapping, drug users, and Fresno combined. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t hurt anything except plastic straw manufacturers, but for the noble Republican princess writing this, it’s the cliché that broke the camel’s back.

The woman (or study group, or St. Petersburg sweatshop) bitterly blames Newsom for not caring about the middle class. Which is being destroyed in America, it’s true, but one can thank thirty years of Reaganomics and supply-side nonsense for that. Granted, California did inflict Reagan on the land, and we’re trying to live that down. But Newsom is continuing Brown’s policy of shifting the tax burden upward to the wealthy, and increasing wages. That’s how you build a strong middle class. You don’t get one by giving your pension and half your income to your employer and hope they’ll build a museum in your town or something.

California, the whine continues, has car thefts and car chases. And that it does, most assuredly. But her answer, which seems to involve locking up millions more people, has been proven not to work. At one point, California’s “tenth largest city” was the prison population, and all that did was breed gangs, hardened criminals, and organized crime. The author complains about the high rate of recidivism (61% in California, compared to 60% nationwide), but offers no solution beyond, “lock them up.”

Next on the laundry list of whines is taxes. Yes, California has high taxes on gasoline, sales tax, etc. Part of the problem is that millions of wealthy Californians are protected from property taxes and wealth taxes. That has changed in recent years, and California is catching up from decades of Republican “feed the rich” misrule.

And yes, California has a problem with homeless people. But again, Newsom didn’t create that problem, and has been working to address it for years. One wonders what the fictional author of the letter has done to address the issue. Besides putting an apartment up for rent by moving out, that is.

It goes on in this vein, an unending and self-pitying whine about how horrible California is, and how wonderful the South is. Gas is only $2.00 a gallon! According to the writer. Except that the cheapest gas in the country is Mississippi, nobody’s idea of paradise. California’s gas is $1.50 a gallon more than Mississippi’s, but California state taxes on gasoline amount to 35 cents a gallon. Mississippi’s is 18 cents a gallon. Obviously something else is at play here, such as price manipulation by the oil industry.

Why isn’t she just joining her family and moving? After all, there’s no reason for her to stay in California, and every reason to move. Doesn’t having to pick hypodermic needles out of her flip-flops and paying $1.50 because state taxes are 17 cents higher get old?

But the nature of this letter isn’t to portray a real situation. The woman does not exist. Her situation does not exist. Many of the items she lays at the feet of Gavin Newsom either don’t exist, or are things he has nothing to do with. They are blatant manipulation, with a glorious disregard for accuracy or truth.

The intent of the letter is to inflame, and arouse feelings of resentment against California, a state that has, since 2008, consistently performed better economically and socially than the rest of the country. It is a success story of liberal governance, and the right wingers must pump out endless lies to vilify it and make it look like one of their own disasters, such as Kansas or Wisconsin.

The article is written with scant regard for any truth whatsoever, and uses almost ridiculous levels of emotional manipulation to try to inflame the reader and shut down critical thought.

The right wing has been spewing this nonsense by the thousands over the past 40 years or more. One thing they did learn from the Nazis and the Communists was that propaganda is a powerful tool, if applied unremittingly and relentlessly.

The Cathy Garnaats of America—and there are millions of them—aren’t vile deplorables who take glee in Trump’s viciousness and contempt for American values. They don’t hear about that. Instead, they hear about how Trump is a victim of anti-American forces who hate and despise everything they hold dear. Today’s minute of hate is Meghan Markle, princess and wife of Prince Harry. She doesn’t want to meet with Trump in London this week, and so Faux News is gleefully leading a chorus on their site of racist and sexist abuse. The deplorables, little better than Nazis, love it. The cultists, usually possessed of a more human core, turn from the viciousness, but wonder how Markle could be so disrespectful to such a wonderful president. They really do.

They may have been born ignorant, as all of us have, but the right wing has used emotional manipulation and lies to keep them ignorant. Many, like Garnaat, need only be confronted by reality. Others will refuse to accept it and have a highly negative reaction.

The propaganda won’t end, because when you have to lie to the people to get your own way, they have to be big, simple lies, repeated endlessly.

But if Trump is indicted for his crimes in the House (which is what Impeachment is), the propaganda machine will break down in the face of a mountain of evidence, and won’t be able to prevent the Garnaats from seeing what is true.

In the meantime, read the piece attached. It’s a good lesson in finely honed propaganda, and a chance to hone your own reasoning skills.

Chico Republican Women

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Chico Republican Women

May 20 at 10:11 PM ·

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The following is an open letter from a friend of mine here in CA whose anger and frustration at the ongoing destruction of the state has boiled over. It reflects the feelings of so many people I know here, myself included. My friend would like this to remain anonymous but hopefully get widespread attention, so please feel free to share:

An Open Letter to Governor Gavin Newsom 5/20/19:

Governor Newsom,

The boxes are filled. The bags are packed. The hearts are breaking.

My family is about to be divided, separated, perhaps forever. I wish you cared.

Our wonderful daughter, along with her husband and their two young children has given up on life in California. The only place they’ve ever called home has become intolerable for them. They’ve found a new home in a southern state, far away from here, in the real America.

I’ve heard the story innumerable times- people leaving, or wanting to leave, what was once the paradise of the West Coast. Not so long ago, kids could walk down to the corner store, or to school, without their parents worrying about their safe return. No more.

You once could visit a neighborhood park, and not fear for your life. No more.

Walking across the street did not require careful examination of the pavement to avoid feces or used hypodermic needles. Now it does.

Illnesses are again being seen in this state that had been rare or non-existent until recently. Typhus, Tuberculosis, Mumps, Measles, Hepatitis A, B, and C are all here again. A worker on the upper floors at L.A. City Hall recently came down with typhus, spread by rats living in the disgusting conditions around the Civic Center.

But you’re concerned that I might ask for a plastic straw.

Your priorities for managing this state are crystal clear, and the middle class is nowhere near the top of the list. I learned in Civics class years ago that the primary job of government is to keep the people safe. What happened? When did our safety and well-being fall off the radar? Not too long ago, my daughter had her new vehicle stolen from her driveway, in the short time it took her to walk the kids to school. Someone was watching, waiting for them to leave. It gives me chills just thinking about it.

You release violent criminals back onto our streets to terrorize our communities, you proudly remove the death-penalty as an option, sending a friendly message to the worst of the worst, and you handcuff our law-enforcement officers, challenging their every move. Officers now must take an extra moment, perhaps just a second, questioning their training and best judgment, before using any amount of force to apprehend a violent criminal. When this results in another dead cop, and it will, the blood will be on your hands, sir.

A few weeks ago, we watched on television as a violent felon led police on a three-hour pursuit, destroying property and narrowly missing pedestrians and other vehicles. We saw him brutally beat his female passenger while driving close to 100 mph. Then last week, a murder suspect shot at police out the window of the car he was being pursued in. It’s a miracle nobody was killed. Turns out, both suspects were free on “early release” through AB-109, that you and other politicians (who all live behind walls, with armed security) forced upon us in the name of compassion. Where’s your compassion for law-abiding citizens, Mr. Governor?

And don’t get me started on taxes and regulations. The amount of money taken from us by this state is criminal. Just living here is expensive enough, but imagine trying to run a business and stay afloat. We have the highest gas prices/taxes in the country, and still our roads are a mess. I recently hit a pothole and the damage to my car was over $1000. We pay you enormous sums to manage the state’s affairs, yet people by the thousands sleep on our streets at night. Homeless encampments are everywhere, in neighborhoods we never imagined they’d be. And still, you want more. There’s a move now to weaken Prop. 13. No doubt it will pass. And I just read that you want to tax online sales now, too. Along with proposals to tax water, telephones, dairy products, fertilizers, health care, and more. But taxing those things will not affect the “super rich 1%”. They’re just more hits on the middle class. You Sacramento politicians have an insatiable addiction to other people’s money. But many citizens have had enough and are walking away.

Which brings me back to my family. They’re closing their business here. You’ll get no more of their hard-earned money. They’ve purchased a home in their new state, big enough for the four of them and a dog or two. Maybe even a horse. The kids will get a great education. They’ll be able to leave a window open at night, knowing that the criminals are the ones who are afraid- afraid of the police, afraid of the courts, and afraid of the citizens who exercise their right to defend themselves. Oh, and gas there is about $2 a gallon.

Somehow, they’ll have to survive without a Fantasy Train to nowhere, but I’m sure they’ll find a way to get by. Meanwhile, your tax base shrinks and Atlas shrugs. Soon the only people left here will be the very rich and the very poor. It’s almost as if you planned it that way.

And now, my family is broken. As are countless others. No more school plays, no more little league games. No more weekend breakfasts at IHOP or Thanksgiving dinners. I’ll happily burn a ton of fossil fuel to go visit them at their new home as often as I can. But, I won’t be there as an instant babysitter when needed on short notice, and I’ll actually notice their growth from visit to visit. I’ll pray every night for their safety and happiness in the years to come. And I’ll cry that I can’t hold them tight. I’m angry as hell, and I miss them desperately already.

But they’ll get no going away card from you and no apologies. You simply don’t care.

Name withheld.

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Decompensation – Trump is at his most dangerous

May 23rd, 2019

According to Dorland’s Medical Dictionary, decompensation, among other things, is “failure of defense mechanisms resulting in progressive personality disintegration.” Basically, if a person with mental illness is confronted by a reality that shatters the comforting lies with which he has cocooned himself, he shatters, both mentally and emotionally.

Donald Trump appears to be in a state of decompensation and seemingly can no longer sustain the pretense of being a functional person able to interact with others.

Yesterday was remarkable enough. In a pre-planned meltdown (and one apparently vigorously opposed by his aides) he declared that he would not be interacting with Congress on legislative negotiations at all until the investigations of himself were ended. That was astonishing.

He concluded this utter spectacle by declaring grandly, that he was “the most transparent president in history, who doesn’t do cover-ups.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the performance “jaw-dropping” and it’s pretty hard to take issue with that.

By way of example, three presidents before him have faced serious impeachment proceedings: Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. All three continued to do their jobs and even on the eve of impeachment votes, continued back-and-forths with Congress regarding major legislation. They had a job to do, and they all had the courage and character to do the job, no matter how bleak their political futures appeared.

He had already declared that investigating him was treasonous, and today he doubled down on that, declaring that James Comey, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe were the traitors he had in mind. The reporter asking him that added, “Sir, the Constitution says treason is punishable by death. You’ve accused your adversaries of treason. Who are you talking about?” Trump didn’t seem to have any problem with the inference that he would want to have those four individuals put to death.

At a rally last night, he declared that William Barr, his lickspittle and contemptible Attorney General, was “looking into” investigating Trump’s political foes.

This is Nazi dictator stuff that is happening here.

Trump’s entire world is collapsing. He is a man who not only has lived a lie, but has been an utter lie since he was about three years old. He loudly proclaimed (and presumably believed) that he was a great businessman and one of the best negotiators on Earth. In the past fortnight, a stunning investigative piece by the New York Times revealed that not only was he a poor businessman, but in terms of money lost, the worst businessman in America over a ten-year span. Despite his efforts to utterly stonewall all investigations, Congress has his bank records from Wells Fargo and TD banks; Rex Tillerson gave hours of secret testimony about his pathetic meetings with Vladimir Putin, and he is losing court case after court case, unable to even use litigation as a delaying tactic.

Imagine the thing in your life that most defines you as a person, and is something your entire self-respect and self-image relies upon. Maybe you know it’s a lie, and maybe you don’t, but suddenly, you are totally and utterly exposed in such a way that the whole world knows about it. This is far worse than dreams about no pants in school, or getting caught downloading porn of 14 year olds. This is something that utterly smashes your entire public persona.

That’s what happened to Trump.

Now, I’m not trying to present him sympathetically. His is a tawdry, sordid, vicious life in which he has coldly and even joyfully hurt and cheated many people. He was utter sociopathic scum before he became president.

He also had Nazi proclivities. During the campaign, people warned that his bedside reading material consisted of one book: “My New Order” by Adolf Hitler. He admitted to this readily enough, but claimed that it was OK because the person who loaned him the book was Jewish. (He wasn’t, and it doesn’t exactly explain why Trump would fixate on a book that, along with many of Hitler’s speeches, provided a step-by-step description of how he attained and consolidated his power.) Even without Trump’s blatantly and viciously anti-Semitic, racist, bullying and dishonest tactics, the fact that he would put in considerable amount of his time studying this particular book is deeply disturbing.

So we have a President who is a sociopath and deeply admires a murderous long-dead dictator, and has a self-evident trait of finding and wanting to kill scapegoats. His actions in the wake of Puerto Rico’s hurricane should have put us all on notice: he doesn’t mind killing people.

Now all the rest of his defenses are crumbling. He is losing court case after court case, and even some Republicans are beginning to distance themselves from Trump. One, a Michigan representative, Justin Amash, called for impeachment hearings, meaning that Trump will want to try and execute him for treason. Pelosi is openly goading him into overreacting to the point where even Congress will have to consider removing him, not through impeachment, but on 25th Amendment grounds. She called on the GOP, his cabinet and his aides to stage an intervention, the way you might with a nephew who just got popped for drunk driving for the third time.

The worst of it is that Trump has toadies in Congress such as McConnell who will do nothing to stop Trump. He has frantically populated the Justice Department and the courts with stooges, and doubtlessly hopes his two appointments to the Supreme Court might shield him. It’s horrifying to realize that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh might do just that; they never were anyone’s idea of independent and impartial jurists, and Trump loves to use the Russian tactic of kompromat; who’s to say what he has on those two? It’s unlikely he would have named either without a file with nasty personal information.

Make no mistake: facing utter personal and professional ruin, Trump is at his most dangerous. He is capable of casually horrific acts; now he has, from his perspective, unlimited reason to employ such tactics.

Brace yourselves, people: the next chapter in this story is going to be very, very ugly, and quite dangerous.

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Aborting America – “Pro Life” shows its pro-death face

May 15th 2019

Imagine if some religious cult sprang up that declared that cancer was God’s way of calling his children home, and thus it was a sin to do anything to treat cancer. Thus anyone trying to eliminate cancer, including the removal of tumors, should be punished, up to 99 years in prison.

If that sounds pretty whack-a-doodle, reflect on the strange things the mainstream religions in America teach. Bible literalists have to believe such utter nonsense as the talking snake story in Genesis, the Ark story, and the sun holding still in the sky for three days. Non-literalists have to accept such oddities as virgin births, miracles, and power of prayer as being a real thing.

So having a group rising up and declaring that blastomas are an expression of God’s love and must be protected at all costs really isn’t all that far fetched.

That there is no biblical basis for such a belief is pretty irrelevant. After all, ‘God’s Will’ has been used to justify most wars, even against other Christian enemies, an unending bitter strife over mostly worthless land in the middle east, slaughter of indigenous tribes in Africa and the Americas, and even the massacre of cats in Europe (led to the plagues, that, as the rodent population exploded). Jewish and Islamic countries have (and still have) similar atrocities stemming from similar beliefs. Indeed, many of the worst elements of religious savagery in all three main faiths stem from the same source—the Mosaic Law of what Christians call the Old Testament.

But religious-based lunacy can exist independently of weird texts translated hundreds of different times that were originally written by people who didn’t know the Earth was a globe or that lobsters weren’t fish.

This leads to the abortion movement. In America, the Catholic Church always opposed abortion on grounds similar to my hypothetical pro-cancer faith; they thought all human seed was sacred, an expression of divine love, and thus it was a sin to waste seed. At various times and in various places, the church punished and even executed men for the ‘sin’ of masturbation.

When fundamentalists glommed on to the notion of stopping abortion in the wake of Roe v Wade, they brought their own brand of fundamentalist lunacy to the table. Every zygote possessed a soul and was an expression of God’s will.

Years ago, I came across a ‘public service announcement’ put out by some of the religious lunatics that featured an animation of a full-term baby being aborted, and as she (curly blonde hair and pink bow in her hair, the way most female babies are born) is dying, she’s screaming “Mommy! Mommy! Why are you doing this to me? Don’t you LOVE me?”

I laughed at the sheer absurdity of that cartoon, but here we are, 30 years later, and millions of Americans believe a truly savage blood libel spread by Republicans and Fox News that babies—real, actual babies—are being aborted after they are born because that is what Roe v Wade demands.

John Oliver had a clip of some intellectual abortion standing in the Alabama Legislature, droning on about “Baby Fetus” and even providing supposed quotes from this etymological absurdity. Two days later, Alabama passed a draconian law banning all abortion and providing life sentences to anyone performing or getting an abortion.

There’s an old saying: “People who can be persuaded to believe absurdities can be led to commit atrocities.”

It’s not even Biblical. The Bible doesn’t mention abortion, although it does condone ripping babies from the wombs of the women of vanquished foes and dashing their brains out against a rock. The New Testament has nothing to say about abortion, even though Nazareth had no shortage of midwifes who had abortifacient herbs and crude tools to physically induce abortion. Further, in many levels of society in that time and place, it wasn’t uncommon for female babies to be drowned or used to break rocks because female children were expensive and of limited use. For some reason, Jesus never did have an opinion on that.

Dressed up as a religious and moral crusade, the anti-abortion movement is neither. It doesn’t really care about “the life of a child,” as witness the fact that few if any of the people running the movement have any provisions whatsoever for the care and feeding of these involuntary children, or helping the mothers in any significant way, or otherwise assuming any responsibility.

It is, instead, a naked authoritarian power grab. It places a large segment of the female population in a precarious role where they can be effectively enslaved, either by pregnancy or the mere fear of pregnancy. If Alabama’s law is allowed to stand, the move will be on to ban birth control of all kinds. In the name of God, of course.

It’s a political movement, as well. The brownshirts of the GOP have long used the religiously insane as a handy bludgeon to enforce their more authoritarian dictates, such as enforced worship of the police and military, and to justify discrimination and segregation.

And if you take a look at the states joining the rush to knock down Roe v. Wade, with the exception of Ohio, all are in southern states with long histories of repressive authoritarians backed by the iron dictates of corrupt pastors.

It’s time to recognize the ‘pro-life’ for what it is: it’s not pro-anything. It’s anti-women, anti-choice, anti-individual, and anti-freedom. It opposes everything America stands for, including the right for every person not to have someone else’s religious dictates imposed upon them. No woman should be enslaved by some politician lying about God’s will. Nobody should have to follow the religious taboos of some church if they don’t want.

They are anti-America, and should be treated, not as voices of some god, but as enemies to American rights and freedoms.

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There was music in the cafés at night – And revolution in the air

May 7th 2019

It’s a bit strange right now, comparing the headlines in the news with the general calm in the population at large. Trump and the Republicans are actively staging a coup against the United States, and seemingly inviting a revolt with their open sneers at the Constitution and rule of law.

But for now, people are just going about their business, outside of the cable stations and general media. Folks watched Game of Thrones the other night, and if they drew any correlations between Cersei and Trump, they didn’t speak of it. John Oliver did discuss what he calls “Stupid Watergate,” but the balance of his show was on the topic of lethal injections.

Some people are watching closely, of course. Even a majority of Americans are watching now. In the cesspools of Faux News, the viewers and readers are being assured that this is a plot against the wildly successful, patriotic and deeply Christian Donald Trump by Democrats seeking revenge for the Clinton impeachment or something. They have succeeded in making their audience so self-isolated that they can tell them anything, no matter how objectively ridiculous it is.

Just to show how insular and divorced from the mainstream this Republican cult really is, a fellow named James McDaniel set up a fake ‘right wing news’ website that featured stories of Hillary Clinton sacrificing children and Barack Obama running a secret coup from an underground bunker in Washington DC. He then promoted the site on actual right wing sites, mostly by forwarding his fake news stories.

In just two weeks, his site received a million unique visits, and hundreds of thousands of likes and shares. He said, “If I wrote about CNN being fake news and connected to ISIS, readers would agree wholeheartedly with my fabricated article. If I wrote about a black liberal or Obama supposedly saying something controversial, the response was unbridled racism and hatred. When I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s new emails that proved she was a child sacrificing maniac, people screamed for her head.”

Alarmed by the type of response he was getting, he posted a message saying everything on the site was fake, and added a disclaimer to every news story. Didn’t help. He wound up parking the page because right wingers kept right on believing the fake news stories.

So it’s not surprising that about 35% of the population has been brainwashed into supporting what amounts to open treason against the United States. But what’s going on with the rest of America?

In light of the Mueller report, in which the redacted version shows such a vast array of criminality and corruption on the part of Trump that over 700 federal prosecutors have signed a document stating that the evidence was so compelling that anyone who was not a sitting president would be facing multiple indictments right now, his popularity has actually improved somewhat, from a -16 on the aggregate polls in late January to a -10 now. Fully 78% of Republican voters believe the Mueller Report cleared Trump of any wrongdoing. Pfft! What do 700 federal prosecutors know, anyway?

Part of this response, ironically, is a tendency of people to ‘rally round the flag’; the thinking, if that’s the word for it, is that our president is under attack, and we must forget our partisan differences and defend the country. If you think that it requires a stunning level of ignorance to achieve that mindset, you are in a minority; relatively few Americans know who William Barr is, or even Mitch McConnell. These vaguely ‘support the President’ sorts take pride in “not paying attention to that political stuff” so all they know, in a dim sort of way, is that Congress and the President are having some sort of tiff, and it’s along party lines. They know who Trump is, but Jerry Nadler is just some Democratic politician they never heard of, so they side with Trump. And they are lacking the intellectual and educational tools needed to understand just how serious Trump’s defiance of the Constitution is, and how grave the consequences for them might be if he should succeed in his drive to become a dictator.

That still leaves over half the voting population of the US unaccounted for. And one of the strangest things about the coverage of all this is the utter lack of attention to what the voting public thinks about all this. Outside of the right wing sewers, media response is all but unanimous and vociferous: rule of law must be upheld, Trump must be held to account. But you can search the web in vain for reports of any outcry amongst the public. The aggregate polling sites ask if people think Mueller ‘cleared’ Trump or not, but not how the feel about what is going on. Activists sites such as MoveOn are rabid about the contempt Trump is showing for America, but not discussing actions outside of the power of the subpoena.

It’s perplexing. In just about any other country, a situation like this would result in massive rallies in every city, and talk of general strikes. Hotheads would be discussing revolution, and broadcasters would be urging calm.

Let me be clear: nobody sane wants a revolution, and I’m talking about rallies, not riots. (I don’t trust the right not to stage riots, either on their own behalf or provoking riots at rallies just for purposes of ratfucking the rest of us). But the country is in a very clear and immediate danger, and if Trump wins this, the only likely outcomes will read like the plotline from Game of Thrones. We can either move peacefully now and help save America from Trump and the Republicans, or face far less palatable options later on.

Why the ongoing silence?

Posted on

Barrbarian Rhatsophy – Barr belongs in jail—next to Trump

May 2nd 2019

William Barr, career criminal and putative top cop of the country, refused to show up before the House for testimony on the Mueller report today. Some wag on the Democratic side replaced the doughy and misshapen Trump stooge with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was an improvement, insofar as the bucket of chicken at least promised to provide some content.

The Republicans, who have descended below the level of kindergarteners in trouble with the teacher, tried blaming the Democrats for Barr’s refusal to testify. One major moron in waiting, Doug Collins, a Republican of Georgia, opined that “The reason Bill Barr is not here today is because the Democrats decided they did not want him here today.”

See? It was all the Democrats fault! Why, they wanted to ask Barr questions about his contradictions and lies, and to explain why Mueller was so pissed at him. That’s all. I’m sure there were reasonable explanations.

Other Republicans blamed Hillary Clinton because they couldn’t think of anything else to say. After all, it’s not like they would ever force Clinton to testify for 11 hours in response to loaded, ideological and dishonest questions. Given the perfect fairness and civility Republicans showed, is it too much to ask that Barr be given a pass?

Perhaps the best rationale came from the perjurer-in-chief, who is of the opinion that the suspect in a criminal trial should be free to refuse to be questioned by authorities if he felt the questions might be biased against him or cause embarrassment.

OK, fair point. When the LAPD asked Charlie Manson if he stuck a fork in Sharon Tate’s belly, that showed great insensitivity and even some microaggression on the part of the police. Better a mass murderer should be allowed to run free rather than to have to deal with impolite and even overbearing police!

Only an overprivileged moron like Trump could, with his bare face hanging out, demand the right for a suspect in a criminal investigation to determine what questions he might have to answer.

And poor Donald has so many other distractions to deal with. Both his nominees to the Fed imploded over the past couple of days, one because he couldn’t handle his household finances, let alone a world economy, and the other because he was the most stupid fucking bastard this side this side of a pile of dog shit. Indeed, Trump nominees implode with such regularity and to such comic effect that it reminds you of that episode of “Russian Doll” where the protagonist dies a couple of dozen times in the space of five minutes. Or Sideshow Bob with the garden rakes.

Now that the clown rodeo has closed for the day and there’s no longer any doubt that Barr is a criminal Trump stooge, the question arises: what is congress going to do about it? Even Pelosi flat-out called Barr’s actions criminal. Dozens of Democrats want him punished: arrest or impeachment, or both.

Make it march, guys. Arrest the guy. If he quits and thus can’t be impeached, he’s still going to face criminal charges. And Trump is starting to realize that the power of the pardon is a dangerous tool, as witness the fact that even as he was schmoozing with the psychotic murderers of the NRA, and despite Vladimir Putin’s howls of outrage, he was letting Maria Butina rot in jail.

If Congress orders Barr’s arrest for contempt of Congress and perjury before Congress, Trump may not dare intervene.

In fact, Trump being Trump, he’ll probably start calling Barr weak, stupid, fat, and a host of other adjectives, and create an enemy where he had an ally. We’ve seen him do that dozens of times before, with Sessions, Cohen, Manafort, and Ryan. It’s a gift, I tell you.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is threatening to sue to prevent Mueller from testifying before Congress. Think about that: the DoJ appointed Mueller to do exactly what he did, with the intent of giving his report to Congress, and now they are suing themselves to prevent Mueller from giving his report to Congress. It’s the sort of clownery you expect from inept authoritarian regimes, whether Rufus T. Firefly or Donald J. Trump.

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