Category: Health Care

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After July 3rd, 2025 — Comes the independence movement

After July 3rd, 2025

Comes the independence movement

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 4th, 2025

Between the infiltration of fascists on the Supreme Court (name the traitors: John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney-Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh) and in Congress (too many to name, but almost unanimously Republicans, and willingness to either commit or bow to treason almost unanimous amongst those Republicans), there was only one result possible. The United States of America never stood a chance.

The passage of the hideous, ironically named “One Big Beautiful Bill” is the capstone to the collapse of America. Yes, it is cruel, vicious, and designed to punish the poor and weaken the middle class into insolvency. It increases the already hideously disproportionate disparity of wealth and power of the top 1% to levels that far exceed those of pre-revolutionary France or Russia. That comes at the cost of a trillion for health care for the people, hundreds of billions more to feed the poor, and education. It will make the US a scientific, intellectual and educational backwater. It will, in time, eliminate accessible health care for most of the population, and weaken and degrade public, secular schools into irrelevance.

But the very worst part is that it erects the most efficient and oppressive police state in the history of the world. It provides more funding for the hated and vicious ICE secret police force than the US Marines get. Coupled with Elon Musk’s vast, comprehensive data theft of virtually every government record on everyone in America, it makes for a vast and omnipresent police state that would make Josef Stalin groan with envy.

Even now, I see people, mostly Democrats, chirping that the Republicans have really fucked up this time, and how we’ll make them pay in the off-terms next year. These people are fools: the Republicans have absolutely no intention of holding free and fair elections. None.

Some people take hope that the bill just signed into law delays some of the worst, most rapacious elements of the shredding of the social safety net until after November 2026, and point to that as a sign the Republicans are nervous about those elections.

Nonsense. They just want to hold what will be utterly fraudulent and meaningless elections to make sure their apparatus of control is rock solid and that they need never worry about any election going forward.

Oh, there will be an election. It will even look fairly convincing, in that Republicans will at least lackadaisically campaign, and if the people controlling the vote count are even half-way competent, the results will all fall into a convincing 10 point range for most of the Republicans. There may come a time when they can run unopposed and win 99% of the vote, like in the Soviet Union, but for now they have to pretend there’s still a United States and it is still a democracy of the people. As long as people can PRETEND the country is still theirs, they are less likely to rise up, you see. To that end, Republicans will wave many flags and pound a few Bibles in order to keep their believers glassy-eyed.

But they don’t intend to allow the people to have a meaningful voice. The bill Trump just signed had an approval rating of just 29% during the final hours of debate. No bill still pending before Congress was ever more unpopular. Ever. And when you have people like Joni Ernst sneering “We all have to die sometime” to people complaining that their children can’t get necessary medical care, or the psychotically racist Laura Loomer talking about deporting all 65 million native Latinos with a grin from the president, you know they have stopped pretending. Trump spent yesterday complaining about how farmers were at the mercy of “Shylock” bankers and crowing that he was going to throw a trashy UFC bloodfest on the White House lawn. They’ve quit pretending. They can’t be arsed giving a shit. They’ve won, and they know it.

But they still fear us. They know that if the people withdraw consent, and simply and peacefully refuse to cooperate, they cannot maintain power. The Soviet Union, the most efficiently oppressive regime in history, fell with hardly a shot being fired simply because the citizenry of the USSR withheld their support and peacefully resisted.

I’ve said before that once-a-month demonstrations aren’t going to cut it. People are going to have to go out every day and protest, and there’s certainly no shortage of things people can protest. The worthless corporate media will largely ignore it, but the internet is building its own fourth estate. Corporate news is rapidly falling into the same niche as Pravda and Izvestiya did in the Soviet Union and RT does today.

The government will make it harder and harder to defy. They may make demonstrating illegal, and even defiance of any sort. Who’s gonna stop them? Clarence Thomas? Mike Johnson? The law will be what they say it is, and it won’t be there to protect you.

But there are hundreds of ways to resist. They still need you, and even though they’ll never admit it, they need the support of the people in general.

Make Trump supporters feel unloved. Don’t miss an opportunity to discuss the failings and deceptions of the Trump regime. Make Trump supporters doubters, and eventually adversaries. When dealing with officials, drag your feet in every way possible. Do it legally, do it peacefully, but do it. And if they try to outlaw resistance, find less obvious ways of resisting, but never stop resisting. The apparatchiks of the Trump regime are human, and will slowly succumb to social pressure. Make them feel unloved.

Trump is a dying man. He isn’t plausible as the face of the fascist revolution now, and it’s only going to get more and more strained as his mind, never much to begin with, erodes. While we don’t know who will replace him, he won’t have whatever cult following Trump still retains at that point, so keep the pressure on, and make it unceasing. Most of Trump’s closest clique are weak and amazingly stupid opportunists, and they will make a lot of mistakes. Make them pay.

This regime can be brought down in ways in which the founders of the United States would approve. But be prepared to be stubborn and unyielding. Make them feel unloved.

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One Big Beautiful Bukkake — Plutocrats Plan Our Gangbang

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

May 26th, 2025

While everyone has been distracted by Trump’s demented and often Naziesque antics, the true fascist mien (cough) of the GOP has been revealed for all to see. Donald is just using his often-cartoonish viciousness and cruelty to keep his most mindless followers hooting in joy as the GOP contemplates its long-held dream of raping America to death.

The House passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (so named by Donnie, who knows how to engage the most stupid people around) by only one vote. I wish I could say that the handful of Republicans who opposed it did so on some sort of moral or ethical principles, but the sad fact is they hate the bill because it doesn’t go far enough. They’re worried about the estimated $4.3T in debt it will add to the existing GOP-created flood of red ink. But rather than eliminate the estimated $4T tax cut that would go to the billionaires, they want to completely eliminate Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

You? Oh, your taxes would go up. Not a lot, but then, forty years of Reaganomics hasn’t left you with much to tax, has it?

One estimate is that 99% of the tax cuts would go to those making more than $4M a year, while people making $17,000 or less would see a tax increase of $1,000 a year. You don’t mind giving up your health care and pension so Bezos can send another bevy of trophy wives into the stratosphere in a giant phallus, do you? Sure, just as long as it owns the libs.

Nobody really knows how many nasties are hidden in the bill. Here’s the ones we’ve found so far.

It extends the “state of emergency” Trump declared over the wholly imaginary Venezuelan invasion of the United States. This means among other things that he can unilaterally declare martial law, and delay or even cancel elections.

The bill has a provision to federalize elections (they are mandated to the states by the Constitution) which means that Trump’s utter corrupt and politicized Department of Justice under Kristi Noem would have complete control over who could vote, how they could vote, and even eliminate the secret ballot in the name of fighting “voter fraud.”

It completely neuters the courts, mandating that the administration can ignore any court edict for up to a year, and protecting all members of the administration from contempt of court rulings—the one weapon the courts have to enforce compliance. There has never been a country without a strong, independent judiciary that was worth a shit, and America would be no exception.

Back when I was a kid, they used to teach about the “Spoils System” wherein new administrations could replace government functionaries with their own people. Needless to say, massive corruption and incompetence was built into such a system, and the Pendleton Law was passed in 1883 creating a non-politicized civil service.

This bill would restore the spoils system. Good luck getting that permit you need if you voted for the wrong guy in the last election! Need a copy of your birth certificate? Don’t forget to bribe!

Protests and protesters could be tracked and penalized, no matter how peaceful and legitimate. Freedom of speech becomes an empty mockery. It includes individual lawful protest. This essay, completely legal and legitimate in May of 2025, could put me in prison next year. Ex Post Facto wouldn’t exist under Trump. He already has a track record of punishing people for actions that were lawful at the time—many still are lawful, but that doesn’t stop Trump.

ICE, already America’s Gestapo, would see its budget increase by twelve-fold to $43B a year by 2029. By then they will probably have run out of undocumented people to throw in the Gulags and will be branching out to arrest anyone with brown skin or a last name ending in a vowel.

Mind you, most of this has no foundation in US law, and much of it is flat out unconstitutional. But no worries: the courts won’t be allowed to stop it. Read back to see the shit status of countries without a meaningful court system.

As is widely noted, the bill would absolutely devastate all social safety net programs (the ones that Elon and his Randroid thugs haven’t already destroyed, like Meals on Wheels or the Weather Service). It’s no exaggeration to say that starvation would become a serious problem in America.

For the second time in a week, some right winger decided to refute our fears about the bill by citing AI: in this instance, Elon Musk’s apartheid joke of an AI, Grok. I’m still laughing.

That “One Big Beautiful Bill”? No worries. Elon’s bastard cyberchild has a simple answer: it doesn’t exist. And I quote: Existence of “One Big Beautiful Bill”: There is no record in my knowledge of a bill by this name or with these specific provisions being proposed or debated in the U.S. Congress as of my last update.

Oh, well. I guess I need to go back and unwrite this sucker. Would Elon lie to me?

Elon isn’t the only one pretending it isn’t really there. The bill holds off most of the very worst provisions until 2029, after the next (and possibly final) presidential election.

Now, it won’t survive the Senate, which means that the whole thing is still a long way from becoming law. I predict the next budget bill will be yet another Continuing Resolution, which is a polite way of saying “Let’s hang the country very slowly.” We’re not dead yet, in other words.

But for anyone who cares to look, it’s a naked look at what the plutocrats who control the GOP have in mind for us. If enough of this monster passes, there’s no turning back.

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The United States versus America — The time is coming to choose sides

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 19th, 2025

I picked up a follower on Blue Sky the other day (I must be in double digits by now!) whose page reveled in his love of country and patriotism. He had pictures of himself in uniform, along with pictures of wheat fields and sunsets and dogs and all the other things that make America special in the eyes of hyper-patriots.

Nothing to take offense to, but I was mildly curious. I’m skeptical of hyperpatriotism for the same reasons I’m skeptical of overt religiosity or guys who scream about “impure women” or whatever. All are signs of fundamentalism, a mental disorder I’m at best uncomfortable around. My writings and posts don’t attract such people, other than the ones who want to scream about what a degenerate I am. One of the nice things about Blue Sky is that people like that tend to weed themselves out in pretty short order.

But I was curious. What did my new-found friend think about events over the past month? I scrolled through his past few weeks of posts. Not one word about any current event: nothing about the abandonment of Ukraine, or a psychopathic South African billionaire and his pock-faced juvenile delinquents rummaging through all the national secrets and finances. Nothing about the immense damage Trump has already inflicted on the country, both domestically and in foreign affairs.

I didn’t block or mute the guy, but I did elect to not follow him back. (Some people think the number of followers they have validates them, and that’s fine. I measure my reach by the number of people I elect to follow BACK. This eliminates all the people who want to sell me land, drugs, or bitcoin, the illuminati, or who want to sex me all night long for the cost of a penicillin shot.)

The polls show that Trump’s popularity is dropping at over 2% a week, which in the ideologically rigid present state of public opinion represents a vast and momentous shit. His polls on the economy have dropped 12% in two weeks, even though the economy really hasn’t reacted to his policies. But many idiots still measure the economy by the price of eggs, which is like picking the Superbowl winner by which mound of corn a chicken pecks at first. And the price of eggs is skyrocketing as bird flu decimates the laying hens.

The malicious ineptitude of the TrumpenMusk regime is starting to percolate through all the propaganda from newspits like Newsmax or the Washington Post. All the redcap morons are starting to realize they really mean the stuff they said in Project 2025, and do hope to wipe out medicare and social security and shift ALL the tax burden to the lower class while they totally raid the entire nation’s wealth. Right now they just see it in them cutting programs that matter to them; day care, product safety regulations, conservation, etc. In short, all the millions of things government actually does because it’s far cheaper and more efficient than the private sector could possibly manage.

For many years, the right wing has promoted the silly notion that you are a patriot if you love America but want to get rid of the United States. Instead of “United States” of course they say “government” and they lie constantly about how the government is wasteful (it is, but so are corporations; but a lot of their operations are ‘proprietary’ and so they aren’t transparent or responsive to public interest, and unfortunately it’s been nearly 250 years since Americans had to deal with power centers that were unresponsive to the public interest.) Government is oppressive, evil, eats kittens, yada, yada, yada.

What they don’t understand (and are prevented from understanding) is that the United States, the thing that makes America special, IS the Constitution, and the government which it founded. The separation of powers, the mandated responsiveness to the people, the protection of the oppressed, the Bill of Rights – that is what the United States is. That is what the rest of the world envied. Not fields and dogs and sunsets, because every fucking country in the world has those, and some are prettier. Without the United States, America is just another patch of land filled with squabbling and destitute peasants, no better than most and worse than some.

The Constitution—the heart and soul of the United States—exists with the express purpose of using government to defend the people from the depredations of banks, aristocrats, and churches. While it has had an imperfect record with these, it worked well enough to make America the greatest of nations for a long, long time.

Trump and Musk are the vile faces of an evil consortium of fundamentalist churches, rapacious corporations, and vicious plutocrats—all the evils men like Jefferson and Madison wanted to free the citizenry from. The reason Trump and Musk are dismantling government isn’t to save the taxpayers money—they have zero interest in that, and quite the opposite, in fact. They want to create a power vacuum and fill it themselves, and put every public need on a “make it pay” basis. Instead of a not-for-profit service such as social security or medicare, they want to run it on a 30% markup, and regard the actual services as outlays that need to be minimized for the sake of profit.

We’re rapidly approaching a point where all the dog and sunset-loving cardboard patriots have to decide if they love a rapidly diminishing America, or want to fight for the United States.

I know which line they may cross: when they declare that they are no longer obliged to observe court rulings. That’s where I begin to advocate the overthrow of Musk and Trump by any means possible. At that point, they are outlaw, and enemies of the United States.

If people want to keep the America they love, they may well have to take up arms on behalf of the United States.

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Let the Lunacy Begin! — Chaotic Trump’s chaotic start

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

January 30th 2025

“A 100 metre-wide asteroid has triggered global planetary defence procedures for the first time after telescope observations revealed it has a chance of colliding with Earth in 2032…Based on measurements gathered so far, the asteroid has a 1.3% chance of smashing into Earth on 22 December 2032, or put another way, a nearly 99% probability of barrelling past without incident.”

My response to that January 29th Guardian article was “Sure. Why the hell not?” Figure Trump will have been just reelected President for life and beyond on a unanimous vote from Congress and the Supreme Court. Most of the US will be an Ayn Rand hellscape where trillionaires amuse themselves by having captive workers put on sex shows. Churches will be clamoring for the newest bible from Lord Elon Musk.

An asteroid capable of wiping out a major city would be a welcome distraction.

Granted, it’s been a bit chaotic the past 10 days or so. Trump talked about shock and awe, which was one way of describing his blitzkrieg-style power grab.

First there was the blanket pardon. Trump is lazy and incompetent, and thought it was too cumbersome to vet all the 1600 or so people convicted for actions taken on January 6th. While questionable ethically (pardons are not supposed to be based on politics or transactional) most of the people pardoned committed minor offenses and some had even done their time. Others where vicious criminals, guilty of anything from sedition to child rape. The head of the Proud Boys was shopped by his own son, and rightly so. Now out, he’s threatening and trying to track down his son. Another died in a shootout with police, and another convicted of forcible child rape and sentenced to 17 years. Fortunately, more responsible adults have kept his ass in prison.

Then there was the since-rescinded spending freeze which caused 48 hours of utter chaos. Matthew J. Vaeth wrote the memo (given the secrecy and buffoonery of the administration, it’s impossible to guess if Trump even knew about it) even though he was only acting interim director of the Office of Management and Budget. But he was also one of the authors of Project 2025, and made his fascist impulses known in the memo, writing “The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.” Just another howling Heritage Foundation right-wing nut.

It was blatantly unconstitutional, of course. Congress appropriates spending; the chief executive branch only administers it, and has no say in second guessing the Congressional budget. A few years back there was a move to give the president line-item veto power, and it was slapped down by the courts as unconstitutional.

Then there was the abjectly silly attempt to get government employees a seven-month buyout option, a bonus for early retirement. Again, totally illegal. This scheme sprung from the noble brow of one Elon Musk, who made a similar offer to Twitter employees when he bought the media, a first step toward turning it into the plane of Nazi vomit it is today. He even used the same title: “A Fork in the Road” for both memos. Musk wants to do for America what he did for Twitter. X it out and replace it with…well, a right wing shit pile.

Rachel Maddow noted that JD Vance, who once said, “So step one in the process is to totally replace — like rip out like a tumor — the current American leadership class, and then reinstall some sense of American political religion.”, was almost wholly backed in his unlikely political career by Peter Theil protégé Curtis Yarvin, who wants to rip out the entire government and replace it with a corporation. He concludes, “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”

Personally, I have a phobia of dictators, I admit it. Never turned out very nicely. And this clown is holding the strings of the vice President.

Trump’s enablers want a Unified Executive, which is a fancy way of saying “Dictator.” Trump may be a bit vague on that, but I’m sure he likes the sound of a scheme that means unlimited profit. He’s like a Ferengi from Star Trek, only not ethically limited by the Rules of Acquisition.

There’s the start of the mass deportation. The claim is he’s deporting criminals. In reality, most of those being deported have no criminal record, and contrary to what the hate mongers on the right claim, the act of being in the country without permission is not an actual crime. People who call them “illegal people” are, wittingly or not, just using the tired old Nazi tactic of dehumanizing their victims. And as for “anchor babies” (Barron Trump qualifies for that term), even this sad spectacle of a Supreme Court is going to find it hard to opine that the 14th amendment can be erased by an executive order from a nutball president.

That all said, there are two things going on for which Trump is not responsible.

He didn’t cause yesterday’s horrible mid-air collision in Washington, DC or even make it more likely. Yes, he forced the head of the FAA to resign, but that was just last week and couldn’t have affected day-to-day operations in the control towers. It was just pure bad luck. Trump, of course, tried blaming the crash on “Biden policies” because Trump is a morally empty dirtbag.

Nor is Trump responsible for the current price of eggs. That’s almost entirely because of the fast-spreading bird flu, which has resulted in the deaths of some 130 million hens. Trump is no more at fault for that than Biden was, but unlike MAGAts, I’m honest enough to not base a blame game just on which party is in the White House.

That said, expect produce prices to explode, since crops are rotting in the fields because of Trump’s pogrom against foreign workers. And I have little hope of any positive approach to bird flu, either.

Four more years of this craziness. At least.

Say! Is there any way to speed up that asteroid?

 

 

 

 

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Springtime for Trumpie and USA — Winter for … well, everybody

Springtime for Trumpie and USA

Winter for … well, everybody

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

January 19th 2025

It really does feel like March 1933, doesn’t it? Hitler has just seized power. In America, the country is teetering on the verge of collapse, and a dozen states are no longer accepting US currency, opting for state script instead. A third of the banks have collapsed, and millions are starving, desperate, homeless. The Republicans are saying the poor are refusing to buy food or pay rent in order to punish the rich. A new guy, an affable and seemingly shallow New York pol named Roosevelt is about to be inaugurated, and the same people beating their breasts over starving children refusing to keep millionaires comfortable are warning the country will collapse, banks will fail, and people will suffer greatly—just like they did under Republicans, only they leave that last bit out and hope nobody notices. Meanwhile, Japan has expanded over much of west Asia and is making little effort to conceal its plans for the Philippines, Indonesia, and even Australia.

We’re at about January 1933 if the parallels hold up. Things are bad and look to get far worse in the near future.

American voters were seduced by an unholy coalition of plutocrats and zealots, who gleefully encouraged people to be their worst. Hate immigrants, gay and trans people, liberals, non-Christians and anyone with a good education. They believe such ridiculous lies as immigrants have a higher crime rate and eat people’s cats and dogs; gays and trans are forcing children to have sex-change operations in secret, liberals want us all to live in caves and hug trees, and non-Christians are completely amoral and most are terrorists. And worst of all, the educated sneer at morons and use big words. It’s why flat earthers hate astrophysicists.

It’s not really a surprise that a crowd like that would vomit up a con artist, a rapist, a philanderer and a felon to the oval office—again. What is shocking is that there are so many Low People (as Stephen King once famously referred to them as) that they could do it. I think a lot of fundamentalists are correct that only God can make people good. Take anyone who thinks that only an invisible, silent sky pixie in his head stops him from stealing, raping, cheating and killing, and give him permission to be a scumbag in the name of god and country, and you end up with a depressingly large number of scumbags.

How low? Well, look at the politicians who watched the Los Angeles fires and thought to themselves, “Hey, I can use that to blackmail the country into doing what I want!” Sure, they’ll provide aid. But they want … conditions.

It’s about as low as an American politician can possibly sink. Donald Trump is one of those politicians, of course, but that’s no surprise. There are mob bosses, serial killers and CEOs with more principles and decency. A lot of it comes from states that California has sent many billions of dollars helping after disasters, such as Florida. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Scumsuckers) said, “I believe that if a state is so grossly mismanaged that the initial disaster is not quickly contained, then we have a responsibility to do common-sense things.” OK, but remember your whole fucking state is going to be underwater by the end of the century, and you’ll be begging for our help. “Rebuild maybe so that the conditions are such that the threat from fire is lessened so that we won’t have to do it again,” added Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-Mewling Hypocrites). Have you asked California for aid in hardening your structures against hurricanes, Carly? Oh, and what’s your stance on immigrants? Ready to throw those whiny ungrateful Cubans out?

At least Florida, like California, contributes more in revenues to the country then it gets back. It’s small compared to the $85-120 billion California overpays, but at least Florida carries its own weight. The loudest whiners come from pauper states that take far more than they give back. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Blub blub blub), a shell of a man emptied by toxic religion and subservience to Donald Trump, indignantly demands conditions. Say, Mike, how much did California demand in return for helping after Katrina? Or any of the other dozens of catastrophes your state has suffered?

Gavin Newsom said of Trump last year, “Everything was a transaction against his own citizens.”

Indeed. Well, expect more of that. Trump is out to punish anyone who didn’t vote for him. States, individuals, it doesn’t matter. He feels victimized because people hate him for being a hateful person, and he is out for revenge. It’s all very noble, you know.

But Trump and his followers have various weaknesses to exploit. The MAGAts and zealots are of a fundamentalist mindset, and are rapidly developing factions and schisms over such issues as whether there are “good immigrants” versus the regular kind, or how much government should be destroyed. (Most, but far from all, are smart enough to want to keep the parts of government they benefit from.) Those can be exploited. The billionaires have a united front right now, but wait until they start seeing others getting favored treatment, whether they actually are or not.

And finally, Trump himself has myriad weaknesses. He’s vain and cowardly. He just moved his inauguration inside and semi-private, supposedly because of cold weather (24F, or -5C, but who could have guessed it would be cold in January?) but I suspect he feared a small crowd would be there, or worse, a large unfriendly crowd from the 100,000 strong demonstration held two days before. He also doesn’t hesitate to screw over his helpers and followers. He’s infamous for that. Tens of thousands of people spend large amounts of money-in some cases life savings—to bear witness to his glorious restoration to the throne, only to have him cancel just 36 hours prior. Even the given reason was stupid. And threatening America’s best allies seems like a really dumb idea, especially given the quality of the few “world leaders” who do support him in Russia, China, Hungary or North Korea.

And you’re seen the quality of his cabinet and other position nominees. You could find a better collection of people in the county drunk tank on a Saturday night with a full moon. Criminals, bankrupts, white supremacists, conspiracy nuts and fools. It’s like each was made from a shaving off Donald Trump himself.

Lastly, there’s Trump’s competence. Or lack thereof. His followers are going to be very upset that many of his “first day” promises are vaporware, idiot ideas aimed at angry morons. His followers, as is usually the case, will be the first to get hit by his supposed brainstorms. Pissing off an angry, ignorant mob that has already been artificially riled up by propaganda seems like a really dumb idea.

As for the rest of us, resist in any way possible. Be rude. Be firm. Make life as difficult as possible for these idiots. And maybe we can salvage the country by doing so.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Trump and the Seven Calls — What are he and Putin up to?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 10th 2024

When Bob Woodward, renowned investigative journalist, revealed in his just-published book War that Trump had secretly sent Vladimir Putin seven COVID testing machines, possibly dooming hundreds of Americans, I shook my head in disgust. But I didn’t expect much to come of it.

Trump would issue a blanket denial, and his mindless supporters would immediately reduce it to the level of “he said – he said.” A normal person wouldn’t have much trouble of weighing the veracity of Bob Woodward against that of Donald Trump, but Trump’s followers have pretty much abdicated all human skills of judgment. They would dismiss it, just as they have dozens of other stories about Trump, many of them proven, that would have destroyed the career of any public figure who wasn’t a cult leader. Cults are dangerous, and about one third of American voters have been brainwashed into becoming followers of a cult.

But then something unexpected occurred. The Kremlin weighed in on the story. Per Bloomberg News, “Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that the tests had been sent, but denied the book’s claim that the two leaders had spoken by phone several times since Trump left office.”

I had just expected the Kremlin would issue a denial, or more likely, just ignore the story altogether. After all, the Russian disinformation media loves to portray Trump as a brave hero beset by liberals and Jews in the American press. This would have fed right into this narrative. (One Russian outlet today managed to find a way to portray Hurricane Milton as being somehow Jewish! Dot’s funny…Milton doesn’t look Jewish…)

That was devastating to Trump, and not because I expect the scales to fall from the eyes of his followers. That’s not going to happen overnight. But it struck me as a clear signal that Putin and his mob have written Trump off as a useful asset and no longer expect him to regain the White House. Clear and independent thinking around exactly staples of the Putin regime, but careful analysis and calculation are. They no longer think Trump is useful. Oh, they’ll keep spreading disinformation on his behalf and supporting him because anything that destabilizing to the United States is for the good, but they no longer take him seriously as an ally. (They already reported today that Milton destroyed Disneyland, which will come as a surprise to the City of Anaheim in California). Keep up the good work, Ivan. There will be an extra potato in your paysack this week!

Now, about the seven calls. There may be tapes—there’s reason to suspect both the FBI and CIA have been monitoring Trump’s calls abroad because of suspicion he is a foreign agent. That’s speculation, of course, but not wholly unwarranted speculation.

But it was JD Vance who tried to ride to the rescue aboard the epileptic cow he calls a brain, telling reporters, “I honestly didn’t know that Bob Woodward was still alive until you just asked me that question.” Dismissing Woodward as a hack, he went on to say, “Even if it’s true, look, is there something wrong with speaking to world leaders? No. Is there anything wrong with engaging in diplomacy?”

Well, actually, yeah, there is. Trump is a private citizen, and there’s this thing called the Logan Act. It says, “Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.” It was passed in 1799, so if any of the stooges on the Supreme Court are minded to bring up their originalist bullshit, they might consider that the people who passed the Act were either founders or knew them personally. You might think someone running for Vice President with an ailing 78 year old man a heartbeat away from Ayn Rand heaven would know that, yeah?

Vance clearly thought that was a valid defense. Vance is a moron. But it wasn’t a confession the phone calls took place. The twin enigmas-wrapped-in-a-riddle-wrapped-in-a-mystery, the Kremlin and Mar-A-Lago, have both denied the calls took place.

But Donald couldn’t resist the opportunity to swan about in his own imagined importance, trumpeting it was “a good thing, not a bad thing,” that he got along with Putin “very well.” “A lot of people think that’s a bad thing,” Trump said. “No, no, that’s a great thing.”

I’m guessing those calls did take place. And they didn’t benefit the United States in any way. Hopefully the FBI and CIA are on this, and we won’t have to wait three years while Merrick Garland dithers.

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