September 21, 2022

Putin's nukes, blackmail or bluff? Be thankful Trump's not president.

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I made these just for the Wonderful Wednesday news:

Trump's renamed social media platform

click images to enlarge

With at least six legal cases swirling around him, this image seems appropriate:

Main Story Below

To be effective the person being blackmailed has to believe that the blackmailer not only has the goods, but that they are willing to use them. A buff to be effective has to make the person being bluffed so nervous that they are willing to give in because they don't want to risk that the threat isn't a bluff. The fact that Putin, referring to using nukes, said "this is not a bluff" suggests the opposite.

As you all know Putin has called up 300,000 reservists to supposedly use in his attempt to destroy Ukraine and made the very thinly veiled threat to use nuclear weapons. Here's an image of the from page of The Washington Post with the stories below.

Putin calls up reservists amid losses and backs annexation plans

MORE COVERAGE

I feel relief that it is significant that Putin no longer can count on having lapdog Trump in the White House. I wonder who the audience is for this thundering saber rattling. It isn't President Biden and I very much doubt it is President Zelensky. I have the impression that it primarily for home consumption.

I don't think he will have President Zelensky and Ukrainian citizens trembling in fear.

Not only do I strongly doubt Putin would authorize a nuclear attack no matter how limited. It would be figurative and possibly literal suicide for him if this led to an escalation to a nuclear confrontation, or an equally or more destructive retaliation without nuclear weapons on targets in Russia with the West. My hunch is that the West would hold back a nuclear response unless Russia escalated since this could lead incrementally to nuclear Armageddon.

I also have serious doubts whether many of these 300,000 reservists will ever end up on Ukrainian soil. This assumes Russia actually has well-trained reservists to send to the front, or even that he could avoid a revolt within the ranks with soldiers refusing to put their own lives at risk in a battle they are starting to discover they are losing.

I think Putin has taken his strategy from the Trump playbook and totally brainwashed himself into believing that the MAGA movement with the orange delusional messiah as its leader has been all cowboy and no hat because Trump is a weakling who, unlike him, wouldn't have the cojones to even ride a horse let alone do whatever it is he actually did when he was in the KGB.

I wonder who Putin's real enemies not in prison within Russia are. There have been rumblings in the news suggesting that he is losing support among high Russian officials and members of the ruling class. What remains opaque is the extent of dissension among top military leaders, and there is an impenetrable veil over what plots may be in the process of being hatched in the Federal Security Service (the FSB which replaced the KGB).

There could be a coup in the offing. If it was initiated by the military I think Putin might be able to retire to one of his opulent dachas (like this one) but if the FSB decided he could become another Trump exerting power in exile they might decide that terminating his presidency with extreme prejudice was the safer solution.

Putin's self-styled narcissistic imaging was mocked in the British tabloid The Sun:

There is no doubt that Putin played Trump like a fiddle recognizing early on how susceptible to flattery he was:

I wrote the following story and put it on Daily Kos on March 11, 2022 and titled it

Putin's President: The ultimate very used, pre and still ownedex-president sale

Remember the days when used car lots were simply called used car or second-hand car lots because the cars they sold were used? Then it caught on that a better marketing ploy was to de-emphasize the fact that the cars were “used” or second-hand and call them pre-owned as if the people who drove them before didn’t actually use them. When I thought of the idea of a title for my diary today I wanted to find a free image to use of a used car lot sign for my illustration and found the perfect one considering that it had a rocket on it. This image was on the Wikipedia page for “used car” and is from a Library of Congress collection. It is a sign for a used car dealership in Utah in 1981. I added the caricatures of Putin and Trump.

Assuming Trump runs for president again, what are low-information Americans who are not totally brainwashed members of the Trump cult voters going to believe?

Come the run-up to the 2024 election will they believe Trump and those supporting him when they accuse candidate Joe Biden of being owned by the Progressive Wing of the Democratic Party? After all they want you to believe they are dastardly socialists or communists in the mold of Che Guevara, that they are out to confiscate your guns, corrupt our youth with perverted ideas about gender, and teach children that slavery was bad. On the other hand, will they believe the Democrats who will hopefully convey a persuasive argument that Trump was a candidate used and very much owned by Vladimir Putin?

Trump himself is mired in his own delusional malignant narcissism where he has continued to show incredibly poor judgment by praising Putin and refusing to condemn him in no uncertain terms. See: Trump praises Putin for his move into Ukraine, calling it 'genius (YaHoo News)' and Trump defends praise of Putin even as he calls Ukrainian President 'brave' (CNN Feb. 27).

Now with Putin showing himself to be a modern day Hitler it is not too early for the Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans and former Republicans, including of course those in The Lincoln Project, to start a campaign to remind the public of stories like this which include numerous photoshopped images:

Screenshot2022-03-11at6.29.12AM.png — www.dailymail.co.uk/...

… also in the Daily Mail:

How the world's press has mocked Trump for his fawning Putin summit and branded him 'treasonous', 'weak' and an 'autocrat'

Media outlets are mocking Donald Trump over his summit with Russia's Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday
Headlines went as far as calling the US President 'treasonous', 'weak' and labeled him an 'autocrat'
Backlash follows Trump's extraordinary embrace of Putin - a longtime US enemy
White House has struggled to explain why Trump aligned so closely with Putin
Lawmakers in both major parties appeared shocked with Trump's suggestion that he believes Putin's denial of interfering in the 2016 elections

… and from The Guardian:

… and this from the Daily Mirror:

And then there are all the inimitable DonkeyHotey (pronounced Don Quixote) and his caricatures of Trump and Putin which can be used in stories. This one of Putin carrying Trump is the most well known. Below is a caricature used in Paying Russia Back for Election Interference Is an Exercise in Futility story which I hadn’t seen before.

September 20, 2022

God, Guns, Evangelicals, Trumpers, and the Supreme Court

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If you do a Google Image search for God, guns, and Trump this is what you see:

Click images above to enlarge

This story leaped out at me through the pain of a waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in after dental surgery:

"On the eve of the first game, which the Knights won, Kennedy was in Milwaukee being presented with an engraved .22-caliber rifle at an American Legion convention.'

Skip this section if you have no interest in guns.

I couldn't find a report whether the rifle was the kind usually used for target shooting and hunting small game or a tricked out version made to look and function like an assault rifle only with smaller and less lethal anti-person bullets. (Click images to enlarge)

The other some friend and I were discussing the cache of silver coins one had stored in a safe that her late husband collected. She said that they might come in useful for trading should society fall totally apart. I said in fact the better item to hoard would be .22 caliber bullets since they are cheap ($40 for 500). They would be used for hunting small game for food rather than against people (unless it was a last resort). Lord knows, the country is awash in weapons designed just to kill people efficiently.

Back to the article, and the gun quote above...

It is is buried in this article:

Here's yet another example of the Supreme Court predetermining a politically decision and ignoring arguments which would undermine the correctness of their ruling. An excerpt from the article:

The district's lawyers tried to correct the record, to no avail.
"You can't sue them for failing to rehire you if you didn't apply," one lawyer, Mercer Island's Michael Tierney, argued during a lower court session. "The District didn't get an application from him, had four positions to fill and filled them with people who had applied. It didn't fail to rehire him."
The Supreme Court simply ignored this inconvenient fact — along with a host of others. At one point during oral arguments, as a different school district attorney was saying the narrative that had been spun didn't fit with the facts — that the coach's prayers were neither silent nor solitary, nor was he fired — Justice Samuel Alito interrupted him, saying "I know that you want to make this very complicated."
Alito persisted in asking about the coach being fired — six times he said it, to the point that the lawyer finally corrected him. Which is a touchy thing to do with a Supreme Court justice.

The article concludes with these wise word from Justice Elana Kagan showering Chief Justice John Roberts for his defense of the legitimacy of the court.

This past week the Supreme Court justices were hand-wringing in public about why so many people seem to dislike them. The way Chief Justice John Roberts phrased it is that the public is questioning the "legitimacy of the court." He said people shouldn't base their views on whether the court's decisions are popular.
That's fair enough. The rule of law isn't supposed to bend with the winds. But Justice Elena Kagan got much closer to the mark.
"I think judges ... undermine their legitimacy when they don't act so much like courts," she pointedly said this past week. "And when they don't do things that are recognizably law, and when they instead stray into places where it looks like they're an extension of the political process, or where they're imposing their own personal preferences."
Your honors, I submit for the record, the Coach Kennedy case. Exhibit A.

As I look for references to God and guns I found this relevant article from The Trace:

As Midterms Loom, Right Wingers Are Revving Up the Faithful with Talk of Religion and Guns

Extremism experts warn that a new crop of ideologues using voter fraud conspiracy theories and religious appeals are pushing their followers toward armed rebellion.

The Trace which published this article describes itself as the only newsroom devoted to covering web violence.

Michael Voris, the president and founder of St. Michael’s media, Church Militant’s mother company, who moderated the convention described in the article reported on in this story. Here are some of his words:

Voris also hosts a web talk show in which he presents monologues for viewers. In one episode about guns, Voris begins by claiming that Democrats misrepresent religion and gender, and lack a “belief in God,” then transitions to a four-minute rant about how “Democrats and Marxist socialists” are eager to take guns away.
“Whoever has the guns, rules the country,” Voris says. “The forces of the so-called Great Reset have gathered, conspired, and laid out their plan.” The Great Reset was the World Economic Forum’s 2020 response to the global economic hardship brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. It quickly morphed into a viral conspiracy theory that held that “global elites” would use the health crisis to destroy American influence and wealth.
At the end of his message, Voris asserts: “The bad guys hate God, and they hate you having guns for the exact same reason. It’s all about destroying your human dignity.”
But Empsall vehemently rejects that guns and Christianity are tied. “America is awash in guns and individualism, and that’s certainly not in the Bible or the gospel,” he said. “They started with the guns and they brought in the religion, not the other way around.”

I am not an anti-gun liberal snowflake. While I consider hunting as a sport which people justify because they eat the game they shoot I still consider it a needless taking of life where you personally watch the animal die rather than the abstract denial of a typical omnivore who enjoys a good filet mignon. I just can't envision myself having a deer in might sights and deciding to end its life.

I can also see target shooting and working to develop in this as a benign activity that people enjoy, but I draw the line at non-soldiers practicing shooting so they hone their skill at killing people

People like the brothers Trump shooting large game sheerly for the pleasure and watching a tiger, water buffalo, or other majestic creature die, and then posing happily with photos of their kills, I consider to be an exercise of blood lust arising out of psychopathology.

In the interest of self-discloure: I have also carried a handgun as a part of my role as a reserve police officer for 20 years and believe in using firearms for true self-defense. In fact it was writing about this that got me permanently banned from posting on Daily Kos. I didn't save that article so since they took it off-line I re-created it here with a justification for writing it.

The twisted belief of these evangelicals and violence threatening Trump supporters is that in their warped perspective they are convinced that if they use firearms it will be in defense of some perverted idea of liberty.

Hal Brown's Blog - changed to Hal Brown's Stressline