Author Archives: oinsketta

Trump’s team “respectfully disagrees”

The three (female) judge panel from the DC circuit court of appeals ruled unanimously that an ex-president does not have blanket immunity against criminal prosecution for crimes committed while in office. Not a big surprise. The president’s spokesman, guy named Cheung, said Trump “respectfully disagrees” with the unanimous ruling.

“If immunity is not granted to a president, every future president who leaves office will be immediately indicted by the opposing party,” Mr. Cheung said. “Without complete immunity, a president of the United States would not be able to properly function.”

If he’s a fucking criminal.

Trump’s logic is kind of self-evident, if you love him. Trump was the forty-fifth president. All forty-four presidents before him, on leaving office, immediately pleaded the absolute, blanket immunity that Bill Barr told Trump he had on more than one occasion, until Barr realized he too might die in prison if he kept going forward with the Orange Polyp’s determination to carry out multiple criminal plans to remain in power after losing his re-election bid. If these ex-presidents had not all invoked their lifetime immunity from criminal prosecution, all would have been immediately arrested and locked up, without trial, by their ascendant political enemies!!! And, obviously, their successor would have had each of them killed in prison, having absolute, blanket, lifetime immunity from criminal prosecution, for anything, ever. It’s only common sense … to an insane person.

Here’s the outraged King of MAGA himself, as only he can do it:

A President will be afraid to act for fear of the opposite Party’s Vicious Retribution after leaving OFFICE. I am your retribution, I will take the things the sick, dangerous enemy deliberately weaponized and exact my terrible vengeance with them. The earth will Shake, Rattle and Retribute, universal, mandatory death penalty, Cod Bless these SHAYsssh. Biden grime fambily.

This prick is relentless in his greed

Jeff Bezos only makes $131, 666 a minute, this master of the universe (divide by 60 the $7,900,000 an hour he made last year, per Robert Reich, a reliable source).  I guess the fucking piece of shit really, really, really wants to be the richest man who ever lived and some other super-competitive piles of dreck are giving him a run for his money. What a shamelessly avaricious little scumbag. I wish him an eternal afterlife in the most lavish, exclusive hell imaginable. Fuck this fucking puto.

And why not try to rake in a few more billion from his millions of addicted customers when he has the power and ability to do so? It’s a lot better making a little extra cash than paying a reasonable amount of tax to a government he can’t completely control… worse, a government who only wants to control him, force him to collectively bargain with his underpaid workers, employ fair business practices, tax him for his massive contribution to global warming and unconscionable shit like that. 

Catastrophizing

I wake up with my skin crawling. Can’t sleep anymore because, in addition to all my other troubles at the moment, I have these fucking microscopic devils running around under my skin. Oh, my god… the horror, the fucking horror! I am soon ripping at my own skin.

This hellish looking baby is called a scabie (Sarcoptes scabiei), a parasitic mite that lives, in the millions, under the skin and causes a contagious itch with… exudative crust…

I scratch my skin hopelessly because it itches everywhere, worst in the places I can’t hope to reach. 

Note: there is no evidence that I have scabies. In fact, I don’t have scabies.  A friend in France recently described this nightmare to me, and the wonderful news he had from a doctor — his case is called “clean scabies” which, like “friendly fire”, or “collateral damage”, really doesn’t change the awful outcome, but is supposed to make you feel better since, in your case, the plague that is tormenting you did not result from your own poor hygienic practices.  

I looked up scabies and found this nightmarish image of the tiny fucker who runs in hoards making the skin horripilate and forming crusts over the itchy places where exudation occurs. Naturally the image of this tiny, demonic monster popped into my head when I woke up today itching. Once it was there, I couldn’t get it out. 

Because my new knee is still often immobilizingly painful ten months after replacement surgery, because I can’t exercise, because, after an objectively hellish experience with old friends I am wrestling with a playful anaconda of a manuscript that, while smiling, challenging and fun much of the time, is still a twenty foot long deadly constrictor, because all my eggs are in one basket and that basket is shredding, because I am flesh and must go the way of all such things… because the city cut off the water this morning and I have buckets of water all over for cooking, washing and toilet flushing… because, because, because….

It doesn’t occur to me, or it does but I dismiss the thought, that I am itching because of dry skin, a common malady of winter in temperate zones that gets more demanding with age. Next to the bed I have a pump bottle of moisturizer, placed there for soothing dry, itching skin. Applying it is a much better option than clawing at my own skin and twitching at the thought of parasitic mites doing gleeful gymnastics under my skin, but it seems as hopeless as everything else at the moment, too much skin to moisturize, can’t reach the places it itches most, wah, wah! Catastrophe!

Catastrophizing happens when you are overwhelmed by the challenges you face and are at the end of your ability to objectively weigh your circumstances. You can no longer see them one by one as discrete things to deal with, they have united to destroy you once and for all.  All the afflictions described two paragraphs above are true. Taken one at a time they are all things that can be taken care of, though some take a long time and require a long term perspective. Taken as a whole, as the relentless, million-faced army of the same implacable enemy, they appear in the form of the undefeatable microscopic tormentor pictured above.

The thought of this whole subject makes my goddamned skin crawl.

Winners vs. Losers (chapter 74, work in progress)

We live in an age where indomitable, driven people who can never be wrong – and who accumulate vast amounts of wealth and power – are widely admired as winners. You see these venerated winners everywhere, often sour-faced, whining loudly about how everyone persecutes them and is trying to steal what is rightfully theirs. What is rightfully theirs is everything in the world, because they are winners. Only losers don’t understand this.

Winning and losing, of course, are the outcomes of games, sporting events, individual transactions, negotiations, fights. Winning and losing are transient states, not a final end judgment on a person’s entire being or what they deserve. An insatiable desire to win the game of life is the hallmark of a gigantic, deluded asshole who needs to feel better than others. It’s nice to win a fair contest of skill, it feels great. That it’s possible to win life itself is a ridiculously childish idea.

People do not win or lose in life, as a look in any direction can confirm. Life is change, chance, desire, work, learning, happy accident, or sad one. The idea of dividing the world into winners and losers (more accurately entitled exploiters and the rightfully exploited) was created and popularized by people who can never be wrong, and it appeals to some primitive, wishful part of the human psyche. In their stilted, black and white, zero sum, win-lose worldview people who win are superior to losers and therefore entitled to whatever they can wrest from others. That’s why CEO pay in Fortune 500 companies went from 30 times the median worker pay in the 1970s to 350 times that today. CEOs are winners, clearly, and average workers are fucking losers, and parasites, and jealous losers and parasites at that.

The story of my permanent banishment from a group of old friends, all very accomplished, hard working pillars of their communities, all full of love and loyalty and unappealably harsh, to-the-death judgment toward certain “losers,” shines a light on how foolish the notion of winners and losers is to describe human life, and how destructive it is to us all.

Way to frame the issues, Grey Lady

The trouble, according to New York Times reporting, is that Biden failed on the BORDER CRISIS, and therefore House Republicans are, logically, impeaching the Biden official most directly responsible for that failure.

What the fuck is wrong with the insanely “nuanced” status quo embracing Journal of Record?

On the other hand, along with occasional important investigative reporting, they sometimes present excellent arguments for law and justice, such as Jamelle Bouie’s recent op ed, a short piece I highly recommend:

Chapter 72 Authenticity

We are living in an age when weak, needy, ruthless, vengeful, endlessly covetous men (and a few women) are seen as geniuses, visionaries and strongmen. Acquiring everything possible for themselves while promising horrific retribution for offenses real and imagined is seen as strength and cheered by admiring crowds. We are living, boys and girls, in an Age of Idiocy, more specifically, the Age of Narcissism. It appears to be dawning on us all slowly.

The most searched for word in 2022 was “gaslighting”. This form of psychological manipulation gets its name from a creepy old film, Gaslight, where the wealthy female protagonist is wooed and married by a man who convinces her she is insane, to cover his own criminal activities. He pretends to go out every evening and secretly searches for stolen treasure hidden in the attic of the mansion, under gas light. Because he’s using lights in the attic, the lights in the rest of the house dim. The husband convinces the wife she is going insane when she tells him about the lights, and for a time she believes him. Hence, gaslighting – lying to make you doubt the reality of your own perceptions, feeding you a diet of deliberate falsehoods to make you fear you’re going mad. Any wonder it was Word of the Year in 2022?

In 2023 the Word of the Year was “authenticity”. It means 1: not false or imitation; real, actual 2: true to one’s own personality, spirit or character 3: worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact, conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features, made or done the same way as an original.

This is the essential quality a gaslighting narcissist forces his victims to abandon. They will tell you what is true, what is false, what you should believe, why you are wrong to believe otherwise, how you should act, look, feel. Your feelings and ideas are wrong, they will tell you authoritatively. They demand that others to be as inauthentic as they are.

It is impossible for a “perfect” person to be authentic, to act according to their true character. They never were allowed as children to develop a true character and be loved for it. Their only choices after that damaging deprivation are a grandiose veneer of perfection or utter, humiliating worthlessness. In order to foster a created, performative persona of strength and perfection, very fragile when held up against reality, it is necessary to keep all those around them in a state of inauthenticity. Everybody in their orbit must be true not to their own spirit and character, to what they need in order to feel comfortable, but to the narcissist’s need for unconditional admiration and obedience.

These kinds of sick fucks have always ruled others, it is easily observed turning the pages of any history book. The rule of the select few is always explained and justified by the mores of the time, slavery was for centuries the norm, for example, but over time the same privileges of a tiny, all-powerful minority are maintained the same way, using the leverage of great wealth, intimidation, fear and violence to hoard the wealth of the majoritarian masses.

Parents who can never be wrong teach their children that they’re wrong even when the kid is right. Narcissism is a zero sum game, meaning there is only winning and losing, controlling and being controlled, the image of perfection or terrifying annihilation. This black and white worldview afflicts people who have been crushed in their soul at a very tender age. The abuse and emotional neglect they suffered renders them unable to compromise or even to listen to anything that contradicts their brittle sense of their special wonderfulness. They are the furthest thing from authentic, since they rigidly cling to an unrealistic view of themselves as perfect, the only alternative to feeling hideously, unlovably flawed, none of it having anything to do with authenticity.

It is a terrible constant in human affairs, the outsized influence these inhuman bastards tend to play on the world stage. Scroll from window to window, you will see these very important pricks pontificating on every platform. They simply cannot shut up. The appetite for their brilliant opinions is seemingly endless. We are fascinated by men who acquire 100,000 times more than any wealthy person needs. Accumulating billions in wealth appears to be proof of their indomitable will to have everything, which many reckon the mark of someone to be admired, even idolized.

As for me, I’ll take someone who can look at herself and the world honestly, in all its color, nuance, light and shade, and speak authentically, with humility and openness, about the hellish odds we are all up against, just trying to be authentic, empathetic and offer each other shared things we all value here in this threatened miracle of a world.

Telltale sign of what you’re up against (from a work in progress)

Chapter 69  Telltale sign: simple questions lead to anger

When you are confronted by an indignant person who has shown over time that they can never be wrong, no matter what, even the simplest request for clarification or empathy will fuel their anger.  People who can’t be wrong, on pain of utter humiliation, have only one aim when they feel challenged — destruction of the enemy.

When you encounter someone who gets mad every time you need to talk about something hurtful that happened, you will find that kindness, patience, friendship, extending the benefit of doubt, love, humor, generosity are useless against this kind of anger. The reason for this anger is that being imperfect in the eyes of others is unbearably painful and humiliating to them. If you insist on being understanding, while needing to finish a badly needed conversation, you will incur only their rage and desire to silence you forever. Trust me on this one, I’ve lived it more than once. 

F__ doesn’t deny that he told me, after weeks of icy silence, “I’ve walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me.” G___ regarded me coolly as her husband drew his line in the sand. I reassured him of my friendship and he seemed momentarily soothed, although this mild, anticlimactic outcome, instead of the desired outrage on my part, meant that the planned hit was not carried out, much to determined G__’s momentary disappointment.

Here’s the thing I know now that I was blind to then. It is essential to understand that when you are in an incoherent conversation with people desperate never to be wrong, all problem-solving tools become useless.  I should have calmly asked F___ what it was that I did to him. This would not have led to any kind of good outcome, but F____’s resulting temper tantrum, with tactical provocation from righteously enraged G____, could have opened my eyes, saved me months of anguish trying to solve a puzzle that had only one solution, a solution I resisted with my entire soul: mutual death. There is no way to avoid it in a conflict with this type. A year and a few months later they were as irreversibly dead to me as they’ve made sure I am to them and anyone who knows them.

What reason to kill when it is a blessing to be merciful, particularly to a loved one? Only one – you are in the hands of someone so damaged that death for you is the only outcome where they feel they are saving face, somehow not being humiliated by having to acknowledge imperfection.  Better, they reason, to righteously kill you than to be seen as a cowardly murderer, or a liar, or someone consumed with unslakable, inchoate rage that is so easily provoked.

We encounter situations where there is a perplexing question that must remain unanswered. The reason for not even asking these questions is having experienced a ferocious reaction to a reasonable question over and over. It makes one hesitant to set off the same kind of savagery in a moment that appears to be emotionally fraught. Experience teaches us that a meaningful answer to a painful question is beyond the capability of someone damaged on a primal level.

Here’s a koan that has become quite familiar to me, I’ve heard it now in five or six restatements but the sentiment is always identical. F___’s version was: You have to understand that I am too upset to hear why you are upset. In other words: my actual pain is much more important than your claimed pain.

There is no question that can clarify this or make it appear to be the reasonable statement of a friend and partner in understanding. Months later I asked F____ about this and he conceded it was not something a friend says to his close friend when they are both shaken up. Notably, he did not express regret or apologize for it. The obvious follow up questions all become useless after you learn that any of them leads to fresh indignation and anger.

This is the wall we face when confronted by a conclusory statement meant to stop us in our tracks, put us on our back foot, silence us, disable us in a fight to the death. The fight to the death starts long before someone who is not destructively damaged is aware of it.  It is unthinkable, except to those compelled to kill, that this kindred soul I thought I knew and loved intimately is determined to beat me at any cost, spread lies to destroy my good name, kill other friendships and forbid their adult children to get back to me.

It is mind-fucking, even after you have seen it a few times in your life. I suppose it takes the trauma of experiencing it as an adult to force you awake, to make you aware that the signs of this intractable sickness are always identical, that motherfuckers who act this way are all interchangeable, they must be seen as perfect or they will make sure you’re good and fucking dead.