When Failed Insurrectionists Rewrite Laws

Posted on by Tim

There are several important things to note regarding the sweeping 6-3 party line ruling of the Trump tainted Supreme Court on New York’s concealed carry law (New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen) today.

The single most important one being that the majority opinion was penned by the Justice whose wife just helped plan, fund, and carry out — with multiple seditious domestic terrorism militias — an armed and murderous attempt to overthrow our halls of Congress and assassinate the Vice President and Speaker of the House along with other members of Congress.

As justification his ruling states that we must honor America’s long history of unrestricted gun access while disregarding the fact that the NY law being challenged has been on the books for nearly 120 years and has been upheld by the SCOTUS bench before. It also disregards the long history of American cities and states attempting to curb gun violence stretching all the way back into the “old west” when visitors to many towns had to turn their guns in at the Sheriff’s Office upon arrival.

As such this will overturn similar laws in at least 6 other states, and will lead to Red Flag laws being challenged and more perpetrators of domestic violence attacks being allowed to obtain firearms again.

But wait, there’s more.

The ruling actually contains this sentence:

“After reviewing the Anglo-American history of public carry, the court concludes that respondents have not met their burden to identify an American tradition justifying New York’s proper-cause requirement,” meaning that a review of American history (where British law holds influence and English is the primary language) says we cannot put a law in place that requires a person to explain why they need to carry a concealed firearm in public to be permitted to do so.

The ruling was issued the same day that the federal Congress prepares to vote on its first major (although weak) bipartisan gun restriction bill in decades, signaling to members that the court will likely strike down any law they pass regardless of how they vote, giving Republicans an easy excuse to back out of their pathetic attempt at compromise.

More importantly though, the ruling will negate many public safety laws and protocols that have been or may be introduced by federal, state, or local authorities throughout the nation by placing a new and ridiculous bar that must be hurdled before safety restrictions can be implemented. If this ruling had been made 3 years earlier it is likely an additional million people would have been lost to the COVID pandemic.

The end result is that this ruling will make all of America less safe, and do so in ways for which a gun in your purse or holstered to your side won’t provide any viable protection.

And that is exactly what Ginny Thomas and her co-conspirators wanted.

Clarence and Ginny Thomas putting the coup back in couple.

Shocking Revelations?

Posted on by Tim

For a moment, let us set aside the few new revelations that were given to us as part of the House Select Committee’s first public hearing on the insurrection attempt led by Donald Trump and his coterie of sycophants, and engage in some real talk about the primary underlying issue.

Based on the reporting and social media commentary following the hearing, everyone seems remarkably shocked at the extent of the conspiracy aspect behind all of this.

I cannot fathom why.

We knew it was a conspiracy all along, long before Donald J. Trump became a part of it.

How did we know?

The short answer for the “TL:DR” (Too Long: Didn’t Read) folks is simply:

History has shown us time and time again that it is impossible for a single person to gaslight hundreds of millions of people into intentionally harming others and themselves for what appears to be the personal benefit of only that one person. Doing this requires a massive support group engaged in coordinated implementation of a well organized, thorough plan. In this case, that plan was generarions in the making. Trump wasn’t its architect, he was just the newest face of the movement.

If you’ve been reading the books and articles of people like Timothy Snyder and following people like Dr. Heather Cox Richardson on social media, you should already have a good idea of what the long answer is going to be. If you’ve been following me on social media at all since 2011, the same should be true. But most people haven’t been putting the pieces together.

Here is a detailed look at what helped get us here.

After the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln wanted to “heal” the divide between what at the time were the Northern Republicans and the Southern Democrats. So, he made several concessions to those southern land owners and former slave owners who had led a treasonous insurrection against our own government. They took every opportunity to systemically entrench support of their “Lost Cause.” It went beyond just putting the failed treasonous military generals in high government positions, which was bad enough.

The 13th Amendment which made the freedom of the slaves a Constitutional Right was itself amended to allow that slavery could legally continue as long as people were convicted and imprisoned first.

This immediately led to the creation of laws that criminalized being Black and started the racial disparity in our justice system. When the 14th Amendment gave them the right to citizenship, many states went further making it illegal for former prisoners to exercise their consitutional right to vote or hold office, so once they managed to get out of prison they’d have no means of working within the system to enact necessary changes.

Thus began the Dredd Scott and Jim Crow eras.

This continued until well into the 20th Century and the Civil Rights Movement.

Then in 1964, Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson dared to sign the Civil Rights Act. The bill enraged and disenfranchised the southern White “DixieCrats” so much that they abandoned the party.

Richard Nixon saw this as a path to power. He would bring Roger Stone along with him.

He immediately began recruiting them to the Republican party by pandering to their racism and Evangelical religious bigotries. This movement of the southern White elite essentially forced both the Republican and Democrat parties to completely swap their social and political ideologies and policy platforms. The sudden Evangelical embrace of anti-abortion politics as a wedge issue was part of Nixon’s courting of the racist White religious right.

Nixon began the dismantling of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal which had helped end the Great Depression and for the previous 50 years ensured that America would become the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world by taxing corporations and elevating the middle class.

It was during the Nixon era when Congress separated the minimum wage from the inflation rate so employers no longer had to provide cost of living wage increases when necessary.

However, Nixon got caught committing illegal acts from the highest public office in our nation, a position commonly revered as the “Leader of the Free World.” When the coverup failed to keep those acts from reaching the public eye, his party members knew the only way to save themselves was to force him to resign before the impeachment trial exposed them too. So they did. His condition for that resignation was a full pardon, which was granted by his VP and successor to the presidency, allowing him to avoid any and all legal repercussions for his actions. And also preventing him from testifying as to whom in his party, and the government, helped him commit those crimes and helped him try to cover them up.

Then Ronald Reagan came along. As Carter successfully negotiated the release of the American Hostages being held in Iran, Reagan was working through back channels to ensure that release didn’t happen until after his inauguration so it would appear his administration secured it rather than Carter’s. This was the foundation of the Iran-Contra hearings that came later, that led to Oliver North’s immunity deal on three federal charges in exchange for his congressional testimony.

While in office Reagan spent a few years intentionally ignoring the HIV/AIDS epidemic because the primary victims seemed to be intravenous drug users and people who were labeled at the time as homosexual. It wasn’t until powerful and influential people, who were formerly closeted members of what is now the LGBTQQIP2SAA community, began announcing their own diagnoses that he could no longer ignore it. Countless people needlessly suffered and died because of his administration’s intentional mismanagement of the early years of that epidemic and the false narratives about how the disease could be transmitted.

He also enacted the nationalization of Trickle-Down economics that has disempowered much of the middle class created by FDR’s New Deal.

And, this will be important later, he vetoed journalism’s Fairness Doctrine Bill. Organizations like FOX News, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, and Alex Jones’ InfoWars, couldn’t exist today if he had allowed it to pass.

But the worst thing that came from Reagan’s tenure was pushing the public narrative of individual American exceptionalism and the belief that everyone who was successful became successful on their own through nothing but hard work and determination instead of through the help of supportive friends, family, and community. This became even more destructive with the conflation of all social service programs as “SOCIALISM” and just to be sure they managed to lump all the varying types of socialism as well as communism together under that one “evil” label. This had been going on for quite some time, but dismantling the fairness doctrine really accelerated the way conservative media outlets could package their propaganda.

Then came the the first of two Bush Presidents. The first was pretty much just an extension of Reagan. He did appoint Justice Thomas to the Supreme Court, although it wouldn’t be until decades later that we would learn that Clarence was only serving as his wife’s proxy on the bench.

Before the second Bush came Bill Clinton, who after playing the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show embraced being called America’s “First Black President,” despite not being Black. His entire campaign was about embracing Corporatism in compromise with the modern Republicans and forcing all of American politics just a little bit further right with each of his political compromises as he tried getting conservative independents to support him.

Clinton and his administration became embroiled in multiple personal and professional scandals, including Bill’s workplace infidelity with interns which led to an impeachment hearing that would teach American teens that committing sexual acts without intercourse doesn’t legally count as sex, the Whitewater scandal, and the fact that they used Black prison labor [see 13th Amendment’s continued legalization of imprisoned slaves reference above] to staff the Arkansas Governor’s mansion while in residence there. That last might well explain why he was so willing to push the center right while compromising with the former DixieCrats.

During Clinton’s tenure, House Speaker Newt Gingrich would take full advantage of both Clinton’s desire to compromise with Republicans and the various scandals to further the only Republican policy platform agenda that had been in place since Nixon. That was to subversively support White Nationalism, Toxic Misogyny, and Religious Discrimination to keep the people divided, to use the War On Drugs and the War on Poverty to wage war on all marginalized people suffering from drug addiction and poverty in the world’s wealthiest nation instead of providing them the resources they needed to improve their lives; because doing so made them easier to control under the guise of maintaining “Law and Order,” “The Rule Of Law” and protecting “Family values.”

It was at this point FOX News was founded by Australia’s Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch weaved White Nationalism and misogyny into everything he did at the network and everything the network put on the air. He created a 24/7 entertainment empire that would serve as a recruiting and indoctrination service for violently angry White men in exactly the same way that other multinational terrorist organizations recruited and indoctrinated their own terrorist cells.

Following Clinton was the second Bush administration.  Which would capitalize on the American media’s conflation of all Muslim ethnicities into one giant anti-democracy terrorist organization.

“W.” would use the well established Republican relationship with American Evangelicalism to stoke the religious bigotry of our nation’s militant right after the 9/11 attacks of 2001 and unleash the world’s greatest military power on the wrong country so we could secure the oil reserves of that nation.   Considering his family’s fortune and power was built upon the oil industry, this was no doubt a remarkably self serving action that cost millions of lives of all those involved and entagled us in a war that would span decades.

He would also use the incident to justify creation of Department of Homeland Security and issue executive orders that would later be codified into law by Congress to bypass the 4th amendment rights of any and all citizens it wanted if it could meet the lowest possible standards of suspicion of a national security threat.   This would be used by increasingly militarized police departments around the nation to wage war on increasingly marginalized communities of color.  It was at this time, that privatized White Nationalist militias really began to see a surge in their membership as angry White men took up arms to protect our country from Black and Brown people attempting to immigrate here both legally and illegally.

Meanwhile, Roger Ailes became CEO of FOX News, Fox Television stations, and 20th Television.  Ailes had served as media consultant for Republican presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush as well as for the first mayoral campaign of Rudy Giuliani.  He would maintain Murdoch’s history of racism, religious bigotry, and misogyny in every aspect of the business, but he was also instrumental in turning the outlet into nothing more than a Republican propaganda machine.   The company’s own legal team would argue in court, against slander and libel lawsuits, that the outlet was nothing more than sensationalist entertainment and could not seriously be considered a legitimate news source.

It was the George W. Bush administration that appointed John Roberts to the Supreme Court as Chief Justice.   The Roberts’ court would almost immediately begin stripping away the political power and civil rights protections of the populace and relocating it into the hands of the world’s wealthiest people and corporations.

Then a mostly unknown Black freshman Senator did the unthinkable.  

He galvanized the nation’s people of color, most especially the women of color, to overcome the centuries of efforts to prevent them from having any political power to not only show up, but to do so in such numbers that those efforts would be rendered meaningless.   Even more miraculously, he did so without disenfranchising the White moderates and liberals who embraced his message of cooperative hope for the future.   And even more miraculously than that, he did it with a decidedly “Muslim sounding” name in the aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraq wars.

Barack Obama was the greatest societal unifying force of a generation.   He pushed social services.  He pushed for getting as many Americans as possible health care knowing he’d never get Republican support for Universal heath care.

The only people who saw him as divisive were the racists who were never going to accept him because of his name and/or skin color.  Many people think he didn’t do enough, but what he and his team accomplished against the most aggressively obstructive Congress was nothing short of astounding.

Prominent Republicans looked at his success and said “never again,” and — probably for the first time — meant it.

The Senate Majority Leader at the time vowed, literally at the inauguration, to do everything possible to ensure Obama would be an ineffectual one term president.  Authoritarian and fascist leaders of foreign governments lined his pockets and that of other Republicans to help him, as did quite a few major corporations and organizations, not the least of which were Russia and the NRA.  

To Obama’s credit, he accomplished much, including getting re-elected to accomplish more.

McConnell and the Republicans fought him every step.   And their biggest complaint, even as he offered them exactly what they demanded in their compromise negotiations always boiled down to “But he’s a Black Muslim,” even though he was Christian.

This is where Donald Trump finally officially enters the picture in August of 2015 to announce the presidential campaign he had been threatening for years. At this point in his life, his one true skill is simply self-promotion.   Russia’s former superspy and current president, Putin, had been grooming him for years.

They funneled money to him and other Republicans through the NRA and his money laundering real estate businesses whose primary clientele was the Russian mafia.  His behind the scenes campaign advisors included Roger Stone, Roger Ailes (and several of his fake news network’s superstars), Newt Gingrich, and media shock jocks Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones.

Publicly, during the campaign, Republicans put up a pretense of hating Donald J. Trump and everything about him.   He had a tendency to talk too much and “say the quiet parts out loud” exposing motives and plans before they could be snuck passed the general populace until it was too late.  He was also at constant risk for sex, ethics, discriminatory, and other legal scandals popping up from his past and present.

However, his donors had much deeper pockets (being mostly adversarial foreign governments) and his advisory team had much more power, experience, reach, and political clout than any of his opponents.

Angry, racist, White Americans loved the fact that he was unabashedly racist and willing to say what they wanted to hear even when everyone knew he shouldn’t be saying it.

Ultimately, when he won the primary, the Republican party agreed to support him for President.  They would protect him from accountability if he would sign off on their desire to stack every federal bench with judges who would be willing to put party platform before their duty to their office.   All three RNC finance chairs from this period were subsequently convicted on various felonies.

The son of a sitting Supreme Court Justice would use his position at a bank to funnel a billion dollars of funding to Trump with a loan no other bank would have made.   The loan appears to have been a funnel of Russian money, not the bank’s own assets.

That Justice would later take early retirement for Trump to seat an additional member on the bench for at least another two generations of furthering the Robert’s court agenda.

McConnell, with the help of all Republicans, literally broke American parliamentary procedures to steal a Supreme Court bench seat from the Obama administration.   Conservative media helped them justify it.

The death of civil and women’s rights champion Ruth Bader Ginsburg would make a third seat available to entrench the Republican agenda on the bench for those generations.

During his presidency, Trump would intentionally damage long standing national alliances, destroy treaties, and court authoritarian regimes as he attempted to remove any and all trace of Obama’s successes from the White House history.   To help accomplish this, nearly every administrative appointment he made was to put in place a person who had already publicly stated that the department they would be heading should be completely dismantled and eradicated.  He immediately began dismantling agencies that performed ethics oversite and civil rights protections.

To further his efforts he would stoke and then dismiss as unimportant White Nationalist hatred and violence toward People of Color and non-Christians.  Drive up the recruitment for White Nationalist domestic terrorism cells (militias) and weaponize them against communities of color along with using ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and the Border Patrol to do the same.  He would also openly encourage more racial policing and police brutality against people of color.

With the help of the entire Republican party and their well established media propaganda machine, he would borrow a page from Reagan’s HIV/AIDS playbook and allow over a million Americans to die as he intentionally mismanaged our government’s response to a global pandemic because at the early stages of that crisis the most effected communities were the ones that weren’t among his support demographic.   They would convince their followers to put themselves and their own families at great risk in an attempt to kill off as many of their opposition voters as possible.

He would be twice impeached, once for attempting to blackmail Ukraine’s president for his own personal reelection efforts and to benefit Putin’s efforts to rebuild the U.S.S.R. and again for leading a violent murderous insurrection against the American government to prevent the transition of power to his rightful successor in the office.   Both times the Republican party did everything they possibly could to protect him from consequence and accountability.

All of this is a matter of public record. 

None of it is part of a big investigative reveal discovered at the Select Committee hearings.

We’ve known all of it all along.

History has shown us time and time again that it is impossible for a single person to gaslight hundreds of millions of people into intentionally harming others and themselves for what appears to be the personal benefit of only that one person.   Doing this requires a massive support group engaged in coordinated implementation of a well organized, thorough plan.  In this case, that plan was generations in the making.   Trump wasn’t its architect, he was just the newest face of the movement.

What we have been up against all along is a small group of kleptocrats enabled by adversarial foreign governments to undermine democracy, dismantle the US government, and erode our international influence to create a society of multinational Corporate Feudalism.  And they have weaponized uninformed outrage, racism, religious bigotry, and misogyny to accomplish it.

If you look at it with that in mind, every single decision they have made over the years makes perfect sense.

Trump wasn’t the mad scientist brains behind the whole thing, he was the monster those mad scientists created and unleashed.

Of course it’s a conspiracy. 

It’s a conspiracy that has been fully entrenched within the #Culturalinertia of our nation’s history.

It will continue until we put an end to it, or it succeeds.

Why Bother?

Posted on by Tim

People have, over the years, said to me “Why bother wasting your time on social media arguing about politics? It isn’t like you can make a difference anyway,”

I suggest they look into the many ways, both good and bad, that social media has had an ever increasing influence on the outcome of each election cycle since its invention.

People have, over the years, said to me “Why bother engaging with the trolls just trying to bait you? You know you’re not going to change their minds?”

I point out that It isn’t about changing that one person’s mind. Every person that hears or reads what we have to say in response to those trolls is influenced by that interaction.

They have the benefit of recognizing the absurdity of the logical fallacy arguments and willfully ignorant stances being put forth by those trolls and a reasoned and thorough rebuttal of them along with correct information.

That influence is more easily attained because they haven’t been subjected to any of the emotional triggers of having any of it directed specifically at them.

If even one is swayed toward a more grounded reality from which to build their own opinions, it has been a worthwhile engagement.

Even on a site that only reaches thousands of people a day, tens of thousands per week, hundreds of thousands per month, just a one percent success rate is a greater circle of influence than most of us can attain offline.

People have, over the years, said to me “Why bother voting, it isn’t like it matters anyway?”

I suggest they look at all the gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts being put into place over the years, especially these last few years, to prevent their vote from being cast or properly counted. If your vote doesn’t matter, why is so much money and effort being spent to block it?

There are many ways to make a difference. There are many ways to protest. There are many ways to stump for a candidate. There are many ways to widen the reach of your influence.

By casting your ballot you’ve done more than anyone doing nothing. By influencing just one other person, you’ve done more than anyone doing nothing.

You are shifting the #Culturalinertia.

If the people you influence are also doing their part, you’ve begun to increase your influence exponentially.

Anyone trying to tell you that you cannot, or that it isn’t worth trying, is actually attempting to silence your voice and limit your reach. Call them on it, make them explain why.

“Never give up. Never Surrender.”
~Galaxy Quest

The Rising Cost Of Greed

Posted on by Tim

Inflation isn’t at record heights because of an increase in production or distribution costs or even pay raises for what were considered menial jobs prior to a global pandemic teaching us who the real essential workers actually are.

Inflation is rising at record paces because the leaders and shareholders of multinational corporations are greedy and price gouging.

Already Americans are paying about $250 more per month, per household, for the same goods than they were before the pandemic according to a study by Moody’s Analytics.

If it were true Inflation the corporations behind it would be, at best, breaking even.  Especially, if production and supply chain delays are preventing them from meeting demand.

However, while many local small businesses are failing — some because they didn’t have the resources or capital to adapt to pandemic business needs — the megacorporations are raking in record profits, undertaking massive stock buybacks, and buying up the resources of the failing local businesses.

What the federal reserve is doing in response to it is; therefore, exactly the wrong solution.

Increasing interest rates now will make loans for individuals and new small business startups with new post-pandemic market strategies even harder to obtain.

As a result people will curtail purchases of non-essential goods and services and be even less likely to invest. It will also curtail new home and vehicle purchases.

The real solutions are easy to identify. They would also be easy to implement if we had a majority of members in Congress working for the people instead of lobbyists.

1.  Establish a minimum wage that is no less than a true living wage.

2.  Tie that minimum wage to true inflation so it remains a living wage.

3.  Establish a national single payer health care system that is completely separate from employment. 

4. Close the corporate tax loopholes.

5. Create a tiered wealth tax on those whose wealth exceeds $3M.

The combination of these things would free employers from the need to pay the employer portion of health care plans. It would free people from the leading cause of bankruptcy in our nation, medical expenses. And it would eliminate the vast majority of the government’s need for public assistance programs like SNaP, CHiP, and others that are currently actually used to subsidize the shortfall between employer wages and living wage requirements.

People would be free to pursue the careers that would interest them most and which they would he best at doing, without fear of losing their health care.

This would stimulate the economy more than anything else we could do.

It would also stimulate the creation of more new innovative small business and free market competition than anything else we could do.

Ultimately, the problem with the Federal Reserve’s approach is that it will punish average consumers even more instead of those driving prices up with their boundless greed.

It’s All So Simple; Really, But Simple Ain’t Always Easy.

Posted on by Tim

Over the past few weeks a lot of different news has been breaking, and the press and the people responsible for it want us all to view each instance as a separate, isolated, and unrelated occurrence, they are not. We have to put some pieces together to put them all in context with each other. If we do that, Things get pretty clear, and the solutions present themselves.

First, lets review a bit of well documented history, that is undisputed by anyone reputable enough to put forth any dispute of merit.

Several years back, multiple foreign interests saw a celebrity conman as a useful idiot they could put in power to serve their interests. They pursued several methods of doing so, ego stoking, funneling money through the NRA, employing a social media troll farm for influence, using hackers to attack our political party offices and election systems, and more. The son of a Supreme Court Justice Antony Kennedy funneled roughly a billion dollars of their money through Deutsche Bank loans that no legitimate bank officer would approve. And, they were successful beyond their wildest dreams.

Their useful idiot became the President of the United States, despite losing the general election by a considerable margin. He spent the next four years stoking racial hatred and political violence. He filled three seats on the Supreme Court with religious zealot personal loyalists with a combination of multiple ethics complaints and inexperience on the bench. One of those seats belonged to Justice Kennedy, who retired early just so this man could appoint his replacement while the Republican party controlled the approval process. He then went on to become personal responsible for more the deaths of more than half a million Americans by seizing on an opportunity to weaponize a global pandemic he thought would be limited to more urban, liberal areas, and controlled before it could spread. His inner circle of kleptrocrats used that opportunity to make a ton of money in illegal and/or unethical investments as they mishandled the national response and created an economic crises. Eventually, though, their misinformation efforts and anti-science, anti-knowledge campaigns backfired, and the virus started taking an even heavier toll on their own support base as vaccines became available. Then when it became clear he wasn’t going to be re-elected, he attempted to lead a violent overthrow of our Congressional system, and seize power for himself. He failed, but he succeeded in further dividing the country with violence, racism, and bigotry. In the process, the Republican senate made a mockery of not just one, but two impeachment trials to protect him.

Now we have a Supreme Court, one third of which was appointed by a violent insurrectionist, rewriting long established and settled law, starting with abortion rights.

During his tenure, the Republicans in state governments around the country have been passing hundreds of voter suppression laws and laws rolling back civil rights, social services, and more.

Republicans are hoping the compromised Supreme Court will uphold their efforts.

Then, after winning back the Presidency, as well as the House and Senate majorities, Democrats wasted nearly a year before pursing real investigations of those that planned and instigated the insurrection attempt, especially those still serving as Congressional peers. They held off on the trials of insurrectionists and cut deals that allowed them to plead out to non-felony charges to avoid more serious punishment, including the, at least temporary, loss of their own voting rights.

Worse yet, the allowed two of their own Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, to hold the ability to achieve justice and make good on promises of progress hostage for their own personal gain.

The real solutions are simple, and should be bipartisan, if one party wasn’t actively trying to weaponize willful ignorance and hateful bigotry in order to entrench us all in corporate feudalism.

But, simple isn’t always easy.

Here are the things that need to be done now:

Close Ranks and Unify

The Democrat Party leadership needs to steamroll Manchin and Sinema, by taking some lessons of the Republicans to heart.

Schumer and Durbin need to tell them to get in line and do away with the filibuster in order to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the For The People Act.

If the two refuse, then Schumer should strip them of all their Committee seats, severely hindering their power to influence legislation in development. They should eliminate all party support for their re-elections and divert it to candidates who will primary them and vote with the party on these vital issues.

Many people think that the threat of doing so will force them to switch parties, but this won’t happen. Neither of them will switch because doing so puts McConnell back in the Majority Leadership seat and eliminates both or their personal gain leverage as they become the 51st or 52nd member of the Republican majority and of no use at all to McConnell in passing or obstructing anything. They are two self centered and self serving to willingly render themselves irrelevant.

Get them in line and pass the bills required to make sure everything else being accomplished right now remains a lasting accomplishment, and not just a brief respite in the eye of the storm.

Fix The Court

Biden assembled nearly 3 dozen experts to form a commission in response to demands from Democrats to restore what they called ideological “balance” on the currently tainted court. They offered him a 300 page research paper that offers no specific recommendations.

So, here are my recommendations for what must be done:

Change the number of Supreme Court Justices is so there is a one to one ratio of Justices to US Appellate Court Districts.

That number is currently 13. Set term limits to be two times the number of judges, so 26 years.

Appoint one new judge every two years to replace the longest serving judge. If a judge dies or retires early, the President would then nominate, with Congressional approval, a temporary replacement to fill the seat until it would have come up in rotation, at which time the temporary nominee could be reconfirmed for their own term or replaced as scheduled.

This would prevent any one administration from being able to hold an imbalanced sway over the court for generations to follow.

Achieve Accountability

Censure and eject all those who participated in the planning and execution of the January 6th insurrection from both the House and Senate, and any governmental/state agency that they are currently working within.

Hold trials for all those who participated in the planning and execution of that insurrection, on the proper felony charges. Expedite the trials.

Disqualify all of them that are currently running for state and federal offices across the nation from ever holding political office again.

There is established legal precedent for all of the above.

Move On

For years now, we have been fighting against a small group of kleptocrats put in power by an adversarial foreign government to undermine democracy, dismantle the US government, and erode our international influence. And they have weaponized uninformed outrage, racism, religious bigotry, and misogyny to accomplish it.

If you take the time to look at all they have done, with that in mind, every single decision they have made over the last several years makes perfect sense.

Only by accomplishing the things outlined above can we begin to address our collective moral injury as a nation and society and begin to heal from the damage they have caused.

This is how we address the ongoing #StochasticTerrorism of the Republican party and begin to course correct our #Culturalinertia.

Space, The Final Frontier

Posted on by Tim

Space has been in the news quite a bit recently as the world’s richest men vie for control of the future of space travel.

Jeff Bezos already wants to open an office park offering wealthy executives the most expensive business commute in history and an exclusive place to shop for things that have to be shipped up from Earth on the same transports. His ultimate goal is for this “Orbital Reef” business park to replace the International Space Station (ISS).

Elon Musk wants to avoid paying taxes that would be used by the current Presidential administration to improve life here on Earth, especially in the United States, because he wants to use that money instead to “get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness.”

Major nations that used to control the world’s access to space are already outsourcing their space travel and satellite repair and maintenance needs to the companies run by these men. Just this month Russia announced it will be contracting SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft to transport Russian cosmonauts between Earth and the current ISS until their participation on the station comes to an end. Meanwhile, the companies run by Bezos and Musk are embroiled in legal battle over providing contract services to the United States’ NASA.

Private companies like Verizon are already lining up to pay these companies to place their own communication satellites into orbit, a service that used to be handled by NASA.

All this has been happening, while China has reportedly launched a new satellite that analysts say can be used as a weapon capable of grabbing and crushing they do not control.

Throughout these developments, we have heard remarkably little from former President Trump’s overhyped U.S. Space Force.

Various news sources have been busy reporting on multiple different aspects of all of this, but there remain a few aspects and connections to other news that they all seem to be trying hard to avoid exploring.

The details hidden in those gaps; though, are innately obvious to those who have followed science fiction stories, novels, and movies over the years.

To us, it is not at all surprising that there has been a strong resurgence of dangerous fascist right-wing Nationalism as we are on the verge of both true space travel capabilities and the beginning of true multinational climate disasters.

As contention for dwindling non-renewable resources escalate, control of the territories that still have reserves of such resources will be guaranteed global superiority, if they can successfully defend them.

Later, when the resources have been depleted the only option for survival will be escape.

At that point the nation or corporation that control access to space travel and the ability to create food and water in space will also control the policy, priorities, and governance of any future the human race may have beyond Earth.

Nations and borders on any individual planet are rendered meaningless when commerce and survival become dependent upon space travel, even more so when it extends beyond orbital spaceships to interplanetary or interstellar travel.

While the culmination of this is not likely to come about in my lifetime, it is entirely possible that these issues will reach their critical peaks within the lifetime of my own children.

A Field Guide to Changing the #Culturalinertia – Part 3

Posted on by Tim

I am long overdue with the release of this third part in our Field Guide to Changing the #Culturalinertia. Follow these links to find parts One and Two. It wasn’t from a lack of trying. I had an essay planned for release in January of this year following the victory of Georgia’s Democrats in securing their national Senatorial seats and also securing what should have been a true Democrat majority in the Senate.

That article was going to address the historical origins of systemic and societal racism in America, how it is perpetuated, and how we could and should have been using a democratic control of both the legislative and executive branches of our federal government for whatever time that control could be maintained. It was going to begin with Abraham Lincoln’s misguided decision to embrace confederate leadership and their “Lost Cause” efforts for the sake of “compromise” instead of allowing them to languish in defeat. Thus began the trend of allowing treasonous generals and politicians into congressional leadership, naming military bases after those same treasonous people, the establishment of Jim Crow laws and sundown towns, the creation of the DoJ to protect civil rights and deal with the KKK terrorists cells and the subsequent subversion of the federal law enforcement agency to be used as tool against any progressive progress made on behalf of People of Color, culminating in today’s school to prison pipeline feeding mass incarceration for privatized prison labor profiteering.

It was a lengthy article that I have deleted and rewritten several times since then because it was scheduled to be released on January 7th, 2021. However, the day prior, a large group of White Nationalists answered the incessant Stochastic Terrorism calls of Donald Trump, leading Republicans, and nearly all conservative media outlets to attempt a murderous insurrection to interfere with the certification of a presidential election and overthrow the legislative branch of our government while planning to assassinate both the Republican vice president and several of our elected Democrat members of Congress along with a few Republican members like Mitt Romney of whom they disapproved.

Every day for weeks after that there were new pertinent additions to be made and the essay morphed into a dissertation.

One of the most telling being that despite the win in Georgia, the Democrats had not truly obtained a Senate majority. Because two right wing conservatives had been elected by their states as Democrats; Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona. Through their refusal to help end the filibuster process, which was originally created as a tool for conservatives to fight against civil rights reforms and is still being used primarily for that same purpose, they have thwarted nearly all major important efforts of the Biden administration without the need of real effort at opposition by the Republicans.

Every time I thought my revisions were done and it was time to release it, new developments would immediately arise within the obvious injustice of the lack of consequences not only for those who perpetrated the offenses but also for those who incited them to it for their own political profiteering purposes.

After months of revisions and rewrites, I have come to an important realization regarding the never ending fight for equity of opportunity and justice. There are a few common recurring points for each side of the political debate on every issue throughout every examination of this fight at every stage of history.

Throughout American history the nation’s conservatives have been working to undermine or eliminate all progressive reforms, all attempts at multicultural equity of justice, and all attempts to establish and secure social safety and security. They strive to maintain gerrymandering, systemic oppression, redlining, and inequality based on gender, ethnicity, and religion.

They feign ignorance to divert the debate to petty points instead of real solutions. They fund and cite pseudoscience to present as real science. They resort to overt lies, which they now call “alternative facts,” gaslighting, cherry picking data, and as many other logical fallacies as they an get away with to control the framing narrative of debate. They have started a civil war and an insurrection, both based on White Nationalist racism.

At the same time, throughout all of American history, the nations liberals and progressives have worked on the assumption that reaching some form of bipartisan compromise with them is vital on every single issue.

That latter, more than anything else, is the true fatal failure of our current system.

The entire political platform of modern Republicans is to maximize suffering and death. It is the reason they fight against all efforts to establish social security, SNaP, CHiP, health care assistance, housing assistance, public health safety, environmental protections, consumer protections, worker safety regulations. It is why they constantly raise taxes on average people while eliminating them for the ultra wealthy and large corporations. They have even courted the assistance of adversarial foreign governments to accomplish it.

So, the next step in our Field Guide to Changing the Cultural Inertia is to stop seeking ways to compromise with those who harbor evil intent.

Until we have made that step, we are letting the terrorists set the terms of our future.

Time For The Hard Questions

Posted on by Tim

Multiple states are passing new abortion laws in an attempt to pressure the Supreme Court to overturn its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling and they are also passing other “trigger laws” which cannot legally be enacted now but are scheduled to take effect 30 days after that ruling is overturned.  Texas never even repealed its abortion law that Roe v. Wade was about, it is still on the books and will take effect immediately upon reversal of the Supreme Court decision. There are several others states that are in a similar situation.

Below we will attempt to engage in some critical thinking with some thought exercise discussion prompts.  In order to help with this, we will need to make a few important stipulations.  First, we will refer to the two major stances as Pro-Choice and Anti-Choice, because those are the true essential stances.  Those who adhere to a Pro-Choice stance are not Anti-Life and are not Pro-Abortion, with few exceptions they would advocate for a choice of carrying to term but would consider abortion a viable option as one of those choices based on a variety of factors. The extent of those factors is open to debate within this group.  Those who adhere to an Anti-Choice stance do so often by professing it is a Pro-Life stance, some are open to exemptions from their ban on abortions for rape, incest, developmental disorders, and/or health concerns for the mother or unborn fetus, many others are not open to any exemptions at all.  I urge you as we focus on the legal and scientific aspects of this, as well as the religious doctrine and moral arguments, to try to leave your emotional triggers and logical fallacy arguments at the door.

The Constitutional Issues

The primary holding of the Supreme Court’s ruling was:

“A person may choose to have an abortion until a fetus becomes viable, based on the right to privacy contained in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Viability means the ability to live outside the womb, which usually happens between 24 and 28 weeks after conception.”

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/113/”

That due process clause is section 1 of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which states:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv

Based upon this, we can see that the Constitutional rights of personhood begin at birth on American soil or naturalization as an American citizen for an immigrant.

Many of these Anti-Choice laws being created and passed are extending the rights of personhood to the fetus prior to birth; in many cases even before the actual brain or heart of the fetus has developed into a functional form.

For this to be legal, it would require another Constitutional amendment moving the point of personhood protections to prior to birth. 

This raises some questions that must be clarified under the law.

  1. At what point do the rights of the fetus and its health concerns overrule the rights of the pregnant woman?
  2. Would the fetus of all pregnant women have to be counted as a person during census taking and all legal decisions based upon census totals once personhood rights are established?
  3. Do parents get a child tax credit/refund if filing prior to birth once personhood rights are established?
  4. Is the fetus counted towards family SNaP nutrition benefits, housing assistance, and other social safety net programs once personhood rights are established?

Non-Constitutional Legalities

Pennsylvania just advanced multiple bills in their legislature that will, if passed, require women who miscarry to file a fetal death certificate with the state authorities and open those same women up to imprisonment for a miscarriage.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed a controversial bill that bans nearly all abortions into law Wednesday evening.

It’s considered the most restrictive abortion law in the United States. The law makes it a crime for doctors to perform abortions at any stage of a pregnancy, unless a woman’s life is threatened or there is a lethal fetal anomaly.

Under the new law, doctors in the state face felony jail time up to 99 years if convicted. But a woman would not be held criminally liable for having an abortion.

Texas Governor Abbott took a slightly different approach, signing this week another of the nation’s strictest abortion measures, banning procedures as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.

Instead of having the government enforce the law, the bill turns the reins over to private citizens — who are newly empowered as unofficial agents of the state — to sue abortion providers or anyone who helps someone get an abortion after a fetal heartbeat has been detected. The person bringing the suit would not have to be connected to someone who had an abortion or to a provider to sue.  It does not include any exemption for rape, incest, or health concerns.  

Under this law, the pregnant woman seeking an abortion cannot be punished, but any “concerned citizen” can sue any family or doctor that helps someone receive one.  Any unfriendly vindictive neighbor or coworker, any religious zealot, can file such a lawsuit.  Even a rapist or sexual abuser within a family could legitimately bring such a suit.

The entire purpose of all of these laws is to further punish women who have already been traumatized by abuse or miscarriage, for their “failure” as an incubator.

This is going to lead to a huge increase in suicides among pregnant women and girls who see no other way out of an already impossible situation due to familial, health, and economic concerns after finding out they are pregnant.

The Science Issues

Most women do not know they are pregnant until they have missed at least one of their menstrual cycles, for those who already experience an irregular cycle it may even be more.  So, these plans pushing bans on abortion to as early as six weeks are pushing the window for a decision prior to the point where many women will even know they are pregnant and far before they will know about pregnancy related health conditions or fetal development problems.

The argument for the six week ban is based on the point at which what is called a fetal heartbeat can be heard on a fetal heart monitor.  But this isn’t an accurate assessment of development.  At this stage what can be heard is a throbbing pulsation of blood through fetal tissue that has not yet developed its own heart and is far from developing its own brain, let alone human cognition.

British researchers analyzed scans of the hearts of healthy fetuses in the womb and found that the heart has four clearly defined chambers in the eighth week of pregnancy, but does not have fully organized muscle tissue until the 20th week.

This is much later than expected, according to the study published Feb. 20 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface Focus.

Previous studies of early heart development in humans have been largely based on other mammals — such as mice or pigs — as well as adult hearts and samples from dead people.

The data being collected by the University of Leeds-led team is being used to create a computerized simulation of fetal heart development. This will help improve understanding about normal heart development in the womb, and could lead to new ways to detect and treat some fetal heart problems early in pregnancy, according to the researchers.

Human fetuses have a regular heartbeat beginning at about 22 days of pregnancy, which is one reason why the researchers were surprised to find that there is little organization of human heart cells until 20 weeks of pregnancy.

“Fetal hearts in other mammals such as pigs, which we have been using as models, show such an organization even early in gestation, with a smooth change in cell orientation going through the heart wall. But what we actually found is that such organization was not detectable in the human fetus before 20 weeks.” 

https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=167987

The Supreme Court decision mentioned above based their determination for the cutoff for legal abortions on the medical viability of the fetus, or its possibility of survival.  Even at that point, and with the medical advancements in the nearly five decades since, survival is far less likely prior to 24 weeks, the majority of those delivered extremely premature do not survive, and the majority of those that do survive have long term — often lifelong — developmental issues requiring extensive and expensive care. 

Medical advances mean that we are getting better at treating preterm babies but the chances of survival still depend on gestational age (week of pregnancy) at time of birth.

  • Less than 22 weeks is close to zero chance of survival
  • 22 weeks is around 10%
  • 24 weeks is around 60%
  • 27 weeks is around 89%
  • 31 weeks is around 95%
  • 34 weeks is equivalent to a baby born at full term.

The Religious Issues

The United States is supposed to be a nation fundamentally based upon the Freedom of Religion. The ideal being that you are free to practice whatever religious beliefs you hold as long as the practice of them brings no harm to people with other beliefs; and they are too. This means you can worship the Aztec gods if you choose to, but you cannot go take a prisoner and offer them up in a ritual sacrifice. It also means you can’t stone someone in public because they have committed what your religion considers a sin.

Those that are atheist or agnostic do not hold the same religious objections as those who are and their decision either way has no bearing upon others at all.

But the religious concept of the beginning of life varies greatly from religion to religion. For example, the Jewish believe that life begins with the first breath. This is why Israel has legalized abortion for years within their nation’s universal health care. Since it is funded by the government, the argument could be made that American military fund assistance to Israel helps subsidize it They were even exempted from Trump’s presidential ban on foreign aid to countries that allow such procedures within their government’s health care programs.

What happens under these laws if a Jewish doctor performs an abortion for a pregnant Jewish woman or girl and then claims the religious exemptions that the Supreme Court has recently been upholding to avoid punishment?

The Catholic church has long had a stance against abortion as well as against all forms of birth control that might prevent a birth or conception.

However, the anti-Choice movement of American Evangelicals is far more recent. The most prominent myth about the origin of their embrace of the movement is that it was in response to the aforementioned Supreme Court ruling. But this simply isn’t true.

“In fact, the Southern Baptist Convention, they actually passed resolutions in 1971, 1974 and 1976 – after Roe v. Wade – affirming the idea that women should have access to abortion for a variety of reasons and that the government should play a limited role in that matter, which surprised us. The experts we talked to said white evangelicals at that time saw abortion as largely a Catholic issue. [The real answer is} in short, desegregation. Two years before Roe v. Wade, in 1971, there was a Supreme Court case [Green v. Connally] that began to pull white evangelicals into politics.”

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/20/734303135/throughline-traces-evangelicals-history-on-the-abortion-issue

For those that don’t realize it, Southern Baptists have a long history of racism and segregation, which the leadership has in recent years denounced, but the church members have been slow to embrace that rejection.

In fact, it was Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, who saw the Roe v. Wade ruling as an opportunity to get the racism of the White Evangelicals politically energized by allowing them a lynchpin single issue voter stance that would mask their racist motivations against racial desegregation in a time when the federal government was openly expanding civil rights for people of color.

“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.” But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. 

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133

This requires us to ask:

If this religious belief is not a deeply held matter of religious doctrine for your religion, but a political construct of White Nationalism and White Supremacy, how exactly can anyone who is not inherently racist continue to adhere to it as a religious objection?

For those whose objections stem from a professed Pro-Life belief, we can see the fallacy for anyone who does not also support pro-life stances for the already living.

A Pro-Life religious stance claiming that it is a mortal sin to take a life, would also require opposing war and the death penalty, as well as advocating for doing everything possible to make sure all the living had access to at least a bare minimum of health care, food, and shelter for all people, regardless of their own religious beliefs or ethnicity. Then there is also the consideration of unplugging someone who is on life support and brain dead, how is the argument different for a fetus that has not yet developed a functioning brain?

The Moral Implications

All of the above requires us to examine our moral stances and justifications, whether we consider ourselves to be Pro-Choice or Anti-Choice.

At what point of development should a fetus be considered a legal citizen with the constitutional protections of personhood? Is it when there is a fetal heart beat, a real heart beat, a developed brain, the first actual breath?

At that point, do the rights and concerns for protecting that fetus outweigh or override the rights and concerns of protecting the pregnant woman carrying it?

Since the fetus is both unaware and unable to make informed medical decisions for itself, should each pregnant mother apply for full medical conservatorship of their fetus in order to circumvent the laws.

What rights should the biological father have in such a decision, especially if the pregnancy was the result of rape or forced incest?

What if the parents have different religious beliefs; whose take priority? Is the answer a matter of who will have to carry the pregnancy or is it a matter of giving one religion a higher legal standing and precedent over others?

Shouldn’t the punishments for incest, rape, and sexual assault be far more severe than the punishment for an abortion resulting from such an attack?

Any claims that a woman or girl who has been impregnated should be forced to carry to term and put the baby up for adoption ignores the the health and economic issues that may make that impossible and the roughly 100,000 to 125,000 children in orphanages and foster care each year that do not get adopted for various reasons. Shouldn’t we find a way to properly take care of them before adding to their ranks?

These are not the only questions, and none of them are simple, but they must be answered.

Until they are, these laws are nothing but a war on women and often one that is deeply entrenched in a history of racial hatred and oppression.

What Really Happened?

Posted on by Tim

Texas conservatives isolated the state from the national power grid in the 1930s, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Federal Power Act, which charged the Federal Power Commission with regulating interstate electricity sales.

In the years since they have deregulated and privatized the power grid.

The failure we are experiencing this week is now being blamed by those same conservatives on renewable energy as they disingenuously campaign against the Green New Deal while people are freezing and life support medical equipment sits powerless.

The reality is that wind energy supplies less than 10% of the Texas power grid and the majority of the equipment failure has been fossil fuel powered equipment, mostly natural gas.

Texas is one of the largest producers and consumers of fossil fuels in the nation and world and the privatized power companies have aggressively resisted renewable energy.

Meanwhile, those homes and businesses with solar panel power support have fared the best throughout these outages.

We had similar failures (although not of this magnitude) in 1989 and 2011. Investigations of both determined the cause to be that power companies refused to spend the money on proper maintenance and winterization of the equipment. The same has already been reported for this year’s failure.

Add to this that the state runs the full power grid to supply energy demand in the summer due to air conditioning usage, and then takes large segments offline for the winter to conserve energy (because fossil fuels aren’t a renewable resource). Despite a week’s worth of warning of the impending arctic weather conditions, they never brought the dormant equipment back online.

They now claim that the energy demand exceeded production capability of the artificially limited production by the improperly maintained equipment. And as people are freezing and dying and absorbing the cost of destroyed perishables (if they can find an open business to replace them) the power companies are already talking about raising the rates to further profiteer off the disaster their own malevolent incompetence created.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, ERCOT, is a nonprofit that operates the state’s electrical grid and manages the flow of electric power to more than 26 million customers across the state — about 90% of the state’s electric load, according to its website. Only the El Paso region is on the national grid, and they are the only region in Texas that swiftly recovered from the weather related issues.

Despite claims that the reasoning is Texas’ long standing policy of feigned federal independence and isolationism, one third of the supposedly non-profit organization that controls the power grid is either out of state or international, and the majority of the remainder are heavily invested in the fossil fuel industry and profiteer personally off the organizational decisions.

I hope that those Texans who survive this state wide disaster of mismanagement, corruption, and malevolent unregulated capitalism, remember it, and the lies that Governor Abbott and his Lt. Governor and AG are telling about it as it is occurring when their reelection campaigns are running.

It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic and pathetic that the state’s Republican leadership is loudly demanding investigation of the problems their own policies have created.

This is your call to action, as soon as you have thawed out enough to act.