Meme-images for your semi-sane and residually honorable MAGA

Swamped with patent disclosures, podcasts and the Great Big AI Panic of 2024. And just learned the H1N5 bird flu may be nastier soon! (😟check your supplies.) Also, I appear to be more optimistic than most... and most of you have voted already. 

Still, I gotta do what I can, offering you some final, concise leverage. Not for your hopeless MAGA-Putinist uncle. But maybe his worried wife, your residually-sane aunt.  

What leverage?  Why... punchy jpegs, of course! 

   == Ammo Images that might sway... ==

How can anyone still sway to the hypnotism...

...of a face drenched in makeup and dripping hair dye?   

But OK. Let's start with a simple question.  

             Who are his enemies and who are his friends? 

ONE sentence ought to settle everything:

                                                     

Two Defense Secretaries. Two chiefs of staff. His Attorney General. His National Security Advisor & Secretary of State. His domestic policy head. Chair of the Joint Chiefs. Two communications directors. His Vice President plus 250 more.

Make your MAGA see this jpeg! ==>

All of them were HIS choices. Whom he called "Great Guys!"... who are now denouncing him as a horror-calamity and lethal stooge of foreign enemies.

 

At minimum, he's a terrible judge of character! (Who fell 'in love' with Kim Jong Un.) 

But don't worry. In Trump II he's promised there will be no adults at all.

Examples: James Mattis, Marine General(ret), Trump’s 1st Defense Secretary: “Donald Trump is the first president in my life who didn't even pretend to try to unite the American people. He tries to divide us.”

Mark Esper, Trump’s 2nd Defense Secretary: “I believe he is a threat to democracy.”

John Kelly, Marine General(ret), Trump’s 2nd White House Chief of Staff: “He often said‘Hitler did good things, too.’”

Ask Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley +Admiral McRaven +250 other officers!  

 Ask nearly all scientists.

Ask counter insurgency experts about “ex” commissar Putin’s long puppet strings.

But Don does have friends!

Here they are!==>

Have your MAGA zoom in and explain this.

== But... but isn't Trump the agent of God? ==

Such a Christian! Though if he ever willingly chose church over golf, no one has seen it. Here's one time he had to show up. And this one image says it all.

There's a hilarious and sad video of him mouthing-along while trying to recite the famous and well-known 23rd Psalm with worshippers and giving up after "He leadeth me.."  Too lazy even to memorize a couple of passages for show, he still after all these years, refuses to name a favorite passage. 

"It's too personal."  Riiiiight.

But then... some evangelicals can see all that! So they switch to the "Cyrus" argument. Like the King of the Medes who freed the people of Judah from Babylon, Trump is a 'righteous gentile!' A pagan who serves God by actions & deeds! 

(How? By destroying America and democracy and serving Moscow? But we'll get to that.)

Huh. Some servant of God. The most opposite-to-Jesus human any of us ever saw typifies every Deadly Sin! (Have your MAGA recite them aloud and NOT see Trump as the archetype!) 

Look, I don't credit the Book of Revelation. (Though all of you should know it! See the comic book version Apocamon; I mean it. You truly need to see what some of your neighbors wish and plan for you!) 

Still, there is a recurring character in that nightmare tome who DT resembles. I'm not talking about the Lamb of God. The character's name starts with "auntie" or "the Anti --" and Trump fits every described characteristic.  To a T.

== Is it the Economy, Stupid? ==

A problem with good times... folks soon take it for granted. Unemployment was the big issue. 

But after clawing our way out of the Covid Recession and Supply Chain inflation (nearly all economists blame Trump for worsening those) the 2021 stimulus bills worked!

Infrastructure - bridges etc. - are being fixed! Unemployment has stayed at the lowest level since the early 60s. We're in the best US economy since WWII.

Inflation? What? Ask your MAGA to step up NOW with wager stakes and bet which two nations have had the LOWEST inflation in the Industrial world for 3 years! 

(Hint, it's the US and Japan.)

 

Then why so grumpy?   Because Fox rants at fools to enjoy sanctimonious grumpiness! It's more fun than accepting the truth... that you are mesmerized by an echo chamber and Nuremberg Rally, with one central goal...

... to hate facts and fact professions & the damn, dry statistics.

But let's make it a wager. Assert the following and demand your MAGAs step up (like men) with cash stakes on the table:

EVERY Democratic Administration was more fiscally responsible regarding debt and deficits than EVERY Republican administration. 

In fact, most Democratic administrations had by far better economic outcomes across the board, for everyone except oligarchs and inheritance brats, who ALWAYS do vastly better under the GOP. Demand wagers!

But this is the biggie. The USA is undergoing the greatest boom in MANUFACTURING since the Second World War.  

That is unambiguous. Democrats did it.

== Climate Change ==

Nothing better illustrates the agenda of the GOP masters than fostering all-out war vs ALL fact using professions, from science, teaching, medicine, law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror.  

"Hate the FBI!" is the most amazing and dangerous in the near term, but the anti-science campaign is core, over the long run.

Dig it. They're not attacking science in order to make $$ by delaying action on climate disaster. It's the reverse. They use climate denialism as one of many tools to attack all scientists and undermine trust in science. 

Why? Oligarchs can't restore 6000 years of insipid feudalism til they castrate all fact professions. But more on that elsewhere.

The crisis over our endangered EARTH is a vast subject! But this posting is about last minute, punchy capsules. So use this: Foxites flee in panic when you mention OCEAN ACIDIFICATION, which is unambiguously killing the seas our children will need and can only be caused by CO2 pollution. How they run from those two words.

Alas, instead of giving credit to the genius meteorologists who now predict hurricane paths within a few miles FIVE DAYS in advance, jibberers yammer: "They cause hurricanes!"

WHO is 'they?'  No, never mind that. You said it when earthquakes hit California. Recognize God's wrath when you feel it...

== Ukraine and NATO and Putin ==

Seriously? Who do you think Ronald Reagan would side with? The barely changed Kremlin and relabeled KGB, run by "ex" commissars who all grew up reciting Leninist catechisms? Who are now re-nationalizing all Russian businesses, crushing dissent and rebuilding the USSR?

Um, can anyone with a trace of fairness in their hearts not root for and support the attacked Ukrainian underdogs? And say "Damn Putin and his fellow tyrants!"

Dig it: NATO is now stronger than ever since 1946! Putin is fighting for his own murderous, richest-man-in-the-world life, desperate to get Trump into the Oval Office. It's his one hope.

LOOK at Trump's pals! At the expressions on their faces. Zoom in.

Can any of your neighbors who support Putin call anyone ELSE a 'commie'?

== Memory Lane ==

And wager NOW over the different death rates of the vaccinated vs. the un-vaccinated.  Death rates are simple. Even the reddest state suppies stats on that. And there's no ambiguity at all. Fox is trying to kill you.

== Immigration ==

But what about immigration? Well, surprise? I'll sorta half give you that one!

It's a vexing problem and the farthest left has not been helpful. They refuse to see how Putin and other tyrants have herded poor refugees into Europe and America, knowing it will push potitics in those countries to the right.  And it has even worked on U.S. Hispanics, who poll overwhelmingly wanting tighter borders.

Look, you may not like facing it, but Putin's strategy here has worked! And if you lefties want the power to do good, YOU are gonna have to prioritize. Compromise.

But this is not a Bill Maher screed aimed at woke-ist betrayals of the only coalition that can save the world. Later.

It is about far-worse MAGA lunacy. And what could be more lunatic than Trump ordering the GOP - last January - to torpedo the Immigration Bill they had just finished negotiating! 

That bill would have majorly increased the Border Patrol, plus internal tracking of refugee claimants and would have built more wall by now than the entire Trump presidency!

Now why would he do that? Simple. Going back generations before Trump & Putin took over the Republican Party, the GOP's master oligarchs loved cheap labor!

You just think about that now.

P.S. If a time comes when Republicans reject the madness and corruption that skyrocketed in the GOP since Dennis 'friend to boys" Hastert, and choose instead to return to political negotiation, moderate dems will race to work out incremental steps to mix pragmatic border security with helping refugees return safely to their improved home countries... with living by the American tradition (and biblical injunction) of kindness to legitimate newcomers.

== Again  - the most-effective single sentence is... ==

"ALL of the honest adults who served under Trump now denounce him."             

Earlier I showed former Trumpists who were admirable to some degree, and now denounce him. Now gaze at some more! Though some of these weren't quite as admirable as the 1st bunch. ==>

Still, these guys at least want the USA to survive! If only because it's where they keep their best stuff. Hypocrites some of them? I prefer the first set! Still, we need all the help...

On the other hand, THIS is a Republican we can all respect! (below):

== So what about fascism? ==

Seriously? This is an issue?

My Dad beat up f--ng Nazis in Chicago in the 1930s, when they marched both for Hitler and for the spectacularly misnamed "America First."  I know f--ng Nazis when I see em! And even if Trump isn't one by strict definition*...

   ... all the current American Nazis think he is! And they love him.

Take it from Doctor Suess!

   

h.

<==And even doctored, you know damned well this image tells truth.

* But of course... he is.

== The endless lies ==

I notoriously demand WAGERS over all the lies! e.g. ANY randomly chosen 5 minute segment of any Trump speech! Put it before a randomly-chosen panel of low-political retired, senior military officers! 

I have a long list (dropped into comments*) of wager challenges. And not one MAGA in ten years has ever had the manly guts or confidence to step up with $$$ atty-escrowed stakes. Not one, ever. Weenie no-cojone cowards.

But let's start with Trump's endless promises to prove Obama was born in Kenya, or the mythical promise of a "Great Health Plan to replace Obamacare! I'll unveil it next week!" And then the next week and the next, for year after year after year... 

...and MAGAs never ask "Um, well?"

Or releasing "My great financials!" Or "I'll proudly release my tax returns when the IRS is done auditing!" Except the audits were a myth!  Or his college transcripts. Or the bone spur xrays. Or the fecal spew of lies during covid.

What we DO have is at least 20 copies of the Honolulu Advertiser from 1962 that folks have found in attics and garages all over Hawaii, with a birth announcement for Barack Obama. But any retraction or shame from ol' Two Scoops? Never.

There's a reason...

<==Declassify the "we fell in love!" notes from Kim! 

Then there's the biggest damn lie of them all...

== And heck, let's give you some more! ==

Do I have an ulterior motive, in dumping upon you this tsunami of jpegs? I mean other than hoping that a few of you will use them to help save the nation and world?

Hey I am over 70 and pushing 'clippings' at the young is what we farts do! ;-0

 But still... I am angry at MAGA crapheads dumping on Tim Walz, a 25 year veteran who trained hundreds of young troops with patience that made him beloved... as with 20 years of high school civics students... and the teams he coached to state championships... and so much more. (The Putin servants searched for ONE former student they could bribe to denounce Walz; even one.) 

A command sergeant major whose shoes you lying bastards aren't fit to...

   Like this good man who served and still does ==>    

(Calm David. You promised 'malice toward none..." Sure, after we save America in this 8th phase of the recurring civil war.)

In contrast to real men... we have this cringing, face-painted carnival barker... zoom in!

The colors are un-altered.

== Miscellaneous Adds! ==

Okay I'll conclude by dumping in a few more. Use whatever you like! MAKE the redeemable/reachable... if you know any... zoom in and see and then snap out of the trance! 

...and a few may even hear the call of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt and even Reagan... realizing they must help rescue the Republican Party from treasonous madness. (LOOK below.)

And remember, Dems ALWAYS do better vs deficits and with almost every economic indicator...

Finally, Here's my biggest effort at supplying political tactics that might have ended this phase of the US Civil War decisively, in 2020, instead of merely getting a Gettysburg - vital(!) but requiring us to keep fighting the same monster.  May this year be Appomattox! Followed by "Malice toward none and charity for all..."

...and an America that leads a consensus-wiser world toward freedom, hope, and the stars.

.........  And in the words of Tiny Tim... God bless us, one and all...

================

================

Oh, I oughta give originator credit lines for every single one of these jpegs!  It's a modern problem. Almost none of the postings I took them from had credits, either!  This is one thing I expect AI to solve and soon.  May they be Machines of Loving Grace.

Betting for - or against our future

Amid yammerings about a "national divorce" and a new-secession*, the sane majority on the Union side of this phase of the 250 year American Civil War is having great difficulty penetrating past Kremlin-basement propaganda to persuade bewitched neighbors to rejoin a Great Experiment in rational thinking, facts and justice.

Some smart folks are trying to figure out why it’s so hard. The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic, by linguistics genius George Lakoff (author of Don't Think of An Elephant) and Elisabeth Wehling is one such effort.

“Voters cast their ballots for what they believe is right, for the things that make moral sense. Yet Democrats have too often failed to use language linking their moral values with their policies. The Little Blue Book demonstrates how to make that connection clearly and forcefully, with hands-on advice for discussing the most pressing issues of our time: the economy, health care, women’s issues, energy and environmental policy, education, food policy, and more.”

My respect for Lakoff is boundless and I quote or cite him frequently in Polemical Judo. But this advice (above) is myopic and self-referential. This approach will only nibble at the edges of the MAGA movement, whose insulated Nuremberg rallies are all about chanted incantations of outrage-at-fantasies, and not appeals to values. (See an example of how deep down the rabbit hole these cult circle-jerks have gone, with almost every paragraph telling – or based upon – an outright lie.)

 If you actually want to chip or chop away at that mad cult, then you are better off using methods I offer in Polemical Judo. 

Where we agree is that the effort is worthwhile! First, because if we can peel just 100,000 more wakened Americans away from today's mad, re-ignited Confederacy, it could collapse their fragile demographics in scores of gerrymandered GOP districts. But also because these are your neighbors and countrymen/women/x, and they deserve your ministry. 

Just look up the phrase: “All Heaven rejoices when…”

But sure, this Little Blue Book is welcome for an entirely different reason. Not to convert MAGAs, but because it could help to maintain the Union coalition! By emphasizing shared values and goals, we might assist Bernie and AOC and Stacey and Liz and DNC Chair Jaime Harrison in their hardest task...

...which is riding herd on the least reliable and most self-indulgent-flakey members of our coalition, preventing a pompously-preening, indignantly impractical far-left from betraying the cause, the way they did, reliably and predictably -- with devastating effects -- in 1980, in 88, in 94, in 2000, in 2010 and again in 2016. 

== Ministering to our neighbors… before the McVeigh Tsunami can build ==

But let's consider just one of my suggested methods... I've been testing it for years and found it to be stunningly, dazzlingly effective. A fact almost as surprising as the near-utter refusal of any Democratic or neutral politician or pundit or citizen to try it, even experimentally!

In Polemical Judo and elsewhere, I’ve pushed hard the notion – proved again and again – that you can corner political fanatics with wagers.  Or rather, by demanding they back up their incantations, their magical chants and rationalizations with cold, hard cash. 

 At one level, it always works. In fact, it is the only thing that ever works with MAGAs. I go into this elsewhere. 

Of course I am not the only one saying this in a general sense. Take the Long Bets site offered by the Long Now Foundation and Stewart Brand and Kevil Kelly, that has for a decade mediated longer term wagers over arguments that can be settled – among adults – by the passage of time. (In an earlier blog I described Kevin’s failure to collect from a famous non-adult!)

Here’s another. A standing offer of (as of 2018) $100,000 of stakes for wagers over climate change that (surprise?) has had no serious takers among the cowardly blowhard denialists. 

“For the fourth year in a row, I am offering a $25,000 climate bet to anyone who thinks he or she is smarter than a climate scientist. The “definition of insanity” meme is as absurd as it is overused. But in fact I don’t expect different results this time. I predict more of the same: 

1. Lack of courage by deniers and conspiracy cranks to accept the bet.

2. Hand-wringing, insults, and excuses by bloggers.

3. Another new global climatological temperature record.

“Most deniers know full well that global warming is real, that it is caused by humans, and that it will continue. Why take a personal risk with actual money when it is easier and less expensive just to continue denying, blogging, and harassing scientists?” 

I hope this endeavor is still active.  I've found that the Confederate 'movement' is driven in large part by a desperate, overcompensating need to express pushy masculinity and that nothing terrifies those preeners more than being challenged to actually step up "like a man" and back up their blowhard assertions with pre-escrowed major wager stakes!

Alas, I also offer a side bet. We’ll get to 2024 without a single pundit or Democratic politician or – (best case) – scientifically-inclined zillionaire realizing how potent – if properly executed – this method could be. 

== Pertinent aside about conspiracy theories ==

As for vast conspiracies, David Robert Grimes has demonstrated that the likelihood of a leak is proportional to the number in on the conspiracy and the passage of time. He approaches the question mathematically here: On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs. It's quite a read. 

But I have an entire chapter dissecting conspiracy theories in ways you never saw before... and it's (you guessed it) in Polemical Judo.

And finally.

== Back to George F. Will… the “worst American.” ==

I admit to polemical excess when I called GFW "The Worst American." My standards were particular... 

That he is clearly not a stupid or misled person, but rather one who is both brilliant and well-trained in the skeptical arts. Moreover, he is fully aware that nearly all of human history was a cesspit of malgovernance by owner-cheater-lords and their inheritance brats... and that delusionally non-sapient oligarchy has been tried endlessly and found valueless, compared to the rare, vivid, fecund, creative and vastly more-just Periclean experiments.

Erudite and educated, he knows well that Marxism was halted in its tracks not by Republican-Confederatism, or by Wall Street scions, but by the Rooseveltean social contract, accomplishing what Marx never imagined possible -- inviting the working class into the bourgeoisie and their most-vigorous children into the best schools and marriages. That experiment has by far the best track record, under any criterion of human success. Including success at generating flat-fair-creative competition and reducing the wastage of talent that Adam Smith despised, above all else.

George Will knows all this... 

...as he knows that the current counter-putsch by world oligarchy has one paramount aim -- to restore the default human condition of deeply-stupid inherited privilege. And hence, Karl Marx is now risen from his deserved dustbin-sepulchre, to shamble once again across every university campus around the world. That feat of resurrection is arguably the only enduring accomplishment of Supply Side 'economics.'

He knows all this. Therefore, alas, it is with open eyes and by deliberate choice that George F. Will spent decades concocting polysyllabic incantations on behalf of an oligarchic world-cabal that he knew, full-well, aims for utter destruction of the civilization and experiment to which GFW owes everything. 

And so, when he saw, at last, what he had wrought, his ensuing denunciations of Confederate/Putinist/Salafist/Scudderite/Trumpite troglodytism and treason were decades late and a 1780 dollar short... and nothing at all like what we need from him, even now.

Is he waiting to see any residual glimmers of sanity flicker on the gone-mad U.S. right? I am sure he will spy some and leap upon them, issuing joyful incantations of "both-sides-ism." And thus evade his one chance at redemption. Alas.

======

* Re: the "national divorce" crap out there... well, I told-you-so. For years now. 

Bill Maher offers a palliative of "toning down the hate a notch." Though he also admits there's no way that

return-to-dialogue will be done by the 25% of the country that's in a hate-drenched psychotic break. I agree

that his prescription would normally be wise, except that it's not how confederates work. Any offer to

"reason together" will be viewed as weakness...

...unless it is couched as strength. And I have repeatedly told you all how to simultaneously offer reasoned discourse

while projecting strength.

"Come, let us check the factual basis for your mad assertions, before panels of senior retired military officers...

with cash money riding on the outcome."

THAT is how you can offer a reasoned, evidence-based negotiation over facts... but in a way that makes you look strong

and confident and that exposes the confederate or oligarch-shill as a yammering blowhard. And a coward, because he will

run away. They always do. And that is always, always and always and always...

...shaming themselves in front of others. And that is a victory. Not the kind we'd like. But the one that we can get.

Oh, one last thing. Maher said that Reds "have all the guns." Wrong. They have MORE guns. But in fact they have

fewer actual trigger fingers. And Maher seems not to know that liberals and minorities have been quietly buying

since 2001. So no. A hot Phase Nine will not be a slam-dunk for reds. Especially after they have spat in the faces

of every single US profession that actually knows stuff. Seriously, guys. How is that supposed to go for you?

Oh, final note: You think Texas can scoop up its marbles and gerrymander-ignore the majority of Texans

and go its own way? Oh, we may allow it! After Dallas-Austin-SA-Houston corridor gets their own secession

plebescite FROM Texas. And the entire Rio Grande basin. Sure. Sell us beef and oil... and watch how quickly

we make those commodities obsolete without your science-hating drag at our ankles. And then, we'll welcome

back counties that wake up and vote and beg to return. Same holds for every sessesh state. It's the deal that's

ACTUALLY plausible. Come on and step up fellahs. And till then, let's bet. No? I thought not.