To Hell With Your GDP

Yeah, be sure and enjoy your “GDP.” I look around and what I see are empty storefronts, rusty old cars (including my own), payday loan sharks and tattoo parlors staffed by people who have part-time jobs without benefits.

Poor, Poor Pitiful Trump

Yes, Trump voters are the salt of the earth, in the "Blazing Saddles" sense of the term.

I Know Just How He Feels

A  New Yorker cartoon by Joe Dator

Why the Republican Party Will Fall

This is the reason why Trump and the GOP must finally crash and burn. The only remaining question that matters is whether they'll take all of us with them.

Uninterested in Trump

You know, Donald Trump is finally just a pitifully damaged human being, nothing more. The fact that so much of his damage is self-inflicted merely makes his situation —and now, by extension, ours — that much more tragic and stupid.

Trump has never interested me, and he still doesn’t. What interests me very much is finding out exactly how a purportedly democratic political system erodes to the point of putting something like Trump in charge.

I Don't Know Whether to Laugh Or Cry...

Please Don't Bully the Nazis!

Donald Trump Is a Bald-faced Liar

The Bible and the Bamboozled

“Too unreflective ever to know himself, too incapable of thought ever to be really a hypocrite, Elmer is honored and beloved of those with whom he comes in contact because he is made of the same coarse clay as they, because no learning, no integrity and no spirituality sets him apart from those to whom he is paid to minister. He is the type most fit to occupy the pulpits supported by materialists like himself to whom the church is half the defender of petty privileges against subversive forces and half the instrument through which a nominal respect may be paid to virtues inconvenient to practice; and to Elmer himself the pulpit is quite as useful as he is to it since … he is enabled not only to taste the intoxication of an orator’s power but to enjoy an income and a position which the mediocrity of his will, the fundamental meanness of his character and the shallowness of his brain could not have earned him by any other means.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch, describing Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry.

And if you ever wondered where in hell the Christians who support Trump came from, here you go. This is the location in hell where they feel right at home.

You Bet, Bob

Fox News: A Vesuvius of Lies

Fifty Shades of Trump

Portrait by Tommervik

Donald Trump is a living index of American society’s most obnoxious qualities: narcissism, racism, sexism, willful ignorance, pervasive dishonesty and self-righteous cruelty.

America likes to think of itself as young and beautiful, like Dorian Gray, but Trump is the picture we had hidden in the attic — now out on display for all the world to see.

Because Republicanism Is Fascism

Riddle me this: If “liberalism is fascism,” as the know-nothing knuckle-draggers claim, then why are ALL the Nazis, Holocaust deniers, white supremacists and pro-Confederacy fetishists on the November ballot — at least a half-dozen of them — running as REPUBLICANS?

Why Your Brain Lies to You

A conceptual sculpture installed at Rong Khun Temple in Chiang Rai, northern Thailand

“So if you ask the question “What kinds of perceptions and thoughts and feelings guide us through life each day?’ the answer, at the most basic level, isn’t ‘The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that give us an accurate picture of reality.’ No, at the MOST basic level, the answer is ‘The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that helped our ancestors get genes into the next generation.’ 

Whether those thoughts and feelings and perceptions give us a true view of reality is, strictly speaking, beside the point. As a result, they sometimes don’t. Our brains are designed to, among other things, delude us.”

— Robert Wright, Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.

Farewell to a Master

Artist Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, was found dead in his New York apartment at age 90.

"Ant-Man and the Wasp' Light and Lively

Well, Disney Marvel has knocked another one right out of the ballpark with Ant-Man and the Wasp, a delightful, perfectly paced action-comedy.

As I had hoped, this Ant-Man sequel turns on the fate of the original Wasp, Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), who was lost in a subatomic universe while on a heroic mission decades ago.

The machinery of the plot is kept well oiled by the witty interplay between the established characters — charming Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), irascible Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), ever-competent Hope Pym (Evangeline Lilly) and lovable goofball Luis (Michael Pena). The film introduces Laurence Fishburne as Bill Foster, a character Marvel fans will recognize as an earlier incarnation of the superhero Goliath.

The movie has suspense, size-changing shenanigans, cute ants, a Stan Lee cameo, a ghostly super villain and a lot of stuff about daughters that brings the story full circle.  And surely we all know by that that at a Disney Marvel movie you must STAY THROUGH THE CREDITS.

How to Stump a Trumpette

Look, Trump’s supporters did not vote for him despite knowing that he mocks disabled reporters on stage and brags about sexually assaulting women. They voted for him BECAUSE THEY KNEW that he mocks disabled reporters on stage and brags about sexually assaulting women. They like the idea.

Fox News: A Lesson in How to Con a Country

People get confused. Fox News is not there to provide information. Fox News is there to validate ignorance.
Remember, if the right-wing echo chamber can demonize an unarmed boy who had committed no crime, and make a champion of the man who stalked and killed him, it can do anything.

Meet the American Traitors

What Republicans Hate

After all, who could hate truth, justice and the American way, right?

Stoic Virtues Still Stand

• The ability to discern the best course of action to take in any given situation.
• The emotional strength to follow that course despite obstacles.
• The insight and understanding to balance the needs of others with your own.
• And, finally, the power of self control.
Those are the four Stoic virtues: wisdom, courage, justice and temperance. And between them, they still pretty much cover the waterfront.

What Is Wrong With You?

Keep in mind that fascists PREFER hard times. They're a necessary springboard to totalitarian power.