I couldn't write this without using the F-word. If you're offended by profanity don't read it. It is about 1960's protesting and protesting Trumpism. By Hal M.Brown

Above is a photo me which was taken last night. Below is me in 1969. I had more hair back then but was just as pissed off then as I am now, and was just as involved in protesting what the goverment was doing. Today I do it mostly on Substack. Then I was one of the leaders of the protest movement at against the Vietnam War at Michgan State, albeit only in the Social Work Department. Michigan State students and faculty were very active in protesting against the war. There were rallies, marches, and teach-ins. After the Kent State Massacre there was a student strike. All of my grad school clesses were held off campus or not at all. Out of five classes I got deferred grades in four of them. MSU was one of the five universities featured in the book “Campus Wars: The Peace Movement At American State Universities in the Vietnam Era (read review).

You can read more what happen at Michigan State here. 

In the 1960’s I subscribed to Paul Krasner’s not particularly slick antiwar and anti-establishment magazine, The Realist. It was printed on newsprint paper.

One isse was sent out with an insert that became infamous becasue of one word. That word was “fuck.”

This is photo of Krasner is from The Realist Archive Project.

From the Archive:

Original "Fuck Communism!" Typography and Design by John Francis Putnam, who also designed The Realist logo. Poster concept was a collaboration with the suggestion for "Fuck" belonging to Putnam, followed by the suggestion for "Communism" belonging to Krassner. Putnam was a regular contributor to The Realist, best known for his MODEST PROPOSALS column. Read a few here, here and here. 

Also Note: The MOTHERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION was a fake organization created by The Realist for use on this poster, and for letterhead for occasional correspondence with parties of differing political opinion that would most likely not communicate with The Realist itself.

The idea of the poster was to mash together two charged themes of the early 1960s, obscenity and anticommunism, but it was obviously Krasner want to offend people by using the then charged word “fuck.” Now even people like Mary Trump use it in their writing. She has finally had it with him so much so that in her recent Substack podcast, The Depravity is the Point, she used the word fuck twice. 

Here’s a bit about Krasner from Wikipedia:

Paul Krassner (April 9, 1932 – July 21, 2019) was an American writer and satirist. He was the founder, editor, and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s as a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies, a term he is credited with coining.

Here’s the part about the poster which Kurt Vonnegut described as

"a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein's e=mc2." Vonnegut explained: "With the Vietnam War going on, and with its critics discounted and scorned by the government and the mass media, Krassner put on sale a red, white and blue poster that said FUCK COMMUNISM. At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable. ... By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn't merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.

Now we have many versions of merchandise saying “Fuck Trump.” This is from Amazon.

I think we need to go beyond saying just “fuck Trump” even though he is so easy to demonize. He has fostered a cult of personality. He wins when we make it all about him. It is about the movement he has unleashed which would still be here if he died tomorrow. We don’t just need to fuck the hell out of Trump, we need to fuck the hell out of Trumpism. If he disappearred tomorrow, we’d still have J.D. Vance, Mike Johnson, and all the wee fascists in Congress, and half the coutry who voted for an autocracy.

I personally think this is too much of a cliche to buy one of these “Fuck Trump” posters to put on my wall. I don’t want his name in my house. I want anyone who comes into my living room to look at this sign and mentally see the word “Trumpism” rather than”Communism.” I want it to be a testament to the protest movement which led to the result we wanted.

Enough about posters:

What this time in our country reminds me of is when protesting against the government ended up making a difference. The Kent State Massacre was a turning point during the Vietnam War. Many supporters of the war found scenes like this to be too much.

One photograph more than any other showed the horror of the war.

Then the most credible voice in the county, Walter Chronkite, said the war was hopeless.

This is the conclusion of his editorial:

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.

On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honourable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.

This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”

I hope I don’t have to wait as long as I did for the end of the war against Trumpism to result in the victory for democracy as I did for the end of the Vietnam War. It is possible that at 81 I won’t live to see Trumpism defeated. I may spend my final years watching in horror along with half the county as Trump turns the United States into a police state.

Addendem:

Now the word “fuck” appears in two pictures in my house.

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I want to thank all of my readers and my Substack subscribers. You can read all of my Substack posts here. If you subscribe you will recieve an email every time I post. Respectful comments are always welcome even if you disagree with me. I generally reply to comments.

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What's wrong with Trump's "Golden Dome" missile defense plan? Everything. By Hal M. Brown

 

I had one takeaway from Trump’s State of the Union address aside from what most everybody else is alarmed and disgusted over. It needs to be addressed. It is Trump’s promising a “Gold Dome” over the country to protect it from attack. You can read the details in this article. Basically it is Ronald Reagans “Star Wars” on steroids.

Trump wants a golden dome over the United States that makes it invulnerable to missile attack. He likened it to Isreal's "Iron Dome" which is used very effectively to shoot down rockets before impact. 

He wants to call his "golden" not, I think, just because ‘Iron Dome’ is a registered trademark of the Israeli defence company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. I would hazard a guess this is because he thinks calling by the name of his favorite metal, the metal he is obsessed with, makes it superior. Forget that gold is hardly a stronger metal than iron. He could have called it “The Steel Dome.”

There is so much wrong here. Aside from the obvious fact that the United States is a far bigger country than Israel which only has to protect itself from missiles and rockets fired from only miles way, if the United States is attacked it will be by ballistic missiles fired from across the globe.

Add to this the question as to which countries would have the capacity to attack us this way. There are only two, Russia and China. Of the two Russia has the most missiles and, most important to consider, some of them are the hypersonic Kh-47M2 Kinzhal. This missile travels at 10 times the speed of sound or Mach 10. This means that currently there is no way to shoot them down.

Let's assume that Russia is still our enemy. This may be a bold assumption since there is growing evidence that Trump has shitcanned our alliance with former allies. Perhaps Russia has become our ally and our former allies have become, if not enemies, countries, as I wrote yesterday, which he doesn’t give a fuck about. 

Say Russia, Russia, Russia is as Trump says, a giant hoax. If Trump isn’t in bed with Putin, we have to make the assumption that Russia is the only country which might threaten us with annihilation. Then a first strike from them, while devastating, would still result in our retaliation from our nuclear triad, and destroy much of Russia.

If it was even possible to build an infallible "golden dome" defense system, dismissing the budget breaking cost which would make all the DOGE cost savings negligible, there is something exponentially worse that this would do. It would start an arms race with Russia which would make the Cold War arms race look like it was a midget standing next to a giant.

Now that I’ve gotten this out of the way, military expert that I am not, just from a common sense point of view, let’s look at where the most likely attack from a foreign power is likey to come from. This ought to be a no-brainer. It is over what in the quaint old days used to be called the “Worldwide Web.” Now we may call it “The Cloud.” Web or Cloud, every country has an infrastructure venerable to what is now called cyber-attack.

If you haven’t heard the news about what Pete “ChristianWarrior” Hegseth has just done, you haven’t been paying attention:

Not only that, but as noted in the AP article, the “Trump administration also has rolled back other efforts at the FBI and other agencies related to countering digital and cyber threats.”

The article also says that “during his Senate confirmation hearing this year, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said America’s rivals have shown that they believe cyberespionage — retrieving sensitive information and disrupting American business and infrastructure — to be an essential weapon of the modern arsenal.” This is the CIA director selected by Donald Trump.

We have two giant questions here. 

One is whether Russia is still our enemy and the greatest threat to our homeand security. By a threat to homeland security I don’t mean a threat from imaginary maruading migrants raping and pillaging their way across the land, but to the homeland being obliterated by a hostile power. How much more real is the threat of a nuclear attack today than it was when the overriding deterrent to a nuclear attack from Russia was mutually assured destruction, or MAD. This aspect of geopolitics is derived from game theory and the Nash equilibrium, although the end of civilization is no game.

The second giant question is whether this “Golden Dome” is really made out of iron pyrite, otherwise known as “fools gold.” Put another way, will it really work as promised? (Actually iron pyrite did have a military use. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was a source of ignition in early firearms.) 

Another way to put it is to quote Shakespeare and remind ourselves that “all that glitters in not gold.”

“The popular form of the expression is a derivative of a line in William Shakespeare's play The Mechcant of Venice, which employs the word "glisters," a 16th-century synonym for "glitters." The line comes from a secondary plot of the play, in the scroll inside the golden casket the puzzle of Portia’s boxes (Act II – Scene VII – Prince of Morocco):”

All that glisters is not gold—
Often have you heard that told.
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold.
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.
Had you been as wise as bold,
Young in limbs, in judgment old,
Your answer had not been inscrolled
Fare you well. Your suit is cold—

Is it worth the cost if it is nothing more than Trump’s self-aggrandizing showmanship and he’s trying to sell the country a pig in a poke? Is it worth the incredible cost if all we will get is something that “glisters” and doesn’t do what it is supposed to do?

Maybe Trump, Pete Hegseth, Dept. of Treasury head Scott Bessett, White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Kevin Hassett and economic advisors you’ve never heard of should get together with Elon Musk and do a little basic arithmetic and measure the cost of the “Golden Dome” against all of the supposed savings from DOGE. If memory serves me, the other night Rachel Maddow said that the personnel cost of federal employees, not counting the military, amounted to 5% of the budget. Musk could fire everyone and Trump still wouldn’t be able to cut the taxes for his billionaire friends.

Note: There are over a dozen links in this Substack. If you want to learn more about the subject with the links just click on them.

I want to thank all of my readers and my Substack subscribers. You can read all of my Substack posts here. If you subscribe you will recieve an email every time I post. Respectful comments are always welcome even if you disagree with me. I generally reply to comments.

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Biggest bully Trump to the free world: "F*ck all of you," By Hal M. Brown

 

I wrote this after reading articles like JD CLASH Trump’s No2 JD Vance denies he claimed UK ‘hasn’t been in a war for 30 years’ after sparking row in the British tabloid “The Sun” and “Australian journalist: 'It’s clear that Trump is an agent of Putin.'“

Trump personally doesn’t care about anyone or anything about himself… well, duh… why do I keep having to write this and trying to find clever ways to say how little he cares. Yesterday I wrote “Donald Trump couldn’t couldn't give a rat's ass about what anyone in England, Europe, or Lower Slobovia for that matter, thinks about his cozy relationship with Putin, his abandoning Ukraine, and his shitcanning. Amercia’s role as leader of the free world.” (There are three links in this sentence.)

Change that sentence to reference what “anyone in the world” and “about anything” and it applies to how little Trump cares about what anybody thinks about what he is doing. All he wants is for people like Zelenskyy to gratify his need for adoration. 

Mary Trump has him pegged accurately as a deeply insecure person. As the one mental health professional who knows him and knew his parents she can’t be accused (like myself and other psychotherapists have been doing) of analyzing him from a distance. Mary, gotta admire her, has finally had it with him so much that in her recent Substack podcast, The Depravity is the Point, used the word fuck twice. This prompted me to use it im my title.

It is important in understanding what drives Donald Trump to realize that you can understand the way he thinks and his behavior by knowing that the insecure child became a sadistic adult bully. From adolescence to adulthood he never actually experienced the feelings he had as a child. He discovered early on that he could deeply bury this feelings by bullying others.

Now, in addition to getting what I think is a visceral satisfaction out of dominating and bullying people who don’t show him the deference he thinks he deserves, in a similar vein he gets a hard-on bullying other countries. 

You don’t have to have any more proof that Trump’s self-image is wrapped up in his feeling like he is the most manly man in the world than to look at his pro wrestling shenanigans and the cartoonish muscle bound super hero depictions of himself which he sold. 

Trump wants to sit on the throne of the phallocentric universe even though he doesn’t know the meaning of the word. He is desperate to dethrone the muscular Vladimir Putin who can ride a horse, actually has a black belt in judo, and has ordered people to be assassinated.

The “I can grab them by the pussy because I’m a star” Trump has no conception that even having this cross his mind, let alone actually assaulting women, proves that he is deeply insecure as a man. 

Musk will be shown the exit if Trump feels threatened by him. Musk has 14 children. Who the hell has 14 children except someone who thinks this proves what a swinging dick they are? He can’t expose himself to prove how manly he is, so he carries his baby on his shoulders. It’s as if he’s saying “look at me, I just made a baby.”

Add up everything Trump has done to show dominance since taking office and the sum is a volcanic ejaculation eruption that makes Kīlauea (the ongoing Halemaʻumaʻu eruption which began on February 25 and had fiery fountains which reached peak heights of around 600 feet) look like a kid’s science fair project. To make matters worse, this is only the beginning.

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I post on BlueSky though the day, You can read my posts here.

What do they think of Trump's cozy relationship with Putin in the other Manchester? By Hal M. Brown

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You know that we have a Manchester in New Hampshire. Fans of Ted Lasso know there's a Manchester in England too.

I was going to unpack everything that was wrong in Trump’s post (above) about why nobody should waste time worrying about Putin. Then I read the first article a web search turned up. It happened to be in the Manchester Evening News (here). 

This was covered in the American media, in Newsweek for example, but it was also reported on in other countries. I came across an article about this in the Manchester Evening News. At first I didn’t think much about this because I assumed it was Manchester, New Hampshire. Then I noticed “MAN UTD” on the top of the page. 

As a fan of the series “Ted Lasso,” I knew this referenced Manchester United, one of the best soccer teams not only in Great Britain but in the world. 

Donald Trump couldn’t couldn't give a rat's ass about what anyone in England, Europe, or Lower Slobovia for that matter, thinks about his cozy relationship with Putin, his abandoning Ukraine, and his shitcanning Amercia’s role as leader of the free world. As I wrote yesterday, Trump only wants revenge for being treated like crap for the previous four years. 

He wants to bask in the warm glow of a sun that shines only on his magnificence. If that level of narcissism was the only psychopatholgy he had it wouldnt be all that bad. He might just be a modern day Caligula.

Unfortunately, it isn’t enough for him to be powerful and to enjoy the trappings and privileges of the presidency. He has to have people cower in fear of him and to bow down to him. It isn’t enough for him to be emperor, he has a driving need to be an evil emperor. When he says “off with their heads” he wants to have the execution televised from the White House lawn.

Trump still believes he has to feign empathy. This may change. Repeatedly he has expressed how it saddens him to know about the death and suffering in Ukraine. He says that he want it to stop. He tries to look and sound sincere. This is all performative. He says the words and people, if they are gullible, just might think he actually feels something. 

Trump never acknowledges that it is Putin who is aggressively targeting civilians and destroying powerplants so people freeze. This because that undermines his narrative of casting Russia as the hero and Ukraine as the villian. If Trump admitted this it would lay bare the lie that he cares about the suffering of Ukranians.

Trump is incapable of experiencing empathy. The only one he ever feels sorry for is himself. The last time this happened was when he had to endure sitting in a hot courtroom during the E. Jean Carroll trial. He’ll think he has to fake it as long as he believes that his grip on absolute power is unassailable. 

Once he believes nobody can ever dethrone him I think he’ll say to himself “fuck putting on the act I’d rather be golfing.”

Addendum:

Trump isn’t particularly good at method acting, but he’s been good enough to convince millions of voters that he cares about them despite not caring about anybody but himself. Perhaps ironically, this is the acting technique developed by a Russian, Konstantin Stanislavski. This seeks to encourage sincere and expressive performances through identifying with, understanding, and experiencing a character's inner motivation and emotions. Actors trying to go beyond getting into the character’s head and get into their hearts. You don’t have to really have empathy to do this well, but it helps. 

Here’s a list of the best American method actors. The one that is generally considered the inspiration for all of them is Marlon Brando.

When I think of what has been happening to America I often flash in my mind to the final scene in “Apocalypse Now” which is simply known as “the horor, the horror” scene. You can view it here.

I must have Brando on my mind since I concluded yesterday’s Substack with this:

I want to thank all of my readers and my Substack subscribers. You can read all of my Substack posts here. If you subscribe you will recieve an email every time I post. Respectful comments are always welcome even if you disagree with me. I generally reply to comments.

I post on BlueSky though the day, You can read my posts here.

For years Trump plotted his revenge as a dish best served cold. Now he is serving it hot. By Hal M. Brown

What if Trump hadn’t lost the election? The term “the big lie” wouldn’t have existed except in books, movies, TV shows, and when one spouse finds out that the other has been having a secret affair for years. Had he won Trump wouldn’t have spent four years convincing a large segment of population that Biden’s winning the election was a big lie.

He wouldn’t have been spending four years seething inside at the utter humiliation of losing and his inciting rage among his cult. Obviously there would have been no assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6th. 

Trump would have reentered office having learned that he had to pick people who were utterly loyal to him since he’d learned that to do otherwise major parts of his agenda would be modified or derailed. Whether these people would have been less extreme and more qualified than those he picked this time is open to speculation, but it is possible. 

Considering that Project 2025 was published in 2023, it wouldn’t have been an actual carefully designed blueprint for turning the government into an autocracy, even though the authors would have been available to advise Trump. 

Musk bought Twitter in 2022 so it is possible he wouldn’t even be in the picture today. 

When it came to winning the election, I wonder what would have happened if the person shooting at him in assassination attempt at Pennsylvania rally had missed completely. There never would have been that bloody ear fist raised photo. That was the best commercial for a product in the history of advertising. It was all the Marlboro Man ads rolled into one. The “Where’s the Beef” ads helped Wendy’s compete with McDonalds. That one photo of Trump without a slogan screamed “the beef is here.” Trump would have won without this, but it sure helped make both him feel invulnerable, and led others to think he was ordained by God to be president. 

A major psychological factor, in fact, the major factor that drives Trump today besides his need to be the greatest and most feared king in history, is his need to exact revenge against all of his enemies. From actual people to nameless immigrants, he relishes being able to make them suffer. 

Not all malignant narcissists are also sadists, but Trump is. He has appointed people who, to varying degrees, have a sadistic streak like Tom Homan and Kash Patel. 

This leads me to my other “what ifs.” Two things happened that shook him to the core but in very different ways. The worst for him was the E. Jean Carroll trial. Day after day he had his freedom taken away and had to sit in a hot courtroom where the only thing he had to be thankful for was that the trial wasn’t televised. There still were unflattering drawings of him from courtroom artists. Donald J. Trump who never was forced to be anywhere he didn’t want to be had to be in that courtroom for days on end. 

The only good thing to come out of that trial for him was the mugshot which ended up on dozens of t-shirts and mechandise. Trump had to be sitting there thinking about becoming president again and getting back at everyone who ever dared to cross the king. He probably thought about having E. Jean Carroll, her lawyer Roberta Kaplan, and Judge Kaplan to be hung in a televised execution on the White House lawn. Instead he spent the years until the election with the resentment festering inside. 

The other thing that happened that caused Trump to have his sense of omnipotence upturned was the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, what he assumed was the king’s impenetrable fortress. The FBI even found sensitive documents in his bedroom. Consider how he must have felt knowing that armed agents were violating his personal domain. 

The meaning of the proverbial phrase “revenge is a dish best served cold” is that taking revenge at a later date is more satisfying that enacting it immediately. Taking revenge later means you have time to premeditate your revenge to perfection instead of acting in haste. The saying means that the longer you wait to take revenge, the more satisfying it is when you do. Now after years of preparing for this day, Trump is able to serve his revenge dishes piping hot. 

Mafia Godfather Don Corleone said, "Revenge is a dish that tastes best when it is cold." We now have a Mafia kingpin running our country. (Reference) 

Since you are reading this on HalBrown.org I encourage you to change and read what I write on my free Substack. You can read all of my Substack posts here. If you subscribe you will recieve an email every time I post. Respectful comments are always welcome even if you disagree with me. If more people do this I won't have to post the same essay in two places.

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