Here we are already in early summer. The weather here at the start of the month was actually a bit cool for early June around here, although I was not complaining. I do not especially like roasting hot weather. That changed and we had a stretch of roasting hot weather.
The weather was just about perfect for an evening spent in the first weekend of June at a neighborhood festival in the area, where I actually never really wandered the festivities, which were officially a daytime event, and hung out for much of the evening around the home of my old musical friend Joel Hazard. There, Joel had organized a little event within the event, not an official part of the festival, at The Most Happening House, live music through the afternoon and evening, staged on his front porch, sometimes including Joel himself, who, I should add, is the best musician I personally know.
That followed a short visit to check out the display booth of another friend, glass artist Michael Zelenka, at a different festival, set up on the main street of the small downtown district of an adjacent suburban town, before heading to the other festival for the evening.
All in all, a fine way to spend a Saturday of what is essentially the first weekend of summer.
When I stop and step back for a little review and reflection on what’s happening in the wider world, it’s hard to avoid the displays of the epidemic madness of bipolar political disorder that I’ve been watching and talking about for quite a while now. The word “ubiquitous” comes to mind. It really is everywhere, all over the place, and it seems to me like it reaches some kind of saturation level in many people, so thoroughly infecting their minds that they really do seem to be unable to be able to see anything apart from a context of sticking everything into dualistic opposing bins of their side versus the other side.
I don’t know how long I’ve been talking about it now, at least a couple of years at this point, and it seems impossible to snap many people out of it when they are in the grip of this form of lunacy. It’s like, the more you try to point it out and nudge them loose from its grip, the more they dig in and bury themselves in it further. As I have already said many times, attempting this is more likely than not to only get a response accusing you of being some evil agent of propaganda of the dreaded Other Side.
It’s no joke to say that you can’t even talk about the weather without running into this bog of mental pollution.
At this stage, with the running bipolar madness of shoving everything into categories of Left/Right, Liberal/Conservative, Democrats/Republicans, we have the particular grouping of “Trump supporters” and this notion flying around of “The Resistance”. All that gets more and more ridiculous. As it has been, all that also brings all kinds of confused absurdity stemming from people putting themselves and others into a stupidly simplistic framework of what constitutes being a member of one camp or the other, regardless of how varied and complicated actual reality might be.
As that subset of the bipolar political disorder rages, we continue to get the effects of the BPD scrambling the perceptions and comprehension and understanding of far too many people about just about anything. You can barely raise any subject without loads of people tying themselves in knots trying to put anything said about it in a context of “well, are you a Trump supporter or part of The Resistance?”.
A half year past the 2016 US presidential election and inauguration, we still have the spectacle of people shouting back and forth at each other wearing their uniforms of Team Trump or Team Hillary. That, alone, is a seemingly endless source of all sorts of insanity (a word I use quite literally here, not being the least bit hyperbolic about it), with loads of people suffering from hyperactive bile glands and lost in all sorts of knotted confusion about all sorts of topics.
As the hopeless farce of the Trump presidency continues, what might constitute somebody being a “Trump supporter” is a much more complex subject than you might surmise from a lot of the noise, and while it strikes me as awfully hard to understand how anybody could actually be much of that, it is evident that quite a few people honestly hoped for what might have been the only real positive result of Trump being installed in the White House. What that would be is some sort of positive dialing back of what we have seen for decades now of the combination of the “neoconservative” political cult of worldwide megalomania ambitions and what Eisenhower called “the Military-Industrial Complex”, quite literally and explicitly seeing Washington DC becoming the seat of a worldwide empire ruling the entire world, even while people carefully avoid using the word “empire”. It’s never “empire”, you know. No empire here! It’s just us good guys bringing the Freedom and Democracy to the rest of the world, with our Commander in Chief as The Leader of The Free World!
That notion seems awfully naïve at this point, very clearly, as Trump as President proves to be not just hopelessly incompetent and inept and ignorant beyond belief of virtually anything related to the job, but also corrupt beyond comprehension, and either unable, unwilling, or both, to do anything except be guided and manipulated along by the whole neocon empirical establishment.
Confusing any and all matters about that, we have the scenario of the combination of factions of Brand R along with Brand D who actually join together, in actual reality and practical actions, as a combined neocon club for Empire, as “Trump opposition”. The hellishly confused twist in this is the astonishing continual display from people declaring themselves as members of Team Hillary, even after a half a year past her losing the election, seemingly completely unable to understand Hillary Clinton as being a loyal servant of the whole neocon establishment, among other things.
It boggles the mind.
The recent news, of course, featured the Trump appearance at the G20 conference in Europe. That event was a source of farce all by itself. One extraordinary incident saw the inexplicable appearance of Trump’s daughter sitting in at the conference table as a placeholder substitute sit-in for Trump, an astonishing thing, an almost comically absurd scenario of some sort of banana republic styled nepotism.
God only knows what those attending thought. It might be a reasonable guess that they did not think of this in positive terms. I suspect there were a variety of idiomatic phrases in the assorted relevant languages correlating to the English “what the fuck?”. That accompanied a variety of scenes where it appeared that the other gathered leaders of national governments were pretty much ignoring Trump and staying away from him and talking amongst each other apart from the American President at any possible opportunity.
There has been quite a barrage of commentary about Trump in relation to the G20 summit, none of it that I have seen being very positive, which comes as no surprise. People there are probably still struggling to believe that this is what the United States elected as head of state. A lot of it has been regarding Trump meeting with the Russian President Vladimir Putin, and, well, that then gets into the mud bog of insanity that has been going for some time.
In a good piece of timing, the Monday July 3 installment of James Howard Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation blog succinctly and very nicely summarized part of the now long running political insanity regarding Russia, and the head of the Russian government in particular. That includes a focus on the sheer nonsense and insanity of the propaganda narratives about what happened, and is still going, in Ukraine, after the plans of the Washington neocons to take over control of Ukraine did not quite work out as they probably hoped, back in early 2014. That came not long after the attempt to justify going and overthrowing another government, in Syria, by devious means involving a supposed chemical weapons attack on Syrians by the Syrian government, which turned out to be bullshit, was foiled in part by the Russians not being willing to allow that to happen to their ally Syria. Ever since those two situations, Russia, and, specifically, Putin, have been the subjects of a nonstop propaganda campaign from the neocons and their minions.
The nonsensical insanity of “the Russians are coming!” mob scene paranoia baiting went into a steady narrative about Trump as Putin’s puppet agent for his evil plans to overthrow the United States and take over the world, which nicely served the goal of the neocons to get their puppet Hillary Clinton elected, which worked extremely well on Brand D loyalists who have such blinders on that they could not, and still cannot, see and understand that the neocon cult is not strictly a Brand-R-exclusive club.
“The Russians hacked our election!” became a running propaganda theme after Wikileaks releases of information about Hillary Clinton and some of what she got up to. That took hold, especially among people looking for any rationalization for Hillary losing the election to avoid facing how horrendous she was as a choice for the office, despite the fact that there has been absolutely nothing indicating that the information leaked about her was wrong, it was largely pretty horrendous, and despite claims about “evidence of Russia’s meddling” regarding the Wikileaks revelations, the evidence of that seems incredibly sketchy or even fictional, and indications seem to be most likely that the “DNC hacks” narrative was nothing of the sort, and probably was passed to Wikileaks by somebody in the Democratic party who was completely disgusted by the very real election manipulations working against Bernie Sanders in order to ensure that Mrs. H. Clinton, loyal servant of banksters and neocon warmongers, was the Brand D option in November, and no other.
Now we have all kinds of noise about Trump as Putin’s personal servant in his quest to conquer the world, despite no evidence, for a start, that the Russians, or Putin personally, have any such plans or quest other that refusing to be a vassal state following Washington’s orders, or, more specifically, the neocons who control Washington, regardless of any lovely notions that this is a democratic republic controlled by, you know, We, the People.
5 Things You Missed While The Internet Obsessed Over “Covfefe”; Kathy G
The Military/Security Complex Is Bankrupting America – PaulCraigRoberts.org
Without Glass-Steagall America Will Fail – PaulCraigRoberts.org
oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: We’ve Lost All Sense of the Common Good
James Howard Kunstler: “We are living in a moment of unprecedented incoherence” – Resilience
U.S. warplane downs Syrian army jet in southern Raqqa province | Reuters
Washington’s ‘Chemical Weapon’ House of Cards Demolished by Ex-Weapons Inspector
Deception Inside Deception: The Alleged Sarin Gas Attack – PaulCraigRoberts.org
Syria: Trump’s Red Line – WELT
New York Times, AP Retract False Claims on Intel Report on Russia Hacking – News From Antiwar.com
the three hot trends in Silicon Valley horseshit – Freddie deBoer – Medium
Suicide by Stupidity – Kunstler
The Two Non-Interventionists | HuffPost
oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: Our Political Parties Are Obsolete
Posted by John Eagan 
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