Category Archives: drawing

She wants attention!!! Everybody else: go vote.

No wonder her entire staff resigned. Who wants to work for a brainless boss? Check out her highly reasonable arguments below:

She sure does blink a lot. Her best answer as a “closing argument” on a Democrat endorsing Trump’s candidate? You be the judge. VOTE.

Asked about her sudden switch of endorsements she said, blinking, frowning, smiling and grimacing, that she wanted to help the Democrats . . . by endorsing a Trump puppet (I know, you figure that one out). Her feelings were hurt by Abdul, she said, and he got angrier and angrier. Her right of center finance also pressured her, apparently, perhaps even bullied her, to endorse the Republican candidate, to help the Democrats.

You know what MAGA is saying: a Muslim is, by definition, an angry, violent terrorist who would lynch the vice president in a heartbeat, spray tear gas on the Capitol Police, beat them with metal poles, gouge out their eyes, rampage in the halls of our nation’s Capitol, strap on a suicide vest, kill children, kill everyone. Quite the compelling argument from a party that has already done all but one of these things (so far), in the name of their Lord and Savior. VOTE.

VOTE.

“[I]t’s a golden age of America,” [Trump] concluded [yesterday at the Reflecting Pool]. “We have a country that we can be proud of again. We were laughed at all over the world for four years. We were laughed at like we were stupid people. We were laughed at by every ruler, every president, every prime minister, every king, every queen, but they don’t laugh anymore. Thank you very much, everybody.” source

Moral Injury

The concept of moral injury arose in the military. It was used to describe the horror and hopelessness felt by soldiers who had followed immoral, even if not strictly illegal, orders. It was a loss of faith — in themselves, their ability to know right from wrong, their ability to trust their leaders and their fellow humans to act with moral decency.

The concept is useful to describe the communal injury we all (well, about 67% of us) are having inflicted on us continually as billionaires seek to control all of our life decisions in the service of maximizing their already unnecessarily exponential profits. Here’s our billionaire president, addressing leaders of the other 192 member nations at the UN yesterday:

In his speech today, President Donald J. Trump, reading haltingly off a teleprompter, said: “I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” source

Threatening to commit a crime against humanity is a crime against humanity, under international law. Except in the Bizarro World these supremely determined moral injury inflicting psychopaths inhabit.

Example of a direct description of moral injury:

A moral injury is a deep, persistent wound to our sense of justice, of right and wrong, our faith in our fellow humans. It involves a crippling loss of faith in our own judgement and sanity and that of our leaders and those who purport to protect us. Victims of moral injury frequently feel suicidal from the hopelessness that comes from their loss of faith in human goodness. We are, all of us, in this overwrought moment in history, deliberately subjected to moral injury at all times in our 24/7 age of instant influence, concentration of power and assertion of anti-consensual, corporate control as the party in power tries to “own” everybody else.

Our elected government asserts its right to kill foreign nationals in fishing boats far from our shores, on mere suspicion of drug running, and execute the wounded survivors of the boat strikes with drones; explode girls in their classrooms in Minab, mistakenly targeted by AI for a US Tomahawk missile strike, kill more girls in a follow-up strike and claim their own leaders killed the girls with US missiles; to shoot, point blank, in the back, in the face, American citizens who pose no threat to masked federal agents and claim the murdered citizens were terrorists; to keep “illegals” guilty of no crime in concentration camp conditions, cramped, without decent food and water, medical care or sanitation, brutalized by guards; we get to annihilate Iran if the leader wants to; sadly the list continues for longer than I can sit here tapping at the keyboard (without vomiting).

All of these things, done in our names, inflict a moral injury on a large sector of the population.   This injury is compounded by the feeling of helplessness imposed by the constant aggressive assertion of the right of the privileged elite to act upon the rest of us without our consent. 

If you can shoot a woman in the face, point blank, and as her dying body slumps on the gas pedal and the car veers off to crash into a tree, call her “fucking bitch” at the end of the video you made of the entire murder — and your government immediately claims that the murdered woman was a domestic terrorist attempting to kill an agent righteously performing his duty, who shot her three times in self-defense while 100% immune from prosecution anyway, try to imagine something worse that one person can do to another, that a government can do to its citizens.  If that kind of cold-blooded murder by a government worker is “perfectly justified”– then, literally, any atrocity you can think of is fine.

This is always the tactic of fascists. The state has a monopoly on the use of deadly force. If you can ensure the state is fascist, a rigid hierarchy controlled by an all-powerful, unscrupulous, unaccountable elite marshalling the citizens for spectacle and war only, the game for absolute control of everyone is won.

As for our moral injuries, we are told to be quiet and not whine about them. Our supremely intrusive non-consensual government, committing its many heinous crimes openly, brazenly justifying them, calling murdered victims the perpetrators, dead perpetrators righteous martyrs, millions in compensation paid to their families, is bascially telling us to take our moral injuries somewhere quiet and go fuck them.

The academic approach to defining moral injury  (which explains why so many hate academia):

Moral injury (MI) is characterised by persistent psychological distress following events that violate moral beliefs. There has been a lot of interest in moral injury particularly over recent years given our increasing knowledge that MI is linked with adverse mental health outcomes including PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), depression, and suicidality. Whilst we know that potentially morally injurious events (PMIEs) can cause moral injury, there is no agreed definition of what a PMIE is. Often discussions on this topic suggest that PMIEs should be ‘high stakes’ events although there is no agreed threshold as to what events are high stakes and what events are not. source

With all respect — fuck you, Doc. You will perhaps gain insight into the parameters of legitimate PMIEs, and the predictive track of their MI-derived adverse mental health outcomes, once you lose funding for your essential research into the exact nature of MI.

The rest of us know a moral injury by experiencing the pain of it, even if we don’t know what to call it.

Seven NY Times Takeaways from Trump-a-Palooza

Conspicuously, the NY Times did not find space to mention that the president asked everyone at his “convention” to raise their right arms and take an oath to cheat at the polls because, according to his “abuser is actually the victim” ideology, the Democrats are trying to rig the election. You can read the Grey Lady’s seven takeaways here.

You won’t find the biggest takeaway reported on. What is wrong with “legacy media”? It is corporate, and being a corporate “person” means never having to admit you’re wrong, or that anything that could possibly benefit you is wrong. Nothing wrong with this, apparently (at least he wasn’t wearing a tan suit, or being demented, like Biden at the debate!)

Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breathe. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do. There’s never been bigger cheaters. They don’t care. I am going to go out and I’m going to get my friends, my family. And we are going to vote on Nov. 3, or we are going to vote before that.

Because I can’t stop banging my head against the wall sometimes, I wrote to the article’s authors just now:

I read your article and was dismayed that one of the takeaways was not the president asking the crowd to raise their right hands and take an oath to commit voter fraud.

How is this not mentioned?

Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breathe. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do. There’s never been bigger cheaters. They don’t care. I am going to go out and I’m going to get my friends, my family. And we are going to vote on Nov. 3, or we are going to vote before that.

The Times does some valuable reporting, particularly the investigative pieces.  I don’t understand the timidity of tone in addressing serious, serious issues raised by having an incompetent, erratic, destructive, divisive, vindictive, increasingly demented, president with complete control of the federal government and one of our two political parties.   One who has also done, or is trying to do, everything on the far-right Heritage Foundation’s anti-democratic Project 2025 checklist.  Your takeaways suggest some kind of normalcy.

To borrow a phrase as deeply cynical (in the context of its use) as “arbeit macht frei” (though actually true) “democracy dies in darkness.”

Any explanation for the omission of the takeaway above would be greatly appreciated,

I’m likelier to get an email from Mr. Trump himself than from either of the two New York Times reporters, I’m pretty sure.

To suggest the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, a bullet from an assault rifle miraculously missing the anointed presidential candidate’s brain by a fraction of an inch, ripping his ear and killing a man behind him, was staged? Ugliness! Ungraciousness!!! Disgusting lack of decency! Treason! Nobody in either party or the media dared to suggest the obvious at the time — even after no medical records were released, after the instant killing (and expedited cremation) of the shooter seconds after the shots were fired, even with no scar on the victim’s ear (further proof of God’s grace toward his chosen favorite, no doubt). A year after Trump miraculously survived a deadly assassination attempt that killed a bystander, a retired police detective posted this, which seems so obvious it should have been pointed out the day after the shooting. Here’s Snopes with the whole story — you be the judge.

Come on in, the water’s fine

No cover-up!

“I don’t have to cover anything up, I am the boss. Sick, deranged, smelly, corrupt communist activist judges don’t get to tell me what to do.”

“I didn’t shit my pants, you shitted in my pants!!! What kind of sick people do such things? I will kill all of you disgusting traitor fucks, watch!”

Photographic proof!

As you can plainly see, God spared his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, while causing only a small wound on his ear, like a stigmata of the ear, because God so dearly loved him that He deflected a deadly bullet and gave an innocent member of the audience, seated behind the president, a quick pass to heaven, so that His imperfect vessel could be miraculously spared and go on to be reelected as the most righteous president, the most righteous leader of any country, in human history. Amen.

Meanwhile, vicious critics continue to attack him, without mercy, seemingly every second.  Thankfully, he can defend himself, including against those who brutally gouged a 250 foot long gash at the bottom of the beautiful reflecting pool in DC to destroy his donor’s perfect work restoring the historic pool to its pristine 1922 beauty:

Friday night, Trump blamed “Radical Left Lunatics, most likely Dumocats [sic], who have spent their lives trying to ruin our Country,” for “some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool.” By this evening, he was blaming “multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll [sic]. Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail! Work will begin immediately on its repair.” Source

Who is David Gentile? What a surprise:

David Gentile (* 1966) ist ein US-amerikanischer Unternehmer und Gründer sowie ehemaliger CEO von GPB Capital Holdings, einer Private-Equity-Gesellschaft mit Sitz in New York, die 2013 gegründet wurde.

The NY Times reports:

The investigation, which has not been previously reported, had begun examining whether improper payments were made to help facilitate the commutation awarded to David Gentile, a private equity executive who was convicted in a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of mostly mom-and-pop investors, some of whom lost their retirement savings.

The clemency grant freed Mr. Gentile last November less than two weeks into a seven-year prison sentence, and wiped away the possibility of forfeiting more than $15.5 million to the government.

Within a few months, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, where Mr. Gentile’s conviction had been secured, opened an investigation into how the commutation came about.

Among the evidence they gathered was information about jailhouse communications in which Mr. Gentile discussed making payments of $2.5 million or more to people or companies to help facilitate his clemency, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation who were not authorized to discuss it.

One of the people who came under scrutiny by investigators was the Rev. Frank Mann, a retired Catholic priest from Queens who is friends with Mr. Trump. In an email sent to The New York Times, Father Mann denied having anything to do with the clemency. But people with knowledge of the prison communications say that the priest corresponded with Mr. Gentile about lobbying the president on his behalf. . .

. . . Mr. Trump’s unorthodox approach to clemency has spawned a seamy cottage industry in which lawyers, lobbyists and others with ties to the president have collected millions of dollars from pardon seekers who would not necessarily qualify for second chances under the Justice Department’s criteria for identifying and vetting worthy recipients.

One lobbyist was charged in March by Mr. Nocella’s office for attempting to violently extort $500,000 from a client who received a pardon from Mr. Trump last year. source