Category Archives: Ahimsa

Great lesson on the Strait of Hormuz

David Feldman, in his incomparable style (I started to say ‘inimitable’, but his distinct delivery isn’t hard to imitate), uses maps to lay out the supreme idiocy of Trump and Hegseth’s loud assertions that they won the war against Iran overwhelmingly and are only negotiating now to… uh, they completely and utterly won, decisively, destroyed Iran’s ability to wage war with unprecedented lethality and violence in the name of all that is holy (and the bossy f-ing pope be damned),  which is why they have agreed to a ceasefire and are negotiating terms with a nation that, whenever it wants to, can stop all oil tankers from passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

It is clearly the lügenpresse [1], the lying globalists who control mass media (you know who he’s talking about…) lying about the most perfect war, more perfect, even, than Mr. Trump’s perfect call asking Ukrainian president Zelensky to “do him a favor” if he wanted the arms shipment Congress had already approved for Ukraine’s defense against Putin’s invasion.   The stinking rat who made that secret phone call public, and lied about the transcript, which was perfect (PERFECT!),  is going to get prosecuted pursuant to Tulsi Gabbard’s referral, and that will happen toot sweet, says Kashyap Patel, who will now be subject to being deposed in the idiotic defamation case the angry asshole brought against The Atlantic for smearing his good name (I know, what good name?).  It’s all the fault of the lying goddamned commie mass media that needs to be brought to heel, clearly.  These public servants are all perfect, the most perfect ever to serve this good nation.  PERFECT YOU SICK FUCKING LYING TREASONOUS MANIAC BASTARDS!!!!!

[1]

Incoherence is perfect for assholes

Think of it from the asshole’s point of view.  If you need to win an argument (because losing, which includes any kind of compromise, is unbearably humiliating  to you) and the facts are not in your favor — FUCK THE FACTS.   Seriously, just keep a straight face, an aggressive stance, attack your opponent and make any noises you like, grunts and squawks are fine.  

Keep doing this, never pause, never back down.   The other person will eventually grow frustrated, if you are arguing about something important — say human rights in a democracy (I just typoed demoncracy, which seems to fit our moment with the antichrist-in-chief).   When their frustration explodes, or they walk away, frustrated, you merely smile and make a mocking little dog sound as your friends applaud.

As long as you cater to the emotional cravings of those you control, people also desperate to be right, who, if in danger of being proved wrong, prefer killing you to admitting fault, incoherence is perfect.  

You can’t argue successfully against an incoherent assertion.   Incoherence is immune to persuasion of any kind.  It is self-contained, self-proving and self-reinforcing.  

When Donald Trump was an adolescent millionaire (his father paid him $200,000 a year from birth, his salary as president of various fake corporations dad set up to avoid taxes) his psychopath [1] father intercepted a carton of switchblades his son had delivered to the house.  Donald’s plan was to arm his schoolyard gang with these knives and rule the elite private school his parents sent him to.   His parents decided that a few years in a military academy would be good for the young bully’s discipline and “make him a man” of some kind.   We see how well that plan worked.  

Trump claims to have loved the hierarchical life at the military academy where he specialized in bullying the younger cadets.   There was a new crop of these young, pampered chumps every fall for Donald to torture with his winning personality.  Then, after graduation, proudly dressed in a splendid military uniform, bone spurs, unfortunately, kept him out of uniform for the rest of his life. 

More than sixty years later, the dude is unchanged.  He bullies everyone around him, except when someone stands up to him directly.  No mere box of switchblades this time, Tomahawk missiles, nuclear weapons, enraged toadies and lickspittles competing daily to prove their unquestioning loyalty to him, unlimited dark money to prosecute his thousands of lifelong grudges against every kind of enemy imaginable.  He now claims the legal right to illegally defund programs Congress funded, endangering and torturing millions and costing countless lives (poor people, disposable) and to have his underlings commit cold blooded murder and get away with it. 

He’s not crazy to believe these things since his 6-3 Leonard Leo majority granted him extraordinary criminal powers in the aptly named  Trump v. United States.  The party line ruling granted him the right to commit criminal acts, and pardon any criminal, if he can claim he did the crime as part of his core duty to advances his/their agenda.   He has replaced the Department of Justice with the Department of Retribution, his gigantic glaring face adorns its building. 

I think of my own father, a soul with many gifts and the most decent of impulses, helpless against the many traumas of his early life.   Whipped in the face by his mother from the time he could stand, growing up in what he always called grinding poverty, legally blind until the age of ten, when FDR’s program for the poor gave him his first pair of glasses to correct 20/400 vision, he considered himself the dumbest kid in his little town, even at the very end of a distinguished life. 

We argued many times over the years about whether people can change in any meaningful way.  I contend we can, and always made the case.   He insisted people cannot change in any fundamental way and that all forms of therapy only support a delusion.  I learned only recently that we were both right, and both wrong.  Many people can change, if their pain makes the need to change urgent enough.  Many people can never change, no matter how acute their pain becomes.  If you can’t be wrong, there is nothing to change.

Donald Trump is an example of the kind who can never change.   He is the perfect avatar for the interests he represents — entitled psychopaths [1] who created an ideology of “liberty” (which requires unreasoning faith to believe) and a massive propaganda machine to promote their right to own and control everything.

There is no good argument for why some should have 100,000,000 times what starving children and their struggling parents have, why children should go to bed hungry in the wealthiest country in human history.  There is no conceivable moral argument for that.  Even Charles Koch’s beloved Institute for Humane Studies never successfully made a moral case for starving poor children. 

And so, an incoherent, demonstrably false fable — makers vs. takers — the rich make the economy move for everybody, and what trickles from their pathologically greedy lips makes fine soup for the rest of us.  Booted and spurred, most of them from birth, to ride the backs of anyone less deserving than they are (in the fine image Jefferson stole from a Scottish rebel about to be hanged), these creatures found their avatar in a man willing to do anything, including bark like a pet dog pursued by hungry, imaginary Haitians, to never lose.

Are we tired of winning yet, America?

[1]

Convert to Catholicism knows way more than the pope

As every American school child knows, morality is not the concern of the American president. The president’s job is not to model or otherwise influence good or bad behavior, it is to dictate American public policy. Which makes him… a dictator? Hey, the pope was good with Mussolini and Hitler, he signed a peace treaty with them, why not the American version? Perhaps JD ought to pray on that, to God, not Peter Theil, before he opens his vapid mouth.

Ah, for Christ’s sake…

Until Trump there was never a stable genius president who attacked numerous foes daily. Not sure an American president has ever attacked the Pope, (possibly during the heyday of the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, when hatred of Catholics raged) but this president is undeniably special. Heather:

Trump tonight posted on social media, in part: “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.” Trump suggested the Pope was elevated to the papacy only “because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” He wrote “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”

Today is Orthodox Easter, and about 45 minutes after attacking the Pope, Trump posted an image of himself in the place of Jesus, apparently healing a sick man in a bed, surrounded by a soldier, a nurse, a woman praying, and an older man. Behind him are the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, and a giant American flag, while in the sky are two eagles, three fighter jets, soldiers, and what seems to be a monster.

Amid popular revulsion at what people are calling heresy and blasphemy, former U.S. representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote: “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit.”

A minute after posting the image of himself as Jesus, Trump posted an image of a Trump tower on the moon.

source

Murderous maniac threatens genocide

Try not to be upset that our president has threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if his demand that Iran drop its defensive posture after refusing to unconditionally surrender, in spite of literally thousands of bombing raids against it in recent weeks, is not immediately met.

You have to see it from Trump’s point of view — he’s upset because the world still doesn’t take him seriously as a major league mass murderer. What does a strongman have to do to earn his place alongside the all-time greats? He’s killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, but that’s chump change to members of the strongman Hall of Fame. He needs a big kill to get the cred as a killer for the ages that he has sought since childhood.

Checking to get the insane bastard’s genocidal quote right, AI gave the first result (I forgot to add “-AI” at the end of my search) I got this:

The auto-generated answer “may contain inaccuracies,” as the psychopathic monetizers of incoherence, fear and hatred — the masters of the universe — inform the users at the bottom of the partially accurate answer. The president’s statement reflects, it’s plain to see, “escalating tensions and the potential for severe military action.” AI does not reflect any kind of psychotic break from reality, not derangement, dementia, a desire to commit war crimes, an inability to back down, ever, stemming from childhood trauma and an overwhelming terror of more humiliation. “Escalating tensions.” you understand, between reality, which has a famously anti-Trump bias, in fact, hates and vilifies all Christian white men, and … the violently acted out prejudices of terrified, enraged white Christian men, as well as Mr. Trump himself.

Look, if an American president, surrounded by sycophantic, militant white Christian Protestants, (including a Secretary of War who believes there’s no such thing as a stupid war crime), can’t make a little Easter joke in a menacing social media post threatening mass killing and sarcastically praising Allah, what is our freedom really worth? Others have a right to hate that freedom, but, you have to admit, it’s pretty incoherent to insist on your right to freedom while denying a Nazi’s right to the same freedom, right? The freedom of the top of the top 1% to do what benefits them is so precious and inviolable, in an incoherent schema, that the lives of a couple of billion poor people don’t amount to a hill of beans. Fair is fair. Be a billionaire or shut the fuck up.

You have to like the symmetry here. Trump promises oil executives that if they give him a billion for his campaign he’ll take care of them once elected. Then he cuts all the renewable energy projects funded under Biden. Then he drops bombs on a country whose predictable defensive move is to close the Strait of Hormuz, driving oil prices up and with oil prices, most other prices. Win-win, if you’re an oil billionaire. Charles Koch may privately hate the vulgar, incoherent, criminally insane Mr. Trump, but he sure is good for the bottom line.

Insane terrible two year-old as the most powerful man on the planet

Below is Dan Rather’s clear analysis of the deadly box Trump has placed himself (and all of us) in. I’ve been at a loss to explain my recent level of anxiety to myself, this — starting with a photo of a woman walking through a bombed out section of Tehran — puts some of my anxiety into pretty good perspective. After watching the excellent Nuremberg the other night on Netflix — the story of how the nations that defeated Nazism began creating a body of international law to prevent another such threat to life on earth — to see our own country in the hands of creatures so similar to the soul-dead men on the docket at the world’s first war crimes trial, makes my skin crawl. It is horrifying to know that the U.S. is now the single greatest threat to life on the planet the world has ever known. Because we have an enraged victim of lifelong epic fury as our Unitary Executive, manipulated by a cabal of determined “ideological” psychopaths with unlimited wealth and power. Here’s Dan:

Wars are chaotic. They’re unpredictable — hence the phrase “the fog of war.” That fog has descended on the war in the Middle East. There are some people who believe Trump’s war is going well. But the consensus of opinion right now is that the battle is going poorly for the United States and Israel.

You have to wonder if anyone is telling the president the truth. Because his version of what will happen if the war continues much longer differs wildly from that of experts in the region. If we think gas prices are high now, just wait.

It boils down to this: Donald Trump is trapped. As of this writing, there is no good option to end this conflict.

  • The U.S. walks away — as Trump has threatened — and the Strait of Hormuz remains under Iranian control. No one in the region likes that scenario.
  • The U.S. bombs Iranian infrastructure, including power plants, which is a war crime. Iran retaliates, likely targeting energy resources around the Middle East, while retaining a sizable portion of its missile stockpile.
  • Trump launches a ground war, which could be long, bloody, and expensive.

Any of the above scenarios could lead to a worldwide recession, or worse.

By the tone of his tweets, Trump’s frustration with the options is boiling over.

the rest is here

Could be, Grey Lady?  Bombing civilian targets like water desalination plants, power plants, infrastructure like bridges and girls schools, all calculated to terrorize and kill masses of noncombatants, ARE war crimes.

Easter message from the chairman-for-life of the (billionaires only) Bored of Peace

There is no proof that the president is insane, demented, gravely ill, so traumatized early in life that his worldview is irremediably dark, childishly selfish, that his only motive is retribution, but the evidence continues to mount. Easter Sunday he posted this message to the people we have “eviscerated”, the evil Iranian regime and all the Iranian people. No time like Easter Sunday for the leader of white Christianity’s mightiest army to threaten the enemies of Christ with massive war crimes. Open the fuckin’ straits or I’ll commit so many war crimes against you scumbags they’ll be shooting the Flintstones, live, in Tehran.

Speaking of hell, does the demon to the left of the flawed vessel of Jesus look familiar?

And here’s Elon Musk’s Grok’s take on the VERY STABLE GENIUS’s holy day threats:

Charisma, times two

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.