The slow disillusionment with Trump continues

While Trump seems to have a lock on the Republican party establishment, we should not assume that his support among the Republican base is also rock solid. There are of course die-hard people who will never desert him, as there are in any cult, but others will peel away with time as they slowly come to realize that he is a paper tiger who talks big but cannot deliver.

The case of one Proud Boys leader illustrates this phenomenon.

Proud Boys leader Ethan Nordean lashed out at President Donald Trump, accusing him of misleading his supporters and then deserting them despite their unwavering loyalty.

“We are now and always have been on our own. So glad he was able to pardon a bunch of degenerates as his last move and s— on us on the way out,” Nordean said in an expletive-laden message about the former president. “F— you trump you left us on [t]he battle field bloody and alone.”
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“I’ve followed this guy for 4 years and given everything and lost it all. Yes he woke us up, but he led us to believe some great justice was upon us…and it never happened,” Nordean wrote on Jan. 20, after Proud Boys members were charged, “now I’ve got some of my good friends and myself facing jail time cuz we followed this guys lead and never questioned it.”

Expect to see more such cases.

The pro-Israel propaganda machine is beginning to sputter

Nowhere is the propaganda system in the US on full display than when it covers the way that Israel treats the Palestinians. There is a full-throated attempt to minimize the war crimes of Israel and maximize the threats posed by Hamas.

As an example, on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, their analyst Domenico Montenaro said that the US has been viewed as a ‘neutral third party’ in the conflict until Tump moved more in in favor of Israel. The idea that the US has been a neutral party is laughable on its face, a delusion that exists only in the minds of establishment journalists who are afraid of running afoul of the Israel lobby in the US that is swift to attack those who step outside the bounds of allowed discourse. The reality is that the US has for decades been joined at the hip to Israel, providing support and cover for its apartheid and ethnic-cleansing policies.
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The US political and media establishment lies in defense of Israel

Chris Hedges writes that pretty much everything that emanates from Washington and Tel Aviv and the mainstream media about the situation in Gaza is a lie, with only a few reports and analyses presenting anything remotely close to the truth.

Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie. Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime. 
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The brutality of chain gangs

Even though I am aware of the utterly barbaric way that prisoners are treated in the US incarceration system, I keep coming across new things that can still shock me. Take this account by Winfred Rembert who was born in 1945 and died this past May, about his experience in a chain gang, where the prisoners do very hard labor in public areas, often alongside roads.

As a teen-ager, he got involved in the civil-rights movement and was arrested in the aftermath of a demonstration. He later broke out of jail, survived a near-lynching, and spent seven years in prison, where he was forced to labor on chain gangs.

He was released in 1974 and took up painting, depicting in stark ways his memories of the horrors he endured. Here he describes one example.
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The New Yorker article on UFOs

The New Yorker has a reputation for being a serious magazine. It is famed for its rigorous fact-checking of its pieces. So when I came across an article in the May 10, 2021 issue titled How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously, I took the article seriously. My attitude towards UFOs is, I suspect, similar to that of many, deep skepticism about the claims that extra-terrestrials have visited us but that the issue is not worth the effort to look into and debunk each and every claim closely.
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Caitlyn Jenner is not ready for prime time

There is currently a recall election for the governor of California and according to the way the system works, there are two things to vote on on the same ballot: Whether to recall the current incumbent Gavin Newsom and, if that vote garners 50% + 1 of the vote, then who should replace him among all the people vying for the position. As I have written before, this is a strange system in that in a highly contested race, it is possible for the incumbent to be voted out by getting just shy of the 50% mark and be replaced by someone with a much smaller fraction of the vote.
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Using non-human animals as slurs

Some people (and I include myself) sometimes describe bad behavior as animal-like, even though many of us treat our pets as members of the family. Commenters are quick to point out that this comparison is often a slander on non-human animals because much of the depraved behavior that humans can indulge in are not found among them. So how did this tendency arise? David Egan writes that the way we use non-human animals as slurs in our language reveals quite a lot about us, and what it reveals is zoophobia, defined as fear or antipathy towards non-human animals.
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