Blog Overview (Permanent Top Post)

This blog explores politics from a liberal/left perspective but also deals heavily with conspiracy theories and various unusual topics. Although I started this blog to research 9/11, my most pressing issue of concern now is anthropogenic climate change.

If you have doubts about the science of climate change, this website is a very useful resource to get educated.

I'm happy to have people comment and contribute ideas here. I don't censor comments except in rare cases where there is abuse or private information. Google/Blogger does sometimes censor comments for reasons I don't understand and I have no control over. Lately, I am not able to even find comments that Google/Blogger has blocked. Sorry about that.

I post kind of irregularly in recent years but I try to keep this site active. Feel free to use the search engine on the side for older content. You can read about the history of this blog here.

I rarely ever check my email for this blog (see sidebar for my address). If you need to contact me, the best bet is to leave a comment. If you need to email me, let me know in a comment that you've emailed me.

Thank you for reading.

Recalling the Old Days of Jeff Hill/DJ Shure/Pumpitout

I documented so much weirdness over the years.

Jeff Hill was the guy who managed to get so many incredible phone interviews with dozens of 9/11 witnesses.

Evan Fairbanks

-- This UA175 puffball discrepancy with his footage still is great proof of composited video. 

Carmen Taylor

Eventually Jeff Hill and others shifted away from the no-plane theory. 

We Need to Accept That At Least 70 Million Americans Just Suck

So many times in the last few days, since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were declared the winners of the presidential race, I've heard someone say that it's fine to be happy, but "we have to grapple with the fact that 70 million still voted for Donald Trump despite everything that we know about him. What are we going to do about that?" 

My response is simple: Maybe we just need to accept that at least 70 million Americans are just shitty people. And, frankly, it's on them to change. They're not fucking children. They're adults who made adult decisions. I'm so fucking sick of the infantilization of the Trump voter, the idea that they're these naifs who need to be nurtured into some kind of maturity, that they have fears of the progressive world (even as they benefit from it in many places with expanded Medicaid), that they are uneducated and inundated with bullshit from Fox "news" and its devolved progeny in the nutzoid right-wing media. 

Fuck that. They chose this ideology. They chose what to believe. They decided to be a bunch of scabby pricks. They gotta own that shit. Forgiveness is wasted on those who refuse to believe they need to be forgiven. The more charitable of you might be able to do it, but I'm not fuckin' charitable to these goons and freaks and worms. Donald Trump played 'em like a goddamn fiddle. Hell, he's still playin' them, squeezing them for more cash under the umbrella of his bullshit "voter fraud" lawsuits. Until they wake the fuck up or are woken the fuck up, they need to exist as a warning not to let them get more power than they have and to work like hell to take away their remaining power. 

It's time to tell Trump voters to spend a little time trying to understand Biden voters so they can see why we fucking kicked Trump's ass.

33 of the Day: Joe Biden Wins the Presidency

 

Ultimately, the election isn't even close.

Biden will have won with the biggest vote total and 2nd biggest vote margin in history. Kamala Harris makes history as the first female VP, first woman of color as VP. 

Some various pieces for posterity:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/kamala-harris-vice-president/2020/11/07/5e6cb460-1df2-11eb-90dd-abd0f7086a91_story.html

https://www.vox.com/21545969/joe-biden-2020-election-winner-trump-vote?utm_content=voxdotcom&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=vox.social

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/joe-biden-elected-president/2020/11/07/53ec8726-1f0b-11eb-ba21-f2f001f0554b_story.html

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/joe-biden-campaign-manager-told-the-political-future-and-was-right

Of course the world's biggest douchebag, Donald John Trump, is acting like a spoiled child and not conceding, like most people predicted.

So Trump: -- lost the popular vote massively both times -- only won in 2016 by flipping normally Dem states by barest of margins -- never cracked 50% in approval poll average as POTUS -- was IMPEACHED -- had an absolutely disastrous 1st term: net job loss, 230,000 COVID dead...

-- 2020 lost with those same Dem states flipping back to Dem 

-- 2020 lost 2 other red states (run by GOP governors)

But yeah, sure tell me how he only lost by vote fraud.

Election disinfo

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/us/spanish-language-misinformation-latinos.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-the-problem-when-it-comes-to-disinformation-so-what-now/2020/11/09/e84b2e62-22c2-11eb-a688-5298ad5d580a_story.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/postal-worker-fabricated-ballot-pennsylvania/2020/11/10/99269a7c-2364-11eb-8599-406466ad1b8e_story.html

GOP theft 

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100214528992

Post election

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/11/trumps-election-meltdown-is-most-dangerous-period-of-this-presidency-psychiatrist/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-will-have-his-own-deep-stateand-his-own-resistance?ref=author

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/biden-wins-arizona-trump-maricopa-us-election-b1721629.html 

https://theweek.com/articles/949070/trump-demonic-force-american-politics

Despite the great power and amazing insights and opportunities that the US presidency offers, Donald J. Trump will leave office the same exact stupid, deeply dishonest, horribly corrupt, extremely narcissistic asshole as when he entered office. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Three Bizarre Scenes of Physical Evidence from 9/11

 The plane wheel in the knocked out WTC columns.

The lamp post knocked into the taxi in the Pentagon attack.

The strange, impossible flight 93 hole.

19 years, later, still makes no sense-- either the with official story or with any other good explanation.

Stewart Rhodes of the OathKeepers is a Fascist Trump-Supporting Douchebag Loonball

 

Oath Keepers militia leader Stewart Rhodes said members of his militia will be at polling locations on Election Day to “protect” Trump voters during an appearance on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ program. 

After making that claim, Rhodes made a number of unhinged statements, including saying Oath Keepers would follow directives from President Donald Trump to take members of the “deep state” into custody and “do what we have to do,” that Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act before the election, that Oath Keepers will “be in range” of Washington D.C., to stop a “Benghazi-style” attack on the White House on election night, and that a war will have to be fought against Democrats on the West Coast who are “bought” by the Chinese government. 

Rhodes also hyped the possibility of a second civil war where his “battle-hardened” supporters kill the “street soldiers” and “command and control” of “the radical left.” He later claimed the United States is already in a civil war because “you have sitting politicians who are part of the enemy’s ranks.” 

Disturbingly, Rhodes telegraphed how he will interpret election results, saying that he would consider a win by Democratic nominee Joe Biden illegitimate and evidence the election had been stolen, presaging how he and his militia might react to that outcome. 

Rhodes’ Oath Keepers militia, which is comprised of “former law enforcement officials and military veterans,” is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of the largest radical antigovernment groups in the U.S. today.” 

The Los Angeles Times reported Rhodes has indicated that some Oath Keepers “have signed up as poll watchers, while others plan to monitor the election armed and ‘undercover,’ drawing their weapons if needed.” 

During an October 27 appearance on The Alex Jones Show, Rhodes said members of his militia are going to “stand up and protect people on Election Day” at the polls because opponents of Trump will be supposedly “coercing and threatening” his supporters as part of an effort by Democrats to steal the election.

Previously I had posted about Rhodes' Group in 2009 in a positive light. In retrospect, it was clearly rightwing extremist crap.

False Flag Attack in Minneapolis Black Lives Matter Riots

Feds say Ivan Harrison Hunter helped burn and loot the Third Precinct building as part of a coordinated attack from the far-right Boogaloo Bois group trying, to ignite an American civil war.

MINNEAPOLIS -- A Texas man who says he is affiliated with the Boogaloo Bois anti-government movement and is suspected of opening fire on a Minneapolis police station during a protest in May is facing riot charges, a federal prosecutor announced Friday. 

Video shot on the night of May 28 shows a person later identified as Ivan Harrison Hunter firing 13 rounds from a semiautomatic assault-style rifle on the Third Precinct police station while people believed to be looters were inside. 

U.S. Attorney Erica MacDonald said Friday that she has charged the 26-year-old Hunter, of Boerne, Texas, with traveling across state lines to participate in a riot. 

According to a criminal complaint, Hunter traveled from Texas to Minneapolis in late May to join in protests over George Floyd's death. Floyd, who was Black, died on Memorial Day after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee on his neck for nearly eight minutes. The incident sparked protests against police racism and brutality across the country. 

According to the complaint, Hunter claims to be a member of the Boogaloo Bois, a loosely-connected anti-government group, and he made statements on social media describing what he did in Minneapolis. Police in Austin, Texas, stopped a pickup truck on June 3 in which Hunter was a passenger for multiple traffic violations. Hunter had six loaded magazines for a semiautomatic rifle in a tactical vest he was wearing. Officers also found multiple firearms in the truck. Several days after the stop, federal suspected of opening fire on a Minneapolis police station during a protest in May agents learned of Hunter's online affiliation with Boogaloo Bois member Steven Carrillo. 

Federal prosecutors have charged Carrillo in the death of a federal protective officer in Oakland, California, during a protest over Floyd's death on the same night Hunter allegedly opened fire in Minneapolis. MacDonald said Hunter made his initial court appearance Thursday in San Antonio, Texas. It's unclear if he has an attorney. His case isn't listed in online federal court records from both Minnesota and Texas.

33 of the Day: Election Day 2020

 It's November 3rd-- 11/3 

3 x 11 = 33

Just VOTE!!! Vote the goddamned psychopathic conman and traitor out of office!!!

Vote for Democracy, Not Authoritarianism

Hugely important piece from historian Timothy Snyder:

In normal times, we might regard any vote as ethical. To participate in an election is to dignify oneself as a citizen with a voice, and to express with others the interests and values that guide the future of our land. But these are not normal times. This is clear from the perspective of the candidates. During a normal campaign, both candidates take for granted that they will walk free after the election. One will be in the Oval Office; the other will go home. 

This year is different. One candidate, Donald Trump, knows that, should he not remain in power, he will descend into poverty, go to prison, or both. He can hold the ongoing criminal investigations at bay so long as he is president, but not thereafter. Trump owes hundreds of millions of dollars to his creditors and has no visible means to pay them back. As president he can expect his creditors to wait; as a private citizen he cannot. 

If someone can maintain wealth and freedom only by holding onto power, that person will fight to hold onto power. Behind the ideologies and the propaganda, this is the core history of tyranny: government becomes the bodyguard of a gangster. Modern authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin have much to say about why they must remain in power, but the real issue is that they wish to die wealthy and in their own beds rather than poor and in prison. In authoritarian countries, the anxiety of the tyrant can be allayed by a promise not to prosecute the leader and his family, and to leave their bank accounts in peace. 

Because the rule of law still (more or less) prevails in the United States, no one can offer Trump such a deal. He is therefore in a fight for his life; from his point of view, he needs to spend the rest of it in the White House. His predicament might not be obvious to Americans, but people in authoritarian countries see it right away. 

It is also unusual, in an American presidential campaign, for one of the candidates to admit defeat. Trump has a fine political mind, and he can read polls and the national mood as well as anyone. For months now, he has been signaling that he cannot beat Joe Biden in an election. When he tried to summon the armed forces to aid him in June, it was the gesture of a man who needed unusual forms of help. When he tweeted in July that elections should be delayed, he revealed that he did not think he could win them. Undermining the United States Postal Service, asking his supporters to vote twice, and saying that he will not accept the results: all of these are ways of saying that he expects to lose. His campaign has ignored swing voters, and the Republican National Convention made no attempt to reach the undecided. 

In the first presidential debate, Trump tried, as he has done for months, to delegitimize the election as such. The plan is not to win the popular (or even the electoral) vote, but rather to stay in power in some other way. If we take Trump at his word and begin from the premise that he cannot win the election, then his actions make sense. The plan is not to win the popular (or even the electoral) vote, but rather to stay in power in some other way. 

We don’t even really have to guess about this, since Trump has spelled it out himself: he will declare victory regardless of what happens, expect state governments to act contrary to vote counts, claim fraud from postal ballots, court chaos from white nationalists (and perhaps the Department of Homeland Security), and expect the Supreme Court to install him. In general, the idea behind these scenarios is to create as much chaos as possible, and then fall back upon personal ruthlessness and an artificial state of emergency to stay in power. 

If Trump creates a constitutional crisis while his supporters commit acts of violence, the Supreme Court might be intimidated. In this transition from democracy to authoritarianism, otherwise known as a coup d’état, the actual number of people who vote for Trump matters less than it would in an ordinary election. In this scenario, it matters more how angry they are, and how willing some of them are to endorse extraordinary actions by Trump, or to take such actions themselves. Since he is treating election day as the occasion for a coup, Trump has good reason not to soften his message to reach more voters. In doing so he would risk losing some of the emotion he needs when he tries to stay in power by non-democratic means. He only has to stay within about ten points of Joe Biden to avoid the demoralization that arises when even core supporters realize they have been deceived by their leader and overwhelmed by their fellow citizens at the polls. It is unusual for a plan for a coup d’état to be broadcast so clearly. 

Yet there is a political logic here, one with deep moral implications. By telling Americans in advance that he intends to stay in power regardless of the vote count, Trump is implicating his supporters in the action as it unfolds. He is giving them notice that they are siding with someone who intends to work hard to see that votes are not counted. He is giving them to understand that they are participants in the unravelling of American democracy. They might not want to face this reality squarely, which would be a normal reaction. This is a lesson of modern tyranny: authoritarianism need not be a conscious project of those embraced by it. They need only sleepwalk through the roles assigned to them. When democracy lies in the dust, they will find rationalizations for what they have done, and will support the authoritarian regime that follows, because they are already involved. No argument from emotions or interests can stop that process. The degradation is ethical, and so the question is about ethics. 

What, then, is the moral meaning of a vote for Donald Trump on November 3? To vote for Trump is to traduce the meaning of voting, which is a normal part of the transition to authoritarianism. Since the collective effect of votes for Trump is to create background plausibility for a coup, each vote for Trump is participation in a plot to end the American republic. It is to vote for a future in which voting does not matter. It is a choice by Americans to no longer make choices as Americans. It transforms individuals with interests and values into elements of a spectacle that legitimates an authoritarian regime change. 

If Trump stays in power, elections will continue to take place, but they will be meaningless. Soon we will not bother to speak of fraud, because voting will be a joke. In that dark scenario, the joke is on the Trump voter, since a vote for Trump is a vote for spiritual self-annihilation. If Trump stays in power in 2021, a Trump voter will enjoy the quick hit of “winning,” a spasm of joy that distracts from a profound moral loss. It is no victory to vote for never voting again, to beg for voicelessness. It is submission. 

Joe Biden is not a perfect candidate, but he is a candidate who supports democracy: the American dignity of representing oneself, and the American aspiration to see our values and interests prevail in our government. If our democracy dies, a Biden voter will be able to say to herself that she did the right thing, did what was possible, did not give in. A Biden voter can speak proudly about America’s past as a democracy, will preserve the moral resources to resist authoritarianism, and might at some later point contribute to a resurrection of the republic. 

In a moral sense, a Trump voter has much more to lose than a Biden voter, since the stakes in November are not only about what the candidates would do in office, but about who we will be afterward as individuals. The Trump voter is risking something precious: his or her standing as an American to be counted, as a person to be reckoned with. To vote for Trump is to cast away that standing; it is to become, as the president likes to say, a “sucker” and a “loser.” To vote for Trump is to give away something that rightly belongs to others, their future in a democracy, and to lose something of yourself that you can never recover, the dignity of a citizen of our republic.

Trump is indeed a traitor and murderer, a filthy traitor and a greedy ass bribe-taking criminal.

How This Fascist POTUS Wants to "Win" "Re-Election"

--Having his white supremacist asshole supporters intimidate Democratic voters at the polls

-- Slow down the mail service and interfere with mail balloting

-- challenging the validity of mail-in ballots in swing states in the courts 

-- winning the case in his rigged Supreme Court

--as a fall-back throwing the electoral college into disarray and winning the election by bizarre, sleazy and extraordinary means. 

One way or another, he wants to disenfranchise millions of voters and destroy our democracy. It's sick and he's one sick fuckface.

Trump Is a National Security Threat

 The GOP has totally squandered whatever credibility they had on national security with this heavily compromised psychopath.

Trump's Very Bad, No Good, Horrible, Catastrophic Week

 First, the NYTimes got hold of his taxes, and showed he is a cheat, hardly paid any taxes and is massively in debt.

Second, his debate performance with Joe Biden was a massive trainwreck, shitshow, dumpster fire. It showed off what a complete sociopath this president is. 

Then he got the Coronavirus because he's a fucking dumbass and got sick enough to be taken to Walter Reed Army Hospital.

For a president who bathes in bad news, this was rough week even for him.