I relate, that tired is "too tired." It is a hairy place. Conspiracist or not, i don't see any label as being
useful here. One thing is sure, in such encompassing efforts there is much truth woven throughout
what he says, as is often the case with so many others introduced to us. He has much to offer:

On this page there are many images not outed here, this is the c/p in full:

Jim Stewartson, Counterinsurgent 🇺🇸🇺🇦💙🎈
@jimstewartson
Jul 25 • 17 tweets • 6 min read •
Read on X
🧵It is clear Kamala Harris can & will win the popular vote. But history tells us that is not enough.

This is no longer a political process, it’s a hybrid war, and there are still major obstacles
to her election that have nothing to with politics.
#Kamala2024
Unroll available on Thread Reader

https://twitter.com/jimstewartson/status/1815931242040418477

For anyone curious about my motivations, my qualifications or my background, I’ve been working at the intersection of entertainment & technology for 30 years. 4 years ago I saw a monster coming for American democracy and vowed to fight it.

I Saw a Monster
Nearly four years later, it has shed its most of its camouflage.
https://www.mind-war.com/p/i-saw-a-monster
From the beginning of my project to fight the insurgency attacking our nation, I identified Mike Flynn as a leader of a transnational crime ring attempt a controlled demolition of the US government.

What made him a traitor is important to understand.
What Makes a Traitor?
How Mike Flynn was the perfect storm for treason.
https://www.mind-war.com/p/what-makes-a-traitor
In my opinion, after 20,000+ hours of research & reporting, WWIII started in December 2015 when Mike Flynn & Vladimir Putin agreed to wage an “irregular war” on the US government, to install a puppet in the White House.

The damage is immense.
WWIII Started in 2015
Phase One was psychological warfare. Phase Two is kinetic war.
https://www.mind-war.com/p/wwiii-started-in-2015
Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Erik Prince & Peter Thiel conspired with Russian intelligence, Saudi & Turkey to steal the 2016 from Hillary Clinton.

Our failure to prevent it, or get any justice for it, must be recognized & corrected.
How Did the Russians Steal the 2016 Election with American Co-conspirators? A Brief Review.
And some remaining questions.
https://www.mind-war.com/p/how-did-the-russians-steal-the-2016
In 2020, now able to influence the levers of power from inside the White House, the same people tried to steal another election.

January 6th was the backup plan. The Insurrection was Plan B.
@gal_suburban & I laid it out.
📣 The Insurrection Was Plan B: Part I
Gal Suburban reports that all the pieces were in place to execute a bloodless coup — except one
https://www.mind-war.com/p/-the-insurrection-was-plan-b
In 2020, I was watching Q anons closely.

Mike Flynn, with the help of people in the US government, radicalized his QAnon “digital soldiers”—by using the Big Lie—into a kinetic force capable of ransacking the Capitol & trying to murder politicians.
How Mike Flynn Transformed QAnon into the Big Lie and Pointed it at the Capitol
For four years, Flynn built a cult designed for violence. Then he found his target.
https://www.mind-war.com/p/how-mike-flynn-transformed-qanon?utm_source=publication-search
Nearly a year ago, Mike Flynn began to pre-program the idea that “black swans” would prevent the 2024 election. This has been a constant theme ever since, along with Trump’s assassination.

His “prophecies” should be taken seriously.
Mike Flynn’s End Times Prophecies Need to Be Taken Seriously
Under increasing pressure, Flynn is predicting “black swan” events that will prevent the 2024 elections.
https://www.mind-war.com/p/mike-flynns-end-times-prophecies
While there is no direct evidence that Thomas Crooks got the idea that assassinating Donald Trump would be “the best case scenario” from Flynn or his associates, this would not the first or the last time Flynn’s psyops accomplished their goal.

Flynn Laden
Flynn Laden
Was Thomas Crooks inspired by American ISIS?
https://www.mind-war.com/p/flynn-laden
It’s been clear that one of the Big Ideas of Flynn and the insurgency is to force a “contested election” by decertifying or replacing electors—in order to bring the winner’s count to under 270.

That would “throw the vote to the House.”
Game over.
Operation 270: The Plan to Let the “House Decide” — Not the People
An emerging seditious conspiracy to throw the election to Donald Trump
https://www.mind-war.com/p/operation-270-the-plan-to-let-the
Our enemies, foreign & domestic, have effectively captured an entire Branch of the US government by allowing Leonard Leo, an open theocrat, to install 2/3 of SCOTUS.

This Supreme Cult will, with 100% certainly, throw the election to Trump if we let it.
Supreme Cult
Mike Flynn filed two amicus briefs to help make machine guns legal.
https://www.mind-war.com/p/supreme-cult
While Mike Flynn’s non-profit was helping SCOTUS eliminate women’s rights, legalize machine guns & make the President a king, Flynn was traveling the country with insurrectionists, PSYOP veterans & Q believers.

The next insurrection will be national.
The Next Insurrection Will Be National
A traveling terrorist camp in the guise of a movie tour is setting the groundwork for mass chaos and violence
https://www.mind-war.com/p/the-next-insurrection-will-be-national
We know the rough plan for the end of America. They always tell you. You just have to listen.

It’s a multi-faceted, constantly evolving conspiracy between avowed enemies of democracy to end the Constitution.

As a reminder, Treason is a crime.
The Rough Plan for the End of America, Version 3.0
Our enemies, foreign and domestic, are projecting their tactics. All we have to do is listen.
https://www.mind-war.com/p/the-rough-plan-for-the-end-of-america
As important context, 60 minutes has done multiple stories on “Havana Syndrome”—the result of literal brain damage inflicted on American citizens by advanced Russian warfare—specifically “directed energy weapons.”

Until we fight back, they will win.
The Russians Are Inflicting Brain Damage On Americans
Directed energy weapons are a demonstration of a much larger cognitive assault
https://www.mind-war.com/p/the-russians-are-inflicting-brain
For years, the insurgency’s motivations and alliances were largely concealed, but it is now switching operational modes from clandestine to overt.

They don’t hide their allegiance to Putin anymore. It’s a Russian fifth column—in America.
Overt, Not Clandestine
The Shift in the Fifth Column Consuming America
https://www.mind-war.com/p/overt-not-clandestine
We are in a cold civil war. Project 2025 is just the opening move in transforming America into a Russia-aligned Fourth Reich. We can win it, but it will take courage & vision.

#LockTheDoors on SCOTUS. Declare Russia a terrorist state. Fire Garland & Wray.
How to Win the Civil War
Joe Biden, if you’re listening.
https://www.mind-war.com/p/how-to-win-the-civil-war
After a long journey doing my best to expose and warn about threats to America, I feel a revived clarity of purpose.

#KamalaHarris2024 is who America wants. It’s clear.

But OUR mission, should we choose to accept it, is to protect her—and democracy.🇺🇸
Clarity of Purpose
The political posturing is over.
https://www.mind-war.com/p/clarity-of-purpose

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1816524376998916380.html

One other page of Jim Stewartson's:


https://www.mind-war.com/p/four-years-later-here-we-go-again

which led to this reminder: Rebekah Mercer Raised Specter of “Armed Conflict” in 2019 Book

The billionaire heir has been financing a host of right-wing individuals and groups involved in the storming of the Capitol.

Matthew Cunningham-Cook
January 27 2021, 6:00 a.m.


Senior adviser to the presidential transition Nick Ayers, left, and Rebekah Mercer, right, Republican donor and daughter of billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, arrive at Trump Tower on Dec. 8, 2016, in New York. Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP

Joe Biden has been sworn in as president, but the divisions exemplified by the January 6 assault on the Capitol are here to stay, if billionaire heir and far-right financier Rebekah Mercer has any say in the matter. That’s according to her little-publicized 2019 book “What I Believe,” a transcription of a speech she gave in 2018 to the right-wing publishing house Encounter Books.

“[W]hat is the state of [the American] experiment today?” Mercer asked. “‘Now we are engaged in a great civil war,’ said Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863. One hundred and fifty-five years later, it is barely hyperbolic to echo the Great Emancipator.” Raising the specter of violence, Mercer writes .. https://www.amazon.com/What-I-Believe-Rebekah-Mercer/dp/1641770856 , “We are not yet in armed conflict, but we are facing an ever more belligerent, frantic, and absurd group of radicals in a struggle for the soul of our country,” referring to antifa specifically and casting her opposition to progressives more broadly in existential terms.

--
[INSERT: ] Mercer is clearly projecting. A civil war is obviously what these far-right, at least fascist-like, people are waging. It has been said truth is a first victim of war and Trump, in the campaign to build and cement mistrust of all that has enabled America to be what it is, in labeling America's media as "fake news" has clearly made truth a victim of their war. Stack his mountain of lies on top of his untrue "fake news" label and he is doing his utmost to eliminate "fact" from any role of importance in American political news.
--

Mercer has been financing a host of right-wing individuals and groups involved in the storming of the Capitol, The Intercept reported .. https://theintercept.com/2021/01/14/capitol-riot-mercers-election-unrest/ .. earlier this month, from Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward to “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander, in addition to her role as a financier of news website Breitbart and the social network Parler. In 2020, Mercer’s father, Robert Mercer, donated $1.5 million to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, and the Mercers donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican National Committee.

The far right has used extensive .. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/right-wing-militias-civil-war/616473/ .. “civil war” rhetoric, [/color] including .. https://twitter.com/misstessowen/status/1346932836704653314 .. on January 6. “How we got to this point is that fascist billionaires like Rebekah Mercer have bankrolled and fueled the rise of violent white supremacist and authoritarian forces in this country,” said Saqib Bhatti, the co-executive director of the Action Center on Race & the Economy. “Mercer co-founded Parler, the app that fascists used to plan violent demonstrations before it was shut down. She and her family have helped fund reactionary causes and candidates, including one of the patron saints of the insurrection at the Capitol, Ted Cruz. Mercer is not warning us against armed conflict, she is threatening us with it.”

The Mercers also own a firearms company, Centre Firearms Co., with a warehouse in Queens, New York, that includes .. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/03/robert-mercer-volunteer-policeman-gun-control .. “an Mk 19 belt-fed grenade launcher, capable of hurling 60 explosives per minute.”

Further incendiary rhetoric pervades Mercer’s book. She calls New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer a “shockingly unethical fantasist,” rails against “Antifa,” saying that it is “one of the militant arms of our current domestic foes, is intent on strangling our freedoms in the name of a belief system that, in the twentieth century, was responsible for the deaths of 100 million people.”

Mercer accuses progressives of having “taken to heart the lessons of Antonio Gramsci in their long campaign against our institutions and have obtained almost complete dominion over education.” Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher who criticized the “cultural hegemony” by which capitalism maintains itself and wrote about the ways that institutions could be changed to more democratic forms through working-class leadership.

Related
Capitol Attack Was Culmination of Generations of Far-Right Extremism
https://theintercept.com/2021/01/23/capitol-riot-far-right-extremism/

Finally, Mercer is indefatigable in her critique of the media. “Today, journalists of the mainstream media are little more than the Machiavellian foot soldiers of the progressive left, unethical to their very hearts, shameless about writing lies and defaming people, and assiduously filtering the stories they print through a prism of partisan prejudice,” Mercer writes. “I know just how unethical, deranged, and shameless some of these journalists really are because I have personal experience as a target for their defamatory fantasies and slanders.”

Mercer contrasted the media’s treatment of Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court justice who was credibly accused of sexual assault by multiple women who went on the record, with its treatment of former President Barack Obama’s use of cocaine as a young man. “It’s just business as usual that the alleged drinking habits of a college student from decades ago are put under the microscope for review while the self-admitted use of hard drugs by the most recently retired Commander in Chief is pounced on as an opportunity to praise him and to point out how he had experienced much and knew much because of his criminal drug use.”

Mercer is incorrect that drug use is criminal. In 1962, the Supreme Court ruled in Robinson v. California that laws that criminalized drug use as opposed to possession or sale were unconstitutional.

“It’s clear that Mercer is not only funding extremist and far-right groups, but she is also reading their rhetoric on her platform, Parler,” said Margaret Huang, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “It’s no surprise that her language mirrors that of the hate groups — they are all on the same team. We need to start seeing donors like Mercer as part of the problem; she is enabling those who are trying to overturn the government.”

Mayer laughed upon hearing that Mercer had written a book and, in response to Mercer calling her a fabulist, said, “It would be so great if only the Mercers were a fantasy! But the more than 11,000 words I’ve written on them are fact, not fiction, which is why the Mercers have never asked for or received a single correction.”

Mercer did not respond to a request for comment.

https://theintercept.com/2021/01/27/rebekah-mercer-book-capitol-riot/

The barperson says, "i'm a Trump supporter, which one of you is a kangaroo?"

"More, from the bear. If he cocks his head friendly like your niece can ask 'have you heard
the one about JFK Jr. and a dying bear walking into a bar together, and then....?'
Can a bear strike a look that asks 'TF?!' "

The bear cock's his head again and says, "Trump's fucked, but he thought i was dead."

What to Do If You See a Bear
By Emma Rathbone
May 27, 2015
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/what-to-do-if-you-see-a-bear

No more no less.

Thanks, will return for a closer look at the place .. one day.

Smooth. Ledecky is a smoothie.

Thank you -- Jim Stewartson, Counterinsurgent 🇺🇸🇺🇦💙🎈
@jimstewartson

Emmy-winning creative technologist, @RadicalizedPod co-host, Journalist: https://t.co/QvvP9wRDg2. This is not politics. This is a coup. #ArrestMikeFlynn

🥥🌴🌊☕️Coffee&Robots🤖🌊🥥🌴🇺🇦 Profile picture Adam Smithee Profile picture Naturallove 🇺🇲🇺🇦☝️❣️☮️ 🌎🌙♎⚖ Profile picture Daniel O'Donnell Profile picture Diana Roby Profile picture 67 subscribed

Jul 29 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
PSYOP ALERT: The world’s richest 4chan incel is already preparing the battlefield for Big Lie 2.0—repetitively accusing Democrats of cheating in the election until it becomes true in the minds of enough voters the insurgency can use it to generate violence. This is terrorism through psychological warfare. Elmo knows this is ridiculous, or should, but he’s validating the MAGA/QAnon grievance complex on purpose, and tilling the soil for deception. I’ve seen thousands of accounts like him. But unfortunately this one owns this website and managed to funnel almost 200M followers to himself. Elmo is a foreign-born racist psychopath who managed to become an oligarch by fraud and now wants to increase his grip on America by ridding us of our pesky democracy. There is nothing neo about this Nazi. As I keep saying, J6 was aimed at one location. The next insurrection will be national. Elmo is already cheering them on. Note that the search results from Google are a complex interplay of factors. Each letter presents different results. This will change in a few hours based on new aggregate data coming into the system, and on each user’s behavior. For example, Trump comes up FIRST in my search.

Jul 25 • 17 tweets • 6 min read
🧵It is clear Kamala Harris can & will win the popular vote. But history tells us that is not enough. This is no longer a political process, it’s a hybrid war, and there are still major obstacles to her election that have nothing to with politics. #Kamala2024 For anyone curious about my motivations, my qualifications or my background, I’ve been working at the intersection of entertainment & technology for 30 years. 4 years ago I saw a monster coming for American democracy and vowed to fight it.

Jul 24 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
The past 5 Republican presidents got into the WH by cheating. Democrats won the popular vote 7 of the last 8 elections, yet find ourselves on the edge of oblivion. The GOP isn’t a party anymore. It’s a criminal conspiracy to steal our franchise as US citizens. We must BREAK IT. Winning another election and living for another day is not enough anymore. I’m tired of one of the parties in our “two party system” trying to murder the other one. It’s not a political system anymore. It’s one party playing politics, and the other trying to destroy politics.

Jul 13 • 21 tweets • 8 min read
Yeah, something feels very weird about this whole thing. Vincent Fusca is just standing around like no big deal. Trump pops up raising his fist. I don’t know. But none of this seems right. This is very, very convenient for the former president, isn’t it?

Jul 6 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
You cannot win a war, if you have not defined the enemy. People who are confused, do nothing.

Jun 30 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Context is everything. Please listen to Mike Flynn’s message to his cult in the context of his new store selling AR15s, and the recent SCOTUS decision to legalize bump stocks — which was aided by two amicus briefs by Flynn’s 501c3. This man is stoking an ARMED REBELLION. #ArrestMikeFlynn More context. Why is Mike Flynn selling weapons of mass death and simultaneously pre-programming his death cult for violence this Summer?

Jun 27 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
As I was saying, I’m starting to get weirded out by the fact that our federal government seems deaf, dumb and blind to the Russian-backed armed rebellion being planned in the open. @POTUS @SecDef why is our @FBI @TheJusticeDept and @SecArmy allowing this to happen? Mike Flynn, the worst traitor in American history, who is currently on his third successive coup attempt, is now selling AR15s on his website—

https://threadreaderapp.com/user/jimstewartson

Israeli Opinion | Welcome to Hell: B'Tselem's Ignored Abuse Report Shows Israel's True Face

"Who was Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader assassinated by Israel in Iran?
"Israel claims it killed senior Hezbollah commander in strike on Beirut
"Netanyahu vows revenge after rocket strike kills 12 people in Golan Heights
"Jewish demonstrators arrested in Cannon Rotunda for protesting Gaza war
"Live updates, Israel’s war on Gaza live: ‘Dramatic surge’ in attacks on UN-run centres
Israel's New Demands Are Expected to Delay Completion of Hostage Deal, Sources Say
"Gaza’s invisible massacre: aid workers killed in record numbers
"Note the latest stolen Palestinian land is contiguous to another block close to the Jordan border. Look at the map again ..""""

Related: Israeli lawmaker defends alleged rape of Hamas prisoner as far-right protesters rage over IDF troops' detention
By Debora Patta, Tucker Reals July 30, 2024 / 10:42 AM EDT / CBS News
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-idf-palestinian-prisoner-alleged-rape-sde-teinman-abuse-protest/


Israeli singer, Ariel Zilber, at demonstrations in support of soldiers suspected of abuse, outside the Beit Lid base,
Sunday. Credit: Nir Keidar

Gideon Levy
Aug 8, 2024

The B'Tselem report published this week, "Welcome to Hell," isn't only a report about what's happening in Israel's prison facilities; it's a report about Israel. Anyone who wants to know what Israel is should read this report before any other document about Israeli democracy.

Anyone who wants to become familiar with the spirit of the times in Israel should note how most of the media outlets ignored the report .. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-08-06/ty-article-opinion/.premium/tip-of-the-iceberg-israel-cannot-whitewash-horrific-abuse-of-palestinians-by-its-soldiers/00000191-237e-dcd6-abf7-777f4f4a0000 , which should have caused outrage and shock in Israel. Even the documentation of the gang rape reported this week by Guy Peleg on Channel 12 News didn't show only the Sde Teiman detention facility. It showed the face of the country.

* Corrupted by the desire for revenge, Israeli prisons have become abuse centers
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2024-08-08/ty-article-opinion/corrupted-by-the-desire-for-revenge-israeli-prisons-have-become-abuse-centers/00000191-2e66-d1b4-a399-7ee642f50000

* U.S. Jews don't feel safer when they watch Israel's Jewish supremacist mobs
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-08-07/ty-article-opinion/.premium/u-s-jews-dont-feel-safer-when-they-watch-israels-jewish-supremacist-mobs/00000191-2806-dbbc-ab95-3957c76c0000

* Tip of the iceberg: Israel cannot whitewash horrific abuse of Palestinians by its soldiers
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-08-06/ty-article-opinion/.premium/tip-of-the-iceberg-israel-cannot-whitewash-horrific-abuse-of-palestinians-by-its-soldiers/00000191-237e-dcd6-abf7-777f4f4a0000

If a report like that of B'Tselem was almost totally ignored here, and if even after the evidence shown by Peleg .. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-08-06/ty-article/.premium/soldiers-suspected-of-abusing-palestinian-prisoner-lied-on-polygraph-test/00000191-2868-d5e8-a397-fef831300000 .. the debate as to whether it's permitted to detain the despicable soldiers presented in it continues – on the Channel 12 morning program there was a discussion of who's in favor of rape and who's opposed – then Peleg's documentation is documentation of the face of Israel 2024, its spirit and its likeness.

Unfortunately, even Peleg continued to call the victim of the barbaric rape a "terrorist" (after all, he does work for Channel 12 News), although a moment earlier he revealed that the rape victim wasn't a member of the Nukhba .. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-08-01/ty-article-opinion/.premium/israels-version-of-the-nukhba-is-worse-than-hamas/00000191-0a8c-de2c-a7ff-4ead436e0000 .. or a company commander – he was an ordinary policeman in the anti-drug unit in Jabalya. He was also pulled out from among dozens of detainees who were lying handcuffed on the floor, perhaps at random because he was the last one in the row. No violence and no riots, as the suspects' disingenuous lawyers tried to claim.

What exactly did that "terrorist" do? And why was he even in prison? Was it because his salary is paid by the government in the Gaza Strip? These are questions that shouldn't be asked. But the picture of his body that was trembling from the pains of the penetration, which flickered for an instant while the rapists hid behind their defenders .. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-08-06/ty-article/.premium/israel-to-open-two-new-wings-at-sde-teiman-after-petition-to-shut-center-down-over-abuse/00000191-26c3-d60f-a3d3-eec76b7d0000 , should have tortured every conscience.

Not the conscience of most Israelis, it turns out. On Tuesday, once again, a High Court of Justice hearing discussing the petition to close the torture facility Sde Teiman was interrupted, due to the shouts of the audience. "The people are sovereign," shouted the rabble at the High Court justices. Soon to come are the lynchings in the city squares, carried out by the sovereign and supported by the media. On the morning TV programs there will be discussions of the legitimacy of lynching. There will be a speaker in favor and a speaker who is opposed, in our balanced media.


A protester against Israel's policy of detention without trial holds a sign reading, 'Guantanamo
is here,' in 2014. Credit: Emil Salman

An abusive husband can be charming, impressive, beloved by everyone who knows him and talented; if he beats his wife or his children – he's an abusive husband. This definition overshadows all other descriptions of him, his violence defines his identity. All his other characteristics are forgotten due to his violence.


Sde Teiman also defines Israel, more than its other characteristics. Israel is Sdei Teiman .. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-07-30/ty-article-opinion/.premium/we-warned-about-harsh-treatment-at-sde-teiman-the-torture-there-has-backing-from-high-up/00000191-030c-dfce-a991-bf7d5cfa0000 , Sde Teiman is Israel. That's also how they treated those suspected of sexual harassment in the Israeli #MeToo movement, which destroyed the careers and the lives of men who were only suspects. But the rapists from Sde Teiman? That's not an issue for #MeToo – they raped a "terrorist."

When you read the 94 pages of the B'Tselem report, which causes you to lose sleep, you understand that it wasn't an exceptional incident, it's the routine of torture, which has become a policy. As opposed to the torture by the Shin Bet, which presumably had a security-minded purpose – to extract information – here it's solely to satisfy the darkest and sickest sadistic urges. Look how calmly the soldiers approach to carry out their malevolent intention. There are dozens of other soldiers too .. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-08-06/ty-article/.premium/soldiers-suspected-of-abusing-palestinian-prisoner-lied-on-polygraph-test/00000191-2868-d5e8-a397-fef831300000 , who saw and knew and remained silent. Apparently they also participated in similar orgies, based on the dozens of testimonies cited in the B'Tselem report. That's the routine.

The indifference to all these things defines Israel. The public legitimization defines Israel. In the Guantanamo Bay detention camp .. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-06-13/ty-article-opinion/.premium/israels-cruel-detention-of-palestinians-is-being-hidden-from-the-public/00000190-1285-d1a8-abbe-93ede6a20000 .. that was opened by the United States after the 9/11 attacks, nine prisoners were killed in 20 years; here it's 60 detainees in 10 months. Need anything more be said?

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-08-08/ty-article-opinion/.premium/welcome-to-hell-btselems-ignored-abuse-report-shows-israels-true-face/00000191-2dc1-d1b4-a399-7de77ec70000

brooklyn13, Like i just told you authoritarians have a sadistic sense of humor. How many children are your people killing every day? Some 19000 children total now in Gaza, and your people are using live bullets against kids in the West bank too, i understand.

brooklyn13, Authoritarians you should know have a sadistic sense of humor. Just keep telling us more about yourself.

There is nothing funny at all about what you see as humorous.

Saw that early this morning. Biggest winning margin i've seen on a track.

I have a niece in Bozeman. Just called her, and they've taken the
Trump visit as a good time to go on a three day canoe and camp trip.

10PM ET .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/09/trump-plane-montana-mechanical/

Is 8:20 Eastern time now.

Trump looking lost, incompetent and clueless creates a warm, fuzzy feeling. Can't understand why .. LOLOLs,

"Unscripted was his press conference yesterday.
Trump's niece on uncle's news conference: 'Looked like he was gonna cry' - Rawstory
Donald Trump's niece Mary was stunned by her uncle's appearance at a Mar-a-Lago press conference Thursday afternoon.
"He looked so lost, he looked so incredibly incompetent and clueless, and crazy," Mary Trump said. "At one point it looked like he was gonna cry.""

FACT FOCUS: A look at claims made by Trump at news conference

VIDEO - Trump lashes out at Harris, recommits to a Sept. 10 debate at hourlong news conference
https://apnews.com/article/trump-news-conference-fact-check-misinformation-eb899c1fc734f5ecb42b8d0902e5c004

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Updated 12:46 PM GMT+10, August 9, 2024

In his first news conference since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president, former President Donald Trump said he would debate her on Sept. 10 and pushed for two more debates. The Republican presidential nominee spoke for more than an hour, discussing a number of issues facing the country and then taking questions from reporters. He made a number of false and misleading claims. Many of them have been made before.

Here’s a look at some of those claims.

CROWD SIZES


FILE - Crowds are shown in front of the Washington Monument during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Aug. 28, 1963, in Washington. (AP Photo, File)

CLAIM: “The biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken — I’ve spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not we had more. And they said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people.”

THE FACTS: Trump was comparing the crowd at his speech in front of the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, to the crowd that attended Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech on Aug. 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial.

But far more people are estimated to have been at the latter than the former.

Approximately 250,000 people attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which King gave his speech, according to the National Park Service. The Associated Press reported in 2021 that there were at least 10,000 people at Trump’s address.

Moreover, Trump and King did not speak in the same location. King spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which looks east toward the Washington Monument. Trump spoke at the Ellipse, a grassy area just south of the White House.
___

JAN. 6

CLAIM: “Nobody was killed on Jan. 6.”

THE FACTS: That’s false. Five people died .. https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-crime-riots-donald-trump-capitol-siege-f7f8dead93998991cfc728e83ea31602 .. in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and its immediate aftermath. Pro-Trump rioters breached the U.S. Capitol that day amid Congress’ effort to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.

Among the deceased are Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter shot and killed by police, and Brian Sicknick, a police officer who died the day after battling the mob. Four additional officers who responded to the riot killed themselves in the following weeks and months.

Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran from San Diego, was shot and killed by a police officer as she climbed through a broken part of a Capitol door during the violent riot. Trump has often cited Babbitt’s death while lamenting the treatment of those who attended a rally outside the White House that day and then marched to the Capitol, many of whom fought with police.
___

DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION


Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks to reporters during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

CLAIM: “The presidency was taken away from Joe Biden, and I’m no Biden fan, but I tell you what, from a constitutional standpoint, from any standpoint you look at, they took the presidency away.”

THE FACTS: There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents the Democratic Party from making Vice President Kamala Harris its nominee. That process is determined by the Democratic National Committee.

Harris officially claimed the nomination Monday following a five-day online voting process, receiving 4,563 delegate votes out of 4,615 cast, or about 99% of participating delegates. A total of 52 delegates in 18 states cast their votes for “present,” the only other option on the ballot.

The vice president was the only candidate eligible to receive votes after no other candidate qualified by the party’s deadline following President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race on July 21.
___

THE ECONOMY

CLAIM: Suggesting things would be different if he had been in office rather than Biden: “You wouldn’t have had inflation. You wouldn’t have had any inflation because inflation was caused by their bad energy problems. Now they’ve gone back to the Trump thing because they need the votes. They’re drilling now because they had to go back because gasoline was going up to 7, 8, 9 dollars a barrel.”

THE FACTS: There would have been at least some inflation if Trump had been reelected in 2020 because many of the factors causing inflation were outside a president’s control. Prices spiked in 2021 after cooped-up Americans ramped up their spending on goods such as exercise bikes and home office furniture, overwhelming disrupted supply chains. U.S. auto companies, for example, couldn’t get enough semiconductors and had to sharply reduce production, causing new and used car prices to shoot higher. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in March 2022 also sent gas and food prices soaring around the world, as Ukraine’s wheat exports were disrupted and many nations boycotted Russian oil and gas.

Still, under Biden, U.S. oil production reached a worldwide record level earlier this year.

Many economists, including some Democrats, say Biden’s $1.9 trillion financial support package, approved in March 2021, which provided a $1,400 stimulus check to most Americans, helped fuel inflation by ramping up demand. But it didn’t cause inflation all by itself. And Trump supported $2,000 stimulus checks in December 2020, rather than the $600 checks included in a package he signed into law in December 2020.

Prices still spiked in countries with different policies than Biden’s, such as France, Germany and the U.K., though mostly because of the sharp increase in energy costs stemming from Russia’s invasion.
___
IMMIGRATION


Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks to reporters during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

CLAIM: “Twenty million people came over the border during the Biden-Harris administration — 20 million people — and it could be very much higher than that. Nobody really knows.”

THE FACTS: Trump’s 20 million figure is unsubstantiated at best, and he didn’t provide sources.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports 7.1 million arrests for illegal crossings from Mexico from January 2021 through June 2024. That’s arrests, not people. Under pandemic-era asylum restrictions, many people crossed more than once until they succeeded because there were no legal consequences for getting turned back to Mexico. So the number of people is lower than the number of arrests.

In addition, CBP says it stopped migrants 1.1 million times at official land crossings with Mexico from January 2021 through June 2024, largely under an online appointment system to claim asylum called CBP One.

U.S. authorities also admitted nearly 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela under presidential authority if they had financial sponsors and arrived at an airport.

All told, that’s nearly 8.7 million encounters. Again, the number of people is lower due to multiple encounters for some.

There are an unknown number of people who eluded capture, known as “got-aways” in Border Patrol parlance. The Border Patrol estimates how many but doesn’t publish that number.
___

CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris “was the border czar 100% and all of a sudden for the last few weeks she’s not the border czar anymore.”

THE FACTS: Harris was appointed to address “root causes” of migration in Central America. That migration manifests itself in illegal crossings to the U.S., but she was not assigned to the border.
___

NEW YORK CASES

CLAIM: “The New York cases are totally controlled out of the Department of Justice.”

THE FACTS: Trump was referring to two cases brought against him in New York — one civil and the other criminal.

Neither has anything to do with the U.S. Department of Justice.

The civil case was initiated by a lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James. In that case, Trump was ordered in February to pay a $454 million penalty for lying about his wealth for years as he built the real estate empire that vaulted him to stardom and the White House.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a state-level prosecutor, brought the criminal case. In May, a jury found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex.

___ Associated Press writers Melissa Goldin and Elliot Spagat and economics writer Christopher Rugaber contributed to this article. ___

Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck ..
https://apnews.com/APFactCheck
__

An earlier version of this story mixed up “latter” and “former” in the third paragraph. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on Aug. 28, 1963, drew a far larger crowd than Donald Trump’s speech near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021.

by Taboola

https://apnews.com/article/trump-news-conference-fact-check-misinformation-eb899c1fc734f5ecb42b8d0902e5c004

Trump can’t take a joke. Democrats need to use that.

"Ruth Ben-Ghiat is also interesting as a contemporary student of fascism."

The authoritarian right doesn’t mind being called evil, but being ridiculed is a different matter.

VIDEO - Like 'an athlete way past his prime': Will Trump continue to scramble? 11:11
https://www.msnbc.com/11th-hour/watch/like-an-athlete-way-past-his-prime-will-trump-continue-to-scramble-216322629706

By Ruth Ben-Ghiat, MSNBC Columnist
Aug. 7, 2024, 8:00 PM GMT+10

All links

It’s the summer of weird Republicans. GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump repeatedly mentions Hannibal Lecter at his rallies, speaking about the fictional cannibal as though he were a real person. “He’s a lovely man. He’d love to have you for dinner,” must be one of the strangest things a candidate has said while trying to attract votes. Meanwhile, Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, has made news with his bizarre opinions, including a 2021 remark that Americans with children should be able to vote more times in an election than their childless compatriots. Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent candidate for president who met with Trump to discuss the possibility of dropping out of the race, admitted to dumping a bear carcass in Central Park a decade ago. (“We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it,” he claimed.)

“These guys are just weird,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said last week on “Morning Joe.” That label has stuck ever since, to the right’s frustration and fury. Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has seized the messaging advantages of “weird,” and on Tuesday she even named Walz to the ticket.

When fringe beliefs become mainstream, it’s easy to accept
a political environment where the surreal and the extreme
are everyday affairs.

For scholars of authoritarianism, the success of “weird” is no surprise. That’s because humor has long been one of the most effective weapons of anti-authoritarian politics. Behind the facade of their omnipotence, most strongmen are brittle and insecure personalities. They don’t mind being called evil, but being ridiculed is a different matter.

[Insert: it's always nice to have an acknowledged expert tell us we've been on the right track for eight years. LOL See:
Hopelessly insecure so that he believes he must always be positive about himself, even though much of that positivity about
himself looks to the great majority of others as sadly delusional. And so has him looking more times than not .. " just stupid."
LOL, Yep, you pretty well got it in just two.
October 1, 2016 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125523795 ]

When fringe beliefs become mainstream, it’s easy to accept a political environment where the surreal and the extreme are everyday affairs. That’s how we get to Fox News host Jesse Watters telling viewers that “scientists” believe that “when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.” The misogyny and transgender phobia that may have inspired this proclamation are no joke, but the opportunity for satire at the ridiculous statement should not be missed.

More from MSNBC Daily
Must reads from Today's list

Deep track record
Tim Walz is the political ally trans people need and deserve
Katelyn Burns
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/tim-walz-political-ally-lgbtq-voters-rcna165372

it's not over
What Josh Shapiro should do now
Rotimi Adeoye
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/kamala-harris-tim-walz-josh-shapiro-vp-pennsylvania-support-rcna165578

Strongmen have their own sadistic sense of humor, which is amply displayed in the awful authoritarian spectacles staged by their governments. The Nazis enjoyed making Communists who entered Dachau concentration camp in 1933, like Hans Beimler, wear signs that said “A hearty welcome!” But they cannot take a joke when they are the targets. That’s why they have to surround themselves with sycophants and lackeys, and their enablers know their prestige must be policed. When a man brought his pet rabbit named Mussolini to a bar in fascist Italy, thinking others would enjoy seeing him order it around, he was quickly arrested and served a year in confinement.

VIDEO - Claire McCaskill: Walz will ‘slice and dice the Trump-Vance ticket with a smile on his face’ 05:27
https://www.msnbc.com/andrea-mitchell-reports/watch/walz-will-slice-and-dice-the-trump-vance-ticket-with-a-smile-on-his-face-mccaskill-216548421671

Chilean graphic artist Guillo Bastías discovered the price of puncturing the leader’s personality cult with humor when the magazine Apsi published his caricature of dictator Augusto Pinochet as Louis XIV in 1987. The regime sent the magazine’s editors to jail for “extremism”: That’s how threatening humor can be as a truth-telling vehicle, in this case about how Pinochet saw the scope of his power.

Satire shifts our perception of things and people, helping us to see them in a new light that is often unflattering to them. And it reminds us that what we are living through is out of the ordinary. As Bastías told me in 2018, he wanted to reassure Chileans suffering under the dictatorship that there were people who were “refusing to accept the disinformation and lies … refusing to accept the abnormal as normal.”

Humor can have a crucial role in the work of mobilization
and civic education to keep those democratic rights.

And so we are back to “weird” as a strategy of disruption, and how thankful we can be that our democratic rights afford us freedom of speech to level such critiques at the powerful without fear of detention or worse. That is how artist Robin Bell was able to stage .. https://www.france24.com/en/20180201-robin-bell-artist-anti-trump-activist?ref=tw_i .. his projections on the front of Trump International Hotel, like a May 2017 work that read “Pay Trump Bribes Here.” While Bell worked in very different circumstances than Guillo, he, too, saw his work as a way of reminding people that “what we are experiencing is not normal.”

Humor can have a crucial role in the work of mobilization and civic education to keep those democratic rights. “Laughtivism,” as Serbian democracy activist Srdja Popovic has called .. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv310vjt0?searchText=&searchUri=&ab_segments=&refreqid=&searchKey= .. it, views humor as more effective than anger in highly polarized situations. When we laugh together, fear and distrust lessen, which is the opposite of what authoritarians want. That, too, is why such leaders can’t take a joke.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a historian and commentator on authoritarianism and propaganda. She is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, the recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright and other fellowships and an adviser to Protect Democracy. She is a regular contributor to MSNBC, CNN and other media outlets. She publishes Lucid, a newsletter about threats to democracy. Her latest book, "Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present" (2020), looks at how illiberal leaders use propaganda, corruption, violence and machismo and how they can be defeated.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-jd-vance-tim-walz-weird-maga-authoritarians-rcna164669

Sweet. newmedman is also way ahead of me on Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Thanks for the intro.

Correction: The link i stuffed by placing the bracket too close to the address:

Arendt examined the intricacies of St. Augustine's concept of love in her dissertation written under Jaspers's direction, an extremely personal work composed in the dense style typical of German scholarship of the period. Although her dissertation bears no indication of any interest in contemporary politics (see Love and Saint Augustine) [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_and_Saint_Augustine ],

It's near the bottom of the article.

Large lung capacity, and can hold breath under water for two minutes. Shucks, guess i'm out.

Yes, got to get the app, and won't download NBC app just for it. Thanks
heaps for the effort though. I'll pick some up somewhere sooner or later.

Yep, just the first there re ego run?? fit. It's nuts they aren't dated.

Good non-3rd parties point. We are all little guys, you aren't like B402. If justice prevails Trump will again be
a little guy in six months, if not SOD help America and Ukraine. And to a lesser degree the rest of us little guys.

Incredible. Could call it water ballet. Australia failed, Ireland ooi failed, VPN San Francisco got me there. Thanks, hadn't seen any of that.

Did Jill Stein voters deliver Donald Trump the presidency?

"Ego trip dagger -- Robert F Kennedy Jr claims he qualifies for ballot in swing state North Carolina"

Related: What do you think of Jill Stein’s tweet accusing the Democratic
National Committee of trying to take third party candidates off the ballot?
Philip Tierney
Lives in Samara, Costa Rica May 28
Albeit that, like many of the Founders, I am not a fan of political parties and regard them as an impediment to democracy and progress. And albeit that a two party system is undesirable. Realistically speaking, what possible chance would Jill Stein or RF Kennedy, Jr. have of being elected president? What then are their motives? Is it to bring their noble causes to the attention of the people? The only candidate for the presidency who is even remotely receptive to Jill Stein’s environmental cause would be the democratic candidate. And that candidate would be most harmed by her electoral run. That, in turn, would make the election of an avowed anti environmental candidate. What do you make of her motives? Are they in service of her cause or not, and if not why else might she be running? Ego, like Kennedy? Obsession? Her candidacy in battle ground states caused Trump to beat Clinton. She saw what happened. Is that her end game? What good could possibly come from her candidacy?
https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think-of-Jill-Stein-s-tweet-accusing-the-Democratic-National-Committee-of-trying-to-take-third-party-candidates-off-the-ballot

Did Jill Stein voters deliver Donald Trump the presidency?

It’s complicated.

by Tara Golshan
Nov 12, 2016, 8:40 AM GMT+11


Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images

Update: An earlier version of this article referenced a study by two political scientists, Kyle Kopko and Christopher Devine, on whether Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s voters could have swung the election to Hillary Clinton. That study was based on incomplete data: Vote totals for Pennsylvania weren’t yet final, and the final tally showed that Clinton could have won the state if she’d had all of Stein’s votes as well as her own. This article has been updated to reflect the final results in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

Democrats are searching for a why in how Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election — an extremely close race claimed by small margins in battleground states, a race that defied almost every poll and projection.

When the reality set in that Clinton actually won the popular vote, likely by more than 2 million votes, [closer to 3 million .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election ] Democrats started revisiting the haunts of the 2000 election. That year, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader’s performance in Florida arguably swung the election to George W. Bush, who claimed the presidency with Florida’s electoral votes by less than 600 ballots. (Nader won 97,488 votes in Florida that year.)

Now, the question lives once more. Did third-party voters lose the election for Clinton as they did for Gore almost two decades ago?

Two political scientists, Kyle Kopko from Elizabethtown College, and Christopher Devine with the University of Dayton, have tried to answer this question. Their conclusion: While the third-party vote could have made a difference in some key states, including Michigan, it’s more complicated than that.

“The 2000 election came down to one state in particular,” Devine said, referring to Florida. “It was very clear that if Green Party voters had voted for Gore, Bush wouldn’t have won. We don’t have as clear cut a story this time around.” In 2016, the election was decided by more than one battleground state — and the importance of the third-party’s performance in those states varied.

A Vox analysis of third-party voter turnout in battleground states in 2016 compared with 2012 does highlight an impressive improvement for third-party candidates this year. That suggests that this year’s major-party candidates were more disliked than Obama and Romney, but it doesn’t mean third parties shaped the election — unless Democrats disproportionately defected from Clinton in all the important states. And that doesn’t appear to be the case.

The third-party voter effect on the election: Here’s the math.

In Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, one could plausibly blame third parties for the outcome. In Michigan, Clinton lost by less than a percentage point, a deficit she could have recovered from with half of Stein’s votes. Again in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Clinton lost by one point, Jill Stein’s votes would have covered her loss. Had Clinton won all three states, she would have won the election.

Kopko and Devine’s analysis took two approaches to examining the third-party question: First, they projected the outcomes in battleground states if Clinton got all of Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s votes. Second, they explored exit polling that asked voters to decide between Clinton and Trump in a two-person race. Both approaches suggested that third parties didn’t make the difference. (To be sure, both approaches have caveats: Exit polling is fallible, for example.)

According to Kopko and Devine’s analysis, if Clinton were given all of Stein and Johnson’s votes, Trump still would have won Iowa, Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina. But Clinton would have won Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan — enough to win her the election. Kopko and Devine’s analysis was completed before all votes were counted.

The final totals revealed that, in fact, Stein’s total voters exceeded Clinton’s margin of victory. In other words, if every Stein voter had voted for Clinton instead, she could have won Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and the presidency.

Time to blame those idealistic third-party voters? Not quite. Obviously, not all Stein and Johnson voters were disaffected Democrats — some would have voted for Trump, written in candidates, or not voted at all.

This is very different from Florida in 2000, where only a small fraction of Florida voters for Nader — about half of a percent — would have needed to vote Gore to give Gore the election.

And that’s what exit polling that asked people how they would have voted in a two-party race — with the third option of not voting — finds. Under that scenario she would have won Michigan, still lost Florida, and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania would have been a 48 to 48 percent toss-up. Clinton would have needed to win both of those states to reach 270 electoral votes. So even in the artificial world of that exit poll that erased Stein and Johnson, Clinton seemed likely to lose.

This isn’t the 2000 election — but third parties did increase their support

That being said, interest in third parties should not be understated this election. In 2012, Gary Johnson attracted 1 percent of the national vote. This year he pulled just more than 3 percent. Jill Stein got 1 percent of the vote this year, compared with less than half a point in 2012. Basically, minor-party candidates tripled their support this year.

That translates to a lot of ballots in battleground states, according to Vox’s analysis. Florida saw an increase of 185,000 votes for minor parties between 2012 and 2016. In Wisconsin, there was an increase of 105,202 votes this year, relative to the last election cycle.

We can’t know for sure where those votes would have gone if not for third parties, but it does indicate that Trump and Clinton were unfavorable enough candidates that people were willing to knowingly sacrifice their vote for candidates that had no chance of winning the election (or even one state).

Johnson had a lot of hype this election. He didn’t really live up to it.


Photo by George Frey/Getty Images

While Stein’s polling numbers were negligible throughout the election cycle, political scientists were more bullish with Johnson, who consistently polled higher than the typical minor-party candidates, and maintained his relatively high poll numbers late into the summer: He was drawing 8.5 percent of the vote in August.

He was able to get national attention, even without participating in the general election debates. In late August, FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten even wrote that Johnson had the chance to win 7.1 percent of the national vote:

Most third-party candidates didn’t lose that much support between late summer and Election Day
… The average drop-off is about 2 percentage points … Johnson was projected to finish with
6.5 percent of the vote in mid-July when he was polling slightly higher than he is today.

That didn’t happen. His numbers dropped to around 4 percent by Election Day.

“Libertarians and the Greens can claim improvement” since 2012, Devine said. “That’s true, but it’s a limited celebration. Especially in a year with historically unpopular candidates, rising frustration with politics and Washington D.C., it’s not that impressive a showing.”

Instead Johnson and Stein reflected the hard truth with minor-party candidates: They don’t usually do as well as the polls may suggest. Once people get into the voting booth they recognize the stake of the election.

Third-party support always fades. This election was no different.

“Third parties tend to lose, their poll numbers tend to decrease over time, and they perform worse on Election Day,” John Sides, a political scientist with George Washington University, tells me.

Take Ross Perot’s unprecedented run in 1992, the most successful modern-day minor-party candidate to date. Perot, a wealthy Texan businessman who ran as an independent with a plan to eliminate the deficit, led both Bill Clinton and incumbent former President George H.W. Bush in the polls for three months leading up to the conventions.

Then Perot began to fade. “The conventions remind regular voters why they are Democrats or Republicans,” Georgetown University political scientist Jonathan Ladd said of Perot’s decline in support.

Perot temporarily suspended his campaign in July of 1992, and restarted it again in October. On Election Day, Perot won 19 percent of the vote behind Clinton and Bush — 1 point less than polling projections. He didn’t win a single state. As president, Clinton eventually took on eliminating the deficit, absorbing the policy idea that made Perot so popular.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/upshot/can-gary-johnson-the-libertarian-nominee-swing-the-election.html ..
Overall, Perot’s trajectory is consistent with other minor-party campaigns. (The New York Times has a good visualization .. of this.) In 1968, third-party candidate George Wallace, who ran on a segregationist platform, won 14 percent of the vote on Election Day, despite polling around 17 percent a few months prior. It’s a “pattern of third-party support fading as people face the prospect of a wasted vote,” Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan tells me.

In other words, as Election Day nears, the reality of a presidential vote dawns on American voters who had once expressed support for third-party candidates.

In a Trump-Clinton race, notably, there was a substantial increase in third-party voters’ interest — but not enough to definitively swing the race.

Sarah Frostenson contributed reporting to this story.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/11/13576798/jill-stein-third-party-donald-trump-win

Good point made.

"Fascinating" Scrambling coverup.

Photographer steps outside of the box


Day 10, your - https://apnews.com/article/paris-olympics-photos-2024-2389cb1d82759d8233a09db0d49550ab
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174890270

Youngest Australian gold medal winner ever:
Aged 14 years and 86 days, Trew eclipses the milestone achieved by Australia's previous youngest medallist, swimmer Sandra Morgan.
Morgan was 14 years and 184 days old when she won gold in the women's 4x100m freestyle relay at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.
"I got told by a few people that I'm Australia's youngest gold medallist, which is, like, pretty insane," Trew said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-07/paris-olympics-arisa-trew-gold-medal-skateboarding-australia/104192674


Arisa Trew of Australia competes during the women’s skateboarding park final at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)
Day 11, your - https://apnews.com/article/paris-olympics-photo-2024-b1b23e281907713e842f7be5f42d29f1
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174890280


Ukraine’s Parviz Nasibov celebrates after defeating Azerbaijan’s Hasrat Jafarov during their men’s Greco-Roman 67kg semifinal wrestling match, at Champ-de-Mars Arena, during the 2024 Summer Olympics, Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
Day 12, your - https://apnews.com/article/paris-olympics-photos-2024-0151b6c103ffdf0331f02dd1e5fe921a
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174890283


Raven Saunders, of the United States, competes during the women’s shot put qualification at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024, in Saint-Denis, France. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)


Brazil’s Roberta Ratzke (9), Ana da Silva (15) and Rosamaria Montibeller (7) celebrate a point during a semifinal women’s volleyball match against the United States at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa)


Uzbekistan’s Abdumalik Khalokov, left, fights Australia’s Charlie Senior in their men’s 57 kg semifinal boxing match at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)


Taisiia Onofriichuk, of Ukraine, performs her hoop exercise in the rhythmic gymnastics individuals all-round qualification round at La Chapelle Arena at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)


Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, of the United States, celebrates wining the gold medal in the women’s 400-meters hurdles final at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024, in Saint-Denis, France. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
Day 13, your - https://apnews.com/article/paris-olympics-photos-2024-3028cdd6dc0ccee4c8a22614213dfe68
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174890297

Photographer steps outside of the box


Day 10, your 1st - https://apnews.com/article/paris-olympics-photos-2024-2389cb1d82759d8233a09db0d49550ab

Youngest Australian gold medal winner ever:
Aged 14 years and 86 days, Trew eclipses the milestone achieved by Australia's previous youngest medallist, swimmer Sandra Morgan.
Morgan was 14 years and 184 days old when she won gold in the women's 4x100m freestyle relay at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.
"I got told by a few people that I'm Australia's youngest gold medallist, which is, like, pretty insane," Trew said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-07/paris-olympics-arisa-trew-gold-medal-skateboarding-australia/104192674


Arisa Trew of Australia competes during the women’s skateboarding park final at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)
Day 11, your 2nd - https://apnews.com/article/paris-olympics-photo-2024-b1b23e281907713e842f7be5f42d29f1


Ukraine’s Parviz Nasibov celebrates after defeating Azerbaijan’s Hasrat Jafarov during their men’s Greco-Roman 67kg semifinal wrestling match, at Champ-de-Mars Arena, during the 2024 Summer Olympics, Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
Day 12, your 3rd - https://apnews.com/article/paris-olympics-photos-2024-0151b6c103ffdf0331f02dd1e5fe921a


Raven Saunders, of the United States, competes during the women’s shot put qualification at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024, in Saint-Denis, France. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)


Brazil’s Roberta Ratzke (9), Ana da Silva (15) and Rosamaria Montibeller (7) celebrate a point during a semifinal women’s volleyball match against the United States at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Dolores Ochoa)


Uzbekistan’s Abdumalik Khalokov, left, fights Australia’s Charlie Senior in their men’s 57 kg semifinal boxing match at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)


Taisiia Onofriichuk, of Ukraine, performs her hoop exercise in the rhythmic gymnastics individuals all-round qualification round at La Chapelle Arena at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)


Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, of the United States, celebrates wining the gold medal in the women’s 400-meters hurdles final at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024, in Saint-Denis, France. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
Day 13, your 4th - https://apnews.com/article/paris-olympics-photos-2024-3028cdd6dc0ccee4c8a22614213dfe68

World of Hannah Arendt

"Bingo. Of course it is deeper... "


Hannah Arendt with her grandfather,
Max Arendt, undated. Courtesy of
the Hannah Arendt Trust.


Portion of Print Page 448 .. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11056dig.050410/?sp=49 ..
from the Eichmann in Jerusalem typescript for the version published in the New Yorker,
1963. The Hannah Arendt Papers (The Library of Congress Manuscript Division).

To enter the world of Hannah Arendt is to encounter the political and moral catastrophes of the twentieth century. Her life spanned the convulsions of two world wars, revolutions and civil wars, and events worse than war in which human lives were uprooted and destroyed on a scale never seen before. She lived through what she called "dark times" whose history reads like a tale of horrors in which everything taken for granted turns into its opposite. The sudden unreliability of her native land and the unanticipated peril of having been born a Jew were the conditions under which Arendt first thought politically, a task for which she was neither inclined by nature nor prepared by education. Insecurity and vulnerability are the general conditions, as she came to realize, in which an urgently experienced need to think is political, though not, to be sure, in a conventional sense. For the traditional view of politics, which may be summarized as the perceived usefulness of government in securing the people's private interests, is in times of crisis precisely what has failed. In her determination to think through the darkness of the twentieth century Arendt discerned a radically different meaning of politics, whose source was the original clearing, in the midst of a plurality of human beings living, speaking, and interacting with one another, of a public space that was brought into existence not for utility but for the sake of human freedom.

There is abundant evidence that Arendt's understanding of what it means to think politically has struck a responsive chord in the contemporary world. In recent years increasing numbers of people have turned to her as a guide they trust in their need to understand for themselves and realize in their own lives the courage it takes to be free. One result of this current interest in Arendt is that, because of constant handling, important components of the literary estate that she bequeathed to the Library of Congress have become fragile and almost illegible. The Arendt collection comprises family papers and personal documents; extensive correspondence with individuals and organizations; notes, background information, transcripts, and court rulings pertaining to the trial of Adolf Eichmann; reviews of her book Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil and articles and letters that reflect the bitter, emotional controversy generated by that work; reviews and manuscript drafts of most of her books; and numerous typed and handwritten notes, poems, articles, speeches, lectures, and essays. The earliest of Arendt's writings in the collection dates from 1925 when she was nineteen, and the latest from 1975, the year she died; by far the greater part of them comes from the period after her emigration to the United States in 1941 as World War II raged in Europe. Now, thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress has digitized her papers, which in itself may be considered a political as well as a philanthropic act, at once preserving her legacy and through electronic media making it accessible to a far wider reading public than was previously possible.


U.S. certificates of naturalization of Hannah Arendt Blücher and of Heinrich Blücher.
The Hannah Arendt Papers (Library of Congress, Manuscript Division).


Königsberg, East Prussia, ca. 1900. Courtesy
of the Hannah Arendt Trust.


Königsberg, now "Kaliningrad." Adapted
from The World Factbook 2000, U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency.


Portion of "Affadavit of identity in lieu of passport" in which is written,
"I wish to use this document in lieu of a passport which I, a stateless
person, cannot obtain at present." The Hannah Arendt Papers
(Library of Congress, Manuscript Division).

Born in 1906 into a well-established, nonreligious German Jewish family, Hannah Arendt was raised in Königsberg, the ancient capital of East Prussia. At the end of World War II that strategic port on the Baltic Sea was ceded to the Soviet Union, its name changed to Kaliningrad after the Russian revolutionary M. I. Kalinin, and its German population dispersed. The fate of Königsberg, today an all but unrecognizable ruin, was sealed when it fell under the sway of not one but two totalitarian regimes, first Hitler's and then Stalin's. Unlike the city of Königsberg, however, Arendt could and did move. As a young Jew working for a Zionist organization she was arrested, escaped, and fled her homeland in 1933. By way of Prague and Geneva she made her way to Paris and from that moment on was in effect stateless, a woman without a country, and was to remain so for eighteen years. She knew from her own experience how "the infinitely complex red-tape existence of stateless persons," as she wrote to Karl Jaspers in 1946, fetters free movement, and from that experience came her insight that the denial of the right to citizenship, prior to any specific rights of citizenship, is integral to the rise of totalitarianism.

Arendt believed that the right to citizenship, the right of a plurality of people "to act together concerning things that are of equal concern to each," is not only denied by totalitarianism, as it is by every despotism, but stands opposed to the principle that guides the acts of destruction that characterize totalitarian systems (see "On the Nature of Totalitarianism .. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11056dig.051930/?sp=1 ") That principle is an ideology explaining the entire course of human affairs by determining every historical event and all past, present, and future deeds as functions of a universal process. Looking deeper into the phenomenon of totalitarianism Arendt saw that the "idea," the content, of the ideology matters less than its "inherent logicality," which was discovered separately and prized by both Hitler and Stalin. In broad outline ideological logicality operates like a practical syllogism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism#]: from the premise of a supposed law of nature that certain races are unfit to live it follows that those races must be eliminated, and from the premise of a supposed law of history that certain classes are on their way to extinction it follows that those classes must be liquidated. Arendt's point is that the untruth of the ideological premises is without consequence: the premises will become self-evidently true in the factitious world created by the murderous acts that flow from them in logical consistency.

In their adherence to the logicality of two utterly distinct ideologies, one that originated on the far right and the other on the far left, Arendt found Nazism and Stalinism to be more or less equivalent totalitarian systems. If the ruined city of Königsberg could speak after having witnessed the terror, the killings by torture and starvation under the regimes of both Hitler and Stalin, it is doubtful that it would point out significant differences between those regimes. To focus on the different content of racist and communist ideologies only blurs what Arendt at first thought of as the "absolute" and "radical" evil they both brought into the world. Her emphasis on the logical deduction of acts from ideological premises, moreover, is linked to her later understanding of evil, stemming from the trial of Adolf Eichmann, as "banal," "rootless," and "thought-defying." The logicality of totalitarian movements accounts for their appeal to the atomized and depoliticized masses of mankind without whose support those movements could not have generated their immense power. Thus Hitler's "ice-cold reasoning" and Stalin's "merciless dialectics" contribute to Arendt's uncertainty as to whether any other totalitarian regimes have existed--perhaps in Mao's China, but not in the despotisms of single party or military dictatorships (see The Origins of Totalitarianism, "Introduction," third edition, 1966).

In 1941, after France fell to the Nazis, Arendt escaped from an internment camp in unoccupied Vichy first to Spain, then to Lisbon, and finally to New York with little money and practically no English, once again a refugee from totalitarian persecution. But in America she found more than refuge: within a year and consistently thereafter she published articles of a political nature, in a new and at first only half-mastered language, unlike anything she had written before leaving Germany (see "From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today .. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11056dig.051190/?sp=1 ,"). Only ten years later, after assiduous work, she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, her first major book and a tremendously complicated one. That it was first conceived as a study of imperialism suggests that when she started it Arendt saw Nazism and Bolshevism as a radical development of the nineteenth-century European phenomenon of colonization and as what she then called "full-fledged imperialism." The book, however, grew and shifted ground as it was written, and in its final form totalitarianism appeared as an entirely new form of government, one that had no historical precedent, not even in the harshest of despotisms. The book also underwent major revisions in subsequent editions. Its original conclusion was replaced by an essay written in 1953, "Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government;" an epilogue on the Hungarian Revolution was added in 1958 and later deleted; and substantial new prefaces were written in 1966 and 1967.


Portion of a page titled "Imagination in Kant .. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11056dig.040420/?sp=2 ,
" from Kant lectures delivered at the New School for Social Research, 1970. The Hannah
Arendt Papers (The Library of Congress Manuscript Division).

Although shortly after its publication The Origins of Totalitarianism was hailed as a justification of the Cold War, that was not Arendt's intention. By that time the Cold War was being fought against the Soviet Union and its satellites and not against totalitarianism, which according to Arendt had ended in the Soviet Union, or at least had begun to end, with Stalin's death in 1953. Furthermore, the Cold War obscured the fact that the historical elements that had coalesced in totalitarian movements remained intact throughout the world and by no means only behind the Iron Curtain. Arendt's portrait appeared on the cover of The Saturday Review of Literature, a popular American literary magazine of the day, and her fame, which at times approached notoriety, increased with her subsequent publications and has continued to grow posthumously. Today her place among a handful of profoundly original, influential, and controversial political thinkers of the twentieth century is secure. In 1951, the same year that The Origins of Totalitarianism was published, Arendt became an American citizen, formally marking a new beginning in her life.

This new beginning in America and its political orientation, while constituting a break with the tradition of Western thought, has been misunderstood as a break with the past itself. Arendt made a decisive distinction between a fragmented past that can be retrieved to give depth to the present and the continuity of a past handed down from generation to generation (traditio) across many centuries. She did not deconstruct the past but dismantled its traditional structure as a uniform stream or unbroken thread that leads progressively from the past to the present and from the present into the future. She was convinced that the advent of totalitarianism in the twentieth century had irreparably ruptured the continuity of history and that the complacency of the idea of historical progress is deleterious to political life. Arendt saw the present as a "gap between past and future" in which every individual's active recollection and deliberately selective retrieval of the "no longer" fosters responsibility for the "not yet." While the ability to respond to the past does not determine the future, it does throw light on it. In her seminars, which always had a historical dimension and which she conducted as if they were miniature public spaces, she urged her students to participate: "Insert yourself," she would say, "and make the world a little better."

Arendt never forgot her foundation in the German language and in German philosophy, particularly in the thought of Immanuel Kant. She was only fourteen when she first read Kant, who in the eighteenth century had also lived in Königsberg and, despite serious controversy with the Prussian autocracy over his teaching of religion, never experienced a need to leave it. The differences in the external circumstances of their lives notwithstanding, Arendt's appreciation of Kant deepened as she grew older. She increasingly came to esteem the subtlety of his philosophically radical distinctions, the role of imagination in his critical philosophy, his equanimity in destroying the shibboleths of metaphysics, and his recognition of human freedom as spontaneity. To her he was more than the philosopher who reconfigured the European tradition by discovering the conditions prior to experience that make experience possible in our knowledge of the world, in our moral conduct, and in our capacity to judge the beautiful and sublime. He was present to her--she used to say she sensed him looking over her shoulder as she wrote--as the last and greatest champion of humanity and human dignity.

To plumb the depths of her fundamental concept of plurality as the essential condition of political life requires some familiarity with her unorthodox approach to Kant (see "Kant's Political Philosophy .. https://www.loc.gov/collections/hannah-arendt-papers/?fa=partof:hannah+arendt+papers:+addition+i,+1966-1977&q=kant%27s%20political%20philosophy "). In Kant's late work on aesthetics Arendt discovered the political significance of common sense, the world-orienting sense that both unites what appears to the private senses and fits what is thus united into a common world. That discovery was crucial, for the agreement of common sense realizes a world that lies between human beings, keeping them distinct and relating them, a shared world in which they can appear and be recognized as unique beings. In the last analysis recognition of human uniqueness is the same thing as equality in freedom, which for Arendt is the raison d'être of political life. Kant not only revealed to Arendt a way of seeing the crisis of the twentieth century, i.e., the refusal of totalitarian regimes to share the world with entire races and classes of human beings and before that the superfluousness of the world-alienated masses who supported those regimes, but also pointed a way to go beyond that crisis by accepting the challenge of restoring a common world.


(left to right) Unknown woman, Hugo Friedrich, Hannah Arendt, and Benno von Wiese
at Heidelburg University, 1928. Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Trust.

The humanistic education to which Arendt was naturally drawn and received at the universities of Marburg and Heidelberg also deepened throughout her life. She studied philosophy, ancient Greek literature (poetry and history as well as philosophy), and Christian theology because she loved wisdom and tragic beauty and was puzzled less by the existence than the exactions of a transcendent God of love. The teachers who exerted the greatest influence on her were Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, whose "existential" philosophies were considered revolutionary by their peers and by themselves. With Heidegger and Jaspers Arendt studied the tradition of philosophic thought from the vantage point of its self-conscious conclusion, and with them both she developed lifelong personal and intellectual relationships, equally meaningful but different in kind.

Heidegger awakened in Arendt a passion for thinking and that awakening, sometimes acknowledged and sometimes not, pervades her work. With him she experienced the awestruck wonder of pure existence that begins the activity of thinking. What Heidegger called the "facticity" (Faktizität) and "thrownness" (Geworfenheit) of human being, the "naked that it is," not how or what or where it is, at one time led Arendt to think that a new political philosophy might be developed from the shock of "speechless horror," akin to "speechless wonder," at the crimes of totalitarianism. She thought then that Heidegger indicated a way to "directly grasp the realm of human affairs and human deeds," which no philosopher had ever done (see "Concern with Politics in Recent European Political Thought .. https://www.loc.gov/item/mss1105601184/ "). She gave up that idea, or at least altered it beyond recognition, because of what she also learned from Heidegger: philosophical thinking is "out of order" in the everyday world of common sense from which the thinker, the thinking ego, withdraws. Although habituated to the activity of thinking, Arendt was haunted by this withdrawal. In the end she turned away from philosophy because she did not believe its truths were relevant to the realm of human affairs. Not their truth but the ever changing meanings of the phenomena of the actual world were the "products" of thinking that increasingly concerned her. A philosopher like Heidegger may dwell in a "land of thought," withdrawn from the world, but a political thinker like Arendt returns to the world where every nonanalytical truth becomes a meaning, in her case an often controversial meaning, an opinion among the opinions of others.

[Insert: Yes, similar though not the same, reals vs ideals, reality understandings vs utopian yearnings...
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174870426]


Karl Jaspers, 1961. Courtesy of the
Hannah Arendt Trust.

Karl Jaspers introduced Arendt to a trans-historical, public realm of reason where it was possible to exist in the present and think in living communication with thinkers of the past, which is one important way that she retrieved the past. From Kant via Jaspers she derived her notion of an autonomous faculty of judgment, and through active, public participation in the realm of reason she developed her own formidable power of judgment. If anything did, it was her exercise of that faculty that eventually reconciled her to what she once referred to as "this none too beautiful world of ours". That remark, made in 1944 at the height of the war against Hitler, is tempered by her belief that "all sorrows can be borne" if, like the Chorus in a Greek tragedy, their witness sufficiently distances himself from them, fits them into a story, and tells and retells that story. Dramas are made to be repeated, stories to be recounted and retold, in order to keep their meaning alive. Although she did not write fiction, Arendt believed that stories and not the methods of social, political, and historical science capture the contingency of human events; and like all great storytellers she realized that the meaning of a story can never be entirely abstracted from it. What she said in 1944 also differs markedly in mood from what she wrote almost thirty years later toward the end of her life about our natural fitness to perceive the diversity and the beauty of the world's appearances. That too is ultimately a function of judgment, of its "disinterestedness" or disinclination to evaluate appearances according to the standard of their usefulness.


Walter Benjamin, undated.
Courtesy of the Hannah
Arendt Trust.

Arendt examined the intricacies of St. Augustine's concept of love in her dissertation written under Jaspers's direction, an extremely personal work composed in the dense style typical of German scholarship of the period. Although her dissertation bears no indication of any interest in contemporary politics (see Love and Saint Augustine) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_and_Saint_Augustine], a decidedly nontraditional Augustine, less Christian than Roman, would later play a vital role in her rediscovery of the prephilosophical, political conception of action. In his De Civitate Dei Arendt found the perfect representation of her view of human beings as beginnings: Initium ut esset homo creatus est ("that a beginning be made man was created") not only concludes The Origins of Totalitarianism but resonates as a leitmotif throughout her work. Nor is any political concern explicit in her second, ambiguously subjective book, on Rahel Varnhagen, in which she dealt historically and critically with the question of Jewish social assimilation, in this case the vicissitudes of the life that an extraordinarily intelligent German Jew elected to live at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Arendt wrote most of the book while still in Germany and completed it during the Paris years at the urging of Walter Benjamin and Heinrich Blücher-- "rather grumpily," presumably because its subject had become "remote" to her. By that time Arendt, as a Jew, had endured a rude political awakening, and the failure of Rahel Varnhagen to establish "a social life outside of official society" would take on a far darker aspect in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Arendt met Heinrich Blücher in 1936 in Paris, where he was a non-Jewish political exile, and married him there in 1940. Under his influence her mind was opened not just to Jewish politics but to the political as such. At the end of World War I in 1918, Arendt was only twelve years old, but Blücher, seven years her senior, had fought in that war, experienced its devastation, and at its conclusion became an active leftist participant in the riots, strikes, and street battles that led to the establishment of the German Republic. A member of the Berlin working class who had a limited formal education, Blücher was politically savvy and aware, as Arendt could hardly have been at that time, of the fundamental changes taking place in those postwar political upheavals. Blücher revealed to Arendt a realm of political reality at the core of the actual world, a realm capable of generating human freedom and, when corrupted, human bondage. Although Arendt consistently avoided situating herself on the left, right, or center of the political spectrum, Blücher became her political conscience, not only when she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism, which she dedicated to him, but throughout their life together.


Hannah Arendt, undated. Courtesy of
the Hannah Arendt Trust.


"The Impact of Marx .. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11056dig.05148a/?sp=1 "
The Hannah Arendt Papers (The Library of Congress Manuscript Division).

The intellectually and spiritually rarefied world of Hannah Arendt's youth was to be shattered by the rise of Nazism in Germany. It is not possible to grasp Arendt's meaning when she writes of the newness of totalitarianism without realizing that not only her own world but the greater German world of which hers was a part--the world of inherited religious beliefs and moral and legal standards thought to be eternal--would be swept away. It must have been as difficult for her as it is for us to comprehend totalitarianism as neither necessary nor entirely accidental, as something brought forth by human beings of her own country and her own generation right in the heart of European civilization and not as some monstrous thing that attacked it from the outside. It must have been difficult for her to write about what she wanted to destroy rather than preserve. And it must have been difficult for her to think about the evil of totalitarianism since, as she eventually came to see, that evil defies thought.

But Arendt did think, write, and try to understand what for her was the real turning point of the twentieth century. As she put it in the preface to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism: "The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live." As her thought expanded beyond the framework of that work her concern with the entire range of phenomena she associated with totalitarianism grew broader and deeper. Among the most valuable and interesting features of the Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress is the presentation of her lecture notes and ma scripts, including those ostensibly dealing with Karl Marx but which in fact reach back to the beginnings of political philosophy. These documents furnish indisputable evidence that Arendt's effort to understand totalitarianism continued in the early 1950s
(see "The Great Tradition and the Nature of Totalitarianism .. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11056dig.05145a/?sp=1 ;
" "The Impact of Marx .. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11056dig.05148a/?sp=1 ;
" "The Spiritual Quest of Modern Man .. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11056dig.052280/?sp=1 ;
" "Totalitarianism ..https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11056dig.051930/?sp=10 ").
Other documents make clear that her search for understanding continued beyond that period and underlies much of what she wrote in The Human Condition and On Revolution--which when read apart from the archival material in her papers have frequently been seen as distinct from that search
(see "Freiheit und Politik .. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11056dig.051400/?sp=1 ;
" "Action and the 'Pursuit of Happiness .. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11056dig.051010/?sp=1 ';
" "Revolution and Freedom;" .. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11056dig.052250/?sp=1
"Labor, Work, Action" .. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11056dig.051810/?sp=1 ).
Indeed, it can now be said that Arendt's effort to understand otalitarianism continued to the end of her life. Her work on the faculty of judgment, just begun at the time of her sudden death, was to have dealt with the way individuals bereft of moral rules and legal strictures can recognize evil and stand up and say "No" to it.

By Jerome Kohn, Trustee, Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust

https://www.loc.gov/collections/hannah-arendt-papers/articles-and-essays/world-of-hannah-arendt/

Bingo. Of course it is deeper. It's the planned, organized and put into practice strategy of embedding mistrust into a susceptible portion of the population. The intentional creation of and the intentional exploitation of an insidious mistrust. An extreme cynicism. It's those using Donald by incorporating his lifetime development mental mess to manipulate portions of the population into a position of not knowing whom to trust, so not knowing the difference between right and wrong. Hannah Arendt saw it some 75 years ago (see reply), we see it today.

Intrinsically related:
And when you have a portion of the population that has a tenuous grasp on reality anyway, having had their
brains softened by FOX and alex jones and rush limpbone, much of the prep work had already been done.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174889442

""The fact that Trump lies about some things when he must know it's a certainty his lie will be exposed is clear evidence he neither cares he is lying nor cares he will be caught lying."
It may be different than that. It's an established behavior of totalitarian government."
.. and your image ..


See again: OUCH, new to me -- ‘Red Caesarism’ is rightwing code – and some Republicans are listening
[...]
* On Jan. 6 Trump’s attorney reportedly told the Pence team its refusal to block the election certification caused the riot
[...]Eastman, 61, is a veteran conservative legal activist who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. A longtime member of the Federalist Society, he has spent much of his legal career fighting same-sex marriage.
P - He is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank based in Upland, Calif., whose leaders stridently defended Eastman from criticism over his role in Trump’s attempt to overturn the election and attacked the media’s coverage of it.
P - Eastman was sharply criticized by Democrats in August last year for writing an article for Newsweek that questioned then-Sen. Kamala D. Harris’s eligibility to be vice president on the grounds that her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born. He said his understanding was that Trump first noticed him arguing against birthright citizenship on Fox News.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=166577611]

The First Amendment in the age of disinformation.
"The strange Republican world where the big lie lives on and Trump is fighting to save democracy
"We see this so called celebration played out daily in Congress, in society and on these boards.
P - Their ideology celebrates faith at the expense of reason and directs them away from attempts to innovate and improve
the world around them, which is seen as dangerous because attempts to improve ‘may’ turn out to be destructive.[11]
P - The Limits of Dialogue Between Faith and Reason: Russell Kirk, John Stuart Mill, and The Stupid Party" "
[...]It’s a fundamentally optimistic vision: Good ideas win. The better argument will prove persuasive.
There’s a countertradition, however. It’s alert to the ways in which demagogic leaders or movements can use propaganda, an older term that can be synonymous with disinformation. A crude authoritarian censors free speech. A clever one invokes it to play a trick, twisting facts to turn a mob on a subordinated group and, in the end, silence as well as endanger its members. Looking back at the rise of fascism and the Holocaust in her 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt focused on the use of propaganda to “make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism.”
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168932013
----------

Though on the surface this discussion might seem esoteric, experts who track extremism in the US say that due to their influence on the Republican party, the rightwing intellectuals who espouse these ideas about the attractions of autocracy present a profound threat to American democracy.

Their calls for a “red Caesar” are now only growing louder as Donald Trump .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump , whose supporters attempted to violently halt the election of Joe Biden in 2020, has assumed dominant frontrunner status in the 2024 Republican nomination race. Trump, who also faces multiple criminal indictments, has spoken openly of attacking the free press in the US and having little regard for American constitutional norms should he win the White House again.

The idea that the US might be redeemed by a Caesar – an authoritarian, rightwing leader – was first broached explicitly by Michael Anton, a Claremont senior fellow and Trump presidential adviser.

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Dementia. Sociopath. Malignant narcissism. Habitual liar. Trump is a mess.

Anti-Trump Republican Hilariously Hits Back at Tim Walz Attacks

August 9, 2024/7:32 a.m. ET

Former Representative Adam Kinzinger came to Walz’s defense.


Adam J. Dewey/Anadolu/Getty Images

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem tried to attack Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz on X, only to be bombarded with mockery.

Noem tried Tuesday to call out Walz as a radical, claiming that he “pretended to be moderate” while they were serving in Congress together but “then showed his true extremist colors as soon as he became Governor.” She also said that South Dakota was performing better economically compared to Minnesota, with people moving away from Walz’s state due to his policies.

But on Thursday, former Representative Adam Kinzinger, an anti-Trump Republican, called her out with a photo of a happy Walz hunting with a dog, referring to Noem’s disturbing account of how she killed her puppy after it failed to live up to her hunting expectations.

Dog is alive tho https://t.co/VsKmlWqF8V pic.twitter.com/I5gSjqwTpb

— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) August 8, 2024

Hear hear!!

James Taylor and Carol King are both gems. No need to ever apologize
for hippie caring. You've Got A Friend will always be a beautiful song.

3:40am here now. Back to bed. Enjoy!!

The fact that Trump lies about some things when he must know it's a certainty his lie will be exposed is clear evidence he neither cares he is lying nor cares he will be caught lying. An ordinary person with an ordinary conscience would not be in that state. It's clear Trump is mentally ill.

Can only see -- Trump’s Truth Social merger partner settles fraud charges with SEC over misleading investors

" I'm not sure if Orlando's been charged criminally. Has he?"

Regulators say Digital World Acquisition Corporation was created to buy Trump’s media company but didn’t disclose that to investors

ByLukas I. Alpert
Published: July 20, 2023 at 6:10 p.m. ET

[...]

A publicly traded investment vehicle that has announced plans to merge with Donald Trump’s Truth Social media company has reached a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over fraud charges that it misled investors about the deal.

As part of the settlement, the Digital World Acquisition Corporation DWAC — a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), or “blank check” company formed in 2021 — was ordered to pay an $18 million civil penalty fee in the event that it completes its planned merger with the Trump Media and Technology Group and takes it public.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-truth-social-merger-partner-settles-fraud-charges-with-sec-over-misleading-investors-69cfe4c4

12yearplan, As Zorax said, oops, on your link. It never hurts to check it after you post.

"Enjoyed this post from last night and gold bug survivalists please note:"

Here you go ..

The truth, however, is that we don’t know why stocks fell. Concerns about a possible recession have certainly risen; I wrote about those concerns in my latest column .. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/opinion/interest-rates-federal-reserve.html . But what was true in 1987 was almost surely true in 2024, too: Most people selling stocks and other assets weren’t engaging in macroeconomic analysis; they were selling because prices were falling. It’s hard to be sure what triggered the sell-off, but it’s also not very important: Market panics can happen for many reasons, and what matters is how long they persist and whether they have serious side effects.

[...]

It’s really hard to reconcile a falling price for Bitcoin with the story that this is all about recession fears. Stocks ultimately derive their value from expected future profits, which will be hurt if we have a recession. Bitcoin ultimately derives its value from … well, nothing in particular. But one of the better arguments for Bitcoin, despite its failure to replace conventional currency as a means of payment, is that it is becoming a form of digital gold, an asset people hold because they consider it a refuge in hard times.

I have problems with this view. We may indeed be heading for a “Mad Max” dystopia, but if we are, do you think we’ll still have a working internet? But never mind. The point for now is that during the recent turmoil, Bitcoin has behaved not so much like gold and a whole lot like Nvidia. As Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal put it, “Bitcoin doesn’t look like the new gold. It looks like three tech stocks in a trench coat.”

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174883722 ..

enjoy Krugman's again.

Scurrilous. Cheap. Swiftboat repeat -- Vance runs a Swift Boat attack against Walz’s military service

''False equivalency flag thrown on you, again.
Putting in papers for retirement after 24 years of service with multiple deployments
is NOT the same as using phony bone spurs to AVOID service."

The broadside is similar to the campaign to discredit 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry over his Vietnam service.

VIDEO - Vance accuses Walz of ‘stolen valor’ over military service

By Jared Mitovich, Meridith McGraw and Connor O’Brien
08/07/2024 10:08 PM EDT

All links, videos

Ohio Sen. JD Vance slammed the timing of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s retirement from a more-than-two-decades-long military career as a means of avoiding a deployment to Iraq on Wednesday, calling it “stolen valor garbage” and testing a new line of attack on the newly minted Democratic vice presidential contender.

There is no evidence that Walz retired to avoid a wartime deployment, and it’s a move that may not work — Walz has faced similar attacks from opponents before during successful races for Congress and governor, in which he explained his Army record in detail but did not make it a central part of his campaign.

The attacks are reminiscent of the 2004 campaign to discredit the distinguished war record of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, who served in Vietnam and later criticized the war — an effort led by Chris LaCivita, now a senior adviser to the Trump campaign.

What remains to be seen is if the tactic will be as successful 20 years later, when the Republican presidential nominee evaded military service, and Vance, despite his deployment to Iraq, has no combat experience either.

“He has not spent a day in a combat zone,” Vance, who deployed to Iraq as a combat correspondent .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_journalism_in_the_United_States .. in the Marines but did not experience combat, told reporters at a campaign event in Michigan on Wednesday. “Do not pretend to be something that you’re not … I’d be ashamed if I was him and I lied about my military service like he did.”

VIDEO - Walz and Vance trade jabs on the trail in Philadelphia

The broadside, quickly repeated by other Republicans, suggests the campaign may see Walz’s military record as a vulnerability for Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate — one which Vance, his Republican counterpart, could be uniquely positioned to exploit as a fellow former enlistee. While Walz has lambasted Vance’s Midwestern bona fides, he has not criticized his opponent’s military service.

Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), a former Green Beret, characterized the timing of Walz’s retirement from the Army National Guard with a football analogy in a video posted on X: “It is kind of like the quarterback of a big team walking away from their team right before they go to the Super Bowl. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

In fact, Walz filed paperwork for his congressional run in February 2005, about a month before reports emerged that the Minnesota National Guard might be deployed. Walz then announced his run in May of that year, two months before the Minnesota National Guard’s directive .. https://www.nationalguard.mil/News/Article/573070/guard-unit-recognized-for-record-deployment/ .. was officially issued.

Some Republicans, including former Vice President Mike Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short, were less excited about pinning Walz down based on his Army background. “A policy attack, I think, would be more effective, perhaps, than some of the personal attacks that have been transpiring.” Short said on MSNBC on Wednesday.

Vance also suggested that Walz lied about serving in a combat zone in a comment circulated by the Harris campaign, where he called for politicians to “make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war.” The Minnesota governor specialized in heavy artillery and was recognized for his sharpshooting skills during his time in the Army, while also being deployed to respond to emergencies such as floods and tornadoes.

“Tim Walz is a fraud who wants to ban firearms like the ones he claimed to carry in war — except Tim Walz never deployed to a combat zone and lied about his record of service in the National Guard,” said Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt.


While Walz has lambasted Vance’s Midwestern bona fides, he has not criticized his opponent’s military service. | Jamie Kelter Davis for POLITICO

Vance invoked the term “stolen valor,” which describes a person who has lied about or misrepresented their military service, though Walz has never claimed he was a combat veteran. The attack the Trump campaign is deploying describes Walz’s retirement before his unit was called up to serve a deployment in Iraq as “stolen valor” — not the typical use of the term.

But the Trump campaign and Republican allies insist the term applies.

“The two biggest sins in the military are claiming credit for decorations you don’t have or claiming combat action that you did not participate in, those are the two biggest sins. And this much is certain: He’s guilty of at least one of them,” LaCivita told POLITICO. “Nothing regarding his lies has been weaponized in a political sense, that’s about to change.”

At issue is not so much Walz’s tenure in the Army National Guard, but his departure from it in 2005, when the now-Minnesota governor retired to run for Congress. Vance and other Republicans have accused Walz of abandoning his unit, the 1st Battalion of the 125th Field Artillery Regiment in the Minnesota National Guard, which was preparing for deployment to Iraq in the fall of 2005.

Walz enlisted in the Army National Guard in Nebraska at 17, completing 20 years of service in 2001 and then reenlisting for four more years after the Sept. 11 attacks that year. Between 2003 and 2004, he deployed to Italy .. https://mprnews.org/story/2018/10/03/tim-walz-national-guard-career-minnesota-governor-race .. on active duty to support base security as part of Operation Enduring Freedom .. https://www.army.mil/article/234854/once_in_the_guard_always_ready_to_serve , the first stage of the United States’ war on terror. The governor has openly acknowledged .. http://mprnews.org/story/2018/10/03/tim-walz-national-guard-career-minnesota-governor-race .. never facing combat during his 24 years of service.

“After 24 years of military service, Governor Walz retired in 2005 and ran for Congress, where he chaired Veterans Affairs and was a tireless advocate for our men and women in uniform — and as Vice President of the United States he will continue to be a relentless champion for our veterans and military families,” Harris campaign spokesperson James Singer wrote in a statement.

The Harris campaign describes Walz as a “retired Command Sergeant Major.” As for his exit from the military to seek office, a Department of Defense military directive .. https://tjaglcs.army.mil/DesktopModules/Bring2mind/SimpleDownloads/Download.aspx?tabid=1214&mid=5133&file=2004%5C10+-+October+2004%5C2004-Oct-Parker-Congress+Amends+Performance+of+Civil+Functions+Restriction.pdf .. in 2004, which was in effect at the time Walz retired, largely prohibited enlisted members of the army from campaigning or holding elected office.

And it’s not the first time his rank at retirement has been disputed; a 2018 paid letter to the editor written by two retired command sergeant majors alleged that Walz inflated his rank during his race for governor. He went on to win that race.

The fight over Walz’s military record could signal how the first presidential campaign with two post-Sept. 11 veterans on the ticket might play out. While Vance has sought to portray Walz as dishonest about his service, targeting a part of Walz’s biography that Democrats have quickly embraced, the Minnesota governor has painted Vance as antithetical to the “regular people” he claims to represent.


When he was running for president in 2004, John Kerry (seen here receiving a military decoration during the Vietnam War) came under attack by an organization called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. | Kerry Campaign via Getty Images

“Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community,” Walz said at the Philadelphia rally .. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/06/philadelphia-harris-walz-campaign-rally-00172975 .. on Tuesday where Harris introduced him as her running mate. “Come on. That’s not what Middle America is.”

Top Democrats contend that continued attacks by Vance on Walz’s military background may come back to hurt Republicans. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, who served in Afghanistan as an Army officer, sprang to Walz’s defense Wednesday following Vance’s “stolen valor” comments.

“Anybody who is willing to raise their hand, to put on a uniform of this country — especially when you consider a small percentage of our population has ever done that — they deserve our most respect. That includes JD Vance, Corporal JD Vance, and that includes Sergeant Major Tim Walz,” Moore said on MSNBC, referring to the vice presidential candidates by their respective military ranks. “And I think JD Vance knows as being a corporal that you don’t get to sergeant major just because. You get to sergeant major because you’ve served the country.”

“I just don’t know if that’s necessarily the hill JD Vance wants to climb,” Moore said of Vance’s newfound focus on Walz’s 24-year military record.

Olivia Beavers contributed to this report.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/07/vance-walz-military-stolen-valor-garbage-00173172

Love it!! Sleep well.

Utterly incredible. Hope she has warm parents,
laughs a lot, and is a relatively happy child.

LOL On the way out have been watching The Addams Family.

rooster, Some rural voters. Some.

"Wait what? After calling rural voters white suprematist and MAGAts for years now all of a sudden they’re great people and walz can identify with racist? Lol
P - Now having Walz be a messenger that can connect with moderate and rural voters, we believe we have a shot, not just in Nebraska, but in states like Iowa, Kansas or other Midwest states,” Kleeb said."

Don't you ever tire of thunking. You know how a car short of oil sounds.

We'll help you to become a better thinker yet, Sweetums.

rooster, And exactly, what fake shit about Trump are you talking about.
You could give us some evidence to back that statement up.
What fake shit about Trump has been posted on this board?

"Are you kidding me. The fake shit that’s posted about Trump and the names they
call him stays on this board with no problem. So no I can post that stuff too"

All the names Trump is called is wholly justified. I can't recall any fake shit.

Fill me in. Am looking forward to seeing you justify that of yours.