A Year of Climate Change Evidence

Worth a read-- "2018 was filled with new evidence and warnings of the high risks and costs of climate change that could help tip the world toward climate action."

Happy New Year! The Blog Is Evolving and Here Is Some History of This Site

I started this blog in 2004 based on my disgust with the George W. Bush administration and their illegal and horrific invasion of Iraq, plus a great deal of dissatisfaction about the official story of 9/11 and the war on terror. 

Politically, I am a liberal, a strong Democrat and have had a lifelong revulsion of conservative and modern Republican politics. A large fraction of my posts here are political in nature and reflect my disdain for the GOP.

I am a scientist by training and I try to evaluate all ideas posted here with critical thinking and in an open minded way. That being said, at this point, I have little or no patience for certain ideas/hypotheses that I have researched and discarded and don't want to waste my time on them. I'm always open to new evidence.

I spend my first few years here researching the terror attacks of 9/11 and then moving onto researching other major conspiracies such as UFO's, the JFK assassination, the Apollo moon landing and the nature of the "powers that be" (PTB). I've found a lot of strange things over the years, and discovered that reality is much more complex and interesting than I ever thought it was when I started this enterprise. More recently I've become interested in more far out ideas such as the paranormal and the nature of consciousness.

I have learned a lot over the years from the things I've researched and posted in my various blogs. The conspiracy world is quite wild and "crazy". There's a huge amount of bad/sloppy research and disinfo and weirdness, and it's a huge job sorting conspiracies out on the internet. I try to do the best I can without getting too bogged down in it.

That brings me to the Anonymous Physicist (AP), who influenced me significantly in terms of the conspiracy world. He led me to some important areas of conspiracy theory, such as the JFK assassination, the Apollo moon landing and UFOs, and wrote a number of really interesting articles that I posted on this Humint Events Online blog site. Many of his pieces are cross-posted here. We had a strong collaborative relationship for several years but eventually I started to get leery of him and we had a break up in 2010 or so. He was a great writer and had some really interesting ideas, but he let paranoia, crankiness and loose thinking get the better of him. He had health issues and severe financial problems and he eventually accused me of being an government intel agent (which I promise I am not). I have lost communication with AP but he continues to post here.

In terms of 9/11, I guess you could call me a "no planes and WTC nukes" dead-ender, meaning I still hold onto those ideas long after 9/11 has stopped being a hot topic. It's not that I know with 100% absolute confidence that 9/11 involved video fakery, faked plane crashes and small nuclear devices in the WTC, I just think the evidence still points there. I also think some version of the official place crash and WTC collapse story is still *possible*. It's hard to know with total confidence and I like to think of what happened on 9/11 in terms of odds. The big problem with 9/11 research is lack of access to all the evidence and also the lack of high quality photos and videos. I keep an open mind and I am open to new evidence. No matter what happened that day, it was a very ugly and tragic, and people in the US government let us down in a huge way.

It is an absolute crime that there haven't been more serious investigations into 9/11 and indictments of people in the US govt who made 9/11 happen. It still is perhaps the crime of the century, or in the top 5, and the official 9/11 story still stinks. The other major crimes so far this century are the illegal invasion of Iraq, the treasonous election of Trump as a Russian plot, the 2007-8 financial crash and scam and the corruption of our constitutional political process by the GOP.

But, like most or all people who researched 9/11, I have moved onto other topics. One has to, because there is no future in 9/11 justice, much like there will never be justice for the assassination of JFK or for the illegal invasion of Iraq and the destruction of that country. Our system cannot deal with criminality on such a scale. Plus, there are too many other scandals and crimes that need attention and other urgent political matters to deal with.

My most conventional but still very important concern is that the GOP is a depraved and malignant evil force in our country in recent years, and in general, their greed, racism, bigotry and rigid small-minded short-term thinking are the reasons for most of the problems our country has and had over the years. The GOP has to die as a political force. This was true under George W Bush, more so under Obama where they acted like spoiled brats, and even more so under Trump, where they have become a grotesquely cruel, corrupt, criminal, idiotic and frankly treasonous political party. George W Bush was the original "worst president ever", and now Trump has taken that mantle of worst president ever, though in a different, more corrupt and disgraceful way. Trump and the treasonous, corrupt, pro-death GOP has to go.

But overall, my most pressing issue these days is anthropogenic climate change, which is a hugely urgent problem that human civilization needs to confront ASAP. Of course the GOP has blocked action on it at every step, showing their corruption and almost death cult mindset. I don't have any tolerance for dogmatic or stubborn climate change denial. Actually I think denial of climate change and carbon pollution reflects greed, ignorance, corruption and even outright evil in our politics and culture. If you have doubts about the science of climate change, this website is a very useful resource to get educated. Note the skeptic claims can be sorted in different ways.

We can evolve to a green, thriving, more equal society and help save much of the life on earth if we work together on the problem of greed and dirty energy. WE HAVE TO EVOLVE.

Overall, I use these blogs as a way to spread ideas, but I know that few people read blogs these days, and even fewer people actually come to this site. I use Facebook and Twitter a great deal in the past 6 years or so, but I use totally separate accounts that are not linked to this blog, and I mostly deal with conventional politics there. Sadly I don't post here as much as I used to post here.

ALAS.

PEACE.

Climate Change and C-words

A lot of important words linked with climate change start with C:

climate

change

carbon

capitalism

corporations

coal

cars

cows

chainsaws

conflict

crisis

catastrophe

cash

currency

China

C is the 3rd letter of the alphabet and 3 is a power number.

Climate change itself is a 3-3 word, and key C/3 words are associated with climate change.

33 is a number with deep symbolism. Anonymous Physicist said it means nuclear weapons/energy and the evil PTB, but I think it's more than that. 

I think 33 is a extremely important number that signifies power and control and may reflect something fundamental in our universe besides simply evil and destruction.

WTC & Nuclear Waste Cleanup

Interesting find here after I saw a tweet about the "Manafort brothers" being involved in the WTC cleanup after 9/11. I was curious if the Trump/Russian operator Paul Manafort was connected to these guys (turns out he is) but then I found this:

An established reputation has led to us being called upon for unique and first of their kind projects. One occasion that stands out occurred shortly after 9/11 when our involvement was requested at Ground Zero in New York City in 2001 to assist in the demolition and removal of the World Trade Center buildings. Unique and highly specialized also were the decommissioning and demolition of the Connecticut and Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plants. The Maine Yankee Plant became the first nuclear power plant to be decommissioned in the U.S.

Quite the coincidence that the same demolition firm that cleaned up the WTC is also experienced in cleaning up nuclear waste!  It's also quite odd that they mention the WTC cleanup back-to-back with the decommissioning of two nuclear power plants.

This blog's review of nuclear demolition of the WTC can be seen at WTCdemolition.blogspot.com.

Also, keep in mind Paul Manafort of Trump-Russia fame is a deeply corrupt political mercenary, so it certainly wouldn't be surprising if his family's demolition firm was quite corrupt and mercenary.

All Aboard the Massive Criminality of the Trump Treason Train

From David Rothkopf:

"So we know this, Russian government representatives reached out to the Trump campaign in 2015 and undertook multiple initiatives and had multiple points and series of contacts with Team Trump for the next couple years.

It's not just the Trump Tower meeting. It's not just the interactions with Wikileaks. It's not just the Russian ties to Cambridge Analytica. It's not just Konstantin Kiliminik, a Russian agent working hand in hand with campaign chair Paul Manafort.

It's not just the ties between Flynn and the Russians. it's not just the links between the Russians and Eric Prince through the meeting in the Seychelles and beyond that. It's not just the ties of Wilbur Ross. It's not just the Trump Organization dealings with Russia. It's not just Jared Kushner's dealings with Russia. It's not just Kushner and Flynn's dealing with Kislyak during the campaign. It's not just the candidate Trump asking for Russian help. It's not just the GRU hacking for which indictments have already taken place. We can go on.

But let's not stop before we discuss the many benefits the Russians delivered to Trump via hacking, the dumping of files, the manipulation of social media and other avenues all to support Trump over Clinton.

Nor should we fail to discuss the benefits Trump offered the Russians since he gained power.

There was his covering up their hacking and his efforts to slow investigations of it. There was his denying the conclusions of the intelligence community about the Russians. There were the talks between Flynn and the Russians about waiving sanctions. There were the meetings with Trump when he was president when he handed over classified information to the Russians. There were whatever promises or concessions were made in Helsinki. There was a pattern of placating the Russians or failing to enforce sanctions for months and months.

In other words, there was plenty of quid and plenty of quo ($50 million penthouse apartments and the promise of big deals or financing benefits aside).

From the outreach to Cohen to just the first months of the administration we can count more than a dozen separate avenues of connection at the highest level. In any normal campaign or administration, just one would set off alarm bells and have the president calling the FBI into action.

But instead, in addition to those dozen avenues, the offers that were explicitly or tacitly accepted, benefits to both sides & the overt betrayal of the U.S. to advance the political or economic interests of Trump and those close to him, we have the president obstructing justice.

Actively obstructing. Threatening to fire all those getting closer to the truth. Lying and lying and lying some more and urging staff to lie and witness tampering and so on. This is not a case of possible collusion. This is sweeping, multi-layered, high level conspiracy led by Vladimir Putin and the Russian intelligence community and involving the active cooperation and complicity of a man who was a candidate for president and then president as well as his entire team.

This is the biggest scandal in the history of the American presidency and there is not another that is close to it.

But that is not all we know. The DoJ believes the president of the United States directed the commission of campaign finance felonies as a candidate.

The NYT produced extensive and compelling evidence of serial tax fraud by the Trump family. The state of NY is investigate fraud in their charities. The House will soon begin investigation of Trump money laundering. A case involving his violation of the Constitution's emoluments clause is under way.

In other words, as massive as the Russia scandal is, it might not be the biggest Trump scandal. It might not even be the scandal that brings Trump down.

But what we know is that all of these or any of these scandals must bring him down.

This criminal has no business being the White House.

He has no business walking freely among us.

2019 is going to be the worst year of Donald Trump's life except for all those that will follow it.

These cases will be investigated further and then proven. Some may be prosecuted while he is in office. Some may wait until he leaves office.

But someday this is already certain, no senior American public official--not Richard Nixon, not Andrew Johnson--will go down in more disgrace or be more reviled by history than Donald Trump.

And that is as it should be."

Fuck Trump and his crime family.

10 Reasons To Think Trump Is a Pedophile

Is Donald Trump a pedophile?

There's more evidence for this than you might think:

1) he was good friends with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and used to hang out at his pedophilia mansion, rode on his "Lolita Express"

2) he was accused in a legal filing of raping a 13 year old at an Epstein party; the now grown woman never came forward due to death threats

3) he continually sexualized Ivanka, even when she was a baby, and publicly said he was sexually attracted to her when she was a teen. He had Ivanka work as a model at a modeling agency that used very young girls and there were rumors of the head of the agency Casablancas being a pedophile.

4) pedophilia is relatively common among rich, powerful people like Trump and is a way to show control and to exert blackmail.

5) It's a common conservative political tactic to accuse the other side of what you are guilty of, and Trump is well known to project his own flaws onto others, and of course Trump's campaign surrogates made a big push to accuse Hillary Clinton of Pedophilia in the 2016 campaign (Pizzagate and rumors of her going off with Epstein).

6) Vladimir Putin is thought to be a pedophile and Trump worships Putin.

7) Trump gave a cushy job to Florida prosecutor Alex Acosta, who helped cover up the Epstein sex ring that included Trump.

8) Trump is amoral and clearly used to flouting the law

9) Besides Epstein, Trump is friends with other accused pedophiles: Casablancas, Arif, Nader, Cohn, which is significant because Trump isn't really known for having a lot of friends

10) Trump defended pedophile Roy Moore and endorsed him for Senate.

-------- Interesting to also note that the GHWB White House was reported to have a pedophile ring (on the front page of the Washington Times)... and then the story disappeared.

 All these corrupt, abusive, sociopathic, pedophilic elites need to finally see justice.

Trump's Labor Secretary Covered Up a Massive Pedophile Ring

Alex Acosta has got to go, due to his corrupt role in letting Jeffrey Epstein getting a super soft plea deal for his massive sex crimes and pedophilia.

It's pretty clear Acosta was covering for the rich and famous who also cavorted for Epstein, including people like Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Alan Dershowitz.

There are actually serious allegations against Dershowitz and previously there was a woman who said Trump had raped her when she was 13.

This ALL needs to come out and the criminals prosecuted.

GOP Traitors

There's pretty clear evidence now that the last 5 Republican presidents covertly colluded with a hostile foreign power:
 
1) Nixon with North Vietnam before the 1968 election

2) Reagan with Iran before the 1980 election

3) Reagan and Bush Sr with Iran in the mid-80's (Iran-Contra)

4) GWB with Saudi Arabia and al Qaeda (pre- and post-9/11)

5) Trump with Russia before the 2016 election

3 out of 5 times it was to help get elected.

First, it's interesting that Democratic presidents don't need such help, but that's probably because they actually have broadly popular policies and don't have to use sleazy corrupt means to get elected. You could make possibly cases for Clinton and Obama to have made some secret deals with hostile foreign powers, but really, there's nothing like what these last 5 GOP presidents have done.

Second, Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr basically wriggled out of trouble for this collusion, though Nixon was eventually removed for other corrupt crimes in office.

GWB was let off the hook because clearly this country was not able to confront the truth about 9/11

I do think Trump will have trouble getting out of trouble for his collusion for a few reasons:

1) he's a dumb criminal and just does a lot of corrupt things right out in the open

2) Bob Mueller is as smart and tough of a prosecutor as they come

3) the case against Trump is as serious as you can get-- colluding with a foreign power to get elected where the foreign power actually attacks our election process -- that's way worse than what happened with Nixon and Reagan. It's on par with 9/11 but the thing with Trump is he doesn't have the national security state (aka deep state) behind him as Bush did.

4) what really sets Trump apart from the other Repubs is that Trump is quite obviously in the sway of Russia-- he didn't just make a deal with them, he became their AGENT. He spouts their propaganda even AGAINST the US state. It's clear that Trump is OWNED by Russia. This is simply treasonous in the most dire and intolerable way for a US president.

If the full charges and case against Trump are brought to light, as I think they will, Trump MUST be impeached, removed from office and sent to jail.

RIP Poppy Bush

Rude Pundit does a fantastic job summing him up as president:

Goddamn, we've become such a pathetic nation living under the bovine shadow of Donald Trump that the orgy of corpse worship of dead George H.W. Bush, our 41st president, makes the nostalgia-gasm over dead Ronald Reagan back in 2004 look like a rushed hand job in the back of the historical convertible. Of course, Bush was a better human than Trump. But there are parasitic worms that are better humans than Trump. The bar is not that high.

So, yeah, sure, you can thank Bush for some things he did that genuinely made the nation kinder and gentler, like the Americans with Disabilities Act or his environmental record (putting aside, for obvious reasons, his years as a Texas oil man). But that's the way it's always been: no matter how shitty you think a president might be, he does a few things that you think aren't bad. It's like if you're fucking a porcupine's asshole, and, once every ten thrusts or so, you don't get a quill in your dick. At the end of the day, you're still fucking a porcupine's asshole. (Sure, it's consensual. The porcupine wanted it.)

Besides, one thing that's been left out in this rush to praise Bush as the Greatest Single-Term President in History or whatever other superlatives you wanna toss out there in the encomiums of doom is that he had no fuckin' choice when it came to legislative goals except to do some rational shit. He had a Democratic House and Senate for his entire term.  Everyone wants to talk about the bipartisanship, the "reaching across the aisle" that Bush did, but the fuckin' Democrats did it, too. They didn't just shut the whole fuckin' joint down unless Bush did what they wanted, like the Republicans did with Obama. So spare a thought or two for Tom Foley in the House and George Mitchell in the Senate. Most of what Bush is being praised for are Democratic initiatives he went along with.

So, sorry, tender-hearted liberals and weeping conservatives, I'm not going to spend any more time fluffing this cock. This is gonna be more of a shit-on-his-dead-face type of thing. See, I was there. I remember. I marched against him, against the Persian Gulf "war," which ended with the United States rebuilding the palaces of the oil billionaires in Kuwait; and against his savage anti-choice policies, which empowered the lunatics of Operation Rescue and the Christian terrorist assassins in their war on women.

You wanna understand who Bush was? Look at the shit he vetoed or pocket vetoed. The very first one was for a hike in the minimum wage, which hadn't budged in 8 years from $3.35, because he wanted it at $4.35 and Congress, in a bipartisan vote, wanted it $4.55. He vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990 because he claimed it would force hiring quotas on businesses (it wouldn't) and because it didn't cap punitive damages on discrimination lawsuits. He vetoed the National Voter Registration Act because of, no shit, false allegations of possible "fraud." He vetoed the Family and Medical Leave Act because he was a prick.  (snip)

You want to talk about the pardons for the half-dozen Reagan administration officials in the scandal of selling arms to Iran in order to fund the terrorist Contras in Nicaragua, obsructing justice and immunizing him from prosecution? Or his lies that got us into the worthless war in Iraq and set us up for our next worthless war with Iraq, all because of Saddam Hussein, who Bush had had no small role in putting into power? Or his role in getting arms and funds to the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight a proxy war with the Soviet Union, which, of course, led to al-Qaeda's formation?

Or his terrible family, who continued to damage the nation in ways from which we will never recover? Or his failures in the wake of Hurricane Andrew (like father, like son, eh?)? Or his propping up of the heinous Reagan? Or his role as director of the CIA? Or Clarence fuckin' Thomas? Or his dragging the economy into a recession because he was willing to pass tax hikes but not enough to turn things around?

Ultimately, George Herbert Walker Bush was just another fucking Republican creep, superficially not quite as bad as Reagan, GWB or Trump.

I will grant him his service in WWII, but his long service as a spy and apparent involvement in the JFK assassination made him part of a very ugly history.

War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity

White House approves broad new powers — including use of deadly force — for U.S. troops on the border.

“It’s not enough that President Trump asked American service members to spend Thanksgiving at the border in furtherance of a partisan agenda,” said Michael Breen, president of Human Rights First. “Now the White House is upping the ante by authorizing those service members to use lethal force against refugees, migrants and others at the border. This legally dubious ‘Cabinet order’ creates confusion, undermines morale, and may very well lead to violence,” Breen said.

The Truman National Security Project, a Washington public policy organization stocked with former Obama administration national security officials, called the White House order “illegal and unconstitutional” and called on Congress to block it. “It is a long-standing policy and undisputed principle that the United States military cannot engage in law enforcement activity at home,” the group said in a statement. “This policy cannot be allowed to stand.”

Shooting at unarmed civilians is a war crime.

----

Middle East civilian deaths have soared under Trump. And the media mostly shrug.

2017 was the deadliest year for civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria, with as many as 6,000 people killed in strikes conducted by the U.S.-led coalition, according to the watchdog group Airwars. That is an increase of more than 200 percent over the previous year. It is far more if you add in countries like Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and many others. But the subject, considered a stain on President Barack Obama’s legacy even by many of his supporters, has almost dropped off the map.

Indiscriminate bombing of civilians is a war crime. 
----


Trump's failure to fight climate change is a crime against humanity

The future of our life on earth it is at stake.

The Jonestown Massacre

This first person account of the Jonestown mass murder in Guyana by Congresswoman Jackie Speier is freaking wild and well worth a read.

Trump Exhibiting "Bunker Behavior" as Democrats Pick Up Biggest House of Representative Gains Since After Watergate

I will make the reckless prediction that “Donald Trump” and “good news” are not fated to appear in the same sentence unless the good news happens to be that his presidency is ending.

Everything about his behavior since the midterms suggests that even he has figured this out. It has belatedly dawned on him that (a) he lost the election he thought he won; (b) the Robert Mueller investigation has moved faster than his efforts to thwart it; (c) any of his legislative fantasies, notably the funding of his border wall, are doomed; and (d) and his pouting in Paris elevated his international image as a buffoon to a whole new level of notoriety. Remember when Republicans attacked Barack Obama (falsely) for allegedly barring Winston Churchill’s bust from the White House? Now the GOP’s hero is a president whom Churchill’s own grandson, the Conservative member of Parliament Nicholas Soames, has labeled “pathetic,” “inadequate,” and “not fit to represent this great country” after Trump failed to show up at the French cemetery rites honoring the fallen of World War I.

That all this makes Trump panic at some gut level is visible not merely in his widely reported spells of rage and bitterness and in his increasingly empty official schedule. He is also stepping up his already impressive efforts to discredit and destroy those democratic institutions that might prevent him from escaping criminal jeopardy. And so he has returned to ridiculing the very lifeblood of America, the electoral process, by declaring elections that don’t go his way a fraud; he has escalated his assault on a free press by barring a CNN reporter and trying to frame him as a fellow misogynistic bully with a deceptively edited video; and, last but not least, he has appointed an acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, who has ridiculed the judicial system, been on the board of a fly-by-night company that practiced Trump University–style consumer frauds, and publicly attacked the Mueller probe in Trump’s own language.

This is bunker behavior. Only a desperate man would try to derail Mueller by installing this transparent reprobate at the Department of Justice. Even more revealing is how Trump has become more and more unhinged since making his Whitaker move. The growing fury, most manifest in his latest anti-Mueller tweetstorm this week, suggests that he already realizes that the ploy has backfired. It seems to be finally sinking in, perhaps under the frantic tutelage of his lawyers, that his fate and the fates of his son and son-in-law, among others in his immediate orbit, are tied to the fates of Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and all the other president’s men whose comprehensive narrative Mueller is bound to tell America no matter what Trump and his stooge at Justice do to try to foil or decapitate him.

The end of Trump (cannot come too soon):

How can we be so certain that Trump’s political days are numbered? First, now we can see more clearly that the blue tide kept rising as many of the closest races, especially for the House, flipped to the Democrats as the final votes were counted. Democrats are now set to gain nearly 40 seats in the House — their biggest gain in decades. Second, we have the smart analysis this past weekend from Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg that the shift away from Trump in 2018 was more profound than many initially believed. In fact, Greenberg makes a strong case that the election was “transformative” with Trump losing support, not only with suburban, college-educated women, but all women. And Democrats gained ground in other areas, too, including working-class men and in rural areas.

The likelihood that Democrats will maintain these gains though the 2020 election is very promising. Unlike many incumbent presidents who have retooled their approach in the face of stinging midterm rebukes, Trump has signaled he’s sticking with his risky behavior. The attack tweets, the latest puerile joke about a congressman’s name and indefensible behaviors, such as believing a foreign power instead of the CIA about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, will continue. Trump will not pass from our politics suddenly from a single dramatic cause, but rather from the accumulation of self-inflicted wounds. It has taken much longer and done more damage than many hoped, but the end of Trump is finally in sight.

Trump of course continues to act like the world's biggest crook and asshole (etc, etc, etc), and it's just hard to imagine a president who so widely loathed as Trump, but he is in fact reviled by over half the country, and for good reason.

I mean, how can anyone so fucking stupid and delusional still be president?

He complained at length that a new Navy ship was using electromagnetic catapults to propel planes off ships. He said steam was better and was incredulous the military would consider otherwise. “Would you go with steam or would you go with electromagnetic? Because steam is very reliable, and the electromagnetic, unfortunately, you have to be Albert Einstein to really work it properly,” he asked. “You have to be Albert Einstein to run the nuclear power plants that we have here, as well. But we’re doing that very well. I would go, sir, with electromagnetic,” the officer responded.

Trump repeatedly asked military commanders what they were seeing in their regions, a conversation not usually held on a televised broadcast. He asked if those serving in Afghanistan were enjoying themselves. (Later, he demurred when asked by reporters whether he would pull troops out of the country.)

He bragged during part of the conversation about sending troops to the Mexico border, a mission that is controversial and seen by many as a waste of time. He expressed no second-guessing about the constitutionality of signing an order giving soldiers the right to use lethal force at the border, although many in his government harbor such concerns.

Russian Fake News, Propaganda, Disinfo & "Active Measures"

This 3 part video series on the Russian fake new operation "Operation Infektion" is worth a watch.

For instance, the conspiracy that HIV was engineered by the US Army as a bioweapon was definitely Russian propaganda. 

I think in the conspiracy realm, it's important to be aware of the influence of foreign propaganda, and particularly for 9/11, we need to wonder about some of the "facts" that are part of the conspiracy lore.

Of course it's a spy game, and the US puts out its own propaganda too, so the truth can be a bit confusing sometimes.

For me the keys are to:

1) have several trusted sources of info
2) never trust any source or one story completely
3) find direct sources if possible, like video
4) highly partisan sources mislead a lot, particularly on the right
5) popular conspiracy sources put out a lot of bullshit
6) be aware of confirmation bias
7) nuance is important

Stess Test for American Democracy

Beautiful passage from Michelle Goldberg:

The last two years have been a stress test for American democracy, and they’ve revealed this country and its worst and at its best. We’ve seen how quickly an entire political party, with shockingly few exceptions, has capitulated to authoritarianism, white-nationalist demagogy and naked cruelty. Trump’s Republican Party has shattered whatever was left of the civic compact binding this country together, abandoning American ideals that transcend blood and soil, and American values that transcend brute power. It’s fitting that the president is closing this political season with an ad so racist that even Fox News has pulled it off the air.

Yet if the past two years have given lie to the myth of American exceptionalism — a system that elevates a person like Trump is by definition not the best in the world — they have also revealed an enduring strain of actual American greatness. Movements like Trump’s thrive on social decay and atomization. Millions of Americans who oppose Trump have responded to him with an enormous civic revival. They have marched, organized Resistance groups, and reinvigorated American politics at every level. In the face of an existential threat to democracy, they’ve rededicated themselves to its practice.

The sheer effort citizens who care had to put into this election to wrest control from a psychotic government was truly remarkable and makes me emotional to contemplate and gives me hope for the future. Believe me, I worked hard on this election too, and we did a lot of great things:

1. The Democrats will take control of the U.S. House of Representatives next year for the first time since January 2011.
2. The Democrats flipped the House and Senate in New Hampshire, and the Senate in Colorado, Maine, and New York.
3. The Democrats won the Trifecta (controlling the governor’s office and both chambers of the legislature) in Colorado, Illinois, Maine, New Mexico, Nevada, and New York. In Oregon and Nevada, they won supermajorities in both chambers.
4. The Republicans lost their Trifectas in Kansas and Michigan.
5. The Republicans lost their supermajorities in the North Carolina legislature.
6. The deep red states of Idaho, Utah, and Nebraska used the ballot to expand Medicaid.
7. Florida voted to restore felons’ voter rights.
8. Paul LePage’s reign of terror in Maine came to a decisive end with the election of Democrat Janet Mills as the new governor.
9. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was denied a third term in office when he lost to Democrat Tony Evers.
10. Democrat Tom Wolf was decisively reelected as governor of Pennsylvania.
11. Gretchen Whitner was elected governor of Michigan, flipping control to the Democrats.
12. Democrat J.B. Pritzker trounced Governor Bruce Trauner of Illinois, flipping control to the Democrats.
13. Democrat Tim Walz was elected governor of Minnesota.
14. The loathsome Kris Kobach was defeated in the Kansas governor’s race by Democrat Laura Kelly.
15. Democrat Jared Polis, who is openly gay, was elected governor of Colorado.
16. Michelle Lujan Grisham was elected governor of New Mexico, flipping control to the Democrats.
17. Steve Sisolak will become the first Democratic governor of Nevada in twenty years.
18. The Democrats retained the governorships of Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Oregon, and California.
19. In addition to winning the governorships of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin (the three key Trump states of 2016), the Democrats also won the U.S. Senate races in those states, too.
20. Russian stooge Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California was defeated.
21. The Republican chairman of the House Rules Committee and former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, was defeated.
22. The Democrats won the seat currently held by Mark “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” Sanford of South Carolina.
23. The Democrats won Eric Cantor’s former seat in Virginia, currently held by the loathsome Dave Brat.
24. The Democrats now control ten of New Jersey’s twelve congressional seats, and an eleventh is nearly tied.
25. Democratic women swept the Philly suburbs winning three seats there as well as another in the Lehigh Valley.
26. The Democrats now control seven of Virgina’s eleven congressional seats, driven by the victories of three women.
27. Democratic women flipped two southern Florida congressional seats.
28. Democratic women flipped two of Iowa’s congressional seats.
29. Democratic women flipped a seat in Kansas and a seat in Oklahoma, and a man flipped a seat in Utah.
30. Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky clerk made famous by her refusal to sign marriage licenses for gay couples, lost her bid for reelection.
31. Missouri voted to hike the minimum wage.
32. There were fifteen House candidates that President Trump went out of his way to endorse who lost.
33. Though Beto O’Rourke narrowly lost his bid to oust Sen. Ted Cruz, the Democrats picked up congressional seats in Texas and made significant gains in the legislature.
34. Democrats Rashida Tlaib in Michigan and Ilhan Omar in Minnesota will become the first Muslim women to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.
35. Ayanna Pressley was elected and will be the first black woman to serve in Congress from Massachusetts, and perhaps the first in all of New England.
36. Democrats Sharice Davids of Kansas and Deb Haaland of New Mexico were elected and will be the first Native American women to serve in Congress. Davids will also be first openly LGBTQ member of the Kansas congressional delegation.
37. Missouri and Utah legalized marijuana for medical purposes and Michigan legalized recreational use.
38. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on New York, 29, will become the youngest woman to serve in Congress, followed closely by Abby Finkenauer of Iowa, also 29.
39. Texas is sending its first Latinas to Congress: Veronica Escobar of El Paso and Sylvia Garcia of Houston.
40. It’s looking like Lucy McBath will do what Jon Ossoff could not and win Georgia’s suburban 6th District.
41. In a rare Senate pickup, Jacky Rosen defeated Dean Heller in Nevada.
42. Democrat Mike Espy forced a December runoff in one of the two Mississippi Senate elections, though it will be an uphill climb to win it.
43. The Democrats will control one Senate seat in West Virginia and one (hopefully) in Montana for another six years.
44. Michigan changed their Constitution to ban gerrymandering
45. Colorado, Missouri and (I think) Utah also passed redistricting reform.
46. As frustrating and abusive as the Trump administration has been, people didn’t turn to violence but instead put their trust in our representative democracy and turned out to vote in big numbers.
47. (Selfishly) for the first time since I moved out of Philly into the suburbs, I will be represented by a Democratic state Rep, state Senator and U.S. congressperson.
48. If you’re into this type of thing, California voters overwhelmingly required that all eggs sold in the state come from cage-free hens by 2022.
49. The dead pimp won (hat tip to Jon Ralston).
50. Can you say, “Good afternoon, Chairwoman Maxine Waters”?

Hansen Versus Sandow on The Most Unbelievable Yet Well-Documented UFO Claim of All Time

It's probably the Linda Cortile abduction case. 

I blogged about it 3 years ago.

This case came up again as I was reading this book: George Hansen's "The Trickster and the Paranormal"

It's an interesting book for sure-- a scholarly and almost philosophical dive into all sorts of strange histories and paranormal events. There's a lot of important and unique ideas explored at length in the book. Hansen's a bit odd in that he believes in the reality of paranormal events, but he also shows how much (supposed) fraud is associated with paranormal events (is a complicated topic). But what's even more odd is how downplays the idea of UFOs and ETs as being real. In the same vein, Hansen completely dismisses the Cortile case as a hoax.

So it's worth revisiting this excellent Greg Sandow rebuttal to Hansen's criticism. He does a great job in pointing out how strong the Cortile case is and taking down Hansen. And it does seem like Hansen acted unethically in dealing with Cortile by publishing her real name, and it's sad and weird that Hansen does this and it makes me doubt his motives, even though his book is quite good otherwise.

Congress Thinks the Public Is Way More Conservative Than It Actually Is

Interesting piece. They blame this effect on corporate lobbyists influencing Congressional staff, which I'm sure plays an important role. But it also seems obvious that the corporate-controlled media has a huge stake in maintaining the idea that the US is predominantly conservative.

All told, the study paints a picture of a Congress that is out of touch with the American people -- with perceptions of public opinion skewed rightward by the influence of deep-pocketed lobbyists. The authors say that the best way to combat these distortions is by increased civic participation among the general public.

“Political action can’t end on Election Day,” co-author Matto Mildenberger wrote in a tweet on Thursday. “Citizens need to keep writing, calling and meeting with elected officials and their staffs long after the midterms.”

Desperate Disgusting Racism to Get Out the GOP Vote

‘Assault On Our Country’: Trump Goes All In On Nativism To Salvage The Midterms

The revelation Tuesday morning that President Trump has plans to end birthright citizenship by executive order is the culmination of the President’s weeks-long effort to inject nativism into the midterm elections as his party desperately tries to hold on to its congressional majorities.

In the closing weeks before voters head to the polls, Trump has repeatedly railed against undocumented immigrants, used nationalist rhetoric to appeal to his base and unleashed anger towards the “other.” Trump’s language of late harkens back to his 2016 presidential campaign, when he offered his supporters a scapegoat, telling them that immigrants were snatching up their jobs and bringing violence to their communities, and only a big, beautiful wall could protect them.

Though Trump has largely avoided talk of his proposed border wall this cycle, he has demonized immigrants at rally after rally while stumping for Republican candidates throughout the country. His language has not been subtle. He’s claimed that undocumented immigrants are “criminals,” described a migrant caravan headed toward the U.S. as an “invasion,” and warned of non-existent “riots” against sanctuary cities.

In case he wasn’t clear enough while describing his immigration policy and disdain for immigrants, Trump told a crowd in Houston that he is a “nationalist,” a term linked to the far-right fringe of the Republican party that helped propel Trump to the presidency.

Trump’s racist ad shows how low Republicans have sunk

President Trump’s blatantly racist ad — showing an illegal immigrant boasting about killing police officers — is a fitting final pitch for a party and a campaign that are now nearly entirely focused on whipping up xenophobia.

And of the ad features a HUGE lie.

The GOP is a malignancy on this country and need to be removed.

These Are the Bad Times

One response to all this is to say that these bad things have always been with us, that Trump is the inheritor of historically racist institutions, unchecked nihilist capitalism, a monstrous military-industrial complex, and a political system bent to serve the greed of plutocrats.

None of this is incorrect. And unquestionably it’s true that he is a figurehead for a party and a movement that were around long before his political career began, and that they rally beside him and go along with him because he’s going where they’ve always meant to go.

But that is why it is so important to recognize, at the same time, that he and they are moving. Getting the same things, but more of them, does not mean getting more of the same. It is worse now than it was last year, and last year was worse than the year before.

It doesn’t have to be new to be disastrous. The idea of American history as an uneven forward march toward greater democracy, despite occasional setbacks and errors, is flatly untrue. Immediately after the Civil War, black men were granted suffrage and were able to hold office, in a multiracial democracy. A successful campaign of terror, permitted by a compliant national government and supported by intellectuals, stripped the freed people of their rights and kept them in subjugation for most of the following century. The country went backwards, savagely and enthusiastically, and stayed there for generations.

The Fourteenth Amendment was a set of words on paper, with no power to protect people’s rights or their lives against the racist laws and policies that had been put into effect. The results were so brutal and effective that by the 1930s, the Nazis were studying them as an example of where a country might be able to go.

Please read all of this excellent essay.

The MAGA-bomber Is a Rabid and Deeply Deluded Trump Supporter

Of course.

His van--

The Biggest Coordinated Terror Attack Since 9/11

Most of the attack took place yesterday, 10/24/18

At least 10 mail bombs to critics of Trump and frequent Trump targets:

* George Soros
* Clintons
* Obamas
* Eric Holder
* John Brennan
* Maxine Waters (DC area)
* Maxine Waters (L.A.)
* Robert De Niro
* Joe Biden (New Castle, DE)
* Joe Biden (Wilmington)

Thankfully they were obvious bombs and intercepted without anyone being hurt.

Probably the work of either "Y'all Qaeda" or "Vanilla ISIS" or maybe a lone "MAGAbomber"-- certainly a rightwinger unless it was a rare lefty running a false-flag attack, which doesn't make much sense.

These stickers on the bombs are somewhat amusing if gross-- said "Git Er Done" in a faux ISIS font with silhouetted mudflap ladies.

Trump Is a Dumb Crook, Literally

Adam Davidson:

One of the biggest surprises in my research on Trump's foreign deals, particularly the one in Azerbaijan with likely money-launderers for Iran's Revolutionary Guard, is how BAD TRUMP IS AT BEING BAD.

He got $5 million to lend his name to a $350 million $-laundering scheme. He's a sucker. Money launderers often get 20% of the money they're laundering.

If he were caught (well, he was, so, rather, if anyone cared if he was caught) he would face hundreds of millions in fines. That's just bad risk management. ESPECIALLY for a fraud-based operation.

Look at how Kim Jong-Un, Putin, and MBS play him. That's how ALL his partners treat him.

He really should be a multibillionaire. But he's too weak and dumb to do these deals well.

His dad was, at least, bold and a bit creative in his fraud and was able to do it at impressive scale.

Trump, himself, has been a chump. Trump the Chump. That's his vulnerability, imo.

Why is he in power then? Because he's a great puppet! So easily manipulated by the PTB with all his blatant criminality.

There Is No Low Too Low for Trump as He Coddles Saudi Killers and Promotes Violence Against Journalists

One can hardly fathom the twisted psyche of a president who, after acknowledging that Jamal Khashoggi, a contributing columnist for The Post’s Global Opinions, had likely been murdered, would go before a cheering mob to lavish praise on a U.S. congressman who physically attacked a journalist.

“Any guy who can do a body-slam, he’s my kind of — he’s my guy,” Trump said in a Montana campaign appearance on Thursday, referring to Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.) who pleaded guilty to assaulting the Guardian’s reporter Ben Jacobs, who had the temerity to ask Gianforte a health-care question. “I had heard that he body-slammed a reporter. And he was way up. … I said ‘Oh this is terrible, he’s gonna lose the election,’ ” Trump continued. “Then I said, ‘Well, wait a minute, I know Montana pretty well, I think it might help him.’ And it did.” And his ghoulish fans ate that up.

The Guardian’s U.S. editor responded with a statement: “To celebrate an attack on a journalist who was simply doing his job is an attack on the First Amendment by someone who has taken an oath to defend it,” said John Mulholland. “In the aftermath of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, it runs the risk of inviting other assaults on journalists both here and across the world where they often face far greater threats. We hope decent people will denounce these comments and that the president will see fit to apologize for them.”

Trump won’t apologize, of course, nor will his devoted base hold his remarks against him. To the contrary, this is what they love about him — the contempt for a free press, the celebration of male thuggishness, the mindless emotional outbursts. Somehow it empowers them, to side with brutes and bullies, to revel in the silencing of a free press.

And in case you thought such moral depravity was limited to a few thousand fans, a concerted smear campaign against Khashoggi is underway. The Post reports:

In recent days, a cadre of conservative House Republicans allied with Trump has been privately exchanging articles from right-wing outlets that fuel suspicion of Khashoggi, highlighting his association with the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth and raising conspiratorial questions about his work decades ago as an embedded reporter covering Osama bin Laden, according to four GOP officials involved in the discussions who were not authorized to speak publicly. …

Also, as ever, fuck Saudi Arabia.  FUCK SAUDI ARABIA.

Sirhan Sirhan: Mind Controlled Assassin

I've long believed the idea that the RFK assassination was a conspiracy, but hadn't really delved into the details much.

The podcast "The RFK Tapes" does a great job of digging into the case and use a lot of original audio tapes in their investigation.

Seems like no doubt that RFK was killed by a CIA patsy, a mind-controlled assassin, Sirhan Sirhan.

In part this was to keep RFK away from the presidency a maintain the JFK assassination cover-up going.

Really worth a listen.

CLIMATE CHANGE CATASTROPHE: BEYOND GENOCIDE

Just two years ago, amid global fanfare, the Paris climate accords were signed — initiating what seemed, for a brief moment, like the beginning of a planet-saving movement. But almost immediately, the international goal it established of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius began to seem, to many of the world’s most vulnerable, dramatically inadequate; the Marshall Islands’ representative gave it a blunter name, calling two degrees of warming “genocide.”

The alarming new report you may have read about this week from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which examines just how much better 1.5 degrees of warming would be than 2 — echoes the charge.

“Amplifies” may be the better term. Hundreds of millions of lives are at stake, the report declares, should the world warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, which it will do as soon as 2040, if current trends continue. Nearly all coral reefs would die out, wildfires and heat waves would sweep across the planet annually, and the interplay between drought and flooding and temperature would mean that the world’s food supply would become dramatically less secure. Avoiding that scale of suffering, the report says, requires such a thorough transformation of the world’s economy, agriculture, and culture that “there is no documented historical precedent.” The New York Times declared that the report showed a “strong risk” of climate crisis in the coming decades; in Grist, Eric Holthaus wrote that “civilization is at stake.”

If you are alarmed by those sentences, you should be — they are horrifying. But it is, actually, worse than that — considerably worse.

That is because the new report’s worst-case scenario is, actually, a best case. In fact, it is a beyond-best-case scenario. What has been called a genocidal level of warming is already our inevitable future.

The question is how much worse than that it will get. Barring the arrival of dramatic new carbon-sucking technologies, which are so far from scalability at present that they are best described as fantasies of industrial absolution, it will not be possible to keep warming below two degrees Celsius — the level the new report describes as a climate catastrophe.

As a planet, we are coursing along a trajectory that brings us north of four degrees by the end of the century. The IPCC is right that two degrees marks a world of climate catastrophe. Four degrees is twice as bad as that. And that is where we are headed, at present — a climate hell twice as hellish as the one the IPCC says, rightly, we must avoid at all costs. But the real meaning of the report is not “climate change is much worse than you think,” because anyone who knows the state of the research will find nothing surprising in it. The real meaning is, “you now have permission to freak out.” As recently as a year ago, when I published a magazine cover story exploring worst-case scenarios for climate change, alarmism of this kind was considered anathema to many scientists, who believed that storytelling that focused on the scary possibilities was just as damaging to public engagement as denial. There have been a few scary developments in climate research over the past year — more methane from Arctic lakes and permafrost than expected, which could accelerate warming; an unprecedented heat wave, arctic wildfires, and hurricanes rolling through both of the world’s major oceans this past summer. But by and large the consensus is the same: We are on track for four degrees of warming, more than twice as much as most scientists believe is possible to endure without inflicting climate suffering on hundreds of millions or threatening at least parts of the social and political infrastructure we call, grandly, “civilization.” The only thing that changed, this week, is that the scientists, finally, have hit the panic button.

Because the numbers are so small, we tend to trivialize the differences between one degree and two, two degrees and four. Human experience and memory offers no good analogy for how we should think about those thresholds, but with degrees of warming, as with world wars or recurrences of cancer, you don’t want to see even one. At two degrees, the melting of ice sheets will pass a tipping point of collapse, flooding dozens of the world’s major cities this century. At that amount of warming, it is estimated, global GDP, per capita, will be cut by 13 percent. Four hundred million more people will suffer from water scarcity, and even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer. It will be worse in the planet’s equatorial band. In India, where many cities now numbering in the many millions would become unliveably hot, there would be 32 times as many extreme heat waves, each lasting five times as long and exposing, in total, 93 times more people. This is two degrees — practically speaking, our absolute best-case climate scenario. At three degrees, southern Europe will be in permanent drought. The average drought in Central America would last 19 months and in the Caribbean 21 months. In northern Africa, the figure is 60 months — five years. The areas burned each year by wildfires would double in the Mediterranean and sextuple in the United States. Beyond the sea-level rise, which will already be swallowing cities from Miami Beach to Jakarta, damages just from river flooding will grow 30-fold in Bangladesh, 20-fold in India, and as much as 60-fold in the U.K. This is three degrees — better than we’d do if all the nations of the world honored their Paris commitments, which none of them are. Practically speaking, barring those dramatic tech deus ex machinas, this seems to me about as positive a realistic outcome as it is rational to expect. At four degrees, there would be eight million cases of dengue fever each year in Latin America alone. Global grain yields could fall by as much as 50 percent, producing annual or close-to-annual food crises. The global economy would be more than 30 percent smaller than it would be without climate change, and we would see at least half again as much conflict and warfare as we do today. Possibly more.

Our current trajectory, remember, takes us higher still, and while there are many reasons to think we will bend that curve soon — the plummeting cost of renewable energy, the growing global consensus about phasing out coal — it is worth remembering that, whatever you may have heard about the green revolution and the price of solar, at present, global carbon emissions are still growing.

Saudi Arabia, a Portrait in Evil

-- aided the 9/11 attacks and funded al Qaeda

 

-- armed and funded ISIS

 

-- got insanely rich from selling planet damaging oil

 

-- beheads political opponents

 

-- extremely repressive and misogynistic

 

-- have bought off Trump with massive purchases of his real estate.

 

-- keep America on their side by buying our debt and politicians and weapons

 

-- kill and dismember dissident journalists

 

FUCK SAUDI ARABIA.

Again-- What Are They Thinking???

I'm still kind of amazed that Republicans are betting their whole future on Donald Trump, a fraud and crook of breath-taking proportions. They HAVE to know that this presidency won't end well, right? Either Trump is going down in total flames from his massive crimes or we will turn into an authoritarian kleptocratic repressive state run by white supremacists. Why would the GOP want either of these futures? Are they really this dumb or evil? Because there's no way American Democracy survives if Trump stays in power after 2020.

The Record Dow Drops All Belong to the Two Worst Presidents Ever

Trump and Dubya.

Today was 3rd biggest. Is a crash coming?

The GOP Is an Enemy of Democracy -- and the Brewing Civil War

Twitter essay by Julius Ghost, worth the time to read:

"I'd like to speak the obvious necessary things about the Republican Party, the most central of which is that this is not an organization that is participating in democracy.

Rather, they are cynically utilizing our democracy's vulnerabilities.

The last two Republican Presidents to enter the White House did so without the popular vote.

The last Republican President to enter the White House with the popular vote did so in 1989.

Yet, when they win, they behave as though they have the mandate that comes with a landslide.

For example, they upend the healthcare program.

They give out trillions in corporate welfare.

They start torture programs.

They start surveillance programs.

They lie us into wars.

They gerrymander at every level they can. They deliberately disenfranchise. They make our elections so imbalanced they can get less votes than Democrats but win 60% of the seats.

They are not interested in democracy. They are not participating in a democracy.

When a Democrat actually does win the popular vote—by a lot—they behave as if they are a majority opposition.

They stall. They filibuster. They delay. They engage in deliberate sabotage to gain political advantage.

They are not participating in our democracy.

The reason the Russia thing matters isn't that Russia is taking us over.

Russia didn't capture the Republican Party. Russia just wants to upend Western Democracy, which happens to be exactly what Republicans also want.

So they were happy for the help, but they didn't need it.

Mostly, Russia doesn't even matter. They're mostly just a warning light, showing how hostile the GOP has become to our democracy, that they would become such natural allies.

Russia's basically just somebody paid to make a distraction while the heist team hits the bank.

Russia isn't taking over. *Republicans* are taking over.

It just so happens they both have pretty much the same mission with the same method: Destroy American democracy by exploiting its weaknesses.

So, what are those weaknesses?

Some of the weaknesses are structural, and designed to do what they're doing, which is to help wealthy landed white guys keep outsized representation against the 'threat' of demographic shifts.

The electoral college is one of these. The way the Senate is allocated is another.

I don't think we can do much about these structural weaknesses until we get supermajorities back.

But there are other weaknesses we can do something about now.

These are 'weaknesses' that in healthier times are strengths, that have been leveraged against us.

What are these 'weaknesses?' Here's a partial list:

* An appetite for compromise
* A mutual trust in the opposition's good intentions
* A desire to be fair
* An interest in keeping an open mind to other perspectives
* A desire to find common ground

These are all good things.

It cannot be overstated the extent to which the Republican Party has proved—PROVED—it has nothing but contempt for all of those things.

They prove that contempt by constantly and cynically using our desire for them to make us play by rules they have no intention of playing by.

They do not care about politeness—at all.
They don't care about finding common ground.
They don't care about what the people want.
They don't care about standards.

To name only the most glaringly obvious of all available tells, I'll refer you to the president they elected.

We have to recognize that they are not playing by the rules we love.

We HAVE to recognize that they are not playing by those rules.

And, since they are in power, that means those aren't the rules.

I think what we need to do is remember WHY we love those rules so much.

We love them because all these things—compromise, politeness, common ground, mutual belief in good intentions—are GOOD things, in healthy times.

In healthy times.

We love them because they indicate health.

I love taking a nice long run. I'll go ten miles.

One reason I love it is because it reminds me that I'm healthy. It's a VERY good thing. And it keeps me healthy.

But if I have a stress fracture, or pneumonia, a nice long run stops being a good thing.

So it is with our rules.

Finding common cause with our opponents is a VERY good thing in healthy times. It reminds us of our health, and increases it.

But finding common cause with an opponent is a very bad idea, if your opponent wants to stab your brother and sister to death.

If you're willing to find common cause with somebody who wants to stab your brother and sister to death, they will still welcome it.

They'll encourage it.

It's not because they value finding common cause with their opponents, though.

The Republican Party has said in plain language that they intend to stab our brothers and sisters to death.

They've PROVED it.

Our gay and trans and black and brown brothers, and all of our sisters.

I have no interest in finding common cause with Republicans.

There have been in the past political parties who have named every deviation from their desired norm as an anomaly to demonize and criminalize and marginalize.

The lesson of history has not been to find common cause with such a party.

I have no interest in finding common cause.

There have been in the past political parties who have selected an already vulnerable religious minority for vilification and scapegoating and expulsion.

The lesson of history has not been to find common cause with such a party.

So I have no interest in finding common cause.

There have been in the past political parties who have selected an already vulnerable ethnic minority for police menace and exportation.

The lesson of history has not been to find common cause with such a party.

So I have no interest in finding common cause.

There have been in the past political parties who have eroded democracy, and elected a foul-minded rally-throwing demagogue as their leader.

The lesson of history has not been to find common cause with such a party.

So I have no interest in finding common cause.

There have been in the past political parties who have separated children from parents forever, and kept them in cages, and pointed to law as justification.

The lesson of history has not been to find common cause with such a party.

So I have no interest in finding common cause.

There have been in the past political parties who have worshipped their flag while turning into the symbol of something foul. Who have worshipped the fear their military brings. Who have turned their police forces into armed forces.

I have no interest in finding common cause.

There have been in the past those whose only perceivable attitude toward their people was contempt, whose only perceivable value was greed for the few and control of the many, who harnessed dominant religion to achieve dark ends..

So I have no interest in finding common cause.

They are not playing by the rules. They have proved it. They have at times bragged about it.

They will be perfectly happy for us to go on playing by the rules, not because they love those rules, but because it'll make it so much easier for them to achieve their goals.

These are not healthy times. The activities of health will not increase our health during such times.

We need medicine. Truth.

We have to be willing to fiercely protect the most vulnerable.

Women
People of color
Muslims
Trans people
Gay people

And Democracy, too.

So, what am I saying? Be just as bad as them? Throw off all restraint and attack like barbarians?

Would that 'twere so simple.

We have to be better. Not better than *them.*

Better than *us.* Better than we've been before.

We have to take our medicine.

We have to understand that justice is more important than comfort.

We have to *insist* on it, even when there's a cost—and there is a cost.

We have to resist that urge to our old comfortable habits.

One of the least comfortable things possible is to plainly look at the bad intentions of those who mean harm.

We have to protect those who would be harmed, and insist on truth, whatever the cost. That is our medicine.

I agree with this. I have no interest in arguing with fascists, or with those who continue to want to apply the methods of health to unhealthy times.

Mobilize, find disaffected people and give them a vision of a society that works for them.

A) I’ve always wondered why “the US is not a democracy, it’s a Republic” was just as closely correlated with being an asshole as having a crusader profile pic, and I think it’s because those saying it are genuinely hostile to democracy.

B) No moreso than a dozen states with a combined population less than that of LA does now.

Tyranny of the majority is bad, but it doesn’t then follow that majorities are always bad.

And minority rule by white supremacy, which we now have, is far worse.

Say “we are a republic, not a democracy.”

Fine. I’ll grant the point. It’s a worthless point.

The republic is a worthless dictatorship and an unjust nightmare if it can’t support equal and fair democratic representation."

--------------------------------------------

I basically agree with all this, certainly what he says about the GOP and how they must be dealt with is spot on. His take on Russia is quite interesting and I don't disagree completely but still the idea that Trump is a foreign agent, is disturbing as fuck to me.