Trump's Mental Deterioration After a Lifetime of Hate

 In some alternate reality somewhere it is sound campaign strategy to go to a Jewish conference on anti-semitism and spout anti-semetic rhetoric including letting the world know that - if he loses - it is the fault of "bad Jews."

In that same universe, it is sound strategy to talk to the civic leaders in a city and basically call their city a shit hole. One person remarked that it's like telling a woman she's ugly and then asking her out on a date.

I'm hoping that we are not living in THAT reality and, call me foolish (you will anyway 🙂  ), but I don't believe we are.

Stetching my memory back decades to C.S. Lewis' "That Hideous Strengh" (I believe - it was in one book of Lewis' "Space Trilogy"), I believe Lewis characterized the "Satan in human form" character as cruelty for cruelty's sake - that is, mindless cruelty.

It's taken just short of 80 years for Trump's malignant narcissisim to turn into unbridled hate and cruelty and, now, what appears to be irreversable mental deterioration.

"“The whole country will be like — you want to know the truth? It’ll be like Detroit,” the Republican presidential nominee said. “Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president.”"
Donald Trump (Speaking to the Detroit Economic Club)

https://apnews.com/article/trump-detroit-2382e6f01ea6d236e8a2b755ff150580

My last full day as a registered Republican...

will be on Wednesday, November 6th of this year no matter who ultimately wins the presidential election. My party affiliation in Pennsylvania will be "None (No Affiliation)."

It is now quite obvious that the de facto "great man" of the GOP is inciting violence during the interval between Election Day and Inauguration Day, that those MANY GOP OFFICE HOLDERS who know how dangerous he is are too frightened of being targeted if they speak out, and that he is painting immigrants - as well as Jews and people of color and gays and about any other marginalized group you can think of - as inhuman.

Trump lacks the brains to understand how dehumanization logically leads down the Nazi path of genocide and certainly doesn't care to: for all his grave faults, he is not ideological - unless his ideology is whatever enhances his own prestige, political power, and wealth.

I'll lose my ability to weigh in on either party's primaries but I am content to let the Democrats and Republicans choose their own candidates for office.

I will continue to help campaign for Democratic nominees until a detoxified GOP returns, which will no doubt be either sometime after I'm dead - or never.

But my agenda will switch from partisan campaigning to rebuilding social capital at the local community level.

The GOP's Bloody Hands

 15 When you stretch out your hands,

I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.

Isaiah 1:15
New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

Historical Note: The GOP's presidential and vice-presidential candidates have worked for years lying that Biden was elected through outcome-changing fraud.

This has delegitimized the entire democratic electoral process for many voters AS WELL AS setting the stage for making the same claim for 2024 and unleashing further violence in an attempt to influence the outcome.

AS OF LAST NIGHT, they have strongly implied that Democrats are responsible for the two recent attempts on Trump's life, all but ensuring that this election will be marked by violence.

Democratic vs. Republican Administrations

"There is no Democratic or Republican way of cleaning the streets."

- Fiorello H. La Guardia

That's not QUITE true.

The Democrats say, "Let's investigate the root cause of dirty streets."

The Republicans say, "Let's find out who is dirtying the streets and shoot the bastards!" 🙂

TIME TO WAKE THE EFF UP! (2/2)

Not you, fascist-tolerant, fascist-adjacent, committed racists, and reactionary modernists such as Thiel and Musk and Vance.

You have thought about the Counter-Enlightenment, organic nationalism, various implementations of it in 20th century Italy, Spanish, Japan, and Germany as well as post-modern varieties in the Russian Federation, China, Hungary, and Iran, and studied it in depth in the writings of folks like Carl Schmidt, Julius Evola, and Alexander Dugin.

You've thought and read about it. Joined collectives with like-minded (and, in some cases, highly armed) others, and have made and COMMITTED TO your decision.

And now you are taking bold, decisive action to achieve that vision in Western, liberal democracies - bolstered  by the phenomenal success of your movement's capture of the White House in 2015 and the subsequent capture of one of the two major political parties in America.

And you are poised within striking distance of doing it again A MONTH from now.

I applaud your seriousness, your industry, and your no doubt willingness to die for what you believe to be a just cause (even if Donald Trump and the other grifters and political opportunists at the top are not).

No. You are not the ones to whom I speak.

I’m speaking of those who would default on their civic responsibility to learn, to think, and to make the MUCH SMALLER SACRIFICE, of VOTING to support Harris / Walz and the Democratic party in this election (with or without the holding of one’s nose) because you can’t bring yourself to vote for a Black woman Democrat (or possibly ANY Democrat).

Or maybe because you harbor some ridiculous belief that NOT VOTING AT ALL is somehow an alleged morally significant symbolic non-act - as if you haven’t learned this late in life that we are ALL morally implicated in the results of our decisions whether the decision is made to ACT or to DO NOTHING.

And that often the only choices we have, particularly with the tough decisions, are all BAD choices with some being MUCH WORSE than others (though, as a Republican, I don’t think that is the case in this election - seems cut and dried to me, at least if one wants to live in a democratic republic under the Constitution).

So wake up. Vote for Harris.

And then let’s all GET TOGETHER (whether one is a non-violent reactionary or Reagan conservative, on the one hand, or a non-violent socialist, liberal, or progressive, on the other) and deal with our respective grievances in the public square and under the rule of law.

TIME TO WAKE THE EFF UP! (1/2)

Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney,  Elizabeth Warren, almost all members of Trump's cabinet as well as key national security and military leaders as well as top leaders in every administration going back to Ronald Reagan are all supporting vice president Harris for president. 

These folks, the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the "good people"at the unite the right rally in Charlottesville who murdered a counter protester, as well as the "patriots"and "political prisoners" who beat the crap out of cops while attempting to prevent the peaceful transfer of power on January 6th, would love to see Trump elected. 

And Trump loves them back.

"The proud boys? Stand back and stand by!"

Neo-Nazi Telegram Users Panic Amid Crackdown and Arrest of Alleged Leaders of Online Extremist Group 

"Introduction to Transrational Thinking"

I’ve always believed that there is a difference between being irrational and being transrational.

If you believe something to be true that goes beyond peer-reviewed science (i.e., just about everything we think we “know”! 🙂 ), that is being TRANSRATIONAL.

If, on the other hand, you believe in something that is absolutely, verifiably NOT TRUE, then you are being IRRATIONAL.

Decided to look this up (for about the first time) and found the cited article that reads, in part:

The concept of Paranoesis (Transrational Thinking), as I developed it, ought not to be

confused with intuition as generally understood (hunch, premonition, "gut" feeling, etc.). This is what could be called "emotional" intuition. The one I'm interested in is known in philosophy as"intellectual intuition" (see Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel, and others). It is a way of thinking (not feeling), on a higher level and usually leads to insights, understanding, and a more comprehensive, holistic knowledge. 

So far, so good. (Though I’m not sure I’d use the term “knowledge” to describe assertions arising from it.)

But then the author goes on to write:

SUCCESSFUL EXPERIMENTS IN TELEPATHY AND REMOTE VIEWING show that there is a faculty of our mind that allows access to non local knowledge, that is, knowledge which is not directly stored in the brain's memory, but resides outside somewhere (as in the minds of other people). I think that Hyponoesis or the fundamental underlying reality is the place where all information resides, and because we are part of reality (as Individual Minds), we should be able to hook up to reality or reunite the Individual Mind (Exonoesis) with Hyponoesis. That's what Transrational Thinking is all about. (emphasis mine)

WHAT experiments? Peer reviewed?

Why claim it’s “knowledge” that goes BEYOND the empirical / rational and then claim that it’s supported by peer reviewed (?) scientific research?

Okay, now we’ve fully entered the realm of what the Germans called “border science” or what might be called “fringe science” or “pseudoscience.”

That’s a bridge too far for me.

Introduction to Transrational Thinking 

"Exiting the Anthropocene and Entering the Symbiocene"

 It has been proposed that humans are now living within a period of the Earth’s history appropriately named “The Anthropocene.”[1] The name is derived from the observed human influence and indeed increasing dominance of climatic, biophysical, and evolutionary processes occurring at a planetary scale. The issue of human dominance is not simply climate change (as bad as that is), it is the whole capitalist development paradigm that is at the dark heart of maldevelopment—that which undermines and destroys the very foundations of all life on earth.

FYI: "Exiting the Anthropocene and Entering the Symbiocene"

One of These is Not Like the Others

 ASSERTION regarding Vance ducking as to whether the 2020 presidential election was legitimate. 

Avoiding an answer to one question when both did that several times is not really an indication of anything other than standard politics.

RESPONSE Substitute him ducking the question as to whether or not the 2nd Amendment should be repealed (merely a DIFFERENT PART* of the Constitution than the part Walz asked about) and it is obvious that both the 2nd Amendment hypothetical and the actual question Walz (and the moderator) asked regarding Article II, Section 1 are FUNDAMENTAL TO THE RULE OF LAW.

Vance and Walz can duck questions all they want about unpopular policies they support or are stuck with but THIS is not a question as to whether someone cheated at poker: the courts and Trump's own Attorney General said the game was fair.

This is someone showing their cards and then announcing they are going to ignore the Constitutional referees and make up their OWN process of determining the allocation of Electoral Votes.

You would see that IN A HEARTBEAT if it was the 2nd Amendment hypothetical.

You SHOULD see it through Trump's challenge to Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution.

* See SCOTUS, "CHIAFALO ET AL. v. WASHINGTON" at 19-465 Chiafalo v. Washington (07-06-2020) 

ORDERS OF CREATION

 ORDERS OF CREATION: A timely reminder that, while the devil is in the details, a Christian has two - and only two - moral responsibilities.

The first responsibility is to share the Good News of Jesus Christ in word and action.

That is a simple task: tell someone you're a Christian and then be mindful that from that point forward your words and actions will show them what YOU, if no others, mean by that.

It's NOT my job to convert ANYONE. That is a work netween God and them and I can only pray that God forgives me for the all but certain mess I'm making of my life that miscommunicates that message. ("Holy Spirit, clean-up on aisle Bekkenhis - he's preaching again.") 🙂

My second responsibility is to ally myself with God's efforts to PRESERVE CREATION, both the natural and the sociological.

One way to do that is to put myself into a purity or holiness community to provide a model for emulation without dirtying my hands. That's called Christian perfectionism.

And, as I have no illusions regarding my ability to be perfect with or without the Holy Spirit and - not being particularly pious by nature - that is not my calling.

The second way is to enter into public life with other sinners (sinning, like misery, LOVES company!) to do our damnedest to attempt to preserve or even improve society without falling prey to the hubris of a thoroughgoing liberal theology's vision of creating the Kingdom of God on earth. THAT'S called Christian realism. (You can look up both terms on Wikipedia.)

"DID HE LOSE THE 2020 ELECTION?"

 "DID HE LOSE THE 2020 ELECTION?"

-Gov. Tim Walz

Paraphrasing Michael Steele's boxing metaphor on Morning Joe:

JD Vance was beating Walz on points in rounds 1 through 9.

In Round 10, Walz landed the knock-out blow.

"We've seen that brought up. I just think for everyone tonight, and I'm going to thank Senator Vance. I think this is the conversation they want to hear, and I think there's a lot of agreement. But this is one that we are miles apart on. This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump's inability to say, he is still saying he didn't lose the election. I would just ask that. Did he lose the 2020 election?"

Vance could not - or would not - say.

It's no mystery why Vance could not say that Trump LOST the election.

Trump would not have picked him without ensuring he was on-board with The Big Lie.

More intriguing, why didn't he just say, "No, he WON the election and was a victim of outcome-changing election fraud orchestrated by the Democrats and the "deep state."?

After all, Trump and Vance are mainlining that position directly into the veins of the rabid, the crooks, and the hoodwinked whose worldview is created by a diet of FOX, Newsmax, Tucker Carlson, and Alex Jones.

It's not like it's a secret. 🤔

On second thought, maybe it IS a secret.

JD Vance DID NOT provide The Big Lie conspiracy theory BECAUSE MOST OF MAINSTREAM AMERICA - the 43 million or so watchinig the debate - KNOW THAT ISN'T TRUE and he doesn't want to blow his brand new "normie" persona and reveal that the MAGA elite has created an alternate reality that would appall most patriots.

Read the full VP debate transcript from the Walz-Vance showdown - CBS News 

The Zeitgeist Movement

 “Our greatest social problems are the direct results of our economic system"

My communist / socialist friends would probably agree with that.

And they might, in fact, be right about that.

But just because someone has identified an aspect - or even THE CENTRAL aspect  - of a problem, does not mean they’ve identified a real-world solution. And, for complex “cloud problems” such as world economies, international conflict, or global climate change, they cannot guarantee that their intervention will not make things worse.

“The Zeitgeist Movement is an activist movement established in the United States in 2008 by Peter Joseph. The group is critical of market capitalism, describing it as structurally corrupt and wasteful of resources. The group dismisses historic religious concepts as misleading, and embraces sustainable ecology and scientific administration of society. VC Reporter's Shane Cohn summarized the movement's charter as: "Our greatest social problems are the direct results of our economic system".”

*   *   *

“An article in the Journal of Contemporary Religion describes the movement as an example of a "conspirituality", a synthesis of New Age spirituality and conspiracy theory.

“Michelle Goldberg of Tablet Magazine called the movement "the world's first Internet-based apocalyptic cult, with members who parrot the party line with cheerful, rote fidelity." In her opinion, the movement is "devoted to a kind of sci-fi planetary communism", and the 2007 documentary that "sparked" the movement was "steeped in far-right, isolationist, and covertly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories."”

The Zeitgeist Movement - Wikipedia 

Conspirituality

Conspirituality is a portmanteau neologism describing the overlap of conspiracy theories with spirituality, typically of New Age varieties. Contemporary conspirituality became common in the 1990s.[3]

*   *   *

“A 2020 opinion piece in ABC Australia said that, as with other extremist movements, the conspirituality narrative portrayed its followers as more enlightened than mainstream society and prone to persecution due to their awareness of the "real truth". Ward and Voas considered the combination of optimistic, holistic New Age culture and pessimistic, conservative conspiracy culture to be paradoxical. Conspirituality includes the "dark occulture" of conspiracy culture. The uniting philosophy of conspirituality movements is a belief that society is under covert control by a group of elites, and that it can be emancipated from that control by a "paradigm shift in consciousness that harnesses cosmic forces". The appeal of conspirituality is the narcissistic idea of being the one to unravel the true explanations for all that is wrong in the world.

“Alex McKeen, writing in The Toronto Star, says:

“Conspiritualists share a conviction that enlightenment exists in a dimension that is separate and above politics, science and everything as banal as “three dimensional” human concerns (a common spirituality trope is reaching five-dimensional consciousness). Once you experience it — and it’s a subjective, private experience — you can’t relate anymore in “3D.”["

Conspirituality - Wikipedia

THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT AND JD VANCE

Start with the Counter-Enlightenments legitimate concerns regarding the anxiety and trauma of universalism, urbanization, industrialization, a cult of rationalism, materialist cultural homogenization, and the destruction of autocratic and traditional institutions that had functioned, in their minds, tolerably well across many cultures and thousands of years of human history.

You CAN end up with fascism, as did the Germans. But you don't have to.

You CAN end up with techno-authoritarianism, as did Yarvin, Thiel, Musk, AND JD VANCE. But you don't have to.

I'm betting that a society that mitigates the "invasive plant" aspect of modernity can best be built under the American constitutional system with its Madisonian separation of powers, its Bill or Rights, and operated by ALL AMERICANS through the free and fair election of representatives.

***
"Following a brief stint as a lawyer, Vance moved to San Francisco. Eventually, he landed at Mithril Capital, a company co-founded by Thiel. He finished writing Hillbilly Elegy while there, and Thiel wrote a blurb praising it. When Vance moved back to Ohio and eventually started his own fund, Narya Capital, both Thiel and Marc Andreessen invested. When Vance ran for U.S. Senate in 2022, Thiel spent an unprecedented $15 million on the campaign and persuaded Trump to endorse him (Vance had previously compared Trump to Hitler). In 2024, Thiel led the charge to convince Trump to pick Vance as V.P.

"Vance is a Thiel creation. And like his billionaire benefactor—who once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”—Vance embraces a radical ideology hell-bent on destroying government as we know it. And they got these ideas, at least in part, from Yarvin.

"Yarvin is the chief thinker behind an obscure but increasingly influential far-right neoreaction, or NRx, movement, that some call the “Dark Enlightenment.” Among other things, it openly promotes dictatorships as superior to democracies and views nations like the United States as outdated software systems. Yarvin seeks to reengineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called “patchworks,” which would be controlled by tech corporations."

* * *

"Vance did not get this extremist ideology from his Appalachian upbringing or—needless to say—Yale Law. It was incubated in America’s tech capital, San Francisco, where he forged crucial ties with Thiel, Yarvin, and David Sacks, the longtime Thiel associate and pro-Putin crusader who recently hosted a Trump fundraiser at his mansion in Pacific Heights. And if Vance ends up in the White House, it will be with $45 million in monthly campaign contributions from Musk, who already made a $44 billion in-kind contribution by gutting San Francisco-based Twitter and transforming it into a right-wing misinformation weapon."

Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas
https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrifying-techno-authoritarian-ideas

PRO-DEMOCRACY COALITION: My personal strategy

1. Campaign for democrats up and down the ticket. Working with Lehigh Valley For All and Susan Wild's campaign (https://wildforcongress.com/). [No direct contact with Bob Casey's campaign but I know both campaigns are including his literature along with everyone else in the downballot races.]

2. Make popcorn, watch cable news, and share my unwanted opinions online between Election Day on Tuesday, November 5th, 2024 and Inauguration Day on Monday, January 20, 2025. I'm inclined NOT to participate in any "live action" stuff unless it is peaceful and led by responsible organizations.

DON'T show up for a brawl and become part of and even escalate any violence. THAT is the job of the Executive branch at the federal, state, and local level.

[THAT was poorly phrased. I really need to read my stuff before I post. Hopefully everyone knows what I meant!! 🤣  ]

3. Should Donald Trump be inaugurated (by fair means or foul), engage in peaceful civil resistance - including civil disobedience if necessary - for CRITICAL ISSUES.

I consider Trump's execution of the Insurrection Act and any illegal, violent action against citizens, on the one hand, and the mass, "bloody" roundup of immigrants (documented or undocumented) and incarcerating them in camps to be such issues.

4. Presuming we survive all that - and we will - we need to talk AND ENGAGE with our seriously aggrieved neighbors on projects to address community level problems, increasing social capital and community resilience against extremism using the three social networking tools of bonding, bridging, and linking.

Megan Leahy: The Bonding and Bridging (Im)Balance

Thank you, J. D. Vance. Now let's give MAGA a Wedgie 🤣

Thank you, J. D. Vance. Now let's give MAGA a  Wedgie 🤣

BEYOND ALL PARTISANSHIP, I am fighting for public facts, American civics, and basic human decency.

I fell asleep during the debate (of course), but the back and forth on Morning Joe clarified things for me a bit.

Vance handled himself as a gentleman. Between the two of them, it was quite the gentlemanly affair with no hard feelings either side.

Walz reminded me of any number of Scout leaders I have had or known.

Vance reminded me of Tom Ellis' characterization of Lucifer (without the later's unfortunate habit of occasionally doing the wrong thing for the right reasons). 🙂

As Charlie Sykes said, "Vance won on style. But this is not figure skating."

If you LISTENED to what Vance was saying, he was asking voters to overthrow the Constitution. For every opportunity he let go, he dropped the elephant in the room right on Vance's head and you'll see THAT exchange, forever, in Harris ads.

Vance demonstrated that you can do the MAGA thing in a classy, gentlemanly way (no doubt REALLY pissing off Donald Trump by everyone telling him how MAGNIFICENTLY Vance did).

It also reminded me of “The Wire” with Trump playing Avon Barksdale, the shoot’m up gangsta who wants to fight for every corner and with Vance playing Stringer Bell, with HIS eye on the wealth and the power to come post-gangsta, where dropping bodies is an unfortunately necessary cost of doing business and the less dropped the better because bodies bring the police.

Admiral James Stravidis even referenced Michael Corleone’s advice from “The Godfather” in reference to Vance’s “style”: ““Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment”

We need a center-right party that can give voice to the important and valid concerns that a LARGE caucus within Trump’s 46% favorability raters, people we know from long experience, that nonetheless embraces speaking the truth, putting community above party, and is grounded in the norm of human decency.

That would put a wedge in the current MAGA coalition and would hopefully exclude the extremist ideologues (Bannon), the bat shit crazies (Gen. Flynn), the insurrectionist cosplayers (the militias), and the grifters (Trump, Guilliani).

It would split the MAGA vote, giving the Democrats the ability to push their agenda while the GOP or its successor can build a loyal party in opposition.

Anyone not admitting that Donald Trump LOST the election yet attempted to retain power through inciting an insurrection timed to prevent the peaceful transfer of power is disqualified right out of the gate.

"WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Nearly identical percentages of U.S. adults rate Donald Trump (46%) and Kamala Harris (44%) favorably in Gallup’s latest Sept. 3-15 poll, during which the candidates debated for the first time. Both candidates, however, have higher unfavorable than favorable ratings. Trump’s unfavorable rating is seven percentage points higher than his favorable score, and Harris’ is 10 points higher."

Favorable Ratings of Harris, Trump Remain Under 50%