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.”
Suddenly, it’s November — again! Yep, we’ve leaped onto Satyrda, November 1, 2025 in Ashlandia, where the temperature is 52 and sunshine is singing praises to blue skies. The thermometer is expected to hop up to 68 F in our area.
Seems like it was just last year when it was November and we were voting on the nation’s future in the United States. The scandal-plagued, greed monger formally known as Trump, more informally known as TACO – Trump Always Chickening Out — won the 2024 election, to the joy of racists, white supremacists, and reactionaries everywhere. The rest of us were less sanguine about it. Now, just a year after that election, the Federal government is grinding to a halt. Under Trump, the government has been shut down for a third time, and Republicans, ‘led’ by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Hell), are refusing to work. Air traffic control and the military are working on promises to be paid, along with TSA. No worries, they’re just the backbone of safety and security. Thanks to DOGE, multiple agencies which helped farmers and families are struggling to function. Trump has stripped funding away from activities and canceled projects regardless of Congressional approval. Congress, remember, are our delegates, voted into office to work for We the People as our servants, just as Trump is supposed to be our servant.
What a servant. Stealing from us. Wrecking the White House. Trying to rewrite history and wipe out our heritage. Arbitrarily deciding what is a crime and who is a criminal, a total 180 of what is supposed to be ‘the American Way’. Taking bribes. Killing in the name of peace. Hounding and persecuting political enemies without evidence, trying to trump up charges that will stick. Dismissing real and meaningful work in the Department of Justice. He’s fired almost all of the Inspector Generals, who were there to investigate the government’s functions to ensure everything was being done legally. A general sense of disarray circles around D.C. It’s like a storm system building toward a hurricane. Distrust of Trump is growing. Disapproval is increasing as the fog thickens about what Trump is doing and how much is legal. Disapproval is rising as citizens and their families starve, employment falls off, inflation grows, and Trump goes golfing.
We still don’t know what it says in the Epstein Files against Trump. Maybe the Andrew formerly known as a prince can illuminate those things for us. I’d love to see that smirk chased off of Trump’s face.
Just a reminder to Trump, the Heritage Foundation and their Project 2025 wet dream, and MAGAland. We the People said No Kings in 1776. We the People said no to fascists in the last world war. We meant it both times. We the People still mean it.
My dreams featured hills, so The Neurons plugged a familiar song about hills in the morning mental music stream. Mind you, one major dream also featured food. People were plying me with sandwiches and desserts wherever I went, doing so as a way of thanks for stepping up and helping them. The food was so delicious and fresh! Kind of amused me in the dream, as I was just a dog with a bone, organizing things because that’s what was needed and that’s my strength. For a time, Der Neurons did consider songs like”Mean Mister Mustard” and “Long Tall Glasses” in the morning mental music stream. But ultimately, they went with “Over the Hills and Far Away” by Led Zeppelin.
We really need more peace and grace in this world. It’s a struggle to get it with Trump and his agents of chaos and destruction. May peace and grace emerge and grow and spread soon. Till then, be strong. Cheers
Summery wisps are present for Sunda, October 5, 2025, in Ashlandia. Now 57 F, sunshine and blue skies say summer but the trees’ scarlets, oranges, golds, and yellows remind us, no, we’re turned the seasonal corner. Still, 75 F is our projected high. Good day for getting outside for yard chores. Papi approved, to judge from his floofverbals — tail up, eyes slitting in appreciation as a sun pool is turned into a floofspot. He commences a lazy spruce up of his whiskers.
Several interesting articles were read this AM. One is an Adam Gabbatt analysis in The Guardian addressing Trump’s increasing strange behavior.
The column highlighted Trump’s AI use to portray Rep. Hakeem Jeffries as Hispanic, a strange and silly ploy which drew Hispanic anger against Trump. That was stacked atop the right-wing conspiracy about med beds shared in a Trump tweet (later deleted), his unfounded ideas about pregnant women using Tylenol, and Trump’s pingpong attention span. Trump went from the Michigan synagogue shooting, where he promised to keep people updated and then never posted about it again, to bragging about the tacky gold decoration he’s added to the Oval Office to his dissatisfaction with an NFL kickoff rule. Then he talked about how presidents walk.
“America is respected again as a country. We were not respected with Biden. They looked at him falling down stairs every day. Every day, the guy’s falling down stairs.”
Trump continued: “I said: ‘It’s not our president. We can’t have it.’ I’m very careful, you know, when I walk downstairs for – like I’m on stairs, like these stairs, I’m very – I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record, just try not to fall because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy.
“We don’t want that. Need to walk nice and easy. You not have – you don’t have to set any record. Be cool, be cool when you walk down, but don’t, don’t bop down the stairs. That’s the one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs, I’ve never seen – da da da da da da, bop, bop, bop, he’d go down the stairs, wouldn’t hold on. I said, it’s great, I don’t want to do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually bad things are going to happen and it only takes once, but he did a lousy job as president.”
Those of us who regularly Trump watch were wearily unsurprised. No, we’re more amazed that the GOP cynically not just accepts Trump’s surreal behavior but actually celebrate and support it. Meanwhile, Trump grows more violent, more eager to use the military every day. Attacks against Venezuela have escalated without any checks being offered by Congress about WTF is going on. And Trump regularly drools over chances of sending in military, even threatening to use the 82nd Airborne, into American cities run by Democrats.
The other article catching my attention was more direct about Trump and his growing wars.
That’s the heart of the matter, isn’t it: Trump is conducting a war on reality, and bringing his alternate reality and self-created facts and history into our reality. That’s the old square peg in a round hole problem. Trump reality is wholly at odds with truth, facts, medicine, and history, and often wars with logic. This piece is by Andrew O’Hehir in Salon. O’Hehir writes,
This war on the world has both fictional goals and real ones, and the fact that those are incompatible is, once again, not a fundamental problem for Trump’s courtiers or adherents. There’s no hypothetical version of global equilibrium in which the United States is simultaneously the dominant superpower and also an isolationist fortress-state with zero immigration. I would guess that Trump loves the sound of that but doesn’t follow the logic too far, while the people who intend to outlast him just “yes queen” along and roll their eyes. Their goal is more doable: leveraging American power to ensure the continued dominance of the billionaire elite for at least as long as our planet remains habitable. (They’re aware that it probably shouldn’t be advertised that way.)
This is how many of us have viewed Trump and MAGALand since early days. I recommend reading the entire article.
The summer/autumn blend has The Neurons feeding me a song about summer. Called “Summer”, by Calvin Harris. This video of young people at a show having fun was amusing to me to watch. Hope it doesn’t something for you, too.
Coffee has again answered the call. Peace and grace are still hanging back, despite my naked dance under the moonlight last night. Hope peace and grace get here soon. Till then, cheers.
Ah, so the ‘no new wars’ POTUS, Trump, he who thinks he so richly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, has declared a war on drugs. After having several Venezuelan boats attacked and destroyed by the United States military, seventeen people killed, Trump is now attacking United States citizens in Chicago through ICE, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives raids. United States citizens were dragged out of their apartments during the night. Their apartments were trashed. All without due process.
All this by the Grand Old Party, the party begun by Abraham Lincoln. President Lincoln, who declared, “A house divided cannot stand,” a phrase he took from the Bible. How sickening now, less than two hundred years later, that party is deliberately pursuing courses to divide the United States by wantonly attacking United States. It’s not just part of the war on immigrants that he began on day one as the 47 POTUS, recklessly abducting, shackling, and deporting people. No, Trump is also attacking Blue states, deliberately withholding funds that were appropriated by Congress. These funds supported approved projects to improve situations. Some are infrastructure. All employed people. Without the approving funding, these projects will most likely un-employ people. That’ll drop state, local, and Federal spending and revenue. Trump, in his hatred for the United States, is deliberately sabotaging the economy. It is surreal.
A house divided cannot stand. You’d think the GOP would know that phrase. You’d think they understand the principle behind it, and the history upon which the speech was made. Yet, they mindlessly endorse and encourage Trump’s war on their own nation. Trump is even trying to set up the use of the U.S. military against United States citizens.
All this by a man with six deferments, an individual who never served the country, who now holds pretensions to being king, an absolute and tyrannical ruler, a dictator. There’s supposed to be a term limit for the presidency, but he’s changing the White House without regard to tradition, norms, history, or good taste, building a monstrosity of a ‘ball room’. Many think these changes are a signal that he never plans to leave.
Donald Trump has left a path of destruction and failures behind him. He’s been a failure at everything he attempted except for lying and being a con man. He declared multiple bankruptcies. He has several failed marriages, cheating on his wife just as he cheated on his taxes. He’s even a failure as a friend, once declaring that he and Jeffrey Epstein were friends, and now denying him, just as Judas denied Jesus in the Bible. Now, as POTUS, like his businesses, his ‘university’, and his marriages, he’s destroying the United States, dividing its population. Are he and his GOP enablers really so dense that they don’t think that destroying the economies of the blue states won’t contribute to the greater downfall of the United States economy?
A house divided cannot stand.
We’ve learned that lesson once. Well, some did. It’s clear that MAGAts and the GOP in general have forgotten that lesson. Either that, or they, like Trump, hate the United States and the freedoms and principles for which it stands.
I can’t conclude that it’s anything but that: Trump hates the United States, as do his supporters. Because as we know, especially with Trump, actions speak louder than words.
And Trump, clearly, is intent on destroying the nation.
It’s a tale of two worlds. It’s the best of times, it’s the craziest of times. It’s a world defined by facts and reason where people come to share discourse about serious problems based on the evidence presented, and it’s a world where a powerful elected official shows serious problems with reality.
This makes it all hard to write. I want to rage about Trump’s insanity. But that’s the problem: he is sick. He should not be in a position of power. He should be retired to somewhere safe, where he can rest with medical care. Trump constantly trolled President Joe Biden as sleepy Joe, always claiming that President Biden was too old and feeble to be POTUS. Well, here we have an expanding body of empirical evidence that Trump’s grasp on reality is as thin and untenable as a cobweb.
Between his psychobabble Tylenol announcement, antifa EO, and his UN speech rife with falsehoods, Trump has blown out any perceptions that he shares the same reality as the great majority. Acting on some fabricated form of history and facts, he makes speeches, boasting about ending wars without naming them, claiming to save thousands of lives, chides others for being ignorant, oblivious to the ignorance which he displays. Whereas before, he was laughed at in his UN speech, this outing found a silent audience; they heard and saw how sick he is. Unless you’re Trump or a MAGAt, you don’t laugh at the sick. Yet, Trump probably saw and heard awe for how great he was. In his mind, they were silent with respect for how brilliant he is. That’s how disconnected he has become.
Tragically for U.S. citizens and the rest of the world, the GOP and Trump’s enablers gleefully go along with his madness. It serves their purpose for him to push his alternate reality unto everyone else and upend science, medicine, logic, truth, and history.
MAGAts seem too mired in their own hatred or alternate reality to raise their voices. This shows again and again through FAFO stories about how shocked they are to be victimized by the person and policies they support. They pretend Trump is religious, despite his history of conning, lying, cheating. They pretend he is fit and strong and muscular, even though pictures show an unhealthy, obese individual. They pretend to hear brilliant insights when he speaks, even when he incoherently rambles. They pretend that he’s religious, sent by God, although he’s committed adultery, paid for sex, has been indicted and convicted of crimes, and shuns the poor and sick while hoarding money.
Most of the wealthiest 1% seem addicted to greed and just keep grabbing whatever they can, regardless of what happens to the other 99% of the population. They’re just looking out for number one; number one is them.
Useful tools like former Fox News are broken individuals who like having attention, power, and position. They’re in over their heads and know it, but that’s okay, because Trump supports them. They’re all going for an ugly spin around the toilet bowl.
Project 2025 participants in Trump’s administration want to break the world. They’re the most dangerous, because they’re organized and serious. They want to create a crucible for cheap slave labor where the wealthy and powerful will flourish with little moral challenge to their ways. Where they can claim their one true god guides their cruelty, hatred, and bigotry. Where white men rule with a few exceptions as salve to prove to themselves they’re not racist, not sexist. They won’t be happy, nor satisfied. But they will be in power. In control.
Concerned only with themselves, bankrupt of morals and empathy, power and control are what they seek. They do not care who they hurt, who is used, or what laws are broken to do it. The ends justify the means in their minds.
This is nothing new. Acting on avarice, greed, and hate, others have peddled lies and misinformation to mislead otherwise good people in order to advance themselves. History shows that’s happened in the United States before. It’s easy to dupe people by drowning them with fake information, especially when it’s what they want to hear, and especially when the wealthiest control most of the media, and the wealthiest are willing to go along with the scheme. The difference now is that a deeply disturbed individual, Donald J. Trump, now commands them.
Howdy, sports fans. It’s Twozda, September 9, 2025. 62 degrees F holds forth in Ashlandia. Marbled clouds headline the moment. Never fear: it’s going to move to 69 degrees F by the day’s end, although we may need to navigate more thunder and rain while we get there. Feels like autumn has got its dandruff up and is out to end summer’s hold on Ashland.
Yesterday early afternoon found us with a huge downpour. People rushed into the coffee shop bursting with news about how intense, sudden, and cold the rain was. Brief was added to its description as the rain ceased after ten relentless minutes.
Then, 2:30 AM. A sound is covering the house. My sleepy mind thought it was a giant fan. Asking, what fan is that, I roamed through the house and realized, that giant fan sound was rain hissing down with Biblical efforts. I returned to bed and sleep only to awaken a while later to my wife in the kitchen getting water.
A sharp, high squeal noise had awakened me. I asked my wife if she’d heard it. “It’s raining,” she said.
I listened. “It stopped.”
“No, it’s still going.”
Papi and I went out back to prove the rain was stopped. It was. Cool breezes swept by with friendly helloes. Moonlight bright enough to walk on broke out. Rain clouds were splitting up and racing away in different directions, leaving a starry dark gray feast for my eyes. “This is nice,” I said. Papi didn’t disagree.
After I was back in bed, a sound like a brassy chord being strong on an electric guitar awakened me. “What the hell was that?” The Neurons asked the dark room. Nobody was giving any answers about noises.
Dad remains hospitalized. Not much can be done about a fractured pelvis. He’s due to be moved to a rehab center today. Andy is also being moved to a rehab center to help him recover from his hip fracture. Sis is mum about her medical procedure and its results.
Gritting my teeth and swallowing my GRRRRR, I peruse the news. Trump is suing the WSJ and anyone attached to the story about his ‘alleged’ birthday card/notes to Epstein. I’m sure Trump is betting that the story will be withdrawn and apologies issues. Meanwhile, he donated the Bible his mother presented to him in his boyhood to a Bible Museum. The net responded with laughter and mocking about the Bible. Most doubt that Trump opened his Bible, read it, and went to church, except for publicity when it suited his needs.
More attacks have been carried out in several wars. None of the war reporting arrives with a sense that the fighting is going to end soon. The major aggressors, Russia and Israel, are well past reasonable lines about their intentions. All can see that Russia will not stop until it has Ukraine. Israel won’t stop until Hamas are all dead. Neither nation displays concern or empathy for the innocents they’re killing.
Economic news will take over today’s media top spots. 911,000 fewer jobs were created between April 2024 and March 2025, BLS says. US job growth through March was significantly weaker than previously thought. Economists and analysts are telling us that it means the jobs markets was even worse than realized. A large downward revision was expected, with many citing sampling errors resulting from declining survey responses, weaker-than-inferred job creation at new firms, and adjustments related to asylum-seekers and other undocumented workers. The pandemic’s impact on the global labor market and residual adjustments were also blamed. Trump’s WH thinks that it proves Trump was right, the Biden economy was a disaster, and the BLS reporting is broken. That’s certainly puzzling, isn’t it: the Trump Regime is depending on a system they claim is broken to prove they’re right. Classic MAGAt non-thinking.
All this has culminated in The Neurons’ song choice for my morning mental music stream. It stormed in Ashland, with more storms coming. Trump is riding a storm of criticism about Jeffrey Epstein. We the People are riding through the storm of data about what’s going on with the economy. Hence, The Neurons summoned The Doors and “Riders on the Storm”.
Coffee has dropped in for an extended visit. May grace and peace visit and stay with us all for a while. Here we go again. Cheers
Autumn is toddling in, dragging cooler air over us. Wildfire smoke adds a gauzy layer to tamp down temperatures. 68 F, clouds scuff up the blue sky. Thunderstorms are expected to drop in, and the temperature will top at a cordial 75 F. This is Munda, September 8, 2025. Our air quality is moderate, hovering in the 90s.
Dad is in the hospital in Texas, going through tests and assessments to see what can be done about his condition. Mom is okay at home, it seems, coming across as feisty in her texts. Steve is in hospice with multiple myeloma. Andy is recovering in the hospital from his surgery and getting ready to begin physical therapy. Sis is going into the hospital for a ‘medical procedure’ today. Telling me via text yesterday that she wasn’t well, she remained vague about what her medical procedure was for. I see my doctor tomorrow. Sounds like friends and family medical week.
The latest unexpected shock to the system politically has the Roberts Court again supporting Trump. Yes, it’s a real *gasp* moment. The ruling allows ICE to randomly patrol and pick up people based on whatever the fuck motivates those actions that day. It’s the Trump MAGALand way. MAGAts are applauding it. One said in comments on an article, “As an American I think that ICE and any law enforcement officer enforcing our immigration laws and detaining and having any and all illegal people regardless of race or nationality, is exactly what they should be doing, and we support them 100%.” Except, yawn, ‘Old Patriot Guy’, they’re not enforcing laws; they’re enforcing Executive Orders. Due process isn’t being followed. But that’s okay with OPG and others like him. Ends justify the means. To them, everyone ICE picks up is an illegal and needs to be kicked out. Like how he shifted from ‘I, American’ to ‘we’ by his comment’s end. Was that a slip of the royal we subconsciously thrust in there? Of course, MAGAts consistently demonstrate narrow focus and shallow thinking. OPG might be applauding and waving his flag over Trump’s ICE disappearing people without due process, but you can bet that his comments will change if he and his get struck. He’ll probably then whine, “What happened to innocent until proven guilty?” We know that in Trump’s U.S., that only applies to PINO TACO himself.
Meanwhile, Trump has again opted for fiction to support his decisions and policies. Has to be so for PINO Trump, if you think about it; truth, logic, reality, honor, and history all stand firmly against him. Since Trump brought it up, how much will longer we need to endure Trumpocalypse? Nine months into 2025, it’s already too much.
Today’s music is for Rick Davies, Supertramp member and songwriter. He passed at 81 after losing to cancer. The Neurons and I agreed to play 1974’s “Bloody Well Right” in the morning mental music stream in honor and memory of Rick Davies.
Hope peace and grace sniff you out and give you help as needed today. Coffee has made a splash in my body. And it’s off to the races we go. Cheers
It’s one of those days when I read the news and let out slow air. First, the quake in Afghanistan. Only five miles deep, it killed over 800 at first count, and they’re still counting. Then the Sudan mudslide which was said to kill thousands. Sorry to read about all that pain and misfortune. I wish and hope for the best for the survivors. Will the U.S. send aid? Under previous administrations, that was almost a certainty. Under PINO TACO, it’s far less likely.
personnelente shared several links today. personnelente always offers links with interesting news and opinions. In this case, it was the Army Times taking up the issue of Trump deploying troops to cities.
The first read was The National Guard, DC landscaping and the great pursuit of lethality. In classic TACO Regime double standards, the Army Times points out what a big show Pete Hegseth made about the Army and ‘lethality’ back in December of 2024. First, the article points out that the national guard troops were authorized to be armed and use force “solely in response to an imminent threat,” according to a Guard statement. Then the article goes on to mock the use of these troops for landscaping duties, duties usually done by the National Parks Service but can’t be done because El TACO dismissed said NPS workers.
Great execution, Donnie boy!
Here’s the Times’ words to convey what’s going on:
Many guardsmen, however, were unaware the imminent threat posed would come in the form of unkempt flower beds and tree debris, their weapons akin to those wielded by an Anglo-Saxon fyrd under Alfred the Great.
But such is the reality for many of the 2,300 or so troops deployed to stem the “magnitude of the violent crime” in the nation’s capital, where threats of high-priced coffee, spandex-clad cyclists and more salmon pants than a Ralph Lauren factory loom around every pothole-riddled corner.
Various critics, meanwhile, have suggested the beautification work runs counter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s oft-repeated mission statement of bringing “a warfighting ethos back to the Pentagon.”
True warfighters instilled with the warfighting ethos, however, know that a warfighting ethos is only at its warfighting ethos-iest when warfighters are fighting a war on boredom.
The second Army Times article is Trump’s push for more troops in US cities at odds with crime stats. As many of us moored in facts and reality already noted, PINO TACO was sending in troops for a problem of violent crime that only exists in his brain and the MAGAheads who bow to him.
President Donald Trump has threatened to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, to fight what he says is runaway crime. Yet data shows most violent crime in those places and around the country has declined in recent years.
Homicides through the first six months of 2025 were down significantly compared to the same period in 2024, continuing a post-pandemic trend across the U.S.
Trump, who has already taken federal control of police in Washington, D.C., has maligned the six Democratic-run cities that all are in states that opposed him in 2024. But he hasn’t threatened sending in the Guard to any major cities in Republican-leaning states.
John Roman, a data expert who directs the Center on Public Safety & Justice at the University of Chicago, acknowledged violence in some urban neighborhoods has persisted for generations. But he said there’s no U.S. city where there “is really a crisis.”
“We’re at a remarkable moment in crime in the United States,” he said.
But these are facts. Truth. Both are those are alien to Trumpworld, where his crazy vision distorts reality and maligns history. Of course, as many point out, much of what he says and does now and forever is to distract us from other things, things which really worry him. Things like Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and what the Epstein file might say about him.
Trump is also trying to distract We the People from things like Trump’s failing health, his flailing efforts to end wars or improve the economy, and his dim chances to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He’s going down fast.
Michael Seidel, writer 