Category Archives: muttering to myself

2% of humans are psychopaths, corporations close to 100%

I wonder how high that percentage goes among human billionaires. The current examples we know suggest a high correlation of the major traits of psychopaths with the best of the best and most deserving of the deserving — ruthless focus on self-interest, manipulativeness, exploitativeness, zero empathy, no capacity for remorse.

It is beyond question that the alter egos of billionaires, the immortal American/global “persons” known as corporations, are almost 100% psychopathic. Here’s the list of their traits from the excellent documentary The Corporation. (watch it for free on YouTube, highly recommended)

Picture any member of Trump’s billionaire cabinet, or the fabulous CEOs who line up to kiss their asses —  Jeff “rent Venice for my next wedding” Bezos, Elon “virtually human, kill millions of brown children” Musk, Mark “go to the mat — and fuck democracy–  for my  right to be richest man in the world” Zuckerberg, etc.   Now, imagine them embodied in an entity of eternal life, the vampire that is the modern corporation.  This “person” owes allegiance to nothing but pathological greed and the compulsion to maximize and hoard profit.  

Starting in 1971, when a group of worried very wealthy psychopaths hired tobacco lobbyist Lewis Powell (soon thereafter placed on the Supreme Court by Nixon) to draft a game plan for ensuring their eternal dominion over puny human persons, we can draw a straight line to Project 2025, featuring corporatist John Roberts and his morally deformed reactionary five on the Supreme Court.   Here’s the most condensed version I’ve seen of that story:

You don’t have to be a psychopath, of course, to raise prices by 100% two years in a row. You only need to be shamelessly greedy and able to do it. If you are a corporation, any amount of money you need to spend to make laws that allow you to double your prices every year is money well-spent. A cost of doing business! And psychopath is such a judgmental word!! How about just “successful” and stop with the judgement. Like the NY Times does:

 

An illegally appointed US attorney illegally “continuing as US Attorney” becomes not a matter of law — her appointment was ruled constitutionally invalid by a federal judge — but the object of criticism from judges who are “critical” of an illegally appointed DOJ official being kept in office after the federal court ruled the appointment illegal.

You see what the New York Times is doing here?  Innocently sanitizing a fascistic disregard for American law and a good old fashioned ass-wipe with the Constitution. Why not? All the points of view that are fit to print.

Bravo, Grey Lady, another bullseye.

Robert Caro, whose lifelong interest as a writer and researcher is understanding power, how it is acquired and how it’s used, wrote that to see what someone will do with power, study what they did as they climbed to power. These Project 2025 fascists were once the “lunatic fringe” John Birch Society, rabid anti-Communist segregationists who made no attempt to hide the foam on their lips. Today, after a long, relentless, fantastically expensive climb to power, they control all three branches of our government. The “Trump White House” released a document, the 2025 National Security Strategy, traditionally used to announce US foreign policy, that says a forthright fuck you to the rest of the world and shits on anything but the business interests of America’s wealthiest. Read all about it, from Heather Cox Richardson.

Transactional love

And the temporary triumph of enraged, heedless incoherence marches on. It’s no surprise that the most obsessively greedy in our nation, and their counterparts in foreign nations, would fall in line with a Nazi-like mob boss who promises them even more wealth — or the loss of it, and worse, for the capital crime disobedience to the Leader. A solid 65% of Americans oppose this kind of open tyranny, the percentage is probably much higher in the case of individual Project 2025 policies (e.g., cutting federal funds and closing rural hospitals so MAGA members will die — to give even more to those who already have hundreds, or thousands, of millions).

It is crucial in this sickening moment in our history to keep our equanimity as much as possible. We face a true catastrophe, but it is not a catastrophe until the curtain actually comes down. The constant roaring threats from these irrational, incoherent fascists are not quite the same as them actually being in charge, firmly and finally in control. Their crazed desperation to seize lawless power and put troops on the streets in Anarchist Jurisdictions before our next election tells us the outcome of this battle for America’s future is far from settled.

We must do everything in our power to remain calm, strong, and reasoning, in the face of desperately violent incoherence. We owe ourselves and the future the preservation of conversation, debate and discussion, rather than a centrally run AI based dystopia where only 1% get to thrive and enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

A perfectly reasonable story

Here’s a little story to illustrate what a perfectly reasonable story is made of, particularly in our age of manipulative social media and the algorithms that keep everyone’s eyes glued to their phones to have our biases confirmed over and over, our outrage stoked.   

Here are the elements of a reasonable story:  the setup is something people can relate to, the unfolding tale is something that rings a bell of true life for them, the ending makes perfect sense in light of the rest of it.   If you trust the storyteller, the context of the story is familiar, and emotionally resonant, the story will be perfectly reasonable to most people.   A story that sounds perfectly reasonable, given the culture we live in , leaves you with no real questions.

So, yesterday I went into a big sporting goods store in a mall, a chain store.  There were two greeters at the door, a male and a female.  Neither one acknowledged me as I approached, neither one could be bothered to turn their heads one inch in my direction.  I was walking slowly with a cane, talking to them, and these two fitness models never even turned to look at me.  I wanted to know where the shoe department was.  I was looking for shoes with the greatest possible cushioning, to try to help my painful knees.  

Asking these two for help was like talking to a fucking wall.   I understand they don’t get paid much, probably minimum wage, and they are from a younger generation, one that doesn’t always make eye contact with humans as much as with screens, but I was asking very little of them, almost nothing.  “Excuse me, can you direct me to the shoe department?”

“Hello,” I said, trying to get their attention.  After the third or fourth attempt I got the message loud and clear.  I was very tempted to tell them to go fuck themselves, but just limped off to find the shoe department on my own.   

The salesman who helped me was very nice, and helpful, and I wound up finding a comfortable pair of very cushioning shoes.  I told him about the two greeters who had been so rude, literally pretending to be deaf and blind.  He smiled indulgently, sympathetically, what else could he actually do?

I didn’t hold it against him, there was nothing he could do about his rude colleagues.  He did his job well, made good recommendations, accurately predicted which of the three pairs of shoes he brought out for me to try on I’d wind up buying.  A very nice guy and I’m hopeful the shoes will help ease my painful bone on bone, metal on metal, knee caps.  If not, this chain has a very reasonable return policy of 90 days, as long as I don’t abuse the shoes during that time.  

I completely forgot about those two dick heads by the front door, until I had to pass them again on the way out.  I called out “goodbye” in a loud voice and neither of these robotic pricks so much as turned their heads to acknowledge I was there.

I took their picture before I left, so you can see what we are all up against in the greatest nation Jesus ever personally gave his blessings of peace and freedom, and the Second Amendment, to.

Grey Lady, pitch perfect

From a New York Times May Day editorial, entitled — There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab. Here they describe a few of his despicable acts of vengeance against a nation that rejected him by a large margin in 2020.

He has fired federal workers without the 30-day notice that the law requires.

Doesn’t this also mean he fired federal workers illegally? Can’t say it, can you?

He has tried to cut university funding by citing antisemitism without following the established procedures for such civil rights cases.

“Such civil rights cases?” More accurately: he has threatened universities, and unilaterally withheld their federally funding, on transparently baseless grounds.

He has issued executive orders punishing law firms for invented wrongdoing.

Well, no problem with that one.

I did have a real problem with this earlier paragraph:

The building of this coalition [to oppose a Trump dictatorship, which the Times apparently calls for] should start with an acknowledgment that Mr. Trump is the legitimate president and many of his actions are legal. Some may even prove effective. He won the presidency fairly last year, by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a comfortable margin in the Electoral College. On several key issues, his views were closer to public opinion than those of Democrats. Since taking office, he has largely closed the southern border, and many of his immigration policies are both legal and popular. He has reoriented federal programs to focus less on race, which many voters support. He has pressured Western Europe to stop billing American taxpayers for its defense. Among these policies are many that we strongly oppose — such as pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, cozying up to Vladimir Putin of Russia and undermining Ukraine — but that a president has the authority to enact. Elections have consequences.

The Grey Lady’s normalizing characterization of Trump’s ridiculous performance as president with a massive mandate is, to say the least, cherry-picked. His many destructive acts, his administration’s rampant lawlessness and contempt for truth, his unqualified, lie-spouting loyalist appointees in crucial positions leaving America open to ridicule and worse, the president’s unprecedented and well-earned unpopularity, all left out of the Grey Lady’s delicate balancing act, their attempt to treat a psychopath as a perfectly normal president just doing the job like any other duly elected president.

To take one example — did he win the election fairly? We all seem to accept it, in the name of affirming democracy as expressed at the ballot box, but to me the jury is out after every MAGA state suppressed voting with new laws making it harder to vote, Trump being the sole Republican to win in several swing states, and Russia literally calling in bomb threats to Democratic districts on election day. Also, I saw no reporting whatsoever (except for mine) on the 20,000,000 less mail-in ballots delivered by the Trump megadonor postmaster in the first election since 2008 when mail-in voting didn’t increase.

Then I read a line like this and just say “fuck you” and turn away:

We understand that Mr. Trump’s defenders believe that Democrats started this cycle by prosecuting him, and there are reasonable arguments against some of those cases.

We understand that the New York Times represents a certain well-invested segment of the status quo, so what else are they going to say? Still, the words “fuck you” ring in my head when I read this kind of pandering nonsense in the journal of record. “His defenders defend him against what they call political persecution and they make some reasonable arguments.” Can you give us one?

Heh, of course you can’t.

In other news that’s fit to print:

How a headline frames the story

This DOJ attorney, Erez Reuveni, was placed on leave by Trump’s DOJ and then summarily fired for being candid to a judge in a federal court.  His only struggle, as an officer of the court, was trying not to lie or be evasive in response to the judge’s questions. Reading it most charitably to ABC, the DOJ did struggle in Maryland migrant case, though Reuveni did not.

Or as the New York Times told it at the time:

Career lawyers representing the government have a long tradition of arguing for the goals of Republican or Democratic administrations, regardless of their personal views. What is different now, they say, is that they increasingly feel trapped between President Trump’s partisan political appointees, who insist on a maximalist approach, and judges who demand comprehensible answers to basic questions.

The most vivid example of this squeeze came on Saturday when one of the department’s senior immigration lawyers, Erez Reuveni, was suspended indefinitely after speaking candidly about the administration’s mistaken deportation of a Maryland man to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador. . .

. . . “Good clients listen to their lawyers,” the judge, Paula Xinis, said.

Instead, the client punished its lawyer. In a letter on Saturday, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said Mr. Reuveni had failed to follow orders and instead committed “conduct prejudicial to your client.”

A second senior immigration lawyer involved in the Abrego Garcia case, August Flentje, was also placed on administrative leave for his failure “to supervise a subordinate,” according to two officials familiar with the move.

source

But corporate media like ABC (who already wrote a fat check to Trump to settle a frivolous lawsuit the president brought against them for a truthful on air statement by one of their talking heads), you know they have to be so careful, because access and frivolous lawsuits and extortion and shakedowns and threatened shutdowns and loss of license, and baseless defamation claims, the threat of censorship and the demand to obey an advance and loss of sponsorships. 

Falling into corporate disfavor by alienating the powerful, and vengeful, is suicidal behavior for a corporation.  So you write the headline that frames it in the best light for the guy you just wrote the multimillion dollar check to Trump’s “library” to avoid a lawsuit you could have easily had dismissed. Hence: THE DOJ LAWYER WHO REFUSED TO LIE TO OR STONEWALL THE JUDGE STRUGGLED IN COURT.  

USA!  USA!!!

What is up with fucking homophobes?

It’s 2025 and there are still millions of insecure, angry men, and a large number of similar women, who hate homosexuals. Hate them. What threat does anyone in the LGBTQ+ world pose to anybody? You’d have to be a homophobe to dribble out an incoherent, hate-filled rationale.

I’d imagine anyone with basic common sense and common decency would understand that people who are not like them, speakers of other languages, people from other cultures, people with different ancestry, religion, do not pose any threat just because of these differences. You don’t like people who speak French? Don’t talk to them, mon ami. Homophobia is irrational hatred just like racism against Blacks, Asians, violent hatred against Muslims, Jews, Central Americans, war orphans. Why did this news from Heather Cox Richardson come as no surprise in the Age of Musk/Trump?

Protesters today packed Christopher Park in New York City’s Greenwich Village near the Stonewall National Monument after the Trump administration erased “TQ+” from the LGBTQ+ on the monument’s website. The Stonewall Uprising of 1969, six days of conflict between police and LGBTQ+ protesters after police raided the Stonewall Inn, brought the longstanding efforts of LGBTQ+ activists for civil rights to popular attention, making Stonewall a symbol of LGBTQ+ rights.

Trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera were key figures in the Stonewall Uprising. Acknowledging their contribution, one protester held a sign that read, “NATIONAL PARK SERVICE: YOU CAN’T SPELL HISTORY WITHOUT A ‘T’”

Former Republican operative Stuart Stevens had a different take. He posted: “When I see the sexual orientation hate come out of the Republican party under the pretext of just being anti-Trans, I am very tempted to name the Republican operatives and elected officials who are closeted gays. It’s not a short list.”

Famous closeted gay superstar mob lawyer Roy Cohn, a highly sexed and very promiscuous man, smiles at his peeps from the hot place. He’s still a bit hissy that his protegé, the handsome young Donald J. Trump, dropped him like a bad habit when Cohn was dying of AIDS. I can picture him bitching to Satan about this betrayal by the ungrateful son of a wealthy man he did so much for every chance he got.

Healthcare, USA style

A very strong case can be made that we live in an extremely toxic culture here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Our culture is so insanely poisoned that the regular slaughter of school children and their teachers by insane “gunmen” is considered, by a powerful, immovable minority, the non-negotiable price for American freedom, somehow.   Our toxic culture is the only one in the world that allows the regular mass murder of our children.  Number one cause of death for children one to eighteen years old — gunshot.

How toxic is our culture? A candidate for the American presidency can tell this colossal, hateful lie, pulled directly out of his own floridly insane imagination, (in a manner that even Hitler might have hesitated to voice in public) gain millions of likes and as many votes, become president again:

He’s angry about a fact that he just made up, young American girls being raped, sodomized and murdered by these illegals…. the dark brown, scary, violent, pet eating ones who are poisoning the blood of our country like the vermin enemy within (folks like me and Mike Pence)…

Just to be clear, this imagined rampage of rapes of young girls by dark-skinned “illegals” (listen to the evocative way the mad fuck pronounces that word), in the mind of this asshole’s diehard fans, means that, blessedly, (for the ones who wear crosses), even more rapists’ children must be born, because that is how Jesus wants it. Fetuses are clearly infinitely more sacred and precious than kindergarten children.

The public’s reaction to the cold blooded murder of a wealthy health insurance CEO has been, largely, to treat the man who killed him as an avenging folk hero. When I told a friend someone had quipped that there are 50,000,000 Americans with a motive to shoot him, his response was “only 50,000,000?” Another friend questioned whether the gunshots were actually the cause of death, isn’t it likely the dead man had many comorbidities?

What did this CEO do to inspire someone to kill him?  He simply did his job, vastly increasing the profitability of his health insurance company by using AI to deny 99% of all claims.   He noted that far less than 1% of those denied health care by his insurance company ever appealed the denial of claims by his bots.  A fucking genius innovator, this guy.  His company, the largest health insurance giant in the world, took in $260,000,000,000 (with a B) last year [1].  They were doing great, more profitable than ever, and the CEO was raking in piles of money for himself.

Did he deserve to be murdered?   Arguably, nobody does.  The public reaction seems to underscore the feeling that in an age when well-connected psychopaths are constantly rewarded, their crimes excused, where no accountability for powerful white men shitting on the world seems to exist, some will argue that this is exactly the kind of exception to the rule that we need right now. 

These CEOs will now all be accompanied at all times by armed guards, ready to maim anyone who might threaten the boss.  Nobody wins this kind of war.  In fact, American fascists are spoiling for exactly this kind of war.  Newly minted acting Minister of Treason General Michael “Q-Anon” Flynn will be empowered with the discretion to create death squads to counter the violent enemy within, particularly in anarchist jurisdictions, where these enemies proliferate like insects.

The point about the brutality of the American health insurance system remains, though.  The United States is the only wealthy country where health care is not a right, where buying health insurance is the best anyone can do when it comes to paying for our own health care.  Who put these parasitic middle men into the loop?

Why are there so many Medicare Advantage and Medigap plans?  Because the gold standard of American health care (health insurance, actually) only covers 80% of covered procedures, while dental, vision and other crucial elements of health care are excluded entirely.  Who benefits from this system?  A company that had revenues of $260,000,000,000 (with a B) last year.   That’s a shit ton of incentive to keep things just the way they are.

No matter who has to fucking die or be killed.

Nothing ever happened to any of the murderously incompetent idiots who willfully allowed twice as many Americans to die of Covid-19 than died anywhere else. The angry moron who oversaw that shitshow of televised carnival barker-led carnage is back in charge again, with loyalty oaths to ensure nobody ever contradicts him again. What a country! Pay your health insurance premiums or die, don’t tread on me!

[1] Forbes

Concierge medical care

America is rapidly becoming, if you have the money and you want responsive medical care, the land of concierge doctors and nurses.

The number one hospital for orthopedic surgery, HSS, where I had my left knee replaced almost 600 days ago, boasts on huge banners all over its grounds that it has been the top hospital for orthopedics fourteen years in a row. That doesn’t mean they provide aftercare, and they don’t claim to. If you have a problem, pain, stiffness, difficulty walking, sleeping, whatever, when the x-rays show a perfect mechanical result, it’s not their problem, since the operation was 100% successful, even if you can’t walk more than a block 18 months after surgery.

They don’t claim to be the number one hospital for follow-up care, as you learn when they provide zero aftercare, can’t get you in to see their physical therapists for post-surgical evaluation and offer no solution (other than another operation, a 50/50 coinflip) to a not uncommon, foreseeable but difficult to fix chronic disability they did not help you avoid.

Corporate medicine increasingly works this way in the United States. Health care is an enormously profitable sector and vampire entrepreneurs are increasingly getting in on this lucrative growth industry. More and more doctors work for corporations that take care of all the business aspects of medical care. The bottom line is probably better for all of them and it’s easier to be a doctor in our country if you don’t have to compete with giant medical corporations that have the wealth and infrastructure to put you out of business.

The only casualty is the patient, sometimes. In the event of a good result, there’s no problem. In the event of a problem, complication, need for follow-up, corporate medicine has an answer — concierge follow up, done by telephone, billed as a regular doctor visit, sometimes 100% paid by insurance, or in the case of someone over 65, if you have purchased supplemental insurance for your 20% Medicare copay.

I had a call from my new urologist’s office the other day. These folks are hard to reach or get a return call from on a good day and I’m not optimistic about reaching anyone there if something goes wrong with my upcoming procedure. The caller, a likable guy named Tony, called to offer me a direct number to call and talk to a dedicated nurse any time after my upcoming surgical procedure.

We wound up speaking for a while and it emerged he was not affiliated, nor did he know, the medical practice he was calling from. Somehow, through corporate wizardry, his call appeared to be coming from the difficult to reach office with an offer to give me a direct after care line. Tony worked for a third party selling concierge assurance to rightfully nervous patients.

He agreed it was crazy that he couldn’t tell me the price I’d have to pay for one of these follow up calls billed as a doctor visit. He was with me when I pointed out the madness of healthcare being the only store in America where they can’t tell you the price of anything before you buy it. The standard line is that the doctor has to wait for insurance to bill them before they can tell you the price. My standard reply is to ask if I’m the first patient who ever came to them with this insurance that they take every day. Their standard reply is some kind of smile reflecting an attempt to be civil. None of these folks have any control of anything, and it’s pointless to antagonize them with questions there are no reasonable answers to. Tony and I parted as friends, our call recorded, and by midway through he was no longer trying to sell me a service he could not tell me the price of, but one I’d definitely be on the hook to pay 20% of.

America the beautiful. Exceptional. About to become even more exceptional. I’m keeping my fingers crossed it won’t become too much more exceptional. It’s already much more exceptional than is healthy for almost every American.