Trumpists and the far-right in this country hope that you won't "worry" about where they are taking this country

 

Sometimes this country just seems like one gigantic dumpster fire that some idiot set because, well, they’re just an idiot…

 

…and because megalomaniacs think setting the world on fire is fulfilling their “destiny” because they just had a "vision" telling them so…

 

…like this guy…

 

…who tells us if he gets another shot at being the man with the nuclear codes, he will unleash the Insurrection Act, that he failed to do on January 6, in Democratic cities. It is just part and parcel of his failure to unite the country in times of “crisis”—this raging narcissist prefers to incite his supporters into seeing their neighbors as enemies who must be crushed at all costs, as long as they don’t have to dirty their own hands in that dirty business, because their laziness begins with their own conscience.

In 2017, Eric Levitz wrote in New York Magazine that because Trump is not of the “political class,” he had not at the time “learned the disciplined use of language” and what “certain words mean in context.” If anything, Trump has become even worse with his use of violent and threatening words. While polls apparently reveal a shocking number of voters find Trump’s violent rhetoric “appealing,” Senate Republicans fear that they will again lose the Senate in 2024 if enough voters know that Trump in office needs some kind of “check” given his unbalanced personality and total lack of moral and ethical values.

Levitz pointed out that Trump “is suffering from an obsessive disorder that renders him helplessly self-destructive. Trump has stomped all over the naïveté defense. All that remains is the insanity plea. To plausibly deny that the president is a criminal, Republicans must stipulate that he’s out of his mind. Which is to say: There is no credible explanation for Trump’s conduct that is compatible with the idea that he is fit for high office.”

As we see today, that has not only not changed, but unlike any other candidates for the presidency in the past he has not the dignity to step aside for much greater failures of conduct. Even Al Franken was obliged to resign his Senate seat simply because of a high school prank-level incident years ago; yet even the “liberal” media has given Trump a pass on two-dozen claims against Trump ranging from “groping” to rape. 

Why? Apparently because it knows Trump just laughs at them, and his supporters don’t think it’s a “big deal” so they won’t be listening anyways. However, the "liberal" media knows that they do have a fanatical audience of gender activists willing to eat their own just to make a "power point," even if it means  being destructive to their own agenda.

We see that Disney films like The Marvels and the next batch of “superhero” films also promise to crap on their core male audience with more characters they are not supposed to identify with, but film critics and activists will applaud that before they go home, not realizing that the "audience" they were trying to reach was not listening and didn't care. What happened next? The film tanked at the box office.

We also saw this in the 2016 election, when everyone assumed Hillary Clinton was going to win the election, not knowing that 53 percent of white women would vote for Trump, and the result was the appointment of three far-right Supreme Court justices and a country blanketed with the same in the federal courts. 

Some people think that is a “good” thing, of course; but then again, when Republican states (putting aside the question of whether Republicans even have a national governing philosophy that isn’t simply characterized by publicity stunts and chaos) are taking away free speech (often couched in “anti-CRT” rhetoric) and voting rights, it isn't so obvious at first that where they are taking the country is a single-party authoritarian regime.

We are told in the Washington Post (“democracy dies in darkness”) that in the expectation that he wins in 2024

…discussions underway reflect Trump’s determination to harness the power of the presidency to exact revenge on those who have challenged or criticized him if he returns to the White House. The former president has frequently threatened to take punitive steps against his perceived enemies, arguing that doing so would be justified by the current prosecutions against him. Trump has claimed without evidence that the criminal charges he is facing — a total of 91 across four state and federal indictments — were made up to damage him politically.

Not only that, but Trump threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act nationally, basically imposing martial law on Democratic cities. He announced that  “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Nazi Germany, anyone? No wonder Deutsche Bank officials have been desperate to misrepresent their dealings with their former "client" in court and expressed no interest in his falsified financial reports; they would then be seen as colluding in his crimes.

It doesn’t matter what is true or not; racists and those with fascist inclinations are hungry for their beliefs to be converted into “concrete action.”  Thus Trump went on to say that “the real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left, and it’s growing every day.” So while he zeros in on the “radical left,” the radical right in fact only grows in prominence, now acting with “lawful” impunity.

And like as occurred during his first presidency, this country's credibility and power on the world stage, as it did with our international allies, will suffer. The country's access to natural resources and fair trade will suffer because of the foolish belief that “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.” This is the talk of a white nationalist who actually hates this country and the principles it was founded on. Trump merely “governs” in the same authoritarian way he ran his “business.” He knows no other way.

His recent announcement that he is again to going to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act is a non-starter for even many Republicans, since it has been noted that there has been no serious discussions to “replace” it. Trump’s only wants to repeal it out of simple vindictiveness toward Barack Obama, since Trump himself has no similar legacy to his name, other than being a complete asshole.

Meanwhile, his toady House Speaker Mike Johnson, the “What, me worry?” guy…

 

…continues to promise nothing but continuing chaos from the House of Representatives on the budget impasse that is entirely of the far-right’s need for public relations stunts. Johnson has no real credibility within his own caucus; as Liz Cheney suggests in her new book, Johnson is apt to be a dishonest conspiracy theorist whose word to those who believe in the truth cannot be trusted, and he was just picked because the far-right of the party believes he can be used, and he was the lesser of many evils that so-called moderates could stomach because of his “nice guy” persona. 

Of course that is only one part of the problem; what the country really needs is someone who wouldn't  “worry” about doing this to Trump and the far-right:

 

Sometimes a film can tell us more truth by simply telling a story rather than with a self-serving "agenda"

 

It appears that theater chains and Disney are still trying to shove The Marvels down people's unwilling throats as the only film this weekend being shown on at least 4,000 screens. The film only continues to tank,  becoming the first MCU film to drop out of the top-5 in its third weekend. But that's not my "problem," and although Iman Vellani says that is not her "problem" either, she should consider the effect on her career, adding The Marvels debacle with her own Ms. Marvel show being the worst-rated MCU show on Disney+.

But thank god there are other ways to pass the time if films are your thing.  It took me awhile to make the decision to spend the money on it, but since Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Satan’s Brew is only available on Blu-ray on the UK distributor Arrow Films recently released third 7-film Fassbinder collection of mostly his lesser-known films, I figured I should just do it before it went OOP and third-party sellers began their extortionist ways.

Satan’s Brew is Fassbinder’s only true comedy in his entire oeuvre,  and a “screwball” comedy as black as black can get—meaning that it is not a proper introduction to those unfamiliar with Fassbinder’s work, as people will think he must have been “nuts” to make a film like this. But then again, I suspect people would also be left with the same incorrect of assessment of Martin Scorcese's output if the first film of his they saw was After Hours.

I really didn’t need the rest on Blu-ray, but I had never seen one of these films, Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, and having now done so, it provides just another reason why Fassbinder is my favorite director. Some people compare Mother Kusters examination of irresponsible tabloid journalism in West Germany at the time to that of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, but in Mother what eventually happens to Mother Kusters (in the German cut) is ultimately more tragic as Fassbinder also critiques the political opportunists and radicals that use her for their own purposes.

The film begins as we learn that Mother Kusters’ husband had just killed a supervisor at work, apparently after being  told that he was going to be part of a mass lay-off at the business he worked at, and then killed himself. Mr. Kusters had never intimated that he might do this to family or coworkers, so it was assumed that he had just “snapped” when he heard the news. 

Many saw the incident as the powerlessness of workers in a capitalist society. Mother Kusters’ home is invaded by journalists who claim they just want the “truth”; here a photojournalist promises to write a sympathetic article as he takes photos of Mother Kusters as she sadly conducts her daily existence, reflecting on life without her husband:

 

Instead, the article that does comes out portrays her husband as a deranged monster, which of course angers Mother Kusters. She is soon left without anyone to console her as her adult children all leave her alone in the house. This leaves her vulnerable to opportunists who wish to use her; she is contacted by an apparently well-off married couple who profess to be sympathetic to the “cause” in which her husband died, and they write an article from the perspective of the abused “proletariat.” 

They turn out to be members of the German Communist Party, and they invite her to speak at a sparsely-attended meeting, where Mother Kusters gives a heart-felt speech about what a good man her husband was and how he was abused by an unjust system against the working class—or at least that was what she was told by her handlers:

 

But afterward she encounters a young “radical” who tells her that these people are frauds and he can help her get real “justice.” At least part of that seems to be true, when Mother Kusters is essentially told that her usefulness to the Party is over, as her purpose was to provide campaign fodder for the coming election. With no one at home to advise or keep a watch on her, Mother Kusters decides to seek out the radical activist, who unbeknownst to her hatches the idea of an armed invasion of the office where the photojournalist works and hold everyone hostage until "their" demands are met. Mother Kusters obviously didn't sign-up for this:

 

For European audiences Fassbinder discarded the climax that he originally filmed, although he chose to ad a written coda (rather than filming it) that told viewers that after the terrorists left the building with their hostages, Mother Kusters was shot by unidentified parties (probably the polizei), but even then Fassbinder could not help but add a note of sarcasm to her death, as it is implied that her daughter, who is a singer, uses the occasion as a publicity stunt as she poses to be photographed cradling her mother in her arms:

 

 

Sorry, wrong “movie.” Fassbinder decided to keep the original filmed ending for the American release, and here we see him treating the radicals not as “terrorists” but as buffoons who stage a sit-in that is ignored by everyone inside the office:

 

The radicals themselves get bored sitting there pointlessly and leave Mother Kusters alone in her thoughts. In one ending (for the European release) she goes to “heaven” as a “martyr” for the “cause,” but the other “heaven” is when the janitor walks in and tells her he can’t leave unless she does, but she can come back the next day if she wants; he is a widower and lonely too, and their conversation eventually ends with the implication that she will move on with her life and they will be a couple:

 

Contemporary American critics saw the film as a "comedy" because of this ending, but the ending that Fassbinder used instead for the German release of the film gives the exact opposite interpretation of the proceedings, given the reality of what was going on in West Germany at the time.

Although Fassbinder was himself critical of what he regarded as a society that had not yet come to grips with its Nazi past (even electing a former Nazi, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, as chancellor in 1966), and was not unsympathetic to the aims of the radical left, he could not help but critique what he saw as the ultimate pointlessness of the activities of the radical political and student movements—especially those that sought to achieve their aims through violence. 

The Baader-Meinhof Gang, which had come into existence a few years earlier and had a similar evolution as that of the Weather Underground in the U.S., isn’t mentioned specifically, but as in  The Third Generation, Fassbinder saw their activities to be counterproductive if not clownish, and its "third generation" had not learned from the mistakes of the first two.

That was then, and this isn’t the “revolutionary” Sixties which spawned not just radical left groups like the Weather Underground and the SLA (the group that kidnapped Patty Hearst), but in response to changes in society also came neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups engaged in bank robberies  and murder like The Order in the Eighties and the Aryan Republican Army in the Nineties—the latter which was suspected of aiding and bankrolling Timothy McVeigh.

The difference between the “left” and the “right” terrorists was that “left” claimed to seek change in an unjust society, and what the right was “seeking” was somewhat unclear, trying undo “change” and reestablish  white privilege and control as the law of the land. The conservative Eighth Circuit Court in Texas is doing its part “lawfully,” by further damaging the Voting Rights Act, declaring that only the federal government (you know, like a Trump administration) can file lawsuits charging racial discrimination in voting laws because the Act doesn’t “explicitly say” that private persons or organizations can do so.

But as Fassbinder implied in Mother Kusters, who can you really believe or trust in this day and age who legitimately represents “justice” that at least has a moral and ethical angle that isn’t entirely self-serving or hypocritical? Take for instance the "MeToo" movement, which has become little more than a vehicle for self-serving narcissists out for revenge for mostly imagined or misinterpreted  "wrongs" done to them.

Why would anyone would "trust" the motivations of the likes of  House Speaker Mike Johnson and Marjorie Taylor Green, who are aiding and abetting far-right conspiracies with the highly selective release of the invasion of the Capitol Building by the January 6 insurrectionists? One far-right YouTuber interpreted one video as showing the insurrectionists were being “respectful” of law enforcement; OK, so what was so “respectful” about breaking down doors to get into the Capitol Building in the first place and interrupting lawmakers? 

If anything, the events of January 6 were counterproductive, because it embarrassed some Republican Senators who previously intended to question the election results. How far-right conspiracies develop out of willful ignorance of the activities of the insurrectionists is shown here:

 

By the way, “RT” stands for Russia Today, which is the Kremlin propaganda organ whose principle function in the U.S. is sow chaos and disrupt a functional democracy, which of course is why so many Republicans appear to be Russian propagandists themselves and supporters of authoritarian government. 

Of course propaganda can go both ways. Since the beginning of the Israeli-Hamas conflict, Jewish groups in this country claim that antisemitic acts have increased almost 400 percent in this country, which is a bloated way of saying four times more than normal. But as we see, what an "antisemitic" act is can merely be criticism of Israeli use of force in Gaza or anyone expressing support for Palestinians.  Regardless of the side you are on, it just seems more like gaslighting and suppressing freedom of speech.

Where this country is going is very worrisome. A new NBC News poll show Trump leading Biden by 48 to 37. Frankly, I wish Biden would not run for reelection and ride off into the sunset with his dignity intact; at the present time, it really does seem as if his age is clouding his judgment. But the poll also showed that a “generic” Democratic candidate other than Biden would be instantly ahead of Trump by a 46-40 margin.

What does that mean? The only “logical” explanation is that many people are not using their heads when making their decisions, just their “gut” feelings. The majority wants an alternative to Trump, they just don’t think that Biden is the "man" anymore because they don't "trust" his ability to make "judgments." I suspect, however, that some of this has to do with whether they "trust" Kamala Harris if Biden passes away during a second term, if she is still the vice president. 

A majority of people know that another Trump administration would be a nightmare turned all too real, given his stated zeal to exact “revenge” on all his perceived “enemies” rather than learning anything from his moral and ethical failures. That this country has allowed itself into a "pick your poison" choice shows just how disastrous it was to elect a completely unfit individual like Trump was in the first place.

What is worse is like those people with political agendas in Mother Kusters, Trump doesn’t really give a damn about “the people” in the individuality—he is only using the generality to advance his own domestic terroristic agenda, because a supreme narcissist only uses the hot air of blind supporters to inflate his own sense of grandiosity.

Of course the result of all of this is no one has any “trust” in the “system” because everyone is pointing the finger at someone else, or whoever they are told to. No one trusts the motives of the other, although the motives of Republicans are certainly more destructive than Democrats on the surface. Maybe people would just be happier if they said we don't want what any of you are selling, and vote for anyone who claims to be a "moderate" without a partisan agenda causing divisiveness and hate.

So you see you can learn something about the world from films that do not preach to you or have an "agenda," but just show you the world as it is, not they way you imagine it to be.

Packers hold on to beat Lions team taking too many bad gambles

 

After last week’s win over the Chargers, I figured anything was possible against the Lions on Thanksgiving Day. I mean this is the Lions team that has never come close to a Super Bowl, last winning a championship in 1957, and since then the Lions have been to the playoffs just 12 times with a 1-12 record and currently on a nine-game playoff losing streak. That compares to a Packer team that in the past 30 years has made the playoffs 23 times, including three Super Bowl appearances. Were these Lions playing at home for real, or were some of people getting all starry-eyed about Jordan Love’s stat line the last couple of weeks for good reason?

I listened to the first of half of the game on the radio, and watched the second half on television. What I heard was on the first play, Jordan Love hit Christian Watson for a 53-yard deep pass, and couple plays later Jayden Reed caught a TD pass for a 7-0 lead. On the highlight reel, what I saw was that Love again underthrew a pass that was thrown deep downfield, but this time there was just enough space between two defenders for Watson to slow down and adjust and complete the play; if the ball had been thrown two more yards further Watson would have walked it in for a 75-yard TD.

Jared Goff and the Lions quickly responded with their own touchdown, but Love was operating under virtually no pressure from the Lions’ defensive front the entire game, and found TE Tucker Kraft in the end zone after another quick trip down the field for a 14-6 lead. Love at that point was 8 of 9 for 124 yards and 2 TDs. Would Goff and Lions answer back? No, Goff would lose the first of his three fumbles of the game, with Jonathan Owens picking up the ball and running it in for a touchdown. Suddenly the Packers, who had trouble scoring 20 points over an entire game, suddenly found themselves with a 20-6 lead in only the first quarter after Anders Carlson missed his third extra point for the season.

Goff fumbled on the Lions next series, but the Packers failed to convert on a fourth down play at the Lions’ 14-yard line. That was the only time in this game that Matt LaFleur would make that mistake, but Lions’ coach Dan Campbell was a gambler, and he would make one bad gamble after another in this game that would all add-up to be disastrous for his team’s chances to win even with Goff’s fumbles. The Packers added a field goal, and then Campbell would pass on the opportunity the first of three times for 3-points on a failed fourth-down play, and the Packers went into the half with a 23-6 lead, with Love having his best half of the year, completing 15 of 20 for 189 yards.

That’s what I heard; what I saw in the second half was considerably less impressive. The Packers would only score again after what everyone who saw it called an impossible to understand and clearly ill-advised fake punt on the Lions’ 22-yard line, after which a TD pass to Watson on third down was possible only because Love actually threw the ball over the defender where Watson could use his height advantage to catch the ball, something which Love had trouble helping him do for most of the season.

The Lions piled-up over 300 yards of offense in the second half, even as the Packers defensive line was all over Goff for most of the game, with 3 sacks, 12 QB hits and those three lost fumbles. Twice in the second half Campbell passed on easy field goals and failed to convert on fourth down. As it was, after a late TD following a quick 91-yard drive, a failed onside kick clinched the win for the Packers; but the reality was that the Lions complete domination of the Packers in the second half could have been much worse, being bookended by TDs and two-point conversion on their first and last possessions of the second half.

Love completed just 7 of 12 for 79 yards in the second half, but the Lions made just enough mistakes—the biggest that ill-advised fake punt attempt that led to the short-field touchdown that turned out to be the only reason why the Packers were able to pull out a “shock” 29-22 win on the road against an 8-2 opponent. Goff completed 29 of 44 passes for 332 yards and 2 TDs, and Lions out-rushed the Packers 140-109 for the game, but the Packer defense deserved credit for making opportunistic plays to abort further damage and allow the Packers to win this game. 12 of the Packer points were the result of the Lions’ offense simply handing the ball to the Packer defense.

The Packers return home to face a Chiefs team that increasingly appears “mortal,” and the rest of the schedule looks as “easy” as what came before it was. The Packers at 5-6 have a chance at not only a winning season but the playoffs, but that depends more on extraordinary good fortune smiling down on the Packers more than Love’s seemingly improving numbers.