Category: Trump and Trump-hatred

A California public school processes today’s grief in a neutral manner

by philg

For parents and students in the East Bay (of San Francisco, California), a reminder from a school bureaucrat, who has stayed entirely “neutral”, to “to follow the example set by Presidents Biden and Obama” (for better readability, not in quote style):

DUSD Community,

In the United States, we have always had a peaceful transition of power between presidents, except for January 6, 2021. President Biden and his administration have demonstrated a high level of professionalism during this transition, just as former President Obama did for President-Elect Donald Trump and each president prior.

The 2024 Presidential election was, for the second time, an extremely divisive election for our country. This election has itself become a point of protest for women, Muslim and Jewish communities, immigrants, and people who care about education, Social Security, Medicare, and a whole list of other issues. There has been a great deal of media coverage regarding the Presidential Inauguration that will take place Monday, January 20, in Washington, D.C.

As educators, we have the incredible opportunity to use the presidential election and the second Trump Inauguration as learning opportunities to help promote social justice [Ed: with taxpayer funds] in a way that actively engages our students. The activities, discussions, and student production that we choose to plan around the inauguration are opportunities to further develop the skills and competencies that we are developing in our Graduate Profile. We need to provide a safe environment for our students during the Presidential Inauguration. I encourage students and staff to reach out to each other and work together on shared, peaceful activities at our school sites. Listening to the Inauguration is an appropriate activity, along with providing the space for students to process Trump’s presidential address. Providing these types of activities is a critical responsibility and opportunity for our educational institutions.

Regardless of the activity, we will stay neutral, share the facts, allow for both sides of an issue to be shared, and create a safe place in our classrooms and at our school sites for discussion to take place. We need to follow the example set by Presidents Biden and Obama and engage in activities that support the peaceful transition of power between Presidents.

In addition, I want to reinforce the importance of maintaining the privacy rights of our students. Under FERPA laws and laws that govern the State of California, our schools will not provide any private student information to ICE (Immigrants and Customs Enforcement) without a formal arrest warrant. Our schools must remain safe and secure for all who attend and work in DUSD.

I thank you in advance for staying in school, remaining respectful, and engaging in meaningful dialogue around the upcoming Presidential Inauguration on Monday, January 20, 2025.

Sincerely,

Chris D. Funk
Superintendent
Dublin Unified School District

In other news, I was just in Berkeley, California, a simple 1.5-hour BART ride from Dublin! The laundry detergent is locked up at Target (along with almost everything you’d find at CVS):

Let’s stroll out of Target, past a few outdoor maskers, and into Pegasus Books, which features a permanent panhandler by the front door. Inside we find empty CD cases for fear that someone without a streaming account will steal the precious CDs themselves:

The Followers of Science (TM) are heavy readers of books about witchcraft:

What if a passion for Hamas rule and Socialism could be combined into a single book?

Some miscellaneous titles:

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Mark Zuckerberg’s foxhole conversion to free speech

by philg

American democracy ends in five minutes. We’ll be weeping not only for the end of Science-guided rule but also because of Climate Change since it was forecast to be the coldest Inauguration Day in 40 years.

Let’s try to push through our shared tears to think about Mark Zuckerberg and his foxhole conversion to free speech. From University of Colorado:

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the company would fire its fact-checkers and instead rely on its users, with the help of AI, to police Facebook and Instagram for false or misleading posts. The company will also move its content moderation team from California to Texas, lift restrictions designed to protect immigrants and LGBTQ people from hate speech and “dial back” penalties for rule-breakers.

Nathan Schneider, assistant professor of media studies, sees it as a wake-up call to users that it may be time to take back some control over social media platforms.

Rightly, many people are terrified. The company has been quite explicit that it is committed to tolerating and normalizing the discourse of the far right, which includes denying the dignity of people in many communities, particularly queer folks. This move reflects the kind of naked power that this company has always been able to exert over speech, and its ability to determine what the bounds of acceptable speech in society are. As the political winds shift, the company appears to be embracing that shift across its networks. We should be asking ourselves whether we can continue to place so much trust in a company that can abruptly remove protections in this way.

There is a solution, fortunately, according to the giant brains of academia:

What’s hopeful to me is a growing movement of people embracing other kinds of social networks like Mastodon and Bluesky. … You could look at an example like Wikipedia – a widely trusted utility on the internet that is mission-driven and organized as a nonprofit.

Here are Zuck’s plans for today (AP):

Compare to 2020: “Facebook censors The Post to help Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign” (nobody could suggest that people had been bribing then-VP Joe Biden via Hunter Biden or amplify the misinformation that the Hunter Biden laptop was somehow genuine).

A literal-minded friend in a chat group explained the motivation for Zuck’s elimination of (Democrat) fact-checkers just as the White House was turning over to Republican rule:

He has principles

An immigrant from Eastern Europe in the same group:

when did he have principles, before biden or now?

(My main question about Facebook is how it can be so jammed with pig butchers compared to the purported unregulated hellscape of Twitter. Maybe the answer is that Facebook is explicitly about friendship and therefore it makes sense to try to befriend someone on Facebook?)

Related:

(the image, full size below, is interesting because it shows Kamala Harris as a key figure in the U.S. civil rights movement, which started in 1954 (Wikipedia) despite her parents having migrated to the U.S. in 1958 and 1961)

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Final week for gay marriage

by philg

According to Democrats, this is the final week for same-sex marriage in the United States.

NBC, about 6 weeks ago:

I wonder if anyone told the happy couples in the article that “have children” is a process that, with the best current technology, can be rushed only to a certain extent.

Here’s a choice portion of the article:

They are one of many gay couples in recent weeks who are rushing to get married, start fertility treatments and take other measures out of fear that some of their rights might be rescinded during a second Trump administration.

The Party of Science believes that there is an effective “fertility treatment” for when Ben and Adam are trying to have a baby together?

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Trump tortures our local billionaire Democrats

by philg

In case you missed this story of semi-local interest to us (we’re a 25-minute drive from Donald Trump’s house without traffic)… “Palm Beach, a Democratic Pocket in Florida, Becomes MAGA Central” (WSJ):

This discreet enclave of about 10,000 full-time residents is part of an area that has long tilted blue. While Florida went heavily for Trump on Election Day, voters in Palm Beach County slightly backed the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris. But with Trump spending so much time in the area, the town of Palm Beach is emerging as the biggest playground for the incoming administration and luminaries of the MAGA movement.

A popular hotel now houses foreign dignitaries, federal officials and various others vying for government jobs, all meeting with Trump during the frenetic transition period. Traffic is so bad on the island of Palm Beach that longtime residents said they have to drive off on one of three bridges and then drive back on another to avoid bumper-to-bumper tie-ups. And Secret Service agents at the area’s chicest restaurants can outnumber the waitstaff.

Trump spent much of his first term as president at Mar-a-Lago, his 17-acre oceanfront compound and private club that he referred to as his winter White House. He entertained heads of state and based much of his campaign and fundraising efforts there. He stayed nearly 150 days at the compound during his first term.

In some ways, residents said, it now feels like a replay of Season One of the Trump presidency. But this time around, he is likely to spend more time at Mar-a-Lago, said a number of his close associates. Some of the wealthiest members of his circle are thinking about buying homes there.

His transition operation now resides within the gilded walls of his estate, where he interviews candidates for cabinet and staff roles. Mar-a-Lago and nearby communities are poised to become the country’s new center of political gravity.

Many of Palm Beach’s old guard aren’t pleased. Because the road in front of Mar-a-Lago is now closed, traffic has never been worse on the island. What would usually take a couple of minutes to drive can now delay residents by half an hour.

Is it time to revive my idea for a rule that whoever is president has to stay in the White House for four years because the modern security state means that the president’s presence anywhere else is too disruptive for peasants?

Should we check back in a year to see what happens to house prices near Mar-a-Lago? Right now the median (or average?) price of a single-family house in Palm Beach is about $11.3 million (Zillow), a considerable bump compared to pre-coronapanic thanks to Florida Realtor of the Year 2020 and 2021 Andrew Cuomo.

The 17-acre National Historic Landmark Mar-a-Lago itself, of course, was valued at $18 million by the entirely apolitical New York justice system.

Back in 2017, the Boston Globe said that a rising sea would soon take back Mar-a-Lago and the rest of Palm Beach (a barrier island about 7′ above sea level, not to be confused with the city of West Palm Beach, which is protected by this barrier). Given a rational market, therefore, property values should be on a downward trend!

Circling back to Donald Trump… the guy is old and he is comfortable at Mar-a-Lago. Federal employees with desk jobs don’t need to show up to work. Why does Trump need to work from the White House at all? Why not let J.D. Vance handle any demanding in-person tasks in D.C. and around the world? If someone wants something from the U.S. president in 2025-2028, he/she/ze/they can Gulfstream it to PBI, pay whatever ramp fee is demanded, and hop an Uber Black to Mar-a-Lago. What about the summer when, you might argue, Palm Beach isn’t at its best. Neither is D.C.! I’m not aware of Trump owning anything north of metropolitan New York City, but maybe he could, jointly with Bernie Sanders, set up a Peace and Reconciliation summer estate in Burlington, Vermont. Or be boring and use his Bedford, NY mansion (Wikipedia).

Circling back to our MacArthur Foundation New Urbanism development here in Jupiter, Florida… I wonder whether the presence of the U.S. president nearby will be a positive or a negative. I’m guessing that it will be a short-term negative due to security-related disruptions on those rare occasions when we do want to go to West Palm Beach and rarer occasions when we interact with the elites on Palm Beach itself. But perhaps the long-term consequences will be positive. Every rich person who moves to Palm Beach is a potential donor to a local or county-wide cultural institution. Trump doesn’t seem like a pork barrel politician so I’m not expecting a major direct federal investment.

Speaking of Jupiter, here’s a place on the good side of the railroad tracks, recently sold for $34 million:

The house was built in 2007, which means the new owner will get to do a lot of work on various systems, e.g., the roof, over the next 10-15 years!

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The fascist dictatorship looms, but Democrats expect to overpower it in 2026

by philg

Friends on Facebook who have posted for 6-9 months about how the election of Trump v2.0 would mean the end of American democracy are now posting about how they expect to retake the U.S. in 2026 and 2028 via selecting candidates who aren’t as brain dead as Biden-Harris-Walz.

The mind of the typical Democrat seems to be summed up in this tweet from Kerry Kennedy, sibling of the traitor RFK, Jr.:

Yesterday was a bad day for our country, for our democracy, for our economy, for our party, for our family, and for ourselves. I’ve lived through 15 presidential elections, and this is not different because it is amplified or more extreme, but because it is fundamentally different. We are facing an incoming president and administration that have developed multiple, detailed plans for a fascist takeover of every department of the federal government. … But I’ve felt beat down before. And despite all of this, I’m confident we will survive. … We have two years until midterms, when we can make a comeback.

Donald Trump will be a dictator. As commander of the U.S. military, the FBI, etc. he will have practical powers to implement a police state that previous dictators worldwide could never have dreamed of. Yet at the same time, there is no doubt that free and fair elections will be held in 2026 and 2028 during which time Democrats can regain power.

(Separately, Democrats tell us that intelligence, conscientiousness, and criminality aren’t heritable. Thus, there is no reason to expect children of the unsuccessful to be unsuccessful themselves and any lack of success must be attributed to racism, xenophobia, etc. At the same time, political wisdom is heritable, which is why we should listen to advice from children of famous Democrats.)

Speaking of the Democrat mind, let’s check out what their thought leaders have had to say. AOC in 2021 wanted to “end minority rule … end the filibuster, expand the court” to “protect our democracy”:

Here’s one from Ilhan Omar in which she would “save our democracy” by abolishing the filibuster and also making sure that whoever won the popular vote would be the new dictator:

CNN on the popular vote:

Rashida Tlaib agreed that the minority party in the Senate should be stripped of all power and whoever happens to be in the White House should appoint 4,8,12, or however many more additional Supreme Court Justices are necessary for Justice:

Will these wise females, all of whom were wisely reelected by their constituents, spend 2025 working toward expanding the Supreme Court and abolishing the filibuster?

How about the “thought followers”, i.e., my friends in the Northeast and California who do and think whatever the New York Times tells them (e.g., “Biden is not senile”; “be enthusiastic for Kamala now”). One Trump alarmist said that the peasants should now “organize” (how many dictatorships have been overturned by a peasant rebellion?). A Manhattan-based doomsayer:

Which brings us to 2016, the last time I felt the way I feel this morning. Nearly all the polls predicted Hillary Clinton would beat Trump to become the first woman president. … hopefully the Democrats will analyze and learn something from this experience and put forth stronger candidates in the future.

The people who said that 2024 would be the last election in the U.S. if Trump were elected now say that they’ll offer “stronger candidates in the future”. Stronger candidates for what? Student council presidency? HOA board membership? The smartest people in America told us that there wouldn’t be additional elections for the House, Senate, or White House in the event of a Nakba (Trump victory).

Related:

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Are Democrats preparing evacuation flights for the faithful?

by philg

Four years ago I wondered why Democrat billionaires didn’t set up transportation for oppressed Americans: Why can’t Michael Bloomberg run a fleet of abortion buses?

This year we are informed that freedom dies on January 20, 2025 if the Nakba of a Trump victory occurs. Polls show that such a victory is at least possible. Here’s an Obama/Biden appointee and member of the “Harris for President National Finance Committee”:

The “Jewish community” (not to be confused with “Jews”) won’t be safe if Trump is elected (for which Doug Emhoff “slams” Trump; not to be confused with “slaps Trump”). Also remember that Andrew Weinstein’s presence on the Harris for President National Finance Committee disproves the right-wing conspiracy theory that rich Jews control American politics…

Here’s The Jewish Democratic Council of America, reminding us of the “direct threat”:

Abortion care can be obtained merely by hopping on a Bloomberg Bus to a state, such as Maskachusetts, where abortion care for pregnant people is available at all stages of a pregnant person’s pregnancy. But the Trump Death Camps (TM) won’t be escapable via an interstate trip because they will be established on a federal basis.

Are the elites who warn of dire consequences from a second Trump presidency making a contingency plan in case the unthinkable occurs? Shouldn’t they have aircraft charters and visas set up for Americans to escape between November 6 and January 19? Evacuating the millions (or tens of millions?) who are “directly” threatened by Trump might not be doable without some advance planning, particularly because most countries defend their borders and won’t allow the undocumented to merely stroll across. Israel is plainly out as a destination for Jewish Democrats due to the country’s refusal to surrender to the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), the Party of Allah (“Hezbollah”), UNRWA, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Finding a country that wants to receive oppressed Americans could be a significant challenge.

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Another call from Kamala Harris for Donald Trump to be assassinated

by philg

Here’s Kamala Harris, a few days ago, referencing Hitler and warning of “unchecked and extreme power” that could soon be wielded by the hated dictator Donald Trump:

(Notice that the person who calls everyone opposed to her a “Nazi” has chosen to wear a brown shirt.)

Is there a way to combine the above warning with Kamala Harris’s worrisome poll numbers in such a way that it isn’t a call for Donald Trump’s assassination? Americans are too stupid/deplorable to save themselves from Nouveau Hitler via the electoral process, according to some polls, which means it will fall to latter-day replacements for General Friedrich Olbricht, Major General Henning von Tresckow, General Carl-Heinrich Rudolf Wilhelm von Stülpnagel, and Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. Assuming that there is a Nakba on November 5, will it be Pete Buttigieg, fresh back at his/her/zir/their desk from maternity leave, who leaves a briefcase under a conference table at a Trump transition meeting? Who could suspect a smiling friendly Mayor Pete?

Separately, I encountered Donald Trump, fresh from a shift at McDonald’s, and a Secret Service agent, at a neighbor’s house last Saturday night:

Related:

A screen shot in case the above tweet is memory-holed:

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Why didn’t Donald Trump and Joe Rogan wear lav mics during the three-hour interview?

by philg

I don’t have the patience to watch a three-hour video, but I did glance at the Joe Rogan-Donald Trump discussion:

It looks uncomfortable to have to keep one’s head in the same position for three hours. Why aren’t both guys wearing lav mics so that they can move around, sit back comfortably, etc.?

Readers: If you watched the three-hour video what did you learn from it? (I wouldn’t trust a highlights reel due to the likelihood of either pro- or anti-Trump bias.)

Related… a 1992 appearance by Donald Trump on the David Letterman show. There seems to be a ceremonial mic on Letterman’s desk, but I’m assuming that both speakers are wearing lav mics and those are the primary sources for what we hear on the soundtrack. If the technology was good enough 32 years ago, why not today?

Here’s a Saturday Night Live broadcast in which both speakers are wearing lav mics:

Related:

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Donald Trump pinball machine design

by philg

Is it time for a Donald Trump pinball machine? The obvious backglass:

One mode would be to try to prevent Thomas Matthew Crooks from being able to bring his drone, rangefinder, rifle, ammo, ladder, etc. to the assassination site and, if those challenges weren’t met, stop him before he could fire off shots.

My favorite mode would be one in which Trump has to hit targets within the game to keep migrants from eating cats and dogs. The backglass would show something kind of like the following glass:

There would be an E. Jean Carroll mode in which the octogenarian has to be dodged in various environments (department store, courthouse, etc.).

There would be a Stormy Daniels mode, of course, with courtroom illustrations:

A “Build the Wall” mode would have the player try to make shots to extend and repair the Mexico–United States border wall while low-skill migrants attempted to stream across the border (the mode would be won if the player managed to get the wall extended to a full 1,954 milers).

I’m not sure how an Apprentice mode or real estate development mode would work.

An Election 2024 mode would surprise the player by starting off easy as a senile Joe Biden was trivially defeated only to be replaced by a Godzilla-sized Kamala Harris who could be killed only by first defeating more than 100 media allies who trumpeted her high levels of “joy” and inspired leadership.

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Donald Trump’s mental condition and Detroit’s overall condition

by philg

My direct exposure to politicians on TV is minimal because I don’t watch TV or cable TV news. From skimming print media, such as the New York Times, and statements from Kamala Harris, I had the impression that Donald Trump’s brain had gone at least “half Biden” and possibly “full Biden” (“Never go Full Biden” being the conventional wisdom). Recently I saw some video on X of a 30-minute block of the man whom we are informed is (1) senile, and simultaneously (2) the world’s biggest threat to democracy.

For comparison, look at this NBC Saturday Night Live skit from 20 years ago. Do the videos support the legacy media/Democrat point of view that Trump has suffered more than ordinary age-related decline?

Separately, Kamala Harris and the New York Times are now telling us to believe that Detroit is a center of “excellence”:

There is no “fact checking” from this hard-hitting independent investigative newspaper regarding the politician’s claim that Detroit is a magnet for excellent Americans.

What does the market say? Here’s a house for sale in Detroit right now on Zillow… for $4,250. This includes three lots, so the actual price of being surrounded by “excellence” is less than $1,500 per lot:

We were supposed to believe that Joe Biden was a paragon of mental acuity (NBC, Feb 2024, interviewing the Secretary of Open Borders: Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas offered a similar defense, calling Biden “sharp.” “The most difficult part about a meeting with President Biden is preparing for it because he is sharp, intensely probing and detail-oriented and focused,” Mayorkas told “Meet the Press.”). Now we’re supposed to believe that Donald Trump is feeble-minded (but also capable enough to burn down the Reichstag on January 21, 2025) and that Detroit is jammed with the “excellent”.

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