Tag: 9/11

Satyrdaz Wandering Political Thoughts

Processing More of Trump

The latest Trumpshit that really annoys is the continued withholding of energy funds to blue states and cities. This has been going on for months. The Trump Regime is withholding the funds because those states didn’t vote for him. The Trump Regime is actually framing it like that to the courts. Once again, Trump is trashing the U.S., spiting the Constitution and the law because of his vindictive nature.

That energy funding was passed by Congress and previous administrations. Yes, it’s being argued now that the TACO Regime’s actions are unlawful.

But, again, Trump can’t see the bigger picture.

Withholding this funding will affect technological development, putting the U.S. further behind other nations. As they advance, we’re regressing.

The funding provided money for projects. Those projects provide jobs. Yes, Trump has abundantly proven that he cares nothing about anyone but himself so the argument automatically beings failing. But growing numbers of unemployed people costs the government and craters the economy. Lets be reductive so he might grasp it: less money in pockets means less money to spend. Less money to spend means less things purchased. Less things purchased means less manufacturing and services, which cut into the gross national product.

I know, I know, this is all beyond the comprehension of a person who thinks starting a lawnmower is overly complicated. Maybe that’s where Trump’s cognitive testing should begin. “Mr Trump, can you open this door by using a handle?”

Assuming Trump does manage to open the door, we can then test him with a series of devices. “Mr Trump, can you start this lawnmower? Can you turn on this dishwasher?”

On the other hand, the TACO Regime is betting on the Roberts Court, who has bailed them out via shadow dockets and breaking with Constitutional precedence to protect Trump’s actions.

Also, as demonstrated over and over again, Trump and his minions love crapping on the United States. They actively hate it and show it through their actions every day, attacking American history, American cities, and American citizens.

The ‘Peace President’ continues to malign the concept.

This time, Trump is attacking ISIS. This is of course in retribution for the deaths of three service members.

“This is not the beginning of a war — it is a declaration of vengeance. The United States of America, under President Trump’s leadership, will never hesitate and never relent to defend our people,” Hegseth said on social media.

~snip~

Yes, that dim beam of light known as Hegseth thinks that changing a word reframes WTF is going on.So, Pete, question: would that be a ‘declaration of vengeance’ against ISIS, which Trump claimed he’d 100% eliminated back in 2019?

Trump claims ‘100 percent‘ of ISIS caliphate defeated in Syria

“We just took over … you kept hearing 90 percent, 92 percent, the caliphate in Syria. Now it is 100 percent. We just took over 100 percent caliphate. That means the area of the land. We have 100 percent,” Trump said.

“We did that in a much shorter period of time then it was supposed to be,” he said. “It was supposed to take — I will not tell you what a certain general told me. But I went and met a couple of other generals. And they said how long do you think it could take, general? One week, sir. One week? I heard two years. One week, sir. Let us do it the way that we want to do it. I said: General, do it.’ And if so, what happened. We had the whole thing.”

~snip~

That’s a perfect summary for Trump. Lying and boasting, working on the same issues that he claimed to have completely solved. Or pretending it’s a hoax or fake news. Always resorting to lies to escape accountability, always depending on bullying to get ahead.

Trump & Hegseth remind me of someone else who said and did something similar.

What’s that expression about learning from history again? Something about not learning from history and repeating it.

Fact check: Trump repeats numerous false claims in prime-time address

Trump spews lies about the economy in his year-end address to nation

Fact-Checking Trump’s Prime-Time Address on the Economy

Why, he’s just telling it like it is. * Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more, say no more *

Some final Dizzy Donny thoughts from the web.

I’m in, Kerry. I’m in.

3

Mundaz Wandering Political Thoughts

My Inner Cynic cracked their eyes opened and cackled. “Huh.”

“What?” I asked.

“I just thought of something.”

That wasn’t news. The Inner Cynic thinks of something two, three hundred times a day. Yet, here they are, saying it like it was important news.

Honestly, I was annoyed. I’d gone back to an article pointed out by Nan the other day: The Anger Games: Who Voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Election, and Why. After reading it lightly once, I was reading it again as The Neurons pondered the articles’ points, such as this one.

Our starting point is the hypothesis that prejudice is fueled more by aggressiveness than by submissiveness, and that it is accompanied by the wish for a domineering leader who will punish the “undeserving.” This wish is clearly authoritarian in the original sense, but we give the notion of authoritarianism a fresh spin. In contrast to most of the established theories, we posit that people with authoritarian tendencies follow domineering leaders less for the pleasure of submission than for the pleasure of forcing moral outsiders to submit. Vicarious participation in the domination and punishment of out-groups is a core part of the authoritarian wish to follow a domineering leader. Hence, to activate this wish, leaders must be punitive and intolerant. Authoritarianism is not the wish to follow any and every authority but, rather, the wish to support a strong and determined authority who will “crush evil and take us back to our true path.” Authorities who reject intolerance are anathema, and must be punished themselves.

Yes, I understood that. Trump obviously and clearly sharply embraced the idea. It’s one of his central policy pillars, sharing space with “Love and obey me,” “Don’t trust Democrats,” “Facts are fake news and don’t trust the media,” “Fuck you, I’m getting mine,” and “Violence is peace.”

The inner cynic said, “Well, what if Trump is blustering and threatening those other countries to provoke them back into attacking us?” As The Neurons stewed on this, the Inner Cynic continued, “You keep thinking that Trump hasn’t learned lessons from the history. But that’s on his own. The Heritage Foundation is propping him up and guiding him. They know history. They know how popular George W. Bush became after terrorists attacked the United States on 9/11. His approval ratings shot up overnight. Then almost everyone rolled over to give him (and Dick Cheney) whatever they wanted in the name of patriotism.”

“Yes, and that culminated in those disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The Inner Cynic chortled. “Yes, and you remember that. You also remember that you were furious when revelations came out later about how the United States was conned into war. You were mad because you saw it coming and predicted it. Then people responded to the revelations with statements like, ‘they fooled us all.'”

“That’s right. They didn’t fool us all. I wasn’t alone in that. I was following Krugman, Olbermann, and other, even Colin Powell, who was against the war before he was for it. That Bush Administration was using information from the intel source known as curveball because he was always lying, for god’s sake. People were acting like brainless zombies.”

“That’s the point, though. How many Americans will remember that crap? You pointed out that the terrorist attacks were a result of failed American policy where we secretly killed people and manipulated others in secret.”

“Again, that wasn’t me, I just — “

“Tut, tut,” my Inner Cynic interrupted. “Let me finish. The point, to finish, is that you think Trump is doing the same thing without realizing what happened before.”

“Right. Because Trump is pretty damn dim.”

“Yes, but the Heritage Foundation folks aren’t. They’re the ones advising, guiding, and goading him. They’re the ones who put stupid, unprincipled people in charge of various departments, people like Noem, Hegseth, Kennedy, Bessent, Miller, Patel, who will do whatever the fuck Trump orders, regardless of law, logic, and precedence.

“There is a reason why there are no guard rails in 47’s Regime. And there’s a reason for the constant chaos and impulsiveness.

“And there’s a reason for his saber rattling.”

Closing their eyes, the Inner Cynic sat back. “And that’s why Trump doesn’t care about falling approval ratings. That’s why he doesn’t give a shit about the laws, the government shutdown, starvation, or inflation. Why he doesn’t care about accountability. He’s going to keep attacking other groups and nations with limited military force until one of them makes the mistake of attacking us back, giving him a firm reason to unleash the full force of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. And Congress will approve it because the homeland was attacked, and the MAGAts will roar their approval, and all those other low-informed people who don’t pay attention will roar right along with them.”

“I hope you’re wrong,” I answered.

The Inner Cynic smiled. “We’ll see.”

4

Disappointment

I was visiting my sister at her house. She, her husband, my wife, niece, her boyfriend, Mom, and I were chatting. All present are Democrats at the least and progressive for the most part. Liberals. Most of our previous conversation included invectives aimed right at Trump and the Trump Regime minions destroying our nation. Then, lo, sis said, “I’m okay with him destroying those boats and killing those drug dealers.”

I was so horrified.

She went on to say, “They know who those people are.”

“Really? The people we were just talking about ‘know’ who those people are in those boats? Those people we just talked about? The ones who lie about anything and everything? You trust them to correctly and intelligently inform us that the people they’re killing in those boats are drug dealers just on their word?”

That was just the opening salvo. Yeah, I ranted. I pointed out that the U.S. military isn’t supposed to be used as wholesale executioners, killing non-combatants or civilians who are not actively attacking United States troops. Pointed out that this takes a huge step around due process and justice. Depends on the single word of a single individual to declare who is a criminal and who is guilty, all without presenting any evidence. And that person who we’re trusted that process to is a well-known liar, an untrustworthy individual named Donald J. Trump. That on its own is terrible but what it does as precedence for the rule of law is monstrously worse.

Further, I added, cuz I was not done, further, haven’t we learned from history? This is the start down the same path of pseudo warfare and lawlessness we pursued before as national policy, policy which ultimately culminated with the attacks of 9/11 that killed thousands of United States citizens, attacks which were then used with manipulated evidence to attack the nations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Where did that lead us? What did we gain from attacking those nations and killing those people and sacrificing so many of our own citizens in fruitless war?

“I don’t care,” sis said. “I want those drug dealers dead.”

Yeah. Disappointed. Angry.

Sad.

5

Twozdaz Wandering Political Thoughts

There are many news stories out there to concern and anger me about the Trump Destruction Machine. One points to how the Trump Regime repeats failed ideas while expecting different outcomes. Racism and sexism comes to mind, as does reckless huge tariffs, and giving tax breaks to the wealthy. None have panned out, except for very short terms. They are not sustainable.

Another of these is the Trump Death Machine’s attack on Venezuela boats, killing people without war being declared, without due process, without evidence. Trump is following a dangerous and problematic policy that has historic precedence. Policies like his led to terrorist attacks on the United States that culminated in the disaster immortalized under another Republican POTUS, 9/11. Sooner or later, some relatives or political leaders will say, “Fuck him,” and counterattack. I don’t need to engage much imagination to conceive of multiple deadly ways in which the United States can be struck. This is simply a losing course. Trump is too ignorant, shallow, and arrogant to understand.

The same can be said for Trump’s tariffs. It’s hilarious to read his reaction to China’s moves when they mirror what Trump has done and continues to do. It’s like Trump had no idea that other nations would not just bend the knee to him and do as he says — and not as he does. Paul Krugman has more lovely details about it. As Krugman points out, ‘”Gosh. Aggressive unilateral trade action is a “moral disgrace.” Who knew?’

Courts and judges are pushing back against Trump’s one-story vision of ‘blue’ cities teetering with destruction and violence. Trump claims they’re on fire, burning down, etc. The evidence isn’t there, but that doesn’t stop him. Just as with Trump’s hugely fake ‘the 2020 election was stolen’ campaign, where courts consistently ruled against him and his surrogates because the evidence for his claims were not there, the same result is happening as people take Trump to court for sending the military into Portland, Chicago, etc. The evidence is not there, and the courts are telling him so. The danger here is that the Roberts Court will take it up, shrug, and overturn these rulings without explaining why. We know why, of course; the Roberts Court is deeply implicit in trying to establish Trump as the first Dictator of the United States.

Turns out that MAGA and I have something in common. When Pete Hegseth, Trump’s proxy in the War Department, announced that Qatar would build a military base on U.S. soil, I reacted with a furious, “WTAF?” Apparently, MAGA reacted in the same way. Didn’t know that at the time, but I saw the spin a few hours later as the Trump Regime pretended, “No, that was fake news, Qatar is not building a U.S. military base. They’ll be hosted on a U.S. base, just as we do with other allies.”

MAGA balked at Team Trump’s Qatari air force base. So now it’s a ‘fake story.’ | Opinion

Finally, just as seen and predicted, with school back in and the Trump Regime virulently rising up against vaccinations, cases of measles are rising again.

More than 150 unvaccinated students quarantined in South Carolina measles outbreak

Minnesota’s measles case count jumps to 20, with most unvaccinated children

Central Ohio declares new measles outbreak linked to New Albany school district

Measles cases in the US continue to rise after already reaching highest count in 30 years

Don’t you we’re on the eve of destruction?

2

Memories

11 September 2025 … Memories

Jill Dennison published a thoughtful post regarding the 9/11 attacks. Like many, I know exactly where I was and what I was doing. For some reason, early that morning, I woke up suddenly ill and went down to the living room at our home in California. Settling on the sofa under a blanket, I turned on the television and heard the news of the first attack. Then, as I watched, I saw the second aircraft strike. It was a very surreal time. My wife recalls it and always comments that it’s not like me to go down and turn on the television like that. She always felt that I had some sort of psychic reaction to the mass deaths that drove me out of sleep.

0

Munda’s Wandering Political Thoughts

Yes, here we go again.

Anyone remember President George Dubya Bush’s war on Iraq?

He wanted to attack it and was looking for a reason. Polls show the public divided about it. Administration officials like Colin Powell said that Iraq wasn’t a threat.

Then we had 9/11.

The Bush Administration was quick to try to connect 9/11 and Iraq, and then began painting pictures of fictional ‘weapons of mass destruction’. They worked hard to sell the need to invade Iraq because of the imminent threat Saddam Hussein posed. Intelligence was cherry picked. The press got involved. Stories were planted by journalists favorable to the administration. Then the administration would quote those newspapers and stories to convince people that even the ‘liberal mainstream press agreed’ that war was needed.

Any of this sound in any way familiar? It should. It was a marketing campaign. The Trusk Regime is doing something similar. Floating the idea. See what sticks. Repeating it, repeating it, repeating it so people become familiar to it. As using military force gains traction as an idea to ‘keep America safe’, the logic behind it becomes twisted. Intel will get cherry picked or made up completely. People not really paying attention to WTF is going on will begin agreeing, “Yes, we need to do this. We need to use military force against this growing threat.”

Use your search engines and the net’s ability to store and recall information to check the polls and reporting of the period before the invasion of Iraq. The pattern was clear then; it’s clear now. Part of the sell back then was how easy such a military adventure would be for a power like the United States. Remember them telling us how short the war would be? How they mocked people who pointed out there wasn’t an exit strategy? Recall, they told us the war would pay for itself.

Trump wants to attack places. Maybe Greenland. Maybe Canada. Perhaps somewhere else. Putting the nation on a war footing will improve his popularity and strengthen his hold. Because if we’re ‘at war’, then criticizing or challenging him can be called out as detrimental to the war effort. Look back at how popular Dubya became for a while. And that was done without AI and bots. Ponder how effectively bots and AI can be used to sell a war on social media these days. Think of DOGE and Elon Reeve Musk’s potential role.

Yemen was a trial balloon to let his military advisors and senior officials a taste of it. More will come.

Tick, tick, tick.

2

Twosda’s Theme Music

Today is Twosda, Feb. 4, 2005. It’s 33 F outside in Ashlandia and ‘they’ are suggesting our high temp will be in the upper thirties.

You want snow? We got snow. Wet, heavy snow. Eight to ten inches of it surrounds my house. Far as I can see across the neighborhood, that’s the same for them. It’s like Nature had a to-do list to deliver snow to us in January. Then, realizing that hadn’t crossed off the list, made up for it with one super load. More snow is falling as I write.

Trees and bushes are bending the knee under the snow’s oppressive weight. Trees have gone down, taking power lines. We endured two short power outages. Each lasted just long enough to reset everything. Others were not so lucky and missed power for four or five hours. More disturbing, shelters weren’t open for the homeless. Reasoning for that varies: no volunteers for it said one place while the city shelter said, it’s contracted to an outside organization and is only open at night. Because, it said, other places like the library are open in the day. That’s the kind of irritating thining that has us rubbing our faces and sighing. I remember this discussion and the objections, but what if the library and those other places are forced to close? That was tutted aside. Sure, let’s plan for the best scenarios, and not the worse.

We also have multiple vehicle accident and stuck vehicles. Been a while since we’ve had snow and it shows. While we have four snowtrucks and drivers to plow the roads, little of that seemed to be done yesterday.

Schools are closed and classs are canceled, if you’re wondering. Not even doing it over the net. And I will also stay home. Write here, if I can. Well, I can, but sometimes *ahem* my household’s other occupants are oblivious to the writing process *ahem*. Yes, I’m whining. I’ll endure and get sumpin’ done.

The Neurons have pulled up a 1992 song and slipped into into my morning mental music stream. I played it once before, in 2021, during COVID shutdowns, when we were social distancing. “These Are Days” is by 10,0000 Maniacs. It’s a song about things happening that you’ll remember and look back upon. It’s an upbeat song about having happy times and remembering them.

Ironically, of course, the song came to me as I perused news that sickened me about what’s being done, supposedly to counter ‘woke’ ideology’, by the Trump administration. ‘These are they days.’ Decades of progress, plans, actions, and history are being chewed up and spit out because it’s ‘not aligned’ to Trump’s values and visions. His efforts are about as misguided as the invasion of Iraq over WMDs that didn’t exist, attacking them over Iraq’s part in an attack on the U.S. that they didn’t do, and is as deep in understanding as relabeling French fries as ‘freedom fries’. I remember, too, that George Dubya Bush claimed afterward that they never said there was a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. Rewriting history. Look at the toll of that war.

And here we go, down another dark, more twisted rabbit hole.

And cue sigh. Here’s the music.

Two last comments before closing. One is about the War in Iraq. I had a friend who commented a few years after the war, they had us all fooled.

That pissed me off. No. They did not. There was a large segment of us who were not fooled. We raged against the war. We marched in the streets, wrote letters, held vigils, and tried to tell the rest of you. You laughed and dismissed us.

The other comment is that many disparaged President Biden’s efforts to address COVID-19. They raged that President Biden was destroying the United States. Yet, we ended up in better shape than most, with fallig unemployment, an improving economy, and a rising stock market (for what that’s worth). But Trump cheerleaders bemoaned the price of eggs and how much it took to fill the gas tank. And they fooled enough people that here we are.

Twenty years from now, I hope I’m here to look back and remember what was said and done, because I think a lot of people will work hard to re-write history. Hell, there is a small chunk of Americans who think that Trump was a great POTUS and did everything he promised in his first term.

So. We’ll see.

0

Monday’s Theme Music

Mood:

Good day to you from Ashlandia, where the road construction continues as we move into autumn’s waters.

It’s 9/11, and you know what that means in 2023. It’s also a Monday. Everyone will be looking back on the 9/11 part. We’ve already had 60Minutes do it. No doubt, that brave journalistic effort will be repeated with solemn broadcasts across the country. Some will probably speculate, could 9/11 happen in America today? Others will remember how the tragedy ‘brought the country together’. More will point out that many of the security measures installed after 9/11 were kneejerk reactions that created the cumbersome Homeland Security. Another faction will discuss the intelligence failures and whether we’ve fixed that while more pundits will write that, noting how Americans reacted to fear, the GOP has seized on fear as their Big Tool for getting voters’ attention and scaring them into supporting the GOP. The GOP will blow things out of proportion and flat lie to that end in these days. We have the videos.

So, first, a correction; I’d seen a weather report that said we were going to be climbing into the upper nineties in our area. I don’t know if I imagined that or if they changed it, but that’s all gone. We’re going to stay mostly in the 80s F. Today we’re at 60 F and we’ll hit 82 F. It’s good tedium to have these manageable, predictable temps.

Sirens are going by down on the main road. I listen and wonder about the story behind them. They stop abruptly; I listen and watch to see if they come up our street. Muses in me automatically created a speculative vignette about what’s going on. My rational mind wonders, what type of vehicle is driving that siren. Worries about fires and friends butterfly around my head.

Flying out tomorrow, so we have prep work underway today. Packing, final cleaning, final coordination with the house/floof sitter. She’s a good friend and good person who enjoys floofs. We’re lucky to have her. It’ll be a day of traveling tomorrow, beginning pre-dawn thirty, flying across the nation from left coast to where the three rivers meet in western Pennsylvania. We’ll be there a while with a wedding in the middle of the visit this weekend.

The Neurons are feeding “A Day in the Life” by les Beatles (1967) into the morning mental music stream (Trademark in jeopardy). The lyrics also hooked my mind and take me into more introspective places. I’ve always thought it was a telling commentary on different points of view with one enjoying drugs, shaking their head at the endless news stream, and the other just dealing with the mechanics of existing and working, doing little thinking about anything outside of that. To those end, I considered it a yin and yang statement on where we are as a modern civilization. But that’s just me. The more existential question is, what are The Neurons up to, feeding this into me? Well, this time my guess is about watching and reading the news and noting others’ reactions to these cycles. They tune in and tune out; and I do the same.

Off to wage peace on the day. Stay pos, be strong, and keep chill. Coffee mug is warming my hand whenever I pause, sipped and gulped to stir the gray beings populating my brain. There must be billions of them. Here’s the music. Cheers

2

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