17 VI 2020: Non-disclosure agreement, yet again!

Trump’s law firm, the Justice Department, is suing to prevent publication of John Bolton’s new book. The report reads: “… the Trump administration went to court to try to claw back Bolton’s earnings for the book and to potentially stop the book’s publication, arguing in a lawsuit that Bolton had breached non-disclosure agreements and was risking national security by exposing classified information.”

So John Bolton will have to join Stormy Daniels and all the others whom Trump has menaced with non-disclosure agreements. Trump has used non-disclosure agreements all his life to suppress evidence of his filthy behavior. I hope Bolton will tell Trump, and Barr, and their minions to go to hell.

As to the risk to national security … no, it’s the risk toTrump’ s security that this is all about. In the Trump system, almost any truth is a threat to security, so we can expect little or no truth from Trump and Barr. I think that Bolton is far more reliable. Bolton knows and can find out what might be a risk to national security. Thus he and we needn’t let ourselves be taken in by what Trump & Co. choose to call national security. In fact, Trump knows very little about national security, but to pretend that he does he will motor-mouth away, telling lies and running the risk of revealing what secrets he happens to remember.

15 VI 2020: Trump collecting waivers

I was not surprised to read that the Trump Machine is requiring anyone who wishes to attend the coming Circus in Tulsa to sign a waiver. The document begins with a warning (required, I’m sure, by Trumpist lawyers) that “inherent risk of exposure to COVID-19 exists in any public place where people are present.” Given this risk, we might expect the document to say “If you are in a high-risk category for COVID-19, you should not attend” and to offer advice about how to minimize the risk of infection in a crowd, e.g., everybody wear a face mask. No, the document continues “By attending the Rally, you and any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19 and agree not to hold Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.: BOC Center; ASM Global; or any of their affiliates, directors, officers, employees, agents, contractors, or volunteers, liable for any illness or injury.” That’s Trump’s empathy and sense of responsibility at work. His zombies are going to have to attend the Circus at their own risk.

This is another instance of Trump refusing to take any responsibility

If you are to have any dealings with Trump, you do so at your own risk.

10 VI 2020: Misc.

1) Sometime during the 2016 campaign Trump asserted that the coming election would be rigged. Of course, he was complaining that it would be rigged against him. If he thought it would be rigged in his favor he would have said nothing about that. The recent election in Georgia shows in a microcosm what Trump, his Republican bitches, and wealthy racists are trying to do: Prevent black people from voting. The stumble-bum elections, the purges of the voter rolls, the resistance to mail-in ballots all come down to the attempt by these anti-democracy sneaks to rig elections in their favor.

2) Barr’s unidentified police. If enforcement personnel are not wearing identification badges, do they not cease to be recognizable as enforcement personnel? Shouldn’t their aggression be resisted like the aggression of any ordinary citizen?

3) The Trumpists want CNN to apologize and recant poll findings that show Biden ahead of Trump. The Trumpists have neither taste nor shame and will try anything. This case points out the chronic inability of Trump and Trumpists to deal with reality that they don’t like.

4) The photograph of the so-called “All lives matter” protesters re-enacting the murder of George Floyd has all the symbols of the base of Trump’s base: misuse of the flag, Trump, and the Republican redneck equivalent of frat boys displaying their devotion to evil. They are hyenas trying to feed on the corpse of democracy. 

9 VI 2020: If Republicans can’t win, they cheat

I have read an article that describes the utter screw-up in voting in the State of Georgia (another Confederate State!). Maybe I’ve grown overly suspicious, but I have to think that the screw-up was planned. The article reported “In April, the state’s Republican House leader, David Ralston, publicly denounced the Republican secretary of state for sending absentee ballots to registered voters ahead of Tuesday’s primary, which was postponed from its original May 19 date due to the pandemic. Ralston claimed mail-in voting is “devastating to Republicans.” I can only read this as saying: If all registered voters are able to vote, the Republicans will lose. 

So Georgia Republicans are trying to sneak their way ahead. They’ve been conducting huge purges of the voting rolls in Georgia to get rid of voters who are likely to vote against them. How different is this from paying voters to vote for you or stuffing the ballot box? As I’ve long maintained, today’s Republicans do not believe in democracy, but are supporters of plutocracy.

9 VI 2020: Is fear-mongering an abuse of free speech? Removing monuments.

Like our President, Tucker Carlson will say anything to please his base. Lately, he has been doing a bit of fear-mongering. He is quoted on CNN: 

“This may be a lot of things, this moment we are living through, but it is definitely not about black lives … And remember that when they come for you, and at this rate, they will. Anyone who has ever been subjected to the rage of the mob knows the feeling. It’s like being swarmed by hornets. You cannot think clearly.”

I think that perhaps Mr. Carlson, who can think quite clearly in his own self-interest, is trying to incite a “mob” to boost his ratings. What Carlson is doing is, in my view, the equivalent of shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.

When a society has gone terribly wrong, one of the things it is likely to do when it recovers is to get rid of the memorials of the persons and events of its shameful past.

Anyone who has spent any time in Germany has seen evidences of the thorough removal of Nazi symbols from public view. Monuments to the heroes of the Confederacy are not memorials of courage and devotion. They are, rather, the propaganda of unrepentant white supremacism. If the monuments of white supremacism in Germany had to go, so too must the monuments of white supremacism in the United States.

8 VI 2020: Dreadful statistics

There is an article on CNN, “American police shoot, kill and imprison more people than other developed countries. Here’s the data,” and the data are shocking. 

The data showing the disproportionate violent treatment of black citizens by police is frightening. Any fool who wants to deny that there is not systemic racism among the American police should look at these data and wake up. 

A couple of other especially dreadful stats: 

Police shootings: in 2018 the American police shot and killed about 1,000 people. The comparable figures for Germany 11, Australia 8, UK 3, and New Zealand 1 per 1000 people. I’m sure that the American police are more heavily armed than those in these other countries, just as I’m sure that criminals are much more heavily armed that criminals in other countries. Are our cops so much less reliable or our criminals so much more vicious? I don’t think so. We are different from other countries, I think, because they are not steeped in gun culture and gun violence. 

We Americans have more guns than anybody. A “Small Arms Survey” of 2017 found that in the U.S. we have 120.5 guns for every 100 persons. Of these, 1,073,743 guns are registered and 392,273,257 are not — so much for gun control. The countries that come closest to us in number of firearms have only half our number, and these are Yemen at 52.8 per 100,000, Montenegro 39.1, and Serbia 39.1. So we are far ahead of any violence-torn country. Conclusion: Yes, the U.S. is violence torn and this is due to gun-culture and racism.

The other set of statistics that amazed me was the size of prison populations: Here are the figures for the number imprisoned per 100,000 people: UK 140 per 100,000, Canada 114, France 100, Italy 98, Germany 75, Japan 41, and the United States of America 655 per 100k. We have 4.6 times more people in prison than any country in the free world. It is Russia that comes closest to us with 615 per 100k while China lags far, far behind with 118 per 100k So some questions arise: 

Are our places of confinement prisons or concentration camps? 

Can any other statistic so well portray the dysfunctionality of the United States?

And what are the causes of this dysfunctionality? 

Among them are these three: 

1) racism,

2) unjust distribution of wealth and opportunity, 

3) our propensity to violence. 

7 VI 2020: Trump’s cowardice spreading

So Trump has various officers of the law hiding their identification as they try to do his dominating. He is making cowards of all of them. “I don’t plan to commit a crime, but if I do, I’ll do it anonymously.” This is just what I would expect from our craven President and his spineless lawyer.

And I read that Trumpist officials, in another attempt to take the “big lie” approach, have been claiming that there is no systemic racism in the American police system. Who the hell is going to believe this?? Well they’ve learned to lie like their Leader. Any honest cop could, I’m sure, identify the racists among her colleagues. 

We are not going to get the kind of police we need if we continue to pay the police so little and give them so little respect. The police are, in my view, more important that the courts, because it is by the police that the law is initially administered. Good, sound police are more important to our democracy than the military.

4 VI 2020: The Clown wants to send in the troops

The Battle of Lafayette Park has shown us how Trump would like to handle the current unrest in the United States — he will have a tool, like Wm Barr, unleash violence upon the demonstrators if they don’t do what Trump wants. Trump already has I.C.E. and the F.B.I. deployed around the country, and now I read that Trump wanted 10,000 troops in the streets to suppress the rebellion, not much short of the number of soldiers we have in Afghanistan.  

King George’s soldiers managed to kill only 5 colonists at the Boston Massacre of 1755. Napoleon’s soldiers used “a whiff of grapeshot” to kill some 300 rioting royalists in 1795. Czar Nicholas II’s soldiers shot more than 500 demonstrators in St. Petersburg in 1905. And no one knows how many the assault rifles and tanks of the Chinese army killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989. 

Is Trump trying to live out his monarchical/dictatorial fantasies by emulating despots of the past? I might think so, but Trump is wholly ignorant of history, of world history and of American history. If he knew more about our country he is trying to destroy, more about its Constitution and traditional separation of civilian and military, maybe he would have not been so quick to try to use our Army against us.

3 VI 2020: Insurrection act applies to all

Trump is talking about launching an armed invasion of our cities based under the pretext of the Insurrection Act from 1807 – he does love to shoot the shit! Do you think Trump dug up this statute on his own? How could he? It was probably one of the semi-fascist amateurs who infest the White House.

If Trump wants to invoke the Insurrection Act, he should go after some genuine insurrectionists who will fight back. All around the country gun nuts have banded together into boys clubs that call themselves “militias,” playing at being “tactical” and itching to defend what they call their rights. There are militant white supremacists who bring AK47s to every event. I don’t know whether this is a requirement of their dress-code or they are afraid to go out into the public without their AKs. In any case, one day they are going to succumb to their urge to shoot something. I read a report today on the Boogaloogers, another group of pseudo-soldiers looking for a fight. The internet is crawling with people like these to whom the term “insurrectionist” applies very well. Will our wannabe dictator get out of his bunker and take on these tough guys? No, because these are the basest of his base.

3 VI 2002: Does Trump want to start a war??

This question has occurred to me several times in the last few days. He might want to start a civil war, any war, because he is a son of Satan who will do anything to be re-elected. Why? Because not to be re-elected would be an unendurable rebuke that would strip him of his immunity and disclose a lifetime of embarrassing secrets.

What has war to do with it? Well, there is a naive tendency to refrain from criticism of even bad government in time of war. That might mute his critics. Then, war is big news and would be a distraction from the malfeasance and foolishness of Trump’s government. Moreover, if there is a war, it would be much easier for the Trumps to postpone, perhaps permanently, the next election, and we might have Emperor Donald the First.

I fear I see another connection between Trump and the satanic. 

I believe that President Trump, a compulsive and resourceful liar, would not hesitate to shed the blood of soldiers, demonstrators, and corona virus patients to hang on to the presidency. Jesus calls the Devil “a liar and the father of lies.” That is in John 8:44, just after He has said that Satan “was a murderer from the beginning.” Deceit and murder are not necessarily associated, at least not in the day to day lives of ordinary people. But when a desperate megalomaniac plays on the greater stage of political life, deceit and murder too often go hand in hand.