Category Archives: Ahimsa

When you work for a compulsive liar

Understand, first of all, why people lie.  If the truth is embarrassing, especially if it’s humiliating, someone with a propensity to lie will always lie.  If confronted about the lie, they will lie again, make you the liar for accusing them of lying. 

This hideous, maddening cycle will be familiar to anyone who has ever been close to, or worked for, someone who can never be wrong no matter what.  If you can’t be wrong, and the facts clearly show you are, then the facts are fucking liars and so are you for bringing up those lies.

Trump is perhaps the most prolific compulsive liar in American history. He’s up there with the all-time heavyweight liars of world history. He may be number one (though, it is said, he smells like number two). If he gets his ass kicked in an election, obviously, the election was rigged, he was cheated out of a victory he actually won by a landslide, was the victim of a massive bipartisan fraud, and when you are the victim of fraud, as he told his enraged crowd on January 6th (a day of love, obviously), you get to play by very different rules. You fight like hell to make your truth the real truth and violence is totally justified because the liars who cheated you won by being scumbags who viciously rigged everything against you and deserve whatever they get, including death.

Picture working for a vengeful, childish asshole like this guy.  Lying is a condition of employment.  You can’t tell the truth.  If you do, the boss will fly into a rage.  When asked if Biden won the 2020 election you deliver the company line “well, he was sworn in as president on January 20, 2021…”.  When pressed on whether Biden won you must not give an inch, must continue this line of idiotic equivocation.  If you say “yes, senator, Biden won…” then you are out of a job, out of the party, out of the cult, out of business, kaput.  Plus, you face an excellent chance of death threats on your phone day and night.  Everybody who works for Trump knows this.  

Still, sometimes there are slip ups, like this, from a recent convert to MAGA spokesman for those furious that Obama “gave” Iran $1.6B in the JCPOA deal where Iran agreed not to develop nuclear weapons.

Trump is trying to cover over the release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets [in his birthday Memo of Understanding — not a final agreement] by saying “no money will exchange hands.” But this morning, Vice President J.D. Vance told CBS that in addition to that $24 billion, Iran will also have access to $300 billion in funds for reconstruction. source

Oopsie.  Et tu, CBS?

Liars lie, that’s not news.  I guess the news is that the central characters of Trump’s inner circle appear to have been captured on tape, discussing various illegal ways to allow the president to do whatever pops into his insane head.  If Stephen Miller, our foremost, infernally powerful, Jewish Nazi, orders 3,000 brown immigrants captured, detained and deported daily, and the boss loves the idea, then… fuck it, suspend habeas corpus (the right to a hearing to contest your confinement)… change administrative rules to make a loophole to avoid giving habeas corpus rights to those illegally detained, invoke the Insurrection Act… kill more “paid protesters” like Renee Good and Alex Pretti… 

The squealing among Trump’s inner circle about the New York Times report on secret meetings in the Situation Room (without the president present) that someone tapped into our nation’s most secure SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility) is an unintentional admission, as Lawrence McDonnell points out, that the reporting is super accurate.  NY Times reporters Haberman and Swan couldn’t have transcribed all those verbatim quotes without a recording. 

More lies are now needed to cover the lying lies that some liar recorded and made them lie in their own voices on a tape that doesn’t exist, like Epstein, who never actually existed, never knew the president, never shared any “wonderful secrets” with him — and the president certainly wasn’t rough with fourteen year-olds’ nipples, where did those stupid, lying quotes come from and, more to the point,  who was the traitorous leaker? — the boss was always a gentle lover who always had consent from every woman and girl he ever touched — no, wait, he never touched anybody! Epstein and those little bitches are all LIARS!!!

Trump is not playing five dimensional chess, he doesn’t even know what a game is. Point out that he just took a crap in his pants and he will angrily scream: “NO! YOOOO took a crap in my pants!!!!” I know you are, but what am I? Another win for the Winner-in-Chief.

Early this morning, Trump posted on social media: “On July 4th, at The Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, in beautiful and safe Washington D.C., we are going to host the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all, a ‘TRIBUTE TO AMERICA.’” source

Be there, fans, will be wild! There should be, literally, hundreds there, mad as hell and ready to rumble.  You go, Mr. President, sir!

Hermann Göring-level contempt

Now it’s no longer taboo, in light of mountains of evidence in support of the comparison, to refer to Todd Blanche, Stephen Miller, Lyin’ Ted, MAGA Mike, Hegseth, Lutnick, Bessent, RFK Jr,. Elon Musk, Jared Kushner, Trump and his accursed spawn, as Nazis.  Nazis will be Nazis, and they always act the same way — indomitable and contemptuous of so-called decency (Hitler called conscience a “Jewish invention”).  The contempt Trump and his best people proudly show for law and the ideals our country was founded on was not exceeded by the most infamously contemptuous of the Nazis.  Think Hermann Göring.  They have all demonstrated that they will follow any insane order from their mad leader, justify protecting a network of pedophiles, a nationwide chain of concentration camps, every voter suppression effort imaginable and the cold blooded murder of American citizens in their cars, on the street.

It’s not even a news story, apparently, when these floundering fascists (in this case Trump, Blanche and Trump’s children) openly defy a federal judge’s order to produce their argument for why their fake “settlement” of a non-case, for their sole, corrupt benefit, was not a fraud on the court. June 12 was the deadline for Trump and Blanche to defend their corrupt, bogus, self-dealing “settlements”. I was very much looking forward to reading their stuttering, incoherent arguments. No argument was submitted at the deadline.

[Correction, there was a submission, not responsive to any of the judge’s three major questions Trump/DOJ were required to answer, though it was submitted late on June 12 (after closing time, apparently). I learned this from Michael Popok on the Meidas Touch network. Bloomberg alone seems to have reported on Trump’s denial of fraud and his attack dog lawyer Alejandro Brito’s attack on the judge, as well as the 35 retired federal judge’s who intervened to remind the judge she still had jurisdiction over the “case”. I haven’t been able to find a copy of this legal masterpiece on-line.]

The Trump DOJ essentially in contempt of a federal court order produced crickets from mass media. No real update on the story since Trump and his DOJ followed federal appellate judge Emil Bove’s advice (from before his lifetime confirmation, when he was number 3 at DOJ) and told a federal judge to go fuck herself. AI had this to say (incorrectly, as it turned out, apparently they filed it late on June 12th)

Absolutely nobody but Michael Popok at Meidas Touch is reporting on this, as though this eye-poppingly criminal conspiracy to defraud the court to further enrich the historically corrupt Mr. Trump is not a subject of even minor public interest.

Of course, in fairness to everybody — there were so many other stories demanding attention in the realm of Trumpish impostures. News broke about a panicked damage control meeting in the Situation Room (secretly, and illegally, recorded by someone there) to strategize about how to protect Trump for accountability for the many wonderful secrets he shared with his best friend, suspiciously suicided incarnation of evil Jeffery Epstein. The demented birthday boy yesterday used the Lincoln Memorial, which his gigantic Arc de Trump will dwarf and obscure the view of from Arlington National Cemetery, as a backdrop for his glorious gladiator fight in a $60,000,000 (including $700,000 to restore the damage to the lawn) cage built on the south lawn of the White House to celebrate his birthday. He gave UFC fighters the honor guard pomp usually reserved for foreign dignitaries and the funerals of top military commanders.

Workers took his name off The Kennedy Center, as ordered, with Trump kicking and screaming, incoherently litigating and in the end demanding an extra 12 hours to do it, but a huge curtain remains in place so nobody can photograph the absence of the insane orange two year-old’s name. He promised, again, that a big birthday deal with Iran is being signed, He bombed Iran, a nation he bombed with no legal justification and has continually branded the aggressor, in coordination with his friend Netanyahu, who he now describes as a difficult man. Meanwhile, the troubling theocrats in Iran continue to be much more credible on the subject of “peace talks” than the Orange Polyp and his chorus of performative liars.

Trump and his lackies are spraying the firehose of mendacity, with the insane Tulsi Gabbard, friend of Assad and Putin, suddenly chiming in about US biolabs in 30 countries, including Ukraine, that Fauci is somehow responsible for. Trump is madly posting gibberish every moment he’s awake, even as he continually falls asleep in public and appears to be dying — though 22 doctors recently signed off on his bill of perfect health. He has the heart of a 65 year-old, we are to believe.

His MAGA suck-ups in Congress also snuck through, at 4 a.m., another 70 BILLION dollars for his masked shock troops who will not be required to abide by the US Constitution. ICE will continue to wear masks, break car windows, illegally enter homes, schools, courts and churches without judicial warrants, indefinitely detain people who have committed no crime, keep them in abusive privately owned concentration camps kept secret from the public, even murder American citizens on video, when necessary and proper.

So, I suppose we can forgive the press (and thank Bloomberg and Meidas Touch) for not taking a single note of his missed June 12 deadline for Trump to explain to the court why he should not be punished for filing a fake lawsuit against an agency he controls, and giving himself and his accursed children (and all of their associates) a preemptive pardon for all past frauds on the IRS/US Treasury in a “settlement” worth probably hundreds of millions for a long history of tax chicanery. All I can say is “USA! USA!!!” Trump looks more fucked every day.

Sports in a corporate culture

Trump sat behind bulletproof glass at Madison Square Garden with his fellow self-made son of a billionaire James Dolan. The cheapest seat in the building, outside of the suite of free luxury box seats provided to Trump, Lutnick and co., was the $1,500 standing room ticket NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani bought for himself. The average ticket price was over $10,000, maybe over $20,000 — VIP courtside seats were over $50,000 each.

The NBA championship brings in obscenely HUGE dollars for the owners and their corporate alter-egos. The NBA commissioner himself welcomed Trump’s visit that closed down ten square blocks around MSG, imposed TSA restrictions on the fans wealthy enough to attend the game and created even more traffic pressure and chaos in the already choked center of downtown (not to mention the loss of a ton of money for local businesses). Here’s NBA commish Adam Silver, from a blandly apolitical take on ESPN (owned by Dolan?):

Though Trump and high-profile basketball stars such as LeBron James have exchanged social media barbs over the years, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said the president was a “genuine Knicks fan” who was “welcome” at the most-anticipated NBA game in New York since the Knicks’ last Finals appearance in 1999.

“What makes sports so special, especially when there’s so much that divides people, is that it’s something we have in common,” Silver told ESPN’s “Inside the NBA” during a pregame interview. “We should look for those things we have in common and build off that.” source

Inspiring words from this handsome corporate rascal:

Hannah Arendt speaking to this moment

Nothing is more dangerous to nature and humanity than an inability to think.    This inability to think is deliberately, mindfully fostered by those who make the most money, and seize great power, when  people can’t think.  Without critical thinking it is impossible to choose well between complex alternatives, to accurately identify problems in the first place, to protect ourselves from predators. 

A populace that can’t think is ideal for manipulation, many of them will be ready to tolerate or commit atrocities for an incoherent “cause”.  The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, as Francisco Goya the painter observed.   Here’s Hannah Arendt, who clearly identified this central villain of human history, from a few generations ago.  

American children raised watching TV, and devices, see more than 10,000 hours of advertising, tailored to their baby minds, before they learn to read. Today attention spans are shattered, brains and social interactions rewired, by constant smartphone notifications from people trying to sell something, push some idea, inoculate the “user” against critical thinking by amplifying their own prejudices and likes and silencing opposing ideas. The algorithms that cater to our personalized prejudices are making a small number of neuroatypical men unlimited billions of dollars as they emotionally and intellectually immiserate billions of vulnerable human beings.

We are at the “mercy” of psychopaths at the moment. Only we, by acting together and thinking as critical problem solvers, can stop these merciless, insane bastards who would have everything. They will own everything even if it takes destroying the earth itself, the biosphere, all the animals and all but a handful of specially selected humans who will live on militarized luxury islands, in outer space or in well-furnished spas deep under the ground. Fuck those putos.

He runs the U.S. like his inherited family business (plus Alex Acosta/Barr/Trump/Epstein FN)

Strapped for cash, as often in his life, billionaire playboy Donald Trump convinced his siblings to violate the terms of their deceased father’s trust and sell all of the Trump properties his father had built and stated, in writing, that he wanted his name on in perpetuity. The Artist of the Deal then quickly arranged to sell all the properties, appraised at $1,000,000,000, for a generous $262,000,000 discount to the buyers. His piece of the sale was still a nice chunk of change and held him over for a while, at least until his next bankruptcy.

The mainstream media continues to sane-wash the accelerating ravings and irrationality of the clearly insane Mr. Trump, who is now also showing daily signs of worsening dementia. Every dollar this self-made genius ever had, until his highly successful presidential grifts began, was provided by his psychotic father, an unscrupulous man with a talent for business as well as criminally avoiding paying taxes on his wealth. Willful, mediocre little Donald was his father’s second choice for heir, after the more intelligent, more talented and affable heir, the oldest son, was afflicted by conscience, moral hesitation and other traits undesirable for the “killer” dad needed to run his ruthless, law-skirting real estate empire.

Young Donald quickly took to the role of killer and decider, nothing that happened in the Trump Organization was not subject to his unappealable will. That total, unquestionable dominance, defiance of his mother (root of his lifelong misogyny) and sadism (initially toward his little brother are all he took into the presidency, riding a showman’s ability, honed for years on a fake reality TV show portraying him as a business genius, to bullshit and con millions of Americans with legitimate grievances, along with irrational ones. Trump’s real genius is his ability to command loyalty from a cast of characters he repeatedly betrays and to stoke irrational rage over things he makes up and repeatedly lies about.

Trump’s expectation of absolute loyalty to his will is beyond question by anyone who works for him. Flattery is also required, and in most cases, a certain of amount of humiliation by the big guy.

So is complete unaccountability for his many criminal acts, among these sexual assault (found liable in the only case to proceed to a verdict), defamation (ditto, twice), paying off a porn star he adulterously date raped to dummy up in the days before the 2016 election, and fraudulently hiding those payments (convicted on all 34 counts), violating the Espionage Act (t seized evidence shows he committed every element to be convicted of it, including obstructing the investigation over and over), running a fraudulent charity (dismantled by state AG), exhorting his followers to “peacefully” break through police barricades and smash their way into the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election (and failing to stop the riot for three hours as he excitedly watched it on TV). The list is really too long to need further elaboration, though I shouldn’t fail to add that he was one of the “unnamed” close Epstein associates granted total immunity in the Dubya DOJ’s infamous 2007 “sweetheart” non-prosecution/immunity deal with Jefferey Epstein, for any and all acts related to Jefferey, or girls Jeffery introduced them to, no matter their age [2].

Trump has never been held accountable for any of his countless crimes and other acts of indecency. The only good that’s come of his reign, and it’s a dubious one to many, is that words like FUCK and SHIT may now be said openly almost everywhere (“cunt” likely coming soon).

Who is surprised, then, when his former criminal attorney, Todd Blanche, acting AG, now auditioning for Attorney General, signs court papers claiming The National Trust for Historic Preservation, who brought suit to stop construction of the Donald J. Trump-Marie Antoinette-Jeffery Epstein Ballroom on the site of an illegally demolished East Wing, failed to rebut DOJ’s very strong statement, in a court filing, that they are nongovernmental partisans acting out of Trump Derangement Syndrome. They NEVER DENIED IT, JUDGE! BECAUSE THEY ARE TRUMP DERANGED LIBTARD CUCKS WHO HATE AMERICA — and that’s a legal fact asserted by the United States Department of Justice, bitch! Nice work, Todd, the boss must be, momentarily, very happy.

Of course, a man who incompetently ran a billion dollar inherited business, and bankrupted every business venture he started, or had it shut down for fraud (Trump University, for example, and he only had to pay $25,000,000 — thanks Pam Bondi, for dropping the case in Florida), believes he is the smartest deal maker who ever lived. He did, as promised, make peace between Ukraine and Russia, by giving Putin everything he wanted (including billions after Trump’s blitzkrieg caused Iran to retaliate by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz). Dunning-Kruger [1].

Too stupid to know how stupid he is, he believes he’s a genius. After all, as he himself tells it, it’s in his genes, his uncle was a brilliant professor at MIT. For the rest of us, he’s placed incompetent, subservient clones of himself in every important position of public trust. Pete Hegseth’s own mother expressed her humiliation at having a misogynist drunk like Pete as her son — and Trump got her to publicly apologize so Warrior Pete could get confirmed as Secretary of WAR on a party line vote. What could go wrong for men who have never been wrong?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Today Connor O’Brien of Politico reported that the Republican chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services committees were surprised and angry at the news that Hegseth was recalling the [5,000] troops from their deployment in Poland. At a hearing with Army officials—who said they had only been informed of the decision days ago—House Armed Services chair Mike Rogers (R-AL) said: “We don’t know what’s going on here, but I can just tell you we’re not happy with what’s being talked about, particularly since there’s been no statutory consultation with us.”

Committee member Don Bacon (R-NE) said the canceled deployment “is a slap in the face to Poland; it’s a slap in the face to our Baltic friends. It’s a slap to the face of this committee.”

In Trump’s mind, Committees were made to be slapped in the fucking face. As hard as possible, as always, for sadistic bullies. Not only that, but there’s no longer such a thing as “Abuse of Power” (as proved by Alan “I Kept My Underwear On at Epstein’s” Dershowitz in Trump’s second, now expunged, impeachment trial) or, LOL, “Conflict of Interest“. This is from the same Heather Cox Richardson letter quoted above:

Wall Street executives told the journalists they were “baffled” by the high volume of trades [thousands of Trump stock buys, based on insider knowledge and profiting from his own taxpayer funded deals with the CEOS of companies he bought shares of] and concerned about the appearance of conflicts of interest. “All of this raises questions that you’d rather not raise as a president,” wealth manager Matthew Tuttle told the reporters. “So now people are asking why is he buying Nvidia and other companies now? When you’re the president you know everything, so any stock you buy, there’s a huge question mark.”

White House spokesperson David Ingle told the reporters that Trump “only acts in the best interests of the American public” and that “[t]here are no conflicts of interest.” source

[1] The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability. The term may also refer to the tendency of high performers to underestimate their skills Continued in Wikipedia

[2] The fuckery goes all the way back to Epstein’s team of lawyers refusing to accept a non-prosecution agreement in 2007-2008 until it was under the terms Epstein demanded (and eventually got) — including absolute anonymity and complete immunity for anyone Epstein ever introduced to a high school, or middle school, girl, for any purpose, (Dershowitz and Kenneth Star led his powerful army of lawyers). The verbiage below is from Bill Barr’s DOJ’s November 2020 report on how to whitewash a travesty of justice and make it seem reasonable indeed, even if regrettable. Even then the court had to force an Epstein deferential Department of Justice (who somehow couldn’t prevent his sketchy “suicide” when he was back in their custody), to comply with the rape victim protection law they had flagrantly, and without consequences, violated way back in 2008. Barr cites a technicality that makes the DOJ’s refusal to hand over the sealed non-prosecution agreement to victims for more than a decade seem reasonable indeed.

On July 7, 2008, a victim, identified as “Jane Doe,” filed in federal court in the Southern District of Florida an emergency petition alleging that the government violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act (CVRA), 18 U.S.C. § 3771, when it resolved the federal investigation of Epstein without consulting with victims [violating the CVRA — as Barr’s DOJ avoids concedinging], and seeking enforcement of her CVRA rights. In responding to the petition, the government, represented by the USAO, revealed the existence of the NPA [Non-prosecution agreement], but did not produce it to the petitioners until the court directed it to be turned over subject to a protective order; the NPA itself remained under seal in the federal district court. After the initial filings and hearings, the CVRA case was dormant for almost two years while the petitioners pursued civil cases against Epstein. . .

. . . The USAO [DOJ local office] opposed efforts to unseal various records, as did Epstein, who was permitted to intervene in the litigation with respect to certain issues. Nevertheless, the court ultimately ordered that substantial records relating to the USAO’s resolution of the Epstein case be made public. During the course of the litigation, the court made numerous rulings interpreting the CVRA. After failed efforts to settle the case, the parties’ cross motions for summary judgment
remained pending for more than a year. . .

. . . In the decade following his release from incarceration, Epstein reportedly continued to settle multiple civil suits brought by many, but not all, of his victims. Epstein was otherwise able to resume his lavish lifestyle, largely avoiding the interest of the press.

On November 28, 2018, however, the Miami Herald published an extensive investigative report about state and federal
criminal investigations initiated more than 12 years earlier into allegations that Epstein had coerced girls into engaging in sexual activity with him at his Palm Beach estate. The Miami Herald reported that in 2007, Acosta entered into an “extraordinary” deal with Epstein in the form of the NPA, which permitted Epstein to avoid federal prosecution and a potentially lengthy prison sentence by pleading guilty in state court to “two prostitution charges.” According to the Miami
Herald, the government also immunized from prosecution Epstein’s co-conspirators and concealed from Epstein’s victims the terms of the NPA.

Of course, fucking Alex Acosta was found, by Barr, his former colleague from the law firm Kirkland Ellis, to have committed no ethical or legal violations by Barr’s DOJ twelve years later, although they felt compelled to add this paragraph (fair is fair, one supposes).

Nevertheless, OPR concludes that Acosta’s decision to resolve the federal investigation through the NPA constitutes poor judgment. Although this decision was within the scope of Acosta’s broad discretion and OPR does not find that it resulted from improper factors, the NPA was a flawed mechanism for satisfying the federal interest that caused the government to open its investigation of Epstein. In Acosta’s view, the federal government’s role in prosecuting Epstein was limited by principles of federalism, under which the independent authority of the state should be recognized, and the federal responsibility in this situation was to serve as a “backstop” to state authorities by encouraging them to do more. However, Acosta failed to consider the difficulties inherent in a resolution that relied heavily on action by numerous state officials over whom he had no authority; he resolved the federal investigation before significant investigative steps were completed; and he agreed to several unusual and problematic terms in the NPA without the consideration required under the circumstances. In sum, Acosta’s application of federalism principles was too expansive, his view of the federal interest in prosecuting Epstein was too narrow, and his understanding of the state system was too imperfect to justify the decision to use the NPA. Furthermore, because Acosta assumed a significant role in reviewing and drafting the NPA and the other three subjects who were supervisors left the USAO, were transitioning to other jobs, or were absent at critical junctures, Acosta should have ensured more effective coordination and communication during the negotiations and before approving the final NPA. The NPA was a unique resolution, and one that required greater oversight and supervision than Acosta provided. (above at p. 11)

[“A unique resolution,” indeed.]

. . . Although Acosta’s decision [not to inform Epstein’s victims that he was about to enter into a [unique, secret] non-prosecution agreement and allowing a letter to be sent to them letter falsely telling them the investigation was ongoing, after the NPA was signed] was within his authority and did not constitute professional misconduct, OPR concludes that Acosta exercised poor judgment when he failed to make certain that the state intended to and would notify victims identified through the federal investigation about the state plea hearing. His decision left victims uninformed about an important proceeding that resolved the federal investigation, an investigation about which the USAO had communicated with victims for months. It also ultimately created the misimpression that the Department intentionally sought to silence the victims. Acosta failed to ensure that victims were made aware of a court proceeding that was related to their own cases, and thus he failed to ensure. that victims were treated with forthrightness and dignity.

OPR concludes that the decision to postpone notifying victims about the terms of the NPA after it was signed and the omission of information about the NPA during victim interviews and conversations with victims’ attorneys in 2008 do not constitute professional misconduct. (at 12)

And in a final fuck you to the victims, and the public (and this investigation was conducted AFTER Epstein was suicided in DOJ detention under highly unusual circumstances still being covered up) fucking Bill Barr’s DOJ investigation concludes, with characteristic candor:

“Acosta … failed to ensure that victims were treated with forthrightness and dignity.” You think?

. . .After examining the full scope and context of the government’s interactions with victims, OPR concludes that the government’s lack of transparency and its inconsistent messages led to victims feeling confused and ill-treated by the government; gave victims and the public the misimpression that the government had colluded with Epstein’s counsel to keep the NPA secret from the victims; and undercut public confidence in the legitimacy of the resulting agreement. The
overall result of the subjects’ anomalous handling of this case understandably left many victims feeling ignored and frustrated and resulted in extensive public criticism. In sum, OPR concludes that the victims were not treated with the forthrightness and sensitivity expected by the Department.


“OPR concludes that the government’s lack of transparency and its inconsistent messages led to victims feeling confused and ill-treated by the government; gave victims and the public the misimpression that the government had colluded with Epstein’s counsel to keep the NPA secret from the victims; and undercut public confidence in the legitimacy of the resulting agreement.”

The misimpression of a unique and unprincipled sweetheart deal to protect wealthy sex offenders, you say?

Here’s an IDEA, Trump DOJ. Violate the Epstein Files Transparency Act Trump signed by heavily redacting everything, in the small percentage of documents belatedly dumped, relating to the perpetrators protected by Acosta’s sweeping non-prosecution agreement against any unnamed man or woman who participated in Epstein’s crimes. At the same time publish hundreds of previously undisclosed victim names and include their nude photographs. That’s forthrightness and sensitivity, Nazi fuck style.

“I really don’t care, do you?”

Words have meaning

Odd to have to say that, but also necessary to remember in our effort to combat incoherence, in this boiling Age of Incoherence we are living in.

Speaking of words with clear meaning, here are some, from psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee, from The Independent (no mass media news source in the US is seriously, directly covering the issue of Trump’s clear, dangerously escalating insanity), that should be heeded, goddamn it…

Many psychiatrists adhere to the “Goldwater Rule,” which discourages diagnosing public figures without personally examining them…. While this wasn’t a diagnosis per se, they [Dr. Lee and 35 other experts in dangerous mental health issues] based their conclusions, they say, on “voluminous evidence from the historical record of the president’s bizarre and impulsive behaviour, rambling digressions, factual confusions, unexplained sudden changes of course in strategic matters, both national and international, and his deeply impaired judgement.”

An accompanying statement concluded that the most worrisome examples were his outbursts of what was termed “extreme, seemingly uncontrollable rage,” such as his multiple threats to destroy Iran. Lee told The Independent that Trump’s grandiose, wishful fantasies and images “are signs of a psychotic spiral…. A desperate attempt to counteract the total helplessness one feels when one is losing one’s mind”….

Since the statement was released, she noted in her Substack that Trump has “exhibited even more signs of grandiosity, e.g., posting images of himself on social media shaking hands with God, acting like Jesus and dressing as a pope. And he has continued nocturnal bingeing on social media posts that are filled with accusations of multiple conspiracies against him, as often as 150 times a night.”

While she maintains she is not diagnosing Trump as she would a patient, Lee says she has a positive obligation to improve society and better public health, which includes acting “if anyone is a danger to society—in fact, danger for psychiatric reasons is a mandated duty for which we could be held legally liable for not responding.”

From a psychiatric standpoint, what does a pattern of sleeping four hours or fewer do to executive function, impulse control and the ability to make life-or-death decisions? Lee says that whether caused by anxiety, depression, mania, stress or substances, lack of sleep will worsen any diminished capacity in a person, including executive function, impulse control and critical decision-making.

“We know that he appears to fall asleep during important functions…. So, the fateful, life-or-death decisions that are handed to him, or that he takes upon himself despite not being equipped to handle them, imperil our nation and all the globe”….

source

Perfectly normal, and much, much better than “Sleepy Joe” and his pathetic AUTOPEN!    Best president ever, bigger than Elvis, bigger than the Beatles, bigger than the Pope, bigger than Jesus Christ.  And don’t even think of calling him Dozy Don, you Trump Derangement Syndrome suffering mother cuckers.

Interpersonal politics

I should have been a fucking diplomat (or maybe an advice to the lovelorn columnist).

Dear C:

In answer to your question [“whatever happened to rachmunnis and forgiveness?”]: rachmunnis is mercy, empathy, decency, kindness.  Forgiveness is a close relative, in fact, rachmunnis is sometimes translated as forgiveness.   

This impulse to act with love, to move past hurt, to nurture someone else, after sitting with their uncomfortable feelings, is the heart of relations between humans who care about each other.  Rachmunnis is easier to recognize than to consistently practice.   

Humility and self-awareness are essential parts of being an empathetic person. You have to be willing (and able) to put yourself in someone else’s place in order to resolve problems, to forgive each other and show love instead of clinging to righteous anger that always escalates when conflicts are never resolved.  

When someone tells you that you’re hurting them, and you insist they’re being oversensitive, overthinking it, making unfair accusations, making you uncomfortable and so on, you are showing the opposite of rachmunnis.  If you do this once in a while it means you’re having a bad day, you weren’t yourself, and it’s not hard to overlook. 

If you reflexively get angry and intransigent when someone tells you that you’ve hurt them, you’re not capable of rachmunnis.  Forgiving a person who lacks rachmunnis is folly.   It’s not true forgiveness, for one thing; it’s an empty gracious gesture that guarantees ongoing future harm.  Forgiving without a real apology means you agree to swallow repeated spoonsful of shit every time the other person feels bad about anything.

What happened to rachmunnis and forgiveness in our case is that I’ve told you, over and over, and in writing several times — writing you tell me is clear, stylish and easy to understand — that it’s impossible to forgive someone who can’t acknowledge fault.  You continue to act like you can’t understand this.

Your son is a very neurotic person, he’s also very angry.   He can only express his anger passively, and he has never conceded any kind of fault to me — or anyone else — as far as I know.   He’s too insecure to admit he’s ever been wrong about anything.  He’s too neurotic to express regret for anything he’s ever done, no matter what the cost to himself might be for not being able to do so.   

In the end, for reasons you know well, I stopped trying to fix things with people who can’t even acknowledge anything is broken.   For your part, you once seemed to understand this — telling me I had enough aggravations with my medical challenges without worrying about trying to be friends with R.  Now you’re intent on forcing me to forgive a very aggravating person, because it pains you that I am such a fine person and your son only wants to be friends with me.   

Can you forgive someone who accuses you of something his angry wife made up, angrily confronts you about it, eye twitching, telling you, before he even informs you what he’s accusing you of, that he’s not sure you can continue to be friends because of the viciousness of what you’ve supposedly done? Instead of showing anger, you answer him like a friend and try to help him with his problem, instead of walking away after the aggressive, ridiculous accusation. He never has to thank you for being a good friend or express the slightest regret about falsely accusing you or threatening you with the loss of an old friendship?  

To be put on the defensive by a person like that, after years of asking him to stop passive aggressively provoking me, is intolerable.  Yet, as even R will probably admit, I acted like a friend, treated him as a friend, did my best to help, seeing him in such a painful position.  To be told years later, many Yom Kippurs [the day when Jews are traditionally required to make amends with those they’ve wronged] come and gone, that, for a series of frankly senseless reasons, I have to forgive him, even if his rabbi/therapist can’t make him see the need to honestly try to make amends with someone he claims to love and admire, is intolerable. Him lying to you about having apologized to me “a dozen times” – the disgusting icing on an excrement cake.  

If you still can’t understand whatever happened to rachmunnis and forgiveness, read the enclosed.  

(which is slightly less diplomatic, I add, diplomatically.)

The evil we are all facing

Although I resisted believing in the existence of evil for many years, today its existence is undeniable. Evil walks brazenly among us. It is embodied in a system where basic human rights of citizenship, won only after a century of sacrifice and bloodshed, can be taken away at the stroke of a pen by six true believers, their unappealable decision perversely disguised as a constitutionally protected take on human equality. There is nothing wrong with cheating, and violating laws, they rule, if it keeps your party in power, no matter what the inferior majority wants.

The evil we are up against in 2026 is impossible not to see, and like most evil, it depends on constantly lying in order for its blinding truths to prevail. To a malignant narcissist who will say whatever is necessary to never be wrong, always be perfect, and have everything they claim taken as infallibly true — constant lying and righteous rage are necessary to prop up the grandiose vision of those who are damaged beyond repair. Insistence on the reasonableness of incoherence is necessary to force incoherent decisions on others. If you can do it with an affable smile, so much the better for your side.

The Age of Reason was an aspiration, a return to the pursuit of classical wisdom abandoned, during centuries of Christian intolerance and a slavish devotion to blind faith in God’s unknowable will, the long sleep of Reason known as The Dark Ages. The light of Reason, it was believed by those enlightened few who embraced the notion of a world guided by knowledge based on shared human experience and demonstrable facts, would soon illuminate the darkness and lead mankind to a better destiny than irrationality, oppression and death by sword and fire to all “heretics”.

Those who have much, and want everything, insist violently on their right to it all. They will not tolerate any of this Reason shit, if it conflicts with their need to dominate and control everything, and to be exempt from all law. For most of history these literal motherfuckers have ruled the rest of us. And to rule without being pitchforked by those they screw, they must peddle an irrational, counter-factual narrative, destroy the critical faculties of the populace (defund the Department of Education, for example) and cancel the right of expression of those who would expose their fundamental, destructive incoherence.

Burn the books, burn the libraries, burn the satirists, burn those who object to torturing our enemies, our neighbors, burn, baby, burn — Jesus loves a good fire to purge sin from the world (according to his most determinedly perverted followers). Burn the law enforcers, if they threaten you or your allies. Burn anyone who objects to burning people!

This insanely punitive pro-conflagration politics will not go down well with most people, unless they are already insane with rage. All this burning of our neighbors makes no sense, except through the lens of violent fury. That’s what advertising/propaganda is for. Keep them enraged with constantly repeated inflammatory lies and they will cheer the burning of those they hate, or, equally good, they will tune out entirely. Incoherence, insisted on, is the message. Lying is essential to the selling of every ugly enterprise.

I get PTSD from something like the Federalist Society Six declaring the other day that the party they belong to, and the power-crazed ideological movement they believe in, may stay in power by any means necessary, and by every means available. What is the legal rationale for striking down a law that finally brought a measure of justice to millions of citizens denied the right to vote for a century? We have the power, The End. Can the recent decision to finish off the Voting Rights Act be rationally justified? Who cares? We have the power, we finally struck down the last of that hated law that gives inferiors the right to elect their representatives, there is no further appeal and fuck you, what are you going to do about it, cuck?

I get PTSD because I have lived the personal version of this kind of politics. Throughout my childhood, in the little nuclear family I grew up in, I was generally blamed for the anger of parents who couldn’t control their anger. Almost five years ago I watched our closest friends, at each other’s throats for days on end in a beautiful rented vacation house, and afterwards, it was all my fault.

It was my fault because instead of saying, during a particularly insane moment close to the end of our holiday, after tensions between this long married couple escalated to an unbearable level, “goddamn it, fuck.. are you all insane?” I stopped myself and said instead “goddamn it, fuck… face,” while looking at my own partner, who although she’d just annoyed me, was as helpless as I was in that moment. I had utterly shocked them by violating their sacred marriage contract never to call each other names — prolonged silence, glaring, passive aggression, making nasty comments about each other, threats of violence were all fair game — but name calling? That was intolerable! They both agreed about that 100%.

Nothing unites enraged people like a common enemy, and that enemy was now me. My name calling in a moment of frustration, even if I immediately apologized for it, even if my apology was sincere, was something they could never forgive, as was my inability to forgive them for blaming me for something that was entirely my fault alone — and the way I had destroyed a beautiful vacation near Woodstock.

I see our political moment the same way.  A compulsive liar is the Leader and anyone on the right who wants power must get it through him (in the original German this was called the Führerprinzip — all power flows directly from the Führer).  To be eligible for power the applicant must demonstrate the ability to lie, to attack anyone questioning their lie, to be eternally brazen and always on the attack.   Nothing can ever be the fault of someone who can never be wrong.  What is hard to understand about that?

That, in a nutshell, is the evil we are up against in this perilous moment. An unreasoning need to be superior that yields to nothing, not reason, mercy, common decency or any humane impulse. The pure, unfiltered will to dominate, no matter what the cost, is the engine of evil. To this end they use lies to turn benefit of the doubt into suspicion, friendship to enmity, love to hate, a willingness to empathize into a desire for violent retribution.

How well will we swim through the sea of blood these fucks have no hesitation to flood the land with?  I am breathing deeply today, writing, refining, remembering to relax my breath, as the top of my head feels ready to blow off.  We must remain cool and rational for the grim fight ahead.  At this point, there is no doubt that we are fighting evil and we have no choice but to continue.

86 47, yo

fourth assassination attempt against Mr. Trump!!!

Totally, totally normal, you traitorous cucks!

President Trump has long been the “decider” in the closely held family business he inherited from his successful, psychopath father. He has bankrupted every business venture he ever went into, or had them closed down for corruption, fraud and abuse — like Trump University or the Trump charity. The guy is a blustering con artist who nobody in his employ has ever said no to. There have never been consequences for anything he’s ever done. The spoiled bully he was as a child is the same special guy running the most powerful country in the world. Falling asleep at a recent televised meeting, during a boring presentation about numbers, a more tactless person than I might call him Sleepy Don.

His niece Mary put it perfectly — he’s the weakest man she’s ever known, his genius is consistently finding people even weaker than him. This weakness in his inner circle must always include a non-existent moral compass. Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, Pete Kegsbreath, MAGA Mike Johnson, Kashyap Patel, Todd Blanche, Tulsi Gabbard, Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessent, Hung Cao, Michael Cohen, the list goes on and on. The soul-dead opportunists riding the MAGA train all know the key to Trump’s inner circle is eternal public deference to the big guy’s desperate, sucking vacuum of an ego. Trump can’t be wrong, has never, ever been, so if he is wrong, forcefully, angrily defend how right he was to do whatever stupid or evil thing he’s just done. Then smirk defiantly for the cameras, threaten to sue, prosecute, imprison, and wait for the moment the bus rumbles by, the one you will inevitably be thrown under, when the time comes.

Is this a surprise to anyone?

A classic asshole, whatever we may opine about his psychiatric condition or how the abuse he endured as a child warped him into the destructive, compulsive liar, with a taste for killing (double tap strikes on fishing boats, a girls’ school in Iran, firing squads for federal executions, yo), who now controls 5,000 nuclear warheads. Sometimes, as they say, a schmuck is just a schmuck.

Same ear, two years later. A miracle.

And in shocking breaking news, truly shocking, who would ever imagine such a thing at such a time?