Containment

Richard Gere, bless his heart, gave an interview recently where he says who would have thought the US would allow a maniac to take over the government and then very quickly destroy it. Then he turned around and blamed the rest of us for not speaking out before it happened.

Where has he been?? Was he not paying attention when Hillary Clinton was mocked for calling Trump’s red hats deplorables? Has there ever been a more accurate description? What about the Women’s March that happened three years in a row? How about the millions of us who lost friends and family members to the head deplorable who used every sophisticated cult technique to make his followers resist any communication from the real world and to stop them from thinking. How about Stephen Colbert who night after night warned the entire country about how awful “the former guy” was?

Richard Gere is sincere but a very naive person if he thinks anyone of us by ourselves or collectively could have gotten through to half the country who voluntarily joined a cult.

Take it from someone who grew up in one: cult members won’t leave until they feel personally betrayed. And many will never leave because they experience the sunk cost fallacy. They’ve spent so much of their lives and sacrificed so much and enmeshed themselves with the organization they willingly joined that they can’t leave without tearing themselves apart and leaving the family and friends who have been their cult companions for decades.

Not only that but even after the cult breaks up and leaves only the most faithful and deluded behind, or the ones who benefit from the exploitation of others, there will be no way to change them. Studies have shown that some people will believe false “evidence” even after the experiment ends and they’ve been shown it’s false. They are already invested in the lies. Think of all the people who won’t vaccinate their kids because some doctor in the UK published a paper about the MMR vaccine. He stood to benefit from that and even when it was proved false over and over again there are still millions of people who believe the vaccine causes autism and now kids dying from measles.

It’s almost like Trump went looking for people like that. You know, the ones who bought into the Great Replacement Theory or military gun nuts who wanted to prove how tough we were or that Christianity was under attack or that the libtards were trying to force everyone to have abortions or knew nothing about family values.

He went after those people and fed them lies because they believed them without question and created a community from them. They are, or were, the new E Pluribus Unum and when your own national mythology is used against that same nation not to create unity but to tear it apart there was nothing any of us could do about it until it burned itself out like some great awakening where the believers sold everything they owned to wait out an apocalypse that never saved the world.

We are living the slow defeat. Some people are leaving the cult because they now see that all the sacrifices they made for a lie have come back to bite them. The actual destruction is yet to come. But the rest of us can’t go back in time to recapture the beautiful parts. We can only go forward to save what is left.

But for the rest of them? That 30ish % that will never leave Trump and will blame the rest of us for stabbing him in the back? They are always going to be with us. We will not change them. They look for a leader to give them certainty because they fear so much. And the bad guys are always going to prey on that fear to make them restless and activate them with a new uniform whether it’s a red hat or a swastika or a cockade. They will do dreadful things.

We can’t change them. We can only contain them.

I hope the media who had such a field day over the last 10 years has learned its lesson. It spent a lot of time doing field studies of the creatures in the back of beyond diners, listening to them spew their unsophisticated hickish view of the world. It was all fun and games to mock Hillary Clinton and tell us all how unlikeable she was until we had our maps changed and lost our press passes, our safe food and quality of life.

Containment is a responsibility, it takes great effort and you can never stop doing it. The minute you let your guard down, some new manifestation, like the AfD in Germany, will be reborn with a new name. This is the lesson we needed to hear from Gere, a recognition about what we are truly up against for eternity. It’s not enough to speak up, we need to structure our cultures in a way that makes this monster hard to awaken.

Omens

A curious thing has happened in the last few days that is “an instance of the fingerpost”. Some high profile Republicans have endorsed Democratic candidates.

Two notable endorsements were from Monae Johnson, Secretary of State in South Dakota and Karl Rove in Texas who is voting for a Democrat for Texas Railroad Commissioner.

In endorsement of Terence Davis over Republican Heather Baxter, a Trump toe sucker, Johnson wrote:

… she was endorsing Davis “with full understanding of what this endorsement may cost me” because he is the “candidate best prepared to protect the office and serve South Dakota with seriousness, steadiness, and integrity.” She urged voters to “to look beyond the letter beside a candidate’s name.”

Baxter is an election “integrity” nut case who seems to think South Dakota needs post election audits and hand counts. She won her party’s nomination by a very slim margin.

Rove’s endorsement was, well, almost unbelievable. This was George W. Bush’s Rat Fu#%er. I can think of few people I detested more than Karl Rove in the Bush years. His gleeful ruthlessness in campaigns for Bush enabled the unitary executive theory that Trump took advantage of.

Even though his endorsement is only for the Texas Railroad Commissioner, which may seem like low hanging fruit, the message couldn’t be clearer. Maybe he can’t go as far as endorsing other Democrats in Texas without drawing the wrong kind of attention from Ken Paxton but Rove is a master manipulator.

Our tin foil antenna should start to twitch right about now. Something’s coming. There are also Republicans in Congress who are starting to become restless. Thomas Massie side-swiped Mike Johnson last week when he entered articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth. Johnson immediately closed up shop in the House and sent everyone home until after the election. That could be because of campaign season but I think Johnson doesn’t want anyone staring at the other droids that are starting to break away and join Massie. If Massie is not exceptional, that’s a signal that the Republican Party is starting to fracture. It’s one of the signs that an autocrats’ reign over a party is coming to an end and Johnson is trying desperately to prevent us from witnessing it.

Over in the Senate side last week, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent was grilled by Senator Sean Casten about where the oil money from Venezuela is going. My SWAG about 6 months ago was that it was going into a private account in Qatar. I was kidding but it looks like that’s where it is going along with a good bit of Venezuelan gold. That’s right. We are cleaning out Venezuela’s Fort Knox. Take that in for a second.

You know, if we get enough senators in November, we can impeach Trump’s ass by February and this time he could get convicted.

As his power slips through his grasp, he’s going to lash out and blame us for destroying his beautiful wickedness. With the spike in diesel prices pushing the cost of everything, it’s going to get really ugly.

“Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.”

***************************

More on my French Connection:

I recently traced my roots back to 1695 in different parts of Europe and the person I find most interesting is on my paternal grandmother’s side. Our ancestor was an 18 year old woman who left Reims, France in 1793. That was the height of the Terror and Reims was particularly vulnerable because of its connection to the coronations of French kings and its location close to Belgium.

To escape from France in 1793 took nerves of steel and a lot of money. If she had been caught, she would have been executed and all her family’s property confiscated. Her likely route would have gone through Belgium and then by sea to England abd eventually Londonderry, Ireland that made and traded textiles. That’s probably her family’s trade in Reims as well.

She didn’t stay there long. She met her husband, a descendent of gallowglasses, in Ireland. In 1796 they immigrated to America. The French were about to invade Ireland and spread the Revolution. Or at least that was the plan. It didn’t happen but it freaked them out enough that they sold everything in Ireland and left for the edge of the frontier in Fayette County, PA.

Fascinating.

My family has been here longer than the Trumps.

Anyway, here’s an episode from The Rest Is History about Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette who also tried to escape the French Revolution through Belgium. Spoiler alert: they didn’t make it.

Why Buffalo Sang O Canada

It’s easier to sing?

It’s like telling your cousins you’re still there for them?

Because 10,000 Canadians are season ticket holders?

Jeez, MAGA, you guys have CDS. Get a grip.

Taking bets

There’s a protest growing at the Kennedy center, it’s a nice Friday night in the Northeast and MAGA is going down.

Somebody’s going to climb that scaffold, rip the curtain off, and tear Donald Trump’s name off the building before the weekend is over.

Donald and the terrible, horrible, no good very bad week

Adam Kinzinger sums up how much money Donald Trump has spent trying to bring the country under his control.

By the way, the thing with the Kennedy Center is particularly weird. Trump seems manically envious of a memorial to a president who was assassinated. What’s that all about? And how did JFK get under Putin’s skin?

September 11, 2026

Today was a beautiful day, just like it was 25 years ago. I was driving to work while flight 175 flew right over me but the sound of aircraft overhead was just background noise, part of my everyday sound landscape.

I passed through Kingston, NJ a few minutes later when WNYC on the car radio crackled and went silent. Without skipping a beat, I switched to WHYY in Philadelphia. I didn’t hear about a plane hitting the north tower and took down the radio antennas until I sat down at my desk and found that the internet was full of the news.

For the rest of the day, I witnessed things I’d never seen or heard before. There were coworkers trying frantically to reach people in Manhattan when cell service was poor at best. I picked my daughter up from school. It was her first week of kindergarten. The school called to say it was closing early. There were children there whose parents might not make it home because they worked at the WTC. My township lost people that day.

The sky was quiet for the first time in my life. Absolute silence.

In that 25 years since the ground trembled beneath our feet, shaking our foundations, and our dreams went up in a cloud of smoke and ash, there have been 25 years of sunsets, full moons, and memories.

It doesn’t last. Enjoy it.

The Lesson of the Uprising

The 14th century Peasants’ Revolt is coming to a theater near you in October in The Uprising. The timing seems intentional and that may be because there is a lesson for us.

Background of what lead to the Peasants’ Revolt;

The 14th century really was apocalyptic in every way possible. To get a full description, read A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman. The century started off well. Beautiful weather, crops flourishing. Then came drought, the mini ice age and famine. There was constant war in France where the English kings fought to retain their lands in Aquitaine. So, it was already getting hard enough.

Then, in 1347, a merchant ship from the east landed in Italy with the plague. It wiped out about 1/3 of the population in Europe. This was probably the root cause of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

The plague took out so many farmers and serfs bound to the land for the aristocracy that there was a labor shortage. The peasants also realized that they could sell their labor to other estates or they could move into the cities and learn trades that were in short supply. So wages went up.

The landowners and nobility didn’t like that. They passed a sort of maximum wage law so prices for labor became fixed and labor couldn’t move around.

Richard II was a boy king. His uncle, John of Gaunt was his regent. But it was Gaunt who was still having it out with the French and trying to acquire Spain for himself, who passed the costs of foreign wars to the commoners. So, taxes went up. And up.

Let’s not leave out the clergy. They held vast tracts of land and also bled dry the peasant farmers who worked for them. So there was a lot to be mad about.

I think an issue with an elite monastery in the east of England was one of the last shoes to drop before the tax collectors came around and made the situation worse. If I recall correctly, the revolt started in Essex. It was lead by a guy named Wat Tyler. The uprising collected thousands on their way to London to petition the king for relief.

It didn’t turn out the way they hoped. The weird thing was Wat and his hordes of angry peasants were more than enough to overwhelm the city and court. But for some reason, Tyler thought he could just have a chat with Richard. So he went to the Tower, had his say, and Richard and his men… uh… killed him. (Correction: it wasn’t the tower. It was at Smithfield outside London) And then they killed all of the other leaders of the revolt. Then, the hordes of angry peasants lost heart and went back to their nasty, brutish and short lives.

The lesson, I think, is don’t let a parlay with the king trick you into thinking he and his nobles give a flying F about your lives. You have enough people on your side to sweep them aside if you are willing to fight. And the last lesson is:

If you’re going to kill the king, you best not miss.

If I were to apply this lesson to the current era, I would say that the peasants are motivated, and righteously indignant. They shouldn’t let any opposition leader talk them into being reasonable. They could overwhelm those assholes at the ballot box this November if they turn out in droves and don’t let any of the king’s men get in their way.

Also, if they vote republicans out of office in both house and senate, that would seriously wound the king. But to really finish him and his party off, as many as possible of the 30+ senate seats in this year’s election have to go to the Democrats or independents. You can’t get rid of him with less than 60 votes to override vetos or convict him and remove him from office.

If you’re truly sick of this administration and its corrupt party, there is only one legitimate way to defeat them and rebuild.

I can’t wait to see how this movie ends.

Find more about the Peasants’ Revolt at The Rest is History. (Highly recommended)

We have to do something about Elon

Does the UK still keep a set of James Bonds with car boats and martini glasses?

The news out of the German state of Saxony-Anhault has Europe shaken. A statewide election shows that the Alternative for Germany (AFD) has won 44% of the vote of the state legislature. It’s not a majority to take over the state but it is a VERY worrying trend. From Reuters:

The anti-immigrant, pro-Russia AfD won nearly 44% of the vote, an outcome that underlined the deep unpopularity of Merz’s ruling coalition and also triggered alarm among Germany’s neighbours, France and Poland, and elsewhere.

However, the party — which wants to deport immigrants, halt support for Ukraine and restore ties with Moscow — fell short of an absolute majority in the state legislature, winning 39 of the 83 seats, and hopes to poach individual conservative lawmakers.

Chancellor Merz’s party is the conservative CDU. For the past several years, it has formed a “firewall” coalition with other parties to prevent the AFD from taking over but this coalition is starting to crack:

Their vow —dubbed the firewall— was to honour the pledge of the country to never again let Nazis come to power in the country.

…

Observers have said that AfD and its supporters abroad, such as America’s Maga movement, have used the firewall to rally support by playing the victim card. They flag that the AfD has argued that the moderates are violating democratic principles by denying the single largest party the right to form the government.

In other words, Germany’s equivalent to MAGA has almost taken over the smallest, poorest of Germany’s east and whines that the firewall coalition isn’t fair because the AFD would have acknowledge that there are other parties in government.

Guess who voted for the far right assholes in Germany? Ok, I’ll tell you. It was men, generally the least educated who long for the good old days of East Germany. (Did anyone else get a flashback to the pre-unification days remembering East German women swimmers at the Olympics? Was it just me? Ok. Anyway…) 50% of men and 39% of women voted for these guys.

They’re nostalgic for those days when your friendly neighborhood KGB agent kept company with your local STAASI. I’d never normally recommend that readers her go to Prime for anything but if you have a subscription, rent The Lives of Others to see what living in east Germany was like back in the fun times behind the Berlin Wall.

MAGA people should watch that too. That’s what’s in store for you. Just ordinary people having to watch everything they say or do no matter how innocent it appears because they’re constantly being monitored by the state and their neighbors. Good times when you couldn’t trust anyone.

Hard to believe that anyone would want that again but throw a little neo-Nazi into the mix and you can see why Poland and France are not waking up happy this morning.

Oh, sure, it’s only one state and in the board scheme of things, it’s tiny. But it’s like Germany has been sleepwalking into this. It was very very slow to give help to Ukraine. I’m not surprised that this small state is feeling the pinch and longs for the days of cheap Russian oil.

This is the CDU and the firewall’s wake up call.

But who else stands to gain from this? Elon. Yep, Germany is the big one in Europe and he’s been supporting the AFD. There has got to be something in it for him. What would it be like to turn Europe into the biggest fans of terraforming Mars?

Or just be in control of a lot of countries that claim to be democratic? The West? NATO?

From Reuters again:

Saxony-Anhalt is a relatively ⁠small state, and one of the poorest in Germany’s former communist east, but Alice Weidel, the AfD’s other national co-leader, hailed Sunday’s result as a milestone and said her party aimed to win at least 40% in the next national election, due in 2029.

…

While far-right leaders ⁠in Europe welcomed the result as a mandate for change, and U.S. billionaire Elon Musk cheered on the AfD from the sidelines, French Finance Minister Roland Lescure told RTL radio it “sends out a very, very worrying signal”.

Here’s my FDR liberal Democrat reaction to this: give them a centimeter, they’ll take a kilometer. They absolutely will not stop until someone stands up to them and tells them enough is enough. If I were Europe, I’d stop dilly dallying about supplying Ukraine with whatever it takes to win the war against Putin. Like, stuff noise cancelling ear plugs in your ears when the AFD and other extremist right wing parties start shrieking it’s not fair to stand in the way of them dragging their countries back to 1939.

There’s something about this that reminds me of the Lincoln speech at Cooper Union 150 years ago.

“But you will not abide the election of a Republican President! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!'” [1]

Yeah, that was a good speech. We should have learned from it before the guys (it’s always guys) voted in Donald Trump.

Let this be a lesson to Europe. They want it all. It’s all about power and control. Now is the time to hit them hard. Bring Putin to his knees and get Elon’s money out of your country once and for all.

Happy Labor Day: Americans Buzdari Iksos Daor

It means Americans are not slaves in a dialect of high Valyrian. If you know Game of Thrones, you’ll know what scene I’m talking about. It’s said by Danaerys Targaryen in one of the best plot twists of the series. What I like about it was she never gave away to anyone what her intentions were. She stayed cool, calm and absolutely focused on her goal.

The rest of the world has been looking at us, wondering if we’re slaves, submitting to the masters with the whips and a man who is arrogant, profane and ultimately very very stupid.

I see us more as the silent determined type walking barefoot over broken glass.

November is Coming.

*****************************

And another thing…

I’ve heard that ranchers are hawking their beef on TikTok now, begging Americans to give them a break.

This is infuriating for a couple of reasons.

I still see a lot of beef in my grocery stores and have for years now. But the prices keep going up. To have a nice pot roast in the slow cooker, you’ve got to fork over about $20. Hamburger is about $7/lb.

Like I said, there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of beef and I’m disinclined to believe that ranchers just can’t cut a break with the weather for the last 6 years. That sounds like a civilization collapse signal.

Their income isn’t what it used to be. That is indeed unfortunate. I know exactly how that feels after my layoff and industry collapse and I didn’t have a ranch where I was pulling in millions of dollars a year. I was just a middle class R&D professional living in NJ paying property taxes through the nose, trying to save for college tuitions and retirement, and working hard to design newer and better drugs for those ranchers’ families. So I know the pain of what it’s like when some corporation and financiers speculate with your livelihood to make their masters richer and get that hot, juicy bonus at the end of the year.

But where my empathy ends is when these ranchers are upset that the import of tariff free meat from Argentina is going to hurt their bottom line. What they are saying is they like the high price of beef. They don’t care about the poor families who are struggling to get by on $40K/year can’t afford hamburgers for Labor Day bbqs anymore.

It was a cool and groovy when the price of beef was high and voting for Republicans seemed like a sure bet to keep them that way. Now that these ranchers see that they can also be taken advantage of by big corporations that feed on their profits, they should STFU about consumers not liking their high prices.

Let’s set aside the fact that they voted for an orange moron and his Congressional toadies that aren’t that much smarter who have perverted what it means to be an American both domestically and internationally. We are royally pissed off about the crazy high prices of food in this country.

The guy they voted for could have made a lot of the current crisis go away if he knew anything about economics and foreign affairs. If he was fighting for the ranchers when he sweet talked them to undress for him for the last three election cycles, he would have truly ended the war in Ukraine for Ukraine’s side and not started a pointless, humiliating, expensive war in Iran. That right there might have helped transportation costs.

Instead, he has pursued a mercantilist agenda where South American countries are like vassal states where we now import less expensive beef while all the other goods in the world are tariffed through the nose to extract money from average Americans in order to spare the ultra wealthy.

Now the ranchers can get a sense of what the rest of us been up putting up with. You know, all of us slacker libtards just doing regular book smart work and doing our thought experiments to know what’s coming if we vote for Republicans.

You don’t have to tell me who you voted for when you complain that you’re getting screwed because the rest of us want cheaper steaks. For that money, I can buy lobsters.

Mohamed Bouazizi, Pierre Damas Bel

Yesterday, Pierre Damas Bel jumped in front of a truck and died. He was 20 years old. He was a student at Wright State University, an honor student in high school, a soccer player and in ROTC. Any one of us parents would be proud to know him.

He was also Hatian, a target of this administration. He came here with Temporary Protected Status. Trump wanted to send these Haitians back to Haiti. The US Supreme Court gave him its blessing.

He was forced to wear a gps ankle bracelet. This kid, the least likely person to need one or have a violent criminal record, couldn’t play soccer with the gps boot on. And he couldn’t wear his new ROTC uniform. He was bullied relentlessly by his classmates who were likely from MAGA families.

I have two quotes to ponder today:

This is what we are up against. This is what the casual Trump voter didn’t understand.

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

O’Brien’s monologue, 1984.

But we don’t know the end of our story.

“‘Despair, or folly?’ said Gandalf. ‘It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy!’”

A 20 year old, no matter which country he’s from, should never give in to despair. You do not know what your future holds.

Don’t forget that Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor who had his wares confiscated by government officials, set himself on fire to protest the autocratic regime in Tunisia. He was 26 years old when he self-immolated and died on January 4, 2011. On January 14, 2011, the President of Tunisia, Zin El Abedine ben Ali stepped down. A lot happened in 10 days.