That golden escalator ...

Miller pledged his utter devotion to his boss at the winter White House. Jonathan Ernst/REUTERS

The defacto president speaks ...

In the video, which has been viewed more than 300,000 times, Trump, wearing a white “USA” baseball cap instead of his usual red MAGA cap, introduces Miller, 41, and hands him the mic.

“He’s a hot commodity,” Trump said, as a woman in the crowd called out, “God bless you.”

“It was the privilege of a lifetime to join President Trump all the way back in 2015 when he came down that golden escalator,” Miller began, wearing a gray suit and standing in front of a fountain at the “winter White House.”

Something wicked this way comes - Ray Bradbury

The Yellow Bastard/Sin City

The spawn of Goebbels applies

The spawn of Goebbels ...

 Illustration by Iris Legendre

The spawn of Goebbels is now Trump's chief of staff

On Friday, President Trump announced that Stephen Miller would replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff. This profile, published in July 2025, charted his path to power.

Stephen Miller was livid. It was a couple of months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, and Mr. Miller, a senior White House adviser, believed that the federal government was not doing nearly enough to stem the tide of illegal immigration into the United States. In a relentless round of meetings, phone calls and emails, he reached deep into the federal bureaucracy and, according to a former Department of Homeland Security official, berated mid- and low-level bureaucrats inside the department. To keep their jobs, he told the officials, they needed to enforce a new policy that punished the families of undocumented immigrants by forcibly separating parents from their children.

Mr. Miller’s demands, however, went unmet. That’s because he was issuing them back in 2017, and the homeland security secretary, John Kelly, had issued his own edict to D.H.S. officials: If Mr. Miller ordered them to do something, they were to refuse, unless Mr. Kelly, the only one of the two men who’d been confirmed by the U.S. Senate to run the department, agreed to the order.

Flash forward eight years, to this past May, when Mr. Miller, still livid and now the White House deputy chief of staff, paid a visit to the Washington headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he berated officials for not deporting nearly enough immigrants. He told the officials that rather than develop target lists of gang members and violent criminals, they should just go to Home Depots, where day laborers gather to be hired, or to 7-Eleven convenience stores and arrest the undocumented immigrants they find there.

This time, the officials did what Mr. Miller said. ICE greatly stepped up its enforcement operations, raiding restaurants, farms and work sites across the country, with arrests sometimes climbing to more than 2,000 a day. In early June, after an ICE raid in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles triggered protests, Mr. Trump deployed several thousand National Guard troops and Marines to the city, over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. 

Goebbels in 1933 - Bundesarchiv, Bild

The spawn of Goebbels applies.

The Midterms saved America. 

Divide & Conquer

 

Stephen Miller White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller in Washington, D.C., on July 22
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The spawn of Goebbels plan to turn America into a dictatorship is alive and well as  divide and conquer applies. Piss people off and get them riled up is exactly what Goebbels did in selling the big lie in turning Germany into a dictatorship in 1933 just as Miller is doing in 2025. Martial Law anyone?

Stephen Miller has a theory about this political moment. As President Trump expands his lawbreaking and dictatorial rule, the powerful MAGA disinformation apparatus—at Miller’s direction—is supercharging public attention to the debate over Trump’s conduct in a way that’s designed to deeply polarize it. That will force Americans to take a side in that standoff, Miller clearly believes, driving them to embrace authoritarian rule, though perhaps without understanding it in exactly those terms.

Yet there’s another dark aim here that’s worth appreciating. Miller is working overtime to polarize the public debate about Trump’s increasingly dictatorial abuses of power. And he’s doing so quite consciously. He relentlessly depicts Democrats as allied with a vast, inchoate class of violent criminals and insurrectionists operating in every shadow of American life. Miller seizes on every attention-grabbing moment he can to amplify the point, even if—and this part is crucial—it looks likely at first to reflect negatively on Trump.

Consider what happened after ICE raided an apartment building in Chicago last week. As Garrett Graff chronicles, media coverage was brutal: It depicted jackbooted federal agents busting down doors and dragging children, some naked, out into the dark streets.

Yet MAGA was undaunted. State-sponsored propaganda video depicted the affair as akin to an action movie featuring the thrilling spectacle of defeated-looking migrants in handcuffs. Miller went on Fox News to hail the operation as an enormous triumph.

Divide and conquer and selling the big lie lives. Goebbels would be proud.

Joseph Goebbels in 1933

Total Control ...

President Donald Trump greets Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr as he arrives to deliver an address to a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 2025, in Washington, DC. Win McNamee/Getty Images

Goebbels would love this play for power. Ask the supremes to give Trump & company the keys to the car controlling the monies of the nation, something the six toadies of said entity just might do given the track record of this sorry lot including John Roberts, the worst sc chief justice in history.

Joseph Goebbels in 1933

In a trio of cases, two currently pending before the Supreme Court and one that is likely to land on the justices’ doorstep as soon as Tuesday, President Donald Trump claims new powers that, if he prevails, would give him near-total control over all US fiscal and monetary policy.

The first is the ongoing litigation over Trump’s tariffs. The Court plans to hear two challenges to the tariffs, known as Trump v. V.O.S. Selections and Learning Resources v. Trump, in November.

At least 10 federal judges have concluded that Trump exceeded his authority when he imposed many of the ever-shifting import taxes that have defined his second term in office. And the amount of money at stake here is massive — Trump’s lawyers estimate that the tariffs “will reduce federal deficits by $4 trillion in the coming years.” Yale’s Budget Lab estimates that they will raise $2.4 trillion if they remain in effect for 2026-35.

Trump, in other words, claims the power to levy trillions of dollars worth of new taxes without seeking new legislation from Congress.

The second case is Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, which is currently pending on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other matters that the Court often decides without explanation. AIDS Vaccine involves “impoundment,” a president’s refusal to spend money that he is required to spend under a federal appropriations law.

The final case is Trump v. Cook, which is likely to reach the Supreme Court as soon as Tuesday. Cook involves Trump’s attempt to fire a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, in violation of a federal statute which only allows Fed governors to be fired “for cause.” Late on Monday, a federal appeals court denied Trump this power — although it did so over the dissent of a judge who previously worked in Trump’s White House.

Trump, in other words, seeks total control over US monetary policy. He seeks the power to cancel federal grants or even eliminate entire federal programs at will. And he claims the power to raise trillions of dollars in new taxes by his mere decree.

End game ...

If Trump gets what he wants from the Supreme Court, in other words, he could wind up with dictatorial authority over US fiscal and monetary policy — fully empowered to tax and spend without any meaningful checks from the other branches of government. And there is a real risk that this Court, which has a Republican supermajority that has shown extraordinary deference to the leader of their political party, will give Trump what he wants.

Next up, eliminate the mid terms. Betting pool, if Trump get what he wants, 90%.

Read Vox's extraordinary piece. It will warm the cockles of your heart just like it did mine.

Testing the waters ...

President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Thursday. Alex Brandon/AP/File

Well, the first step to killing the 2026 mid terms has begun with Trump getting rid of mail-in ballots and voting machines via executive order, thus attempting to eliminate the states' right to manage voting, something written into the Constitution with Amendment 10 on December 10, 1791.

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution,
nor prohibited by it to the States,
are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The gloves are off. Will Steven Miller, the spawn of Goebbels, Peter Thiele or The Heritage Foundation prevail or will the courts and the people? The very existence of America is at stake here without question.

President Donald Trump’s announcement Monday that he will sign an executive order aimed at getting rid of mail-in ballots and voting machines seems unlikely to amount to much. He doesn’t appear to have any such authority, and legal challenges would surely follow.

But it was instructive in one way: It made clear the president elected to lead the party of states’ rights has very little regard for states’ rights.

Indeed, he almost seems to disdain them.

It’s difficult to read his comments any other way, especially as he has spent much of his second term attempting to chip away at states’ rights — or at least, the ones he doesn’t like.

While selling his new pitch to get rid of mail-in voting and voting machines, Trump included this remarkable pair of sentences.

“Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

Trump has described the states as “agents” of the federal government before in this context, but without casting them as subservient to him personally.

This is a rather novel take on the Constitution, to put it mildly.

A man photographs himself depositing his ballot in an official ballot drop box in
Philadelphia on Oct. 27, 2020. Mark Makela/Getty Images

President Trump announced Monday on his social media site, Truth Social, that he plans to "lead a movement" to get rid of mail-in ballots and voting machines in the country ahead of next year's midterm elections.

Part of his plan includes signing an executive order that bars states from using mail ballots and potentially some voting machines. He said, without evidence, that voting machines are "highly inaccurate," as well as more expensive and less reliable than counting paper ballots.

"We're going to start with an executive order that's being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail in ballots because they're corrupt," Trump said during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House Monday. "And it's time that the Republicans get tough and stop it because the Democrats want it. It's the only way they can get elected."

WTF comes to mind here ... or, lets think about the chaos if Trump's MAGAs decide to take matters into their own hands regarding the voting machines part of the equation or possibly Agent Orange sending in the National Guard or Marines to take care of the "problem". A rather disquieting thought, right?

A civil war looms ...

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

Channeling Goebbels, Make a system look bad by crippling said system in order to eliminate it or privatize same as needs warrant, something DOGE is doing to Social Security by compromising one's ability to get or change SS settings according to one's needs. To your truly, outrage comes to mind as one, it's our money and two, compromising seniors not tech savvy or handicapped to get or control access to their money is cruel and indecent to the nth degree. 

In less than two weeks Social Security is set to enact major changes that threaten to upend services for many Americans, in order to fight fraud that amounts to a fraction of 1% of the agency's spending.

Why it matters: Social Security Administration veterans and powerful lobbying groups warn the changes, made at breakneck speed, may even foment more swindling.

The agency's internal documents caution the changes will effectively cut some Americans off from receiving benefits.

Former officials say the changes will overwhelm the agency's already stretched resources, with staffing at a record low and America's aging population rapidly rising.

Catch up quick: At a press conference on Tuesday, acting commissioner Lee Dudek said $100 million is lost each year to direct deposit fraud. To address it, the agency is curtailing its phone services.

Effective March 31, Americans won't be able to call and sign up for Social Security benefits, or make major changes to their accounts that require ID verification.

They either must use the internet or visit a field office, not an easy option for many of the people who most rely on Social Security.

By the numbers: $100 million in fraud represents about 0.00625% of the $1.6 trillion the government sends out each year in Social Security benefits.

A civil war looms ...

Update: A judge with guts puts a restraining order on DOGE regarding SS.

Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander in a scathing ruling accused DOGE of launching a “fishing expedition” at the Social Security agency and failing to provide any reason why it needed to access vast swaths of Americans’ personal and private data.

Hollander said the “defendants, with so called experts on the DOGE Team” never identify or articulate a reason why DOGE needs “unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems, thereby exposing personal, confidential, sensitive, and private information that millions of Americans entrusted to their government.”

Let's hope this is the beginning of the end of these bastards intent
on destroying a once great nation known as America.

A defining moment

It is uncertain whether President Trump has the authority to unilaterally halt funds

allocated by Congress.Credit...Ken Cedeno/Reuters

Channeling Goebbels comes to mind when reading the NYTimes piece titled White House Budget Office Orders Pause in All Federal Loans and Grants as the language used is an updated version of edicts voiced by Goebbels when disseminating Nazi policies to the great unwashed.

Joseph Goebbels in 1933

Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending “ wokeness” and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again. The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.

At this point in time, there's pushback but the question to ask is, how long thanks to the supremes granting immunity to the president for acts deemed to be official. 

The White House budget office has ordered a pause in grants, loans and other federal financial assistance, according to a memo sent to government agencies on Monday, potentially paralyzing a vast swath of programs and sowing confusion and alarm among the array of groups that depend on them.

The directive threatened to upend funds that course throughout the American economy: Hundreds of billions of dollars in grants to state, local and tribal governments. Disaster relief aid. Education and transportation funding. Loans to small businesses.

But the two-page memo from Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, left the scope of the pause, and much else, unclear.

Among the uncertainties was whether President Trump has the authority to unilaterally halt funds allocated by Congress. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said in a statement that the memo “blatantly disobeys the law.”

“Congress approved these investments and they are not optional, they are the law,” Mr. Schumer said, adding that “Donald Trump must direct his administration to reverse course immediately and the taxpayers’ money should be distributed to the people.”

Click here to read the memo. 

The splintering of America has begun.

Trump rescinded the order, for now.

The only constant in life is change - Heraclitus

2Step/R. Moran

Since the beginning of time, man’s reality distortion field rules as our tiny take on existence
is but a dust mote in god’s eye, something readily understood by Heraclitus, in 500 BC, stating 
The only constant in life is change. 

Heraclitus

Ignore this at your peril.

Here are the essential characteristics that define the success or failure of every endeavor.

500BC: The Art of War

The Art of War - Sun Tzu

Competency and situational awareness determine the success of any given initiative.

• “All warfare is based on deception.”
• “It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.”
• “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”
• “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle”
• “We are not fit to lead an army on the march unless we are familiar with the face of the country—its mountains and forests, its pitfalls and precipices, its marshes and swamps.”

Selling the Big Lie, aka Propaganda, drives advertising, politics and war.

The "art" of persuasion

 

1928, Edwin Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, writes Propaganda

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

1933, Joseph Goebbels, channeling Bernays, creates the gospel of Nazism

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”

“National Socialism is a religion.

 All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmodedreligious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion

Subjectivity rules based on the fact every person views reality in her own way.

The Rashomon effect: Tajōmaru the bandit and the wife of a samurai,
two characters who offer different perspectives of events in the film Rashomon

The word assume kills clear thinking as it remains forever the ass of you and me.

“Question everything.” - Einstein

Inventing ways to “explain” the unknowable never ceases to amaze.

Politics and the English Language - Orwell

Governments lie. - I. F. Stone

Misery loves company.

It’s all about the money.

News as entertainment medium

Tech never sleeps.

Zeno's Paradox

Tracy Ma

Yours truly has written copiously about quality and how its intimately connected to morals even if the quality attained in the creation of something is intended for a purpose not aligned with morality. Think Bernays and Goebbels to see why this take rings true. With this being said, an excellent NYTimes article titled Tyranny of 'the Best' describes Skinner box tendencies many people exhibit when obsessing about finding the best of any given thing while totally missing out on what it means to be truly alive. As one fairly cognizant about how data is packaged and dissiminated, I can honestly say I'm not a chipmunk spinning in a wheel driven to find out what 'the best' actually means, something most comforting while others continue their endless pursuit of what's 'the Best' is in a fashion similar to Zeno's Paradox where Achilles never wins.

Zeno of Elea (c. 450 BCE) is credited with creating several famous paradoxes, and perhaps the best known is the paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles. (Achilles was the great Greek hero of Homer’s The Iliad.) It has inspired many writers and thinkers through the ages, notably Lewis Carroll (see Carroll’s Paradox) and Douglas Hofstadter, both of whom wrote expository dialogues involving the Tortoise and Achilles.

Without 0, the Tortoise always wins. :)

Rankings, of course, are nothing new. Sight and Sound has put out a list of greatest films every 10 years since 1952. The U.S. News & World Report college rankings were first published in 1983. (It will probably surprise nobody that this year’s top three are Princeton, M.I.T. and Harvard.) Rolling Stone released its first list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” in 2003. Some version of the “hottest new restaurants of the year” could be found in local newspapers and magazines for decades — not to mention the best dentists, doctors, schools. These have always provoked conversation, backlash, letters to the editor.

Maybe. But to me, anyway, the experience of shopping for a hair dryer online feels less like being a pawn in a Matrix-esque mind-control operation and more like being trapped inside a box of plastic toys that have all been wound up so they constantly chatter and clatter against one another. The reality is I just want to spend as little time as possible in that box, while also hopefully buying something that won’t break the second time I use it. Best-of lists and rankings can seem like a simple solution to this problem.

There are a lot of areas where people don’t feel as if they have expertise, and ratings “get rid of that feeling of not being competent,” Rick Larrick, a professor of management and organization at Duke University, told me.

Zeno's Paradox rules as does the Skinner Box. :)

Skinner Box

Toons/rev XXX

Tech never sleeps.

Channeling Goebbels.

It's a tithe, right?

The Memory Hole circa 2023.

Misinterpreting The Art of War.

Speaking of Ron ...

 

https://twitter.com/JuddLegum

What's Hitler's last name? a blurb posted by yours truly, discusses the fact you can't fix stupid when it comes to the great unwashed electing monsters like Hitler thanks to Goebbels and the art of banning/burning books in 1933. Well, we now have a wannabe fascist in Ron DeSantis using the same Nazi playbook in order to "protect" kids from dangerous ideas in the year of our lord 2023.

To whit ...

On May 10, 1933 student groups at universities across Germany carried out a series of book burnings of works that the students and leading Nazi party members associated with an “un-German spirit.” Enthusiastic crowds witnessed the burning of books by Brecht, Einstein, Freud, Mann and Remarque, among many other well-known intellectuals, scientists and cultural figures, many of whom were Jewish. The largest of these book bonfires occurred in Berlin, where an estimated 40,000 people gathered to hear a speech by the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, in which he pronounced that “Jewish intellectualism is dead” and endorsed the students’ “right to clean up the debris of the past.”

Let me say it again. One of the very first things the Nazis did was burn books, by authors they considered dangerous, subversive, antithetical to their ideology. That’s the difference between us and them. Nobody’s burning books — LOL, “books” — by Tucker Carlson or who have you. They’re right there for everyone to read, as absurd as they are. Who does things like burn, ban, cover up books? It’s a pretty good sign you’re dealing with actual, real deal, bona fide fascists.

Benito Mussolini (left) and Adolf Hitler (right),

the leaders of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, respectively

What's Hitler's last name?

 

Credit: Giovanni Battista Recco, Annelisa Leinbach

Stupidity, an all too common human condition, not only can be humorous but also dangerous as the stupid can be led as seen by the rise of Hitler where the big lie was fed to the great unwashed with skill and precision by Joseph Goebbels, the propagandist elite who channeled Edwin Bernays in enabling the Nazis to attain power via the ballot box in 1933. 

Edwin Bernays                                Joseph Goebbels

When we know something or someone is evil, we can take steps to fight it. With stupidity, it is much more difficult. Dietrich Bonhoeffer argues that stupidity is worse than evil because stupidity can be manipulated and used by evil. He also argues that stupidity tends to go hand-in-hand with acquiring power — that is, being in power means we surrender our individual critical faculties.

To whit ...

There’s an internet adage that goes, “Debating an idiot is like trying to play chess with a pigeon — it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory.” It’s funny and astute. It’s also deeply, depressingly worrying. Although we’d never say so, we all have people in our lives we think of as a bit dim — not necessarily about everything, but certainly about some things.

Most of the time, we laugh this off. After all, stupidity can be pretty funny. When my friend asked a group of us recently what Hitler’s last name was, we laughed. When my brother learned only last month that reindeer are real animals — well, that’s funny. Good-natured ribbing about a person’s ignorance is an everyday part of life.

Stupidity, though, has its dark side. For theologian and philosopher Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the stupid person is often more dangerous than the evil one.

You can't fix stupid  - Trump or DeSantis 2024.

1/6/2021

The storming of the Capitol by white supremacists and other militant groups marked a dangerous shift in American politics and national stability.Photograph by Peter van Agtmael / Magnum 

Yours truly has written copiously about the dangers of Agent Orange and the millions of minions who continue to believe in this wretched excuse of a human being, partially because of being denied the "American Dream" and also of being part of something bigger than themselves. America's not exceptional but it is self delusional and yes, we have been betrayed by our so-called leaders but to lose this flawed democracy to an entity like The Donald or to a pretender lurking in the wings is something devoutly to be avoided. This country needs a complete reset and a drastic revise to the Constitution to fix errors the Founding Fathers have overlooked when trying to cobble together a government that 1, would keep the elites in power and 2, to address the shortcomings of a political system too tightly bound to religion and noblesse oblige as seen in long established monarchies like England, France and Spain. 

The edifice of American exceptionalism has always wobbled on a shoddy foundation of self-delusion, and yet most Americans have readily accepted the commonplace that the United States is the world’s oldest continuous democracy. That serene assertion has now collapsed.

On January 6, 2021, when white supremacists, militia members, and maga faithful took inspiration from the President and stormed the Capitol in order to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election, leaving legislators and the Vice-President essentially held hostage, we ceased to be a full democracy. Instead, we now inhabit a liminal status that scholars call “anocracy.” That is, for the first time in two hundred years, we are suspended between democracy and autocracy. And that sense of uncertainty radically heightens the likelihood of episodic bloodletting in America, and even the risk of civil war.

Using Goebbels as guide, think selling the big lie and employing the proper use of violence to destabilize the country. It worked for the Nazies in 1932/3, could it work in America in 2024?  One never knows, do one?

The US Capitol building reflected in a puddle in Washington DC January 4, 2021. 

Photograph by Mark Peterson