"By stepping down, as the conservative writer Erick Erickson observed, Wray has created a “legal obstacle to Trump trying to bypass the Senate confirmation process.”
Here’s why. According to the Vacancies Reform Act, if a vacancy occurs in a Senate-confirmed position, the president can temporarily replace that appointee (such as the F.B.I. director) only with a person who has already received Senate confirmation or with a person who’s served in a senior capacity in the agency (at the GS-15 pay scale) for at least 90 days in the year before the resignation." -- NY Times Dec 4. That's not Patel!
Nobody else seems to have picked up on this, including the progressive media.
FWIW, I got calmer after finding writers and podcasters who could replace the MSM which discredited itself during the year before the election. I find that davidrothkopf.substack.com, heathercoxrichardson.substack.com, Michael Podhorzer (www.weekendreading.net), timothysnyder.substack.com, and Anne Applebaum in her book, “Autocracy Inc.” and her podcasts for “The Atlantic” do a good job answering two main questions: “What is happening now?” and “What should we do now?” Reading them helps keep me from pointless rumination on one hand and hysteria on the other. Also, they address a question I habitually ask myself in stressful times: “What’s the worst that could happen right now.” For Americans, the answer is that Trump could transform our democracy into a cruel, predatory autocracy.
These writers don’t have all the answers and we have a lot to learn, but they have started educating us about how autocrats enact this transformation more gradually than in the past and use similar techniques like lying relentlessly, capturing the courts, creating a cadre of billionaire oligarchs, suppressing the Media, etc. So now I don’t erupt like Mt. Etna every time I hear a ridiculous, illogical lie. I can sometimes realize lying is a tactic and think of the need to counter every lie as, sort of, the equivalent of household drudgery; something that has to be done, but never seems to end. Like ironing.
Putting up an effective resistance is just easier and less fraught with emotion (in our better moments, anyway) if we know what’s happening, know what to expect, and have a plan.
Absolutely. All the jolts of comedy, farce, twit wits, deadpan, satire and headshots of quizzical dog expressions will help us through the maze of absurdity. “Guess you had to be there,” was brilliant.
David, I can't see as much humor as you can. Sigh. But for my part I will make a list of things T says and check them off as he accomplishes them. Ditto for all his appointees. I'll let you how it goes. I'll do the same with my personal life. In Berkeley our lives are intertwined with ecological goals, so my goal tomorrow is to empty vegetable and fruit clippings and the coffee grounds tomorrow am, hopefully before my husband grinds tomorrow's beans. Maybe I'll have a substack column! Try not to be too critical, and don't use red. I'm still recovering from my father correcting my reports in elementary school with red pencil. (He would hand back a few handwritten pages, covered in red pencil, saying, "you did a good job on this, I just made a few corrections...")
Great reminder that we are all only human and some dark stuff is pretty funny. Finding the funny is how we survive. If it wasn't for comedians, I wouldn't have had any strength remaining to fight back after the last abominable Trump administration.
Mussolini started this ruthless game with his Blackshirt thugs. He taught Hitler and Hitler created his Brownshirts. Hitler purged his own paramilitary Brownshirts during The Night of the Long Knives. He then took the Brownshirt remains and started the SS, a military machine with one focus. Yes, Trump will activate his thugs. Heads will roll. Count on it. https://hotbuttons.substack.com/p/the-playbook-is-known?r=3m1bs
Love the paragraph on the social media rage machine always stoking the flames, they are rewarded by the people who want to be manipulated into rage—again. This pattern can occur when folks are running from their complex feelings of grief.
Laughter is the best medicine, yet, when we are grieving it’s a new cognitive skill to hold space for the laughter and be in various stages of grief. We need to practice. Grief isn’t easy. If it’s a struggle day, that isn’t a failure. You simplify need practice.
Laughter will be a vital component of personal sanity for us all!
What is about to happen to us doesn't have a skip forward like a bad movie or reel. It should have one because it's just bad plot, and that's the joke.
"Psyops goes after experts, science, democratic institutions so to try to create psychological means to create uncertainty and distrust to ready people for authoritarian influence."
"Victims obey psyops to commit treason through ideology, money, or blackmail."
"Humans are emotional, social beings, so Information overload looks for authoritarian certainty to relieve stress. First of all, we have states, we have governors, I live in Massachusetts which has a gay governor."
"People will lay down only if they believe they have to lay down, and I'm saying, come on we're Americans, we grew up knowing what Russia was like, China was like, we don't want to be Russia, we don't want to be just put into prison like Navalny and murdered, or poisoned, or have a plane blow up, so let's get real and roll up our sleeves and say 'Not on my watch'."
"I want to give people hope and to say, "You are not alone." We're Americans, we believe in the constitution, we believe in human rights, we believe in the rule of law, and anyone who wants to take away the rule of law and just say 'screw it, I'm the king', should irk us enough to action."
"Learn how to regulate your emotional states. Understand breathing is the most powerful way to change your consciousness. If you're feeling anxious, long slow exhales will calm down your nervous system."
"You need to be human. Get hugs, get kisses, eat well, get 7 to 9 hours of sleep, most people are sleep deprived and it's one of the BITE Model criteria of brainwashing. If you are sleep deprived you are not thinking clearly."
"We need people who are going to support independent journalism by subscribing."
"Lets destigmatize being ex-cult. Intelligent people can be hacked, there is life after cult, normalize it and let's connect with people who are in MAGA world so there's an off-ramp, you can share their stories."
"A technique Hassan shares with his clients is to have them visualize the cult leader to be a foot tall in diapers, so they're looking down and they laugh. Think of Donald Trump as one foot tall in diapers whenever you think of Donald Trump. It's gonna have a very different emotional attachment."
You put into words what I’ve been thinking the past couple of days. I’m stressing myself out anticipating what might happen and I have to change my approach or I’m going to waste a lot of precious time and energy on stuff I can’t control. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
"By stepping down, as the conservative writer Erick Erickson observed, Wray has created a “legal obstacle to Trump trying to bypass the Senate confirmation process.”
Here’s why. According to the Vacancies Reform Act, if a vacancy occurs in a Senate-confirmed position, the president can temporarily replace that appointee (such as the F.B.I. director) only with a person who has already received Senate confirmation or with a person who’s served in a senior capacity in the agency (at the GS-15 pay scale) for at least 90 days in the year before the resignation." -- NY Times Dec 4. That's not Patel!
Nobody else seems to have picked up on this, including the progressive media.
Thank you. Well said.
FWIW, I got calmer after finding writers and podcasters who could replace the MSM which discredited itself during the year before the election. I find that davidrothkopf.substack.com, heathercoxrichardson.substack.com, Michael Podhorzer (www.weekendreading.net), timothysnyder.substack.com, and Anne Applebaum in her book, “Autocracy Inc.” and her podcasts for “The Atlantic” do a good job answering two main questions: “What is happening now?” and “What should we do now?” Reading them helps keep me from pointless rumination on one hand and hysteria on the other. Also, they address a question I habitually ask myself in stressful times: “What’s the worst that could happen right now.” For Americans, the answer is that Trump could transform our democracy into a cruel, predatory autocracy.
These writers don’t have all the answers and we have a lot to learn, but they have started educating us about how autocrats enact this transformation more gradually than in the past and use similar techniques like lying relentlessly, capturing the courts, creating a cadre of billionaire oligarchs, suppressing the Media, etc. So now I don’t erupt like Mt. Etna every time I hear a ridiculous, illogical lie. I can sometimes realize lying is a tactic and think of the need to counter every lie as, sort of, the equivalent of household drudgery; something that has to be done, but never seems to end. Like ironing.
Putting up an effective resistance is just easier and less fraught with emotion (in our better moments, anyway) if we know what’s happening, know what to expect, and have a plan.
There are 3 kinds of people.
Those that can count.
And, those that can’t.
Excellent advice, DR. On all points, I agree.
Absolutely. All the jolts of comedy, farce, twit wits, deadpan, satire and headshots of quizzical dog expressions will help us through the maze of absurdity. “Guess you had to be there,” was brilliant.
Oh, Dear, David. I thought Kimberly was a sort of hot piece of ass. Now she is supposed to be Pamela Harriman?
Perfect!!!!
David, I can't see as much humor as you can. Sigh. But for my part I will make a list of things T says and check them off as he accomplishes them. Ditto for all his appointees. I'll let you how it goes. I'll do the same with my personal life. In Berkeley our lives are intertwined with ecological goals, so my goal tomorrow is to empty vegetable and fruit clippings and the coffee grounds tomorrow am, hopefully before my husband grinds tomorrow's beans. Maybe I'll have a substack column! Try not to be too critical, and don't use red. I'm still recovering from my father correcting my reports in elementary school with red pencil. (He would hand back a few handwritten pages, covered in red pencil, saying, "you did a good job on this, I just made a few corrections...")
I think there’s a typo— you value people who “ get the joke “, I assume, but your writing says the opposite. At least to my reading.
Great reminder that we are all only human and some dark stuff is pretty funny. Finding the funny is how we survive. If it wasn't for comedians, I wouldn't have had any strength remaining to fight back after the last abominable Trump administration.
Mussolini started this ruthless game with his Blackshirt thugs. He taught Hitler and Hitler created his Brownshirts. Hitler purged his own paramilitary Brownshirts during The Night of the Long Knives. He then took the Brownshirt remains and started the SS, a military machine with one focus. Yes, Trump will activate his thugs. Heads will roll. Count on it. https://hotbuttons.substack.com/p/the-playbook-is-known?r=3m1bs
Love the paragraph on the social media rage machine always stoking the flames, they are rewarded by the people who want to be manipulated into rage—again. This pattern can occur when folks are running from their complex feelings of grief.
Laughter is the best medicine, yet, when we are grieving it’s a new cognitive skill to hold space for the laughter and be in various stages of grief. We need to practice. Grief isn’t easy. If it’s a struggle day, that isn’t a failure. You simplify need practice.
Laughter will be a vital component of personal sanity for us all!
What is about to happen to us doesn't have a skip forward like a bad movie or reel. It should have one because it's just bad plot, and that's the joke.
"Think of Donald Trump as one foot tall in diapers whenever you think of Donald Trump"
LIVE: Trump Cult Expert Reveals PSY-OPS that Swung Election | The Weekend Show
https://www.youtube.com/live/WcxjsWnHtk4?si=RLFRz1Q-rS5zivXi
In a nutshell:
"Psyops goes after experts, science, democratic institutions so to try to create psychological means to create uncertainty and distrust to ready people for authoritarian influence."
"Victims obey psyops to commit treason through ideology, money, or blackmail."
"Humans are emotional, social beings, so Information overload looks for authoritarian certainty to relieve stress. First of all, we have states, we have governors, I live in Massachusetts which has a gay governor."
"People will lay down only if they believe they have to lay down, and I'm saying, come on we're Americans, we grew up knowing what Russia was like, China was like, we don't want to be Russia, we don't want to be just put into prison like Navalny and murdered, or poisoned, or have a plane blow up, so let's get real and roll up our sleeves and say 'Not on my watch'."
"I want to give people hope and to say, "You are not alone." We're Americans, we believe in the constitution, we believe in human rights, we believe in the rule of law, and anyone who wants to take away the rule of law and just say 'screw it, I'm the king', should irk us enough to action."
"Learn how to regulate your emotional states. Understand breathing is the most powerful way to change your consciousness. If you're feeling anxious, long slow exhales will calm down your nervous system."
"You need to be human. Get hugs, get kisses, eat well, get 7 to 9 hours of sleep, most people are sleep deprived and it's one of the BITE Model criteria of brainwashing. If you are sleep deprived you are not thinking clearly."
"We need people who are going to support independent journalism by subscribing."
"Lets destigmatize being ex-cult. Intelligent people can be hacked, there is life after cult, normalize it and let's connect with people who are in MAGA world so there's an off-ramp, you can share their stories."
"A technique Hassan shares with his clients is to have them visualize the cult leader to be a foot tall in diapers, so they're looking down and they laugh. Think of Donald Trump as one foot tall in diapers whenever you think of Donald Trump. It's gonna have a very different emotional attachment."
You put into words what I’ve been thinking the past couple of days. I’m stressing myself out anticipating what might happen and I have to change my approach or I’m going to waste a lot of precious time and energy on stuff I can’t control. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.