July 8, 2023

There are famous fictional butlers. White House butlers Alonzo Fields and Eugene Allen were real. Now we have Walt Nauta.


By Hal Brown

Do you recognized whose bald pate this is? If you do, you have been following the news about the butler who could contribute consequentially to Trump's legal leap into the abyss.

Update:


Below: some of the most famous butlers in fiction:

Click images to enlarge

While his name may be far less known than butlers in fiction, Alonzo Fields actually served in the White House for twenty-one years under presidents HooverRooseveltTruman and Eisenhower. Of those twenty-one years, twenty were spent as the White House chief butler.


Alonzo Fields wrote a book:


Eugene Allen, raised on a virginia farm, was another White House butler. He worked there for 34 years starting as a pantry man and working his way up. 

A movie was made about him:


Above: When Nauta sported a short cropped but full head of hair.
Perhaps he shaved his head so not to make Tump jealous.

The story of Nauta (Wikipedia article) fascinates me. His name is pronounced NOW-tuh Just like Alonzo Fields and Eugene Allen, Nauta came from a humble background to a job where he was a witness to history. 

Nauta was one of one of six children growing up in Guam. His real first name is Waltine.



Here's a photo of him in uniform from his Facebook page:
Click to enlarge

Also from Facebook, dated Feb. 22, 2022, this is him at Mar-a-Lago:
Click to enlarge

Nauta never got beyond high school. He enlisted in the Navy where he served as a cook, technically as a culinary specialist

We know that after enlisting in 2001 he served in a number of units as a cook. He ended up as a petty officer. According to Trump he retired as a Senior Chief Petty Officer.


Navy petty officers are equivalent to sergeants in the other American armed services.

In 2012 Nauta was assigned to the Presidential Food Service, which is run by the U.S. Navy and manages the White House Mess as part of the White House Military Office.

Somehow he managed to score the cushy Navy job of being selected to be the White House valet under Trump. He then must have ingratiated himself to Trump and ended up as his body man


Until now Reggie Love, President Obama's body man (above), has been the best known. 

How Nauta managed all of this and then end up facing possible imprisionment along with his boss is a tale yet to be told.

As is well known now when Trump left office Nauta followed him to his other residences as a close aide. It is yet to be determined how close he was to him personally. It is possible that he ended up as a confidant and the closest person Trump ever had to a friend.

Currently we have Michael Cohen, who should know of what he speaks, warning Nauta about the consequenses of being a loyal servant to Donald Trump:

Click above to read article and view interview.

What has Nauta's alligence to Trump earned him so far? At minimum, it is being a footnote in the history books. If he decides to tell the absolute truth (there should be no other kind but Trumpworld has alternate definitions) he could pass Michael Cohen in history and end up as another John Dean.
Cohen got his law degree at the decidely unprestigious Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan (when I lived in the state I knew two excellent lawyers who went there) and Dean got his at Georgetown. 

High school graduate Nauta's place in history is already assured. His significance in history is yet to be determined.

Who knows, if he plays this right maybe he can write a book (perhaps with help) or sell rights to his story for a NetFlix or Paramount movie.

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July 7, 2023

There's a Devil emoji for far-right anti-woke warriors, these rightious believers need a God emoji

 


By Hal Brown

This blog was inspired by this article in Media Matters:





Excerpt:

Last year, Trump ally and provocateur Roger Stone even claimed that a “Satanic portal” had opened over the White House after President Joe Biden took office. 

This sort of framing, which posits that political enemies are literal “demons” waging a “spiritual war,” stems largely from a right-wing Christian movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation. For years, the NAR movement has reportedly sought “to take dominion over politics, business and culture in preparation for the end times and the return of Jesus.” Rolling Stone described the core NAR belief in spiritual war in a profile of one of the movement’s leading figures, commentator and self-proclaimed prophet Lance Wallnau:

NAR followers like Wallnau believe that America is specially anointed by God to project Christianity across the globe. And the NAR movement’s followers view foes of their quest as satanic. This is not metaphorical. They hold that the physical world is enveloped by a supernatural dimension, featuring warring angels and demons, and are convinced that demons afflict their enemies on behalf of the devil. The movement holds that these spiritual battles are reflected in earthly politics. As the late NAR founder C. Peter Wagner explained in a striking NPR interview in 2011: “I believe there’s a lot of demonic control over Congress … that needs to be dispersed.”

Fiery rhetoric of a spiritual war coupled with demonization of opponents has created an atmosphere in which violence appears permissible and justifiable to followers. For instance, the violence at the Capitol on January 6 was largely undergirded and inspired by boisterous cries of spiritual warfare from prominent figures on the religious right — including Wallnau — who have conditioned their audiences to consider political violence a legitimate tactic. 


Because there are so many people who not only believe that God is real also believe that the Devil and his demons are real I thought that it was time for God to have His own emoji.

The Devil got his emoji in 2010.

The world got a little more mischievous in 2010 when the Smiling Face With Horns emoji 😈 was approved on Unicode 6.0. It’s commonly called the Devil or Happy Devil emoji.

On most platforms, the Smiling Face With Horns emoji 😈 depicts a purple face with devil horns. Microsoft still features a red-faced devil, as did Google and Samsung until they brought the style of their emoji more in line with Apple’s smiley devil in 2017.

Regardless of style, the emoji is suggestive of a prankster or naughty, naughty person. Reference.

I don't remember an uproar in the evangelical community when the Devil was so honored.  There are over 3,600 emojis, so many that this list page takes a long time to load.  No specific people have an emoji and as far as I can tell the Devil is the only entity that has one.


My hunch is that the Big Guy Down Under was more than pleased that this slipped by fairly unnoticed. After all, the closest emoji Big Guy in the Sky got  to having an emoji depicting him (or Him) is πŸ˜‡ sometimes used with the praying hands, πŸ™ which are often used to illustrate worhiping God.


You can find references to God on Twitter using several emojis. Below are  examples:




There's no emoji specifically for God. There aren't any for Jesus either. There are emoji for various religions, for example ✝, ✝️, ✡, and ☪️.


The two most well-known images of God are Michelangelo's Creation of Adam" from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and "God the Father" by Cima da Conegliano. 





Neither was made into an emoji. The later could be easily made into an emoji.

It could look something like this...


By Hal Brown







July 6, 2023

Yoiks, more Hunter hysteria. Somebody left a dime bag of cocaine in the White House.

 


Above: DEA website showing a small amount of cocaine and DonkeyHotey caricature, modifed by author. 

Is this worth calling it Crackgate? Wait for Jim Jordan to open a House committee investigation.

By Hal Brown

Here's a story that should really have been a major hoo-hum once it turned out that the powder discovered in the White House wasn't some kind of deadly poison. As you can see by clicking here it is all over the news. Call it hunting Hunter hysteria. 



Of course Fox News had a story:


Those who want to turn hapless Hunter Biden into a demonic presidential progeny, a modern day version of Rosemary's Baby (you know who impregnanted Rosemary) will use this opportunity to suggest that the Oval Office is a dope den where Joe and Hunter snort lines of coke together. 

In fact, Hunter Biden's addction was to crack, not cocaine from which it is derived (read about diffrences here), and to alcohol, which isn't to say he never snorted cocaine. This is irrelevent to those who want to hype this story into yet another way to hound Hunter.

Trump jumped all over this:


Does anybody really believe that the COCAINE found in the West Wing of the White House, very close to the Oval Office, is for the use of anyone other than Hunter & Joe Biden. But watch, the Fake News Media will soon start saying that the amount found was “very small,” & it wasn’t really COCAINE, but rather common ground up Aspirin, & the story will vanish. Has Deranged Jack Smith, the crazy, Trump hating Special Prosecutor, been seen in the area of the COCAINE? He looks like a crackhead to me!

I assume the next all cap paranoid rant will accuse Jack Smith, Joe Biden, and Hunter Biden of snorting lines of coke on the Oval Office desk or, since he doesn't know a coke snorter from a crack smoker, that they're doing lines of blow chased by  smoking rock and maybe downing a few speedballs for good measure. Maybe Trump will claim they party down with their pal Cracky the Crackhead...

I don't know how Trump knows what a crackhead looks like or that the term means someone who is addicted to crack cocaine, not powder cocaine, which is usually smoked and not inhaled through the nose (Reference). Perhaps he thinks they all look like Cracky the Crackhead.

According to FanDom: "Cracky the Crackhead or Cracky, is a supporting character throughout the Howeiazy series which I 'd never heard of until now. Cracky usually goes around to people arbitrarily and tries to negotiate deals with them in exchange for compensation or drugs."

DeSantis attempted to respond with his version of humor: “A lot of us have believed the Biden administration has been blowing it on a lot of fronts … I guess it’s a little more literal than even I had thought.” I have to begrudgingly give credit to DeSantis if he was the one who decided to say Biden was "blowing it" using one of the slang words, blow, for cocaine.


Sensible people will conclude that the most likely explanation for this is that someone realized that they had the "dime bag" (see below) on their person and decided it was prudent to get rid of it. The next most likely explanation is that somebody planted it there to cause trouble.


Addendum:

Peruse the articles and you'll come across this in The Guardian:


Related from a year ago, also in The Guardian:

As the pie chart from this website shows, far more people use cocaine than use crack.

Crack and cocaine are different (see website). Crack, like heroin and meth, are known as street drugs while cocaine is often considered a party drug and has a reputation of being used by celebrities and well known people (see list of 15 of them). 

 


Above: DEA website showing a small amount of cocaine and DonkeyHotey caricature, modifed by author. 

Is this worth calling it Crackgate? Wait for Jim Jordan to open a House committee investigation.

By Hal Brown

Here's a story that should really have been a major hoo-hum once it turned out that the powder discovered in the White House wasn't some kind of deadly poison. As you can see by clicking here it is all over the news. Call it Hunter hysteria. 



Of course Fox News had a story:


Those who want to turn hapless Hunter Biden into a demonic presidential progeny, a modern day version of Rosemary's Baby (you know who impregnanted Rosemary) will use this opportunity to suggest that the Oval Office is a dope den where Joe and Hunter snort lines of coke together. 

In fact, Hunter Biden's addction was to crack, not cocaine from which it is derived (read about diffrences here), and to alcohol, which isn't to say he never snorted cocaine. This is irrelevent to those who want to hype this story into yet another way to hound Hunter.

Trump jumped all over this:


Does anybody really believe that the COCAINE found in the West Wing of the White House, very close to the Oval Office, is for the use of anyone other than Hunter & Joe Biden. But watch, the Fake News Media will soon start saying that the amount found was “very small,” & it wasn’t really COCAINE, but rather common ground up Aspirin, & the story will vanish. Has Deranged Jack Smith, the crazy, Trump hating Special Prosecutor, been seen in the area of the COCAINE? He looks like a crackhead to me!

I assume the next all cap paranoid rant will accuse Jack Smith, Joe Biden, and Hunter Biden of snorting lines of coke on the Oval Office desk or, since he doesn't know a coke snorter from a crack smoker, that they're doing lines of blow chased by  smoking rock and maybe downing a few speedballs for good measure. Maybe Trump will claim they party down with their pal Cracky the Crackhead...

I don't know how Trump knows what a crackhead looks like or that the term means someone who is addicted to crack cocaine, not powder cocaine, which is usually smoked and not inhaled through the nose (Reference). Perhaps he thinks they all look like Cracky the Crackhead.

According to FanDom: "Cracky the Crackhead or Cracky, is a supporting character throughout the Howeiazy series which I 'd never heard of until now. Cracky usually goes around to people arbitrarily and tries to negotiate deals with them in exchange for compensation or drugs."

DeSantis attempted to respond with his version of humor: “A lot of us have believed the Biden administration has been blowing it on a lot of fronts … I guess it’s a little more literal than even I had thought.” I have to begrudgingly give credit to DeSantis if he was the one who decided to say Biden was "blowing it" using one of the slang words, blow, for cocaine.


Sensible people will conclude that the most likely explanation for this is that someone realized that they had the "dime bag" (see below) on their person and decided it was prudent to get rid of it. The next most likely explanation is that somebody planted it there to cause trouble.


Addendum:

Peruse the articles and you'll come across this in The Guardian:


Related from a year ago, also in The Guardian:

As the pie chart from this website shows, far more people use cocaine than use crack.

Crack and cocaine are different (see website). Crack, like heroin and meth, are known as street drugs while cocaine is often considered a party drug and has a reputation of being used by celebrities and well known people (see list of 15 of them). 

 


Above: DEA website showing a small amount of cocaine and DonkeyHotey caricature, modifed by author. 

Is this worth calling it Crackgate? Wait for Jim Jordan to open a House committee investigation.

By Hal Brown

Introduction: Substance abuse is a major problem in the United States and treatment programs are sorely both underfunded and unavailable for those who need them the most. Rather than being exoriated or mocked for his previous addiction Hunter Biden 's story should be a cautionary tale. His addiction to both alcohol and crack made it even more diffoicult to overcome. Anyone who finds they have to rely on non-prescribed drugs or alcohol to get through the day should seek help.

Here's a story that should really have been a major hoo-hum once it turned out that the powder discovered in the White House wasn't some kind of deadly poison. As you can see by clicking here it is all over the news. Call it Hunter hysteria. 



Of course Fox News had a story:


Those who want to turn hapless Hunter Biden into a demonic presidential progeny, a modern day version of Rosemary's Baby (you know who impregnanted Rosemary) will use this opportunity to suggest that the Oval Office is a dope den where Joe and Hunter snort lines of coke together. 

In fact, Hunter Biden's addction was to crack, not cocaine from which it is derived (read about diffrences here), and to alcohol, which isn't to say he never snorted cocaine. This is irrelevent to those who want to hype this story into yet another way to hound Hunter.

Trump jumped all over this:


Does anybody really believe that the COCAINE found in the West Wing of the White House, very close to the Oval Office, is for the use of anyone other than Hunter & Joe Biden. But watch, the Fake News Media will soon start saying that the amount found was “very small,” & it wasn’t really COCAINE, but rather common ground up Aspirin, & the story will vanish. Has Deranged Jack Smith, the crazy, Trump hating Special Prosecutor, been seen in the area of the COCAINE? He looks like a crackhead to me!

I assume the next all cap paranoid rant will accuse Jack Smith, Joe Biden, and Hunter Biden of snorting lines of coke on the Oval Office desk or, since he doesn't know a coke snorter from a crack smoker, that they're doing lines of blow chased by  smoking rock and maybe downing a few speedballs for good measure. Maybe Trump will claim they party down with their pal Cracky the Crackhead...

I don't know how Trump knows what a crackhead looks like or that the term means someone who is addicted to crack cocaine, not powder cocaine, which is usually smoked and not inhaled through the nose (Reference). Perhaps he thinks they all look like Cracky the Crackhead.

According to FanDom: "Cracky the Crackhead or Cracky, is a supporting character throughout the Howeiazy series which I 'd never heard of until now. Cracky usually goes around to people arbitrarily and tries to negotiate deals with them in exchange for compensation or drugs."

DeSantis attempted to respond with his version of humor: “A lot of us have believed the Biden administration has been blowing it on a lot of fronts … I guess it’s a little more literal than even I had thought.” I have to begrudgingly give credit to DeSantis if he was the one who decided to say Biden was "blowing it" using one of the slang words, blow, for cocaine.


Sensible people will conclude that the most likely explanation for this is that someone realized that they had the "dime bag" (see below) on their person and decided it was prudent to get rid of it. The next most likely explanation is that somebody planted it there to cause trouble.


Addendum:

Peruse the articles and you'll come across this in The Guardian:


Related from a year ago, also in The Guardian:

As the pie chart from this website shows, far more people use cocaine than use crack.

Crack and cocaine are different (see website). Crack, like heroin and meth, are known as street drugs while cocaine is often considered a party drug and has a reputation of being used by celebrities and well known people (see list of 15 of them). 




In the news today: How far will the Supreme Court go to promote trans ignorance and anti-trans bigotry? By Hal M. Brown, MSW

Above:  Protesters of Kentucky Senate Bill SB150, known as the Transgender Health Bill, cheer on speakers during a rally on the lawn of the ...