Category Archives: Ahimsa

Shit sandwich

I love the way the New York Times implies that Trump, who is as empathetic and ethical as his long-time friend Jeff, really wanted to, and actually did, give masses of Americans significant tax breaks, when 99% of the tax cuts went to people who are already billionaires. You’ve got to love the poker face on that Grey Lady…

It’s the incoherence, stupid

Lying is one thing, and it’s a bad thing, most of the time. Without trust, there’s not much basis for dialogue or friendship. You can lie to spare someone’s feelings, but outside of that, it’s hard to think of a good lie. The truly corrosive thing in human relations is incoherence. If someone insists on an incoherent version of events, no communication is really possible with that person. The only healthy course of action is to understand you’re dealing with someone who is incoherent and disengage.

You can never persuade an incoherent person to listen to nuance or to compromise based on shared reality because their need to believe what they believe is impervious to reason. They are incoherent because they have no emotional choice but to believe what they believe, 100%. Doubt would crush them, because, in any dispute based on what is really going on, they have no ammunition, outside of a blind, angry insistence that they’re right. Being wrong in any detail of anything is an intolerable humiliation they will never submit to. In a war with such brutal stakes, incoherence is truly their only play.

I’ve had the misfortune to know many of these motherfuckers over the course of my long life. Some have been very good companions, everything is fine with them, as long as you’re conciliatory. You can laugh with them, enjoy a good meal, go on an adventure together, until any conflict arises. In the event of any kind of disagreement, unless you drop it immediately and pretend it never happened, you get a childish insistence that what happened never happened, they don’t remember, or understand, or that you’re a liar, or that they might have been lying when you quote them as saying they might have been lying, that they never called you a liar and certainly never said they might have been lying, etc. It can make your head spin when these creatures really get going.

I knew an old lady, 98 now (same age my mother would be if she was alive), since I was her son’s best friend in fourth grade, who often insisted on things that were incoherent. She had to believe, for example, that the nightmarish marriage her son fought in for almost thirty years was completely the fault of his insane ex-wife. It was one of those conflicts, you know, where only one person is to blame for all the ugliness and the other, the innocent party, simply made the mistake of engaging with someone who was a violently enraged lunatic. There was no reason, in the old lady’s version, for the furious wife’s rage, outside of her own troubles. Her husband had absolutely nothing to do with it, even if he was passive aggressive, habitually untruthful, a provocative weasel, etc.

In the end I did the only thing possible in the face of an insistence on an insane worldview. After hearing the same insane insistence that I must forgive even people incapable of regret, empathy or apology, I stopped taking her calls and wrote her a note which I put in the mail. Her response was a classic, a close variation on the one you will always get from someone who insists incoherence by way of the last word is simply fine and dandy and there will be no further discussion of the matter. I put the perfectly polished turd of her last word in a frame, nobody I know ever phrased it more to the point:

Incoherence, when it comes from the most powerful man in the world’s most powerful country, is truly fucking horrific.

This morning, Trump’s social media account once again blamed U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for not joining his war, although NATO is a defensive alliance, designed to respond to an attack. The account posted: “Without the U.S.A., NATO IS A PAPER TIGER! They didn’t want to join the fight to stop a Nuclear Powered Iran. Now that fight is Militarily WON, with very little danger for them, they complain about the high oil prices they are forced to pay, but don’t want to help open the Strait of Hormuz, a simple military maneuver that is the single reason for the high oil prices. So easy for them to do, with so little risk. COWARDS, and we will REMEMBER! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

This afternoon, Trump told reporters: “You know, we don’t use the strait…we don’t need it. Europe needs it, Korea, Japan, China, a lot of other people, so they’ll have to get involved a little bit on that one.” He also said: “I think we’ve won, we’ve knocked out their Navy, their Air Force. We’ve knocked out their anti-aircraft. We’ve knocked out everything. We’re roaming free. From a military standpoint, all they’re doing is clogging up the strait. But from a military standpoint, they’re finished.” . . .

. . . Aware that [Trump’s impulsive] war is historically unpopular, Republicans in Congress are refusing to exercise any oversight of the Pentagon and the White House. Megan Mineiro of the New York Times reported today that Republicans don’t want to expose disapproval of the war and so are simply cheering Trump on in public. Rather than holding public hearings that would allow the American people to hear the administration’s justification for the war and plans for its execution, as Democrats demand, Republicans are permitting the administration to inform Congress as it wishes, behind closed doors.

“You don’t want to show that kind of division to your enemy when you’re in the midst of a war,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Mineiro. “I don’t have a problem with the administration avoiding showing our enemy that they don’t have 100 percent support of the Congress.”

“They’re holding news conferences,” Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) told reporters last week, so there is no need for official hearings.  source

See, as long as FOX NEWS CHANNEL is covering the ongoing story, there’s no reason for debate in Congress. Unite behind the Commander-in-Chief or make yourself liable to the punishment for treason. Debate only aids our enemy, whoever that might be, and the Commander-in-Chief is the only one who determines who is an enemy and who deserves death, so stop being disloyal and just support our troops. So-called intellectuals, and so-called pragmatists, always insist that men of action have to explain themselves. That is the fatal liberal error of history, according to devotees of the incoherence of the will.

Assholes assume everyone is like them

If you are the kind of person who cheats at games, you assume everyone else is cheating, that’s why you have to. Apply this to any asshole behavior and you’ll find the same thing. We “wise apes” (homo sapiens) rarely do anything without feeling completely justified. How do you lie about people legally in the country being savages who eat good people’s dogs and cats? Your enemy would do the same thing, to gain an advantage, if they had the cojones, el huevos. If you rig elections, it’s only because your enemies are rigging elections, otherwise how else would they win?

Trumpism, like the ethos of our own religious white Christian slaveholders, is the perfect illustration of this principle. The slaveholders used overwhelming violence, well-armed militias and the threat of death to keep the slaves in line because if the slaves ever got free they would, according to their innocent masters, mercilessly massacre all the people who committed what they felt were atrocities against them. For that reason, the terrible vengeance an enslaved people would rightfully seek, the masters had to be extremely violent.

Old Mr. Day of Love himself told the crowd he was whipping up to peacefully storm the Capitol to gently convince reluctant members of Congress to declare him the winner of an election all evidence, and several of his closest advisers (including giant human turd Bill Barr who used the word “bullshit” to describe the baseless election fraud claim) said he’d decisively lost:

“When you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules. So I hope Mike has the courage to do what he has to do, and I hope he doesn’t listen to the RINOs and the stupid people that he’s listening to.”

source

This little piece, repeated by MAGA spokespeople from time to time, reminded me of that timeless human principle, that wrongdoers always justify themselves by accusing everybody else of doing the same thing, in their position.

Let’s leave aside the fact that the Trump administration is continually pursuing baseless prosecutions, without any evidence of wrongdoing, with their weaponized, scofflaw Department of Justice, a department that also routinely defies court orders.  And not to apply logic to an unfounded and false statement, but the FBI in the lead-up to the 2020 election was under the control of Trump enabler Bill Barr’s Department of Justice.  

They had just suicided Jeffrey Epstein so he’d be nice and quiet about his long friendship with his longtime running buddy President Trump.  There was, literally, nothing to see there — both guards were gone and the cameras were out when he suddenly died — a series of regrettable fuck ups, as Barr shrugged when the threat of Epstein was gone. Who exactly would have weaponized these “untrue and sensationalist” claims?   Trump’s enemy former FBI director James Comey had been dismissed years earlier, he couldn’t have done it.  Hugo Chavez, perhaps?

We are to believe that all the heavily redacted Epstein files that have been released are all totally kosher, in accordance to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law, veto-proof, by Mr. Trump.   The names and nude photos of underaged Epsyein victims revealed to the public, oops, DOJ said they were under pressure to release files and mistakes happened (though no abusers’ names were mistakenly revealed).   The three million pages Blanche and Bondi refuse to release?  Well, the EFTA has no criminal enforcement provision, so fuck you.  The president has nothing to hide (it’s not like he’s hiding his entire educational record or anything like that).  How dare you question the most transparent administration in the history of the world?! 

In fairness to the serially immoral, criminally insane Mr. Trump, he assumes anyone would do the same, act exactly as he knows he has to act, so he’s just doing it before somebody can do it to him. If you had evidence of your own crimes, wouldn’t you do everything possible to hide them? Come on, be honest.

Do not panic, induced despair is the main tool of Nazis

Though he lied about it at the time, obviously, the Hitler book the totally non-racist Mr. Trump had on his nightstand was not Mein Kampf, as some reported, but The Collected Speeches of Adolf Hitler. Trump is not known to be much of a reader, I suspect the Hitler tome was just there to remind his wife, Ivana, who she was married to. Anyway, the German strongman had nothing on our American Dictator On Day One. Though I got lots of shit for comparing Trump and his hand-chosen cast of freakishly cynical, ambitious, amoral shapeshifters to Nazis, I get less shit about it today than a couple of years ago.

I’ve always been fond of long sentences. Why place a period to end a thought you’re still thinking when you can use a comma, you know, sometimes an em dash — and continue on indefinitely; when in doubt, why not a semicolon? Anyway, here’s one of the longest English language sentences I’ve ever seen, and it’s a beauty in its catalogue of recent inhuman cruelty and incoherence. It’s written by a self-identified human named Gene Weingarten.

In the last two weeks alone, Donald Trump has destabilized the Middle East, turned the United States into a pariah state, killed more than a hundred little girls by mistake then denied he had done it and then admitted he might have done it but he didn’t know for sure because he hadn’t bothered to look into it, caused gas prices to spike by 25%, enabled Israel to commit atrocities against Lebanon, begged for military help from our historic allies whom he had previously insulted and alienated, and then threatened to punish those same allies if they don’t help him, said many in the media were “guilty of treason” for not cheerleading his benighted, unpopular war, gloated about having castrated the fourth estate, proudly identifying his conquests by name in a social media post …

… declared the Iran war over, then not over, and then over, again, then said that we had “totally demolished” a key Iranian oil facility, but added that he might bomb it a little more “just for fun,” continued pardoning his cronies and white-collar felons whose crimes have already wiped out nearly $2 billion in victim repayment and taxpayer recovery for various frauds, said that a former U.S. president he wouldn’t name had told him he regretted not bombing Iran first, but all four living former presidents immediately denied having said it, saw his approval rating plummet like a flapping turkey dropped from a helicopter, said he might “take” Cuba, revealed that his administration was considering withholding HIV aid to Zambia “on a massive scale” unless that impoverished country gives us access to their copper, cobalt and lithium stores … and played at least four rounds of golf.

According to my research, at 286 words the passage above was the longest single sentence ever written in a Substack newsletter.

Also, just an aside, in researching that item about Trump threatening widespread death to Zambians, I discovered that The Wikipedia entry devoted exclusively to DonaldTrump’s racist views is significantly longer than the Wikipedia entry for The Korean War.

These psychopaths (self-obsessed, manipulative, always ready to lie, lacking any ability to empathize) want you to believe their power is absolute, unchallengeable, the strongest force in the universe. They control their lackeys through transactional bribes, promises of unlimited opportunities for power and corrupt self-enrichment; their followers by lying promises they have no intention of keeping, and; all others by terror.

Terror is the main weapon of fascists. If they can keep masses of citizens in constant confusion, perplexed, anxious, in fear for their physical safety, the lives of their loved ones, they have a tremendous advantage. Like all bullies, pushing an incoherent claim to the right to make others do what they want, they are also very fragile. Defiance drives them insane. It is important, in these dangerous times, not to give in to the despair they are laser focused on instilling. There is nothing at all inevitable about their transforming the United States into a permanent one party fascist police state, though that’s clearly their goal. They are fucking up massively and spectacularly, over and over, in spite of controlling all three branches of the federal government. Every election, every poll, every utterance by any of them, demonstrates the unpopularity of their cruel grift, over and over.

FCC chairman Brendan Carr can’t cancel broadcast licenses for stations that don’t kiss an insane president’s ass passionately enough. He performs that threatening dance, on Elon Musk’s social media platform, to please his enraged master. Pete Hegseth can openly announce his intention to keep committing war crimes, and kick out photographers who don’t get his makeup and lighting right, he’s still ordering war crimes to be committed. Kristi Noem can’t keep her job, no matter how incompetently she did it, once she announces Trump was in on her $220,000,000 emergency vanity project that enriched her friends and her. The same holds for every one of Trump’s fire breathing lickspittles. Things are very, very bad when creatures like Stephen Miller and Jared Kushner have more power and influence on world affairs than Congress, than anyone confirmed as a member of Trump’s cabinet.

Remember that all of these people were chosen by the Very Stable Genius for their incompetence for their respective jobs. They were hired based solely on their fawning obedience to the master’s will, their ability to gratify his need for praise, and the destruction or weaponization of every federal administrative agency they oversee. The rightwing billionaires who pay for Trump’s campaigns have long been determined to destroy the “administrative state.” They are getting what they paid for, at the moment.

Trump, like his German hero of a century ago, believes he is an infallible genius in all matters. He’s a genius at conning about 35% of the country, he has an undeniable talent for that, got to give the handsome rascal his props there. His boy, the Austrian corporal with the little mustache, shared that genius for moving crowds of his aggrieved countrymen to passionate ecstasies of rage and religious fervor. Outside of that, their outsized talent for lying and throwing tantrums terrifying to their inner circles, and their recklessness, there is little remarkable about either one. True, Mr. Hitler racked up impressive numbers in the mass murder department, but that doesn’t make him a genius. Nothing that Mr. Trump has done so far suggests he will get the chance to match those numbers, though he may well try, and with the nuclear code and his thirst for murder, who knows?

The desperation of the deteriorating Mr. Trump is evident in his obsession with the election he lost, still insisting he won. He’s now trying to force the Senate to pass a bill for him to sign into law that will disenfranchise about half of the voting population. Massive voter suppression on a national level is his only hope for avoiding what is coming for him and his party.

If not voter suppression he must again provoke his followers to commit mass violence he can blame on antifa. That or stage a mass death terrorist attack on a sanctuary city in the US. He is perfectly capable of doing both of those things, as he’s already shown on his infamous Day of Love in January 2021. It would not be wise to bet against his willingness and ability to have his lackeys organize a false flag terrorist attack, if pressed. As always for his type, he must maintain power at all costs. Otherwise, it’s… crap, it just won’t go away, will it?

Take courage, my fellow humans, from Lawrence O’Donnell

Trump “reviewing” Executive Order placing himself in charge of U.S. voting

I saw a video last night from Angela at Parkrose Permaculture in which she reminded viewers that an executive order is not a law or a royal decree.  Executive orders that are illegal, and most of Trump’s have been, can be challenged in court and ruled unconstitutional, as many of Trump’s have.  But what jumped out at me was the reporting she played that kept saying that Trump is “reviewing” a draft secret executive order.   He’s considering it.   But who wrote the executive order for his review and consideration?

My money is on the cabal of fascist billionaires who put him back in the Oval Office, using both hook and crook.  These amoral organisms, focused solely on increasing their already obscene wealth and profiting handsomely off every economic disaster,  are intent on a creating a new feudalism where most of the work is done by unpaid robots and where all non-billionaire humans are dependent on their mercy.  Billionaires have shown over and over that they have very limited mercy for anyone but themselves.

Bear in mind that Trump’s DOJ (literally, since he consistently lied that Biden weaponized his DOJ, he considers himself fully entitled to use it as his personal Roy Cohn) has sued 30 states for their detailed voter rolls, the better to identify and disenfranchise anyone who voted against MAGA in the past, lives in certain zip codes, or who can be identified as Black, Hispanic, young, female, Asian, a voter in Democratic primaries, etc.  Since the five-four 2010 decision in Citizens United, when unlimited campaign contributions from billionaires and corporate “persons” became unquestionable “free speech”, these sick bastards have spent literally thousands of millions of dollars getting their preferred candidates into power.

Meanwhile, wielding his dependable high-powered fire hose of diarrhea, and spraying it in every direction at once, Trump, acting unilaterally, at the prodding of Netanyahu, Kushner and Witkoff, and on behalf of the monetary interests of these same obscenely wealthy monsters, sent US forces to attack Iran and destabilize the Middle East.   The Iranian head of state has been killed by either the US or Israel.  USA!  USA!!!  Or should I say, TRUMP!  TRUMP!!!!.

So today we don’t see stories on the front page about the 13 year-old interviewed by the FBI four times about Trump forcing sex on her and smacking her around when she tried to resist. Once a rapist, always a rapist, most would say. If you can do whatever you want to girls and women, because you’re an aggressively litigious star with a hundred white-shoed pit bull lawyers on staff, you’re golden.  You can do whatever you want to the people who donated to your charity, the suckers who attended your “university”, that multitude who died of COVID because you weaponized the pandemic, the millions of working class voters you suckered into voting for you.  The question is — why not do it to THE WHOLE WORLD?   Why wouldn’t you, if you were Trumpie? 

Trump’s favorite poem is The Snake.  When someone recites their favorite poem over and over, believe it.

No More Impossible Letters

I have a category on my list to the right of this post called “Impossible Letters.” I wrote such letters for many years, each time making a case for kindness, consideration or decency, once all other appeals for these things failed.

I recognized, as I toiled over these pages, trying to get each phrase to ring just right, that the letters were impossible, that the most gently worded, generous, most persuasive, moving case I could present would change nothing. Nonetheless, I continued writing these impossible letters well into the start of old age. I almost never heard a peep in response to any of these letters, but of course, I was complaining, no matter how gently — and now in writing! — about not getting a human response, so the person I was writing to was too defensive to dignify my letter with an acknowledgement.

I’m done writing these letters. If you have to write a letter setting out why you require basic decency, you might as well stick a feather up your ass, dip the end in ink, and write your letter that way. It seems simple beyond needing an explanation, if a doctor, let’s say, treats you carelessly, dismisses your medical questions, claims to have answered them all already (even if you never discussed those concerns with him) NO LETTER IS GOING TO CHANGE THIS. In fact, the letter will make you an enemy to the vain doctor, and a threat, if the letter is written well. Plus, nobody is paying the doctor to read your whining prose.

Amazing that it took me so many years to understand this simple concept: if something is emotionally impossible for someone to give, it is emotionally impossible. That doesn’t mean you’re not raising entirely reasonable concerns, or expressing basic human things that virtually anyone would agree with. It means, if the person you’re writing the letter to has already demonstrated, over and over, that they will not cede any ground to make things better, the best letter anyone could compose will only make matters worse.

Here’s the big discovery. There is a certain personality type that cannot be wrong, must blame others when they are wrong, and will fight to the death if the person they blame refuses to take all responsibility for conflict. This type is immune to persuasion since they are compelled to do these things, by a terror of humiliation based in childhood trauma and shame. Not every traumatized child winds up this way. In some people, being abused actually fosters empathy later in life, but people who cannot be wrong or ever admit hurting others are this way because they were damaged as young children. They can’t help themselves. As long as you are always agreeable, avoid anything that makes them uncomfortable, make them laugh when things get tense, are conciliatory at all times, you need never see the implacable side of these relentless motherfuckers. Once they sense you have some kind of issue or problem with them, the game is on and you must either submit to an irrational narrative (like a conflict is caused solely by one party — you) or it is a fight to the death.

Is there any universe where it makes sense to write letters to someone like this? None that I know of. The only use for a letter to one of them is to make the break complete, if needed. A final word to show you understand the unwinnable game you are now in, increase their defensiveness, fear, anger and make sure their brittle vanity ensures they will never contact you again. I take pleasure in doing this as politely as possible, on the rare occasion that I need to write one last impossible letter.

There is a certain sweetness in crafting a cold ending like this one, to a very old woman, a onetime friend of my mother’s, the mother of a childhood friend I haven’t seen in years, who angrily insists I have to forgive people who claim to love and admire me, no matter what I think they’ve done to me:

When you raised your voice to me a few months back, in response to something you didn’t want to hear about your son, and told me to “be quiet and listen! You’re not going to get the last word!” that should have been the last time I talked to you.   Like your son, you mistake my good will and calm manner answering questions about my health for some kind of deep friendship.

Then I took a red crayon and drew a small heart, in the matter of an angry Christian, wishing somebody a facetious “have a blessed day”, under which I wrote my name one last time. Her daily stream of indignant phone messages should finally stop, once the mailman delivers this kiss goodbye.

Trump-negative reporting by Bari Weiss’s CBS News!

What’s the world coming to when you have a billionaire crony buy a major news network, appoint a reliable political ally as news editor-in-chief, and they still report this kind of ugly, critical shit about you? From Heather Cox Richardson:

Daniel Klaidman, Michael Kaplan, and Matt Gutman of CBS News reported that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit after a federal raid on a popular horse racing venue in Wilder, Idaho, led to the detention of 105 undocumented immigrants as well as the temporary detention of 375 U.S. citizens or lawful residents. Only five arrests ended in criminal charges, all for unlicensed gambling.

Answering allegations that agents had used zip ties on children, both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) field office in Boise and Homeland Security spokesperson Trisha McLaughlin flatly denied the allegations. “ICE didn’t zip tie, restrain, or arrest any children,” she said. “ICE does not zip tie or handcuff children. This is the kind of garbage rhetoric contributing to our officers facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.” But after photographic evidence of zip-tie bruises on a 14-year-old female U.S. citizen as well as personal testimony, the FBI changed their assertion to say no “young” children were zip-tied.

An 8,000% increase in “death threats” against Trump’s violent, armed for insurrection Ku Klux Klan brigades? That’s almost as high as the 9,000% reduction in my drug prices under the most transparent, generous and loving president in world history. All that cash they send me every month is making me not care so much about civil liberties anymore, as long as those fat checks keep rolling in. Still, some part of me still notices there’s not a peep in the corporate media, or anywhere else, really, about the steady number of actual military veterans who kill themselves every day in the US. It adds up to around 6,000 a year.

More than 6,000 veterans have died by suicide each year since 2001, with the figure peaking in 2018 at 6,738 deaths. The slight decrease in 2023 follows the downward trend since 2018. source

Thank you for your service, loser.

As for actual total losers, nobody is reporting how many hundreds of thousands of poor, “nonwhite” children Elon and Donald continue to gleefully kill by slashing USAID funding and putting Little Marco in charge of closing it down completely. The shameful, quiet mass slaughter was discussed in the press briefly after The Lancet’s recently produced report projecting more than twenty million additional deaths (on top of the between 500,000 and 1,000,000 already dead in 2025) that will occur in the next four years. Here’s Little Marco, for the defense of Ayn Rand’s strong-get-to-fuck-the-weak view of the world:

Asked about the study, a senior US State Department Official called The Lancet a “failed journal” and said: “Some recent ‘studies’ are rooted in outdated thinking, insisting that the old and inefficient global development system is the only solution to human suffering. This is simply not true.”

“Rather than helping recipient countries help themselves, the old system created a global culture of dependency, compounded by significant inefficiency and waste. This has prompted development donors everywhere – not just the United States – to reconsider their approach to foreign aid,” the senior official added. Last July, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the new approach as “prioritizing trade over aid, opportunity over dependency, and investment over assistance.” source

And finally, the latest in Epstein/Trump news, Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) with a nice summary of the facts of the coverup and the always outraged, tantrum pitching Pam Bondi burning him for blasphemy. She had previously screamed at lawyer and constitutional scholar Jamie Raskin (D-Md) ” ‘You don’t tell me anything, you washed up loser!  You’re not even a lawyer!” You can google that yourself, Pam.

Fascism’s hatred of compromise

Fascists do not compromise, being uncompromising is their brand. Fascism, militaristic rule by state violence, backed by corporate power, is based on a relentless appeal to terror. Being terror-based, fascism never needs to articulate a rational set of beliefs based on observable reality — no argument is allowed in a fascist state. A terrified populace is ready for the protection of a “strongman,” a leader who will never yield or bend. That these strongmen are, in fact, the weakest and neediest (and generally the most insane) people in history, is obscured during their reigns by the irrationality they unleash among a public scared out of its collective wits. A fascist ruler never compromises, about anything, ever — hence “strongman”. An angry two-year old never compromises while raging either, but nobody confuses an enraged toddler with an all powerful being. Unless your critical faculties have been disabled by a crippling fear of death, in which case that infuriated toddler has every right to rule.

Fred Koch, wealthy father of the most influential fascist of the American rightwing, billionaire polluter/”philanthropist” Charles, was essentially a Nazi. The German nanny Fred hired for his four boys (as he built the fuel refineries that kept Hitler’s Luftwaffe in business throughout the war), a stern disciplinarian who required the young brothers to defecate on a strict schedule, ran back to Germany to be with her beloved Fuhrer, after his blitzkreig conquered France. Fred Koch inspired his boys to fight, to compete for dominance. The two history recalls as The Koch Brothers, Charles and David, ruthlessly fought their brothers in court for decades and essentially prevailed. You can read the sickening details of how this psychotic father replicated himself in his two “strongest” offspring in Jane Mayer’s masterful Dark Money. David, backed by Koch money, ran for vice president in 1980, on the Libertarian ticket. The Kochs got an appropriate 1% of the national vote for the millions they spent on the campaign. Charles, a brilliant and dogged engineer, got to work building, testing and constantly correcting a vast anti-democratic machine to influence public opinion, frame every public issue to suit his private passions, pass unpopular legislation, defeat regulations to protect air, water and biodiversity, gain control of the federal judiciary (he succeeded 100% with the 6-3 ideologically pure Federalist Society Supreme Court) and so on.

A step back into the America that MAGA wants to make great again, back to the days before “judicial activism” destroyed our great nation. 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court, after hearing the arguments, ruled that “separate but equal” in America’s racially segregated public schools was a crock of shit. They ordered “desegregation” of all American public schools be carried out “with all deliberate speed”. The speed was deliberate enough that racists went to work to make sure their children never had to sit in the same classroom as non-white children. The public school I attended was not integrated until 1964. That school, one of the top rated public schools in New York, was the elementary school Trump would likely have attended, he could have walked there from the house he grew up in less than ten minutes. His psychotic father had other plans for his sadistic young son.

American racists were outraged at the “judicial activism” of the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education ruling. It made no difference to them that the decision was based on a rational evaluation of the evidence presented, in fact, that made it 100 times worse. In response to this judicial act of “communist” sabotage, brought by Negroes and their race traitor allies against a school board 146 miles from his hometown of Wichita, Fred Koch and several wealthy industrialist fellow travelers founded The John Birch Society, a far right-wing fringe group still in operation today. You can visit their website. Once the lunatic fringe of the right wing, which Republican politicians and pundits were always careful to distance themselves from, JBS, as they brand themselves now, is mainstream MAGA, the quivering heart of the present day Republican Party. Check out this photo, the first thing you see when you open their homepage:

A Who’s Who of popular (and obscure– who are those two on the right?) American fascists. These extremists have a vision, as you can see bullet-pointed above. A white Christian oligarchy where none of our most entitled and deserving “legacy” citizens ever have to hear whining from “communists” and other sick individuals (people like me) who hate their freedom. You could call that a coherent worldview, if it wasn’t so inhumanly insane. The hallmark of these fuckers is their refusal to compromise. Here is their glorious mission statement:

Americans committed to:

  • Defending our God-given rights
  • Protecting liberty
  • Upholding the Constitution
  • Promoting less government
  • Preserving America’s founding values

Something I learned from my personal life — there are people, dear loved ones sometimes, who, once in a conflict, reveal a rigidity and need to fight to the death that was unthinkable a moment earlier. Their unwillingness to compromise is actually an inability to compromise, based on a deep terror of loss of control. This type only feels safe when they are in charge and their will is not disputed. They refuse to negotiate because they can’t compromise, crippled by a fear as powerful as the terror of imminent, violent death. Feel sorry for these creatures if you are kind-hearted, but never underestimate the depths of their desperation when they are in a battle to the death (which they always are when compromise is needed).

Speaking of psychopaths, it struck me last night — Trump was deeply jealous of his buddy Jeffrey, a guy who started with nothing but an amazing ability to lie and manipulate and an insatiable appetite for young girls, and wound up as a super-wealthy friend and confidant of the most powerful people in the world. Epstein got away with raping 14 year-old girls for decades, and his powerful buddies — including lying gay anti-icon Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent [1] — all stayed close to him anyway, even after his criminal proclivities became public. Wealthy, powerful men like Woody Allen, Larry Summers, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Trump, all stayed friends with Epstein, seemingly whether blackmailed by him or not. No wonder the perverted fucker was suicided in federal detention under Trump and Bagpiper Bill Barr. How infuriating his successful, unaccountable scumbag life must have been to the eternally covetous Donald John Trump!

[1] In the event the administration becomes aware of this on finance.senate.gov and takes it down, as they are wont to do, here is the first part of the post:

Washington, D.C. – Following new revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s deep and long-running relationship with J.P Morgan, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., today introduced the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act (PETRA) to compel Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to turn over Epstein-related Treasury records to Senate investigators. Finance Committee staff reviewed a large portion of those files in person at the Treasury Department in 2024. Senator Wyden has sought to obtain the complete set for further investigation, but Bessent has repeatedly refused to produce them to the committee and downplayed their significance. The files detail Epstein transactions totaling at least $1.5 billion dollars, and they include the names of women and girls he may have trafficked, as well as the identities of individuals whose involvement with Epstein may put them at risk of blackmail or other foreign corruption. They also reveal potential violations of federal anti-money laundering laws by J.P. Morgan and other banks–compliance failures that helped Epstein continue abusing and trafficking women and girls many years after law enforcement was first alerted to his activities.

“The basic question here is whether a bunch of rich pedophiles and Epstein accomplices are going to face any consequences for their crimes, and Scott Bessent is doing his best to make sure they won’t. My head just about exploded when I heard Bessent say it wasn’t his department’s job to investigate these Epstein bank records, because it’s simply impossible that somebody with his background in finance is unaware of FinCEN or any of the other investigative offices within the Treasury,” Senator Wyden said. “From the beginning, my view has been that following the money is the key to identifying Epstein’s clients as well as the henchmen and banks that enabled his sex trafficking network. It’s past time for Bessent to quit running interference for pedophiles and give us the Epstein files he’s sitting on.” 

Negotiating with Nazis is a doomed exercise

The only language Nazis speak is power. The only way to defeat Nazis is through constant, organized, unbroken resistance. It is futile to argue with people who hold violently incoherent views and demand obedience or death. The impasse over funding of DHS is a great example of the futility of negotiating in good faith with a party that spits on good faith. This is a characteristic of any fascist movement. One slogan of the early Nazi supporters was “wir scheissen auf die frieheit!”, which the NY Times delicately mistranslated as “we spit on freedom” when the German verb actually means “shit”. We are a nation of laws, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage in fighting Nazis. As Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Josef Goebbels famously said:

The Framers of the Constitution, who “conservative” “constitutional scholars” like MAGA Mike Johnson claim to revere, amended the Constitution with explicit protections against government intrusion into personal freedoms. These first ten amendments are called The Bill of Rights. The Fourth Amendment [1] protects every person living in the USA from unreasonable searches and seizures. If the government wants to search your home, they must have a warrant signed by a judge who agreed there is probable cause of some illegal activity before that search is legal.

Nazis hate restraints like this on their power. They insist that the power they have justifies whatever they do, and if the doing gives them more power, so much the better. You cannot negotiate with Nazis. One reason is that their worldview is incoherent and inhuman. They can’t be persuaded by evidence, logic, appeals to ethics, conscience, common sense, common decency, fairness, justice, etc. Their mission is to unquestioningly serve the weltanshauung of their insane Leader. All authority in a Nazi system is top down, all power emanates from an infallible, superhuman Leader (Unitary Execuctive in American fascist lingo). Opposing the will of this all-powerful being is punishable by death in a Nazi state.

So true believer MAGA Mike Johnson refuses to yield, insisting DHS has the indisputable legal right to disobey the Constitution and a hundred years of Supreme Court precedent in performing its duties. Johnson insists DHS may make its own rules about arrest, detention, gassing and killing civilians in “self-defense”, and create their own “administrative warrants,” ignoring the Fourth Amendment, to round up dangerous brown children and their immigrant parents. 75,000 of these “worst of the worst” are already detained in over 200 American concentration camps.

There will be no compromise on this in the DHS funding debate, courts may not order the Leader to do anything that violates the Leader’s view of what must be done to preserve The Homeland (also borrowed from the German, Heimat [2], used by Nazis to define love of the Fatherland). MAGA “populists” work in coordination with our most powerful billionaire psychopaths and their hundred tentacled legal/public relations/voter suppression octopus. One particularly smelly tentacle is the “law firm” America First Legal, headed by nonlawyer Stephen Miller, the most adept and virulent of Mr. Trump’s inner circle of psychopathic asslickers. Miller’s absolute power flows directly from the Leader. Check out Miller’s mission statement for suckers who might kick in a few bucks they don’t have:

We protect America First values by holding every level of government accountable, strategically litigating against unconstitutional policies, and ensuring that power stays where it belongs — with the American people.

We are in a hard fight for our democracy, with worse days to come. Our elected leaders, many sponsored by, and beholden to, legally created “persons”, corporations, who are always psychopaths, are probably not up to the task of fighting for our experiment in self-rule. It is up to each of us to push them to stand firm in a battle where they have only the leverage we provide by organizing, protesting, speaking out. Call your senators.

[1] The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and sets requirements for issuing warrants: warrants must be issued by a judge or magistrate, justified by probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and must particularly describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized  source

[2] The word describes a state of belonging “the opposite of feeling alien,” and its definition is not limited to a geographical place Continued in Wikipedia