Ice on the Moon

The list of people I have followed and admired over the years and watched them fall from grace is long and sad. Sometimes their transgression can be forgiven to a degree and mostly not. In my view it is related to fight or flight. This is a well-known concept but is actually not true. There are four…fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Fawning is when you simply give up and submit. If something is trying to eat you it does not work but then neither does fist-fighting a lion. But anyone who has submitted to bullying can tell you, fawning will keep you from getting beat up. That these celebrities are trying to fawn their way out of being put out of business is obvious.

My wakeup call was a shop where I worked in the 90’s that played Rush all day loud. Made me dem for life. The reality is MAGA strong men and tech-bro’s are sociopathic bullies and are instantly recognized and adored by men who want to continue to bully or be the buddy of the bully like they were in high school. You know what they say; high school never ends.

I remember that article from 2018. It has proven true for the last 7 years.

He is the richest man who ever lived not by serving others but only by serving himself. This is the transactional world of Trumpism. Everything, EVERYTHING, must generate profit for a seller. No breakeven, no “giving”; no commons free to all. Except for the air we breathe nothing is for free and the owner must be paid at a profit. Someone must get more from less. As wealth concentrates upward with no redistribution there are fewer at the top with everything and more at the bottom with nothing. And this is of course the frequently observed flaw in neoliberalism and Market Fundamentalism: There must be a loser, and those losers must fall out of the bottom of the system into destitution. To “give” them anything is simply not acceptable and heretical to the god of the market. No “free”….the only freedom is found in freedom from taxation and regulation enabling unrestrained greed and exploitation.

This very simple truth about making money the god of this world is not talked about in public. Ever. Because it is essentially about glorifying the predator and the people who rage at sharing anything; selfishness that treats selflessness as stupidity. Only greed matters in the end. This ideology is, right now, at this very moment, taking absolute power over the world. The result can only be a new dark age of death and destruction. The fundamental golden rule to do unto others is denied and called a lie while the one with the gold makes the rules is called the truth. That is the grift, that someone must get more from less is the Market Fundamentalist version of creation, of God creating something from nothing. Except that for Mammon worshipers, it is not a God of the living, it is a god of amassing power over what is, and this god is divorced from life as the fundamental meaning. It is anti-life and evil.

There are no “useless eaters”, there are only human beings and none of us can be priced in value millions of times higher than others. The simplest truth of all can be found in understanding the only reason anyone owns anything is the rest of us let them. The only reason money becomes a god is because we let that god be worshiped. WE, collectively…. we the people, have the power and give limited authority to ideas and individuals for the common good. The lie that our collective is evil, that actually only the strongest apex predator should have authority and not being loyal to that strong man is some kind of “slave morality”, this is the evil that creates death camps and mass murder.

Not much time left to decide what each of us worships.

Kaplan wisely left out specific damning of Trumpism but his meaning is clear to anyone paying attention. He is essentially hoping for a rough ride and then something better. One thing is for sure….it will not be about billionaires. They are an endangered species.

After millions can no longer make ends meet, perhaps as soon as this summer, look for somebody, maybe AOC, saying out loud to the public what Chris Hedges some years ago said about FDR: that he told the rich they had better cowboy up that over 91 percent tax to pay for safety nets or there were going to be millionaires hanging from lamp posts everywhere.

I am not impressed with much of what Galloway says but sometimes he is right on.

I fact-checked it and it is all true. He is named after a character in a sci-fi book written by von Braun. His grandfather was an antisemite and pro-apartheid.

Liberals better starting preparing. Harris lost because of the price of eggs, because she was both non-white and female, and because she was not allowed to promise she would tax the rich. And that was the end of America.

The Reagan Revolution was the beginning of a cancer that killed America on election night. It took 43 years to end 248 years of democracy. Democrats have no excuse because for 22 years of the 43, over half of that time, they held office.

The straight-up fascism of Trumpism is manifesting well before they have taken the absolute power they are obviously going to replace democracy with. Shadow president Musk is revealing his “free speech absolutism” is a joke while Trump is disavowing all his reelection promises one by one.

Everything, EVERYTHING, in politics reduces to the rich evading taxes and regulations.

Long does not even have a college degree. He introduced legislation to abolish the IRS and institute a scientology-inspired 30 percent sales tax on EVERYTHING.

No taxes for the rich is on the way. No taxes at all, even though they pay very little now.

The cabinet picks are like a middle finger to Americans….basically Trump saying I am going to rob you blind, and you are such fools you will bend over and cheer. Clear evidence that America was over on election night. All Trump had to do was keep saying the radical left were the problem.

‪Karly Kingsley‬ ‪@karlykingsley.bsky.social‬ wrote a good list and I am going to post my “big 7” version also:

No matter what the corporate elite and billionaires tell you,

Universal health care is not radical

A living wage is not radical

Affordable housing is not radical

Unions bargaining for pay and benefits is not radical

Higher education without debt is not radical

Solving Climate Change is not radical

Progressively taxing the super-wealthy is not radical

Joy tells it like it is. The election was the end of America. Nothing can save us except what cannot happen: millions in the streets demanding the end of the reign of Trump and his oligarch owners. The proverbial snowball.

Near the end of June, in 2022, I wrote that, “It has become clear to any of us with any critical thinking ability that the elections are going to be a nightmare. The Christians who have not been corrupted better be ready to fight for survival. Nobody will admit that what is almost certain to happen is mass violence.” What was not clear to me but has since become so is that most Americans are more concerned about the price of eggs than saving 248 years of democracy from being thrown on the trash pile. I should have known this several years ago when a coworker expressed his unhappiness about talk of raising the minimum wage. I asked him why it made him angry, and he said it would raise the price of the breakfast burrito he bought on the way to work every morning.

When I predicted mass violence, I had thought it would be so clear that Trump would lose that he would call out the MAGA AR-15 army into the streets and there would be a civil war. It did not go that way and some weeks before the election I somehow knew Trump would win and America was over. We deserve what happens next. Materialism dematerialized our country and now we can only pray it does not progress to showers and ovens.