Category Archives: Politics

America for International Readers

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Note: This essay is aimed at readers outside the USA who may not be up to speed on the present political mechanics of how US government operates. Fellow Americans, for you this is old news.

The entire world is aware that America is under the control of a wealthy property developer with a focus on golf resorts and gold leaf. His malignant world view is on a long held transactional footing. He may not be suffering from an actual mental illness, but he certainly has multiple, overlapping personality disorders. He is widely viewed as a dangerous a$$hole, but in America this is not a legal or practical barrier to elected office.

President Trump is a walking, talking monument to “Greed is Good”. The man is intelligent, but he does have negative personality traits that have been amplified and sustained by his wealth and election as President. The man has over time developed a reputation for having an uncanny knack for business deals and the accumulation of hotels and resorts, all aggrevated by his successful reality TV show. Afterall, he is a billionaire, isn’t he?

That wealth facilitates power should not surprise anyone. It exists everywhere. In America children are taught that anyone can grow up to be president. You just need to study hard and achieve. Anything is possible, it is often said. In reality, this is only approximately impossible, not completely.

America is a stratified society with the ultra-rich occupying the top social layer with the dirt poor and criminals at the bottom. In between are layers of the highly educated and the poorly educated. Upward mobility across the layers is sometimes possible, but transition to the millionaire and billionaire layers is difficult and highly reliant on luck. Your own good luck may depend on the bad luck of others.

As a group, Americans are inclined to believe that the wealthy are imbued with superior abilities but manage to discount the effect of luck. A large bank balance is enough math needed to measure a person’s overall merit. Whether or not wealth was achieved without having committed hard or soft crimes or keeping your sanity is not a metric. To many voters, merit stands on wealth accumulated where wealth stands for cash, credit or real estate.

The judgement of a person’s merit is neither inherently right nor wrong since such determination is subjective. A person’s lifetime merit is the sum of their actions and intentions and is inherently qualitative. However, if the operating policy of your life is transactional like our President’s, then the barrier to offensive behavior and ill-gotten gains is much diminished. A charitable person may claim that there is goodness in everyone, but if “goodness” only rests on the avoidance of a heinous crime as with our President, then I beg to differ. In his 2016 campaign Trump admitted in public that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue in New York City and get away with it. This was a revelation about him, but nobody took it seriously.

In America, there is the common view that wealthy people are deserving of our fascination for having achieved their wealth. Add this to the support of certain religious groups and you can win elections. In the early years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, a concentrated effort was made to recruit religious groups, namely southern conservative protestant denominations, into the fold of the Republican Party. Decades of harping about abortion and moral majorities was a political strategy that diminished liberal candidates and brought throngs of single-issue voters to vote Republican. It worked and continues to be a strength of the GOP.

Today the hot-button issue is not so much abortion as the lurking specter of socialism and even communism. Socialism is presently found in the form of local fire and police departments, utilities, schools, Medicare, social security and more. Take away any of these services from conservatives and the howling will begin. I suppose they are against your socialism, but not theirs.

At present, the United States is functionally unable to control President Trump. The Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party or GOP, has a majority of votes in the House, the Senate, owns the Presidency and has a majority of life-time justices in the Supreme Court. Trump is party leader and is supposed to be balanced by the Supreme Court, two houses of Congress. These are the much praised “checks and balances”. The US Constitution was designed to prevent a chief executive from becoming a dictator. Regrettably the Constitution did not anticipate the present circumstance and is inadequate to provide a remedy. The Republican members of the Congress are deathly afraid of being subjected to a primary vote where candidates are selected for the later vote directly into Congress. They have refused to apply their checks and balances, so here we are.

Besides the constitutional branches of government is the so-called 4th Estate, the news media. Historically, newspapers unofficially held some amount of influence over politicians by virtue of fear of bad publicity. Until Trump came along, this fear was quite influential. His habit of continuous complaining about the media led to the formation of media businesses based on his every utterance. This has greatly diminished the influence of the 4th estate.

If you intend on starting a new democratic nation, pay attention to the manner in which the US is self-immolating on the global scale. Note how a malevolent political party took control of the government by simply getting elected. The conditions under which a Trump-like person is elected along with his party being in total control of Congress calls for an official body that can physically remove him from office if Congress finally gets around to voting him out in case he refuses to relinquish power. Electing a malevolent president supported by an ineffectual congress and cabinet is a dangerous condition requiring preplanning. America has to endure this situation by law.

The seemingly ideal condition of citizens electing candidate as president by a simple majority is hobbled by the electoral college. This college consists of electors designated by each state whose number is based on population and who unanimously cast their votes for a presidential candidate. This was put in place at the demand of southern slave states whose populations were greatly increased by slave populations. The result was a system that compensated slave states with an increased number of votes for the white population.

The US is locked into a terrible condition where a minority of neoliberal ideologues who, from in the shadows of Trump, are forcing their malignant theories of capitalism on the nation. No one voted for a libertarian society. Malignant because it seeks to transfer much more wealth and power to a small caste of oligarchs at the expense of the majority of the public.

Look at the rise of Elon Musk. He controls a space program, a media empire called “X”, an electric vehicle manufacturing enterprise, a large orbital telecommunications constellation and has the ear of Trump. He recently exercised his own foreign policy by shutting down access to his telecom satellites to Ukraine, thereby crippling Ukraine’s access to satellite telecommunications and much to the detriment of Ukraine’s war effort.

US President Trump must be reined in for many reasons, but here I refer to his support of Putin. Offering to back off sanctions on Russian oil exports, Trump has thus given aid to the Russian war effort in Ukraine. Trump’s strange affinity for Putin remains unexplained.

Submission to the Orange Genius

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It has been said that one of the purposes of government is to protect ourselves from each other. From fellow citizens, that is, and more than just brutish criminality. There are subtleties here that stand in the shadows behind criminal and civil law. The very meaning of freedom is at stake.

Like untold millions I assumed freedom simply meant the ability to travel, speak and associate with whom I please without government interference. But that is just the dust jacket of the book. The inner chapters have a particular inflection, building upon the superficial blurbs on the dust jacket. In this sense freedom includes the unfettered ability, i.e. the bigger freedom, for individuals and companies to separate the citizenry from their wealth either in ways yet to be banned or by good old fashioned fraud and theft.

The term “unfettered ability” includes the staging by the government to clear the regulatory path for the extraction of wealth from the public. This occurs through deregulation of business practices that were meant to protect the public from unfair leverage, theft or legally grey activity. Businesses would prefer customers be lined up with credit card in hand like pigs to slaughter for efficient processing. After all, don’t spreadsheet toting MBA-in-finance views on efficiency trump our desires for a good and decent life? Isn’t economic efficiency the apex of capitalistic society? Shouldn’t we be grateful that wealth funnels to the right people? After all, they know best. Just ask them.

Another aspect of deregulation is the removal of constraints on the recovery of natural resources and any lasting, though necessary, environmental insult that may result. The word recovery is interesting because it helps to normalize the private extraction and ownership of Earth’s non-renewable resources. The word recovery sounds almost heroic or herculean in describing the grasping of someone’s missing property that has been heretofore inaccessible.

While fabulous wealth is waiting below earth’s surface for the industrious to pull out and be rewarded for their risk and efforts, the other issue is how to balance the reward to miners and drillers with the inevitable loss of wilderness and exhaustion of resources. The global economy is heavily reliant on mineral resources- BTW petroleum is a mineral- that props up the house of cards supporting our modern lives. Our economies are dependent on stacks of apex technologies built upon apex technologies. Apex technologies that required a goodly bit of finesse to achieve may have weak points built in that were unavoidable.

A weak point may be a single raw material supplier or the price of a scarce specialty material on the international market. What was previously a trade secret for a manufacturer may have been superseded by the granting of a patent to another company who was unaware of the previous secret use but with patent in hand is in no mood to forge a sweetheart agreement. The collapse of an apex technology that supports other apex technologies can bring subsequent technologies into hard times.

How is it that millions of voters can justify to themselves their pandering and submissive behavior towards Trump. Witness the slavish honoring of Trump with their apparel and rote parroting of his insane rhetorical yammering. This is not unique in history but is telling of the effectiveness of Australian Rupert Murdoch’s media empire outside his own country.

Given the submissive behavior expected in the prevalent Christian religion towards the Holy Trinity, are MAGA people predisposed to bowing in prostration before their orange crusader? There appears to be more devotional thinking than analytical thinking among the MAGA hordes. The MAGA love for Trump grossly resembles religious devotion. It’s just a theory. If it dissatisfies the reader, come up with your own.

Post Script

An interesting contradiction is with MAGA American support of Zionism. American Zionists defend the reclamation of the Levant by Jewish Zionists, but seem unwilling to validate similar action by Native Americans. Indians do not figure in Christian eschatology in the manner Israel does. If Indians were said to have a role in the second-coming of Christ, I’m sure the situation around an Indian homeland would be quite different.

The Wicked Mr. Trump’s UN Speech

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Today’s address to the general assembly of the United Nations by the wicked Mr. Trump is yet another lurch in the psychotic breakdown of foreign policy of the United States of America. Trump’s speech further reinforces the spectacle of America’s moral collapse and declining status in the international community.

The adjective wicked is a bit antiquated but nicely fits for Trump. The word evil has supernatural connotations that might actually confer superhuman abilities which would flatter him and thereby be undeserved.

The current version of the Republican Party has led America into a disaster the likes of which are heretofore unseen. Trump has driven away our closest allies. He has deeply offended and threatened Canada, arguably the nicest country in the world. The citizens who voted for Trump own this festering boil and should be made to make amends. Idiots are elected by idiots.

Perhaps the USA could be excused for the first election of Trump. But to elect him twice and then make a show of failing to restrain him in his misdeeds is unforgivable. We have lost allies and trading partners in the international community and many of those states have already forged agreements and trade relationships leaving the US behind. There will be no return to past alliances.

It is as if the USA does not understand what a great position we have held since the end of WWII. American influence is already disappearing on many fronts.

Even when the time comes that Trump is out of the picture, the EU, trading partners and NATO will remain skeptical due to our 4-year election cycle that can abruptly reverse policies. America’s flip-flopping of policy with the election cycle has long been a source of consternation for the EU.

TRUMP IS A DISASTER AND MUST BE PHYSICALLY REMOVED FROM OFFICE TO STOP THIS DAMAGE TO OUR NATION. THERE IS NO INDICATION THAT HE WILL VOLUNTARILY VACATE THE OFFICE WHEN THAT TIME COMES. AN AGENCY OR COMMITTEE WITH THE AUTHORITY TO REMOVE TRUMP MUST BE DEVISED TO ACT UNDER THE FORCE OF LAW TO DO THIS OUTSIDE OF HIS ADMINISTRATIVE CONTROL.

Trump, Vance, the cabinet, Speaker Johnson and the congressional MAGA Republican caucus are burrowed deeply beneath the skin of government and must be voted out for the continuity of our democratic republic.

The majority of voting Americans who oppose Trump are obligated by law to respect the election schedule imposed by the constitution in regard to elected office holders. While we follow the law in this regard, the congressional majority has declined to apply the built in checks and balances allowed by the constitution, thereby allowing Trump’s actions.

So far Trump opponents have been peaceful in their protests and general conduct. We have declined to storm government buildings, breaking in doors, injuring police officers and using bear spray in protest. It is because we, the loyal opposition, understand that it would be wrong.

How to be patriotic to Trump’s America? That’s a tough question. My tattered patriotism remains with pre-2016 America.

Insurrection by Proxy

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Below is a quotation reported in The Hill of the “swearing in” of attendees at the recent 2026 Dallas hootenanny of the GOP. Trump asked the attendees to take the following oath-

“I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States, that loves us so much he can’t even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends. I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do. There’s never been bigger cheaters. I don’t care. I am going to go out and I am going to get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November third or we are going to vote before that.”

Nobody would write a movie script with a scene having the above swearing in conducted by a president. It’s too corny for adult audiences. It would result in a movie rated 7 tomatoes out of a hundred on the Rotten Tomato scale. Yet the president of the USA delivered this order to commit voter fraud in the Nov. 2026 midterm election.

The American president is verbally directing citizens to commit voter fraud. This is an attack on the central pillar of American democracy. It is meant to disqualify winning Democratic members of congress by direct injection of hand waving uncertainty into the very voting process itself. This could lead to the congress disqualifying elections where the GOP led congress could cherry pick districts to disqualify and at a pace that would lengthen the duration of GOP dominance while investigation drags on.

This is tantamount to the theft of public voting rights and is a hybrid attack on America itself. If another country did this, we would consider it as an act of hostility.

According to the Cornell Law School website, treason is defined as-

Treason is the betrayal of one’s own country by attempting to overthrow the government through waging war against the State or materially aiding its enemies. According to the United States Constitution, Article III, Section 3, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.” Furthermore, 18 U.S.C § 2381, states that a person guilty of treason against the United States “shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.” 

Trump’s speech gives instructions that if executed as requested, will result in the ruling political party having oversight over the remedy to alleged election fraud. How much more absurd does this have to get before there is a large scale uprising? The 2016-2016 decade of Trump has been a disaster extending well past our borders. The whole global political and financial operating system is fragmenting and rebuilding to the exclusion of the USA.

I doubt that in the current political climate a court, especially SCOTUS, would actually find Trump guilty of treason. Whether or not Trump’s oath constitutes “betrayal” is a legal grey area and grey areas are beachheads for the MAGA lawfare invasion.

And now the landscape is shifting again, in ways that should alarm everyone who cares about a free press and its role in American democracy. The tech oligarchs who built our dominant social media platforms—the distribution mechanisms where people go to discuss politics—are consolidating power in ways that are explicitly hostile to old-media ethics like rigorous fact-checking, fidelity to the truth, and avoidance of partisanship.

Americans can’t rely on mainstream media to hold the lines of democracy anymore. Not because mainstream media is bad, but because it’s actively being captured, or hollowed out, or reconfigured by people who do not share its traditional mission. Sarah Longwell, The Bulwark.

What used to be reverently referred to as the 4th Estate is being taken over by America’s splotchy clique of oligarchs. The acquisition of CNN and CBS by an IT Oligarch’s clan and Fox News by an Australian monopolist have gone far to turn the news policies of electronic media from liberal to Trump loving broadcasters.

The conversion of the meaning of the words liberal or liberal media to a common epithet began decades ago in the Reagan years. During the Reagan years, the Republican Party joined up with conservative protestant evangelical congregations to spread anger and dismay. It has worked brilliantly. Evangelical pastors, especially those on television, began to blend theology with conservative politics in their weekly performances.

Hellfire, brimstone and abortion combine naturally like eggs, bacon and home fries stimulating the end-times theology of Baptist church goers. Citizens normally absent from the political scene latched onto abortion as their single issue and voted accordingly, irrespective of what else may come of their candidate choices.

From inside my online world, I’m left to conclude that the Democratic party and the so-called liberal media have consistently FAILED to meet expectations as a unified political force in opposition to the GOP. This, multiplied by voters who vote against their best interests under the hypnotic blathering of Trump and his stable of idiots, has led to the accelerated demise of America’s global hegemony.

The Democratic party has failed to produce a platform that lights a fire under voters and candidates. Republicans know how to get elected but can’t seem to govern. Democrats show greater skill in governance but have trouble getting elected. The Republican electoral playbook is wide open for study. They’re good at persuasion and mobilizing voters. Yes, they’re liars, but this is a war for the progressive America we recently allowed to slip from between our fingers. More Democrats should be removing their gloves in this cage fight for America.

What’s Worse- Authoritarianism or Socialism?

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Over the decades I’ve listened patiently to conservatives, especially the elected GOP types, spout off about liberal proposals or programs as being “socialism.” The very word carries a strong revulsion in them, enough to cause right wingers and even some centrists to recoil in horror. In common usage, the word is almost spat out of their mouths with the same abhorrence that one might vocalize in reference to a Old Nick himself. The mere utterance of the word should be enough to demolish liberal proposals like affordable healthcare or Pre-K programs.

My station in life has been in the field of chemistry, not psychology, so I am hardly qualified to clinically diagnose what psychology lies behind this vigorous and frequent epithet. Despite the mountain of clinical ignorance I reside under, I can offer a few observations in the not-so-subtle form of questions.

  • What event led to the huge corrosive and emotional investment many conservatives have with socialism?
  • How is it that I can read comments from conservatives in social media or network news wherein acute criticism is levied on socialism, but such criticism is not expressed on authoritarianism? Are they OK with authoritarianism or just unwilling to invite comparison?
  • Do conservatives still believe that socialism automatically means Soviet-style socialism? Didn’t the Soviets prove to the world that Soviet socialism doesn’t work? Many of us were paying attention to this event, weren’t you?
  • Could it actually be that conservatives view socialists as freeloaders wanting to suckle on the generous American teat?

Without food, shelter or skills, the world is a dangerous place for those not born into wealth or without a record of good luck. The sort of dilute socialism in practice in the USA since FDR brought us a social safety net has had many positive effects. The overall effect is that it has reduced some of the harshness of life for a great many.

Perhaps the beef that the moneyed class has with liberal democracy is that they are prevented from accumulating gilded-age wealth by every means possible? They want absolute control of markets and labor. The role of government is to arrange consumers for easy pickings, like fish in a barrel. In the biological world, unlimited growth is called cancer. The religion of shareholder value sets the pace for endless growth, despite the mathematical absurdity of it.

Greed is like a penis- it has no brain. It only knows that it wants more.

The 2nd Amendment-banging ultra-right wingers in camouflage britches have long been eager to explain that they were prepping for oppression by a tyrannical government. Well boys, the tyrannical government is here here! Now whatcha gonna do?

The Trump Coup d’Etat Shifts Into Low Gear

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Search results from Googling “$350 billion attack on communism”-

“House Speaker Mike Johnson is pushing for an additional $350 billion in military spending for the Pentagon, on top of an already approved record-breaking $1.1 trillion defense budget. Speaker Johnson explicitly stated that a portion of these funds is needed for “fighting communism on our own shores”. This comports with what I’ve read elsewhere.

Speaker Johnson is a punk and a POS.

More of the same from the Republican fearmongering playbook. They lurch from the unjustifiable attack on Iran to a $350 billion uptick in action against the American republic. Somebody convince me that we can elect our way out of this death spiral. This is a coup d’etat in slow motion. This festering blend of Trump cult, Christian evangelical Zionism, testosterone bravado, and libertarian utopian fantasy is free to bungle forward while the fearful Republican majority looks on.

Critical to their coup is that democrats and liberal independents will obey the law without violence while MAGA republicans bog the system with lawfare. Their cunning legal appeals give the ultra conservative in the Supreme Court to rule in favor with precedent setting decisions favoring the gaggle of MAGA Republicans. The press must begin to focus on the Heritage Foundation and its members who provided Project 2025.

Trump is like a corrosive gas. He expands beyond precedent on presidential norms, and like a corrosive, his actions corrode the departments who have to deal with it. He tramples norms and waits for the courts to tell him no. All the while, his behavior seems to display increasingly disabled thinking and disregard for demonstrable facts.

Here is the question.

By maintaining civil obedience during public displays of protest, do we of the loyal opposition do our Democratic Republic a disservice by staying away from a show of physical force or lawfare? Must we remain “peaceful” and witness the fall of the American empire. The Democratic Party seems incapable of finding good candidates and getting them elected at the necessary.

Are we liberal patriots or are we sheep?


Yammering Idiots

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Noisy idiots have been a problem throughout history. What to do with precocious citizens with half-baked yet strangely appealing ideas? The notion that jobs are being taken by immigrants is an enduring and popular fancy. Another is that the federal government is merely a front for a squad of hidden mandarins quietly controlling the government from a bunker.

So, where do I get off calling people idiots? Is it not possible that I am an idiot as well? Yes, I’m anxious to clear the air and admit to my own idiocy. No point in denying it. As a lifetime member of the set of all idiots, I’ll offer a defining quality of idiocy.

An idiot is someone who knows enough to assert a statement with certainty, but not knowing enough to realize their knowledge may be too shallow or based on falsehoods or inaccuracies. Idiocy is a vector pointing in the wrong direction with imaginary magnitude. It’s a part of the human condition everyone is afflicted with but differing in direction and magnitude.

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The rest of this post is cut and pasted from Facebook. I don’t know who wrote it but here is the link.

Umberto Eco was a scholar — a man who spent sixty years inside libraries, inside ancient manuscripts, inside the deepest questions human beings have ever wrestled with. How do we make meaning? How does a symbol become a belief? How does a word become a world?

He wrote The Name of the Rose — a murder mystery set inside a 14th-century monastery, where the most dangerous weapon wasn’t a sword. It was a book. And the most dangerous idea wasn’t heresy.

It was forbidden knowledge in the hands of the unprepared.

He understood, better than almost anyone alive, what happens when information moves without wisdom to carry it.

So in June 2015, when Umberto Eco accepted an honorary degree from the University of Turin and turned to face the journalists in the room, what he said wasn’t a prepared speech.

It was a warning.

“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced. But now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner.”

The room went quiet.

Because everyone in it knew he wasn’t being cruel. He was being precise.

For most of human history, spreading an idea required effort. A book had to be written, edited, printed, and earned its way into hands. A journalist had to answer to editors who asked: Is this true? Can you prove it? A voice had to build credibility slowly — through knowledge, through time, through the hard work of being right more often than wrong.

That process wasn’t perfect. Important voices were shut out. Power shaped what got heard. The gatekeepers had their own agendas.

But there was friction. And friction — it turns out — slows things down just long enough for truth to catch up with speed.

Now that friction is almost gone.

A rumor written in anger at midnight can reach a million people before sunrise. A post with no sources, no context, and no accountability can be shared more times than any correction will ever be. Outrage travels faster than nuance. A confident lie moves faster than a careful truth.

Eco understood this — not because he hated technology. Not because he was a bitter old man longing for simpler times.

He understood it because he had spent a lifetime mapping exactly how human beings get deceived. By symbols. By certainty. By the seductive confidence of a voice that sounds like it knows.

His warning wasn’t that everyone having a voice is wrong.

Every person deserves to be heard. The democratization of expression — the idea that you no longer need wealth or institutional power to reach an audience — is genuinely, powerfully good.

His warning was about something quieter. The collapse of the space between having an opinion and having expertise. Between speaking and being believed.

We feel that collapse every single day now.

In the health post written with total confidence by someone with no medical training — shared a hundred thousand times by people who trusted the tone, not the facts. In the political story that races ahead of the truth. In the moment satire gets mistaken for news, and no one notices until the damage is done.

The algorithm doesn’t reward careful.

It rewards engaging. And “engaging” — too often — means shocking, confirming, or enraging.

Umberto Eco died in February 2016. Just eight months after that warning. Just as the world he described was beginning to fully unmask itself.

He never saw what followed.

But his words survived. And they don’t read like criticism anymore.

They read like a map.

So the next time something lands in your feed and every instinct says share this now — pause. One breath.

Ask: Who said this? Why does it make me feel this way? Is the confidence of the writing a substitute for evidence?

Not because you distrust everything. Not because truth doesn’t exist.

But because the single most powerful thing any of us can do in an age of noise — is slow down long enough to think.

That, Umberto Eco would say, is not weakness.

That is the only thing standing between information and wisdom.

US Constitutional Trip-Hazard

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It appears that the US has had a particular “trip hazard” within it all along. Not an error of commission so much as an error of omission. We have been so busy heaping praise and devotion to our Constitution that the cold eyes of criticism have not held sway. To be sure, here criticism also means “analysis and judgment of the merits and faults of a literary or artistic work“. For crying out loud, even Einstein’s theory of relativity, which has been endlessly validated, is still subject to criticism yet it is physics and based on mathematics.

Can it be true that the Founders were able to construct a constitution so tight, internally consistent and prescient that the future could never evolve in a way that calls for revision. Seriously, could they have believed this?

The view from 30,000 ft shows that there are circumstances wherein safety rails meant to restrain a runaway President have failed. To date the US President is still subject to many restraints except for a part requiring Congress provide effective a counterweight to the executive. The current circumstance is where the Congress chooses not to summon self-control enough to exert its constitutional responsibility to declare war or not. To declare war is to draft and execute a policy directing the US to summon resources and direct military engagement with another state. This was done properly and for the last time by FDR in 1942 against axis-aligned Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania (Google).

Perhaps the Constitution does not disallow a wide-eyed march into chaos and ruin by majority rule. In other words, within the constraints of this founding document, there are pathways to self-destruction. It is conceivable that the founders hadn’t considered a self-immolation led by a madman in the future. Could they have anticipated that 1 or 2 of the 3 branches of government would choose not to execute its responsibility to provide effective checks and balances? After all, why would rational citizens allow the nation they love to celebrate fall into collapse?

Actually, the Republican majority party in Congress probably doesn’t believe that there is a failure of checks and balances on their part. Why would they challenge the president, their national party leader and lord of the MAGA movement? The Trump network is large and powerful and getting ‘primaried’ is a likely outcome for sheep who stray from the flock.

In effect, accusations of constitutional disobedience spread across all party members is less fearsome than near-term personal electoral defeat. MAGA Republicans fear that their careers hanging separately is more likely than hanging together. Safety in numbers.

Somewhere there is a coterie of planners who, having drafted Project 2025 now underway, are busy plotting the transition to illiberal democracy. Who are these big-money usurpers, and how do we turn the rock over and expose them to the light of day?

# 47 Must be physically removed from office

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Unless Trump is physically removed from power, the current conflict in Iran will blossom into WW III as Iran bombs our bases in our allied countries. He will not relinquish the White House voluntarily even if lawfully removed from power, so the Congress must be prepared to drag him off-site. This will be the first step in the recovery of America. His little buddy, JD Vance, cant be trusted either but I don’t know how that can be dealt with.

Not that Iran will beat the US, but with the US distracted and bogged down with its foreign military projects and complete destruction of foreign relations, there is the likelihood of oil shortages throughout Asia. Our opponents will use this lull in US global hegemony to settle scores in other parts of the world. Does the invasion of Cuba really make sense now or ever?

How long will China and everyone else allow the US/Israel war to cripple their oil supplies by the blockade of the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz?

Russia and Iran understand asymmetric warfare. We do not. We strut around thumping our chests bragging about how great we are. Our weapons are indeed impressive as everyone has noticed. If only our grasp of international politics matched our facility with warfare.

N. Korea will use US distraction and it’s overextended military as well as lost international good will to invade S Korea. China may decide to invade Taiwan in a year or two. Do people honestly think that this all consuming American distraction in the Middle East will not be exploited by the bad actors of the world?

Trump is a madman who is leading our country into the graveyard of collapsed empires.

MAGAs are cognitively impaired enough to not see him for what he is and their elected representatives who have circled around him have everything invested in MAGA voters transfixed by him. MAGAs are cognitively impaired enough to not see him for what he is and their elected representatives have circled around him have everything invested in MAGA voters transfixed by him. By cognitively impaired I just mean that the the fear center in their brains can’t let go despite what they see and hear.

Who gave you the authority … ?

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Copied from a source whose name may be off-putting to MAGA Americans. The words of the UAE businessman should stand apart from sanctimonious misperceptions burrowed under the skin of MAGA supporters.

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“One of the UAE’s top businessmen, Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor, just lashed out at Trump over the Iran War.

His Excellency President Donald Trump,

A direct question: Who gave you the authority to drag our region into a war with #Iran? And on what basis did you make this dangerous decision?

Did you calculate the collateral damage before pulling the trigger? And did you consider that the first to suffer from this escalation will be the countries of the region itself!

The peoples of this region have the right to ask as well: Was this your decision alone? Or did it come as a result of pressures from #Netanyahu and his government?

You have placed the countries of the #GulfCooperationCouncil and the Arab countries at the heart of a danger they did not choose. Thank God, we are strong and capable of defending ourselves, and we have armies and defenses that protect our homelands, but the question remains: Who gave you permission to turn our region into a battlefield?

For before the ink has dried on the #BoardOfPeace initiative that you announced in the name of peace and stability, we find ourselves facing a military escalation that endangers the entire region. So where did those initiatives go? And what is the fate of the commitments made in the name of peace?

Most of the funding proposed in those initiatives came from the countries of the region themselves, and from Arab Gulf countries that contributed billions of dollars on the basis of supporting stability and development. And these countries have the right to ask today: Where did this money go? And are we funding peace initiatives or funding a war that exposes us to danger?

More dangerous than that, your decision does not threaten only the peoples of the region, but also reaches the American people whom you promised peace and prosperity. And here they are today, finding themselves in a war funded from their money and taxes, with costs ranging, according to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), between 40-65 billion dollars for direct military operations, and could reach 210 billion dollars including economic impacts and indirect losses if it lasts four to five weeks, not to mention the sacrifice of Americans themselves in a war in which they have neither camel nor she-camel.

You have even broken your promises not to get involved in wars and to focus only on America and put it at the top of your priorities, as you ordered foreign military interventions during your second term that included seven countries: Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, Nigeria, Syria, Iran, and Venezuela, in addition to naval operations in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific Ocean. You directed more than 658 foreign airstrikes in your first year in office, which equals the total strikes in Biden’s entire term, for which you directed your arrows of criticism for involving the United States in foreign wars.

Your Excellency the President, these numbers have severely reflected on your approval ratings among Americans, which have declined since your inauguration for the second term, by about 9% in just 400 days.

These numbers say something clear: Even within #TheUnitedStates, there is growing concern about being dragged into a new war, and about exposing the lives of Americans, their economy, and their future to unnecessary risks.

True leadership is not measured by war decisions, but by wisdom, respect for others, and pushing toward achieving peace. And if these initiatives were launched in the name of peace, then we have the right today to demand full transparency and clear accountability.”