I Bow to Rome, Not Washington

Today is a milestone in my life.  After failing to get confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church, the church of my birth, when I was supposed to back when I was thirteen, I finally received the Holy Spirit and entered into fellowship with my fellow parishioners.

How did I miss getting confirmed when I was a kid?  Let's just say that, despite the traditions of Catholic confirmations, Jewish mitzvahs, and Mormon lay priesthood indoctrinations at the age of thirteen, that age, according to my own personal experience, is an extremely inappropriate age for the clergy to confer adult status on any child. 

I chose as my confirmation name Linus, after the saint to became the first successor to the Apostle St. Peter after the apostle was martyred via inverted crucifixion.   As I explained on my Facebook timeline, where I first announced the good news, Peter had established his ministry in Rome at the direction of Jesus and, with the followers he attracted, built the foundation for the Roman Catholic Church as we know it today. When Peter was martyred, Linus assumed leadership of Rome’s Christians and led the new church under difficult circumstances, and Linus himself was martyred after twelve years as the bishop of Rome. Linus was succeeded by Anacletus, and with that succession, the Holy See was firmly in place, thanks in no small part in Linus’s work as the bishop of Rome. Saint Linus represents starting from the beginning. I only returned to the Church recently and I have been confirmed 47 years late, so this is very much for me a beginning.

Unfortunately, for me and my fellow initiated Catholics in my parish, today was also the day of Rededicate 250, a Christian jubilee of recommitting These States to Jesus Christ, or at least the stern, stoic, authoritarian Jesus Christ that MAGA evangelical Christians revere unreservedly.  In addition to the usual fundamentalist charlatans and snake-oil salesmen who make up the MAGA Christian nationalist clergy, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who served his long-awaited last day as archbishop of New York three months ago, also officiated.  It was mostly a gathering of misanthropic clerics who want Americans to live a life of Christian fundamentalist self-repression and control through the federal government - and oh yes, ostracize Jews and Muslims.  And, despite the presence of Cardinal Dolan and MAGA Bishop Robert Barron, Catholics, whom MAGA Christian leaders like Pete Hegseth's pastor regard as enemies of the state.  Because, apparently we bow to a Roman dictator.

That's pretty rich from Christian nationalist Trump supporters who bow to a golden calf. 

Or should I say a golden jackass?

This monstrosity was unveiled recently at Trump's Doral golf club outside Miami.  It was dedicated by one of Trump's "spiritual advisors."  

I have a feeling that mime artists who make a living as living statues of gold will need to pick another color.

How about white?  Trump likes that!

Count me out.  By getting confirmed, I rededicated myself to a church with beautiful and enduring traditions and principles, the church of Rome, the church of my family.  I have also turned away from the land of my birth.  I am turning away from the American ideals that have propped up this nation and the reality of the U.S. as it is today, der Amerikanisches Reich.  I will direct my attention to the Vatican, and as always, I will commit myself to following the Holy Father in Rome - not the Antichrist in Washington.

And don't be surprised if the Church identifies the United States as an oppressor that must be broken up into smaller entities.   

Blood On the Rise is Following Us

This is how liberty dies . . . 

. . . with the use of force.

Trump just federalized the California state National Guard unit and sicced the troops on protesters demonstrating against ICE removing immigrants from various locations in Los Angeles.  Innocent bystanders have been arrested along with demonstrators.

Suddenly, going to the No Kings Day protests coinciding with the big Army parade in Washington doesn't seem like a good idea.  

But it is.  And anyone who can go should.  Anyone who can't go should be there in spirit at least.  Because if Los Angeles - the scheduled sight of the 2028 Olympics (it may be time for my to write another open letter to my Olympic heartthrob Janet Evans!)  - isn't safe, what locale is?

If we're not in an Amerikanisches Reich yet, we're certainly close.

When the Reichstag moment does come, prepare for martial law and curfews.  Prepare for suspension of the Bill of Rights and for executions of dissenters.

Prepare for sham elections in which Democrats - if they're not completely banned - may be allowed to field candidates but will lose in a rigged system.  Prepare for women's rights to be obliterated, and prepare for gays to wear pink triangles and for Muslims to wear yellow crescents in public.

Prepare for all art, music, cinema and books critical of the leader - or even any classic pop music, movies or literature or classical music that the leader has a problem with - to be banned as non-patriotism-promoting.

Prepare, in other words, for the entire country to become Utah.

Prepare also for separatist and secessionist movements to emerge.  The Constitution clearly means nothing anymore.  It's time to dissolve the Union and break the U.S. up into separate countries.  As soon as we get the chance. 

The OTHER Unholy Trinity

The three riders of the apocalypse in the regime of Der Amerikanischer Führer are in place.  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is Secretary of Health and Human Services . . . 

Tulsi Gabbard is now Director of National Intelligence . . .

. . . and, as of today, February 20, 2025, Kashyap Patel is director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Helter skelter.

So, if you hope to survive Trump, good luck.  Because of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., you may have to deal with a disease that makes COVID look like the common cold.  If you survive that, Tulsi Gabbard may let a Russian operative poison you for having insulted Putin when Biden was President, or maybe there'll be a contract on your life for insulting Elon Musk that escapes her watch.  And if you end having to deal with Patel . . .

. . . you'll wish you'd been done in by one of the other threats.

They're coming down fast . . . yes, they are . . . yes, they are.

(Correction:  The above photo is not of Kashyap Patel.  The above photo is of James David Vance.  I regret the error.)

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I GOT BLISTERS ON MY FINGERS!

Crash On the Ground

When Joe Biden became President four years ago, it looked like the United States was finally on the way to becoming a decent country like most of our contemporaries in the industrialized world.  He launched an ambitious agenda to spend money on public works and amenities, was able to bring down the costs of insulin and other prescription drugs, reinvigorated existing social programs and sought to introduce new ones (though "Build Back Better" didn't quite work out), set out to get the U.S. to take the lead in combatting climate change, invested in manufacturing jobs, recognized the contributions of Americans of African, Latin American, Asian, and Oceanian origin, expanded NATO, stood firm with Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders, and put the United States on a course to become a social democracy like Canada and the nations of western Europe.

Then Donald Trump came back and reversed all of that in one week.  And then some.

When I say that I don't have to leave America because America left me, this is what I'm talking about.  When the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union ended with it, the United States in the early 1990s had prevailed in the struggle against communism at a great cost - the money, blood and treasure spent in proxy wars, military buildups,  sophisticated weapons systems, and the national security state left our cities in ruins, our health care system a byzantine mess, our educational system in a shambles,  and our public amenities in tatters.  In 1992 Democrat Bill Clinton ran for President on change and "putting people first," and he came into office with many Americans like myself expecting a change for the better.  Then came Newt Gingrich and the scuttling of ambitious policies like health care reform.  Whatever progress Clinton did make in his Presidency was overturned by George Walker Bush.  Then in 2008, our first black President - Barack Obama - was elected on a promise of hope and change, getting health care reform through but not quite what many admirers of the British, French and Canadian health care system wanted, but there was still hope for the future.  For once we had a President who was talking about high-speed rail. Then came the Tea Party came into power, and after programs like high-speed rail were canceled in three out of four states planning for it, Obama never mentioned it again.  And when he tried to get gun control legislation passed in the wake of the 2012 Newtown massacre in Connecticut - certainly a watershed moment like that would have led to sensible gun laws - all his efforts proved was how powerful gun culture in this country really is.

Whatever progress Obama did make in his Presidency was overturned by Donald Trump, except for the Affordable Care Act, and when Trump's reign degenerated into a pandemic and an insurrection, it seemed as if America had sunk as low as it possibly could have.

I began to grow angry and misanthropic toward my country, these United States, at about the same time Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House and launched his Contract On America, and not enough of my fellow Americans gave a twit, and those that did, like a then-unknown democratic-socialist independent congressman named Bernie Sanders, were drowned out.  That antipathy only grew over time, and I increasingly wanted to leave America.   The Republican Party became dead-set against progress.  And I'd long since realized that the "new" Democratic Party was no longer the party of the common people, and that certainly became apparent when the 2016 presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley were undermined by the party's national committee, but Biden's 2020 campaign and his old-school New Deal agenda gave me hope.  And I definitely felt that we were on our way to a better place once he was sworn in.

It now turns out that the Democratic Party was hardly on the same page as President Biden, who saw "centrist" Democratic senators undermining him at every turn, and Sanders was clearly his closest ally.  It also turns out that Democratic bigwigs - including Obama - moved behind the scenes to defeat Sanders when he appeared to be on the verge of surging to the 2020 Democratic nomination and get other Democratic presidential contenders to drop out to help Biden.  It's not that Sanders would have been better for the working man than Biden, although most progressives believe that maxim, that makes this revelation so offensive.  It's that Democratic leaders would once again undermine and override the will of its own rank-and-file voters like they did in 2016.  Sanders, who made the mistake of not actually becoming a Democrat, was (and remains) a threat to the party's reliance on donations from the same corporate interests that have made America a country not worth living in so much.

The Democrats and Republicans became two pro-business parties divided on the issue of women's rights.  As Michael Moore, who is a knee-jerk progressive who thinks he's the smartest person in America - and sometimes he is - said in one of the times he was he smartest person in America, Democrats say one thing ("Save the planet!  Bullet trains for Amtrak!") and do another - hold hands with the bastards who make America a terrible place to live.  Republicans simply gave those same bastards offices in the West Wing.          

And that feeling I had back in 2021, that we had hit bedrock and were on our way to a better place?  Yes . . . it felt like we were finally taking off to become a more perfect Union.  Trump's return to office with a plurality of the popular vote meant that we crashed right after takeoff.  

And when Trump won, that's when America left me. 

War's over, folks.  MAGA dropped the big one. 😭

The Enemy From Within?

People thought I was being hysterical and hyperbolic when I kept saying that, if Trump got re-elected President, he would make dissent a capital crime.  He demonstrated that quite clearly in an interview he gave to the insufferable Maria Bartiromo on Fox News.

"I always say, we have two enemies," Trump said to Bartiromo.  "We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries."

Trump added that he didn''t think the aftermath of the election would produce any violence , as President Biden recently warned, at least not from the side that votes for him.  Rather, the violence would come from his . . . opponents.

 "I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within . . ..  We have some very bad people we have some sick people, radical left lunatics." he said, adding that any unrest caused by anti-Trump demonstrators "should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary by the military, because they can’t let that happen."

In other words, Trump will arrest and subdue anyone who expresses opposition to him.

And he will likely, as I keep saying, make dissent a capital crime.

With three weeks to go in this presidential election campaign, the pro-democracy coalition fighting Trump must hang together in 2024 . . .

. . . or they will most assuredly hang separately in 2025! 😱

Take Off to the Great White North

I have an announcement to make.

Despite President Biden's insistence that he's staying in the presidential campaign to defeat Donald Trump, and despite the backing he has from rank-and-file Democrats and the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, establishment Democrats, including my own congresswoman, continue pressure on him to withdraw from the campaign.  His subsequent demonstrations of political viability in a press conference and on the campaign trail apparently, have satisfied no one among the Democratic elites and the mainstream media.  This only weakens efforts to stop Donald Trump from retaking power and to stop the Heritage Foundation's National Socialist-resonant Project 2025 from becoming the law of the land.  It looks like Trump will make history not only by becoming the first Republican President to serve two nonconsecutive terms and becoming the first convicted felon to hold the office, but by becoming the U.S.'s first dictator with absolute rule over the people.

As I have bashed Trump regularly on this blog, and as Trump promises retribution against his opponents, I literally fear for my life.  I have long believed and continue to believe that Trump will make dissent and vocalized opposition to his administration a capital offense.  I also believe that Trump acolyte Kash Patel, who is likely to hold an intelligence post in the next Trump term if not the post of CIA director itself, will likely collect and organize data of "enemies of the state" among the general populace with a thorough examination of the servers of blogging platforms - so any anti-Trump blogs will be found even if their founders delete them before January 20, 2025.  I also expect the method of capital punishment of anti-Trump citizens to be brutal, most likely hanging, though Trump has also suggested the use of guillotines.  And even if the Trump regime does not punish citizen dissenters who voice their objections with the death penalty for sedition, why would I want to live in an America governed under the auspices of Project 2025?

Therefore . . . if Trump is returned to power on Election Day, I plan to move to Canada before Inauguration Day.  

I want to leave before Trump takes power, as I also suspect that Stephen Miller, Trump's point man on border security - and the closest thing America has to Heinrich Himmler these days - will close the border not just to those who want to get in but to those who want to get out . . . not just to preserve human capital but to avoid the humiliation of anyone leaving a country Trump claim to have restored greatness to.  I already covered that back in January.

I have nothing to lose.  I live on my own now.  Don't ask me how I became able to do that, you don't need to know.  But as I now live on my own, I'm unfettered.  I can go wherever I want.  I do have a life where I live now, but it's not enough of a life to keep me here.  I have virtually no relatives left.  I have a few friends, but they're not always available when I want to see them.  In fact, they're rarely available.  And some of my "friends," it turns out, don't merit the term.  Case in point:  I was at a social event this past spring and I saw a woman I had been platonically involved with for quite some time, but I hadn't seen her in person since before the pandemic hit.  Anyway, I went up to her after so long and said hello to her, and she shook my hand and said it was nice to see me - she acted as if I'd lent her money or something.  With "friends" like that . . . Good grief, I have more intimate friendships with people on social media than most people I know live and in person.  So I don't feel anything holding me back from leaving the country.  Another friend of mine who had more reason to stay here already did.   

So why Canada?  First of all, proximity.  It's a quick drive up Interstate 87 to the border, beyond which lies Montreal.  A drive to Toronto via Interstates 80 and 380 and Interstate 81 with a connection to the Macdonald-Cartier Freeway is also doable, and Toronto is the city I'm looking at the most.  Second, convenience.  Even if I chose to take a mere fraction of my worldly possessions with me, getting them moved across the ocean is far more cumbersome than getting them moved across an imaginary line on the ground or the St. Lawrence River.  Third, I have my kittens to think about.  I Don't know how I can, or if it's even possible to, transport domestic animals to a European country.  And I am not planning to have my kittens rehomed or returned to the cat-fostering service I adopted them from.  Whether it's a household with one person or a household with two adults and 2.6 children, household pets are part of the family, and I will not abandon my kittens Chico and Claudia.  I have a lifetime commitment to my feline pals - their lifetimes. 

There are other reasons I want to move to Canada.  Single-payer health insurance is a plus, and I certainly wouldn't mind renouncing my American citizenship with the knowledge that Trump wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act.  I also get to keep my Sirius XM subscription, as I consider satellite radio to be a necessity.  I can count all of the European countries that have sat on zero fingers - and I can tell you after having listened to enough British and Irish music radio that European terrestrial radio isn't much better than American terrestrial radio.  And, there are other, more seemingly trivial reasons that I won't discuss here.  But the relative ease of escaping to north of the border compared to escaping to Europe, Australia or New Zealand is a big reason in and of itself.       

So that's it.  I've made my decision.  And I plan to see my lawyer to draw up a contingency plan in the very likely event that Trump is back in power six months and change from today.  Of course I will vote for Biden in November, but if Trump gets in, I'm getting out.  It's that simple.

And I would advise anyone who stands a better and graver chance of being incarcerated or executed for sedition in und Amerikanische Reich than I do to make similar plans.  That would include members of the Biden administration . . . and President Biden himself.