I want to repeat, the Woman’s March committee is launching The People’s March on Washington on Saturday,January 18 from 10 — 3. Go. I have offered to help organize buses from Hartford, Connecticut as was done 4 years ago when I went. You can contact them and organize locally or go to DC. I’m going to DC.
The first story that inspired my book, "Donald's Vanity Tantrums"
First Press Conference of the Incoming President
(The Golden Shower Caper)
“It's a lie... It's fake news... It's a total political witch-hunt.”
Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2017, I had just finished supper and I had tapped the TV zapper to the public television channel just in time to hear, no… No it couldn’t be something about... No it couldn't be. But it was. President-elect Donald Trump in front of a phalanx of American flags in the lobby of Trump Tower.
BuzzFeed was outing Trump's alleged hotel peccadilloes in Moscow and Trump was refusing to let BuzzFeed ask questions at the press conference by repeatedly calling the reports "Fake news. It’s a total political witch-hunt.”
This was the incoming president's first news conference? My attention was naturally aroused. What could possibly have happened? Since uncorroborated news stories are usually not published by the mainstream media, I had to search online for the full story.
BuzzFeed has rapidly become mainstream and is partially owned by NBC Universal. The whispers were that President-elect Trump paid Russian prostitutes in Moscow to urinate on his hotel bed in the president's suite – the same one that President Barack Obama slept in. But was Trump in bed when the alleged peeing occurred? Anyone can hire someone to pee on a bed. But not everyone enjoys lounging underneath a golden shower.
The U.S. director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, denied leaking claims that Russia possessed compromising personal and financial information on Trump. At the same time, Clapper tendered his resignation.
Some call this Trumpian erotica "Pissgate." Getting peed on in the wrong place lowers expectations of the most powerful man on earth.
The suffix "gate" was added to scandals after Richard Nixon’s "Watergate" crisis. Insider knowledge is an advantage in any reelection campaign. So it was with Russian operatives gaining online access to Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Trump has a fascination with gold, whether it's the color or actual gold, or just the word. But Trump is gemaphobic, as he said in an obvious reference to the accusations of the golden shower capers. But urine is an astringent. So why would our incoming president suggest that he would never submit to a “golden shower”?
Emperor Caligula hasn't anything on this president!
Bill, you bad boy! You and I had similar thoughts. See my comment about 200 spots below. I think that's maybe how the Muskrat, Pee Pee le Put and the Dumpster have sealed their Bromance! Bwahahahahahahaha
I can not believe that you, a trained lawyer and judge chooses to hype a known media flack like Jessica Denson who has no legal background and only a relatively light weight undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Central Oklahoma (just one step up from a junior college). She also was a right wing functionary during the first Trump campaign (2016) and when she got fired she parlayed it into a huge lawsuit which she ultimately won.
I don't begrudge her her victory but in my opinion that provides NO reason to use her as some "high level" source for looking at the legal aspects of our elections, any more than you would select me. At least I have a legal education and I provide my bases for my arguments (even if you disagree).
Someone with your background should be ashamed to connect yourself with her drivel which had no justification in the law and I am still shocked that you don't see that. Like it or not there is no legal basis to argue for trying to oust Trump from the Presidency using the at best tenuous theory of the 14th Amendment.
I don't like Trump anymore than you do but I do believe in the absolute supremacy of the constitution as well as the Supreme Court (despite its obvious bias right now) and there is clearly no way that Trump is going to be kept out of the White House.
So you would be better advised to stop wasting your time on specious arguments and start looking at ways we can all resist the coming tsunami.
Actually, his hatred of Obama makes more sense that he would want the bed destroyed by peeing on it.... no more "Obama Slept Here" title... the claim that dump wanted to be peed on "saved" him from the reality of why he really wanted it done .... he is a germaphobe... too bad...
What the hell is wrong with these guys? They all seem to have missing parts, and maybe that's why they try to make up for it by amassing stuff. What a bunch of pervy twerps.
Also: A peaceful march is being organized by Jessica Denson. January 3-5, Washington DC, to call on members of congress to support 14.3 on January 6. Her position has support from major constitutional lawyers. Those who cannot march are urged to write their US Senators and House Rep, calling on them to object to the certification on grounds that Trump is disqualified by the constitution. Nothing in the SCOTUS rulings alters this fact.
Sadly you are simply wrong here. You and others have grasped on to the 14th Amendment argument which is specious at best. Trump had not been adjudicated as an insurrectionist. Until that happens there is no basis for disqualification. I am NOT arguing that he ISN'T an insurrectionist; in fact I believe had the Biden administration not dragged their feet he would have been found guilty of charged offense re: Jan 6 2021, but that never happened and you can't hold someone guilty of that crime until it had been proven in a court of law or declared by Congress via impeachment.
Trump was (rightly or wrongly) not found to have been guilty of the impeachment charges in 2021 and had never been held guilty by any court of those offenses (the Stormy Daniel's case is not relevant as it is a state case and doesn't find him guilty of anything remotely close to insurrection).
So under our Constitution you are innocent until proven guilty and this there is no valid decision holding him accountable. The only other case is the Colorado case to keep him off the ballot and the Supreme Court threw that case out.
So in the end there is no basis for summarily refusing to verify the election. In fact we (Democrats) in 2021 used the notion that the election certification is a purely ministerial act and that the Congress had no power to keep someone who is elected from taking office. That was upheld by the Supreme Court and Biden was inaugurated.
We can't expect to argue out of both sides of our mouth.
Trump was found to have engaged in insurrection against the constitution by the court in Colorado. No ruling since has overturned or disturbed this finding. Trump is an adjudicated insurrectionist:
If you actually read the Supreme Court decision, they made it absolutely clear that a state court has no power to step into this decision for Federal offices.
"This case raises the question whether the States, in addition to Congress, may also enforce Section 3. We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency."
That is the direct wording from the SCOTUS decision overturning the Colorado courts decision to bar Trump. It seems pretty clear to me. State courts have no power to act in Federal elections with respect to the 14th Amendment, Section 3.
I personally wish this were NOT so but I also wish that the Supreme Court hadn't overturned Roe v Wsde but they did and at least for the time being SCOTUS decisions are the law of the land.
SCOTUS ruled only on the ballot question. SCOTUS' ruling did not even touch the finding of insurrection by Colorado. They left that finding in place and nothing in their ruling implies or states otherwise.
The Colorado ruling finding Trump engaged in insurrection makes, Trump disqualified - not from the ballot, but from holding the office. That is plain in 14.3. Only congress can lift that disqualification by a 2/3 majority vote of both houses.
If they fail to lift the disqualification, certifying the vote for him to take office is an unconstitutional act.
Hmm, immigration—so vexing a problem! True MAGA wants no new immigrants, especially nonwhite ones. BUT on their other side you have immigrant Musk, plus Usha Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy, immigrant children … PLUS Trump, the cheater husband of TWO immigrant wives (both ex-Soviet). What to do? What to do?
That's just nonsense. Musk is a citizen. Should he be? I have no idea but they made him one back in 2002 and that decision will stand. I am all in favor of doing anything legal to bring down the Trump oligarchy but illegal things like deportation of citizens is just total nonsense.
And, Musk hired a High-IQ 14 year old, Bangladeshi American, KAIRIAN QUAZI to run Space X's Starlight satellite internet Platform. Kairian graduated high school at Age 10 & a Silicon Valley University at Age 14 in Santa Clara County, CA.
Make that highest IQ percentile 99.9% @thepythonkairian.
Jon, I agree with most of what you've said, including the sense of despair that we've gotten ourselves into this situation. But I disagree with your claim that there is no justification for removing Musk's citizenship. There is, based on his repeated attempts to undermine governmental processes and decision-making. It has been done before. Though I believe it is both legal and possible, I doubt it will happen, because we do not have enough people with the sense and the balls to stand up and do it. But then... that could change.
Elon Musk is an ongoing national security risk and I think all the grownups here might be willing to acknowledge that brown people have been deported for far less
Not only have (mostly brown) people been deported for much less, but I noticed your consistent running up and down thread after thread practically advocating for these treasonweasels after Donald met with Bibi during an active IDF genocide of Gazans - a violation of the Logan Act, just one Merrick Garland failed to prosecute him for - and after Elno broke promises to "employees" and threw them in a truck to canvass for Donald Trump after he refused to tell them what the "job" was
A record number of immigrants have become billionaires in the U.S., with 92 foreign-born individuals accounting for 15% of all American billionaire wealth, totaling $711 billion. (Forbes).
More than 10% of the nation’s billionaires, including the founders of Tesla, Nvidia, PayPal, Google, Calendly and Zoom, are immigrants.
Democracies and Billionaires are mutually incompatible; you have one, or the other, not both.
The problem is in the very existence individuals who can buy 3/4 of congress with petty cash, or who can swing a low information electorate with a million dollar lottery, or who can select and publish the disinfotainment consumed by half the population, etc. These are individuals who, if they can do what they want, they do. And one thing they want is power.
The challenge with immigration is a) if the rate is excessive (v. the historic norm, or needs) or b) if there is inadequate rational selectivity to best serve our needs, or c) if the bureaucracy needed to properly administer that rate of influx is insufficient.
Power concentrations corrupt because the individual begins to feel they are special, and entitled to decide things for others on the basis of their having the power to do so, and not because of the merits of the decision, as might be determined consensually, nor constrained by democratic natural law: one person = one moral agent = one a priori equal vote.
Exactly. To clarify: billionaires are an existential concern for democracy; immigration is merely a concern about management of a useful resource. Night and day.
And probably no one will because he has too much money and if he was to be deported and subsequently pulled out all of his money from the US a major crisis would erupt.
I believe under ouf Constitution Americans are entitled to have MANY different opinions and positions, and can even argue verbally in opposition to the government (just as we are doing now in anticipation of the upcoming Trump "holocaust"). So "acting like an American citizen" is a pretty low bar and certainly I can't point to anything Musk has done (yet) that would violate that criteria. If you can, please state what it is. Thankx!
Sorry last I looked there were no offenses for being dishonest (unless the dishonesty is illegal), having a lack of integrity or hating your country. And people buy off the opposition on both sides.
Of course its not okay. That wasn't the question. The issue, at least as I understood it, was whether Trump needed to adhere to some standard of conduct to avoid legal problems and I was just pointing out that there is nothing that can really be done about him NOT acting like a good citizen (which would probably be the first time), at least not legally. Should we attempt to hold him accountable in some way as citizens? Of course., but I just don't think we can rely on the courts to help us much with that.
Sorry, Jon, I just get really, really, tired of both-sides-ism and rationalizations for not doing stuff that we know is right. My button.
We're honoring a former President, however briefly, who understood dishonesty IS harmful & wrong and committed to the American people to not lie to them... at the same time as we've elected a President to serve, however little, who has no clue or care about the distinction between right and wrong, and whose blatant documented lies to America are in the thousands.
America is facing the starkest moral choices, and it is breaking bad.
In addition to finding the moral courage of a President Carter (or, a typical farmer of his day), enforcing a socially and governmentally correct AND APPARENTLY INCOMPRENSIVELY valuable ethic regarding honesty in public and private life, may require two kinds of legal achievement:
a) (accountability for assaults leveraged by internet algorithms) - Creative lawyers (using big data?) need to find ways to connect the dots between a lie on 'X' and a statistically linked culpable death, as a new class of internet mob crime, and as an indictable murder (for instance), OVER AND OVER, until
b) (accountability for disinfotainment & surveillance capitalism) We must also somehow find the legal experience and moral wisdom to roll back a century or two of 'pragmatic' but ultimately unsustainable amoral precedents in legal practice, like 'buyer [must] beware' (which rewards deception), or that 'free speech' as currently formulated includes the freedom not just to speak one's truth as they see it (original intent) but also the freedom to HARM the public and the nation with millions of AI generated, algorithmically targeted and personalized, 'disinfotainment' ('lies on steroids', if you will) - and this wealth/info/behavioral extraction system is destroying democracy, market economy, and national security as it destroys public access to reliable information for making every type of choice - 'flooding the channel with s**t'.
This was NOT the original intent of the 1st Amendment.
We seem to have reached the position of untenable governance of a commercially divided nation. I posit this is because distinguishing truth, and guarding the integrity of public life, appear to be well beyond what our recent governments have even endeavored. Other western nations have drawn better (& more difficult) lines regarding deception for profit, and harmful speech, and are better for it. Some disappointed Americans are emigrating to find more constructive society.
We KNOW ours is an incorrect moral (socially sustainable) position, but it is one that we have taken eyes wide shut, due to both:
i) (legal pragmatism) the laziness and fear regarding the difficulty of enforcing a law prohibiting anything like 'bearing false witness against one's neighbor', and
ii) (profiteering) the naked opportunism of the kleptocrats, media oligarchs, and doxing propagandists who are happy to have few and weak laws regarding deceit and 'taking', that feeds their extractive wealth and media assaults.
An example of the pervasive harm of deceit, disinfotainment, and self-service (if one needs more than the President-elect) draws on simple observations from a macro econ course at Harvard - about 40 years ago (my 2nd post doc; I'm old, have been around; worked in government, for you on 5 continents), as follows:
The enormous benefits of competitive, free markets, succinctly listed, are not limited to, but include leveraging efficient and effective 'survival of fittest' selection, and distributed local intelligence decision-making, using:
1) competition to improve products, 2) competition to create new products, 3) competition to deliver products where needed, 4) competition to lower prices -both for production, and distribution, 5) informed selections among all these competing options by consumers acting in seemingly reliable and locally expert 'self-interest'.
US Capitalism lays claim to these inevitable marketplace efficiencies and Americans have 'bought this lie, hook, line, and sinker. The opposite is closer to the truth. The lie is not that a market cannot produce these benefits. The lie is that US Capitalists actually want such a free market.
What most Americans are not educated enough to understand is as simple and basic as it is stunning they don't understand - that, to obtain these benefits, there are just 3 simple requirements. One must have:
1) product CHOICES that may differ in meaningful ways,
2) consumers who are sufficiently INFORMED about the product differences to be able to act in their best interests, and
3) consumers who in fact do PURCHASE RATIONALLY, in pursuit of their best interests. None of these need be perfect to have large market benefits; but they all must be substantially present.
But the ugly truth about the (laissez-faire) capitalism practiced in the US, is that it is utterly DEVOTED TO COMPLETELY COMPROMISING EACH of those three pillars of a well-functioning market (which are, again: 1) meaningful product choices, 2) good information about choices, and 3) rational purchasing in best self-interest)
In fact, every self-interested US Corporation (and by US law, corporations ARE self-interested!) DOES THIER BEST to:
1) corner the market or collude on prices with their competition (and to lie well enough to not get caught) - these 'paper-crimes' are called 'price-fixing' and 'monopoly' but are viewed by many as only a 'game' that 'the most clever must lie best to win most', without regard for the externalities of such deception to either our functioning market economy or to our social cohesion & mutual trust (trust is the basis of money; it is fundamental to representation and continuity of financial value),
2) knowingly mislead and misinform the consumer via advertising ('flooding the channel with s**t', as Steve Bannon delicately puts it) so that the consumer has only the info that the seller wants the buyer to have, and ideally, the consumer (the 'mark' in this case) seeks, finds, and virally shares this disinfotainment,
3) prompt or compel the buyers to act on impulse, emotionally and irrationally, in a manipulative and extractive manner often directly OPPOSED to the consumer's best interests (use fear, sex, hunger, addiction, ...)
Consider obesity, addictions, indebtedness, societal conflict, failing US production & markets, corporate bailouts and lack of accountability for white collar crime - and then look at those CEO and other 'executive' salaries. If one could do the math, the guy that was shot in the back perhaps killed hundreds of Americans via refused healthcare coverage, for his salary - but yes, with LOTS OF HELP within his corp., in his industry, in the courts, and in the halls of congress. He was legally killing people; killing him was illegal. Both are morally culpable - almost moral twins.
The CEO was possibly a loving dad, and a remote-control mass murderer at the same time, as we have seen often throughout the history of the Captains of Industry. HE surely didn't see it this way - I have a brilliant narcissist brother who has rationalized his addictions all his life. Loves his kids (& abuses his wives, & lovers, but who's counting?). My brilliant older brother, a self-described 'personal anarchist' (rules for everyone else) once taught me that it was the VERY brightest who were most capable of fooling themselves. HE did NOT die before seriously harming everyone who ever loved him.
But it seems time for the pendulum to swing the other way.
Honesty and Trust need enormously more legal and societal support.
Jimmy Carter was dead right in his infamous 'malaise' speech.
The 'cleverness' of deceit may work for a quarterly report, but not a 30 year plan, or a life. We should require all commerce to subsume all its externalities (carbon tax, waste tax, disinfotainment convictions?) this requires longer timeframes and standardized, more (falsifiable) metrics.
A better understanding & better moral mindfulness is past due.
We should not forget that Musk is not an immigrant (not since 2002) he is a US citizen. There is no valid reason or legal justification to deport him (sadly). We should avoid lame invalid arguments like this or we risk being even more marginalized than we will be under the next administration. There are plenty of good arguments to make to attack Musk's positions but his citizenship (or lack thereof) is not one of them.
I am in the US right now, but I wrote about the AfD right when I got back to the US. As a Brown-skinned German and American I am always looking at which way the wind is blowing. I happen to live in the one state in Germany that does not have any AfD representation. I am glad of that. However, there are AfD members in my city and the leader, whose wife is Turkish which makes him claim he is not a racist, got beaten up. That is not the way to handle AfD. I would like to see the Constitutional Court of Germany outlaw the party, and then the people who joined it will have to go back to the other parties that give them some of what they want, which is to love on Putin, and to pin their problems on immigrants who have Brown skin or practice Islam, or to be told that they can get lots of government support monies without having any economic base because all of the immigrants were gotten rid of. But, Putin's putting his Bots to work in Germany just like he did in the USA, and Musk is bribing people just like he did in the USA, so while I don't see the AfD leading Germany right now, read my article on why, I do think that Musk's company should be taken away from him and requisitioned by the German military, and Musk kicked out.
THIS, immediately, in the USA. "I do think that Musk's company should be taken away from him and requisitioned by the German military, and Musk kicked out."
I absolutely agree with your statement "But, Putin's putting his Bots to work in Germany just like he did in the USA, and Musk is bribing people just like he did in the USA"
You're right, they shouldn't be beaten up. They should be "terminated with extreme prejudice." People used to get medals for terminating Nazis. A tradition we should revive - there and here.
Good question, Susanna. Much of what has been offered in these comments offers further hate and violence. It begins to feel like we are all becoming unhinged.
Without responding to anyone's Comment this morning except your Comment above, any words for ... let's say an American citizen Latina madre of a multi-generational family who some family some targeted for 'deportation' on Day 1?
I know Liz Cheney can take care of herself AND her family.
Any Comment on those who have decided to 'Kiss the Ring' at MAL?
Or orange body parts? Gates too.
How about those that are "donating" bribes ... er, sorry, cash to Trump's Inauguration Fund (not)?
Have you commented in the wrong place? This has nothing to do with what John D. Cooper wrote. His comment was a response to mine, which was a response to one that advocated "terminating with extreme prejudice" individuals with reprehensible politics. The latter was liked (so far) by 28 people, despite the fact that this Substack deals with the law and is titled "Civil Discourse." I'm a little disappointed that it hasn't been taken down, and the author hasn't seen fit to edit it.
I agree, John. Reading many of the comments on this post makes me wish I hadn't bothered to get up this morning. This is unusual on Joyce's substack, but unfortunately common on some others, and, unsurprisingly, many from the same people I see making them on those other substacks. Wish they would take their vitriol elsewhere, or just stuff it. I learn so much from the thoughtful comments I normally see here.
Please consider, sir, how the "unhinging" is incited, and by whom.
Linda in Germany was advocating for requisitioning of companies, and expulsion of Musk from countries in which he himself is a security risk as well as looking to incite violence.
I think we need to be careful as unrest increases to place the blame for that incitement squarely where it belongs, such as in Donald Trump and Elon Musk and their followers (ALL the terrorist instigators this past NYD weekend turned out to be Trump supporters. That should not be overlooked. Propagandists like Trump and Musk and Putin depend on our confusion).
When Angela Merkle responded to a question about the generous policy of allowing in many migrants with “because we have guilt” I thought that she would seed the next ugly far right backlash and guess what has happened? We seem to never learn the lessons of history. No nation accepts massive influx of foreigners. Non. I don’t care what the industrial needs are.
Bill, which thing that I said are you disagreeing with?
The US does accept massive influxes of immigrants and always has even if there have been limitations we still accept massive numbers.I will assume you are not pure Native American all the way back? Most Americans are either immigrants or descendants of one or more. Australia is like that too, and New Zealand. We have countries that are made up of immigrants, and their offspring. Germany wasn't always Germany at one point it was Germanic tribes, so who comes from those? To keep our economy growing we need new people coming. So does Germany, and Italy, and France, and Sweden, all of these countries that are anti-immigrant now.
The anti-immigration wave in White Supremacist countries like Germany and the USA began in the 1980s-1990s according to Prof. Kathleen Belew's book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. After the Oklahoma City bombing there was a gathering in the US in the NW of White Supremacists from around the world. They decided to change their strategy of fighting directly against the government because they did not want to be infiltrated by the FBI. So, their new strategy was to ally with people like White Christian Nationalists who had similar beliefs without the violence, and to tone down their overtly racist rhetoric and replace it with anti-immigration language, and then instead of trying to blow up the government from without, they would run for office, and blow it up from within. Of course, it ends with a race war.
And, since DT has agreed with Musk and Ramaswamy that H1B visas are important for the USA I see us continuing to have a lot of immigration to the USA.
Germany is working on getting more immigrants to come, and unfortunately for the AfD, a lot of those people are going to be Brown skinned, and/or Muslim. I personally think Germany should be offering people in the US refugee status from Trump once he takes power.
Sorry not that I disagree with you (I don’t generally) but simply pointed to what I say was an ugly backlash when Merkle stated her position and that backlash has materialized l
It's hard to define what "massive influx of foreigners" means. Canada accepted large numbers of immigrants relative to its size and yet until recently, there were no major complaints demanding that this end. And not all foreigners are alike. Educated people with fairly moderate politics who understand the need for some assimilation are one thing. And I must stress that there are many people like that who are non-"white." (I know an African man, originally from Uganda, who is just like that.) People who are not well-educated and/or are steeped in violent religious or ethnic hatred and/or enjoy an outdated ideology that involves the imposition of inequalities on others are another thing. And that only describes some foreigners. It is very diverse. But it's important to note that each country's immigration profile is different. Though Musk has it almost all wrong, I think it should be easier for countries to be more selective regarding the kinds of values prospective immigrants have, and I think refugee status should be denied to people who would probably be thrilled to be the ones doing the persecuting if only the situation were different.
But I don’t know why you can’t understand that we lost our country to a madman. Was all those migrants worth? I ask you. I’m less interested in the pros and cons. I wanted to save my country. My country is lost. Now it will be taken over by raping and pillaging of any and all values. Do you get it? I sense you don’t. And that is you prerogative. I see it differently.
Yeah, that's pretty much what happened 400 years ago. Those damn 16th ad 17th century European immigrants took over by raping and pillaging, not just the values, but the very bodies and entire cultures of people in the Americas. I am all for sending them back, except for the ones who have adopted indigenous values. You and Musk are first, Bill.
Come on, Germany, hang in there. You are an example of a nation transcending a dark past into a great power democracy and force for good. Russia will need Germany's example as she heads, hopefully, for decisive defeat in Ukraine. This X-post is facto: stunning numbers. https://x.com/UKikaski/status/1872990283060686878
According to Timothy Snyder Russia is doing terribly as well. North Korean soldiers are just cannon fodder because they have never been in combat before. In the Counteroffensive I read about them being young and malnourished and trained that you never surrender, rather take your own bullet. They don't know about surrender. I really want the EU to come through, and I hope Biden gets to send this last bit of help before DT's next administration. Wondering if he will go back to the White House, or stay at Mar-a-lago.
It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if Trump moves the White House functions to Mar a Lago and moves every classified document as well as anything else he can grab there too.
I had hoped that President Biden would order field training exercises in Western Ukraine between units from the California National Guard and Ukrainian Army. Then Trump would have to pull them out and be forced openly to acknowledge his abandonment of Ukraine.
While I did not find a graph with percentage of population I read that these are the countries with the l highest percentage of immigrants.
"According to available data, countries with a population made up of more than 20% immigrants include: United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Luxembourg, and to a lesser extent, Australia, Canada, and Switzerland; with the UAE having the highest percentage at around 87%."
I found that Switzerland was included when I asked what countries had more than 20% of the population being immigrant. So I asked what percentage of Swiss were immigrant and this is what AI told me.
"About 40% of Switzerland's population has a migration background, and 31.7% of the permanent population is foreign born:
Migration background: This includes immigrants and the Swiss-born children of immigrants.
Foreign born: This is the percentage of the permanent population who were born in another country.
Defining the 25% foreign population in Switzerland - SWI ...
Switzerland has one of the highest percentages of foreigners in Europe. The largest immigrant groups come from Germany, Italy, France, the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Portugal, and Turkey.
In 2021, Switzerland received 123,000 new immigrants, with 76.6% of them benefiting from free mobility. Switzerland has become a popular destination for highly skilled migrants, including from West Africa."
When I look at Germany it tells me this.
"In 2022, immigrants made up about 14.6% of Germany's population, or roughly one-sixth of the total population. However, when considering people with a migration background, the percentage is higher: 28.7% of the population, or 23.8 million people, had a migration background in 2022. This includes people who were born to two people who moved to Germany, or who moved to Germany themselves."
When I look at the US it tells me this.
"In 2023, immigrants made up 14.3% of the U.S. population, which is about 1 in 7 residents. This is a significant increase from 1970, when immigrants made up only 4.7% of the population."
So, US and Germany have a significantly smaller percentage of immigrants living in them than the UAE yet in both countries it is made into a problem, which I don't hear in the UAE. I asked if it was a problem and was told this.
"No, generally speaking, UAE citizens are not significantly upset about the large number of immigrants living there, as the country heavily relies on migrant labor to fuel its economy, and most citizens recognize the positive impact immigration has on their lifestyle and infrastructure; in fact, a majority tend to favor a more open approach to immigration compared to the global average."
So, somehow they understand that they rely heavily on immigrant labor, whereas the US and Germany are not able to make this clear to their citizens. A failing.
Oh, and in case you are wondering who has the lowest percentage of immigrants. This is a list I was given.
"According to available data, countries with the smallest percentage of immigrants include: Madagascar, Myanmar, Cuba, China, Vietnam, and North Korea; these nations generally have a very low immigrant population relative to their total population, with some even reporting less than 0.1% immigrants within their borders."
I think in general the UAE doesn't offer its immigrant population any easy path to citizenship, at least not for non Muslim immigrants. They use immigrants as a substandard workforce in building, farming and other intense labor jobs. On the other hand, the US offers all legal immigrants a path to citizenship via the green card and then actual naturalization. We have no ethnic, nationality or religious restrictions on this, just legal immigration and residency.
I do not say that the UAE has an easier path to citizenship or that their low status workers are not treated badly. I just say that the US treats its low status workers badly and what Trump is proposing is venal and horrid, and nothing to make us feel superior about. It is instead a shameful solution, and I do not agree with any of the people who say that we cannot absorb the number of immigrants we get, I say we do not choose to do it well. Both the US and Germany are countries that are 14% immigrant and that is nothing compared to the UAE 87% so it can be done, and that was in response to someone saying that no one could handle that without everyone getting upset. I just found an example that contradicted it for whatever reasons. We can argue until the cows come home that a greater percentage of low skilled UAE immigrants get treated badly than in the US, but the number of immigrants we have means that probably a greater number of immigrants get treated badly here.
Countries are not obligated to offer citizenship to foreign workers, but many do because it makes coming to their country more attractive. The relative ease of getting citizenship in the US is part of the big draw. If that changes, as is intended by Trump, it may be less of a draw. Currently many Universities are telling their foreign faculty and students to get back to the US before January 20, so that they don't face loss of their visas. Since being in the US is no guarantee that they won't lose their visas that may not be the best route to go.
Just to clarify, personally I am seriously worried about the effect both economically and politically on our whole country if we attempt to deport millions of people whether they are legal immigrants or not. Personally I would favor the elimination of ALL immigration laws here except with respect to people who have committed serious felonies in their home or other countries. I would eliminate all visa restrictions except as noted above and essentially have open borders. As you said i think we could easily absorb far more people into this country than we permit now. This would also eliminate any need to deport anyone except those found guilty of serious crimes (not considering immigration "crimes" as serious ones).
I hope that makes sense. I think we probably basically concur on most major issues here.
I’m almost as tired of reading about Musk as I am Trump. But read, digest, understand, and act we must. Otherwise we may not have the freedom to read or act in the future.
exactly Martin. Well said. I took much longer below, trying to give more meat to your "cut through it" statement. I also try to link in other things happening that are beyond the old apartheid that Elon was Elon's school.
Who died and made Musk the emperor of the world? He’s the little boy who was bullied and now has some power so he wants to take everyone down. We can thank the Supreme Court for what he’s doing to America
We can’t stop him politically but boycott X and don’t buy Tesla’s. And don’t give him government loans to run his businesses. When he asks for money tell him he’s got enough of his own, so use that. I know that’s not how it works but it’s our money and we’re giving him. Enough is enough. This guy is really pissing me off
Yep. He's busy polluting Texas waters and now he wants his own municipality near his SpaceX facility (that pours wastewater into the nearby Gulf without a permit). He's The Menace.
What is also concerning about him is that his company launches our spy and communication satellites and must know how they work and how to locate them. Ukraone is drpendent on his Starlink internet for communications, not a smart move for us or NATO. We need to ditch musk, for security reasons, and revitalize NASA so it's answerable to our country, not a meglomaniac who has no allegiance to ours or any other country. It was uninformed of us to believe that the only issue we needed to pay attention to was saving money and we could simply contract our space program out to "businesses". We've created musk.
So true. And who knows where Musk’s loyalties lie? It’s certainly not to the US which made him wealthy beyond anything he ever imagined. Having grown up someplace else he doesn’t have the history or values this country raised us on. His thinking on what this country should be is not understood or needed from a guy like him
His loyalties lie with: very very rich, very intelligent (in terms of IQ, yes even the new definition), Men & Women & Diverse, of any race, who believe that their "elite culture" should be separate from ours. They want to build that Space station where only others like them are allowed to live. The rest of us toil for them as serfs in our polluted world. It's not racism. It's Identitarianism. (don't bother looking it up in the regular sources, it's a quite clandestine ideology re-packaged in France. It probably began with Oswald Spengler, a philosopher and Mathematician, in Weimar Germany almost a century ago.
Read Anne Applebaum and/or listen to what she is saying every day. It's not that someone died. It's that the Greedy Oligarchs want more, yes money but also the power to keep that money and get more.. Muskrat said it not long ago: " I'm not the richest person in the world. Putin is! Besides I couldn't afford my own armies." YET, added by moi.
I literally "saw" Hitler when the orange sadist descended on that golden escalator on June 16, 2015. I have lived for almost 10 years with a horrible feeling of doom. The coming months will tell whether or not it's too late to get out.
I wonder what in the heck he is thinking these days. Does the orange sadist ever even speak with him? Seems like all of his energy is focused on the muskrat. It must feel weird.
It's "Muskrat love..." KD. The stinky Rat has given him a new ideology. Paraphrasing: "I'm an Identitarian, not a Racist, that's fake news. Some blacks are my best friends, they know not to send their kids over to play with mine. They like their food, I like my nuggets. It's cultural, you idiots! Lets keep them apart, remigrate them if they don't like it, don't let their culture spoil ours."
True, he has a different disease. It's called identitarianism, or in South Africa it's called Apartheid. I also think Vivek suffers from the same disease. I paraphrase him: "It's cultural, I don't want my kids mixing with your kids. I'm not a rascist, I just want my kids to grow up smarter than you are teaching your American kids". "Please keep them away (apart) from my kids.
Sadly, if you step back from that particular person and his motivations, it's true that there is a "dumbing down" or "Idiocracy" problem with America. Some segments of MAGA illustrate that problem. Carl Sagan's predictions were correct.
The lack of critical thinking is a scourge on American progress. "In a world where truth is blurred, ethics are lost, and intellect is rare, the marketplace of ideas falters." He didn't say that, I did, but he did say that the "inability to distinguish between truth and what feels good" will lead to a susceptibility to misinformation, and here we are! I agree with you, and you raise an interesting thought: Am I guilty of identitarianism in the selection of my culture too? My circle may not be very very rich, but there is no dearth of critical thinkers, truth seekers, 1%ers, do gooders. I have never suffered from hunger with any of my "culture".
I think he will use Musk to some degree but when he doesn't like what Musk is saying, or has a falling out, things will change. The fact is that Trump likes laissez-faire capitalism in which the more someone "invests", the easier it should be for them to do business without any kind of restrictions or oversight. So Musk fits in with his vision. Doesn't hurt that he is a racist too. Still, there will be infighting between the different factions among the Rethuglican Party -- some worship wealth whereas some want prices down and are concerned about working-class matters.
Italy passed a law in1992 allowing anyone who has grandparents born in Italy to apply for citizenship. I’m applying. My grandparents on my mother’s side were born in Sicily.
So does Germany, I just like being an American. I may not like it in 4 years, but I'll be appropriately proud of our sticking to the experiment even though there were many violations throughout our history.
Shanghai also was a refuge for Jews. 20 to 30 thousand Jews fled to Shanghai where they didn't need visas or other forms of permits. Interestingly, the Japanese, who controlled China at that time, couldn't understand the Nazi hatred of Jews and wouldn't send them back to Europe. In Europe, the government of Bulgaria, where the Jewish population numbered about 50 thousand, also refused to hand over their Jews.
That might change at some point. Also, sometimes I wonder if certain large countries could decide to create "autonomous regions" or entirely new countries that large numbers of migrants could move to, based on certain development patterns designed to include the right kind of people arrive at the right time to set things up.
I have no idea what The Muskrat’s relationship is with Peter Thiel, but he’s certainly proof closer to home that being gay doesn’t prevent you from being a right wing bigoted oligarch, I mean techbro.
Sioux, they are both identitarians...read anything from any of these folks Yarwin, Höcke, Oswald Spengler, Saummeur, Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Guillaume Faye and Renaud Camus, Carl Schmitt, Martin Sellner. The Tech Bros are particular to Yarwin because he re-packaged Oswald's elitism ideology for the American Tech market. Especially Thiel, who can read both. Alex Weidel the leader of the German AfD is a Gay woman, her wife is a brown skinned Sri Lankan Swiss. They don't care about race, sexual preference, nationality...they are "ABOVE" all that. Just don't mix my elitist culture with your mediocrity...as per Vivek, yesterday!
A very dangerous development, indeed. Sioux and Joyce, you gave us a very good account of an aspect of the struggle in Germany and in the EU. The movement to the right in the EU was led by identitarian ideology (it is different from identity ideology). Which explains much of the AfD's strong appeal to intellectuals early on (few really understand what identitarian means and it is/was perverted relatively easily by the Fascists and Neo-Nazi's). In concept it is NOT a racially hierarchical ideology but rather a rejection of multiculturalism. "Each country in the EU should maintain its historical culture, and not coalesce into a "Melting pot" Europe. Migration at the levels you have described, of course, greatly disturb identitarian goals. By the way, you will not find much info on identitarian ideology in the usual sources on the internet etc. because the Identirary movement across the EU is clandestine. They do not participate in elections, they are somewhat under the normal radar screen). In the most recent "Wannsee Conference". Not the Nazi one in Jan, 1942, but the AfD event held in Berlin in 2023. Yup, they picked that spot in Berlin on purpose. The Identitarian leadership was spirited in secretly (the leaders are prohibited from entering Germany and one is living in Austria) to help the AfD work through their policy on "re-Migration" and "Blood Contamination". Yup, so the ideology of these people (which "started" in France, or was re-packaged there) are similar to the American Ku Klux Klan of the EU. Always present at Neo-Nazi and Right Wing demos; Never present in the poles; often very violent; outlawed in most EU states. Why do I bore you with this? Sorry if I am, I'll come to the point right now.
Well , Elon Musk, of course. Identitarian is really nothing other than "Apartheid" re-packaged by a couple of French guys. Oh, and where is Elon Muskrat from? You have it!... and if you delve deeper into the ideology, and why he (a supposedly "smart" guy) is part of that team, you can really see where he is heading. Racial Separation, is only ) a slight shuffle to the right and you have "Racial/Cultural Superiority (although the original identitarians deny it. Oh-Oh!
So, Elon is also usurping the right to be the "Oligarch of Germany", since there isn't a person (in his right mind) with that kind of wealth who will take on that position. That position is still vacant. Höcke tried, but he is already vilified by many in pacifist Western Germany, and is tied up in court every time he raises his right arm, and he doesn't have the cash. The AfD is right now losing voters to the BSW (A new far left, Moskau loving party named after its leader Bündniss Sahra Wagenknecht). What Höcke does have, is the New Provinces (former GDR). With a remainder population that can't come to grips with the freedoms of Capitalism and Democracy. They yearn for the days of "Planned Economy" and to be told what to do all day long. He also has the Neo-Nazi thuggery which has found a fertile turf there (in Thüringen) to brutally dominate in the New Provinces (Those that object are severely punished first, then killed if they persist). The German centrist parties made the mistake to leave "those crazy people" out of their calculations and attention since the 90's., thereby leaving a void for the AfD and others.
With the Federal election coming up, the timing for Elon's appearance "on the scene" is perfect. Just as in our recent US election he can maybe move voters over to the AfD because the German populace certainly admires a successful "Tech Bro". He could help to put the AfD and its more radical sister parties over the 20% hurdle it is facing in the coming elections. That would be dangerous. For those of you who know all this, I apologize. I wanted to add some further insight to what is going on here in Europe. I said in yesterday's comment to Apache (another commenter), it is going to get rough here, and Putin is financing it all. I wonder what Muskrat and Pee Pee le Put had so much to talk about? Hmmm let me see...maybe the Muskrat really really needs to pee on some Russian Whores...nah, he can get those in the States. Hmmmm....musing
Bruce, I seriously think that it's important we all understand this stuff. I really think you should write a Substack about it. I noticed that you only have six subscribers. If you write about this stuff you will get a lot more. If you feel safe doing this, of course.
Hey Paula, I appreciate the implied support, but I am not a writer. I am not in the least interested in getting subscribers. If people here read my comments, that's enough for me. Maybe one of us can write. It would take too much of my time, and I am focused on other things. I hope a real writer takes up these thoughts and does what you suggest. I asked Tim Snyder to write a book about it.
Stupid question time: where is all this coming from? Is it the culmination of fifty years of right-wing manipulation, which includes an assault on education and growing wealth inequality? The result of civil wars around the world creating refugees? A warping of digital technology and the riches it's provided for a few lucky men? Climate stress? Overpopulation? A right-wing takeover of the media? The normalization of greed due to people like Reagan and Thatcher? The fall of the Soviet Union? Social media? Something else, such as the passing of generations perhaps? I ask this because it all seems to have come on so fast and it's all so radically different from the accepted values of the last 70 years.
A combination. Decades ago, folks had three network choices for the nightly news. It didn’t matter if you watched CBS with Walter Cronkite or NBC with David Brinkley/Chet Huntley.
Today, millions watch Fox and get seduced by rightwing propaganda. So they will believe the stolen election nonsense and mob the Capitol
On January 6th; they will believe the Biden bribery nonsense because Fox ran with it some 2,600 times. Etc etc
The country is polarized because millions embrace propaganda
That makes sense. And of course all the guardrails have come off that would prevent them from getting away with all that lying. Although I have to ask how that could possibly have happened. I guess by chipping away at the laws and regulations that hold society together.
BTW, your mentioning Cronkite etc. makes me smile. I miss a lot about that time, although there was a lot about it that wasn't good.
Abraham Lincoln warned the way of the school room in one generation will become the way of the next government. Take a look at WhiteChalkCrime.com that blows the whistle on our schools and think about running for school boards on a save democracy platform and take control of our schools so our next government has a chance. Our schools took democracy down. They can resurrect it if decent people take control of them.
You know what's really powerful is parents and older siblings making some time to just talk about the news to their children/ younger siblings. Kids then pay attention to further developments they hear about on the news and share their own ideas about what's going to happen next. It is something they can participate in. There are opportunities when they ride along while you're doing errands or traveling to visit relatives, etc. We learned so much from the discussions my parents had with each other (one was Republican, the other was a very liberal Dem) in which we could ask questions and share our thoughts, too. Parents are still important people to their kids.
That’s needed now more than ever. I can’t even imagine a kid processing Trump if he was raised right.
That being said one of the points I make in my recent memoir about my teaching experience is I had so much power in the classroom. I got my students totally hooked on learning and respecting me. It was magical. My kids at home - forget it. Night and day.
Teachers that are good are gifted with the ability to influence. When they got rid of teachers like me children lost a lot.
People blame social media but I think good teachers keep students balanced in spite of other forces. Children need to be influenced outside the home. Gifted children more so. That’s why good schools are so important - why I dedicated my life to exposing what’s going on. I just don’t think parents can do what teachers can do. I know having done both.
The relationship is entirely different snd kids are programmed to not listen to parents to the extent they can. But they welcome mentoring from teachers. That’s why they can make such a difference.
I have no doubt we’ve raised a couple of generations of poorly influenced children who’ve grown up not able to process that a con man will con them.
Yes, yes, yes!! I totally agree. I have your book--just haven't started it yet. I do have a passion for education but I don't have kids and I live in a reddish community. I'm not sure what to do in that case. I do have two step-granddaughters who live in the UK. One is a baby but the other is an amazing, smart, outgoing eleven-year-old who is being raised right by my stepdaughter. Be that as it may, I'm not sure how to contribute. I'm too old to get a job. I used to be a librarian, among other things, although I worked at corporations for most of that career rather than in public libraries. I must read your book, Karen. Maybe it will help. Education rocks!!
Nothing lasts forever, Gary. This is a very Buddhist way of thinking. We have to be open to change. (For the record, I am not a Buddhist but I find Buddhism compelling.) Of course how change manifests itself is the issue. And I don't have any answers here. All I know is that the hate has to stop.
I am not optimistic (and I’m a small town idealist)
Truth and honesty form the cornerstone of any relationship. We now live in a world where 40 percent or so reject truth, fact, reality, etc.
I commute each month between where I work in Austin, Texas and a small town in Michigan where I grew up. It’s a church-going town (formed in 1845 by German Lutherans, ostensibly to bring Christianity to Native American tribes. The parochial school enrollment was triple that of the public school when I was growing up.)
It’s a 70 percent Trump town. Trump has boasted how much he loves money. Scripture informs us the love of money is the root of all evil. But folks here will embrace evil instead of rejecting and renouncing evil - if it comes wrapped with an “R”
Christians are reminded about the importance of treating “the least of these” as they would treat Christ. But the Trump evangelical crowd cheered and applauded when he separated thousands of young and terrified children from their terrified and desperate parents. (While Jesus wept)
No, it isn't, and I don't have any particular insights into how to do it. I try to be nice and friendly to people I see. Whether that makes any difference I don't know.
I miss those times, too, Paula. You're right, though, because back then we were fighting institutionalized racism. This trend will also pass but it does make you wonder what the destination will look like.
I was thinking about Walter Cronkite after reading these comments last night--about him and the fifties, sixties, and seventies. It all seems like a dream now. But there were rules and expectations and most people accepted and abided by them. Now it's all chaos. I suppose our ancestors had to deal with chaos as well and those few decades were anomalous. But order *is* possible. We just have to figure out how to restore it. (And I don't mean by installing dictators.)
Paula, perhaps that is how your life felt in those decades, but it wasn't like that for everyone. The "rules and espectations" were for white middle class people. My family had a different experience, as shortly after my parents finally were able to buy a small house, my father became ill and though he kept trying to work, eventually couldn't.
Eventually my mom (who hadn't worked since before WW2) had to figure out a way to support our family while medical bills accrued. We almost lost the house and it was only help from family that kept us going. We got lucky: mom was determined and creative and made her job into something that kept us above water. But I couldn't start college until years later, and worked my way through because by then the scholarships were aged out.
And I remember as a teen that it was common for older people to refer to us as "juveniles", meaning juvenile deliquents, as if the two were equivalent. I think is was a kind of envy that we had the flexibility in life they didn't growing up and thought we shouldn't either. I knew kids who actually were sent to juvie because of the way the community looked at them.
We were mostly white looking, though we're mixed race and culture, so we didn't experience the limitations and humiliations that obviously black and brown people did, or the very poor.
Yeah there was order for some, but it was order on the backs of people who didn't live in the mainstream. What we are now has its roots in those decades, and even before then. I have no desire to return to it. Other countries went through worse trials in the Wars and the depression, but emerged determined to create better civilizations from what they learned. We chose not to, though some overtures were made in that direction. We still can. But not by going back, because it isn't worth going back to. We have to go forward, and join the other nations who did so decades ago.
I completely understand, Annie. There was a lot that was wrong then. I tried to say that. Maybe I wasn't clear. But yes, I was lucky in many ways. Despite the fact that I had terrible parents, I was comfortable, at least physically. It could have been much worse.
Much much bigger than you can imagine, Paula. Anne Applebaum starts to put dimensions to it, but it is even much bigger than the Autocracy. See my comments on Identitarianism below, and you start to get the bigger picture. Although I'm certainly not sure that I see it all yet either. It's been about 100 years exactly in building...and it's global.
US taxpayers are subsidizing this man Musk, and it needs to stop. He can find subsidy from elsewhere, or figure out how to own his industries on his own, if he wants to live as a Nazi. The USA federal government should demand payment, or nationalize the companies he thinks he owns. Find honest, skilled people to manage them for fair profit and the good of the country. Enough of this disgraceful charade, Elon and mother Maye.
I couldn’t agree more! Elon Musk’s goal is to bleed the US taxpayers dry, laughing all the way to the bank. We are being used and abused by this con man. He has no business getting subsidies or inserting himself in our government or politics. Stop the steal, and let him take his business elsewhere, maybe South Africa? Do some good in his homeland. Speaking of which, what’s Musk’s hysteria about immigration? The irony is that he is an immigrant. So in the true fashion of the right wingers, he needs to go back where he came from.
The whole privitization binge needs to stop. It creates Muskʻs power and the power of other feckless billionaires. Iʻd rather not get to Mars than have to live under the thumb of someone as odious as Musk.
President Musk has been lying all along about just about everything. We shouldn’t be surprised that an Afrikkaner has the thoughts expressed in the German newspaper editorial.
It’s said that he lied about his status when he applied for his green card. If we had an aggressive DOJ something would have been done already. We know the incoming Administration is not going to do anything.
Keep in mind that Musk did not found Tesla. Tesla Motors was founded as an electric carmaker by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. Elon Musk, co-founder of Paypal, was an early investor in Tesla and board member, before taking over as CEO. So most of the initial innovations are not his.
Thiel and Musk both made their vast wealth through a modern form of extortion. Payola…sorry…Paypal, is simply a vast financial racket that takes a cut off the top of others economic transactions. Neither man is a creative entrepreneur. They can buy both. And they do. Take away their ill gotten gains and they would be unemployable.
Great wealth acts like a magnifying glass upon the character of any individual. By their malicious conflict engendering and life destroying deeds neither man seems to have much of one 🐈⬛
Fun fact - not all Teslas are made in the USA. Many are made in Shanghai. I doubt that any of the tech bro innovators prefer to have factories in the USA because workers here have (or should have) some expectation of a living wage and a few basic protections. H-IB visa holders can be booted out by the companies for whom they work at the drop of a hat so they are similar to indentured servants. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2024/12/12/tesla-emerges-among-top-employers-of-h-1b-visa-holders/
Tesla’s biggest plant is in China. He is building a battery plant right next to it. He’s the one who wants the US to take Greenland. It is mineral rich in the minerals he needs for his Teslas.
'In May, the AfD was expelled from a pan-European parliamentary group of populist far-right parties after a string of controversies, including a comment by the senior AfD figure that the Nazi SS were “not all criminals”.
'The ID group, which includes France’s far-right National Rally, Italy’s Lega, Austria’s Freedom party, Geert Wilders’ Dutch Freedom party and Vlaams Belang in Belgium, said it “no longer want[ed] to be associated” with such incidents.'
Alice Weidel, the head of the AfD, wished Musk and Trump a happy Christmas and “all the best for the upcoming tenure”.
Watch for possible political developments with far right extremists in Northern Ireland. Whether it is from within loyalist British Unionism or Opus Dei Catholic British Unionism, both the British and Irish governments political neglect of this colony since 2007 has allowed for a vast growth of young disenfranchised far right male white supremacists to flourish on the ground. Much of this is being led by ex soldiers of the post 2001 wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Many came home to find nothing but unemployment and social exclusion and being sidelined by a technocracy rising to great wealth off their sacrifice.
The only way things won't go quite badly is if (a) there is some kind of pushback within the right wing itself and (b) military leadership publicly and loudly expresses support for a centrist interpretation of the Constitution and proclaims that the identitarian policies of abuse are unwelcome and wrong. Now, how badly will things go? It's very hard to tell. Certainly the fact that the US House of Representatives is evenly divided could help.
So now we have Trump AND a side-kick (not elected) who spread disinformation about whatever pops up on the radar. Musk’s response to very direct correction of his misunderstanding of the the German political party is typical - deny, deny, deny. Two liars, attached at the hip.
It is still possible for the "correct information" side to push back to some degree, and it needs to do so very visibly, in the faces and in the places where wrongness has most purchase.
I am grateful that the EU journalists association officially left X. I am in the US right now and a friend sent me an article about Die Welt, but since neither she nor I subscribe to it, I could not read the article.
Read your piece, Linda. Very well stated and researched. Unfortunately, this is how Nazism started, nice and slow. At least Germans know their horrendous history and the LBTQ+ community has reestablished itself there. I am always astonished how gays can be attracted to these campaigns, even in our own country, but here we are.
Thank you Marlene. Alice Weidel claims she does not want to discuss her sexuality, and says it and her personal life should be irrelevent. I would say she lives on a river in Egypt. Da Nile. Hocke is creepy too, and won in the state my maternal grandmother was born in. So, I visited her village after the wall came down and it was traumatic because my relatives there were like their souls had been sucked out of them. That is life in a fascist state for so many.
In any case, the AfD and others are selling snake medicine to their followers. All of my American friends in my city in Germany and I, also hate the Bundnis Sarah Wagenknecht BSW party. She broke off from Die Linke (The Left) to form her own party. Where she differs from the AfD is very little as far as I can see, but because she comes from the Left, which is not anti-immigrants, but is pro-Putin in this anti-imperialist sort of way, she is treated like she is more mainstream. She is proPutin and anti-immigrant, so how is she different? Still, I appreciate that she takes votes from both the Left and the AfD, and in that way she is useful.
I am working on an article about the upcoming German election, but have taken a break from writing articles, which I just started, now that I am in the US and spending time with my family and seeing friends.
Linda, please read my comment below before you write the article, check the sources, names etc. It might make the article more valuable, and you might get at the culprits who are operating below the surface, clandestinely in Germany. If you think I'm misguided, let's discuss. Thanks.
I agree. These people know no history or a false one. All of these people with terrible social skills winning elections are they just gathering up all of the other social misfits under their umbrella?
Scroll down in this article and you will see Alice Weidel with her wife Sarah Brossard, who refuses to live in Germany, which is why Alice has to go back and forth from Berlin to their home in Switzerland.
I feel Sarah Wagenknecht is creepy too. I know a guy who is leftist, but likes her. Well, he is divorced and a lot of men vote for her just because they think she is attractive. She is half Iranian, and again, there is a hypocrisy to her support of the anti-immigrant stance. She grew up in the DDR, and like Weidel has a PhD. Wagenknecht seem like an opportunist to me, just like Weidel.
Thanks so much for your detailed analysis from on the ground research. It is always a painful task to be both part of and outside where you are living. Women supporting and becoming politically active in far right ideologies is also common in Northern Ireland. Although the still judicially denied and unaddressed sexualised violence deployed by all sides as a norm in the conflict here has created a chill factor for any woman without male ‘backup’ to progress in any area professionally. Of course Boris Johnson’s UK Brexit Conservative party is also now made up of many such women. I understand their mentality from having lived here as a blow in for so many years. It is not so much internalised misogyny as an internalised colonialist worldview. It is difficult to see if you think of empire building as being in some distant past. Once you realise the pursuit of perpetual economic Progress is just empire building wearing a neo liberal political uniform rather than a military one, it begins to become more visible.
Musk is doing everything in his power to leverage his ownership of DJT. Suddenly Musk's every word is corporate-media click bait all over the world. Muskawamy's spat with MAGA is working well for Musk, too. Trump shouted "Heil Elon!" as he tossed Loomer, Bannon, and the rest of the cult under the bus. Trump voters: Is this what you had in mind on election day?
If Trump wants to deport immigrants, perhaps he should start with Musk.
I want to repeat, the Woman’s March committee is launching The People’s March on Washington on Saturday,January 18 from 10 — 3. Go. I have offered to help organize buses from Hartford, Connecticut as was done 4 years ago when I went. You can contact them and organize locally or go to DC. I’m going to DC.
The first story that inspired my book, "Donald's Vanity Tantrums"
First Press Conference of the Incoming President
(The Golden Shower Caper)
“It's a lie... It's fake news... It's a total political witch-hunt.”
Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2017, I had just finished supper and I had tapped the TV zapper to the public television channel just in time to hear, no… No it couldn’t be something about... No it couldn't be. But it was. President-elect Donald Trump in front of a phalanx of American flags in the lobby of Trump Tower.
BuzzFeed was outing Trump's alleged hotel peccadilloes in Moscow and Trump was refusing to let BuzzFeed ask questions at the press conference by repeatedly calling the reports "Fake news. It’s a total political witch-hunt.”
This was the incoming president's first news conference? My attention was naturally aroused. What could possibly have happened? Since uncorroborated news stories are usually not published by the mainstream media, I had to search online for the full story.
BuzzFeed has rapidly become mainstream and is partially owned by NBC Universal. The whispers were that President-elect Trump paid Russian prostitutes in Moscow to urinate on his hotel bed in the president's suite – the same one that President Barack Obama slept in. But was Trump in bed when the alleged peeing occurred? Anyone can hire someone to pee on a bed. But not everyone enjoys lounging underneath a golden shower.
The U.S. director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, denied leaking claims that Russia possessed compromising personal and financial information on Trump. At the same time, Clapper tendered his resignation.
Some call this Trumpian erotica "Pissgate." Getting peed on in the wrong place lowers expectations of the most powerful man on earth.
The suffix "gate" was added to scandals after Richard Nixon’s "Watergate" crisis. Insider knowledge is an advantage in any reelection campaign. So it was with Russian operatives gaining online access to Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Trump has a fascination with gold, whether it's the color or actual gold, or just the word. But Trump is gemaphobic, as he said in an obvious reference to the accusations of the golden shower capers. But urine is an astringent. So why would our incoming president suggest that he would never submit to a “golden shower”?
Emperor Caligula hasn't anything on this president!
Bill, you bad boy! You and I had similar thoughts. See my comment about 200 spots below. I think that's maybe how the Muskrat, Pee Pee le Put and the Dumpster have sealed their Bromance! Bwahahahahahahaha
We have only one out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-puZlM-47o&t=1402s
I am "on board" looking for this leadership for a while now. Thanks Daniel.
I can not believe that you, a trained lawyer and judge chooses to hype a known media flack like Jessica Denson who has no legal background and only a relatively light weight undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Central Oklahoma (just one step up from a junior college). She also was a right wing functionary during the first Trump campaign (2016) and when she got fired she parlayed it into a huge lawsuit which she ultimately won.
I don't begrudge her her victory but in my opinion that provides NO reason to use her as some "high level" source for looking at the legal aspects of our elections, any more than you would select me. At least I have a legal education and I provide my bases for my arguments (even if you disagree).
Someone with your background should be ashamed to connect yourself with her drivel which had no justification in the law and I am still shocked that you don't see that. Like it or not there is no legal basis to argue for trying to oust Trump from the Presidency using the at best tenuous theory of the 14th Amendment.
I don't like Trump anymore than you do but I do believe in the absolute supremacy of the constitution as well as the Supreme Court (despite its obvious bias right now) and there is clearly no way that Trump is going to be kept out of the White House.
So you would be better advised to stop wasting your time on specious arguments and start looking at ways we can all resist the coming tsunami.
Read the damn case. As one law professor said, SCOTUS found the Constitution unconstitutional. https://nowmarch.org/legal-authority/
Actually, his hatred of Obama makes more sense that he would want the bed destroyed by peeing on it.... no more "Obama Slept Here" title... the claim that dump wanted to be peed on "saved" him from the reality of why he really wanted it done .... he is a germaphobe... too bad...
You got a point there, Ginger.
What the hell is wrong with these guys? They all seem to have missing parts, and maybe that's why they try to make up for it by amassing stuff. What a bunch of pervy twerps.
I'll be marching in Tucson
When and where Tucson? I’m in!
I'm guessing you found it. For you and others, here is more for all locations. https://www.womensmarch.com/
Just sent them a $100 donation
Also: A peaceful march is being organized by Jessica Denson. January 3-5, Washington DC, to call on members of congress to support 14.3 on January 6. Her position has support from major constitutional lawyers. Those who cannot march are urged to write their US Senators and House Rep, calling on them to object to the certification on grounds that Trump is disqualified by the constitution. Nothing in the SCOTUS rulings alters this fact.
https://nowmarch.org/about/
https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/5055171-constitution-insurrection-trump-disqualification/
Her most recent program:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-puZlM-47o&t=769s
Please remember DC, Puerto Rico, and others who have no voting House members and NO Senators. We need many more to act on our behalf.
Sadly you are simply wrong here. You and others have grasped on to the 14th Amendment argument which is specious at best. Trump had not been adjudicated as an insurrectionist. Until that happens there is no basis for disqualification. I am NOT arguing that he ISN'T an insurrectionist; in fact I believe had the Biden administration not dragged their feet he would have been found guilty of charged offense re: Jan 6 2021, but that never happened and you can't hold someone guilty of that crime until it had been proven in a court of law or declared by Congress via impeachment.
Trump was (rightly or wrongly) not found to have been guilty of the impeachment charges in 2021 and had never been held guilty by any court of those offenses (the Stormy Daniel's case is not relevant as it is a state case and doesn't find him guilty of anything remotely close to insurrection).
So under our Constitution you are innocent until proven guilty and this there is no valid decision holding him accountable. The only other case is the Colorado case to keep him off the ballot and the Supreme Court threw that case out.
So in the end there is no basis for summarily refusing to verify the election. In fact we (Democrats) in 2021 used the notion that the election certification is a purely ministerial act and that the Congress had no power to keep someone who is elected from taking office. That was upheld by the Supreme Court and Biden was inaugurated.
We can't expect to argue out of both sides of our mouth.
Trump was found to have engaged in insurrection against the constitution by the court in Colorado. No ruling since has overturned or disturbed this finding. Trump is an adjudicated insurrectionist:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/colorado-judges-allows-trump-primary-ballot-delays-decision-general-election-2023-11-18/
https://www.citizensforethics.org/news/press-releases/crew-statement-on-court-finding-trump-engaged-in-insurrection/
If you actually read the Supreme Court decision, they made it absolutely clear that a state court has no power to step into this decision for Federal offices.
"This case raises the question whether the States, in addition to Congress, may also enforce Section 3. We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency."
That is the direct wording from the SCOTUS decision overturning the Colorado courts decision to bar Trump. It seems pretty clear to me. State courts have no power to act in Federal elections with respect to the 14th Amendment, Section 3.
I personally wish this were NOT so but I also wish that the Supreme Court hadn't overturned Roe v Wsde but they did and at least for the time being SCOTUS decisions are the law of the land.
SCOTUS ruled only on the ballot question. SCOTUS' ruling did not even touch the finding of insurrection by Colorado. They left that finding in place and nothing in their ruling implies or states otherwise.
The Colorado ruling finding Trump engaged in insurrection makes, Trump disqualified - not from the ballot, but from holding the office. That is plain in 14.3. Only congress can lift that disqualification by a 2/3 majority vote of both houses.
If they fail to lift the disqualification, certifying the vote for him to take office is an unconstitutional act.
As am I!!!
Hmm, immigration—so vexing a problem! True MAGA wants no new immigrants, especially nonwhite ones. BUT on their other side you have immigrant Musk, plus Usha Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy, immigrant children … PLUS Trump, the cheater husband of TWO immigrant wives (both ex-Soviet). What to do? What to do?
Focused Resistance. Nie welder 1933!
Deport them all....by their own rule...proximity of family and all that...if you're in the same house...
That's just nonsense. Musk is a citizen. Should he be? I have no idea but they made him one back in 2002 and that decision will stand. I am all in favor of doing anything legal to bring down the Trump oligarchy but illegal things like deportation of citizens is just total nonsense.
Chill out Jon...just pointing out the absurdity of the rule trump's border guy is going by....
And, Musk hired a High-IQ 14 year old, Bangladeshi American, KAIRIAN QUAZI to run Space X's Starlight satellite internet Platform. Kairian graduated high school at Age 10 & a Silicon Valley University at Age 14 in Santa Clara County, CA.
Make that highest IQ percentile 99.9% @thepythonkairian.
The other day I saw a phrase I will remember --
"A token is always spent"
Interesting corollary: Donald Trump is famous for his “thrift”—he hasn’t spent his own money for decades.
Musk, and his own wife!
Musk is a citizen. No justification at all for deportation even if i would love to see it. I believe in the law even when it works against me.
Jon, I agree with most of what you've said, including the sense of despair that we've gotten ourselves into this situation. But I disagree with your claim that there is no justification for removing Musk's citizenship. There is, based on his repeated attempts to undermine governmental processes and decision-making. It has been done before. Though I believe it is both legal and possible, I doubt it will happen, because we do not have enough people with the sense and the balls to stand up and do it. But then... that could change.
Elon Musk is an ongoing national security risk and I think all the grownups here might be willing to acknowledge that brown people have been deported for far less
https://youtu.be/dXfzU6tS-b4?si=BlNSIn81ZW-OM1vi
He's also a national security risk
https://youtu.be/dXfzU6tS-b4?si=BlNSIn81ZW-OM1vi
Not only have (mostly brown) people been deported for much less, but I noticed your consistent running up and down thread after thread practically advocating for these treasonweasels after Donald met with Bibi during an active IDF genocide of Gazans - a violation of the Logan Act, just one Merrick Garland failed to prosecute him for - and after Elno broke promises to "employees" and threw them in a truck to canvass for Donald Trump after he refused to tell them what the "job" was
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-america-pac-blitz-canvassing-michigan-uhaul/
They're despicable people who do not have the interests of all Americans at heart and moreover didn't ask for your counsel.
A record number of immigrants have become billionaires in the U.S., with 92 foreign-born individuals accounting for 15% of all American billionaire wealth, totaling $711 billion. (Forbes).
More than 10% of the nation’s billionaires, including the founders of Tesla, Nvidia, PayPal, Google, Calendly and Zoom, are immigrants.
Democracies and Billionaires are mutually incompatible; you have one, or the other, not both.
The problem is in the very existence individuals who can buy 3/4 of congress with petty cash, or who can swing a low information electorate with a million dollar lottery, or who can select and publish the disinfotainment consumed by half the population, etc. These are individuals who, if they can do what they want, they do. And one thing they want is power.
The challenge with immigration is a) if the rate is excessive (v. the historic norm, or needs) or b) if there is inadequate rational selectivity to best serve our needs, or c) if the bureaucracy needed to properly administer that rate of influx is insufficient.
Power concentrations corrupt because the individual begins to feel they are special, and entitled to decide things for others on the basis of their having the power to do so, and not because of the merits of the decision, as might be determined consensually, nor constrained by democratic natural law: one person = one moral agent = one a priori equal vote.
There are plenty of terrible billionaires who aren't immigrants too though. Mark Andreesen comes immediately to mind.
Exactly. To clarify: billionaires are an existential concern for democracy; immigration is merely a concern about management of a useful resource. Night and day.
That's why HRC claimed as a campaign promise that she would overturn Citizens United.
And why Putin was desperate to stop her.
https://youtu.be/dXfzU6tS-b4?si=BlNSIn81ZW-OM1vi
Excellent idea!
That sounds like an excellent idea!
He’s a US citizen.
Which he gained illegally. He violated his student visa by working in the country. That's grounds for revocation.
Exactement!
Much like at least Cheetolini's current wife (no work visa for her "modeling").
Then her parents were beneficiaries of "chain immigration" which Cheetolini whined about and claimed to plan to end (another failed promise).
Thank you. I was relying on Joyce’s statement that he is a citizen. And yet, no one really seems to care about getting to the bottom of it.
And probably no one will because he has too much money and if he was to be deported and subsequently pulled out all of his money from the US a major crisis would erupt.
He does need to act like an American citizen....honesty, integrity, love of country.....not buy off the opposition.
I think acting with honesty, integrity and love of country is beyond his ability to comprehend. Not in his playbook.
Not only not in his playbook but also not in his consciousness
AMEN!!
I can't help wondering if those qualities apply to the 77.3 million USians who voted for Trump.
I believe under ouf Constitution Americans are entitled to have MANY different opinions and positions, and can even argue verbally in opposition to the government (just as we are doing now in anticipation of the upcoming Trump "holocaust"). So "acting like an American citizen" is a pretty low bar and certainly I can't point to anything Musk has done (yet) that would violate that criteria. If you can, please state what it is. Thankx!
Sorry last I looked there were no offenses for being dishonest (unless the dishonesty is illegal), having a lack of integrity or hating your country. And people buy off the opposition on both sides.
Well, guess THAT makes it ok then… eh?
Of course its not okay. That wasn't the question. The issue, at least as I understood it, was whether Trump needed to adhere to some standard of conduct to avoid legal problems and I was just pointing out that there is nothing that can really be done about him NOT acting like a good citizen (which would probably be the first time), at least not legally. Should we attempt to hold him accountable in some way as citizens? Of course., but I just don't think we can rely on the courts to help us much with that.
Sorry, Jon, I just get really, really, tired of both-sides-ism and rationalizations for not doing stuff that we know is right. My button.
We're honoring a former President, however briefly, who understood dishonesty IS harmful & wrong and committed to the American people to not lie to them... at the same time as we've elected a President to serve, however little, who has no clue or care about the distinction between right and wrong, and whose blatant documented lies to America are in the thousands.
America is facing the starkest moral choices, and it is breaking bad.
In addition to finding the moral courage of a President Carter (or, a typical farmer of his day), enforcing a socially and governmentally correct AND APPARENTLY INCOMPRENSIVELY valuable ethic regarding honesty in public and private life, may require two kinds of legal achievement:
a) (accountability for assaults leveraged by internet algorithms) - Creative lawyers (using big data?) need to find ways to connect the dots between a lie on 'X' and a statistically linked culpable death, as a new class of internet mob crime, and as an indictable murder (for instance), OVER AND OVER, until
b) (accountability for disinfotainment & surveillance capitalism) We must also somehow find the legal experience and moral wisdom to roll back a century or two of 'pragmatic' but ultimately unsustainable amoral precedents in legal practice, like 'buyer [must] beware' (which rewards deception), or that 'free speech' as currently formulated includes the freedom not just to speak one's truth as they see it (original intent) but also the freedom to HARM the public and the nation with millions of AI generated, algorithmically targeted and personalized, 'disinfotainment' ('lies on steroids', if you will) - and this wealth/info/behavioral extraction system is destroying democracy, market economy, and national security as it destroys public access to reliable information for making every type of choice - 'flooding the channel with s**t'.
This was NOT the original intent of the 1st Amendment.
We seem to have reached the position of untenable governance of a commercially divided nation. I posit this is because distinguishing truth, and guarding the integrity of public life, appear to be well beyond what our recent governments have even endeavored. Other western nations have drawn better (& more difficult) lines regarding deception for profit, and harmful speech, and are better for it. Some disappointed Americans are emigrating to find more constructive society.
We KNOW ours is an incorrect moral (socially sustainable) position, but it is one that we have taken eyes wide shut, due to both:
i) (legal pragmatism) the laziness and fear regarding the difficulty of enforcing a law prohibiting anything like 'bearing false witness against one's neighbor', and
ii) (profiteering) the naked opportunism of the kleptocrats, media oligarchs, and doxing propagandists who are happy to have few and weak laws regarding deceit and 'taking', that feeds their extractive wealth and media assaults.
An example of the pervasive harm of deceit, disinfotainment, and self-service (if one needs more than the President-elect) draws on simple observations from a macro econ course at Harvard - about 40 years ago (my 2nd post doc; I'm old, have been around; worked in government, for you on 5 continents), as follows:
The enormous benefits of competitive, free markets, succinctly listed, are not limited to, but include leveraging efficient and effective 'survival of fittest' selection, and distributed local intelligence decision-making, using:
1) competition to improve products, 2) competition to create new products, 3) competition to deliver products where needed, 4) competition to lower prices -both for production, and distribution, 5) informed selections among all these competing options by consumers acting in seemingly reliable and locally expert 'self-interest'.
US Capitalism lays claim to these inevitable marketplace efficiencies and Americans have 'bought this lie, hook, line, and sinker. The opposite is closer to the truth. The lie is not that a market cannot produce these benefits. The lie is that US Capitalists actually want such a free market.
What most Americans are not educated enough to understand is as simple and basic as it is stunning they don't understand - that, to obtain these benefits, there are just 3 simple requirements. One must have:
1) product CHOICES that may differ in meaningful ways,
2) consumers who are sufficiently INFORMED about the product differences to be able to act in their best interests, and
3) consumers who in fact do PURCHASE RATIONALLY, in pursuit of their best interests. None of these need be perfect to have large market benefits; but they all must be substantially present.
But the ugly truth about the (laissez-faire) capitalism practiced in the US, is that it is utterly DEVOTED TO COMPLETELY COMPROMISING EACH of those three pillars of a well-functioning market (which are, again: 1) meaningful product choices, 2) good information about choices, and 3) rational purchasing in best self-interest)
In fact, every self-interested US Corporation (and by US law, corporations ARE self-interested!) DOES THIER BEST to:
1) corner the market or collude on prices with their competition (and to lie well enough to not get caught) - these 'paper-crimes' are called 'price-fixing' and 'monopoly' but are viewed by many as only a 'game' that 'the most clever must lie best to win most', without regard for the externalities of such deception to either our functioning market economy or to our social cohesion & mutual trust (trust is the basis of money; it is fundamental to representation and continuity of financial value),
2) knowingly mislead and misinform the consumer via advertising ('flooding the channel with s**t', as Steve Bannon delicately puts it) so that the consumer has only the info that the seller wants the buyer to have, and ideally, the consumer (the 'mark' in this case) seeks, finds, and virally shares this disinfotainment,
3) prompt or compel the buyers to act on impulse, emotionally and irrationally, in a manipulative and extractive manner often directly OPPOSED to the consumer's best interests (use fear, sex, hunger, addiction, ...)
Consider obesity, addictions, indebtedness, societal conflict, failing US production & markets, corporate bailouts and lack of accountability for white collar crime - and then look at those CEO and other 'executive' salaries. If one could do the math, the guy that was shot in the back perhaps killed hundreds of Americans via refused healthcare coverage, for his salary - but yes, with LOTS OF HELP within his corp., in his industry, in the courts, and in the halls of congress. He was legally killing people; killing him was illegal. Both are morally culpable - almost moral twins.
The CEO was possibly a loving dad, and a remote-control mass murderer at the same time, as we have seen often throughout the history of the Captains of Industry. HE surely didn't see it this way - I have a brilliant narcissist brother who has rationalized his addictions all his life. Loves his kids (& abuses his wives, & lovers, but who's counting?). My brilliant older brother, a self-described 'personal anarchist' (rules for everyone else) once taught me that it was the VERY brightest who were most capable of fooling themselves. HE did NOT die before seriously harming everyone who ever loved him.
But it seems time for the pendulum to swing the other way.
Honesty and Trust need enormously more legal and societal support.
Jimmy Carter was dead right in his infamous 'malaise' speech.
The 'cleverness' of deceit may work for a quarterly report, but not a 30 year plan, or a life. We should require all commerce to subsume all its externalities (carbon tax, waste tax, disinfotainment convictions?) this requires longer timeframes and standardized, more (falsifiable) metrics.
A better understanding & better moral mindfulness is past due.
so are most of our domestic terrorists
but his is not by birth
and that isn't stopping Trump's great round up of POC
Well, scratch that one, then. Onward.
not by birth....and if we get rid of that...
We should not forget that Musk is not an immigrant (not since 2002) he is a US citizen. There is no valid reason or legal justification to deport him (sadly). We should avoid lame invalid arguments like this or we risk being even more marginalized than we will be under the next administration. There are plenty of good arguments to make to attack Musk's positions but his citizenship (or lack thereof) is not one of them.
He gained his U.S. citizenship illegally, however, by overstating his student visa.
There's a video admission of that by no less than his own brother (and WaPo reporting on it from months ago) and it's grounds for revocation.
It's also been repeated multiple times uptgread, and yet you seem determined to consistently ignore it.
Also - what part of "national security risk, immigration status notwithstanding" do you refuse to understand? And why?
https://youtu.be/dXfzU6tS-b4?si=BlNSIn81ZW-OM1vi
All of a sudden, X looks like a swastika with a haircut .
I am in the US right now, but I wrote about the AfD right when I got back to the US. As a Brown-skinned German and American I am always looking at which way the wind is blowing. I happen to live in the one state in Germany that does not have any AfD representation. I am glad of that. However, there are AfD members in my city and the leader, whose wife is Turkish which makes him claim he is not a racist, got beaten up. That is not the way to handle AfD. I would like to see the Constitutional Court of Germany outlaw the party, and then the people who joined it will have to go back to the other parties that give them some of what they want, which is to love on Putin, and to pin their problems on immigrants who have Brown skin or practice Islam, or to be told that they can get lots of government support monies without having any economic base because all of the immigrants were gotten rid of. But, Putin's putting his Bots to work in Germany just like he did in the USA, and Musk is bribing people just like he did in the USA, so while I don't see the AfD leading Germany right now, read my article on why, I do think that Musk's company should be taken away from him and requisitioned by the German military, and Musk kicked out.
https://lindaweide.substack.com/p/the-afd-in-germany?r=f0qfn
THIS, immediately, in the USA. "I do think that Musk's company should be taken away from him and requisitioned by the German military, and Musk kicked out."
I absolutely agree with your statement "But, Putin's putting his Bots to work in Germany just like he did in the USA, and Musk is bribing people just like he did in the USA"
F
You're right, they shouldn't be beaten up. They should be "terminated with extreme prejudice." People used to get medals for terminating Nazis. A tradition we should revive - there and here.
Since when is advocating murder OK on Substack? Because that's what "terminated with extreme prejudice" is a euphemism for.
Good question, Susanna. Much of what has been offered in these comments offers further hate and violence. It begins to feel like we are all becoming unhinged.
John D, I always read your thoughtful comments.
Without responding to anyone's Comment this morning except your Comment above, any words for ... let's say an American citizen Latina madre of a multi-generational family who some family some targeted for 'deportation' on Day 1?
I know Liz Cheney can take care of herself AND her family.
Any Comment on those who have decided to 'Kiss the Ring' at MAL?
Or orange body parts? Gates too.
How about those that are "donating" bribes ... er, sorry, cash to Trump's Inauguration Fund (not)?
Have you commented in the wrong place? This has nothing to do with what John D. Cooper wrote. His comment was a response to mine, which was a response to one that advocated "terminating with extreme prejudice" individuals with reprehensible politics. The latter was liked (so far) by 28 people, despite the fact that this Substack deals with the law and is titled "Civil Discourse." I'm a little disappointed that it hasn't been taken down, and the author hasn't seen fit to edit it.
I agree, John. Reading many of the comments on this post makes me wish I hadn't bothered to get up this morning. This is unusual on Joyce's substack, but unfortunately common on some others, and, unsurprisingly, many from the same people I see making them on those other substacks. Wish they would take their vitriol elsewhere, or just stuff it. I learn so much from the thoughtful comments I normally see here.
Please consider, sir, how the "unhinging" is incited, and by whom.
Linda in Germany was advocating for requisitioning of companies, and expulsion of Musk from countries in which he himself is a security risk as well as looking to incite violence.
I think we need to be careful as unrest increases to place the blame for that incitement squarely where it belongs, such as in Donald Trump and Elon Musk and their followers (ALL the terrorist instigators this past NYD weekend turned out to be Trump supporters. That should not be overlooked. Propagandists like Trump and Musk and Putin depend on our confusion).
https://youtu.be/dXfzU6tS-b4?si=BlNSIn81ZW-OM1vi
Thank you for this informative post.
When Angela Merkle responded to a question about the generous policy of allowing in many migrants with “because we have guilt” I thought that she would seed the next ugly far right backlash and guess what has happened? We seem to never learn the lessons of history. No nation accepts massive influx of foreigners. Non. I don’t care what the industrial needs are.
Sorry if I am in disagreement with you, Linda.
Bill, which thing that I said are you disagreeing with?
The US does accept massive influxes of immigrants and always has even if there have been limitations we still accept massive numbers.I will assume you are not pure Native American all the way back? Most Americans are either immigrants or descendants of one or more. Australia is like that too, and New Zealand. We have countries that are made up of immigrants, and their offspring. Germany wasn't always Germany at one point it was Germanic tribes, so who comes from those? To keep our economy growing we need new people coming. So does Germany, and Italy, and France, and Sweden, all of these countries that are anti-immigrant now.
The anti-immigration wave in White Supremacist countries like Germany and the USA began in the 1980s-1990s according to Prof. Kathleen Belew's book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. After the Oklahoma City bombing there was a gathering in the US in the NW of White Supremacists from around the world. They decided to change their strategy of fighting directly against the government because they did not want to be infiltrated by the FBI. So, their new strategy was to ally with people like White Christian Nationalists who had similar beliefs without the violence, and to tone down their overtly racist rhetoric and replace it with anti-immigration language, and then instead of trying to blow up the government from without, they would run for office, and blow it up from within. Of course, it ends with a race war.
And, since DT has agreed with Musk and Ramaswamy that H1B visas are important for the USA I see us continuing to have a lot of immigration to the USA.
Germany is working on getting more immigrants to come, and unfortunately for the AfD, a lot of those people are going to be Brown skinned, and/or Muslim. I personally think Germany should be offering people in the US refugee status from Trump once he takes power.
Sorry not that I disagree with you (I don’t generally) but simply pointed to what I say was an ugly backlash when Merkle stated her position and that backlash has materialized l
It's hard to define what "massive influx of foreigners" means. Canada accepted large numbers of immigrants relative to its size and yet until recently, there were no major complaints demanding that this end. And not all foreigners are alike. Educated people with fairly moderate politics who understand the need for some assimilation are one thing. And I must stress that there are many people like that who are non-"white." (I know an African man, originally from Uganda, who is just like that.) People who are not well-educated and/or are steeped in violent religious or ethnic hatred and/or enjoy an outdated ideology that involves the imposition of inequalities on others are another thing. And that only describes some foreigners. It is very diverse. But it's important to note that each country's immigration profile is different. Though Musk has it almost all wrong, I think it should be easier for countries to be more selective regarding the kinds of values prospective immigrants have, and I think refugee status should be denied to people who would probably be thrilled to be the ones doing the persecuting if only the situation were different.
But I don’t know why you can’t understand that we lost our country to a madman. Was all those migrants worth? I ask you. I’m less interested in the pros and cons. I wanted to save my country. My country is lost. Now it will be taken over by raping and pillaging of any and all values. Do you get it? I sense you don’t. And that is you prerogative. I see it differently.
Yeah, that's pretty much what happened 400 years ago. Those damn 16th ad 17th century European immigrants took over by raping and pillaging, not just the values, but the very bodies and entire cultures of people in the Americas. I am all for sending them back, except for the ones who have adopted indigenous values. You and Musk are first, Bill.
"Linda on Life Abroad", As the URL links: "The AfD in Germany".
Resist.
Hi Linde, Lies doch bitte mein Kommentar viel weiter unten. Es sind noch andere Strömungen im Fluß.
Just remember that X is pronounced "sh" = Xitter.
Yes, that's how I pronounce it 🤪
Timothy Snyder posted "The Mump Oligarchy--A Glossary" posted this Sunday morning listing words to discuss "Mumptopia".
'sh-Xitter should be added to the list.
Have never forgotten it. To me it will always be Shitter.
Come on, Germany, hang in there. You are an example of a nation transcending a dark past into a great power democracy and force for good. Russia will need Germany's example as she heads, hopefully, for decisive defeat in Ukraine. This X-post is facto: stunning numbers. https://x.com/UKikaski/status/1872990283060686878
According to Timothy Snyder Russia is doing terribly as well. North Korean soldiers are just cannon fodder because they have never been in combat before. In the Counteroffensive I read about them being young and malnourished and trained that you never surrender, rather take your own bullet. They don't know about surrender. I really want the EU to come through, and I hope Biden gets to send this last bit of help before DT's next administration. Wondering if he will go back to the White House, or stay at Mar-a-lago.
Linda, For an update on Biden's " last ... help":
12/14/24 on NYT: U.S. transfers $20 Billion Loan to Ukraine ...".
12/28/24 - Yesterday: "U.S. [sent] 1.25 Billion in military assistance" to Ukraine.
It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if Trump moves the White House functions to Mar a Lago and moves every classified document as well as anything else he can grab there too.
I should hope classified documents are being destroyed so Trump can’t get his hands on to sell or give away to our enemies.
I had hoped that President Biden would order field training exercises in Western Ukraine between units from the California National Guard and Ukrainian Army. Then Trump would have to pull them out and be forced openly to acknowledge his abandonment of Ukraine.
Wouldn’t that be a welcome outcome.
Yes. Exactly. In China. Where Elon builds enormous factories.
Musk has a huge factory near Shanghai & is building another immediately adjacent to his foothold.
And Germany! Which is very relevant today.
This list shows which countries have the most immigrants in absolute numbers, but not as a percent of their population, which is misleading.
https://theconversation.com/which-countries-have-the-most-immigrants-113074
While I did not find a graph with percentage of population I read that these are the countries with the l highest percentage of immigrants.
"According to available data, countries with a population made up of more than 20% immigrants include: United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Luxembourg, and to a lesser extent, Australia, Canada, and Switzerland; with the UAE having the highest percentage at around 87%."
I found that Switzerland was included when I asked what countries had more than 20% of the population being immigrant. So I asked what percentage of Swiss were immigrant and this is what AI told me.
"About 40% of Switzerland's population has a migration background, and 31.7% of the permanent population is foreign born:
Migration background: This includes immigrants and the Swiss-born children of immigrants.
Foreign born: This is the percentage of the permanent population who were born in another country.
Defining the 25% foreign population in Switzerland - SWI ...
Switzerland has one of the highest percentages of foreigners in Europe. The largest immigrant groups come from Germany, Italy, France, the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Portugal, and Turkey.
In 2021, Switzerland received 123,000 new immigrants, with 76.6% of them benefiting from free mobility. Switzerland has become a popular destination for highly skilled migrants, including from West Africa."
When I look at Germany it tells me this.
"In 2022, immigrants made up about 14.6% of Germany's population, or roughly one-sixth of the total population. However, when considering people with a migration background, the percentage is higher: 28.7% of the population, or 23.8 million people, had a migration background in 2022. This includes people who were born to two people who moved to Germany, or who moved to Germany themselves."
When I look at the US it tells me this.
"In 2023, immigrants made up 14.3% of the U.S. population, which is about 1 in 7 residents. This is a significant increase from 1970, when immigrants made up only 4.7% of the population."
So, US and Germany have a significantly smaller percentage of immigrants living in them than the UAE yet in both countries it is made into a problem, which I don't hear in the UAE. I asked if it was a problem and was told this.
"No, generally speaking, UAE citizens are not significantly upset about the large number of immigrants living there, as the country heavily relies on migrant labor to fuel its economy, and most citizens recognize the positive impact immigration has on their lifestyle and infrastructure; in fact, a majority tend to favor a more open approach to immigration compared to the global average."
So, somehow they understand that they rely heavily on immigrant labor, whereas the US and Germany are not able to make this clear to their citizens. A failing.
Oh, and in case you are wondering who has the lowest percentage of immigrants. This is a list I was given.
"According to available data, countries with the smallest percentage of immigrants include: Madagascar, Myanmar, Cuba, China, Vietnam, and North Korea; these nations generally have a very low immigrant population relative to their total population, with some even reporting less than 0.1% immigrants within their borders."
I think in general the UAE doesn't offer its immigrant population any easy path to citizenship, at least not for non Muslim immigrants. They use immigrants as a substandard workforce in building, farming and other intense labor jobs. On the other hand, the US offers all legal immigrants a path to citizenship via the green card and then actual naturalization. We have no ethnic, nationality or religious restrictions on this, just legal immigration and residency.
Yes, the US has a relatively easy path to citizenship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_workers_in_the_United_Arab_Emirates
I do not say that the UAE has an easier path to citizenship or that their low status workers are not treated badly. I just say that the US treats its low status workers badly and what Trump is proposing is venal and horrid, and nothing to make us feel superior about. It is instead a shameful solution, and I do not agree with any of the people who say that we cannot absorb the number of immigrants we get, I say we do not choose to do it well. Both the US and Germany are countries that are 14% immigrant and that is nothing compared to the UAE 87% so it can be done, and that was in response to someone saying that no one could handle that without everyone getting upset. I just found an example that contradicted it for whatever reasons. We can argue until the cows come home that a greater percentage of low skilled UAE immigrants get treated badly than in the US, but the number of immigrants we have means that probably a greater number of immigrants get treated badly here.
Countries are not obligated to offer citizenship to foreign workers, but many do because it makes coming to their country more attractive. The relative ease of getting citizenship in the US is part of the big draw. If that changes, as is intended by Trump, it may be less of a draw. Currently many Universities are telling their foreign faculty and students to get back to the US before January 20, so that they don't face loss of their visas. Since being in the US is no guarantee that they won't lose their visas that may not be the best route to go.
Just to clarify, personally I am seriously worried about the effect both economically and politically on our whole country if we attempt to deport millions of people whether they are legal immigrants or not. Personally I would favor the elimination of ALL immigration laws here except with respect to people who have committed serious felonies in their home or other countries. I would eliminate all visa restrictions except as noted above and essentially have open borders. As you said i think we could easily absorb far more people into this country than we permit now. This would also eliminate any need to deport anyone except those found guilty of serious crimes (not considering immigration "crimes" as serious ones).
I hope that makes sense. I think we probably basically concur on most major issues here.
I’m almost as tired of reading about Musk as I am Trump. But read, digest, understand, and act we must. Otherwise we may not have the freedom to read or act in the future.
That concerns me as well.
Musk will never stop. Therefore:
Always pay attention and
Never forget.
Never give up.
Never give in.
And let the door hit his tush on his way out.
Add to that tecolote42, Make sure you understand him, then I am with you.
Musk is a child of apartheid South Africa. Which he abandoned when apartheid ended.
That should tell you all you need to know.
Especially that he is “a child.”
Let's not compare his behavior to children. He is egotistical, self-serving, conniving. Children do things out of need. His is not a need.
Yes, an Afrikaner.
Now an Identitarian
exactly Martin. Well said. I took much longer below, trying to give more meat to your "cut through it" statement. I also try to link in other things happening that are beyond the old apartheid that Elon was Elon's school.
Who died and made Musk the emperor of the world? He’s the little boy who was bullied and now has some power so he wants to take everyone down. We can thank the Supreme Court for what he’s doing to America
We can’t stop him politically but boycott X and don’t buy Tesla’s. And don’t give him government loans to run his businesses. When he asks for money tell him he’s got enough of his own, so use that. I know that’s not how it works but it’s our money and we’re giving him. Enough is enough. This guy is really pissing me off
Yep. He's busy polluting Texas waters and now he wants his own municipality near his SpaceX facility (that pours wastewater into the nearby Gulf without a permit). He's The Menace.
😡
What is also concerning about him is that his company launches our spy and communication satellites and must know how they work and how to locate them. Ukraone is drpendent on his Starlink internet for communications, not a smart move for us or NATO. We need to ditch musk, for security reasons, and revitalize NASA so it's answerable to our country, not a meglomaniac who has no allegiance to ours or any other country. It was uninformed of us to believe that the only issue we needed to pay attention to was saving money and we could simply contract our space program out to "businesses". We've created musk.
So true. And who knows where Musk’s loyalties lie? It’s certainly not to the US which made him wealthy beyond anything he ever imagined. Having grown up someplace else he doesn’t have the history or values this country raised us on. His thinking on what this country should be is not understood or needed from a guy like him
Musk is tight with Putin and I believe either of them would throw the other one under a bus.
His loyalties lie with: very very rich, very intelligent (in terms of IQ, yes even the new definition), Men & Women & Diverse, of any race, who believe that their "elite culture" should be separate from ours. They want to build that Space station where only others like them are allowed to live. The rest of us toil for them as serfs in our polluted world. It's not racism. It's Identitarianism. (don't bother looking it up in the regular sources, it's a quite clandestine ideology re-packaged in France. It probably began with Oswald Spengler, a philosopher and Mathematician, in Weimar Germany almost a century ago.
Read Anne Applebaum and/or listen to what she is saying every day. It's not that someone died. It's that the Greedy Oligarchs want more, yes money but also the power to keep that money and get more.. Muskrat said it not long ago: " I'm not the richest person in the world. Putin is! Besides I couldn't afford my own armies." YET, added by moi.
Really important comment; thanks Fred!
I have been saying since the election that I feel like an older Jewish matron in Berlin in 1938. When it was clearly too late to get out.
I literally "saw" Hitler when the orange sadist descended on that golden escalator on June 16, 2015. I have lived for almost 10 years with a horrible feeling of doom. The coming months will tell whether or not it's too late to get out.
Just remember he is aging, physically unhealthy, and suffering from dementia....
All true, BUT -- muskrat is not!
And neither is Vance who scares me more than the moron
I wonder what in the heck he is thinking these days. Does the orange sadist ever even speak with him? Seems like all of his energy is focused on the muskrat. It must feel weird.
It's "Muskrat love..." KD. The stinky Rat has given him a new ideology. Paraphrasing: "I'm an Identitarian, not a Racist, that's fake news. Some blacks are my best friends, they know not to send their kids over to play with mine. They like their food, I like my nuggets. It's cultural, you idiots! Lets keep them apart, remigrate them if they don't like it, don't let their culture spoil ours."
Vance has almost no worshippers like the Orange turd.
Vance also doesn't inspire the same level of cultism that Orange does. He has all the charisma of dryer lint.
True, he has a different disease. It's called identitarianism, or in South Africa it's called Apartheid. I also think Vivek suffers from the same disease. I paraphrase him: "It's cultural, I don't want my kids mixing with your kids. I'm not a rascist, I just want my kids to grow up smarter than you are teaching your American kids". "Please keep them away (apart) from my kids.
Sadly, if you step back from that particular person and his motivations, it's true that there is a "dumbing down" or "Idiocracy" problem with America. Some segments of MAGA illustrate that problem. Carl Sagan's predictions were correct.
The lack of critical thinking is a scourge on American progress. "In a world where truth is blurred, ethics are lost, and intellect is rare, the marketplace of ideas falters." He didn't say that, I did, but he did say that the "inability to distinguish between truth and what feels good" will lead to a susceptibility to misinformation, and here we are! I agree with you, and you raise an interesting thought: Am I guilty of identitarianism in the selection of my culture too? My circle may not be very very rich, but there is no dearth of critical thinkers, truth seekers, 1%ers, do gooders. I have never suffered from hunger with any of my "culture".
But his sycophants are not, and that's probably been the plan all along. Traitor has been Putin's dupe and is now obviously Musk's.
I think he will use Musk to some degree but when he doesn't like what Musk is saying, or has a falling out, things will change. The fact is that Trump likes laissez-faire capitalism in which the more someone "invests", the easier it should be for them to do business without any kind of restrictions or oversight. So Musk fits in with his vision. Doesn't hurt that he is a racist too. Still, there will be infighting between the different factions among the Rethuglican Party -- some worship wealth whereas some want prices down and are concerned about working-class matters.
And a kind Elon willing to buy your jewelry .. at a reasonable discount.
we old people tried to see what countries would take us, and there aren't ANY we would feel comfortable in where they would take us. Ulp!
Italy passed a law in1992 allowing anyone who has grandparents born in Italy to apply for citizenship. I’m applying. My grandparents on my mother’s side were born in Sicily.
So does Germany, I just like being an American. I may not like it in 4 years, but I'll be appropriately proud of our sticking to the experiment even though there were many violations throughout our history.
Italy also grants the ability to remain if you buy property, although I am unsure what the if the status is citizenship or like a green card.
Imagine what the Jews felt in the 1940s.
Fun fact: With most countries - including the USA - excluding Jews, Singapore welcomed them.
Shanghai also was a refuge for Jews. 20 to 30 thousand Jews fled to Shanghai where they didn't need visas or other forms of permits. Interestingly, the Japanese, who controlled China at that time, couldn't understand the Nazi hatred of Jews and wouldn't send them back to Europe. In Europe, the government of Bulgaria, where the Jewish population numbered about 50 thousand, also refused to hand over their Jews.
not correct. Please check the sources. I posted them Yesterday.
That might change at some point. Also, sometimes I wonder if certain large countries could decide to create "autonomous regions" or entirely new countries that large numbers of migrants could move to, based on certain development patterns designed to include the right kind of people arrive at the right time to set things up.
I have no idea what The Muskrat’s relationship is with Peter Thiel, but he’s certainly proof closer to home that being gay doesn’t prevent you from being a right wing bigoted oligarch, I mean techbro.
We need a "Night of the Long Knives" (Roehm was among those who didn't live to see morning) in Silly Con Valley.
Who ya gonna kill TC?
Sioux, they are both identitarians...read anything from any of these folks Yarwin, Höcke, Oswald Spengler, Saummeur, Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Guillaume Faye and Renaud Camus, Carl Schmitt, Martin Sellner. The Tech Bros are particular to Yarwin because he re-packaged Oswald's elitism ideology for the American Tech market. Especially Thiel, who can read both. Alex Weidel the leader of the German AfD is a Gay woman, her wife is a brown skinned Sri Lankan Swiss. They don't care about race, sexual preference, nationality...they are "ABOVE" all that. Just don't mix my elitist culture with your mediocrity...as per Vivek, yesterday!
A very dangerous development, indeed. Sioux and Joyce, you gave us a very good account of an aspect of the struggle in Germany and in the EU. The movement to the right in the EU was led by identitarian ideology (it is different from identity ideology). Which explains much of the AfD's strong appeal to intellectuals early on (few really understand what identitarian means and it is/was perverted relatively easily by the Fascists and Neo-Nazi's). In concept it is NOT a racially hierarchical ideology but rather a rejection of multiculturalism. "Each country in the EU should maintain its historical culture, and not coalesce into a "Melting pot" Europe. Migration at the levels you have described, of course, greatly disturb identitarian goals. By the way, you will not find much info on identitarian ideology in the usual sources on the internet etc. because the Identirary movement across the EU is clandestine. They do not participate in elections, they are somewhat under the normal radar screen). In the most recent "Wannsee Conference". Not the Nazi one in Jan, 1942, but the AfD event held in Berlin in 2023. Yup, they picked that spot in Berlin on purpose. The Identitarian leadership was spirited in secretly (the leaders are prohibited from entering Germany and one is living in Austria) to help the AfD work through their policy on "re-Migration" and "Blood Contamination". Yup, so the ideology of these people (which "started" in France, or was re-packaged there) are similar to the American Ku Klux Klan of the EU. Always present at Neo-Nazi and Right Wing demos; Never present in the poles; often very violent; outlawed in most EU states. Why do I bore you with this? Sorry if I am, I'll come to the point right now.
Well , Elon Musk, of course. Identitarian is really nothing other than "Apartheid" re-packaged by a couple of French guys. Oh, and where is Elon Muskrat from? You have it!... and if you delve deeper into the ideology, and why he (a supposedly "smart" guy) is part of that team, you can really see where he is heading. Racial Separation, is only ) a slight shuffle to the right and you have "Racial/Cultural Superiority (although the original identitarians deny it. Oh-Oh!
So, Elon is also usurping the right to be the "Oligarch of Germany", since there isn't a person (in his right mind) with that kind of wealth who will take on that position. That position is still vacant. Höcke tried, but he is already vilified by many in pacifist Western Germany, and is tied up in court every time he raises his right arm, and he doesn't have the cash. The AfD is right now losing voters to the BSW (A new far left, Moskau loving party named after its leader Bündniss Sahra Wagenknecht). What Höcke does have, is the New Provinces (former GDR). With a remainder population that can't come to grips with the freedoms of Capitalism and Democracy. They yearn for the days of "Planned Economy" and to be told what to do all day long. He also has the Neo-Nazi thuggery which has found a fertile turf there (in Thüringen) to brutally dominate in the New Provinces (Those that object are severely punished first, then killed if they persist). The German centrist parties made the mistake to leave "those crazy people" out of their calculations and attention since the 90's., thereby leaving a void for the AfD and others.
With the Federal election coming up, the timing for Elon's appearance "on the scene" is perfect. Just as in our recent US election he can maybe move voters over to the AfD because the German populace certainly admires a successful "Tech Bro". He could help to put the AfD and its more radical sister parties over the 20% hurdle it is facing in the coming elections. That would be dangerous. For those of you who know all this, I apologize. I wanted to add some further insight to what is going on here in Europe. I said in yesterday's comment to Apache (another commenter), it is going to get rough here, and Putin is financing it all. I wonder what Muskrat and Pee Pee le Put had so much to talk about? Hmmm let me see...maybe the Muskrat really really needs to pee on some Russian Whores...nah, he can get those in the States. Hmmmm....musing
Bruce, I seriously think that it's important we all understand this stuff. I really think you should write a Substack about it. I noticed that you only have six subscribers. If you write about this stuff you will get a lot more. If you feel safe doing this, of course.
Hey Paula, I appreciate the implied support, but I am not a writer. I am not in the least interested in getting subscribers. If people here read my comments, that's enough for me. Maybe one of us can write. It would take too much of my time, and I am focused on other things. I hope a real writer takes up these thoughts and does what you suggest. I asked Tim Snyder to write a book about it.
Stupid question time: where is all this coming from? Is it the culmination of fifty years of right-wing manipulation, which includes an assault on education and growing wealth inequality? The result of civil wars around the world creating refugees? A warping of digital technology and the riches it's provided for a few lucky men? Climate stress? Overpopulation? A right-wing takeover of the media? The normalization of greed due to people like Reagan and Thatcher? The fall of the Soviet Union? Social media? Something else, such as the passing of generations perhaps? I ask this because it all seems to have come on so fast and it's all so radically different from the accepted values of the last 70 years.
A combination. Decades ago, folks had three network choices for the nightly news. It didn’t matter if you watched CBS with Walter Cronkite or NBC with David Brinkley/Chet Huntley.
Today, millions watch Fox and get seduced by rightwing propaganda. So they will believe the stolen election nonsense and mob the Capitol
On January 6th; they will believe the Biden bribery nonsense because Fox ran with it some 2,600 times. Etc etc
The country is polarized because millions embrace propaganda
That makes sense. And of course all the guardrails have come off that would prevent them from getting away with all that lying. Although I have to ask how that could possibly have happened. I guess by chipping away at the laws and regulations that hold society together.
BTW, your mentioning Cronkite etc. makes me smile. I miss a lot about that time, although there was a lot about it that wasn't good.
Abraham Lincoln warned the way of the school room in one generation will become the way of the next government. Take a look at WhiteChalkCrime.com that blows the whistle on our schools and think about running for school boards on a save democracy platform and take control of our schools so our next government has a chance. Our schools took democracy down. They can resurrect it if decent people take control of them.
You know what's really powerful is parents and older siblings making some time to just talk about the news to their children/ younger siblings. Kids then pay attention to further developments they hear about on the news and share their own ideas about what's going to happen next. It is something they can participate in. There are opportunities when they ride along while you're doing errands or traveling to visit relatives, etc. We learned so much from the discussions my parents had with each other (one was Republican, the other was a very liberal Dem) in which we could ask questions and share our thoughts, too. Parents are still important people to their kids.
That’s needed now more than ever. I can’t even imagine a kid processing Trump if he was raised right.
That being said one of the points I make in my recent memoir about my teaching experience is I had so much power in the classroom. I got my students totally hooked on learning and respecting me. It was magical. My kids at home - forget it. Night and day.
Teachers that are good are gifted with the ability to influence. When they got rid of teachers like me children lost a lot.
People blame social media but I think good teachers keep students balanced in spite of other forces. Children need to be influenced outside the home. Gifted children more so. That’s why good schools are so important - why I dedicated my life to exposing what’s going on. I just don’t think parents can do what teachers can do. I know having done both.
The relationship is entirely different snd kids are programmed to not listen to parents to the extent they can. But they welcome mentoring from teachers. That’s why they can make such a difference.
I have no doubt we’ve raised a couple of generations of poorly influenced children who’ve grown up not able to process that a con man will con them.
Yes, yes, yes!! I totally agree. I have your book--just haven't started it yet. I do have a passion for education but I don't have kids and I live in a reddish community. I'm not sure what to do in that case. I do have two step-granddaughters who live in the UK. One is a baby but the other is an amazing, smart, outgoing eleven-year-old who is being raised right by my stepdaughter. Be that as it may, I'm not sure how to contribute. I'm too old to get a job. I used to be a librarian, among other things, although I worked at corporations for most of that career rather than in public libraries. I must read your book, Karen. Maybe it will help. Education rocks!!
All true. If I want to increase my despair, I ask myself to ID the societies/civilizations that have sustained themselves into perpetuity.
The Babylonians? Incas? Aztec? Egyptians, Romans? British?
So… we shouldn’t be so cavalier to think our way is going to last forever. We are divided, and I can’t see a way forward (into the distant future)
Nothing lasts forever, Gary. This is a very Buddhist way of thinking. We have to be open to change. (For the record, I am not a Buddhist but I find Buddhism compelling.) Of course how change manifests itself is the issue. And I don't have any answers here. All I know is that the hate has to stop.
True, Paula.
I am not optimistic (and I’m a small town idealist)
Truth and honesty form the cornerstone of any relationship. We now live in a world where 40 percent or so reject truth, fact, reality, etc.
I commute each month between where I work in Austin, Texas and a small town in Michigan where I grew up. It’s a church-going town (formed in 1845 by German Lutherans, ostensibly to bring Christianity to Native American tribes. The parochial school enrollment was triple that of the public school when I was growing up.)
It’s a 70 percent Trump town. Trump has boasted how much he loves money. Scripture informs us the love of money is the root of all evil. But folks here will embrace evil instead of rejecting and renouncing evil - if it comes wrapped with an “R”
Christians are reminded about the importance of treating “the least of these” as they would treat Christ. But the Trump evangelical crowd cheered and applauded when he separated thousands of young and terrified children from their terrified and desperate parents. (While Jesus wept)
Teaching them “love” is not easy :(
No, it isn't, and I don't have any particular insights into how to do it. I try to be nice and friendly to people I see. Whether that makes any difference I don't know.
I miss those times, too, Paula. You're right, though, because back then we were fighting institutionalized racism. This trend will also pass but it does make you wonder what the destination will look like.
I was thinking about Walter Cronkite after reading these comments last night--about him and the fifties, sixties, and seventies. It all seems like a dream now. But there were rules and expectations and most people accepted and abided by them. Now it's all chaos. I suppose our ancestors had to deal with chaos as well and those few decades were anomalous. But order *is* possible. We just have to figure out how to restore it. (And I don't mean by installing dictators.)
Paula, perhaps that is how your life felt in those decades, but it wasn't like that for everyone. The "rules and espectations" were for white middle class people. My family had a different experience, as shortly after my parents finally were able to buy a small house, my father became ill and though he kept trying to work, eventually couldn't.
Eventually my mom (who hadn't worked since before WW2) had to figure out a way to support our family while medical bills accrued. We almost lost the house and it was only help from family that kept us going. We got lucky: mom was determined and creative and made her job into something that kept us above water. But I couldn't start college until years later, and worked my way through because by then the scholarships were aged out.
And I remember as a teen that it was common for older people to refer to us as "juveniles", meaning juvenile deliquents, as if the two were equivalent. I think is was a kind of envy that we had the flexibility in life they didn't growing up and thought we shouldn't either. I knew kids who actually were sent to juvie because of the way the community looked at them.
We were mostly white looking, though we're mixed race and culture, so we didn't experience the limitations and humiliations that obviously black and brown people did, or the very poor.
Yeah there was order for some, but it was order on the backs of people who didn't live in the mainstream. What we are now has its roots in those decades, and even before then. I have no desire to return to it. Other countries went through worse trials in the Wars and the depression, but emerged determined to create better civilizations from what they learned. We chose not to, though some overtures were made in that direction. We still can. But not by going back, because it isn't worth going back to. We have to go forward, and join the other nations who did so decades ago.
I completely understand, Annie. There was a lot that was wrong then. I tried to say that. Maybe I wasn't clear. But yes, I was lucky in many ways. Despite the fact that I had terrible parents, I was comfortable, at least physically. It could have been much worse.
Paula- good list. I vote “all of the above.” Add the bank bailouts of 2009 and Covid.
Oh yes, excellent points!
All of the above.
Much much bigger than you can imagine, Paula. Anne Applebaum starts to put dimensions to it, but it is even much bigger than the Autocracy. See my comments on Identitarianism below, and you start to get the bigger picture. Although I'm certainly not sure that I see it all yet either. It's been about 100 years exactly in building...and it's global.
It's not a stupid question at all. It is THE question. And, the answer SUCKS!
US taxpayers are subsidizing this man Musk, and it needs to stop. He can find subsidy from elsewhere, or figure out how to own his industries on his own, if he wants to live as a Nazi. The USA federal government should demand payment, or nationalize the companies he thinks he owns. Find honest, skilled people to manage them for fair profit and the good of the country. Enough of this disgraceful charade, Elon and mother Maye.
I couldn’t agree more! Elon Musk’s goal is to bleed the US taxpayers dry, laughing all the way to the bank. We are being used and abused by this con man. He has no business getting subsidies or inserting himself in our government or politics. Stop the steal, and let him take his business elsewhere, maybe South Africa? Do some good in his homeland. Speaking of which, what’s Musk’s hysteria about immigration? The irony is that he is an immigrant. So in the true fashion of the right wingers, he needs to go back where he came from.
He’s not against the foreign tech workers he wants to hire via H1-B, turning them into low-paid indentured servants.
The whole privitization binge needs to stop. It creates Muskʻs power and the power of other feckless billionaires. Iʻd rather not get to Mars than have to live under the thumb of someone as odious as Musk.
I agree completely. Now HOW are we going to stop it? I feel so helpless in this political hurricane.
President Musk has been lying all along about just about everything. We shouldn’t be surprised that an Afrikkaner has the thoughts expressed in the German newspaper editorial.
It’s said that he lied about his status when he applied for his green card. If we had an aggressive DOJ something would have been done already. We know the incoming Administration is not going to do anything.
Then he would have taken his innovations elsewhere and somehow we'd be kicking ourselves that we didn't exploit him when we could have. Sigh.
Keep in mind that Musk did not found Tesla. Tesla Motors was founded as an electric carmaker by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. Elon Musk, co-founder of Paypal, was an early investor in Tesla and board member, before taking over as CEO. So most of the initial innovations are not his.
Thiel and Musk both made their vast wealth through a modern form of extortion. Payola…sorry…Paypal, is simply a vast financial racket that takes a cut off the top of others economic transactions. Neither man is a creative entrepreneur. They can buy both. And they do. Take away their ill gotten gains and they would be unemployable.
Great wealth acts like a magnifying glass upon the character of any individual. By their malicious conflict engendering and life destroying deeds neither man seems to have much of one 🐈⬛
Fun fact - not all Teslas are made in the USA. Many are made in Shanghai. I doubt that any of the tech bro innovators prefer to have factories in the USA because workers here have (or should have) some expectation of a living wage and a few basic protections. H-IB visa holders can be booted out by the companies for whom they work at the drop of a hat so they are similar to indentured servants. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2024/12/12/tesla-emerges-among-top-employers-of-h-1b-visa-holders/
I live in a California town where Teslas are made.
Tesla’s biggest plant is in China. He is building a battery plant right next to it. He’s the one who wants the US to take Greenland. It is mineral rich in the minerals he needs for his Teslas.
From The Guardian:
'In May, the AfD was expelled from a pan-European parliamentary group of populist far-right parties after a string of controversies, including a comment by the senior AfD figure that the Nazi SS were “not all criminals”.
'The ID group, which includes France’s far-right National Rally, Italy’s Lega, Austria’s Freedom party, Geert Wilders’ Dutch Freedom party and Vlaams Belang in Belgium, said it “no longer want[ed] to be associated” with such incidents.'
Alice Weidel, the head of the AfD, wished Musk and Trump a happy Christmas and “all the best for the upcoming tenure”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/20/elon-musk-claims-only-afd-can-save-germany
An unabashed, unashamed neo-Nazi sympathizer with access to the White House and the Oval Office.
What could possibly be wrong with that?
Thank you. I'll be back after I go throw up. scarier by the minute.
Totally nauseating hearing people with tiny cold grinch hearts saying Merry Christmas -- makes anything else preferable.
Watch for possible political developments with far right extremists in Northern Ireland. Whether it is from within loyalist British Unionism or Opus Dei Catholic British Unionism, both the British and Irish governments political neglect of this colony since 2007 has allowed for a vast growth of young disenfranchised far right male white supremacists to flourish on the ground. Much of this is being led by ex soldiers of the post 2001 wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Many came home to find nothing but unemployment and social exclusion and being sidelined by a technocracy rising to great wealth off their sacrifice.
The only way things won't go quite badly is if (a) there is some kind of pushback within the right wing itself and (b) military leadership publicly and loudly expresses support for a centrist interpretation of the Constitution and proclaims that the identitarian policies of abuse are unwelcome and wrong. Now, how badly will things go? It's very hard to tell. Certainly the fact that the US House of Representatives is evenly divided could help.
So now we have Trump AND a side-kick (not elected) who spread disinformation about whatever pops up on the radar. Musk’s response to very direct correction of his misunderstanding of the the German political party is typical - deny, deny, deny. Two liars, attached at the hip.
I cannot wait until both of them go down in a flame of utter disgrace.
Yes, I’d buy a ticket for a front row seat and bring popcorn
It is still possible for the "correct information" side to push back to some degree, and it needs to do so very visibly, in the faces and in the places where wrongness has most purchase.
Here is the article I wrote on the AfD last week.
https://lindaweide.substack.com/p/the-afd-in-germany?r=f0qfn
I am grateful that the EU journalists association officially left X. I am in the US right now and a friend sent me an article about Die Welt, but since neither she nor I subscribe to it, I could not read the article.
Read your piece, Linda. Very well stated and researched. Unfortunately, this is how Nazism started, nice and slow. At least Germans know their horrendous history and the LBTQ+ community has reestablished itself there. I am always astonished how gays can be attracted to these campaigns, even in our own country, but here we are.
Thank you Marlene. Alice Weidel claims she does not want to discuss her sexuality, and says it and her personal life should be irrelevent. I would say she lives on a river in Egypt. Da Nile. Hocke is creepy too, and won in the state my maternal grandmother was born in. So, I visited her village after the wall came down and it was traumatic because my relatives there were like their souls had been sucked out of them. That is life in a fascist state for so many.
In any case, the AfD and others are selling snake medicine to their followers. All of my American friends in my city in Germany and I, also hate the Bundnis Sarah Wagenknecht BSW party. She broke off from Die Linke (The Left) to form her own party. Where she differs from the AfD is very little as far as I can see, but because she comes from the Left, which is not anti-immigrants, but is pro-Putin in this anti-imperialist sort of way, she is treated like she is more mainstream. She is proPutin and anti-immigrant, so how is she different? Still, I appreciate that she takes votes from both the Left and the AfD, and in that way she is useful.
I am working on an article about the upcoming German election, but have taken a break from writing articles, which I just started, now that I am in the US and spending time with my family and seeing friends.
Linda, please read my comment below before you write the article, check the sources, names etc. It might make the article more valuable, and you might get at the culprits who are operating below the surface, clandestinely in Germany. If you think I'm misguided, let's discuss. Thanks.
De Nile Island...Very nice place in the middle of Cairo. Lived there once.
UGH! Too many women who have gone to dark side!
I agree. These people know no history or a false one. All of these people with terrible social skills winning elections are they just gathering up all of the other social misfits under their umbrella?
Scroll down in this article and you will see Alice Weidel with her wife Sarah Brossard, who refuses to live in Germany, which is why Alice has to go back and forth from Berlin to their home in Switzerland.
https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/why-far-right-on-the-rise-germany-afd-election-win-clf9k76l8
I feel Sarah Wagenknecht is creepy too. I know a guy who is leftist, but likes her. Well, he is divorced and a lot of men vote for her just because they think she is attractive. She is half Iranian, and again, there is a hypocrisy to her support of the anti-immigrant stance. She grew up in the DDR, and like Weidel has a PhD. Wagenknecht seem like an opportunist to me, just like Weidel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahra_Wagenknecht
Thanks so much for your detailed analysis from on the ground research. It is always a painful task to be both part of and outside where you are living. Women supporting and becoming politically active in far right ideologies is also common in Northern Ireland. Although the still judicially denied and unaddressed sexualised violence deployed by all sides as a norm in the conflict here has created a chill factor for any woman without male ‘backup’ to progress in any area professionally. Of course Boris Johnson’s UK Brexit Conservative party is also now made up of many such women. I understand their mentality from having lived here as a blow in for so many years. It is not so much internalised misogyny as an internalised colonialist worldview. It is difficult to see if you think of empire building as being in some distant past. Once you realise the pursuit of perpetual economic Progress is just empire building wearing a neo liberal political uniform rather than a military one, it begins to become more visible.
Musk is doing everything in his power to leverage his ownership of DJT. Suddenly Musk's every word is corporate-media click bait all over the world. Muskawamy's spat with MAGA is working well for Musk, too. Trump shouted "Heil Elon!" as he tossed Loomer, Bannon, and the rest of the cult under the bus. Trump voters: Is this what you had in mind on election day?
Musk is a James Bond level villain.
And a prolific breeder.