Message for Elon

Call Me 🤙

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

More from Belle of the Ranch:

If more people read, they would have seen this coming

The books The Handmaid’s Tale and Prophet Song tell us what life in the US is going to be like if we don’t stop it now. Forget about the forced rape in Atwood’s book. I am referring to creeping, suffocating oppression, followed by union and community leaders disappearing, deployment of national guard troops, blood in the streets, violent takeover of all branches of government, American refugees desperately escaping to Canada.

We have to stand up early. I don’t think June 14 is going to be a birthday parade.

Is your bugout bag ready?

Actually… screw it. Let Trump declare the Insurrection Act. I’m not going to live under tyranny. That’s not what Americans do. Time for us to show our quality.

Hell hath no fury like a narcissist scorned.

They are never getting back together.

They both have similar personality disorders with a hefty dollop of narcissism.

What does a narcissist do when he/she loses control of a situation or suffers a direct hit to their image? They have something called narcissistic rage. That often takes the form of an obsessive drive to get. even.

It’s what drove Trump for four years. For four years he swam in a sea of revenge fantasies. If he ever got back in office, he was going to make the whole country pay. They want good government? He’s going to put the most incompetent yes men in charge. He sipped the bitter tears of his enemies. It has been a divine 6 months. Oh yes.

Now he’s expected to occasionally do stuff other than revenge and the triumph of having to act like a president is so five minutes ago. But I digress.

Their partnership was never going to last. This isn’t going to be a Planes, Trains and Automobiles kind of ending. No. What you have here are two narcissists who expected the other one to be grateful to him. In this scenario, Elon’s genius has been greatly exaggerated. There was never going to be an outcome where he was going to be glorified for what DOGE did. And he sure as hell isn’t going to hear it from Trump because DOGE didn’t cut $2Trillion and that means Trump is going to have to raise the tariffs to pay for tax cuts. And that will make him unpopular with his base.

And Elon is pissed because he paid for Trump to get back into office for a variety of reasons, especially skullduggery on Elon’s part that could have sent him to prison. Trump should be licking his shoes in gratitude. Instead, he’s not making Congress make deep enough heartless cuts to everything that matters to Americans so that Elon can keep his tax cuts. NOW, he’ll get his tax cuts but it will add to the debt. And he hates that. But it’s the ingratitude that burns his oatmeal.

Are they thinking about the country now? Will Elon try to save his companies? Will Trump stop destroying our government before it’s too late?

Eff no.

They are spending all of their mental energy thinking about how they can get. even. They may look distracted but they’re not. They are laser focused on getting rid of that loser feeling inside. They are going to do a rapid unscheduled disassembly on each other. They might pretend they made up to soothe the market or MAGA republicans. But they would be waiting for just the right moment to spring a very painful trap.

Trump has the upper hand because he’s got all the levers of government at his disposal. Don’t be surprised if Elon takes a vacation in Ecuador soon. And Elon is going to make sure that if he goes down he’s going to take Trump with him.

Yes, it is a giant distraction from Russ Vought’s budget wet dream complete with privatizing social security. Yes, Trump is trying to provoke an insurrection while he’s rolling a couple of battalions and their tanks into DC.

But the real distraction is going on in their heads, consuming them both until someone breaks. Right now, Elon is giving everyone the silent treatment, a classic narcissist move. Narcissists know that the worst thing you can do to another narcissist is be indifferent. That’s going to drive Donald up a wall.

Mutually assured destruction. That’s all they care about.

News about LA Protests- from Germany.

Has anyone seen anything about protests in LA in the New York Times or Washington Post? You’d think these images would get readers’ attention and yet… nada.

The Germans are tracking it. Here it is. I don’t speak German and nearly every word is a mystery to me. But you can’t say it’s not important. Watching the implosion of the US must be fascinating and horrifying to Europe.

This is the best reason to subscribe to foreign news sources. Trump has captured and intimidated most of US media. Oh, and get a VPN. I have a feeling that things are about to escalate.

Trump and Doge now have access to your social security information.

The US Supreme Court did an unsigned opinion giving DOGE access to all of your social security information.

Oh, you probably thought they already had it. Nope. They were stopped from getting their hands on it by a lower court judge that said DOGE members had to go through the same PII and HIPAA training that so many other professionals have to do in order to maintain the safety of this information and to attest that they will not use it for malicious purposes or material gain. So DOGE appealed to the Supreme Court and it was like, “yeah, go ahead and take a look around. No problem. This is just temporarily lifting the stay until we get around to figuring out what DOGE is officially allowed to use. And it’s perfectly ok if you can access the medical records and mental health info from family court rulings. Bon Apetit!”

They say it’s to weed out fraud, waste and abuse. But the SSA says that the number of cases of fraud, waste and abuse is extremely small.

If you are still falling for this waste, fraud and abuse BS because some blonde tart on Fox News is telling you that and asking why anyone would stand in the way of ferreting it out, you’re the dumbest mark in the country and Trump depends on your ignorance and gullibility to steal everything you’ve got.

What they really want is to use this information in a surveillance network and to suppress any kind of dissent so they can do whatever they want. If you complain, suddenly you won’t be getting your SS checks, or they’ll be hard to access or oopsies! They’re gone.

You know, you try to warn people that it’s what Trump is after. He wants total control over your lives. But did people listen?

What if they decide you don’t deserve your SS benefits? What if they impose a cap? What if it’s transferred to a private company that issues you an annuity and takes a hefty fee for itself? What if it’s invested in crypto coin instead of US Treasury Bonds??

So many questions with no clear answers.

Call your congressman. I just did. I want answers and I want it to be absolutely clear what they are going to do with the information. I want to see all the fine print. Make Trump, Vought, and Musk spit it out. In public.

Here are some of my questions:

What do they want to do with your SS information?

Are they going to reform the SS computer system using a private entity (the guy runs AirBnB)?

How much will we be paying this private entity?

For how long?

Were there any competitive bids? Creating a new infrastructure and user interface ain’t cheap and it’s not fast. It will take years, decades even because after they get the contract and create the program, they’ll want maintenance fees.

Will the private company sell the US a license for its software? What will be the licensing fees? For how long?

Will anybody OTHER THAN THE SS RECIPIENTS AND TRUST FUND be making money off of investments? How much? What fees are we talking about? Will there be a restriction based on how risky an investment is?

Will Donald Trump be getting a kickback on any contracts to any private IT entities?

What are the requirements? Remember, the TAXPAYERS are the customers, not a private company.

I want to see what the infrastructure is going to look like, are they going to be using the cloud, how are they planning to refactor all that COBOL code, using what language, what database schema, how long will it take?

What are the business continuity processes? In other words, if a server goes down and it screws up your direct deposit, how long is it going to take to resume service? How many seconds?

Who is going to troubleshoot problems?

What operating system will we be using?

Who is going to be resolving vulnerabilities?

What will be the mandatory SLAs (service level agreements) for fixing incidents? The VA has them, the SSA should have them too.

Who will they work for??

What happens if a taxpayer’s records are lost?

What is the backout plan if something goes drastically wrong?

What about failover? Failover to what? Where?

What is the information going to be used for? Will it be cross referenced with voting records or any other information?

Will this information go into Palantir?

Do we have a contract with Palantir currently?

What will it be cross-referencing?

Will machine learning and AI be used?

Who approved of this use of our data?

Will this information be sold to a third party? For what purpose?

What is the process for SS recipients to challenge an erroneous fraud allegation??

I’ve already called my congressman. I will probably call again and again until I get answers to the questions above.

Stop the Steal of the Big Beautiful Bill.

That’s all.

Ok, a little more.

They’re going to try to steal everything that’s not nailed down.

Your taxes are going up, unless you make $500000/year and over.

You services are going to be plundered.

That’s what’s up.

“Billionaires will never create a system that gets rid of billionaires” (Belle of the Ranch) and they don’t want YOU in their club.

It makes them feel less special.

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PS. It doesn’t matter if you have more money than god. If you’re not officially the POTUS, you ain’t got no power.

Which is why we should never put vengeful, selfish, turncoat, barely average IQ guys who have no interest in governing and the soul of a shark in office.

Money can’t buy you that kind of power, Elon.

Now, why don’t you go do a lifetime of charitable work to make up for all the hamfisted idiocy you foisted upon us? It will be good for you. Go visit Leo in Rome. Be contrite. It will do you good.

We interrupt this presidency to apologize to the world

I’m at a loss for words. The greatest nation the world has ever seen has devolved to be run by a stupid orange toddler who always sits like he’s taking a dump. Our personal data and everything we have worked for is being held hostage by a ketamine soaked rocket man. The Congress is being run by an evangelical Boy Scout from Louisiana and a one of the few people that South Dakota even has who has never met a billionaire he hasn’t wanted to give extra money to.

We have a Supreme Court that we can’t trust to do the right thing when the right thing is desperately called for.

Steve Bannon is grinning like Littlefinger because Chaos is a Ladder. There are masked ICE guys running around dragging parents away from their children and getting shamed by the locals.

And now this after Trump and Elon have been trading insults for a couple of days:

Today, Chancellor Merz from Germany met with Trump who proceeded to talk the most inane nonsense likening the Ukraine- Russia war to two kids fighting in a playground. Then he chastised this responsible, statesman from Germany about how we saved his country’s ass during WWII.

For all you Trump voters out there: you have made us a complete laughing stock on the world stage. Our reputation as a world leader in anything is ruined. No, seriously. You should really sit and think about whether this is what you want. Because even for a corrupt state, this is out of control. There is no strategy, no plan, no consideration for the security and safety of the citizens, and no way for this to get better unless you decide he’s got to go. We are going to descend very rapidly to something this country has never seen before and the world is going to have to take actions against us to mitigate the damage.

It’s time to snap the eff out of it now. The fun and games are over.

To the rest of the world, I’m very sorry. This country has been royally messed up since George W. Bush and the party in charge has been extraordinarily lucky.

It’s TACO Tuesday!

Let this new reality sink in

This morning, Ukraine destroyed about 34% of Russian bomber aircraft with $47000 worth of drones. The attack was brilliantly planned. Somehow, Ukraine was able to smuggle in truckloads of Trojan drones, drive them close to the airfields, and then open the tops of the storage containers, releasing the little flying demons to find their targets.

It’s estimated that the Ukrainian “Web” had been in planning and execution for a year. Which means that Zelenskyy knew all about it when Donald Trump told him he didn’t have any cards left. And today this little bit of bitter truth showed up on BlueSky:

Oh, snap.

Slava Ukraini!

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Ukraine is done. They might have a bunch of clever little attack insects already in Russia waiting to be activated. That will leave Russian intelligence and the military scrambling to find their rest of them. But I doubt they’ll use the same tactics twice. This may be Ukraine going in for the kill. They got fed up with begging the world for help and decided to play the long game on their own terms.

Anyone want to guess what’s next?

Trump’s America is like growing up as a child hostage in a cult.

Living in Trump’s America as an “over educated”, free thinking, moderately liberal Democrat feels very much like my childhood.

Despite the fact that I was a good student in accelerated classes, was relatively quiet and kind, and didn’t do anything even remotely disobedient until I was 16.5 years old (I was a late bloomer), it was never enough. I could never be considered good enough unless I surrendered completely to the Truth as they saw it. It taught me to hold on to my own beliefs including in myself.

I was criticized for being too bookish. It taught me to treat my books as precious objects.

I was criticized for not punching people who bullied me at school. (this was an artifact of the working class neighborhood one of my parents grew up in). It taught me to avoid confrontation. I’m not sure this was a good thing.

I was mocked for trying to be “better than other people”. It taught me to keep a low profile.

I was discouraged from going to college because the end of the world was coming and that wasn’t necessary. Besides, I wasn’t sufficiently humble. It taught me Imposter Syndrome.

I was expected to believe things about the world and evolution that my sciences classes were showing to be untrue. It taught me to evaluate and analyze to eliminate conflict in my mind.

I was criticized for my interest in classical music, singing and dance. It taught me that these were worth the effort to understand.

All of my choices were overridden by someone else. I came home one day to find my bedroom was repainted glossy bubblegum pink. I was not allowed to be upset about it. It was only one of many instances where my tastes and preferences were unimportant. I still struggle with this.

I expected to have no privacy. Anything I did in public that was outside of the norms of the religion and were witnessed by other members of the religious community were promptly reported back to my fanatically religious parent for discipline. Some of these norm bending activities wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in other religions. (Singing Christmas carols? Holding someone’s hand?) My room and belongings were subjected to searches without my knowledge. It taught me to respect the privacy of others.

I was expected to attend hours per week of the most boring, dumbed down Bible studies and coercive individual indoctrination sessions in preparation for baptism that I never intended to do. It taught me to never push my personal beliefs on anyone.

In short, nothing I valued was of value. I was only allowed to value what narrowed my mind and limited my choices. I was to be submissive and uncurious, uneducated and self-effacing and aggressive only in promoting the beliefs of a religion I didn’t believe. It taught me to never participate in spreading misinformation.

My highest aspiration was to be a cashier at K-mart, a missionary for the religion, or a full time resident of their publishing facilities, until some righteous male truncated my life with pious domesticity and housework. It taught me that the universe does not create second class citizens.

It is suffocating to have everything you value in life kept out of your reach, denigrated on a daily basis, and have to suppress every natural inclination for things that are not accepted within the community you are forced to be in. It taught me to hold on to myself inside.

I’m not predisposed to authoritarianism and even though I was brought up in an authoritarian religion, I do not resonate with people who embrace these cults. It may be physiological. Maybe I didn’t get that gene.

What I have observed from being up close and personal with a religious cult is that it attracts two types of people. There are people who find that obeying a strict set of rules calms some fear they have whether it is natural or created. These people have rules that make it difficult for us to connect with them but apart from their relentless evangelizing, they’re still kind and loving.

The other type of people use the strict set of rules to bend others to their will because they enjoy the control it gives them. They can reward or exclude people from their group and ostracize if necessary to get compliance. These people stop at nothing to get their way and if it isn’t a religion, they’ll join some other entity that will allow them to punish people who don’t give in to them. Control can be very destructive. There’s nothing holy about it.

It was extremely stressful for me and it came out in my sleep. Starting in my adolescence, I had recurring night terrors and sleep walking. I think my mind was telling my body to get out. That still happens whenever I’m stressed and to prevent waking up in terror and suffering a week of laryngitis from screaming, I slept with the light on for years. Since the election last year, I’ve turned off my light at night. I mean, the worst is happening. Might as well get some sleep.

My fanatically religious parent asked me when I was an adult if I had been abused by someone and that’s why I had night terrors. I couldn’t think of anything like that but it occurred to me later that, yeah, I was abused – by the fanatical religion I was surrounded by. Every day was an assault on my being as if I were chased into a room and slammed the door, while a maniac on the other side pounded and screamed to get in.

As I was saying, I don’t know why people get into cults. I mean, I know what studies say and I understand the indoctrination mechanisms. But I don’t understand in a physical sense what cult members feel in their heads. I can’t grasp the need or desire to surrender my inner self to an authoritarian cult or religion. I can’t even lose myself in the fanaticism of my own side of the political spectrum. I saw through the tactics that our center “left” political leaders tried on us, very successfully in some cases.

There is one exception. I’m suspicious of music with certain chord progressions at rallies or church events. I can feel that music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, so unless I’m expecting to be entertained, I distrust it and my mind is on alert to not give in to it.

Or let’s just say that I don’t vibe to Lee Greenwood because I don’t worship idols. I vibe with Woody Guthrie because I genuinely like people and our power to turn the darkness to dawn. Roll on, Columbia, roll on.

What I’m trying to say is Trump and MAGA can try to suffocate you or tell you that your degrees and knowledge are worthless to them. And they can hurt your feelings and bully you. But you do not have to give up your inner selves to that.

Nothing bad lasts forever. It only lasts longer than you would like. And there are always ways to escape through literature, interests, art, friends and nature. When the time comes, you will find your courage.

And we are all children of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, we have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to us, as yet the universe is unfolding as it should.