Impeach Trump!

I actually have a whole list of people, but let’s start at the top.

I suppose it’s because Right Wing violence is ubiquitous that it’s mostly ignored by the Corporatist Media (more than a few Racists, Misogynists, and Bigots in their ranks too, especially at the higher Executive levels). It’s a ‘Dog Bites Man’ story.

Should a handful of “Antifa Protesters” break a window or burn an unoccupied car or a trash can it is the “Start Of The Communist Revolution!!!” “Man Bites Dog!!!”, and, “Aren’t you a hypocrite for tolerating this? Where is the Outrage!!!”

Banging on The Supreme Court doors? Ruining the dinners of Corrupt Republicans who, if they’re not just as Racist, Bigoted, and Misogynistic as their constituents, are Lying, Cynical, Thieves? All they wanted was a quiet $500 a plate meal with their Missus or Mistress. Where is the civility!? It’s the End Of The World!

Lindsey, my fainting couch. I do declare I feel an attack of the vapors coming on.

Well, the reason I put scare quotes around “Antifa Protesters” is that frequently they’re Alt-Right agent provocateurs. In the ultra-rare case (I estimate that 90%, and probably more, of Political Violence comes from Far Right Fascists) that they’re actually a Leftist, normally they’re also certifiable lunatics that even Lefties won’t talk to because they’re creepy as hell and also probably Cops looking to bust you.

Charlottesville? Now that was a Violent Mob. They beat people, threatened to beat people, and killed one. You doesn’t even have to look that far back (Charlottesville was a little over a year ago), on October 12th, just 11 days ago, members of the Proud Boys and other Alt-Right Fascist Groups beat up a bunch of peaceful counter protesters outside a rally they held in the Metropolitan Republican Club. There were multiple victims, one of whom was captured on cell phone video being kicked in the head by no less that 15 Thugs while they screamed “Faggot” at him (on our sites we call things what they are and don’t Bowdlerize, we are not afraid to be truthful about bigotry and racism). Read all about it at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Now chants of “Lock Her Up” are dated and cliché, and merely rude. This, well…

There may be somebody with tomatoes in the audience. So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell— I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise. It won’t be so much ’cause the courts agree with us too.

In some jurisdictions that’s called Incitement to Riot and is not protected by the First Amendment at all. Did he Incite a Riot? Why, yes. From The New York Times–

Donald J. Trump said on Sunday that he would look into paying the legal fees of a man who was accused of sucker-punching a protester at one of Mr. Trump’s rallies last week, directly contradicting his claim that he does not condone violence by his backers.

The man, John McGraw of Linden, N.C., was arrested on Thursday and charged with assault, battery and disorderly conduct. After the incident in Fayetteville, N.C., Mr. McGraw said that next time he might kill the protester, who he said was not acting like an American.

Mr. Trump, the leading Republican presidential candidate, defended Mr. McGraw in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program on Sunday, claiming that the protester was taunting him and making crude gestures. While he said he did not want to see violence at his events, Mr. Trump said that the man who threw the punch might have gotten carried away but that he “obviously loves the country.”

Of course he reneged on that promise to pay because in addition to all his other sterling qualities Trump is also a deadbeat.

As you may know retired Hedge Fund Manager George Soros, who does not characterize himself as a Democrat though he frequently contributes to Democratic candidates and Liberal organizations, has been the target of numerous Right Wing conspiracy theories, not only for his political views but out of naked Anti-Semitism because he happens to be Jewish.

The latest one to make the rounds is that he organized and is paying for the Caravan of asylum seekers making its way through Mexico. Not true. MSNBC is now reporting something I saw but can’t find at the moment, which is that it was actually started by a local Honduran politician at a Rally. Update: Found it at Daily Beast– Forget Trump Hysteria, Here’s How the Migrant Caravan ‘Crisis’ Really Began. It’s even more damning than I remembered, a local TV Station that supports Honduras’ Right Wing Dictator promoted it as disinformation to embarrass the politician. Read.

“Lock Her Up. Lock Her Up.”

So this morning they found a bomb in George Soros’ mailbox.

Explosive device found in mailbox at George Soros home
by Erin Durkin, The Guardian
Tue 23 Oct 2018

An explosive device was discovered in the mailbox outside the home of billionaire financier and philanthropist George Soros, authorities confirmed on Tuesday.

Soros, a political activist and major donor to liberal causes, has been a favorite target for rightwing groups and conspiracy theories, and a magnet for criticism from Donald Trump.

An employee at the home in Katonah, an affluent suburb in wealthy Westchester county, just north of New York City, opened a package that had been left in the mailbox, and found the device. The staff member took the parcel away from the home into a nearby area with trees and undergrowth, then alerted law enforcement.

Bomb squad technicians detonated the package in the wooded area, police told the New York Times. Soros was not home at the time.
…
“The components were there for an explosive device,” the official told the Associated Press, adding it was “not a hoax device”.

The Bedford police department received a call at about 3.45pm on Monday about the suspicious package in the mailbox, police said in a statement. Katonah is a hamlet within the town of Bedford.

“An employee of the residence opened the package, revealing what appeared to be an explosive device,” the department said. “The employee placed the package in a wooded area and called the Bedford police.”

The case has been turned over to the FBI, which is investigating through its joint terrorism taskforce. “We are conducting an investigation at and around a residence in Bedford, NY. There is no threat to public safety, and we have no further comment at this time,” the FBI’s New York field office said on Twitter.

Investigators are reviewing surveillance video to determine whether the package had been sent through the mail or otherwise delivered, the law enforcement official said. There were no immediate arrests.

Soros, who was born in Hungary, has given money to Democratic candidates and progressive causes after making his billions running a hedge fund.

He has become an arch-enemy of the right, and the address of his home has often been posted on social media along with derogatory comments.

Soros, who is Jewish, has also been the target of antisemitic comments and conspiracy theories.

Trump has targeted him as well, claiming without evidence that protesters opposing the supreme court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh were “paid by Soros and others”.

Most recently, Soros has been falsely blamed for paying Central American migrants to join a caravan of people attempting to travel to the United States. The Florida congressman Matt Gaetz posted a video that claimed women and children being given cash to “storm the US border at election time” and suggested without evidence that the source could be “Soros? US-backed NGOs?”

Soros has also been the target of a hostile media campaign by the nationalist government in his native Hungary.

The FBI and ATF are all over this one because tampering with the U.S. Mail is a Federal Offense.

Knock, Knock, Knock.

Who’s there?

Candygram.

Look, I’m 120+ years old. Of course I remember the first season of SNL. Unfortunately a lot of the sketches aren’t on YouTube, including “Land Shark”. Other ones I miss are “Super Bass-O-Matic” and “Julia Child”.

Joe: No, no evidence at all. I mean, people have been writing up lists, no rioting in California. Democrats aren’t giving away cars to illegal aliens. They’re not Oprah. Democrats haven’t organized the caravan. Fifty thousand people were not standing outside of Texas Stadium last night, ended up it might be one or two thousand. Selling weapons to Saudi Arabia isn’t creating one million jobs. That’s a lie, that’s not even close. Illegal immigrants aren’t voting… you can go down the list.

He talks about getting an additional $1.6 billion for the wall. We’ve talked about unknown Middle Easterners. There are 20 things Donald Trump has created out of thin air. Donald Trump could have said just as easily yet, in that Honduras group, there are Martians. There are aliens in there and they have sharks with lasers on them and they are going to come to America and they’re coming to your children’s school. These are land sharks, as well. And they’re going to shoot their lasers between your children’s eyes.

That is just as accurate as every lie he has told those poor, unsuspecting crowd members.

Eugene: Look, there is a frenzy and more than a flurry of desperation around these lies

Even for Trump, this is extraordinary. This is just — you have to sift carefully for any sort of grain of potential truth in anything that he said last night. It’s unbelievable. Back away for a second, though. Why is — does the president having to go to a rally for a Senate race in Texas of all places and they have to deploy the president there to help save Ted Cruz two weeks before the elections. That’s not a good look, that’s not a good sign. and it tells me there’s more consternation and panic in the president’s circle.

Some News

I’ve played video games like this.

They never end especially well.

Survival of the Richest
by Douglas Rushkoff, Medium
Jul 5, 2018

Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk?-?about half my annual professor’s salary?-?all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology.”

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys?-?yes, all men?-?from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Should they invest in something like Dragons Den Bitcoin? What’s the future of blockchain? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers?-?if that technology could be developed in time.

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.
…
Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better than the undead?-?and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite viewers to imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans, where one group’s survival is dependent on another one’s demise. Even Westworld?-?based on a science-fiction novel where robots run amok?-?ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: Human beings are simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we create. The robots learn that each of us can be reduced to just a few lines of code, and that we’re incapable of making any willful choices. Heck, even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their bodies and spend their rest of their lives in a computer simulation.

The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.

Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space?-?as if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and somehow survive in a bubble on Mars?-?despite our inability to maintain such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar Biosphere trials?-?the result will be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.

When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an “event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.

They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves?-?especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.

Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own humanity have much better options available to us. We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.

Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.

Straight Randian selfish narcissistic individualism. The ‘Libertarian’ Creed. I’m a civil libertarian but I believe in privacy and freedom for everybody, not just those who can afford it.

I’d quote the Salon article by Nicole Karlis that I picked up the link from but it kind of detours into speculation from ‘Life Counselors’ and forgive me, but I could put out a shingle, call myself one, and coin a mite more money than I make from writing about Politics and stuff.

People would think I was good too.

After the Rachelpocaypse

I can swear like a 20 year old. Back in the day it was “like a sailor”, Sailor Mercury the magical Buzzfeed quiz machine tells me. Yes, I had to look it up. It’s like Peanuts or Crisps, you keep going until the bowl is empty.

Remember that attack in Kandahar? The one I highlighted ONLY TWO DAYS AGO?

Remember how General Austin Miller, commander of all U.S. forces in Afganistan emerged miraculously unscathed despite the death of Afghan Police General Abdul Raziq, and the Provincial Intelligence Chief, General Abdul Momin?

It seems Brigadier General Jeffrey Smiley was not quite as lucky.

U.S. general wounded in attack in Afghanistan
By Dan Lamothe, Washington Post
October 21, 2018

A U.S. general was wounded in an attack last week in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province that killed two senior Afghan provincial officials and targeted a group that included the senior U.S. commander in the country, four people with knowledge of the assault said.

Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Smiley is recovering after suffering at least one gunshot wound inside the Kandahar governor’s compound, three of the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. U.S. military officials in Afghanistan and at the Pentagon have declined to comment on the attack or identify the wounded, describing them only as an American service member, an American civilian and a contractor who is part of the military coalition.
…
The attack caught the U.S. military by surprise. General officers are rarely in situations where they face attack, and even more rarely wounded.

Among those present during the attack was Army Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, the top U.S. officer in Afghanistan. Butler has said that the U.S. officials present were caught in the crossfire after a gunman started shooting. The Taliban asserted responsibility for the attack and said Miller was among the main targets.

Smiley has served in the Army for just over 30 years and became a general in May 2017, according to an official biography. He deployed in Afghanistan this summer, taking command of a unit with headquarters in Kandahar known as Train, Advise, Assist and Command-South. The headquarters is largely composed of members of the 40th Infantry Division, a unit of the California Army National Guard. Smiley has commanded Guard units in California for years.

The Afghan officials killed include Kandahar’s top police general, Abdul Raziq, a powerful but controversial security official who had survived numerous assassination attempts. He had risen to power while clearing the Taliban from Kandahar but was accused of extrajudicial killings, torture and other human rights abuses. He denied the allegations.

Also killed was Kandahar’s intelligence chief, Abdul Momin. The governor, Zalmai Wessa, was shot but survived.

The attack prompted the Afghan government to postpone voting in Kandahar for parliamentary elections by a week. The elections were held Saturday across most of the country, with some Afghans waiting hours to vote.

Afghanistan is a disaster. The United States is losing. D.C. collectively (yes Democrats included, Obama’s ‘Good War’ you know) is more than willing to send more soldiers there to die in pursuit of a policy that has already failed. Do you want to be the last one as we evacuate from the roof of the Embassy in Kabul?

U.S. Out. Now.

Unlike some people I associate with I am not combat trained, I don’t know 16 ways to kill you with my little finger though I’m pretty sure I could bash you enough times with a rock to do the job (I am after all elderly and non-threatening). I’d ambush you, you’d never see me coming and I would not disguise my murderous intent.

I’ve struck someone with purpose exactly twice, once in third grade and once in fifth. Same guy, same reason (he was attempting to bully me), same place (between the eyes, breaking his glasses), same result- he backed off (fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice? Won’t get fooled again. Did I mention he was dumb?) and we were both suspended for a week which was fine with me and I had to pay for a new pair of glasses which was not exactly fine with Emily and Richard. Vacation!

So I’m a violent homicidal maniac, a great huge green rage machine (that is actually true), a psychopathic serial killer who you can’t have dinner with unless you like brains acidulated in white wine vinegar, dredged in flour, sautéed in butter, and served with a white wine and garlic pan sauce.

With Fava Beans and a nice Chianti.

And/or Liver which is often over cooked and best served with Bacon (mmm… Bacon), Onions, and Ketchup. I’ve never actually cooked brains- ick.

I’ve also been on the receiving end and it’s almost exactly like this-

Tough guy Donald Trump
by Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon
October 20, 2018

Musing on Gianforte’s skills as a body-slammer Trump recalled that Vice President Joe Biden had “challenged me to a fight, and that was fine. And when I said he wouldn’t last long, he’d be down faster than Greg would take him down. He’d be down so fast. Remember? Faster than Greg. I’d have to go very fast. I’d have to immediately connect.”

Let’s take a moment and consider these fine words from the President of the United States. First, what Trump is praising Gianforte for is the wrestling equivalent of a sucker punch. Ben Jacobs, the reporter for the British newspaper The Guardian, was asking him a question about the Republican healthcare plan when Gianforte suddenly “grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him,” according to Alicia Acuna, a Fox News reporter who witnessed the assault. “Gianforte then began punching the man, as he moved on top the reporter and began yelling something to the effect of ‘I’m sick and tired of this!’” (You can listen to a tape of the incident here)

“At no point did any of us who witnessed this assault see Jacobs show any form of physical aggression toward Gianforte, who left the area after giving statements to local sheriff’s deputies,” the Fox News reporter recalled.

So what captured Trump’s attention wasn’t a story of a man defending himself, but rather a man violently attacking an unsuspecting victim who had a legitimate reason to be asking the candidate questions about issues in the campaign for the office he was aspiring to. An attack that got him arrested and convicted of assault.

With that, Trump was off into dream world. Everything he said there after was all in his imagination. He wasn’t telling his Montana audience what he did to Joe Biden. He was telling them his imaginary fight with Biden “wouldn’t last long” because “I’d have to go very fast. I’d have to immediately connect.”

What? Who talks like that? Who says “go very fast?” What does “immediately connect” even mean? Huh? What the hell is he talking about?

Trump has never seen a punch thrown in anger in his life. He’s never thrown a punch himself. He has certainly never been hit by one. He’s never had anyone on top of him, punching him in the face; or been on top of someone else, punching another person in the face. He’s never been knocked out. He’s never come back to consciousness, unable to see, both of his eyes swollen shut, nose and ribs broken, blood from facial cuts and mouth pooling in the dirt next to a gravel road.

I have. That was a beating I took one night in Columbus, Georgia, when I was jumped by four guys who were out cruising the back streets of the town, looking for someone to beat up. I was in a phone booth making a call across the street from my rented trailer when the accordion door slammed open, I was spun around, and the next thing I saw was a gigantic fist wearing a big ring about three inches from my eyes. The fist hit my face, snapping my head back, breaking the glass wall of the phone booth. They dragged me out, and I managed to flail a couple of punches before I was thrown to the ground. They took turns pounding my head while the others kicked me.

Only the headlights of a passing car saved me. The guys who beat me fled the scene, but they weren’t finished. The same four were arrested a few hours later in the process of beating a guy they had picked up and driven to a secluded parking lot behind a junior high school. Their second victim that night died in the emergency room at the Fort Benning hospital in a bed on the other side of a cotton curtain from me as doctors worked feverishly to save him (emphasis mine).

Violence isn’t some lame-ass political candidate “body slamming” a reporter. People get beaten up badly enough to be hospitalized. Their bones are broken. They need to be stitched up. Sometimes they die.

This is the real problem with Donald Trump. He doesn’t just live in a world free of facts and morals and consequences, where he can idolize dictators like Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He lives in a world where because nothing bad has ever happened to him, it doesn’t happen to anyone else, either. Violence isn’t real for him. It’s just words, and as he shows us with his disrespect for facts and the people who report them, words don’t matter to him. The 59 Tomahawk missiles he sent into Syria were just a “strike” against a “regime” which, that week, he chose not to be fond of. That $110 billion “deal” with Saudi Arabia he talked about every other time he opened his mouth this week? It’s completely phony, but we do have a deal to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia that was made by the Obama administration, and what are those weapons? Well, a good many of them are the so-called “smart bombs” they have been dropping on innocent civilians in Yemen in that slaughterhouse of a war that’s been raging for the last three years.

Last August, a Saudi airstrike hit a school bus in Yemen, killing 51 and injuring 79. Forty of the dead and 56 of the injured were school children. A 2016 report to the U.N. Security Council held that 2,682 civilian deaths were caused by air-launched weapons. Those were air-launched smart bombs sold to Saudi Arabia by the United States.

That’s violence, deadly violence that was caused by American made bombs being sold in a so-called “weapons deal” to Saudi Arabia.

And now what’s Trump doing? Now that Mohammed bin Salman is being exposed for having ordered the death and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, he’s looking wildly around trying to find a way to wiggle his way around the support he’s given the sinister prince and the murdering regime in Saudi Arabia.

Trump loves guys like Congressman Greg Gianforte and Vladimir Putin and Recep Erdoğan and Mohammed bin Salam. He loves them because he thinks they’re “tough.” The problem is, Trump doesn’t know what the fuck tough is.

That’s what it means to stomp someone in the face with Golf cleats. That’s what it means to crush a protester with a car. That’s what it means to offer to pay the legal fees of your Brownshirt rally attendees if they ‘rough people up a little’. Fascism? You’re swimming in it. Are you going to back the Communist Antifa or the Sturmabteilung? Perhaps you believe in Direct Action like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi. Good luck with that, it is a very hard path with uncertain outcomes.

Truscott attended the United States Military Academy, graduating in 1969. In 1968, Truscott and other cadets challenged the required attendance at chapel services. Later a court case filed by another cadet along with midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy resulted in a 1972 US Court of Appeals decision (and upheld by the Supreme Court) that ended mandatory chapel attendance at all of the service academies. He was then assigned to Fort Carson, Colorado. There, he wrote an article about heroin addiction among enlisted soldiers and another about what he felt was an illegal court martial. He was threatened with being sent to Vietnam, so he resigned his commission about thirteen months after graduating, receiving a “general discharge under other than honorable conditions.”

What are you fighting for?

Phil Ochs

Country Joe McDonald- Feel Like I’m Fixing to Die Rag