Women are being trolled with the taunt “Your body, my choice” and President-elect Trump has announced his nomination of Matt Gaetz, former congressman, for Attorney General of the United States. Gaetz will be completely focused on revenge. In addition, Trump states that he intends to pursue recess appointments immediately and asks the Senate to go into recess for the minimum two weeks needed.
We should also note that Mr. Gaetz was supposed to receive a report this week on the House Ethics Committee’s long-running investigation of his participation in drug and under-age sex parties while he was in Congress. He resigned just a few hours before the report was to be delivered, putting himself out of the reach of the investigation.
Mr. Trump has successfully engaged in the same behavior, stalling the four criminal cases against him until the clock runs out. He has made full use of the Democratic administration’s almost two-year delay in delivering indictments for his incitement to insurrection and retention of classified documents (with obstruction).
It is clear that Biden’s main fault was that he was too nice. Biden should have allowed or prompted his Attorney General to proceed immediately with the case against Trump. Biden should have trumpeted his own accomplishments, loudly, far and wide. Where is his press conference announcing that the economy of the USA is the “envy of the world” (per the Economist magazine)?
One last question: why didn’t the Harris campaign know that there were ten million Democrats who planned to sit out the election– the ten million that Harris needed to win?
It is clear from the final voting numbers that Trump retained all but a couple of million of his die-hard followers– he received almost the same number of votes in 2024 as he did in 2020. But Harris in 2024 received over ten million votes less than Biden in 2020, indicating that many Democratic voters sat out the election.
It was also clear from Trump’s campaigning style that he had no interest in courting voters beyond his hard base. He made it all about his grievances and revenge, and allowed the voters to pursue their prejudiced views on inflation and immigration. No-one who voted against him before would ever vote for him again.
It may have been a mistake to campaign with never-Trump Republicans. The time may have been better spent trying to find and motivate those Democrats who were not going to vote at all.
The less said about the new Health and Human Services chief, the better.
More than 10 million voters who tapped Biden in 2020 did not vote for Harris in 2024, and as a result Trump swept all the swing states and won a popular majority. Trump received about the same number of votes as he did in 2020: 72-74 million.
From these numbers, we know that the same people who voted for Trump in 2020 voted for him in 2024. He only lost a couple of million votes in the interim, despite all the publicity surrounding the incident of January 6, 2021, the loss of civil suits for fraud and sexual abuse, and a felony conviction for election interference (the coverup of a sexual encounter, i.e. adultery).
We can assume that these voters have an almost psychotic devotion to Trump and were unaffected by his many scandals.
But the loss of more than 10 million votes (they’re not through counting all the mail-in ballots) by Harris from Biden’s win demands explanation. For some reason, these people seem to have not voted at all.
There are four factors that may have prompted nominally Democratic voters not to tap Harris: inflation, immigration, gender, and ethnicity.
Let us objectively consider these issues: they were all pounded upon, over and over again, by the Republican propaganda machine.
Inflation was primarily a result of the pandemic, which caused an increased demand on shipping and at the same time forced shutdowns, sickness of employees, and quarantines. These factors dramatically increased shipping costs and led to rises in prices for many goods, almost all of which are shipped from somewhere. As a result, inflation was worldwide and has barely subsided at the present moment.
In fact, the US suffered less from inflation and recovered faster than almost all other countries. The inflation rate climbed to 9.1% in 2022. It has dropped to 2.5% in the last few months. The overall increase in the price of food from 2020 to now was 25%. The raw numbers are painful, but our relative standing among world economies is exceptionally good.
Republican propaganda made it seem as if Biden was personally responsible for inflation and could have controlled it if he wanted to. In fact, our country did better than most countries in response to the worldwide problems, so Biden should get credit for that. The failure was in not taking propaganda advantage of these accomplishments.
With “irregular migration” (viz. illegal immigrants) the situation has been very different. The Biden administration made few public statements and appeared to do little to combat large numbers of immigrants until it tried to pass comprehensive border legislation, apparently at the last moment. Trump blocked this legislation although it provided a close approximation to Republican demands, and used the persistence of the problem for propaganda.
Too late, Biden introduced executive actions which successfully closed down the border. For the last few months, border activity has been very low. This accomplishment was not publicized (possibly for fear of putting off liberals?)
Republican propaganda made it seem as if Biden was personally responsible for letting murders, rapists, and people carrying fentanyl in backpacks into the country, and then giving them welfare.
Propaganda surrounding these issues didn’t improve Trump’s numbers despite its evocation of the fantasy of murderers from Mexico. But apparently it suppressed Democratic enthusiasm for voting.
Harris did not make propaganda of hers being a new policy approach. She even refused to criticize anything Biden had done: “I wouldn’t change a thing.” She should have separated herself from Biden and announced reversals in policy on the margins at least.
The last two issues, gender and ethnicity, were played upon crudely by Trump. Did they also dampen Democratic enthusiasm for voting? Probably, there was an element of misogyny and racism in the results.
Who falls for propaganda? Poorly educated people. These people are also more likely to be racist and misogynist. The voting breakdown bears this out, with Trump support concentrated among people with a high school diploma or less, and Harris support in the college educated. White women and young people as a whole broke for Trump. We can surmise from this that the lower a person’s intelligence (as reflected in their educational achievement), the more likely that person is to succumb to propaganda. Women– white women?
The issues of inflation and irregular migration, as propagandized to people of low intelligence, combined with the inherent bias of the American public against women and nonwhite ethnic backgrounds, may account for the collapse of Democratic support in 2024. There is no need to infer failures to campaign properly or faux pas, nor the influence of Biden in whatever way. These factors alone explain the difference.
I am deeply disappointed in the American public. At the same time, I can comprehend the baleful influence of the Republican propaganda machine in turning gullible people away from the Democrats. The policies of Republicans have also weakened education all over this country, especially in the public schools. A poorly educated people of subnormal intelligence are the ideal subjects for propaganda.
The failure of the Democratic campaign was primarily ineffective propagandizing. I would suggest a study of the existing literature on effective propaganda. We can begin by studying Goebbels, Hitler’s indispensable propaganda minister.
The Republicans certainly have studied Goebbels, and there is evidence that Trump has studied Hitler’s speeches. His first wife said he kept a book of the speeches at his bedside, and it is apparently the only book Trump has ever studied in depth.
There is a crying need for effective propaganda against the Republicans. This material need not twist the facts far, as there is abundant objective evidence for the advantages of Biden’s and Harris’ policies over Trump’s.
I predict that the Trump administration will immediately develop violent internal conflict and pervasive dysfunction due to the appointment of multiple incompetent apparatchiks (Trumpists).
As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often does rhyme.”
photo illustration courtesy of pixabay.com and Erika Wittlieb
Trump knows he is losing.
/”It appears that trump now knows he will lose the election. Nothing he says is designed to attract additional votes. He simply wishes to create as large a fire as he can on the way to defeat.” –MHW, Chicago, IL
World War III may have already begun.
“We are the greatest nation in the history of the world. That’s a fact.” –President Joe Biden
“The United States is going to hell.” — ex-President Donald Trump
Image by GernotBra from Pixabay–Alps in Switzerland
This is a pretty picture. It has nothing to do with climate change. I included it because it popped up on a search in pixabay under “climate change” and I liked it… Never mind.
The existential threat that I noticed is from changing weather patterns in the mid-US continent, specifically Texas and the Central Plains. According to Google, this area is under greater threat from climate change than any other in the US. The description specifically mentions heat, drought, and flooding, but neglects severe weather like tornados and hurricanes.
During the last couple of months, the US Central Plains has been hit by successive storms, heat, rain, tornados, and derechos (high winds that are mostly in a straight line). The weather service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), predicts that hurricanes will be more frequent this summer and fall– twice the average rate.
The combination of record-breaking heat and severe storms will be exhausting this summer. Next year will probably be worse. It’s too late to do anything to stop this weather– what we do now will take ten years to have an effect.
The question is, will this alarming weather be sufficient to turn the average citizen against global warming– that is, to just acknowledge that it exists? Evidence from other controversial areas suggests that it will have little effect. When presented with stronger evidence, climate-change deniers usually double down on their assertions. Psychologists explain that these people have deeply internalized their beliefs and the possibility of change is threatening to their very personal integrity. Accepting that you might be wrong has a shattering effect on your personality.
So here we are. On one side are people who study and respect the science, for whom the answer is obvious and very negative.
On the other side are people who deny the science, in some cases because they have a vested interest in continuing to burn fossil fuels. In other cases, they have been duped by propaganda– remember that, ever since the oil companies discovered in the 1980s that they were causing climate change, they have been spending millions on negative propaganda.
The only change is likely to be among those who were not paying attention before, and among children who have not been exposed to the problem yet. So it is likely to be a gradual change.
Another subject that has caught my eye recently is the resurgence of the the Proud Boys– you can read the details in Reuters today on their website. The leadership of this group was sentenced to long prison terms after the insurrection of January 6, 2021. Some 70 Proud Boys were imprisoned, of the over 1400 people who have been on trial for January 6 charges. One anonymous Proud Boy averred that the riots would not have happened without their presence.
Membership in the Proud Boys dropped afterwards, but it has been rising recently. (Estimates range from a few hundred to 5,000, with considerable uncertainty.) Remaining members have decentralized the organization, eliminating leadership positions. Each chapter (of about 150 in 48 states) is independent now. Communication between chapters is minimized, and members are prohibited from speaking to the press at all.
The great danger of this group is that they are specifically aimed at engaging in physical confrontations with their opponents– before 2021, they used to engage in street brawls with people who identify as “anti-fa”. Their specialty is attacking demonstrators for causes they don’t like, from Black Lives Matter to LGBTQ+ causes. Their spiritual leader is still Donald Trump.
I have an ominous premonition that a resurgent Proud Boys, and many groups like them, will instigate street violence and armed attacks after the November 5 election. I have a feeling that Biden will win, and the count may be very close. When that happens, these people will see it as a signal to go out and fight against all the groups that they blame for their predicament. There will be attacks on Congress, on demonstrators, and possibly the White House (since Biden will be the rightful occupant).
Remember that the people who left two live pipe bombs at the Capitol on January 6 (they were found and defused) have never been caught. These people are surely planning more terrorism.
I’m hoping that the FBI and Homeland Security will be surveilling the Proud Boys and their like. I didn’t used to like federal law enforcement personnel much, but more and more I’m beginning to feel that they are potentially real heroes in protecting the US against these monsters. They used to do a lot of questionable things like surveillance on leftist groups, searching for commies, and chasing after drugs… but since Hoover died, the FBI has reformed itself to be a more objective organization that realizes it needs to protect all Americans.
So here’s hoping the deep state rides to our rescue. After that, climate change will kill us all, but there’s nothing we can do about that (just kidding, of course we can do something!)
PS According to a local newspaper, a Queens man was convicted of 34 counts of business fraud in a Manhattan court last Thursday. He’s going to appeal.
Sunrise and Sunset
Photograph of recent sunrise from my house by me
At sunrise, there is often a mist that comes up and obscures the horizon. It is faint, but when you look towards something that is far away you will see that the details are obscured.
The weather never changes here. It is always sunny and nice, sometimes with puffy white clouds.
Online, in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Apple News app, things are getting violent and chaotic. What’s happening feels like stochastic terrorism. Just a week ago, the prime minister of Slovakia was shot five times and critically wounded. His life has been spared, but other, lesser known people will not be so lucky.
Now Biden is behind in the polls and he’s counting on a knock-out blow at the debate. I predict a finite probability that Trump will cancel the second debate after a weak performance in the first.
Yet those things aren’t going to affect us directly. What will affect us all is the unavoidable death-watch beetle of climate change, ticking away in the sea and air. The effects are already being seen in the abnormal weather patterns and sudden temperature extremes that we experience now.
Unprocessed COVID grief from 2020
Here’s a theory: the people of the United States are “in a funk” with rates of depression, anxiety, and just plain “disgruntlement” that are through the roof– because we have unresolved trauma from the pandemic. This theory is propounded in an article by clinical psychiatrists George Makari and Richard Friedman, published in The Atlantic in March. Mary Trump refers to it in her blog on Substack.
The theory claims that under normal circumstances in a national emergency, the people would unite under the leadership of an understanding and caring president like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 2020, however, we were deliberately divided by the man who held the presidency at the time because he believed that the key to his re-election was to divide the people into “us” and “them.”
In medical terms, we are suffering from PTSD. We have gone through a great trauma, more than a million of us have died, and we have suddenly been told we don’t have to worry about it anymore (although hundreds of people a week are still dying from COVID). What is worse, the trauma continues because Donald Trump continues to divide us. We can’t recover from the trauma while it is still going on.
Many, in fact most, people don’t show outward signs of PTSD. The damage only results in a somewhat diminished mood. Some people have nightmares, depression, irritability, and free-floating anxiety. A few people are completely unable to function at all.
The important thing to combat this problem is a therapeutic approach to current society. A wise, benevolent leader would do the things that bring us together– someone like Joe Biden. He doesn’t have to be a good golf player; FDR, for example, couldn’t even walk and had uncontrolled hypertension (for which there was no known treatment at the time). Trump, on the other hand, is the opposite of therapy.
Our natural tendency to avoid painful memories has induced us to forget or at least weaken our memories of the worst of the pandemic. Trump was president for the first ten months, the worst months although the death toll was still limited. The incident at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 puts a firm terminus on that period in our minds.
Yet we still forget just how bad things got in 2020 and 2021. Even after Biden became president and the vaccine came out there was still a lot of dying going on. The virus spread throughout the US despite all our isolation and masking, but there was a significant sabotage movement going on that only became stronger with time. Instead of uniting over our shared experience and having the benefit of mutual support, we divided into two warring clans: red and blue. We wasted much of our energy fighting over what was going on and what to do about it.
Then the same people who denied the seriousness of COVID and questioned vaccines and masks blamed the very people who were providing the vaccine and decreeing economic relief for the inevitable inflation and supply chain problems caused by the pandemic.
Trump’s propaganda has convinced us that his lies are the truth. There’s no other way to explain the survey that shows that over 15% of us believe that Biden is responsible for the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. That’s the opposite of the truth and beats the 5% of us who think the Earth is flat.
Our current malaise is a direct result of the divisive propaganda promulgated by Trump and his allies that caught us in a vulnerable time and is still preventing us from healing by continuing the trauma.
If this malaise prevents us from re-electing Joe Biden then our country will go down a very dangerous path. Newsweek quoted Mary Trump, niece of Donald Trump, as saying “He will destroy us.”
I didn’t mean to imply that the size of the picture relates to the degree of culpability of the subject. War crimes and crimes against humanity committed on both sides are credibly alleged by the investigators from the International Criminal Court in their report. Requests for warrants were today addressed to a Court Judge. The subjects are three leaders on the Palestinian side and two on the Israeli side.
That means that both these sides are at fault in the atrocities which have been revealed to a horrified world by modern journalism. Yet both sides feel fully justified, even proud of what they have done and are still doing. Clearly, the minds of the participants are overtaken by delusions about what they are doing and why. I don’t want to say that the thing to do is put them on antipsychotic drugs, but that suggestion comes to mind.
On the other hand, Ukraine
This situation is entirely unlike that which is occurring in Ukraine. There, the Russian Army mounted a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on the flimsiest of pretexts two years ago. The Ukrainians have been fighting off the Russians although they are badly outnumbered and outgunned. Their equipment is mostly donated by friendly countries like us. It looks like in the long run, they will lose unless they get reinforcements.
The Ukrainians (who are at least somewhat democratic) had been relying on a treaty signed with Russia thirty-two years ago when Ukraine became an independent country. Russia promised never to violate Ukrainian territory in return for all of Ukraine’s nuclear missiles.
So I think the Ukrainians deserve all the help we can give. The Russian government is invading a smaller country and committing war crimes, and there’s already a warrant out for Vladimir Putin’s arrest. We have to stop him or he’ll keep doing it to one country after another.
Israel, Hamas, and Gaza
Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem by jdblack via pixabay.com
Aside from everything else going on in the Gaza strip since October 7, there is one thing the Israelis seem to have neglected: the infrastructure needed to supply millions of suddenly homeless Palestinians, a hostile and impoverished people.
There is no police presence in the areas the IDF has denuded of habitable dwellings; there is no count of the remaining population, there is no coordinated effort to supply the necessities of life to these people such as water, food, and shelter.
As a result, after six, then seven months of war, the Palestinian people of Gaza are suffering another catastrophe, this one worst than the first.
Whether they deserve what happened is hard to comprehend. After all, more than half of them are women with children. Surely, children under twelve cannot be held criminally responsible for what Hamas has done.
What has happened, I have to keep reminding you, is a tit-for-tat increase in violence that has been going on for hundreds if not thousands of years. The perpetual war has been waxing and waning, but it clearly was ongoing in the second century AD (the Common Era), when the nascent Christians began to directly blame the Jews for the death of Jesus Christ.
I’m going to try not to get into first-century Jerusalem politics right now although it’s a fascinating subject. Suffice it to say that Jesus Christ, a legendary figure from the time the Romans occupied Jerusalem in about 30 of the Common Era. Many prophets were crucified during that period of time in Jerusalem. A single direct reference to Jesus is found in the History of Jerusalem penned by an eye-witness, Josephus Flavius. He also mentions several other martyrs to the cause of freeing Jerusalem from the Romans.
Nonetheless, a conspiracy theory grew up in the early second century that Jesus had been betrayed by his own people, the Jews (specifically the SanHedrin, a council of powerful locals) to be crucified. The Jews delivered him to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who said what he said, offered the crowd Barabbas or Jesus (so it was the crowd’s fault, yes?) and then delivered Jesus to the Army to be murdered.
This conspiracy theory, that the Jewish “deep state” (the SanHedrin) had condemned Jesus for his anti-establishment teachings, has been orthodoxy in Europe since before the Middle Ages. The theory was only definitively shot down by a Pope in 1970. Many people still prescribe to it, including such far-right Republicans as Marjorie Taylor-Greene.
So, the revolt of Jerusalem occurred, and the Romans wiped the Temple off the face of the Earth in around 70 CE. A second, more desperate Jewish revolt occurred in the early second century, which was even more ruthlessly quashed. Nonetheless, Jewish people are reported to have lived in the Jerusalem area despite these thorough Roman military campaigns.
When the Muslims invaded shortly after their inception, they took over the site of the ruined temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed by the Romans. They built a new complex of mosque and related buildings, including the Dome of the Rock shown in the photograph above. The Dome is said to contain the rock from which Mohammed ascended to Heaven in his final Night Journey. More importantly, it occupies the space previously held by the Jewish Temple and thus emphasizes the idea that Judaism is conquered.
Despite all this, the remaining Jewish population of the world benefited from the Diaspora. Since everyone spoke the same language, they naturally preferred trading with their own, and formed huge networks.
The campaign to return to the historic land of Israel is not a new thing.
a 70-year-old’s pains
image from pixabay.com
Every morning by four or five o’clock I wake up with pain in my back, neck, and shoulders; I take some pain medicine and go back to sleep. By six I m fully awake. I get up slowly and stiffly. I have pain in my neck and shoulders especially until the medicine has really worked and it eases somewhat. I usually just sit on the porch and drink coffee with milk until it improves.
I have had pains in my midback since I was 18 and was involved in an accident. I was riding my bicycle when I was hit from the side by a small car (a Toyota Corolla), hit my back on the windshield/roof line, and catapulted into the street. I had some scrapes on my legs and a terrible pain in my back at the junction of the thoracic and lumbar spine (around waist level.) Xrays were negative– this was 1972, when CT scans were a distant dream.
I began having chronic back pain years later, but ibuprofen would usually help. I didn’t let it stop me from hiking, camping, bicycle riding, and generally being active, until around 2000. At that time, I was in another accident. I was driving a car that was T-boned from the right side by another driver who ran a stop sign. I was knocked out and bruised all over. The most serious problem was a concussion, and I have no memory of the two hours after the crash. Nothing about the ambulance ride or the first hour in the ER.
After that, I let the pain and the concussion limit my activity, which was a mistake.
Now, I’m disabled; I had major surgery in August 2016 to place titanium rods in my spine and cut away bone that was pressing on the nerves. The surgery gave me dramatic improvement, and I can now walk a mile or two. Every day walking is key to my continued improvement.
In other ways, though, the pain is worse. I have progressive arthritis in several areas– my left wrist, left ankle and foot, right knee, fingers, and so on. Thus, I have a lot of stiffness, especially in the morning. Stretching exercises (gently) do help.
So, at the age of seventy since about 5:30 PM on April 26, 2024, I am pretty fragile. What I’m doing now (typing) is a pretty low-stress activity. Pressure on the lower side of my wrists does induce intermittent numbness in my hands, but that’s something I can overcome by frequently lifting my hands off the keyboard.
That’s my story. I still enjoy life, but it’s a bit more circumscribed than it used to be.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 