Archive for August, 2017
Houston
My son went to the rally in downtown Houston today. This is small portion of the Nazi fighters.
And the entire Trump/Nazi crowd —
This is Houston, where it was almost 96 degrees today with 80% humidity and our people turned out.
My son was a tad disappointed that he didn’t get arrested. His lawyer wife stayed at home with the baby so she could make bail for them. Here he is with his wife’s two best friends.
Rumor has it that 40,000 people turned out in Boston against 25 Nazis.
I’m posting this on the go so please forgive any mistakes.
No One is Fooled
When a loose collection of neo-Nazis, White Supremacists, and assorted other alt-right dumbasses amassed in Charlottesville, Virginia last week to scream about everyone they hate including Jews, African Americans, and Muslims, they were “protected” from non-existent oppression by another loose collection of weirdos. This particular group was 
made up of camo-clad goofballs armed more heavily than local and state police complete with body armor, semi-auto rifles and side arms, and with enough other tactical gadgets to give any gun nut a hard-on. One of those groups, the Pennsylvania Light Foot “Militia”, was there, playing dress up and parading around like they were some kind of actual military or law enforcement group, which they most certainly are not.
This “militia”, which is really just a group of paranoid white guys who like to run around in the Pennsylvania woods playing war, is lead by Christian Yingling, who names among influencers in his life cynical carnival barker and
conspiracy peddler Alex Jones. Recall that Alex Jones still claims that the US government killed 20 kids and 6 staff in Newtown Connecticut as a “false flag” operation to start confiscating guns even after being discredited on national television. Yingling’s various Facebook pages promote the normal fringe rightwing bullshit, and in his media interviews he talks about how his followers “feel” that their First and Second Amendment rights are being infringed when, in fact, the opposite is true. He fans the flames of ignorant paranoia, magnifying that paranoia through his motley crew of gun toting weirdos. He makes anti-Muslim claims of violence while ignoring the fact that far more attacks with almost as many victims in the US are caused by white supremacists and anti-government radicals who believe the same nonsense that he peddles on a regular basis.
After literally being run out of Charlottesville last Saturday by local police, Yinling is desperately trying to recast himself and his group as a neutral “peacekeepers” and has now even offered “protection” to Black Lives Matter, even though he has zero record we can find of ever doing anything but promote racist, anti-government and extreme right wing fervor. His group’s appearance in Charlottesville last Saturday to protect the racists and violent neo-Nazis is enough information that normal people need to make a reasoned judgement about their radical ideology. His new revisionist “neutrality” reminds us of CJ Grisham and his merry band of gun nuts of Open Carry Texas who, several years ago threatened women’s lives, harassed anyone who dared to disagree with them, and paraded around with long rifles pushing their radical guns-everywhere ideology. When the threats backfired, Grisham desperately tried to rebrand his group as dewy-eyed good guys collecting school supplies and canned goods for the disadvantaged. No one was fooled then, and no one is fooled now over Yingling’s attempt at rebranding.
Let’s not beat around the bush. These “state militias” are not militias at all. They have no authority from any governmental entity to be “peacekeepers”. They are not sanctioned by any authority other than their own fantasies. Their entire existence is ad hoc and they have no authorized standards of conduct or training. The states don’t want them, and local law enforcement don’t want them. The catastrophe in Charlottesville last week was the textbook example of how these vigilante groups don’t do anything but confuse a volatile situation, delay police response, and INCREASE risk rather than mitigate it. Their mere presence is a threat.
It’s long understood, as intended in the Founding documents, including the Constitution and Bill of Rights, that militias were the new US goverment’s first line of defense against threats to that government. They were organized to PROTECT the government, not threaten it. The militias came under local and state authority except in time of war when they were federalized. Today, the actual state militias are not these self-proclaimed and self-aggrandized collections of screwballs, the state militias are part of the national defense under the National Guard, managed by the states except when activated by the federal government.
Groups like Yingling’s Light Foot (and Small Brained) “militia” need to stay home and just run around in their own woods playing army. They don’t have any goddam business inflaming an already engulfed movement of racists and neo-Nazis that they, and the current administration in the White House, are enabling.
Go home. Stay home. Stop “helping”.
Originally posted on Gun Owners for Reform on Facebook.
Well, The Global War on Terrorism Probably Won’t Include the Klan
Okay, here ya go. Notice anything odd about Trump signing the Global War on Terrorism Act?
Yeah, there’s diversity – there’s a short white man, a tall white man, a chubby white man, a bald white man, a white man with glasses, a white man in uniform, a old white man and a completely insane white man. Oh yeah, there’s one woman, but Mike Pence can’t have dinner with her.
So there ya go – this ain’t a dog whistle, this is a white man bullhorn.
The 5 Traits That Explain Trump
There are five basic personality traits that Donald Trump displays that explain every action he takes, every word he utters, every tweet he twitters, every position he maintains, and every flip he flops. They overlap in their effect, and reinforce one another into the model of duplicity, stupidity, arrogance and incompetence that infests the White House now. Everything Trump does reflects this personal pathology, a toxic cocktail betraying a diseased brain.
He is a narcissist
Professionals often differentiate between grandiose narcissists, who really believe the world revolves around them, and covert narcissists, who think their natural gifts deserve to have the world revolve around them, but are actually compensating for a glaring shortcoming known but to them which, if revealed, threatens their social standing. I believe narcissism is narcissism, and the flavor depends on whether you’re talented and introspective enough to realize the outer shell is, indeed a shell projected to others whose approbation is locked into your idea of self-worth, or whether the outer shell is all there is.
Trump is the grandiose type; other than the shell, there is no “there” there. In fact, like so many on the Right these days, introspection would kill him via suicide. If they had the gene to process irony, they would collapse under the weight of their own shame. But Trump’s projection is not a defense mechanism, not even subconsciously. It’s unwarranted, overweening arrogance, completely oblivious to his own hubris.
It’s why everyone else in the world who criticizes him at all is clearly lying, in his eyes. There is nothing in him that can admit of his being anything other than magnificent. It is also what justifies all his criminal behavior and his reflexive lying. Trump believes an act is “good” simply because his doing it makes it good. A “fact” is “true” simply because he stated it, and “how dare you call ME a liar.”
He has attention deficit disorder
Trump’s tragi-comically short attention span can be so debilitating that, at times, he cannot even finish a sentence. He digresses into a series of dependent clauses, or asides, or equivocations, and trails off into weak, open-ended finishes, or simply switches without segue into a new, unconnected thought.
Like many ADD folks, he CAN concentrate for an extended period of time on something that interests him. As far as we know, only one thing truly interests him: himself. So the hours he spends “working” is often just spent reading things about himself. The one briefing book he will peruse until dog-eared is the one prepared twice a day full of glowing encomiums about himself, and pictures of himself looking god-like if there aren’t enough good things written about him.
He demonstrates the Dunning-Kruger effect
Trump is deeply, intensely and sincerely stupid. Part of it is genetics, but his worldview of unmitigated superiority feeds into this as well. It cannot conceive of himself as someone who could be stupid. In addition, he is ignorant. His ADD prevents him from remedying this, because he can’t concentrate long enough to read in-depth analyses (let alone understand them) so he captures the world in sound-bites from TV, and briefings must have pictures and maps – he likes maps. His speech patterns betray this, as well. Very often, the words he uses to define a concept are really verbal cues about the concept, rough trigger words that, in normal people, set off a chain of other associative ideas. For Trump, the thumbnail IS the picture.
The Dunning-Kruger effect essentially says that some people are so dumb, they can’t conceive of how dumb they are. Their brains cannot conceive of a world more complex than they can understand, nor of any valid points of view other than their own. Any factoids Trump does manage to learn (“France is America’s oldest ally!”) must be little-known facts, that a lot of people don’t know (not just himself.)
He’s an authoritarian
The idea of the authoritarian mindset was developed post-WWII in an attempt to understand not just fascist leaders, but the followers of such leaders, as well. The characteristics of authoritarians include a Manichaean worldview, a personal, cultural and ethnocentric superiority complex, a difficulty in dealing with uncertainty, and thus a yearning for a clear, simple and direct chain of command. It roots and cloaks itself in a patina of morality, moral certainty, moral absolutism.
“Disgust” is a common conceptual framework for the “Other,” a set of racial, or sexual, or religious, or political boogeymen who are to blame for everything, and who dirty the body politic, or infest the homeland. Listen to how he often expresses disgust, especially for women and their bodily functions (Hillary was in the bathroom!) Female uncleanliness and ritual impurity has long been a trick used by authoritarian males to assert unwarranted dominance.
Trump has to keep up the glamour and prestige (in the magical senses of those words) of being the ultimate authority. It’s why he has the ironclad non-disclosures and insisted on always being called “Mr. Trump” by all his employees.
He’s a eugenicist
Being a grandiose-type narcissist, not only is he the most wonderful example of a human being, but history and nature conspired to make him so! Trump truly believes that he is a product of superior genes and that, by extension, so are all of his children. Also by whatever passes for logic in that mush melon of a head of his, white breeding is superior to non-white breeding, and rich breeding is superior to poor breeding. European breeding is superior to most, and European-American breeding is superior to all.
Therefore, if you are part of the Other, if you don’t share the characteristics of Trump, the apotheosis, in his diseased brain, of a man, then you DON’T deserve health care, nor regular food, nor clean water nor adequate shelter. If you had any worth at all, you could pay for these things yourself, and people who are not Trump-like actually are criminal sub-humans, undeserving of existence. The less you are like Trump, the less you are TO Trump, unless you bend the knee to him, and sing his praises; then, you are merely the exception that proves the rule, the sole credit to your Otherness.
These five personality pathologies clearly interconnect with and reinforce one another. Together, they comprise a man so fatally flawed, and so blind in his own hubris, that he is beyond the pale of normal comprehension, which is why so many people have asserted so bootlessly for so long that, WAIT! He soon will pivot to “normal.” WAIT! He’s gonna be “Presidential” now. WAIT! Reince Priebus, General Kelly, Ivanka and Jared, Somebody, Somehow, Somewhere will rein him in. All those folks are still WAITing, because abnormal psychology is Trump’s normal setting.
We who saw through him from the start? Sadly, we are not surprised by any of his behavior.
But we are, rightfully and righteously, disgusted.