Today’s Instagram walkabout post
Today’s podcast is from John Heilemann's Hell and Highwater #108 - Stuart Stevens and Rick Wilson - This is one of the best podcasts I’ve heard explaining what’s going on in our government… Not just dissing Donald Trump or the Republican Party because this are ex-Republicans talking. NOT John Heilemann who has always been an independent. But how things work, how they’ve been done, what’s going on and, how easily it can be done for certain types to take down a country like ours. To turn it into something it’s fully against, since it’s establishment, over 200 years ago. For example, page down to the * paragraph below.
There’s a very good comment later in the podcast about The Lincoln Project. The comment was made that it’s now bigger than the RNC or the DNC and has a lot of donors. It’s not what the MAGA or RINO Trump politicians and voters think it is. It’s not about any person or party. It has members from all sides of politics and donors as well. So especially those who think they hate The Lincoln Project are the people who most need to listen to this because they are about our country and not about any one individual or entity. Just America and America being functional and fruitful as intended to be. Not a mind numbing, ridiculous autocracy. Remember, we were founded as a response against tyranny while what we’re seeing now is a move by Trump loyalists invoking a kind of tyranny because they’re rejecting the “tyranny” of democracy (which makes no sense) and is maligned redefinition of what democracy truly is. All because they don't get their way, in going against what America is and always has been. It's kind of mental defectively bizarre.
I just want to mention that since I’ve had a bad case of COVID-19 a couple times now over two years, and as I have long CoViD now, since I am recently 67 years old, should I die, and in today’s climate and with my growing toward 2,000 articles online since about 2010, with my calling out both traitors and before that international terrorists going back to9/11, as I've stood up for Egyptian people during their Arab Spring uprising as many of them were hitting my blog when cut off from social media by their government, as I've stood for Ukraine from day one, and stood against fascists and traitors in our own country since Trump began to run for POTUS in 2016 (and ridiculously won) and then again (ridiculously again) running in 2020, should I happen to die, my blog, in being titled "Murdockinations", is available online, as you may know, by using that word with a Dotcom suffix (murdockinations.com). I mention this only because if I were to die, as I pay for that domain name and URL forwarding to the base URL, jzmurdock.blogspot.com. While the easy name to get there will eventually expire, you’ll be able to get to the base URL and hopefully for a very long time. Maybe even long after my death someday, and after Trump dies and his toxicity is pruned and painfully squeezed from our body politic and international consciousness. I hope you’ll still be able to see people like me online who spoke out for what is right and what is correct. What is moral and ethical and what our country was founded upon, not what fools have tried to hard to subvert into being. That being in so illiberally trying to force us into being a national fascist, autocratic state. We are a Republic, and a democracy, if we can keep it. If the fascists win, if Trump or his criminal family win, people like me may be wiped off the Internet and then only those who have read me or others like me, will remember us until a they too are neutralized or eventually die off. Gladly, there are international entities who are making copies of the Internet in other countries and those will hopefully survive. Unless this entire planet goes insane and turns into a giant ant hill led by a top despotic ant. As fascist's always wish to be, in being that top single power and single point of consistent failure. As Putin has made himself into being now. As Trump tried to make himself into being. And as America was never designed to be.
The Lincoln Project documentary series debuts on Showtime on October 7.
I think John Heilemann was correct saying when Tump's Mar-a-Lago residence had a warrant served by the FBI, inside Trump's tiny self involved mind he went, “Yippee! Attention on me, me, me again!”
Back in the 80s and 90s those who knew Trump best in New York City rightly treated him like the clown that he is. As someone who worked for Giuliani said, "Trump is the guy you throw a couple of parking passes to and ignore." Well, when you let the stupid and worse, the criminal lead, you find there’s a stupid voting block that will follow. As well as those attracted to breaking norms, destruction for fun, and crime for the sake of its entertainment value.
“What the fuck are you talking about, Trump is not a billionaire. I am a billionaire. Trumps a clown living on credit.“ From the book, By Rick Wilson, "Everything Trump Touches Dies - A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever"
There's a problem with the Republican Party? When you have a party that will vote for someone who is indicted? When an indictment would actually help his election acquiring Republican votes? When you have a Republican Party who will vote for someone who is an obvious criminal and even spawned an insurrection? Yes there is indeed a problem with the Republican Party.
When Trump was attacking the FBI for serving a legal warrant founded in fact and evidence, where were the real Republicans or even the RINO Republicans? Regardless which side you’re on, or how you see either of those terms, where were any Americans, one time Trump supporters, or Republicans of any flavor, of any note, standing up and saying, “THIS is wrong!“ And IF there WERE any incidents you can point to, where someone did speak up? There wasn’t enough of them. It wasn’t enough, obviously.
We need to understand exactly when a conspiracy actually is just a conspiracy theory. Because 99.9% of all the conspiracies we’ve heard in the past 10 or 20 years or not based on enough factual evidence to support the reality of the contentions. In science, which is the ultimate version of seeking facts in reality, a true scientist who has made it an art, which is science beyond science, actually can... let’s call it, intuiting a judgment, that is then eventually backed up with the science. That IS possible. However that is not every person who thinks they have “evidence“, who thinks they have made a correct and proper judgment. Even most professionals fail at that. Because of that, conspiracy theories have run wild and led to an actual and true mental defect and criminal morph from his lifetime as a “business“ mob boss/leader, to POTUS45. How can this happen? Decades of poor education all across the country. Mostly Republicans weaponizing our education system. Weaponizing serious issues for their own benefit toward acquiring power and profit. Even going to the point of considering themselves a Prophet...for their actual profit.
It’s 9:26AM, closing in on walking my 2nd mile. It’s already getting warm. It won’t be long before it’s too warm for me to walk. Air quality today was 40, considered healthy and yet I can see a mist in the distance that I wonder if it’s water particles or smoke, or something else. I shouldn’t even be on this walk considering my condition. I’m just hoping the exercise outweighs the downside.
MAGA, those who thought Trump was a Bernie Madoff and they his investors supporting him, and were beating the market. Until Madoff's scheme failed and the FBI arrested him, brought him down and showed him his new permanent residence in a federal prison. Just as Trump should be. Although he has seriously earned one and only one punishment, crowding out all others for capital punishment, our nation’s most serious punishment One that we should never use, because I’m against capital punishment, EXCEPT for very few, very specific types of cases and crimes. Donald Trump has gone way above that bar which is an area he’s excelled in as he’s expert at lowering bars he the crawls beneath going ever lower until he hits the very lowest levels, that no one ever conceived possible.
^
My adult son manages a health food store and who is a local CBD expert where doctors call him to ask for comment on prescriptions for their patients, sent me an article from some research. We do that kind of thing all the time. On astrophysics, on astronomy, on whatever. Including politics, mostly because of the ongoing insanity. Trying to keep each other along the lines of the factual and real. Anyway, new research is showing people who abstain from alcohol, but drink a little once in a while, even those into moderate use, up to heavy even usage perhaps (yeah, I thought that too), are exhibiting benefits toward warding off conditions like Alzheimer’s in their later years. I started smoking weed in August 1972 just before 12th grade. And it saved my life. I drank like anyone in high school, but I had somehow gotten onto pills for a while. Though I didn’t like uppers, speed. Valium seemed to help with my ADHD. My somewhat stressful family life, landed me in the hospital during my last semester of 12th grade, for a few days. Three neurosurgeons reviewed my situation and gave me a prescription for Valium. Then said, "Here you go. Now, either move out of your parents or, take these." A few months later, at 17, I graduated and got a job and moved into an apartment. I also stopped taking Valium. But that August previous had really helped me curb my pill usage. Which honestly may have led to my hospital stay, as I didn’t have anything powerful enough to help me cope with my situation. I mention all this because in the late 90s and early 2000s I quit smoking cannabis out of fear that if I got caught, I could lose my kids. That’s abuse by the state via just bad laws. Cannabis should never have been a schedule one drug like heroin. Or illegal. After my divorce in 2002, as stressful as it was in raising two kids, I still didn’t smoke pot. But when they were about to move out as adults around 2010, I went back to it. I wasn't really worried about losing young kids to the state anymore. I bought my first vaping table device, because the goal had always been to be healthy. Which is why we switched to bongs in the med to late 1970s in being better than sucking hot smoke and ash into your lungs. My how times have changed… Cannabis is now legal in Washington state, though it desperately needs to be federally legal nationwide, and internationally. As for alcohol, I only ever drank socially, after my late teen years. By time I turned 21, I was done going to bars or parties. Once into college, after the USAF, I watched my younger college friends partying, but I was glad to be over that party of my life, so I could spend my energies on studying. It's just nice to kn0w that how my life turned out, seemed to be a lot more healthy for me in the long run, than I'd ever anticipated.
9:38 AM starting my 3rd mile and getting even warmer.
OK. As far as Donald Trump‘s right wing bubble, thinking that he can mentally declassify our most top-secret documents, this is technically what we call, bullshit, and for many reasons. If he finds a way to prove that case through a bazaar series of legal maneuvering, well... whatever. At that point, we would need to nail down these laws so this never happens again. But honestly, I’ll be surprised if he gets away with it, as he’s already gotten people killed. Yes, classified related deaths we may never hear about it.
Donald Trump again (I'm so sick of hearing about this national disaster...): "Gee golly whiz, I declassified everything, I just use my mind, I can do that because I’m the president." Uh huh. That sounds very similar to when you think you’re so famous you can just walk up to a woman and grab her by the pussy and believe they’ll just let you do it, let you do anything. The thing about these toxic personalities is they don’t even realize how many times the people they don’t seem know they’re abusing, or really they don’t care they’re abusing, keep getting away with it. While those are people they are victimizing, damaging, and potentially ruining the rest of their life. Which is why we have laws against people like that doing things like that. They're called, predators.
As John Heilemann says in today's podcast, when Trump was a reality star he thought he was omnipotent. Which I kept saying before Trump was elected, and after, that you never ever give a personality like Donald Trump power and certainly never make them the most powerful man in the world, as president of the United States. That, is utter stupidity and as we’ve seen, extremely dangerous. And may even destroy the country. That is yet to be seen. That’s how dangerous this is, completely aside from international relations he ruined, or the Ukrainian war he may well have invoked because Putin has similar thoughts. Thinking he is omnipotent. Think about the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who died because of Trump manipulating and gaining political currency by how he handled the pandemic. As I'd also said before, before Trump was elected, you don’t elect someone like him because if something bad happens, and he’s in power, very bad shit will happen. And did. And so hundreds of thousands of Americans died because of everyone who cast a vote for Trump as president.
The defect in Conservatism that I’ve always mentioned is when you get a toxic personality like Donald Trump, in part because of evangelicalism, in part because of religion in general, especially Christianity, which has been a part of a defective Republican Party for decades now, that party collapsed right into Trump's lap. AS they began to politically fluff him until today, fellating him politically and monetarily because they couldn't do it physically and sexually, apparently. That’s the Republican Party people belong to now.
After experiencing these past years with how Trump manipulated people and how they fell into praising him as "Lord" or something, if not just political Lord, I will never again ask myself how the 1930s with Hitler happened. Or how Hitler was able to manipulate people like Trump does, only until the holocaust happened and literally millions of people died all over Europe and Russia. Political actions that also allowed Putin to continue, which could allow Trump to have power again. Do not think we won’t see these things again, because it’s already beginning, and it’s already happened in Ukraine and elsewhere via Putin. We are lucky today in that Hitler was smarter than Putin or Trump. But what Putin and Trump lack in intelligence, they do their best to make up for with their other illegal illiberal actions. Don't think that Trump in power again, unrestricted that time, won't devolve into a nightmare.
Interesting, the only way Germany could stop the workers from becoming Bolsheviks and taking over, because the elites had been so out of touch and made such a dual class system, was in supporting Adolf Hitler. And that’s exactly what we’ve been seeing with McConnell and others in the Republican Party in their supporting Trump. So many laws and actions Republicans have pushed through, stacking the court, stacking in the Supreme Court. Manufacturing crises, with immigration, while refusing to work together to update immigration laws for decades, weaponizing things like abortion issues, and bizarrely, women’s health issues in general, weaponizing isseus surrounding immigrants and minorities, sexual and gender issues. Criminally using human beings like pawns as Florida Gov. DeSantis did. We’re watching the modern American version of what happened all through the 30s in Nazi Germany. And if you can’t see that, then you’re in that bubble supporting it happening. Best you pay better attention. Better we all pay better attention.
There is an interesting technique in podcasts I just noticed. Though it has been used all through history and broadcasting. At the beginning you play a few short clips of what’s coming in that next time frame. When you get to that in the podcast, and hear those words again, your mind is a double take. It says, "Hey I’ve heard this before." Hopefully you’ll recognize you just heard it in the beginning of the podcast, maybe 30 minutes ago. But I believe there’s a second function that kicks in. The "I have heard this before… Somewhere" recognition. Even if that lasts for a second, it adds weight and veracity to the quote. Because in the back of your mind, which keeps working on things like this for at least a few seconds or minutes, you color that thought with a color of import. Possibly that you’ve heard it from another person. Which doesn’t say to you, "plagiarism" in this format. Rather it says to your internal, lower level processing mind, that if two people said this thing, then there must be more importance, relevancy and actuality to it. This is in part what phenomenology is about, studying and recognizing things like this. It's what I studied and got my university degree in psychology in. Observing the human experience and human interactions with literally everything. It’s observations like that which I can include in this blog, that made me initially think there might be some relevancy and usefulness to my posting it in a blog for people to read and consider. I believe all the other stuff I talk about here, will eventually move over to that side of the process. So, hopefully, more to come.
*How does a strongman/autocrat come to power? First, you attack civil systems. You even attack the election system. Because once you get people to believe everything you say, once they start to believe that their democracy and their government are that dysfunctional, what they desperately will feel they need at that point is... a strong man to fix it all. And look, all along, here was a strong man who has been claiming that he and he alone can fix all of this. Which to any adult or critical thinker would immediately recognize as utter fantasy. Especially in a country with all the specializations we have. You can’t come fix my sophisticated computer program just because you’re a good leader. Even if you ARE a good programmer, you still have to know that specific computer language or operating system. And you may even need to know that specific application well enough to fix it. So how did someone like Trump, get so many to buy into his utter and complete bullshit?
Do remember that the Republican Party walked right up to the edge of supporting Putin and his genocidal campaign against a friendly neighboring country of Ukraine. And then they saw Trump leap into it and realized finally, "Oh shit! We’re on the wrong side of this!" And they just tiptoed away... slinking back under rocks and into their dark recesses of right wingednesses. Until they were able to come back out again for other things that abuse our citizens and government, in so many other ways. Because that is what they do. And keep doing.
Donald Trump‘s way of doing things is a shotgun approach to insanity. Throw shit up against the wall and see what attracts the most flies. The flies being his MAGA supporters. The Republican Party didn’t know what the hell to do with this in the beginning and so they rebuke him, strongly. Until one by one they were brought to silence. Because they saw how effective his method was. Until finally they started doing it too. This Trump mental illness and criminality is insidious. It's infectious. It’s gone into their political party which Trump infected during his presidency and he injected it into our government. Remember, Louis DeJoy is still Postmaster General. Three Supreme Court Justices and hundreds in the Federal courts, many who were patently unprepared to be judges. This is going to take decades to fix.
10:20 AM It’s gotten even warmer and I question doing this last mile but, hey, I’m doing it.
As I mentioned above earlier, I wanted to write this blog as a phenomenologist observing everything. A lot of it is about politics because right now, considering Putin and nuclear war, it’s probably our most relevant, existential consideration, and threat. So much of my observations in this blog and in the past few, since I began, I know, they are very political. But it’s more and more been getting me oriented to try and get to the phenomenological side of things, which is what really excites me. But as with someone strangling you, regardless your orientation, your first and foremost consideration will be to be able to breathe again. So hopefully with time, I will indeed get to the phenomenological side of observing our human existence and experience.
Apparently, The Lincoln Project is the only political entity that POTUS45 (Trump, for foreigners and those comatose these past years) really tried to shut down. That and that alone should make you realize that they are the greatest pro America entity to evolve since the beginning of Trump and his curious and criminal version of politics. Hopefully they will supplant him entirely and the mindset that he infected others with and all those who have been afflicted with his terminal political and social disease.
There it is, 10:36 AM and I just finished 5 miles. That’s 80 miles in the past week, walking. That's 320 miles a month, if I can keep it up.
I just got home, and saw my voters pamphlet in the mailbox. I’ve been voting all blue all through Trump because the Republican Party lost their damn mind and needed to be reminded, we're all Americans, not citizens of Trumpland. How many Republicans wisely left the party? Some of those led to creating The Lincoln Project. Which, had some problems, but they have self corrected. They got an outside legal entity to legitimately evaluate them and they’ve now course corrected. Problem people are now gone. Aside from that, I saw some Republican official talking on the news a couple weeks ago who suggested that we please don’t use a vote all blue. And I was like, yeah right, good one. But he had a valid argument. If we vote blue for a candidate we know will lose against a MAGA candidate, they will win... unless people vote for the Republican candidate opposing him. We do really need to vote for that Republican candidate, who is for what Democrats are for, America, just a differing opinions. Who is not a hater of our country or democracy. I’ve said all along I don’t hate Republicans, I do dispose the stupidity they have embraced. We need to have an opposing party in our two party system, regardless of what you think, or want. We just don’t need an opposing Republican Party who thinks they exist nearly to oppose the Democrats. That's childish and stupid, but effective in politics and has proven to be. But it subverts democracy and may well end it. They should only be opposing Democrats when they have bad ideas, because they don’t always, and sometimes they have good ideas, just with poor executions. That's when Republicans should pick up the idea and come up with a better way to execute it. Which would get Democrats on board. I don’t know why that’s so difficult to understand anymore. Vote vote vote, but vote, wisely!
