The Republican Party Is the Epidemic

A reminder that Trump is merely a symptom. The Republican Party is the disease epidemic. The “reasonable conservative” is a species as dead as the dodo. What we have left are what we saw at the GOP presidential debates even when Obama was running — audiences that cheered wildly for poor people to die in agony without health care, for child labor and for wholesale executions. They created Trump. American conservatism is finished. It’s fascism that’s fashionable.

So no, Republicans aren’t getting off the hook for installing a would-be banana republic dictator as president of the United States. History will hang this around GOP necks like the stinking corpse of an albatross.

Life, Liberty and "Socialist Plots'

A century ago, the American goal was civic progress. Today, we let roads and bridges collapse, permit the destruction of public education, scheme to turn Social Security and Medicare over to Wall Street, invite sectarians to dismantle secular government, relieve the rich of the burden of taxation while rewarding them with corporate welfare, and constantly seek new means to prevent citizens from voting. Today, the American goal is civic regression.

Had Enough of the Christian Bullies?

Every time someone has knocked on my door to attempt to shove their religious beliefs down my throat — including last Friday — it's never been an atheist. It's always been a Christian.

Time to Fleece the Rich

The rich have benefited vastly from the infrastructure, the educational system and the legal protections afforded them by this society. And it's past time for them to PAY THAT BACK.

Life's Challenges Are Your Tests

“The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life’s challenges when they come,” Eckhart Tolle wrote. “Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious. You can use a challenge to awaken you, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper sleep. The dream of ordinary unconsciousness then turns into a nightmare.

“If you cannot be present even in normal circumstances, such as when you are sitting alone in a room, walking in the woods, or listening to someone, then you certainly won’t be able to stay conscious when something ‘goes wrong’ or you are faced with difficult people or situations, with loss or the threat of loss. You will be taken over by a reaction, which ultimately is always some form of fear, and pulled into deep unconsciousness. Those challenges are your tests. Only the way in which you deal with them will show you and others where you are as far as your state of consciousness in concerned, not how long you can sit with your eyes closed or what visions you see.”

Why They Hate Knowledge

Republicans always think that because they are ignorant of something, that makes it untrue.

When Freedom Isn't

Doing what you like is freedom. Liking what you do is happiness. The solution to the problem the Buddhists wisely identified as “dukkha.”

Freedom is insufficient to provide happiness to most people, because they are unprepared to be happy within the conditions of human existence. The next thing you want or must have will not provide happiness, any more than the last one did. This, by the way, is the opposite of the lesson that commercial television is employed to teach you. That sells freedom, or rather the illusion of freedom.

Down the Evil Road to Socialism

I do love it when old right-wing parasites, busy collecting their taxpayer-paid Medicare and Socialist Security, start twitching and moaning about “socialism.” These venerable sponges seem to be suffering from the delusion that they’re Daniel Boone.

Is Trump a Good President?

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

Why Trump Voters Are Stupid Children

Umair Haque: “Have you ever wondered why you can’t 'reason' with a Trumpist? Why a Brexiteer will simply just ignore reality? It’s because erotomania is occurring — what psychologists might call an ‘erotomanic transfer.’ They have bonded so strongly to demagogues, they feel about them like they would surrogate parents — Trumpists and Brexiteers believe, just like little children, that mommy and daddy will always look after them, even until the end of the world. There is nothing you can say to convince them otherwise because there is nothing that can be said at all to convince them otherwise. 

"They are operating at a level below words, at a level of pure feelings. The pleasure of erotomania grips them in a kind of delusional mania — and you can see it on the rapturous, ecstatic faces at Trump or Brexit rallies: can you see the same note of fervent exhilaration I do? It’s the look of infantile regression — when an adult has become an infant, and feels perfectly cared by an ideal mommy and daddy again. This pattern of collective delusion — delusions of grandeur, which feed persecution fantasies, held in place by an unbreakable erotomanic bond with a demagogue, which operates far below the level of the adult mind — we’ve seen it before.”

And Trump Will Forever Stain the Fascist GOP

An Apology in U.S.-Occupied Wherever...

Look for any members of society who are so mythologized that their actions and motives must never be questioned — priests, coaches, soldiers. There is where you'll always find the worst corruption. It is inevitable.

Donald Trump: A Joke Too Obvious to be Funny

Gee, you'd think picking a serially bankrupt con artist and lying "reality show" goon to run the country would turn out better, wouldn't you?

As Empty As An American Head

I once had a bumper sticker on the back of my car that read, “Education Lights a Fire,” or words to that effect. But someone took the trouble to carefully and thoroughly peel it off.

And I must say, nothing in my own education ever prepared me to understand the kind of blind fear and virulent stupidity that would be required to make someone want to do a thing like that. I still shake my head when I see that tattered blank space, as leeringly and malignantly empty as an American head.
That act spoke the very volumes it doesn't read.