Articles from September 2020

Trump’s getting ready to take over as dictator

Democracy is toppling because of a con man and raging narcissist who doesn’t want to leave office because he knows he’ll go to jail. I just finished Michael Cohen’s book; Trump is everything we’ve said he is: racist, rapist, misogynist, a–hole, power grabber, bully. He doesn’t believe in God; he has no interest in Evangelical interests; he’s only using them to get more power–just like the Nazis used the Evangelical Christians of their day. He cares nothing about anyone but himself. He’s having his Reichstag Fire. And the concentration camps are already on the border, with border guards being used to “keep peace” on our streets. The Gestapo is being put in place.

Reports are coming out that Trump is getting legal teams ready to push the outcome of the election in his favor. His comments today very much sound like he doesn’t want our votes to count. His pick of Supreme Court justice also looks like it’ll be whoever can kiss his backside the biggest. We knew all along that McConnell’s refusal to allow Merrick Garland so much as a hearing, was all politics and zero principle. He’s proved that to be true.

Cohen writes,

“Please remember what I testified to Congress, the second time: There is a serious danger that Donald Trump will not leave office easily, and there is a real chance of not having a peaceful transition. When he jokes about running again in 2024 and gets a crowd of thousands to chant “Trump 2024,” he’s not joking. Trump never jokes.”

Cohen also writes,

“The reason the President wanted a new head prosecutor in the Southern District, I knew better than anyone, was so that while in office, he could arrange to be federally indicted. In the event he loses the election in November, he could then pardon himself, as he’s long claimed to be his right. The reason behind that unprecedented and serpentine thinking was that Trump knows perfectly well that he is guilty of the same crimes that resulted in my conviction and incarceration. He also knows that I would be a star witness in that case, and my book a fundamental piece of evidence for his guilt.

“Without the immunity from prosecution granted to the president, Trump will also almost certainly face New York State criminal charges. He would likely be convicted on both the Federal and State charges and face serious prison time. That is Donald Trump’s greatest fear in life, believe me, and if he fails to get reelected, that will be his fate—and he knows it—so silencing me was an essential part of his overall plan to evade the law and avoid that outcome.”

The GOP is going along with it because it’s been their dream for half a century to grab all the power in this country and turn things into their own version of utopia, ie power for big money and corporations, nothing for the rest of us. They don’t care about religion. They only care about their pocketbooks. I’ve watched this for decades, saw it even when I was a Republican myself. No “both sides” crap here. This is what happens whenever reformers start to cause progress: conservative factions try to turn it all back the way it was before. And they often succeed.

Chris Rock has NVLD

When I saw the article blurb on my browser, and they just said “learning disability”–rather than saying “dyslexia” or “autism” etc. — I just knew what kind of learning disability Chris Rock had been diagnosed with.  So I read it and sure enough:

The far bigger commitment has been therapy, however; seven hours a week, he says with unmistakable pride. His decision to seek meaningful help for the first time in his life was precipitated by a friend’s suggestion that he may have Asperger’s. It prompted a nine-hour battery of cognitive tests earlier this year, from which doctors diagnosed Rock with a condition called nonverbal learning disorder, or NVLD. As he’s come to understand it, he has tremendous difficulty with non-verbal signals — which doesn’t sound too drastic until, as he explains, you consider that some 80 percent of communication is nonverbal. “And all I understand are the words,” he says.

Rock often takes things too literally as a result and, like others with the condition, suffers from a kind of all-or-nothing thinking. “By the way, all of those things are really great for writing jokes — they’re just not great for one-on-one relationships,” he says. Until now, it’s made much of Rock’s life uncomfortable. “And I’d always just chalked it up to being famous. Any time someone would respond to me in a negative way, I’d think, ‘Whatever, they’re responding to something that has to do with who they think I am.’ Now, I’m realizing it was me. A lot of it was me.”

You can read it in “This Is the Best Part I’ve Ever Had”: Chris Rock Talks ‘Fargo,’ Aging and Why He’s Spending 7 Hours a Week in Therapy

 

On Trump’s latest executive order

From a post I just made on Facebook:

(I used a conservative source, The Hill, so no one could complain I was getting this from the librul media.)

I remember, back in 1994, a school board in Texas wanted to do this very thing. I remember Pat Robertson praising them. I remember thinking I’d been so wrong about Pat Robertson all those years, that he truly was a racist and was preaching poison. Now Trump is doing what that Texas board wanted to do, only trying to force the entire nation to teach this white-washed, racist version of history to the youth. Not surprisingly, “Trump Youth” and “Hitler Youth” are trending on Twitter right now.

Meanwhile, Trump is doing his usual politics of division, telling people that liberals are trying to destroy the country. Every day with this clown in office, I get more and more worried that one day my views are going to be illegal.

It’s sickening to hear Trump, a white supremacist, twist the words of Martin Luther King, using his name in vain, projecting onto the left what Trump himself is doing.

The efforts of so many over the years to bring full equality to this country, are finally bearing fruit–so Trump is trying to erase it overnight. This is what conservatism has done over and over again throughout history: Reformers come along, start to make real change that improves the lives of everyone, so conservatives wipe it all out again and go back to the way things were. This is one of many reasons why I abandoned the GOP some 15 years ago.

New revision and buy links for my book Tojet

After April’s fiasco on the Lulu website–after a disastrous “upgrade” which screwed up thousands of people’s projects–I’m in the process of moving my books over to Draft2Digital.  You will still see links for the Lulu version of Tojet around the Net, but I retired the Lulu project, so they should disappear soon.  The link you need to find Tojet is here.  It leads you to different vendors.  Not Amazon yet, because my old links have to disappear first so Amazon doesn’t blacklist my new links.  Amazon’s rules are draconian….. But you can find a MOBI formatted book for your Kindle here.

It’s taking so long to move my books over because the files are 12-15 years old and need extensive formatting fixes to work with modern ebooks.  The days of using your print book’s PDF as an ebook are long over.  Not only that, but I’ve also been skimming through looking for stuff I want to change.

So Tojet has been revised for 2020, and I’m about to start the process with The Lighthouse.  I really look forward to updating Lighthouse because–even though it seems like everybody else prefers Tojet–The Lighthouse is my favorite of the two, with its Gothic themes and–I think–superior writing.  Yet everybody likes Tojet better.  Go figure.  😉  [Update: Lighthouse is done; see here for links.]

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