Truths about Trump

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I’m watching the horrors taking place in the USA with absolute disgust and bewilderment.

I have to ask myself how such a coarse, crude, uneducated and nasty man came to power. What does that say about American people and their society?

This is what I see:

A complete conman who is using his office to make vast wealth for him and his family – to the tune of $5,000,000,000 in the first year.

A man who claims to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize who has bombed and threatened more countries than any other President

A Billionaire who brought in tax breaks and loopholes for Billionaires

A liar who consistently lies about everything big and small

A narcissist who makes everything about him and wants everything named after him

A man who claims to represent the working man but really represents other billionaires and puts people like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg in charge

A hypocrite who does the opposite of what he tells others to do ie. covid vaccination

An incompetent fool who acts on ‘gut instincts’ rather than solid facts and surrounds himself with incompetent sycophants who won’t challenge his stupidities

A extreme right-wing nutcase who identifies and sides with other tyrants and despots like Putin and Netanyahu, Kim Jung Un and Bolsonaro

A science denier who cannot read, is ignorant and stupid and jumps on populist bandwagons like climate denial, covid vaccine conspiracy

A man who cannot be trusted as he vacillates, stabs allies in the back and sides with enemies like Putin

A failed businessman who sees complex things in black and white and can’t understand the implications and effects of things like tariffs and interconnected world trade

A populist who has used conspiracy theories and claims of fake news to undermine the establishment, create division and incite fools.

A man who makes stupid claims that are impossible to do – like ending the Ukraine war in 1 day, bringing down the price of groceries and fuel, stopping illegal immigration by building a wall, bombing Iran into regime change, bringing back old outdated industry and making America great again – when the results of his ill-thought through actions are to create the very opposite – he has protracted the Ukraine War by backing Putin, put up the cost of fuel and groceries with tariffs and war against Iran, put the US in decline by causing the rest of the world to seek other markets due to tariffs and insults, driven allies to gang up against the USA, caused much hatred and alarm in Canada and Greenland with ignorant, stupid threats

A racist who has unleashed his stormtroopers into Democrat cities to harass and murder people with impunity.

A man who ignores national and international laws and side-lines democracy by issuing Presidential decrees instead of using Congress and the Senate

An illiterate who can’t and doesn’t read, hence does not understand complex issues, science or world issues

A vindictive person who cannot stand being criticised and uses his powers against anyone who stands up to him – through arrest, harassment, threats and law suits. Who has directed the legal system to act on his behalf

An antidemocrat who has loaded the Supreme Court with sycophants, undermined the voting system and seeks to control the democratic system in the same way as Putin does – making elections and democracy a sham and giving himself absolute power

A man who cannot stand criticism to the point where people entering the country have their phones checked and f there s anything critical of Trump they are denied entry

A fascist who is busy setting up a police state

A figure of ridicule around the world behind his back and sycophantic false kow-towing to his face

An idiot who has added trillions to the US debt.

A self-serving conman who is a danger to the whole world order

Apart from that…

Jonathan Pie, Trump and the BBC – Satire or truth?

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Jonathan Pie in his indomitable calm reflective mood. Not so much satire as naked truth!

The only time Trump didn’t lie??

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Under cover of Free Speech!!

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When are the Epstein Files going to be released??

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Is this yet another Trump cover-up?

53 and imploding

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I wrote this when I was fifty-three years old. A stream of consciousness, an antinovel. I still like it. I’m visiting with myself.

53 and imploding eBook : goodwin, opher: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

Excerpt – 53 and imploding

I am a watcher, a commentator, and a masturbator in the winds of time. I am an idealist and a dreamer. I am the ultimate optimist and the perennial pessimist. I write to change the world and I write even though I believe nobody will ever read anything I’ve ever written.

I often tell people that when I die they will make a huge funeral pyre out of my books. They will burn me with my own words. I write so that my flaming voice will roar me higher into the heavens in one last spectacular display of ineffectual verbosity – one final impotent gesture of defiance.

That’s all we have – gestures of defiance!

I am a watcher.

If only I believed that there was a part of me able to see that last dramatic gesture. I would love it. But I don’t believe anything will remain. Life is ultimately futile. Yet in defiance and idealistic struggle there is substance and worth.

I am standing on this mound surveying the plains before me. Society, with all its control and expansion is consuming the natural world. The forces of the establishment, with their mantra of growth and greed, are like a forest fire sweeping down to destroy the whole planet. I see the scurrying of helpless individuals and species defenceless against the holocaust of mindless progress. I see the entourages careening off each other like terrified billiard balls. I see the luxurious penthouse suites towering imperiously above feeling they are immune to the destruction. We are impotent. Even my funeral pyre of a lifetime’s words isn’t going to create much of a fire-break. What the fuck!

Semaphore messages across enemy lines. Are you out there? Can you understand me? Do we share a language? I think I am alone.

If you could see me now I am smiling ironically.

None of it really matters. If not this fire then it will be the next or the four billionth. What does it matter? Eternity looks over my shoulder and is smiling with me. She likes what I am writing. She knows it ranks among the very, very best. There is none better.

I am happy that there is none better.

All these symbols I am arranging. No other mind could do it the same. No one has. I am unique. The conveying of meaning, the portraying of scene, the characterisation, the pace, the setting. There is none better. This is as good as it gets. My words are right up there with the very best. Roll over Shakespeare your time has gone.

53 and imploding eBook : goodwin, opher: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

53 and imploding – Me

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Incredibly, I wrote this novel twenty-three years ago. I was suffering some kind of mid-life crisis in that I was questioning what I was doing. We have 4000 weeks of life (if we’re lucky). I had spent twenty-eight years teaching. I’d become a Deputy Head. I had spent twenty-eight fighting the system, pushing the limits, in order to make education vital – to bring young minds to life, to broaden their perspective. I was tired. I wanted my life back.

I had started out in my teens full of radical enthusiasm. I was jaded. I was looking to get out. Little did I know I was on the brink of change. Instead of retirement I took on headship and really changed things. But that’s something else.

This ‘novel’ was my antinovel. I had no structure to work on. I just wanted a stream of consciousness that told it as it was.

This is me. You are in my head.

53 and imploding – Me

I am no writer; I am a liberator of ideas.

So what is this I am doing? Can you imagine me sitting here? It is eleven in the evening. Outside it is dark and raining. It is pleasantly warm. I am sitting at my desk, a burnt out old 53-year-old small guy with longish thinning hair and a threadbare ambition. I have standing in the community. I am a deputy headmaster at the third oldest school in the country. Some would envy me this position. I spit on it. It keeps me warm, well fed, and comfortable. It pays for the wine, the music and the car. It has enabled me to raise and care for my family. It takes time from my pointless writing. It is a noose around my neck strangling the vitality out of my ageing synapses. I am suffocating in this shit. It is true that it affords contact with some extraordinary young minds, as well as a larger number of less extraordinary young minds, but it is none the less a role I go through; a set of challenges I have to rise to. It eats away at my nerves and erodes my mental health. It robs me of time, ease, friendship and thought. It buys that with money and comfort. This is addictive but probably not a good trade. Who can say? It depends on what your purpose for living is. It depends on your ethics and morality. Ha!

Can you picture me yet? I am sitting here at six minutes past eleven in front of a computer screen typing in Microsoft word. This is page five of Chapter one. I have two sheets of A4 paper in front of me. One is covered in my own indecipherable scrawl in red ink on both sides. The other has black scrawl on two thirds of one side. They are the only clues I have as to where the next pages will take me; that and some weird idea that I want to explore the reality of life and delve into what is really important. You see – I do not lie when I say I have no plan or structure. Life has no plan or structure. We impose that on it with hindsight and the absurd need for order.  We are programmed to look for the patterns and meaning. That is the secret of our evolutionary success. Why should life have meaning? I do not believe in destiny. I do not believe in God or some equally absurd after-life. I believe in haphazard circumstance that leads from one thing to another. Sometimes this serendipity is fortuitous. When remarkably unlikely events conspire to occur we marvel. We proclaim them miracles or mystical intervention. They are merely life. That is what happens when you throw seeds to the wind – they sometimes fall to create a picture.

The Very Scary Truth.

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·  Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

The Very Scary Truth.

‘Flood the zone with shit’. So advised Steve Bannon, onetime chief strategist for Donald Trump, who understood long ago that if you want to get away with an outrageous act, follow it with another and then another. That way, the media will be sure to move on to the newest horror, so forgetting the one before.

Trump continues to live by that rule, making it hard to keep up with everything he and his circle do and say – and he’s not even back in office yet. It therefore requires a conscious effort to take a step back and see what’s happening. That might be easier this week than others because the most egregious outrages form a pattern, one that poses a severe and direct challenge to Britain and its neighbours.

Start with Elon Musk’s war on the UK government, now increasingly explicit. On Monday the X owner, who sits at Trump’s right hand, leading his new, if not formally constituted, department of government efficiency, polled his 212m followers on whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” Naturally, they were in favour, by 58% to 42%.

It might be tempting to write that off as a joke, but it came in a blizzard of posts from, or amplified by, Musk, pressing the unfounded casethat Keir Starmer and his ministers are guilty of a cover-up of horrific child abuse by gangs of British Muslim men. Drawing on a series of distortions and wholesale fabrications long circulated by the far right, Musk has also called for Starmer to be jailed.

Lest this be construed as nothing more than a rich man having fun – some like yachts, others toy with the politics of foreign countries, each to their own – the FT reported on Thursday that “Musk has privately discussed with allies how Sir Keir Starmer could be removed as UK prime minister before the next general election.” He’s serious.

Pause for a moment to note how the same Brexiters who once insisted EU refrigeration standards for exported kippers, which turned out not to exist, were an intolerable violation of British sovereignty are now untroubled by a foreign oligarch openly engaged in overturning a British election – indeed, how eagerly the likes of Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick have hitched a ride on Musk’s bandwagon. Nigel Farage is getting some credit for refusing to back Musk’s support for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the far-right agitator known as Tommy Robinson, but that’s self-preservation on Farage’s part – he knows that Robinson toxifies his brand.

None of that should distract from what this is: a deliberate attempt by the man at the side of the incoming US president to destabilise a loyal and longstanding ally. Those deluding themselves that Trump will respect the supposed special relationship between the US and UK need to absorb the fact that while Musk has been aiming his fire at London, Trump has raised not a murmur of protest.

And why would he, given that he too has spent the week destabilising an ally? Plenty thought Trump was kidding when he talked about acquiring Greenland, but not many are laughing now. He dispatched his son Don Jr to the island on Tuesday, as Trump explained that the US needed Greenland for its own security.

Trump knows that Greenland is a self-governing territory of Denmark, a US ally. But that doesn’t trouble him. Instead, he claimed the island “would love to become” a US state while threatening Denmark in the manner of a mafia boss running a protection racket. “We can’t be too happy with Denmark,” Trump said, not long before a New York court on Friday confirmed his status as a convicted felon,“and maybe things have to happen with respect to Denmark having to do with tariffs.” Nice business you got here; would be a shame if something happened to it.

It’s time we all got the memo. This is not how allies behave. Trump is acting instead like an enemy of the US’s historic partners, either threatening their security and sovereignty directly or indulging hostile interference in their domestic affairs.

The pattern of conduct by the Trump-Musk axis should be familiar. The torrent of lies, aimed at widening ethnic divisions and inflaming nativist nationalism. The determined control of media and information, already greeted in the US by a phenomenon that the eminent scholar of tyranny Timothy Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience”: witness Mark Zuckerberg’s craven ditching of factchecking in deference to Maga-world’s loathing of facts, or Jeff Bezos’s apparent resolve to neuter the Washington Post. The erasing of the boundary that should separate big business from the state, with plutocrats and government instead blurring into one. The dreams of territorial expansion.

Remind you of anyone? It’s a playbook written by Vladimir Putin, with Trump as America’s tsar and Musk as his principal broligarch. While the Russian dictator covets Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, Trump is eyeing up Greenland and the Panama Canal (and even Canada).

Putin’s agents meddled in democratic elections everywhere, including the US; now Musk does that job more overtly, whether it’s his vendetta against Britain’s Labour government or his enthusiasm for the German far right, demonstrated again on Thursday when he hosted an audio love-in on X with the leader of the Alternative für Deutschland party. As Bannon rightly remarked of Musk this week: “Money and information are the twin tactical nukes of modern politics – and he can deploy both at unprecedented scale.”

And just as Putin understood early that dictators flourish when citizens stumble in a fog of disinformation, and that there can be no accountability if the media are either crushed or discredited, so Trump once admitted to a reporter that he attacks journalists very deliberately, “so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you”.

The west took a while but eventually it came to understand the threat of Putin and, largely, united against it. Now the non-US west has to achieve a similar clarity and unity in the face of Trump and his own brand of authoritarianism, currently buttressed by the sugar-daddy of the global far right, Musk.

For Britain, this will not come easily. For one thing, UK prime ministers do not like being at odds with the US president and, when it comes to Musk, there’s little Britain alone can do. The answer is obvious, though not many in Westminster will want to hear it. The only body in this neighbourhood with the heft to stand up to Musk and his billions is the European Union. If Musk gets his way, and installs nationalist populist leaders in Paris, Berlin and elsewhere, that may cease to be true. But for now, the EU is the only serious democratic counterweight to the Trump-Musk axis.

The richest man in the world has put a target on Starmer’s back and the most powerful man in the world has let it happen. If Starmer is to defend himself, and Britain, he will need allies – starting with those who are nearby and from whom we so recklessly walked away.

·  Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Definition of Free Speech

Posted on by Opher

The right to tell lies without being called out.

The right to spread conspiracy with nobody to counter it.

The right to interfere in other peoples’ business with impunity.

The right to undermine all experts and scientists without having to provide evidence.

The right to spread hate and division.

The right to promote racism and misogyny without penalty.

The right to undermine democracy.

The right to destroy the very tenets of a civilised society.

Free Speech means the survival of the fittest – the fittest being the wealthiest!

Freedom of speech means the right to exploit, denigrate and destroy what you don’t like.

Free Speech is the rhetoric of bullies, racists, greedy capitalists and corrupt politicians.

Do away with fact checkers. Do away with truth. Free licence for liars, thieves, bullies, thugs, criminals and manipulating profiteering billionaires.

The War on Truth.

Posted on by Opher

Once upon a time we knew where we stood. The mainstream media had a bias (and sometimes made genuine mistakes) but we could read between the lines and had a good idea of what was going on. The money for that army of reporters has dried up. We moaned and griped about the bias of the media but we had a good picture of what was happening. They had highly trained, experienced journalists on the ground investigating and reporting.

Not anymore.

For the past ten years Trump and other populists have been waging a war against experts, science and rational thought. It’s been relentless. They have successfully convinced people that all experts and scientists lie; that they are all in the pockets of either Big Business (Big Pharma) or some shady body they call ‘Deep State’. The only source of ‘truth’ are Trump and the populists.

These populists have one aim – to make money. Nothing else matters. To this end they look after the interests of their paymasters – the billionaires. They want a quick buck out of oil. To hell with global warming or the environment. We can’t allow that to get in the way of making money. Open up the wilderness, remove pollution laws and environmental restrictions. MONEY MONEY MONEY.

They’ve exploited terrorism, Muslim extremism and mass immigration to create fear, hate and division as a vehicle to get them elected.

They use targeted social media to reinforce conspiracy theories and sow the seeds of distrust and fear.

They cunningly exploit the publics own fears and doubts.

Conspiracies are endorsed – Global Warming is somehow a global scam, Covid is a scam, the CIA blew up the towers, we never landed on the moon, the holocaust never happened, all predictions are wrong, scientists can’t be trusted, the election was stolen, Trump’s convictions were all manufactured – a witch hunt. It’s calculated. We are taught to distrust the evidence of our own eyes. Trump’s crowds are bigger than ever before in history. We are living in the age of Orwellian double-think. This time it’s real. We are being orchestrated with a real ‘two minute hate’.

First Musk came out from the shadows to openly embrace the limelight. He used the MAGA movement and is making billions more. He banished fact checking from Twitter. Who needs facts? Under the banner of ‘Free Speech’ you can say what you like, put out lies and blatant propaganda and nobody can question it. The barriers have gone.

Zuckerberg could see which way the wind was blowing and quickly jumped on board.

The rule of law has been bypassed. We are now living in the Wild West where anything goes. It’s a scary place. A handful of billionaires now call all the shots. They manipulate us through their media platforms and, as we’ve seen with Trump, use their money to escape the law. They are effectively above the law.

There is nothing subtle about this. We see with Musk. He has become so brazen that he operates in the open. He seeks a future without any restrictions, where he, and his fellow billionaires, can operate without restriction. Forget workers’ rights, unions, environment or safety regs. This is the Wild West. To this end he is now taking on governments. He doesn’t like any government that has a left tinge. He wants the world governed by right-wing greed. They have their sights on the Labour government, NATO and the UN – anything that might interfere with unrestricted gluttony. Everyone is running scared because they can see the immense power these people have. They control the media. They control minds. They control elections. That power is very real and Musk knows it.

The truth is now what they say it is.

Trump, Musk and Zuckerberg have declared war on facts and truth. The pushback must start now

This is the new world.

The billionaires call all the shots.

The only question really is how far will they go?

How much money does one man need? When is enough enough?

(PS – despite the romantic representation of the Wild West in the films, it was a fearful, ugly, brutal time of death, prostitution, fear and violence. Laws were brought in for a good reason!)