Evil doesn’t negotiate—it devours: The perils of trusting Republicans with America’s future. The GOP isn’t interested in Democracy, and it’s time to wake up…
The ongoing trials of Faust. I read your headline to my adult daughter. She said "Dad, we all do this, all the time. We try to reason with or compromise with people who do bad things. We cannot live without doing this.' I did not have a strong answer for her. There are, of course, counter points, but the sad truism is that our social, political and survival dialectic has been morphed, via applications of flawed logic and semantic manipulations, to the point of 'resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.' The counter points are raw, naked and cathartic. Deal with the devils daily, hourly, or fight them constantly, without enough time or energy or strategy to 'pick' your battles. I solidly and strenuously agree with Churchill. I am not alive if I am not immersed in some form of Fury, even when I am experiencing beauty, compassion and altruism. It seems to require a complete surrender to the quantum field, which I admit is very exciting. At 76, I have been fighting, with attendant fury, on so many fronts for so long I become exhausted if I stop to consider taking a rest. Imagine what I just said, it is depleting to feel depleted. But I admit, I feel great love for beauty, peace, and the harmony I feel inside those times. As a Buddhist I know I should not suffer from attachments, or expectations, so I must awaken to the amazing energy of the quantum field and let it guide me, or propel me, the devils be damned. Strength and honor.
"Evil NEVER surrenders: It’s time to stand up and fight." (emphasis added to Thom's patent wisdom).
Evil is evil. Monsters are monsters. These mutant humanoid chaos agents are what they are, incapable of being anything other than. As angry as we may be at them, it is ultimately our fight to keep them contained and impotent. We are losing this fight - because the majority of regular people don't even know we're in one.
This is what can make the fight so alienating….so many do not see it and it morphs continually and wends its way into every nook and cranny while we fight our little fights and yet it keeps coming.
My current iteration of understanding of where we are both physically, politically and metaphorically is that we are already inundated, imagine the effects of rising sea waters and creeping up so we think we can gauge how much longer, but instead it starts backing up the waterways and pushing sewage in reverse, and making septic fields move backwards and so we may have a house that appears to be “safe” but we are absolutely surrounded by the equivalent of sewage with no clean water to be found. It is very nearly unlivable for the human body, mind and don’t even think about any conception of our shared commons and The People which are given a valuation of zero by the corporatocracy.
Michelle Goldberg's description of the Laken Riley Act tells me that this is a reanimation of Guantanamo, only in our own country, on our own people. Yes, you too can be a terrorist!
Fetterman has behaved like a DINO since Day 1. He is the new Sinema - a wildcard pretending to be on a mission. His nonconformance to a civil dress code is not proof he is a progressive. It is just proof that he is nonconventional - or a slob.
The Democratic party has so bought into politeness and civility that they appear elite. Moreover, as Thom nicely points out, that makes them vulnerable to being conned by people who have no honor. Their only moral code is to lie, cheat, and steal to stay in power, and screw those who won't.
Tom, as I said above, IMO Fetterman and Stephen Miller are kindred souls, with pretense of being an ideologue, both are Israeli Firsters. Above all things, ideology, right or wrong, good or bad, they are motivated by the welfare of Israel, just as the ummah is motivated first and foremost by the Palestinians.
After seeing the female Dems giving him hell, I don't see how he could think women are not killer enough for combat. The idea that every male soldier is more fit or mentally ready for war than any given woman is a joke.
I know I served with some ladies with lethal skills. Conversely, I served with some men that weren't ready for anything, much less a fire-fight.
Democrats will need to do as you say Thom, and I'd love to see all the good people do their part regardless of gender. Wake-up indeed, especially because they are so afraid of "woke" politics!
I appreciate the fact that Senator Duckworth gave such a powerful performance, but the fact remains that Hegseth will be confirmed because the GOP know how to circle the wagons and the Dem's do not. I was glad we were rid of Sinema and Manchin, now we have Fetterman and Gallego. Wonderful.
Alis, biologically women make better pilots,better reflexes than men, lower center of gravity, they also make better SEALS, higher tolerance for pain, and cold, The initiation that SEALS and special operators have to go through, is bullshit, has nothing to do with duty performance, it is simply a hazing ritual to wash out those that aren't ape men, and maintain the ego of SEALS and special operators. the macho mystique.. I was a spec ops team leader, and once out of the hazing period, my team and never had to endure the bullshit
Stalin found that women made better snipers than men, and then there was the famous squadron of Night Witches, women who flew bombing raids at night.
…and yet the majority of Americans just voted for this. The US has an ignorance problem. Democrats need to stop with logical, fact based, policy rhetoric in public places. To an ignorant audience it sounds weak and feckless. Democrats need to dial up the tough guy rhetoric in order to capture the ignorant undecided voters.
Frankly, when you read that people were purged from voter rolls under guise of fraud— that did not exist— I still question if this man is still a legitimate president. He ran for four years— with the media’s help. The media helped so much that many will believe that what Biden did was done by……….
Ms. Harris did a great job in just 3 months as candidate. Yes, you can pick her to death — but for 3 months her showing was not bad.
We need to stop looking like “ deer for headlights “ and speak out when our media push lies. Scream if necessary.
We should also fight for our public schools and children. Stop voting for people who dismantle and steal money from your schools.
Send people out to talk to parents of public school children. Support teachers. Do not allow any and everyone get rid of committed teachers on the slightest whim.
Look at who is running for office in your town.
Last but not least— confront your own racism.
Because like it or not — and no matter how many black politicians in Republican Party who only care is to speak ill of black peoples in order to be accepted— Candace Owen’s—
The vote for Trump/ Musk was a racist vote.
Yes, I know about Vance— but who the hell sees him :(
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” If that's the danger of battling monsters, imagine the extreme perils of trying to do business with them.
We have become unable or unwilling to label or confront evil. The planet will take care of us in dramatic fashion since we have not taken care of it. We have been around a tiny percentage of the time the dinosaurs were. Our vaunted intelligence, decreasingly in evidence, and utterly defeated by greed, may lead to our self extinction sooner rather than later. I don’t know that we are amenable to any wake-up call, however profound. But as this last election here, and around the world, has demonstrated, progressive change is unlikely to come a sent a messy series of likely bloody revolutions and another terribly turbulent era of human history. While he is the center of the lives of my wife and me, adorable, smart, funny and affectionate, I wish our beloved grandson had not been born. I see a bleak future ahead, in which even with some decent resources as a grubstake, if you will, his life will be arduous and pretty unpleasant. Our kids, in late middle age, will struggle but manage. I will, quite happily, be gone soon. My wife will likely live beyond me for a few years. Limited as we are by physical and health issues, we will be fine too, except psychologically as we watch our world regress in too many ways from the one in which we have spent the bulk of our lives. For now, the morbidly rich and the ignorant, bigoted minions they have so successfully cultivated are in the ascendant, and I see little on our side capable of or prepared to do what is necessary to overcome them. I would love to be convinced otherwise.
Thom is shedding light on the core issue of our world today. Old political party structures are crumbling. Speaking of the USA, we know the Republican Party is gone, it is simply a shell entered and used by an invading species. The Democrats are right behind. They are going through the motions of a process no longer of any use. They sleep walked through the 2024 election, without a clue as to what was really happening.
I suggest you read an opinion piece written by Peter Thiel in this past weekend's FINANCIAL TIMES entitled A TIME FOR TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION. In it he gives a very concise view of what the guys pushing the MAGA buttons are thinking, and how they envision the brave new world they are creating.
It is alarming.
He (they) believe the structures of our political economy have already failed and need to be purged. the future will be found in some kind of "free of any monitoring" internet-generated consensus.
You can guess who will be managing the controls of this internet through to the predetermined consensus. As the Wizard declared to Dorothy: "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"
Everything that is about to happen in Washington is not much more than a KABUKI performance that allows those still needing it to feel the system is working. Reading this article I realize Money now believes that they can by-pass the administrative structure built to manage society's consensus and to provide some fairness and a view to a national vision.
The future is one where All will be driven by direct access to the mob via technology that big money controls. There is weakness there, and full attention should be focused upon poisoning the different factions against one another. Legislative rear-guard action can work, as long as we are free of illusions about restoring a bi-partisan world.
This will be essentially a knife fight.
And mob driven rule has a key weakness: There has to be a ring-master, a mob whisperer who can congeal the consensus. And their MAGA whisperer is old.
The view should be to shoot ahead of the curve, and prepare for major action at the time when DT's voice fails. There will be tremendous struggle and disruption while groups work, and cheat each other, to find and control the replacement.
Living here in California I am outraged by the statement that aid is conditional. That California has to change its ways to receive aid.
Couple of things here.
Hey, Mike Johnson, Mr. I Live by the Bible, I'm not a bible expert so would you please point out to the heathens out here where in the Bible it says that helping your neighbor is predicated on that neighbor 'reforming' their behavior to align with the providers of aid? I may be an atheist but that sure doesn't seem to fit in with the "Love thy neighbor like thyself " directives that came from your "Lord & Savior, Jesus Christ". (And didn't we hear those words a lot yesterday?)
Let's say you don't provide aid. OK, you do know that California has the 5th largest economy in the WORLD! That our state provides billions in taxes to the federal government, which in turn spends an inordinate amount of aid in poor red states.
When I pay my taxes can I just demand that my taxes only go to things that I believe in, like support for green energy, reducing carbon emissions? I'd like to see more research into "cold fusion". That would be a game changer!
But, no, republicans will rant & rave about how they are party that supports the blue, supports family values all while screwing those very people so that they can make more money & achieve more influence & power.
And so we get the likes of Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, RFK Jr. And all the other misfits that republicans want in places of influence & power so that they can put the oligarchs in place that they can sidle up to & maybe get a crumb or two from the table.
If you look around the globe, this focus on the battle between Good and Evil is being discussed in almost every format and situation....ie Ukraine. One would have to consider the fact that it is an infected collective pimple getting ready to burst. This battle between Good and Evil has been going on a really long time....longer than we on Earth can imagine. At some point, the Darkness always implodes upon itself. ALWAYS!!! Does that mean that there is collateral damage? Generally. Evil has consciousness just as Good has consciousness. Therefore it knows how to function to its advantage...thus, the battle for choice. Much of this battle takes place in the dreamtime and this influences the free will of the captive. Evil will take advantage of every weakness in the human condition to offer up an alternative solution to that particular weakness, whether individual or collective. When people marry themselves to this darkness, consciously or unconsciously, they weaponize themselves and build fortifications around themselves to try and deflect any other consideration from devaluing their chosen perspective. The devaluing of their personal station in life is their greatest fear and this is the leverage with which their darkness feeds. Evil depends upon this hardening of the arteries for its survival. It depends upon peer group association to strengthen its delusions. Once the break comes, and it always comes, the group dynamic folds inward and then the occupying forces scramble like rats abandoning a sinking ship. It has always been and it will always be.
Frank, I just wrote my own mini treatise on evil, and how Biblical authors dealt with the fact that evil does exist in the human heart, along with good, and it’s up to each of us, daily, to choose, as you so beautifully wrote, not to harden our arteries. Thank you so much for writing your perspective here.
It seems important here to know and remember that the MAGA/white supremacy movement features absolute control of resources critical to current and future technologies "By whatever means necessary" as Karl Rove stated so succinctly back in the NeoCon era. These people fully understand the changing climate issues and the consequences, but they use denial to gain political advantage. ProPublica's fine piece about Dr. John Tanton's early influence in this regard may still be available via Google. There are several other good discussions of this "white people rule" philosophy. Resource control is fundamental to the long-term plan - no matter whose resources.
Sadly, we have a Politics industrial complex which traffics in billions of dollars & facilitates democracy 's perversion.
The ongoing trials of Faust. I read your headline to my adult daughter. She said "Dad, we all do this, all the time. We try to reason with or compromise with people who do bad things. We cannot live without doing this.' I did not have a strong answer for her. There are, of course, counter points, but the sad truism is that our social, political and survival dialectic has been morphed, via applications of flawed logic and semantic manipulations, to the point of 'resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.' The counter points are raw, naked and cathartic. Deal with the devils daily, hourly, or fight them constantly, without enough time or energy or strategy to 'pick' your battles. I solidly and strenuously agree with Churchill. I am not alive if I am not immersed in some form of Fury, even when I am experiencing beauty, compassion and altruism. It seems to require a complete surrender to the quantum field, which I admit is very exciting. At 76, I have been fighting, with attendant fury, on so many fronts for so long I become exhausted if I stop to consider taking a rest. Imagine what I just said, it is depleting to feel depleted. But I admit, I feel great love for beauty, peace, and the harmony I feel inside those times. As a Buddhist I know I should not suffer from attachments, or expectations, so I must awaken to the amazing energy of the quantum field and let it guide me, or propel me, the devils be damned. Strength and honor.
We need to take back the Democratic Party
www.thepeoplesproject2028.org
"Evil NEVER surrenders: It’s time to stand up and fight." (emphasis added to Thom's patent wisdom).
Evil is evil. Monsters are monsters. These mutant humanoid chaos agents are what they are, incapable of being anything other than. As angry as we may be at them, it is ultimately our fight to keep them contained and impotent. We are losing this fight - because the majority of regular people don't even know we're in one.
This is what can make the fight so alienating….so many do not see it and it morphs continually and wends its way into every nook and cranny while we fight our little fights and yet it keeps coming.
My current iteration of understanding of where we are both physically, politically and metaphorically is that we are already inundated, imagine the effects of rising sea waters and creeping up so we think we can gauge how much longer, but instead it starts backing up the waterways and pushing sewage in reverse, and making septic fields move backwards and so we may have a house that appears to be “safe” but we are absolutely surrounded by the equivalent of sewage with no clean water to be found. It is very nearly unlivable for the human body, mind and don’t even think about any conception of our shared commons and The People which are given a valuation of zero by the corporatocracy.
Michelle Goldberg's description of the Laken Riley Act tells me that this is a reanimation of Guantanamo, only in our own country, on our own people. Yes, you too can be a terrorist!
Fetterman has behaved like a DINO since Day 1. He is the new Sinema - a wildcard pretending to be on a mission. His nonconformance to a civil dress code is not proof he is a progressive. It is just proof that he is nonconventional - or a slob.
The Democratic party has so bought into politeness and civility that they appear elite. Moreover, as Thom nicely points out, that makes them vulnerable to being conned by people who have no honor. Their only moral code is to lie, cheat, and steal to stay in power, and screw those who won't.
Tom, as I said above, IMO Fetterman and Stephen Miller are kindred souls, with pretense of being an ideologue, both are Israeli Firsters. Above all things, ideology, right or wrong, good or bad, they are motivated by the welfare of Israel, just as the ummah is motivated first and foremost by the Palestinians.
Senator Duckworth handed Hegseth his ass.
After seeing the female Dems giving him hell, I don't see how he could think women are not killer enough for combat. The idea that every male soldier is more fit or mentally ready for war than any given woman is a joke.
I know I served with some ladies with lethal skills. Conversely, I served with some men that weren't ready for anything, much less a fire-fight.
Democrats will need to do as you say Thom, and I'd love to see all the good people do their part regardless of gender. Wake-up indeed, especially because they are so afraid of "woke" politics!
I appreciate the fact that Senator Duckworth gave such a powerful performance, but the fact remains that Hegseth will be confirmed because the GOP know how to circle the wagons and the Dem's do not. I was glad we were rid of Sinema and Manchin, now we have Fetterman and Gallego. Wonderful.
"...the GOP know how to circle the wagons and the Dem's do not." Bingo. That's every battle between these two parties for at least the last 4 decades.
Alis, biologically women make better pilots,better reflexes than men, lower center of gravity, they also make better SEALS, higher tolerance for pain, and cold, The initiation that SEALS and special operators have to go through, is bullshit, has nothing to do with duty performance, it is simply a hazing ritual to wash out those that aren't ape men, and maintain the ego of SEALS and special operators. the macho mystique.. I was a spec ops team leader, and once out of the hazing period, my team and never had to endure the bullshit
Stalin found that women made better snipers than men, and then there was the famous squadron of Night Witches, women who flew bombing raids at night.
…and yet the majority of Americans just voted for this. The US has an ignorance problem. Democrats need to stop with logical, fact based, policy rhetoric in public places. To an ignorant audience it sounds weak and feckless. Democrats need to dial up the tough guy rhetoric in order to capture the ignorant undecided voters.
Thank you for explaining the Laken Riley act.
Frankly, when you read that people were purged from voter rolls under guise of fraud— that did not exist— I still question if this man is still a legitimate president. He ran for four years— with the media’s help. The media helped so much that many will believe that what Biden did was done by……….
Ms. Harris did a great job in just 3 months as candidate. Yes, you can pick her to death — but for 3 months her showing was not bad.
We need to stop looking like “ deer for headlights “ and speak out when our media push lies. Scream if necessary.
We should also fight for our public schools and children. Stop voting for people who dismantle and steal money from your schools.
Send people out to talk to parents of public school children. Support teachers. Do not allow any and everyone get rid of committed teachers on the slightest whim.
Look at who is running for office in your town.
Last but not least— confront your own racism.
Because like it or not — and no matter how many black politicians in Republican Party who only care is to speak ill of black peoples in order to be accepted— Candace Owen’s—
The vote for Trump/ Musk was a racist vote.
Yes, I know about Vance— but who the hell sees him :(
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” If that's the danger of battling monsters, imagine the extreme perils of trying to do business with them.
We have become unable or unwilling to label or confront evil. The planet will take care of us in dramatic fashion since we have not taken care of it. We have been around a tiny percentage of the time the dinosaurs were. Our vaunted intelligence, decreasingly in evidence, and utterly defeated by greed, may lead to our self extinction sooner rather than later. I don’t know that we are amenable to any wake-up call, however profound. But as this last election here, and around the world, has demonstrated, progressive change is unlikely to come a sent a messy series of likely bloody revolutions and another terribly turbulent era of human history. While he is the center of the lives of my wife and me, adorable, smart, funny and affectionate, I wish our beloved grandson had not been born. I see a bleak future ahead, in which even with some decent resources as a grubstake, if you will, his life will be arduous and pretty unpleasant. Our kids, in late middle age, will struggle but manage. I will, quite happily, be gone soon. My wife will likely live beyond me for a few years. Limited as we are by physical and health issues, we will be fine too, except psychologically as we watch our world regress in too many ways from the one in which we have spent the bulk of our lives. For now, the morbidly rich and the ignorant, bigoted minions they have so successfully cultivated are in the ascendant, and I see little on our side capable of or prepared to do what is necessary to overcome them. I would love to be convinced otherwise.
Thom is shedding light on the core issue of our world today. Old political party structures are crumbling. Speaking of the USA, we know the Republican Party is gone, it is simply a shell entered and used by an invading species. The Democrats are right behind. They are going through the motions of a process no longer of any use. They sleep walked through the 2024 election, without a clue as to what was really happening.
I suggest you read an opinion piece written by Peter Thiel in this past weekend's FINANCIAL TIMES entitled A TIME FOR TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION. In it he gives a very concise view of what the guys pushing the MAGA buttons are thinking, and how they envision the brave new world they are creating.
It is alarming.
He (they) believe the structures of our political economy have already failed and need to be purged. the future will be found in some kind of "free of any monitoring" internet-generated consensus.
You can guess who will be managing the controls of this internet through to the predetermined consensus. As the Wizard declared to Dorothy: "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"
Everything that is about to happen in Washington is not much more than a KABUKI performance that allows those still needing it to feel the system is working. Reading this article I realize Money now believes that they can by-pass the administrative structure built to manage society's consensus and to provide some fairness and a view to a national vision.
The future is one where All will be driven by direct access to the mob via technology that big money controls. There is weakness there, and full attention should be focused upon poisoning the different factions against one another. Legislative rear-guard action can work, as long as we are free of illusions about restoring a bi-partisan world.
This will be essentially a knife fight.
And mob driven rule has a key weakness: There has to be a ring-master, a mob whisperer who can congeal the consensus. And their MAGA whisperer is old.
The view should be to shoot ahead of the curve, and prepare for major action at the time when DT's voice fails. There will be tremendous struggle and disruption while groups work, and cheat each other, to find and control the replacement.
That is when to strike.
Living here in California I am outraged by the statement that aid is conditional. That California has to change its ways to receive aid.
Couple of things here.
Hey, Mike Johnson, Mr. I Live by the Bible, I'm not a bible expert so would you please point out to the heathens out here where in the Bible it says that helping your neighbor is predicated on that neighbor 'reforming' their behavior to align with the providers of aid? I may be an atheist but that sure doesn't seem to fit in with the "Love thy neighbor like thyself " directives that came from your "Lord & Savior, Jesus Christ". (And didn't we hear those words a lot yesterday?)
Let's say you don't provide aid. OK, you do know that California has the 5th largest economy in the WORLD! That our state provides billions in taxes to the federal government, which in turn spends an inordinate amount of aid in poor red states.
When I pay my taxes can I just demand that my taxes only go to things that I believe in, like support for green energy, reducing carbon emissions? I'd like to see more research into "cold fusion". That would be a game changer!
But, no, republicans will rant & rave about how they are party that supports the blue, supports family values all while screwing those very people so that they can make more money & achieve more influence & power.
And so we get the likes of Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, RFK Jr. And all the other misfits that republicans want in places of influence & power so that they can put the oligarchs in place that they can sidle up to & maybe get a crumb or two from the table.
Worthless, they are all worthless!!!
If you look around the globe, this focus on the battle between Good and Evil is being discussed in almost every format and situation....ie Ukraine. One would have to consider the fact that it is an infected collective pimple getting ready to burst. This battle between Good and Evil has been going on a really long time....longer than we on Earth can imagine. At some point, the Darkness always implodes upon itself. ALWAYS!!! Does that mean that there is collateral damage? Generally. Evil has consciousness just as Good has consciousness. Therefore it knows how to function to its advantage...thus, the battle for choice. Much of this battle takes place in the dreamtime and this influences the free will of the captive. Evil will take advantage of every weakness in the human condition to offer up an alternative solution to that particular weakness, whether individual or collective. When people marry themselves to this darkness, consciously or unconsciously, they weaponize themselves and build fortifications around themselves to try and deflect any other consideration from devaluing their chosen perspective. The devaluing of their personal station in life is their greatest fear and this is the leverage with which their darkness feeds. Evil depends upon this hardening of the arteries for its survival. It depends upon peer group association to strengthen its delusions. Once the break comes, and it always comes, the group dynamic folds inward and then the occupying forces scramble like rats abandoning a sinking ship. It has always been and it will always be.
Frank, I just wrote my own mini treatise on evil, and how Biblical authors dealt with the fact that evil does exist in the human heart, along with good, and it’s up to each of us, daily, to choose, as you so beautifully wrote, not to harden our arteries. Thank you so much for writing your perspective here.
The GOP does believe in Democracy…. As long as they can control who votes. Their definition…
It seems important here to know and remember that the MAGA/white supremacy movement features absolute control of resources critical to current and future technologies "By whatever means necessary" as Karl Rove stated so succinctly back in the NeoCon era. These people fully understand the changing climate issues and the consequences, but they use denial to gain political advantage. ProPublica's fine piece about Dr. John Tanton's early influence in this regard may still be available via Google. There are several other good discussions of this "white people rule" philosophy. Resource control is fundamental to the long-term plan - no matter whose resources.