Category: History

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The Abyss Stares Back – If Friedrich Nietzsche wrote comedy, America 2020 would be it

The Abyss Stares Back

If Friedrich Nietzsche wrote comedy, America 2020 would be it

October 17th, 2020

Well, nobody said the home stretch of the 2020 election was going to be boring. OK, so we all thought the polls would be a lot closer now than they are, portending as they do an utter bloodbath for the GOP. And of course we all worried about how many dirty tricks Trump and the GOP had. Some were predictable: the Hunter Biden “bombshell” in which a computer turned up at some repair shop on which there was supposedly a whole bunch of emails that said stuff like “Hey, my dad wants you to have a bunch of military secrets if you’ll just fire this one judge.” Some of the emails were tracked back to a Russian disinformation outfit, but what really made the whole thing moot was that the right-winger truther who owned the repair shop said the computer, along with two others, were dropped off by someone who could have possibly been Hunter Biden on April 12th, 2019, but the firmware on both the computer BIOS and the hard drive showed that the system had been manufactured on April 19th 2019, a week after Hunter dropped it off. My god, the man can TIME TRAVEL! He’s an existential threat to the entire universe, and you libtard sheeplings are just sitting around making Guiliani jokes!

Voting fuckery is widespread, of course. Abbott, the fascist running Texas, arbitrarily decreed that each county should only have one dropbox. Other GOP states reduced the number of polling places, resulting in line of voters in scenes one expects in fascist banana republics. Like the sort the GOP wants to turn all of America into. In California, GOP outlaws set out phony dropboxes.

Trump has openly said that one reason he wants the godstruck vacuity Barrett on the court by the election is in case he needs the court to rule that those silly old votes don’t matter, and the GOP gets to appoint electors in order to ensure a Trump victory. Given the size of the popular blowout the polls forecast, such a move would result in a popular revolt and even possibly a civil war, but Trump figures he has command over the military, and should the Pentagon decide that they promised to spend some quality time with their cats rather than gunning down Americans, he also has a pack of heavily armed street nazis.

It’s not clear what the military would do in the face of a coup. Trump is commander in chief; but his orders would be illegal if not flat-out treasonous. The street nazis would be faced with a situation where even if they did prevail, they would have absolutely no popular support, even among most Trump supporters. And a hundred million or so people looking for ways to ambush and kill them. They might be vicious crazy bastards, but they aren’t stupid. The leaders know they can’t possibly hold power with a coup that has absolutely no popular support.

Trump himself may be aware of that, or at least suspect it. He joked the other day about leaving the country if he lost the election because losing to “Sleepy Joe” would be so embarrassing. Trump very famously does not joke, but he does have plenty of reasons to flee if he loses. There’s a tidal wave of criminal and civil proceedings awaiting him the minute Biden is sworn in as President, along with many angry creditors, including quite possibly organized crime.

He may well owe hundreds of millions of dollars to Russian interests, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Putin has assured him that if he defects with most or all of America’s military and strategic secrets, Putin would take care of all those nagging debts and set him up in a dacha on the Black Sea. Trump would certainly be willing to entertain such an offer, especially if Putin assured him he would be a hero, nay, a GOD to the peoples of all the Russias, and they would praise him and lionize him for the rest of his life. Oh, and think of all the American liberals who would be sooooo pissed off if he did that!

That would leave Mike Pence as acting president, and he would be an extraordinarily unpopular leader of a country in chaos, head of a party reviled by 70% of the population as traitors. Pence will try to present himself as an expression of God’s Will, and when that falls apart, he’ll resign. The Senate will note that Trump didn’t formally resign, and vote that treason and fleeing the country are not impeachable offenses. It’s not like the GOP will have anything to lose at this point, and chaos might result in a long-hoped-for corporate takeover of the country. Except the country would be disintegrating at that point, with several powerful blue states voting to secede. The Senate will then convict Trump, accept Pence’s resignation, and dump the whole mess in Pelosi’s lap. That may be enough to avert collapse, assuming the Qanon nuts don’t just assume that Pelosi is an intergalactic lizard with a taste for human babies who wants to take their guns. Which she is, of course. The tail is a dead giveaway.

Now, people have said that I’m too conventional, too cautious in my political forecasts, and that may be true. I didn’t even mention North Korea invading the state of Washington, or proof that there is no such thing as COVID-19 coming out. Those could muddy the waters, sure. But I live and die by Occam’s Razor, and manage to look unshaven despite that.

So there’s your immediate future, America. Jokes by Friedrich Nietzsche, screenplay by Garth Ennis, directed by David Cronenberg.

Get a good night’s sleep, folks. You’re gonna need it.

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The Burning Man – Trump’s 42 days in the desert

October 10th 2020

The real polls are shifting, and the shift is enough that I’m starting to feel reasonably secure that the Republican fascists may not be able to steal this election. I figure that what with the gerrymandering (both built-in with the Electoral College or created by corrupt state legislatures), the powerful propaganda arm, the sabotage of mail-in voting and further sabotage of in person voting, the Dems would need about an 8 point lead in the polls to actually win over the fascists.

Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com, the most accurate of the aggregate pollsters, had Biden’s lead over Trump rock steady between 5.5 points and 7.5 points for three months following the end of primary season. Normally, that would be an unassailable lead, but the extent of Republican malfeasance made it, at best, too close to call.

At the beginning of the GOP convention, it was at a seven point lead. The Democrats had run a extremely well-crafted four-day infomercial, and the GOP was going for a semi-live show with small audiences rather than the virtual effort by the Dems. Manly men don’t fear the reaper, even if at the time it had already killed some 170,000 Americans. The polls, I reasoned, would have to be above five points for Biden to for him have any chance at all to make up the three more points needed to overcome Republican cheating and lying. And given how entrenched both sides appeared to be, that would take a miracle.

But a week after the convention, the polls hadn’t budged. Seven points. The American public, which largely avoided the four day Donald Trump Show, was unimpressed by all the screaming and lying the GOP put on.

I watched, and during the show I tried pretending to think like an average Republican voter. China and Iran wanted war with us. Russia was our friend, and we could deal with North Korea as equals. The deficit didn’t matter, and Trump was good for the economy. Trump was a godly man who just happened to be a genius at business negotiations. Dems wanted to take everyone’s guns and tax us all to death. Liberals really did sell children as sex slaves in the basement of pizza joints…well, ok. Not even Republican voters believed that one. But they did believe that Hunter Biden was up to no good, abusing his father’s connections, but Don Jr, Eric and Ivanka weren’t.

Even trying to wear that mind set, I found the show unconvincing. From a more sane perspective, the show was an orgy of loud lunacy.

I was pleased, but I misinterpreted that unwavering result. I assumed it meant the body politic had become utterly intransigent, and nothing was going to change anyone’s mind. Anyone who still supported Trump at that point either dismissed or accepted the utter chaos, incompetence and dishonestly of his administration. Hell, the First Lady could tear up the Rose Garden, or get taped saying “Fuck Christmas” and it wouldn’t change anything, right? Well, funny story…

The turning point came an eternity ago—September 20th. That’s when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Yeah, just three weeks ago. Hard to believe, isn’t it?

Her death horrified liberal Americans. What followed horrified most other people. Trump and McConnell, in a massive fireworks burst of hypocrisy and willingness to commit a massive power grab, immediately nominated a replacement for Ginsburg. Not just another tiresome and in all likelihood corrupt neoliberal hack like his first two; this time he picked a god-struck woman whose closest literary cognate is the mad Ignatius J. Reilly from Confederacy of Dunces. The cult she is a member of apparently formed the basis of the cult that destroyed America and enslaved women in Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale. Her position is so extreme it overcame America’s reluctance to attack Christians on the basis of religion.

The willingness of the Republicans to set aside legislation desperately needed to keep thousands of people alive, fed and in shelters in order to ram though the nomination of this viciously unsuitable woman dismayed a large majority of voters—including Republicans, who uneasily remember the Republican stance of no nominations during a presidential campaign that the Republicans used to ignore the nomination of Merrick Garland in Obama’s final year. It was such rank hypocrisy that even the shills at Fox News had trouble selling it, pretending instead that the Garland nomination never happened.

Then the presidential debate showed the world that Trump was a braying, vacuous bully with no answers but lots of empty demagoguery.

Then he got sick. Under just about any other circumstances, a sick leader would have gotten a sympathy bounce in the polls. But his attitude had been so reckless and foolhardy, and so damaging to the country, that most people thought he brought it on himself. People were appalled at the sight of him recklessly endangering the lives of others around him in his mad drive to show that this disease that has killed 215,000 people in his own country is no big deal and can be safely ignored.

There were a dozen other self-immolations. Dissing the troops. Attacking Gold Star families. And finally, becoming totally unhinged and largely incoherent.

So yeah, suddenly, Trump has managed to fall to 10.1 points behind Biden. It seemed impossible three weeks ago, but Biden now seems to be beyond the point where Republicans can steal it.

But remember. This all happened in three weeks. That’s an eternity in politics. We still have three more weeks to go before the election.

Don’t relax.

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Trump Hits the Wall — Flacks find defending his record…difficult

October 7th 2020

Every once in a while, one of those endless screeds that right wingers love to pass around comes across my screen, and I think, “Oh, what the hell. Let’s blow this ignorant dirtbag out of the water.” I’m just a sucker for low-hanging fruit, I guess.

Here’s this week’s screed, which the author pulled down himself within an hour. I guess he had some regrets. Well, we all do.

ATTN LIBERALS: I call this the Biden Challenge!. I Am going to list 25 Things that Trump has done to improve all of our lives as well as the entire world! The challenge to you is to see if you can do the same for BIDEN!.. And you can even use Biden’s whole 47 years as A base!. As well as what you think he will do as Pres, So here we go!!… 1) Lowered Taxes for all of us ( Not just the rich ). 2) Killed Solimantie 3) Killed Al Baghdadi 4) Defeated 100% of ISIS 5) Moved our embassy to Jerusalem 6) Rebuilt our military 7) Got us out of the paris accord 8) Got rid of NAFTA 9) Replaced it with a new trade deal the USMCA ( Much Better for the USA ) that required a deal with Mexico And Canada 10) Got out of the IRAN Nuke deal 11) Has made the EU And Germany pay there share for defence 12) Cut regulations to allow our economy to boom 13) Made the USA #1 in Gas production in the world 14) Broke records on the stock markets almost daily 15) Best unemployment rates for Blacks ever 16) And Asians 17) And Mexicans 18) Is building the wall and securing our southern border 19) Little rocket man is Not Testing Nukes and more ( For Now ) 20) Has been tough on China And has made the USA hundreds of Billions in Tariffs ( 1st Pres to do so) 21) Gave Billions from the tariffs to our farmers that were targeted by China to make them right !!. 22) The Trump tax cuts allowed large co, to return to the US an build there new factories and businesses here. Creating good paying jobs. 23 ) wages are up under Trump !!. 24) Created a new branch of our military The Space Force 25) And pre Covid19 we had the best economy ever and had no signs of slowing down. And he can do it again. There is the 1st 25 I can come up with another. Lets see what you can do with Biden . I bet none of you will. But look forward to see if you even try !!

OK, I’ll take that one on:

1) Trump lowered taxes 93% for the top 10%. He greatly reduced benefits for the rest of us, exploded the deficit to quadruple what it was under Obama. Biden led the task force that guided Obama in lowering the annual deficit over his last five years. 2) Soleimani was engaged in talks with US when Trump ordered his assassination. It was a cowardly act by the US. 3) Biden was part of the task force that killed Osama bin Laden 4) ISIS is still quite alive and just as dangerous. Taking the cities didn’t kill the movement or the philosophy, and only a daft fool would think otherwise. 5) Moving the capital to Jerusalem was a Netanyahu-inspired bit of political theater that guaranteed no peaceful ‘two-state’ solution in the middle east. 6) The military didn’t need rebuilding, but it does after three years of Trump. Morale has never been lower than it is now, what with Trump sucking up to US enemies and disrespecting the troops. 7) The Paris accord will go ahead without America, and guarantee America will just be left behind economically, outside looking in. 8 & 9) Replaced it with NAFTA II which had only minor cosmetic differences 10) Trump violated Iran nuke deal which allows Europe to assure that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons, and now America has no say in a process to prevent trouble there 11) Utter nonsense. Trump weakened NATO, to Putin’s delight. 12) Cut regulations on environment, health and safety. Regulations that saved Americans over a trillion dollars a year in health costs and personal safety. 13) Fossil fuels are the answer to climate change, or so Trump would tell us. 14) We know the billionaires and big corporations made out great. At our expense 15, 16, 17 & 18) Black unemployment briefly was good, but nothing to do with Trump. It was only a hair better than it was the day he took office, but it’s in the crapper now. Unemployment is well over 8% overall now, and not likely to improve until the US is ready to deal with COVID. The wall (the 2,500 mile wall that Mexico was going to pay for) is all of thirty miles long, and some of it is already falling down because the contractor was crooked. 19) North Korea tested a nuke earlier this summer. Kim Jong Un regards Trump as a cheap date—which he is. 20) Tariffs are a tax American consumers pay. Anyone with a high-school education knows that. 21) Farmers got a few billion in aid, but lost hundreds of billions due to protectionist programs. They are not happy. 22) Nobody forced manufacturing to leave—they just wanted cheap labor and no health and safety regulations. They screwed America, not the Chinese. And they haven’t come back. They’re parasites, and America isn’t a good host. 23) Wages are stagnant under Trump and now dropping overall because of unemployment. The bottom half of the working community only got 20% of the raises back when they were still happening. 24) Space Force is a joke. 25) Economy grew faster in the final three years of Obama/Biden than it did the first three years of Trumppence. Again, Trump was just riding Obama’s coattails.

I’m guessing you’ll run away now, but I just refuted every single one of your talking points.

I won’t play the silly game of “What did Biden do with his presidential powers” because Biden was never more than one of a hundred Senators and then Vice-President, a notoriously powerless position. But I will note some other things Trump has done that Biden has not done in 46 years—or ever.

Things Biden hasn’t done that Trump has:

He’s never had to pay off porn stars to cover up sex affairs with them weeks after the birth of his son.

He’s never had to pay out a settlement for swindling black people out of fair access to rentals.

He’s never had to settle for a billion dollars for a class-action suit for swindling people through a fake university.

He’s never been banned from ever running a charity again because he swindled a children’s charity.

He’s never killed over 150,000 people pretending that a national health crisis isn’t real because that would be bad for business.

He’s never turned America into a pathetic joke by sucking up to filth like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un or Rodrigo Duterte.

He’s never tried to blackmail, extort or subjugate the American people.

He’s never threatened to “lock up” his political opponents, or found a corrupt lackey to investigate political opponents in hopes to locking them up.

He’s never been impeached.

He’s never been accused to cheating the government out of hundreds of millions in taxes.

He’s never made a media circus out of cheating on his wife.

He’s never called for the execution of young men even after their innocence was proven.

He’s never tried to get government employees to sign NDA’s to cover up his criminal acts.

Biden is a decent person who, at worst, will be an average president.

Trump is utter filth and he has been an unmitigated disaster for and to America.

 

So: That’s what I can do with Biden. I bet no Trumpkin will dare challenge it!

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Trump and COVID — Republicans prove that yes, there is a pandemic.

October 2nd 2020

The news that Trump’s open contempt for science and public safety finally caught up to him is one of the most expected shocks in history. For the past six months or so, I’ve expected to wake up to a headline reading “Trump rushed to Walter Reed with Respiratory Distress.” Or those in utter awe at my prognostication abilities, I also predicted the Dodgers would have a good season, California would have wildfires in the late summer, and bell bottoms would make a comeback. I am like unto a God.

Historians will never figure out why the Trump administration was openly contemptuous about wearing masks, still the single most effective way we have to slow the spread of COVID-19. After all, psychiatrists can’t figure out the motivation now.

Authoritarians are famous for denying the obvious when it’s obvious that things are going to hell and it puts them in a bad light. The story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned is apocryphal, but Roman leaders told many reassuring lies in the centuries of Rome’s decline. Hitler pretended all was well and German victory inevitable as late as April, 1945. Baghdad Bob swore there were no American troops were in Baghdad and what’s more, Homer Simpson was screwing their wives while they fought overseas.

But few governments told such transparent lies with so little hope of a good outcome under circumstances that weren’t yet dire.

It’s a sign of the intellectual rot infecting American society that conspiracy theories already abound. Some Republicans have claimed that liberals put the virus in a solution and painted it on Trump’s microphone and dais before the debate. (The only way it would work in reality would be if they painted it on Putin’s penis.) Another was that the Chinese somehow infected Trump because he was about to reveal that they deliberately released the virus.

Just to show that the idiocy is bipartisan, some liberals are claiming Trump is faking the whole thing as a sympathy ploy and/or an excuse to skip the debate.

Well, the good news (sorta) is that with two dozen or so people who have been exposed to Trump getting sick themselves make the odds that Trump is “faking it” vanishingly small. I doubt we’ll get much in the way of accurate and full information going forward. That isn’t even just a matter of Trump’s veracity: historically Presidents and their staff have lied about their health. Few people knew Harrison was dying until after he died. Teddy Roosevelt hid an injury from an assassination attempt and gave a speech. (Points for a gutsy move, though!). Woodrow Wilson had a major stroke and his WH concealed his incapacitation for almost 18 months. Eisenhower concealed the severity of his heart attack because he believed the thought of a Nixon presidency would panic the country.

But with this administration, I have little hope of any transparency. The Trump crowd lie just because they lie. They don’t even need a reason.

Despite his general health, the odds at this point are in Trump’s favor. The disease kills about 5% of those who catch it. For someone in Trump’s observable condition, that rises to about 15%. And given that he is showing symptoms, it’s likely that he will have knock-on health problems for the rest of his life. It’s reasonable to expect that he will walk out of Walter Reed in due course—a few days, a few weeks, a few months. But he won’t be the same man who went in today.

Just the fact that he got sick is going to utterly destroy the anti-mask, anti-science Republican movement that is the main reason COVID-19 has been and remains out of control in America. People who persuaded themselves that it is all a hoax are going to have to reassess that view. Trump’s open contempt for masks and social distancing have caught up to him. People may continue viewing evolution and climate change as commie plots, but the fact that it has laid their hero low means they will have to be circumspect about this one. Some of the smarter ones will start wearing masks. The dumber ones will isolate into non-mask communities, and evolution will take its course. It won’t cure America of its fevered infection of utter stupidity, but it will put a dent in it.

We’re already in one of the most chaotic periods in American history since the Civil War, and this will make things that much worse. If he’s in the hospital for more than a week, Republicans will say the elections must be postponed. Trump will probably get a sympathy bounce in the polls, but it’s unlikely that will translate to more votes. Everyone will be watching Pence for signs he’s preparing to become America’s 46th president. With Trump ill and the nation in crisis, the grotesque drive to rubber stamp Amy Barrett onto the Court may have to actually suspend. For one thing, Trump’s reckless approach to social distancing has infected a number of Senators, all Republican. (Barrett has been exposed to Trump and his Petri dish of a White House over the past week, but there are reports that she tested positive for Covid last summer and is (presumably) immune.

We can’t control events stemming from this latest crisis except for one: Don’t be stupid. Mask up, keep your distance.

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Amy Coney Barrett — Godstruck, Authoritarian, and part of Scalia’s nonsense doctrine

September 26th 2020

Amy Coney Barrett once said that we should always remember that a “legal career is but a means to an end . . . and that end is building the Kingdom of God.”

This, by itself, should be a disqualifying statement for a Supreme Court nominee. The role of any American judge is to uphold the law as it exists under the United States Constitution. Not the bible. Not some tooth fairy interpretation of the universe.

The Constitution doesn’t mention any kingdoms of god. Indeed, it only mentions religion twice, second in in the well known “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and first in the main body of the Constitution, as the only clause that cannot be amended: “but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”. The joint purpose of both clauses is to prevent government from favoring any religion over any other religion, and to prevent religion from using government for its own empowerment.

Interpreting American law as a device for the establishment of a religious kingdom is an undesirable trait in a municipal night court judge; it’s a horror show in the mind of a Supreme Court justice. Justices interpret the Constitution, which doesn’t mention God, Allah, Thor, Coyote or any other being as being superior to itself.

Kingdoms of God—i.e., theocracies—are without exception repressive and cruel. There is no room for individual rights in such, and one can search scriptures of any religion in vain for mention of freedom of speech, freedom of worship, or selecting one’s own representatives. Indeed, most scriptures have very long lists of ideas and opinions that can mandate being put to death. In so-called “Christian” lands, the Catholic Church has a particularly bad record over the years of mass killings, pogroms, and terrorization of any who didn’t worship as they wanted.

The very first thing Barrett’s “Kingdom of God” would have to deal with would be the non-believers, the ‘blasphemers’ and the ‘perverts’. The results would be bloody and vicious, as bad as what we see in Saudi Arabia or Iraq today.

The second big problem with this nomination is that Barrett, a clerk for Tony Scalia, adopted his amazing nonsense known as “Originalism” in which the SC justices are supposed to divine the original intent of the authors of the Constitution.

Aside from the insanity of trying to divine the inner thoughts and hopes of men through their 18th century verbiage, there’s one significant problem with original intent: it doesn’t exist.

Nearly every line, every clause of the Constitution was vigorously and sometimes vociferously debated. Even the parts of the first Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, that they decided to blend into the new document were argued over. After all, the Articles had failed, which is why, ten years after winning independence, the colonies were still trying to figure out a new government.

The Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers show the amazing diversity of opinions that had to be appeased, assuaged, and mixed into a main document that wound up in a lot of spots being a lot less than clear or even coherent. The whole thing was written by committee, for Pete’s sake! The Bill of Rights was an afterthought, and it, too, was subject to a wide range of input as to its form, or even if it should exist at all. Some feared that government might conclude that rights were limited to those in the Bill of Rights, and so as an after-afterthought, stating “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Then it occurred to the Founders that this meant people could start assigning themselves rights all willy-nilly, so they had an after-after-afterthought, and added the Tenth amendment, which read, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” It took endless debates about Nullification and a Civil War for them to realize that States should not be allowed to override the rights guaranteed to all by the Constitution.

Given what a dog’s breakfast the creation of the Constitution was, it’s a bit of a wonder it’s worked as well as it has, really.

But it’s utter insanity to claim there was some sort of monolithic “original intent” in the Constitution.

Finally, Barrett is a Dominionist. This is the “Gott uber alles” crowd who think their particular religion has supremacy over the Constitution (despite the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution, the one part where the intent of the Founders is easy to discern!).

They want to blend the incoherence of the original intent crowd with the far greater incoherence of the bible literalists to produce a governing body that is morally bankrupt, intellectually absurd, and as capricious as a cow on ice, with belief and governance combining to each thoroughly corrupt the other.

Barrett is a contemptible and calculated sop to the crowd that has America’s worst interests at heart, a corrupt and cynical ploy for the support of people who really don’t like the idea of a free and independent United States.

Are there any Republicans with the patriotism, courage, and intellect to reject this pathetic bible flogger?

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The Cultivation of America — Teaching free people to drink Kool-aid

The Cultivation of America

Teaching free people to drink Kool-aid

September 18th, 2020

As this is being written, the horribly sad news broke that the great Ruth Bader Ginsberg has died from complications of pancreatic cancer. An extraordinarily brave and determined woman, she represents the best America will be.

Now is the time to remind Republicans that eight months before the election in 2016, they announced they would not consider a nomination to the court in an election year. If their lust for power causes them to forget that stand, remind them that people have had enough of this criminal and corrupt reign of GOP power, and an attempt to ram some third-rate Nazi onto the court over the next 45 days will result in severe civil strife.

Talking with Trump supporters, one is struck by the things they believe that are patently false. The economy is not great under Trump. In fact, it didn’t grow as fast in the first three years of Trump as it did in the final three years of Obama. And the fourth year has been a catastrophe, one created by the pandemic but made far worse by the Republicans taking advantage of the crisis to steal trillions from the country. Biden isn’t a socialist. I’m a socialist, and I wish to hell he was, but he isn’t. Neither of us are communists. Wearing a mask is no more an infringement on rights than requiring shoes in a restaurant, or having to drive on the left-hand side of the road. Nobody’s coming for their guns, or making them be atheist, or forcing them into same-sex marriage.

The range of belief is from simply uninformed to utterly ridiculous. Obama isn’t a Moslem, and nor is his minister. Antifa isn’t intent on burning Oregon down. Trump isn’t one of the common men. Not unless you pronounce the first “m” like an “n”. He didn’t get rid of the deficit—he quadrupled it. YOUR taxes didn’t go down, but he wants you to give up your Social Security and Medicare to make up for the cost of the taxes lost to billionaires and corporations. Oh, yes, and COVID-19 is a real thing, and actually has killed nearly a quarter million Americans. It wasn’t made up by scientists to make Trump look bad. He did that all on his own.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t dissuade followers. One was quoted in the Guardian as saying, “It’s [the pandemic] a ploy to take away from (Trump’s) success.”

These delusions are not only impervious, but tend to strengthen when opposing points of view appear.

The delusions, constantly reinforced by the right wing disinformation bubble and Trump himself, are red-flag markers of cultic thinking. Roughly 40% of Americans have joined a cult.

While most cults are reasonably harmless, some are predatory and malicious, and all, given enough power, become very dangerous, given that they are predicated on such tenets as separation from the greater society, most often in the form of a paranoid “us versus them” worldview, replete with conspiracy theories, and mistrust of established authority, be it governmental, scientific or educational. Most have some form of bigotry backing the sense of separation. It’s not uncommon to see cultists who fervently believe that a clandestine cabal of “those people” secretly control the world through wealth and hidden power, and simultaneously believe that those very same people are intellectually and morally inferior to themselves. Nearly all powerful sects believe the existing order must be torn down and replaced with, well, something.

That “something” is almost always utopian in theory, and horrific in practice. Cults aren’t emotionally or mentally equipped to deal with dissent, and people who refuse to submit to the utopian demands of the cult are rapidly targeted for punishment, either though ostracization or more severe measure, including imprisonment and death.

In the most dangerous types of cult, the cult of personality, the goal is a utopia run by the leader. The Leader, whether it be Hitler or Jim Jones or Donald Trump, is seen as wise, generous, benevolent, and caring for his followers. Usually none of those characteristics are accurate. Such leaders are authoritarian, narcissistic, and manipulative.

While cults of personality are usually the most dangerous, they are also the most vulnerable. The leaders tend to conflate their ideas with themselves, and the ideas often don’t hold up well in the absence of the leader. The leader doesn’t usually have a good second-in-command, an item seen as a vulnerability, a reminder that the leader won’t be there forever, and a possible threat from within. Number two in cults tend to be ruthless enforcers, devoted to carrying out the leader’s will and never having any particular will of their own.

Remove the leader in a cult of personality, and the cult usually collapses in relatively short order. There are exceptions, of course. Scientology and Mormonism survived the deaths of their founders. And Christianity is sort of an oddball situation, where the leader had already been dead for some 300 years before the cult really got going and they maintain their status by assuring everyone he’ll be back any old time now.

But in nearly all cases, a cult collapses when the central figure is removed. Sometimes the ideas survive, and resurrect themselves in different forms down the road. Hitler may be dead, but after three generations, Nazism is enjoying a bit of a revival. New iterations of the People’s Temple will horrify the world every decade or so. Mao is long gone, but the Chinese government survived by turning its back on everything Mao stood for and prevailing through sheer authoritarian muscle. Stalin died, and communism used authoritarianism to cling to power for nearly 50 years, and I’ve no doubt new communist movements will arise in the future.

Toxic ideas survive, but the leaders do not.

But removing the leader does suppress his followers. If Trump loses the election, he may fight it, but his followers for the most part will have the wind taken out of their sails. The ones that threaten to fight in the event of Biden winning will find themselves on television, fighting American troops, and they won’t have the support to continue. Their families will spend generations pretending they never existed.

Trump won’t accept the election, and in the event he declares he won’t leave the White House, the government must remove him, by force if necessary, and don’t even wait for the Inauguration. Remove Trump and jail him for trial, and let Pence try to hold the government together until January. Jail Barr, too—he’s Trump’s real second in command, a vicious thug who will cheerfully commit atrocities to keep Trump ascendant. He knows without Trump, he has no future.

But Trump is the center of his cult, and without him, there is little for his followers to cling to.

If he fights the election results, take him out. Do it now. It will save the country from a brief but very painful civil war. Remember, the cult is Trump, and Trump is the cult. Defeat Trump, and you defeat the cult.

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Satire is Dead – Trumped like a can of beans

August 18th, 2020

Hours before the opening of the Democratic Convention, Trump tried to grab the headlines that he would be making a very, very important pardon the next day.

A lot of people thought he might pardon Julian Assange, if for no other reason than it would annoy American intelligence agencies. Even Trump couldn’t quite dare pardoning Snowden, who is more of a loose cannon. Now, my own opinion was the pardon couldn’t be all that important, since Hitler blew his brains out 75 years ago and even Trump wouldn’t be able to rehabilitate him. Granted, I was joking, but Trump, like most right wing whacks, will do ANYTHING if he thinks it might annoy a liberal. Honoring Hitler has a proven track record of annoying liberals. And since Trump is reduced to thinking anyone not in Qanon or the Nazi Party is a liberal, that’s a satisfyingly large audience to antagonize.

So today, he pardoned…Susan B. Anthony. Now, there’s nothing wrong with the pardon itself. The 19th century suffragent was convicted under an unfair and unjust law, one that was struck down some 48 years later and 14 years after her death. She’s since been widely honored, becoming the first actual woman to be on a US coin.

But in the middle of a vast campaign to persuade voters that permitting mail-in voting would cause vast amounts of voter fraud and thus would justify disenfranchising millions of Americans, he just pardoned someone for committing the crime of … voter fraud. Yes, that’s right. Anthony was convicted and jailed for voting under false pretences, ie, pretending to be a male. A US male, if you will.

Trump had various loony toons from the anti-abortion movement with him as he signed the pardon. The no-choicers had decided, based on precious little evidence, that Anthony was anti-abortion. While she surely opposed the practice of forcing women to have abortions against their will, there’s no record of her opinion on the right of women to elect to have an abortion. Indeed, while abortion was fairly common place despite being sometimes illegal in some states, it wasn’t a big issue since the country wasn’t overrun with pseudo-religious nutjobs who mistook their own personal squeamishness for a natural law of the universe.

Some wondered if Trump was taking a shot of some sort at Michelle Obama. The former first lady had just decimated Trump in a speech at the DNC, declaring Trump “in over his head” and deadpanning, “It is what it is.” Trump was in an open fury the next morning, banging around on Twitter like a nervous cat in a box with exploding ladyfingers. If he was trying to show up Little Miss “It Is What It Is” he missed badly.

Having put that nasty little negress in her place (and I’m pleased to see my spell checker didn’t like that word), Trump went after Jacinda Ardern, another strong women who has humiliated Trump in the past (they are legion, you know). Having just finished eulogizing his brother for having the grace and courage not to be jealous of Donald’s superiority and brilliance, he attacked Ardern and New Zealand for having an outbreak of Covid-19. “The places they were using to hold up now they’re having a big surge … they were holding up names of countries and now they’re saying ‘whoops! Do you see what’s happening in New Zealand? They beat it, they beat it, it was like front-page news because they wanted to show me something.”

The “Big Surge” was nine new cases in one day. Under Trump’s leadership, the United States has more than nine new cases each and every second of every day. The second wave is arriving—there has been a surge of new cases throughout Europe (where the disease actually originated) and Asia. New Zealand had been doing extraordinarily well fighting the plague (the best, as opposed to Trump’s America, which has been the worst) but this is a pernicious disease.

Perhaps if Trump is really lucky, a child will die in New Zealand. Then he can use that to justify the ten thousand or so children in the US who are likely to die from his push to have the schools reopen.

Finally, just in case anyone is feeling a need to ironically mock the American leader, Trump yesterday teamed up with that con artist Mike Lindell, who shills pillows on the television to hawk the latest miracle cure for Covid-19: Oleander. The compound, called oleandrin, is toxic, and has no known efficacy against Covid-19. One expert wrote, “Oleandrin? Yeah that would definitely end up killing people,” tweeted David Juurlink, MD, PhD, of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto. Trump is pressing for the FDA to give it a handwave approval, desperate for a miracle cure before the election and willing to kill millions if need be to secure such.

I hereby urge Trump and everyone who supports him to take oleandrin and let us know how it works out. After all, it won’t kill all of them, and they should be prepared to risk their all for Donald.

And we can bury the unlucky ones in the same graveyard where we just buried satire.

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Tin Soljas — Mercenaries against America

July 26th 2020

For some time, rumors had been swirling around that the costumed clowns would-be Dictator Trump was sending into American cities, beginning with Portland were in fact, mercenaries, scummy for-hire bravos, cast-offs and retirees from the military, or just gun-nut yahoos looking to bag a few people they disapprove of. Medium has a major story this week detailing the presence of gunsels from Triple Canopy and Academi, two disguised dependent corporations of the infamous Blackwater. The article states, in part that the so-called Federal Protective Service “..In fact, FPS spends more than $1 billion a year on these contract security guards who are authorized to conduct crowd control at federal properties, such as those in Portland.”

That’s a lot of money to be spending on hired pork meant only to terrorize peaceful demonstrators. In fact, according to Medium, “There are some 13,000 security guards nationwide employed by FPS via contracts with private security firms, a figure that can be expanded through existing and future contracts.”

These are not federal troops. They are not part of any legitimate policing agency. They aren’t even special agents such as exist in the Secret Service or DHS. They are mercenaries. They are for-hire thugs, glorified security guards with weapons of war. They aren’t in American cities to keep the peace: they are there to shatter it. They want riots, confusion and chaos because that is what Donald Trump needs as an excuse to cling to power.

Americans are better than Donald Trump and his rent-a-pigs, and they have been proving it in Portland, with a March of Moms, a line of real American veterans (as opposed to the “Let’s pretend we’re still soljas” in Blackwater) and in a truly magnificent stand, a naked woman performing yoga poses in front of the mercenaries. (They retreated in considerable confusion!). One guy showed up with a hockey stick to (successfully) bat tear gas grenades back at the portapigs. One heroic vet, Christopher David, 53, joined the protest because he was disturbed by reports of federal officers in unmarked cars arresting people without explanation. They beat the hell out of him with batons, breaking his right arm, and tear gassed him at point-blank range. Showing balls of steel, he strode away from the puzzled and defeated assailants.

While I’m deeply contemptuous of these thugs and the morally diseased people who deploy them, I don’t underestimate the danger they pose. Take Iraq, for example.

There were many different reasons why the American invasion and occupation of Iraq failed, but it was Blackwater that made such a complete calamity for America inevitable, even if the Americans had done everything else right.

First there was the 2004 Fallujah ambush. Four Blackwater mercenaries were ambushed, killed, set afire, dragged through the streets of Fallujah and hanged from the struts of a bridge spanning the Euphrates River. The four individuals weren’t believed to be doing anything more sinister than making a food delivery, but they were seen by the locals as symbols of greater problems. America got off to the wrong foot in that city, riding tanks and humvees into town with huge American flags flying, in direct defiance of orders not to fly flags lest they be seen, not as liberators, but invaders. It was a grotesquely stupid display of ooh-rah patriotism.

Americans, both soldiers and mercenaries, did door-to-door searches, and it’s believed that the mercenaries hit on the bright idea of bringing bomb-and-drug sniffing dogs into the households of the residents. Iraq, like many Islamic nations, has a deep taboo against allowing dogs in the home. Scattered reports of viciousness, molestation and even rape of women, and contempt for Allah circulated. The ambush of the mercenaries resulted in great joy in Iraq and a tepid response in America, where people were unenthusiastic about the use of mercenaries. It’s true that America couldn’t have won independence from England without the presence of mercenaries, but those were German mercenaries, hired by the Crown, and hated by the colonists. Mercenaries don’t have a good odor in America, and nor should they.

In the wake of the hanging of the four mercenaries, a popular uprising drove the Americans out, temporarily. But Blackwater influence in Iraq wasn’t done.

In September 2007, Blackwater gunsels, apparently without provocation, opened fire on a crowd of civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, killing 17 and injuring 20. Even though America promptly pulled the mercenaries out of the region, it solidified the opposition in Iraq that eventually lead to the Americans being driven out in disgrace.

Why use mercenaries in the first place? American politicians knew the public wouldn’t count them as part of the deployment, and wouldn’t care as much about casualties amongst private contractors. And the Republicans suffered, then as now, from the mad delusion that things such as military operations should be privatized, even if they cost more (some mercenaries in janitorial positions made more than the officers they cleaned for) and were less easy to control. Eric Prince, owner of Blackwater/Academi/Triple Canopy is, along with his vile sister Betsy DeVos, well-positioned in Republican circles. And both are tight with Trump and his mafioso clan.

Mercenaries aren’t soldiers, or even police. Many have little or no training, and discipline is notoriously shoddy. They have little or no training in keeping the peace, but are very adept at disrupting it. They are pure poison to the discipline and morale of both real soldiers and police. And they are a reckless, direct and immediate danger to the people they are putatively there to contain.

There aren’t there to protect the cities of America. They are there to drive them into chaos, so Trump can end the United States once and for all.

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The World Hates America — With Damned Good Reason

July 2nd 2020

When the news broke that the US government had snapped up the entire world stock of available remdesivir, the only drug shown to be effective in treating COVID-19, there was immediate outrage. While it’s not a cure of any sort, it shortened the course of hospitalizations for this disease by some 20%, and improved the survival rate by a similar amount. Make no mistake: this is no panacea. COVID-19 is still an extremely dangerous and deadly disease, and remdesivir or no, the long-term effects remain unknown.

The government snapped up some half a million doses, enough to treat about 50-100,000 people hospitalized with COVID-19. It represents some three months of the world’s supply.

It was a vicious and sociopathic move by the US, and unfortunately, is seen as being typical of how Americans operate. In fairness, most Americans were appalled, and that number will grow once it becomes clear Trump didn’t buy it to save their miserable lives, unless they were billionaires or Nazis.

Gilead, the company complicit in this deeply immoral deal, came under immediate scrutiny by the EU and other developed nations. Gilead signed an agreement with the EU to boost production so demand could be met in the next month or so, when warehoused supplies ran out. The unspoken threat was they had better, or the EU would simply suspend their copyright on the drug and make the recipe available for all other pharmaceuticals. The US would oppose that, of course, being the beacon of light to all corporations all over the world, but frankly, the opinion of the US doesn’t carry much weight these days.

Part of the outrage stems from the fact that the US needs more remdesivir than anyone else, simply from reasons that were self inflicted. Where most of the developed world have brought the plague down to manageable levels, the ones governed by insane fascist bastards—Brazil, Russia, India and America—have totally lost control of their infestations. In America, cases which had run over 30,000 new cases a day in late April, were brought down to under 20,000. But between intense pressure from corporate overlords to reopen and “save the economy,” cruel contempt for the safety of workers, prisoners, native populations and the aged, and a truly crack-brained notion that wearing a mask infringed on personal rights, the US completely blew it on efforts to control the disease. New daily cases are above 50,000 now (over 57,000 today) and are expected to reach 100,000 a day over the next few weeks.

The US was already seen with a mixture of horror and pity. The antics of the Trump regime were bad enough; this self-immolation made the US pariah and object lesson. Now the the pity and horror are admixed with rage. If the Americans are too fucking stupid to control their plague, the thinking goes, what right have they to deny responsible nations this drug which might save lives? The US has reached the same communal level as that of a drunk stealing communal wine from the local church.

So now America is seen with horror, pity, and rage.

It’s not as bad as it sounds. Oh, not America’s reputation—it’s thoroughly trashed and will remain that way for decades to come. But Trump’s effort to screw the world isn’t as lethal as it might sound. EU countries, Canada and other places had already stocked up on enough remdesivir to get them through most of July, and they did it without fucking anyone else over. If Gilead follows through on the promise to boost production, little or no harm will be done. And as noted, America is an object lesson: unless you want to see tens or hundreds of your fellow citizens die, don’t follow their example. Tough out the economic lock down, take care of your people, and reopen wisely. Don’t be that guy.

The Republicans have made it clear they won’t extend unemployment benefits or do anything for the millions of people still out of work. To them, open stores are more important than dead Americans. Work, or die. Or both. Report to your work camps for the greater glory of the fuhrer!

The Trump administration is involved in Stalinesque efforts to hide the damage. Just as Hitler secreted his death camps in eastern Europe outside of German borders, Republicans are working hard to hide the extent and damage of the plague, flooding media and social media with false stories about Democrats inflating death numbers, and “wanting America to fail.” The mindset of the GOP, like those of the Nazi party eighty years earlier, is to blame “enemies from within and without” for their failings.

Even now, millions of Americans run around shouting they have a right to go maskless. Police officers in a coffee shop in Oregon today harassed and berated store clerks for asking them to observe the “Masks required” sign on the front door. By the standards of American cops, these were better behaved them some—they didn’t shoot the clerks, or even arrest them. I wonder if those cops think they have a right to go in a day-care center and shit on the playfloor. It’s pretty much the same thing.

Trump is cutting testing so there will be less cases reported. Is it possible to be more stupid?

The EU has banned Americans from visiting. A poll in Canada showed reactions to American visitors ranging from strong aversion (Quebec, where only 24% favored allowing Americans to visit) to projectile vomiting revulsion (BC, where only 6% wanted to allow Americans in). Granted, BC has had a problem with sick Americans sneaking in, and did long before COVID-19 turned up.

The US may or may not come to terms with this disease. But they’ve already lost all their friends, aside from the President’s manipulative buddy in the Kremlin.

Wear a mask. Stay safe. Don’t be one of THOSE Americans.

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Transitioning — The World is Changing—Fast

June 14th 2020

In front of Parliament in London, they encased the statue of Winston Churchill in plywood and put barricades around it to protect it from defacement and possible destruction at the hands of demonstrators. Just a few weeks ago, such a situation would have been unthinkable, let alone that it could have arisen from the murder of a black man by police in Minneapolis, four thousand miles away and three weeks before.

But in a social convulsion analogous to the Arab Spring, the mass demonstrations sparked by the murder of George Floyd have spread beyond America and throughout the west.

The Churchill statue is under threat much the same way the Confederate statues are under threat in America. There are quite a few distinctions that can be made, of course: Churchill didn’t fight for the enemy, and the statue wasn’t put up to try to keep alive a racist legacy. Now, if a statue of Klaus Barbie

had been erected in Coventry as a not-too-subtle reminder to the Jewish population to know their places, then it might make a lot more sense that people might want to pull it down.

Churchill had a lot of baggage, to be sure. He was a bigot, contemptuous of the peoples the English subjugated, and had a track record of enormous incompetence. But he was also one of the main reasons the United Kingdom still exists today. When England needed a heroic leader, he rose to the occasion. So unlike the Confederate statues that dot the US, there are actually legitimate reasons to honor Churchill with such.

Unfortunately, movements like this tend to overreach, and hopefully common sense will prevail in London. Teach Churchill’s flaws, but honor the man for his greatness.

In the United States, the groundswell of discontent is still taking shape. A lot of what we’re seeing is hopeful. African-Americans deserve far better treatment than they’ve been getting, and have a right to walk the streets and drive their cars without fear, just like the rest of us. The role of police in society needs to be rethought from the ground up. In the 60s and 70s, when society was obsessed with crime and social unrest, the concept arose of cowboy cops who didn’t play by the rules and didn’t mind breaking a lot of eggs to make an omelet. It became fashionable to have out-of-control cops protected by a ‘thin blue line’ mentality that took care of their own, no matter how corrupt and self-defeating it might be. Few noticed or cared that there were no omelets, just plenty of broken eggs, and the police were seen, more and more, as vicious bullies and swaggering cowards. Community relations, in far too many places, was seen as being for weenies.

Additionally there was the racial component. Cops in far too many places were there to uphold white privilege. And subjugate black people. Police batons were called ‘night-sticks’ even though they were most often used in broad daylight, and had worse names. The war on drugs, itself a tactic of racial oppression, made things even worse. So did increasingly draconian laws, such as ‘three-strikes’ which overwhelmingly targeted African-American populations.

It wasn’t enough to attack minorities, though; police were useful for attacking other vulnerable parts of the population, those seen as unprofitable by capitalist leaders. So more and more, police were sent to deal with homelessness, mental illness, poverty, and any other social problem that presented itself. They weren’t just the bully boys of capitalism; they became its janitors, as well.

Black Lives Matter and the rest of the movement hope to address that, and that can only be an improvement.

But there are two other elements of American society that also scream for reform, and without them, the chances of success are much slimmer.

First, there is the problem of capitalist domination of society. No fascist society is free, and a fascist society is one in which the people serve the economy, rather than the other way around. Capitalism requires a large pool of economic outcasts in order to threaten the workers and consumers. Its morality is not the morality of human beings, and bullying and subjugation are essential to maintaining control. Putting jails and the justice system on a “make it pay” basis ensured a vicious abattoir of oppression and viciousness in lieu of justice.

The GOP, now a Nazi Cult, insists that Americans must be prepared to die in the hundreds of thousands in order to protect billionaires from becoming millionaires, as witness Trump’s determination to pretend the coronavirus has gone, and America can resume business as normal. His Nuremberg rally, the Repulsa in Tulsa, planned now for the day after Juneteenth, will require that attendees not wear masks or practice safe distancing, but also sign a waiver relieving the Trump campaign of liability if they become sick from this plague that [cough] doesn’t exist.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but America must reduce the role of the upholstered parasites who use racism and unfairness as means of control.

The other major item is guns. That the President is a cowardly racist who thinks it’s fine for disgusting white neo-Nazis to carry weapons of war, but hides in a bunker behind 12 foot high fences at the thought of black people chanting, clearly demonstrates the racist and vicious nature of “gun rights.” Far too many of the wrong people have weapons meant to terrify and harass the rest of society—including cops. Cops are constantly being afraid because so many howling nuts have so many weapons, and that in turn makes them more trigger happy. I’m not saying that to excuse the behavior of pigs who think that killing blacks as a warning to the rest is legitimate police work—this is a problem in addition to that, one that affects good cops as well as bad. We saw the white trash Nazi movement in action in Michigan; America needs to rethink a philosophy that allows such cretins to have .50 cal machine guns.

It’s scary, and nobody knows where it’s going to go, but one thing is certain: America needs this social tsunami. It wasn’t survivable in its present form.

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