October 3, 2024

Chalk up another life ruined by Trump.

I wonder how many there are by now. Not just in his political career, but going back years, including all the people he ruined financially by not paying them what he owed them.

We know that everything Trump touches dies. But for every one of those "deaths" (literal or figurative), there is a ripple effect of others (relatives, friends, associates) who are harmed.

The trail of destruction left by this one individual is immeasurable...and it continues as we speak and will continue to do so as long as he is still on his planet. Putting him behind bars would slow him down, probably a lot, but even there he will still have the power to cause trouble (albeit on a smaller scale) as long as there are people on the outside who are willing to help him communicate with whatever ragtag remnant of miscreants still support him.

It's really mind boggling how much damage can stem from the evil perpetrated by one single person. There's a reason I sometimes call him the Orange Hellbeast. His ability to create and foster hate and evil and channel those things to his own benefit seems almost supernatural sometimes.

No, I don't really believe there's anything supernatural about him. I just can't think of a better way to capture the sheer extent of his malevolence than to call him a beast from hell (which I also don't literally believe in). To me, he is and always will be the Orange Hellbeast.

October 2, 2024

If they allowed themselves to admit that he lost the election, they'd have to admit that he lied about it.

And if they were to admit that he might pissible lied about the election, that would open the the door to admitting that he's lied about other things and acknowledging that he's a liar in general. And then where would they be?

At this point, they (by which I mean those who are full-fledged members of the cult) are deeply invested in the belief that the Orange Hellbeast is their lord and savior, come to rescue them and other "real" Americans from all the things they fear. You know, things like:

- black and brown immigrants
- black and brown people in general
- muslims, jews, atheists, and anyone else who doesn't share their religious beliefs
- women who want to be able to make decisions about their own bodies and the health care they're allowed to receive
- LGBTQ+ people (especially those scary drag queens ) who think they're entitled to the same rights as everyone else
- all those evil teachers and librarians who want to turn kids gay (or worse, trans) and woke by letting them read books that depict any of the above kinds of people as anything other than subhuman, depict slavery as a BAD thing, and/or provide a view of history that isn't completely sanitized and pro white people
- and so on and so forth
Obligatory sarcasm emoji:

The MAGA cultists can't afford to let even a tiny sliver of truth penetrate their defenses and will always fight to hang on to their illusions. Why? Because they believe they NEED the Orange Hellbeast to save them from all of the above, and they don't want to live in a world where they'd have to face their fears without their "protector."

It's sad, and it's sick, but these losers desperately want and need to hang on to their illusions and will fight tooth and nail to do so.

Fortunately, not all Trump voters are full-fledged cultists, and some of them are reachable. Many people who voted for Trump in the past have already recognized how dangerous he is and pledged their support to Harris and Walz, and, with luck and hard work, many more will do the same in the coming weeks.

We can't do anything about the brainwashed, fully invested cultists, but fortunately, there's a lot we CAN do to win this election without (and in spite of) them!

September 25, 2024

People who think they have the right to tell someone else how to feel really grind my gears.

I detest ANY kind of comment that implies we can all just decide how to feel and feel that way. Wtf, do these people think humans come with a dial that can be set to the emotion of our choice? Ordering someone to feel X instead of Y is just plain stupid, on top of being rude and insensitive, and doing that to someone who is dealing with trauma and/or whose brain chemistry is out of whack for reasons beyond their control is just plain cruel.

I don't think most people mean to be rude, insensitive, or cruel when they say things like that, but one's intentions and the effects of one's behavior on others cam be VERY different things.

Some people say things like "stop feeling sorry for yourself" or "cheer up" out of a genuine (albeit very misguided) desire to help. Others say those things because they're tired of hearing about someone else's misery and just want to make it stop.

There are also people who are deliberately inconsiderate or even cruel (and some of us unfortunately have more people like that in our lives than others). This group may do the most lasting damage, but the first two can also do a lot of damage without intending to.

I wish parents would do a better job of teaching kids how to manage their emotions, but it's a hell of a lot easier said than done, especially for those who have never learned how to manage their own emotions properly (like my parents). Too many of us never have a good model of a well-adjusted adult to follow or get our own needs met sufficiently while growing up, and we have to spend the rest of our lives figuring out these things work.

When I look back at the mistakes I've made in my life as a result of learning the wrong lessons while growing up, I can get very frustrated about all the things that went wrong because I didn't know how to handle them better. I'd be better off if I could remember to give myself credit for the lessons I've learned and the work I did to learn them, instead of resenting the fact that I had to do all that work. I suspect that's true of a lot of us.

September 21, 2024

When was that show taped?

Stephens was a jerk, and Ruhle handled him brilliantly. My opinion of him may vary some fraction of a nanometer in one direction or another, depending on whether that show was taped before the Dana Bash interview, but not much more than that.

On second thought, I take back that fraction of a nanometer. Bret Stephens works for the NYT, which makes it pelucidly clear that he was speaking out of butthurt over the fact that Kamala has so far declined to sit down for a grilling an interview with him and his Gray Lady colleagues.

He wasn't really concerned about not knowing Kamala's stances on particular issues; he was just bent out of shape about not being given a chance to ask her a bunch of oddly specific "gotcha" questions of his own devising (such as the example he gave).

It's not THAT hard to find out what a candidate's stances on particular issues are, and he damed well knows it. He just feels entitled to grill her in granular detail on topics that go far beyond that, and he was sulking about not being able to (and not honest enough to admit it).

September 21, 2024

Can't think of anything to add.

But reading that list, I am struck by what it says about him. Like all narcissists, he is deeply, profoundly insecure, and his insults of both men and women read like a catalog of the traits he hates and fears in himself.

Every time he opens his mouth, he's either bragging about his own imaginary attributes and achievements or insulting people who are, in reality, much more accomplished than he is. He needs to constantly do both in order to maintain the fiction that he really is the smartest, most successful, most EVERYTHING person who ever walked the earth AND to beat back the unconscious insecurities that are always threatening to engulf him. Such is the tightrope walked by a malignant narcissist such as TSF.

September 12, 2024

Need help with Google Photos

I can't figure out to upload photos from my Android phone to Google Photos. I have a lot of photos in there that I'd Iike to upload to Google Photos, so I can then download them to the Android tablet I do most of my internet activity on.

At one time, my phone was set to automatically backup photos to Google Photos, but it stopped doing that a while back. I don't know how the setting got changed or how to fix it.

Basically, I want to set Google Phtos to backup again, AND I want to upload a bunch of pics that weren't automatically backed up to Google Photos. Can anyone help?

September 12, 2024

Trump Tower ruled 'public nuisance' over fish kills

OMG, it just figures, doesn't it?

A building owned and operated by the Trump Organization has been ruled a "public nuisance" due to violating state and federal environmental regulations and demonstrating zero concern about the issue? Who'd a thunk it?

Oops, forgot to include link: https://chicago.suntimes.com/environment/2024/09/11/trump-tower-ruled-public-nuisance-kwame-raoul-friends-chicago-river-sierra-club-fish

September 9, 2024

Trump's Psychologist Niece Says 'Donald Is Dementing'

Source: Daily Beast

Donald Trump’s niece says her uncle’s mental condition is declining and that he is now “demonstrably untethered from reality.”

Mary Trump, the psychologist and writer who is now an outspoken critic of her father’s younger brother, addressed the former president’s cognition after his rambling, incoherent answer to a question about childcare last week. Asked at the Economic Club of New York about what legislation he would advance to make childcare more affordable if he wins back the White House, Trump blathered on for almost two minutes in a response that left media pundits at a loss to explain what he was trying to say.

*snip*

“It’s deeply disturbing that somebody as unhinged and incoherent as Donald is allowed to run for the presidency in the first place (and that leaves aside all of the other disqualifying things about him),” Mary Trump wrote, lamenting a lack of urgency from the media “in the face of Donald’s increasingly bizarre behavior.”

“On any given day, he is demonstrably untethered from reality—and it often seems that the reason the warning lights aren’t constantly flashing red is because nobody covering him expects otherwise,” she continued. “Surely a political press corps that spent months arguing that President Biden’s age rendered him mentally unfit, wouldn’t look the other way when the Republican candidate, the oldest person to run for president in American history, is not only old but decompensating before our very eyes. The difference of course is that Biden is aging while Donald is dementing.”



Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-psychologist-niece-mary-says-donald-is-dementing

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No paywall link: https://archive.ph/2024.09.09-095700/https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-psychologist-niece-mary-says-donald-is-dementing

September 9, 2024

Of course he's always right! /s

In his tiny, diseased mind, I mean. It's part and parcel of his malignant narcissim.

He has a profound need to believe he's always right, in order to maintain his narcissistic delusions of being the smartest, strongest, most successful, most amazing person in the world. Admitting that he's ever made a mistake is anathema to him, as is admitting that there's anything he doesn't know more about than anyone else.

I believe this is why he can't stop yapping about the court cases he's lost. He knows that losing a civil case or being convicted of a crime means that somebody decided he was WRONG about something, and that is intolerable to him! He feels compelled to keep telling the world the verdicts were wrong and "why" and painting himself as the injured party.

Of course, that behavior only hurts him in a multitude of ways, such as E. Jean Carroll taking him back to court and suing him for defaming her again, but I don't think he's capable of grasping that, at least not anymore. I think the dementia has robbed him of everything except his desperate need to be RIGHT and his compulsion to keep trying to convince the world of that.

I think this is only going to get worse as the dementia progresses. It's absolutely insane that someone is so obviously and profoundly impaired has a chance of being elected president.

September 7, 2024

I don't know...

This might be helpful to some kids, I guess. But I was a loner, not because I wanted to be, but because I was painfully shy with a ton of social anxiety that was exacerbated by my family moving around too damned much during my tween and teen years. The idea of my peers being tasked with trying to "drag" me out of my shell makes me shudder. I was IN that shell to begin with because of my peers treating me like a freak because I didn't talk, dress, act, and think exactly like everybody else. The last thing I would have wanted was to be targeted with forced "friendliness" by the same kids who I already KNEW saw me as a weirdo and a misfit.

I think one of the best things schools could do is teach kids about how people are NOT all just alike, and that's OKAY.

In my experience, teens are, collectively, the most judgmental people in the world, and they can be beastly to any kid who is a little bit different in any way. Every time we moved and I had to change schools, each school had its own culture and its own rigid set of unspken rules about what was socially acceptable, and God help anyone who didn't know ALL of those rules and follow them perfectly. It was exhausting trying to figure out what the expectations were in each new place, and anyone who isn't clairvoyant is bound to mess up somewhere. So of course I did mess up,
especially when I was new somewhere and still trying to figure out how things worked.

I wish that schools would teach kids that it's perfectly all right to be "different," and that being a square peg who doesn't quite fit into the little round hole everyone thinks you should fit into does NOT mean you are a freak or a complete failure at life. It would have meant the world to me to hear a message like that, and I think it would have done the kids who were NOT misfits a lot of good as well, in a different kind of way. It might have helped all of us to be nicer to each other and less quick to pronouce judgment.

Nothing like that ever happened at any of the schools I attended. We were all allowed to treat each other however we wanted and ostracize anyone who didn't fit in The kids who knew how to fit in or had some ability they could get recognition for found success and approval in various ways while the rest of us floundered along as best we could.

The teachers never seemed to notice someone was having trouble, unless they acted out or or were literally flunking. People like me, who were quiet and shy and didn't cause any trouble, who were not stellar students but not literally failing any of their classes were ignored. I got along fine with teachers and other adults, and they never seemed to notice I had any problems or needs that weren't being met.

Nobody paid any attention to bzd bullying or acknowledged it in any way back then. Nowadays, everyone knows bullying is a thing, but the approach seems to mainly be just to tell kids not to do it and maybe punish them if they do. IF anyone is teaching kids to accept and embrace their own and each another's differences, to be kind to themselves and their peers, and to understand that we're all different and that that's a feature of being human, not a bug, I'm not aware of it. But I think that could help SO much.

P.S. Sorry for writing a freaking book, lol. This topic stuck a nerve with me!