politics

What are the implications of meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What do you see as the positive and negative of Sen. Chris Van Hollen meeting with “mistakenly” deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia today, 4/17 in El Salvador?”

Both the positive and the negative are that he met with him and provided photographic proof of life.

It’s a positive that he is still alive, and his family, along with the nation, can hang onto some hope that this will be resolved and that he will return home.

For this very same reason, it is a negative because it means Donald Trump’s criminal presidency will have pushed tolerance for the intolerable a little bit more.

Unless he is stopped, he will continue to push boundaries until nothing can stop the floodgates of a citizenry pushed past its breaking point.

He still has almost four years to cause a systemic collapse, enabling him to enact a coup to maintain a permanent lock on power.

Everything he is doing now is the equivalent of a predator (gaslighting), stressing out their prey and pushing them past the point of clarity of reason to manipulate them into a vulnerable enough position to achieve an ineffectually defended subjugation.

He is creating divisions that will oppose one another when it is time to mobilize and strike.

This term in his presidency is dramatically different from his first term because he’s had enough of a break in between to develop a coherent destruction strategy.

Unlike his first term, where he was enamoured by the novelty of power, this time around, he appears very focused on pushing the nation and the globe into an entirely new dynamic.

It’s easy to write him off as being too incompetent to pull off a strategic shift in the global balance of power, but he’s not quite so alone nor quite so surrounded by people who would keep him in line.

This time, the sheer nastiness of his enablers goes well beyond the casual cruelty of his previous support staff.

Comparing Attorney Generals, for example, is the difference between day and night. Bill Barr was a naive loyalist, while Pam Bondi is an incredibly cruel and psychopathic caricature of a human being.

The bull-in-a-china-shop antics of clumsy catering to fleeting whims in his first term have been supplanted by a strategically maximized form of tactical destruction.

After stressing out over whether or not Garcia was still alive and questioning if he was being withheld from public view out of fear that he was no longer among the living, it appears calculated to achieve a maximum stress effect.

The same appears to be the case with the tariffs.

This is what a predator does in an abusive relationship by tweaking emotions to their extremes and burning out their prey by forcing them to exist in a persistent state of fight or flight to normalize an existence of high levels of anxiety.

Why are you a liberal (left-wing)?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-are-you-a-liberal-left-wing/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

I’m not. I hate ideologies because they kill brain cells and destroy one’s critical thinking skills.

I prefer focusing on issues, learning about them, determining the best solutions, and then identifying who tries to do the same. I also look for those who have developed agnostic ideas and proposed solutions that work best for everyone, especially the people, because the wealthy often don’t need help. The government has favoured them so much over the last several decades that they’ve become a threat to the rest of the world.

What I identify with in the founding principles of liberalism are the values of “liberty, fraternity, and equality,” which often align me with liberalism, but not always. The only political party I’ve ever been a member of is the now-defunct National Party, also known as the Progressive Conservative Party. That party no longer exists. Their views have been stripped from them to become the Frankenstein’s monsters of humanity called the Maple MAGAts in Canada. They are a “light version” of the American MAGA movement, and mainly because the Koch parasites who have corrupted the American political landscape have been doing the same in Canada while focusing on Alberta and its oil wealth.

The results have led to corruption in that province in ways that run counter to Canadian values. Their current Premiere is an example of toadying for power, and how it perverts community values and cultivates a misanthropic attitude toward the people they’re supposed to serve.

My thoughts align with the direction the Canadian Liberal Party has taken, and I’m pretty excited about a full Prime Ministerial term with Mark Carney at the helm. I was initially hesitant because he was an unknown, but his interview with Jon Stewart quickly won me over. The more I see him in action, the more I like him.

While Jack Layton was the leader of the NDP, I was drawn to his party because his values focused on everyday Canadians. Governments have focused far too much on developing the corporate sector, which has been a detriment to the people and the nation.

No nation can exist without its people. Corporations are supposed to serve the people, not rule them. It severely disturbs me that what should be a community development function for governments has become a sociological corruption, supporting a sociopathic, profit-chasing national development model.

If I were to encapsulate my political views, I would describe them as a community development-oriented vision for politics and social leadership at all levels (and most notably, at this stage in my life because of specific issues that have been draining my attentions in an incredibly destructive way involve “encouraging” the police to review their function in society to align themselves with the ethos of protecting and serving more closely. I’m of the mind that they’ve become so corrupt in a heinous militarization strategy that they’ve become little more than a government-sanctioned domestic terrorist organization.)

Why are Republicans now against tariffs?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why are elected Republicans now saying that tariffs previously led to the worst depression our country has ever seen after supporting them just recently?”

Instead of asking why they “are now saying,” you should ask, “Why didn’t they say so before?”

The answer to your question is easy to figure out through simple “pocketbook logic.” It can be endured if something affects someone, be it health, mood, or anything.

The moment something affects their pocketbook, however, it becomes a serious matter.

Up until now, they believed their pocketbooks were safe. Now, they no longer believe that.

They now believe that their pocketbooks are being severely damaged. Now they think their long-term economic future is in jeopardy. They now fear losing their jobs and being forced into the poverty they have been creating for their constituents for decades.

In many ways, sadly, this harsh dose of life-threatening reality might be the kick in the butt of the complacency of a nation.

Nothing can motivate 350 million people into united action more effectively than all fearing for their lives.

The longer the public and the authorities allow this economic destruction to continue, the more likely the entire world will experience a severe depression. If that happens, there will be no placating the massive chaos that will ensue without taking dramatic steps to reign it in, such as by instituting Martial Law.

If Trump can maintain his power while instituting Martial Law, the odds are excellent that democracy will be set back one hundred years. We can then expect a return to an almost primitive social existence with gated communities for the elites and the rest of humanity living like herd animals.

If Martial Law is instituted through a military coup where Trump is hauled off to prison or shot for treason, then it will take the rest of this century for the world to restabilize. We will experience a dramatic restructuring of government processes, such as through a modern version of a “grand new deal.”

On the back end, for those lucky enough to survive the nightmare, humanity will earnestly face the environmental challenges we’ve been postponing.

The sooner we can reassert sanity, the sooner we can adjust our behaviours and restructure our collapsing societies as we transition into a fully automated system for human civilization to thrive.

How do we deal with Fox media lies?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How do you deal with a family member who believes everything that Fox News says?”

I remember as a kid how futile it was to explain to my parents that wrestling on television was fake.

They would point to the blood they saw and use it to prove it was real.

It didn’t matter in the least what was said to them or what was pointed out as an obvious ploy or staged athletic move; they refused to acknowledge the truth of the fraud the rest of us kids saw in the wrestling performance.

Making matters more convincing that it wasn’t an argument worth pursuing was how their agitation quickly escalated into anger if we persisted past the point of their capacity for maintaining patience with their annoying children. We learned that once we detected visible signs of anger, it wasn’t worth the effort to push them any further. By that point, the conversation had escalated into a frightening experience.

We eventually gave up and decided there was no harm in letting them believe whatever they wanted to believe.

Fox is an entirely different matter because its effect on their audience has contributed to a nightmare affecting the world.

I suggest one does not bother addressing the issue with one’s family because even if one succeeds in helping them accept reason, that victory has little impact on the severity of the problem Fox poses in society.

Addressing Fox as a threat to national stability and security is essential. There could be several approaches to addressing this problem, and one of them could be an aggregated accounting of behaviors exhibited by Fox adherents, collected by family members to construct a compelling argument for affecting legal change and influencing the media as a whole for the benefit of society.

My view on news media in society is that there is no justification for consolidated enterprises serving a profit motive. The Fourth Estate is a critically important entity within a democratic society that must be capable of earning and maintaining the public trust. That is impossible when their mandate is to serve the billionaires who are the existential threat to our democracies that we now face.

Let us take a page from the peer review process applied within the scientific community, ensuring integrity throughout the science discipline and the scientific community.

Matching the scientific community’s level of granularity in self-policing is as simple as breaking up large news media enterprises into community-based and locally-owned operations.

The more numerous the entities that represent the Fourth Estate, the more able they can become in ensuring the public is well served with a diversity of perspectives that can achieve a far more objective delivery of information than is possible through the lens of a billionaire who controls the dissemination of information with a self-serving agenda.

Funding for individual operations could be coordinated through a crown corporation that provides administrative services, such as an access point for advertising and a payment system modeled on existing systems, like Medium, where payments are distributed based on readership and engagement. Graduated access levels could be permitted, and stories can be assessed on a scale of widespread need for distribution versus content catering to niche markets. Public and subscription-based funding could support a system for disseminating critical information to broader audiences, ensuring everyone can access news crucial to their lives.

Why is there no neutral ground in America?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why does it seem that there is no neutral ground for political parties in America? You seem either extreme right or extreme left. Indeed, agreeing that the opposite party have a point seems to brand you as a traitor? Why is there this perception?”

The perceptions you describe result from a myopic lens in which the nation is ruled by one extreme.

There is no extreme left in the U.S.

No parties or groups are demanding to seize ownership of the means of production.

You argue that there is an extreme left because it helps to lessen the seriousness of the challenges facing your nation today. It’s a perception that helps to justify its Nazification as a reaction to a perceived enemy rather than a decline and degradation of its long-held moral values.

To believe an extreme left exists is to deny the harsh reality of natural cruelty your nation has been cultivating for decades.

Gordon Gecko was a warning against this cruelty, but as a nation, you embraced it, and you embody it by permitting the ongoing mass murderers of children in schools, by denying healthcare as a human right, by permitting whole towns to poison their people through contaminated water, and by justifying a profit motivation.

Your nation has been welcoming this transition into a culture of sociopathic dehumanization for decades, and you have cheered it on. You cheered when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers’ union. You cheered when he shut down mental health facilities and threw the vulnerable out onto the streets. You supported his hatred of gay people and allowed countless murders of them by denying them life-saving medical treatment.

You justify the fabricated existence of a far-left because you struggle to avoid facing the ugly truth of the nation you have become by choice.

There is no neutral ground because all that remains is a toxic evil threatening global stability. Those who struggle to muster the courage of their ancestors are stunned to find themselves engaged in a surreal battle against monsters who should know better than to deem themselves modern-day kings among the educated and democratized masses.

How close is the U.S. to a dictatorship?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://donewiththebullshit.quora.com/How-close-is-the-U-S-to-a-dictatorship-10“

This question assumes that a threshold is crossed, and a switch flips between a non-dictatorship and a dictatorship. The reality is that there is a transitional stage between the two states.

If you think of the process as day becoming night, twilight occurs between the two unless you live on the equator.

The U.S. is in the twilight stage of becoming a dictatorship and already exhibits key stages of the transition into darkness, such as launching a strategic assault on private law firms that would challenge his executive orders and other actions in court. His strategy has been to intimidate those entities that would restrain his efforts to achieve a complete dictatorship.

Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps are two major law firms that have capitulated to Trump’s bullying. These entities are essentially among the nation’s final layers of protection against a full manifestation into a dictatorship. If these protections fail, full-on chaos is the only option for the people. There won’t be enough time to hold out for another almost two years for a mid-term election. Americans will have no choice but to embrace a violent uprising because defeating these entities essentially guarantees he has the full cooperation of the courts to do what he pleases.

That means he will likely declare Martial Law to tamp down any resistance to furthering his stranglehold on the nation.

Americans are on the precipice of losing their democracy completely. Even though they’ve endured the pseudo-democracy of a corporatocracy for the last more than one decade, they’re entering entirely new territory if Trump succeeds in defeating enough law firms to gain his legal stranglehold over the nation.

To answer this question from the perspective of a countdown to midnight clock used to determine how close the world has been to nuclear annihilation, the U.S. is best expressed through a song by Midnight Oil, “Minutes to Midnight”:

Everybody say, “God is a good man”
(Minutes to midnight)
Everybody say, “God is a good man”
(God is a good man)
Ah, clock on the world
(Yes, he’s a good man)
Driving a dump truck up to the sun
(Is he a soul man?)
A sigh in the human heart
(Three sides to every god)

I look at the clock on the wall
It says three minutes to midnight
Faith is blind when we’re so near

But ears can’t hear
What those eyes don’t see
But ears can’t hear
What those eyes don’t see
And you can’t see me

Is it time for the equality of wealth in America?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “After the rich gets richer and poor gets poorer, it’s telling us that capitalism is failing. Is it time for communism for equality of wealth in America?”

The period between FDR’s New Deal and Ronald Reagan proves that capitalism is an effective system for creating a thriving middle class, maximizing opportunities for upward mobility, and providing a clear path to raising people out of poverty.

That was a period in which the now-myth of the “American Dream” was real and attainable. Everyone can attain a modest life of comfortable dignity, achieve beyond minimal existence, and grow their material success solely through disciplined effort.

What happened was what always happens when public memory is short, and the hardships of previous generations are forgotten.

People forgot what life was like when employment was insecure, rife with abuses, insufficient to survive on, and barely above an enslaved existence. Weekends off did not exist. Overtime pay did not exist. Statutory holidays did not exist. Job security did not exist.

For a brief time of almost one-half of an entire century, a working life was a life of dignity.

Then, we forgot and got complacent.

We grew frustrated with union strikes when they disrupted our otherwise predictable lives.

We saw corruption within unions and began forgetting their origins as a defence mechanism protecting the working class from capitalist corruption.

We began trusting the capitalist class had our best interests at heart and cheered when Ronald Reagan betrayed the once-thriving middle class by launching the beginning of a sustained assault against our only protection against capitalist corruption and abuse.

As a result, the poor are no longer becoming richer but poorer, as we have lost out on the basic dream of home ownership and a piece of the dream we were all promised.

We have lost our ability to succeed on effort alone.

Now, we are searching for solutions to our suffering outside the solution we once had that we let slip through our fingers through apathy and disinterest.

We lost our ability to live lives of dignity in the same way we have allowed a Nazi resurgence — through disengagement, apathy, and indifference.

The rich are becoming richer, and the poor are becoming ever poorer because we have allowed this to happen.

We don’t need to adopt a new system to fix what’s broken.

We don’t need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

We must fix ourselves first and then reassert the mechanisms of control that prevent corrupt powers from further corrupting a balanced system.

We can learn from other systems, borrow ideas from them and adapt them to our needs, but we don’t need to make radical changes — at least, not radical on the level of tearing everything down and rebuilding from scratch.

We have a solid frame for a still functional society that needs only some essential architectural revisions to restore economic justice and make life prosperous for everyone again.

Perhaps the most important lesson we can extract from this historical period is the importance of restraining power. We cannot live in a stable world that permits individuals to possess more power than nations.

In a world of equals, no human is above another, regardless of one’s skills, talents, or capabilities. We are all one as a community, and we must protect the integrity of the community if we wish to ensure individuals can achieve their potential in life. A balance between community and individuality is crucial to achieving our potential because individuals pave the way for communities to follow. In contrast, communities support and enable individuals to leap safely into the unknowns that lead us all to undiscovered territories and achieve greater heights.

Will Trump’s tariffs bring new jobs?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Is there any way that these new tariffs by Trump will bring any new jobs in the next 5 years or will they just add more inflation and costs to the US families?”

Let’s assume the plan is to increase jobs in the U.S., such as with increasing aluminum production. That would mean Trump would now be in the middle of discussions on that issue, if not initiating plans for increased energy production through hydroelectricity. Plans would be on the table for the development of dams that can serve to replace Canada’s aluminum production.

Why has there been no discussion?

Are there even any sites in the U.S that can compete with Canadian dams?

Why have there been no feasibility studies?

Why has there been no discussion about addressing the increased costs of tariffed products?

Everything about Trump can be described as a knee-jerk response from a bully. He consistently behaves like a childish bully who is used to people capitulating to his demands.

When Canada and the European Union discuss developing their trade relationships, he threatens to escalate his tariffs.

That doesn’t sound very forward-thinking to me. Does that sound like strategic thinking to you?

How does he intend to compensate for the burdens he’s been placing on the working class?

Oh… that’s right, he and Musk have been talking about how an allegedly short restraint would benefit the American people because they’ve become too complacent in their luxuries as their quality of life tanks and life expectancy shrinks.

The harsh reality is that the American people are being played for suckers by the wealthy class for who a bit of belt tightening isn’t a threat to their lives. Belt-tightening for them barely registers as cutting back on options for the new nested doll yacht purchase and cutting back on staff to maintain it on their behalf.

They won’t feel the pain of the inevitable recession he’s causing. Many are likely looking forward to it as an opportunity to invest in business purchases for fire sale prices.

How anyone may parse his decisions, they can’t avoid concluding that he intends to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the working class.

That’s the core goal of Project 2025 and the Dark Enlightenment group as they reduce the nation to a two-class system of rulers and serfs.

He doesn’t care about your jobs.

He already knows his buddy Elon will replace many jobs with intelligent robots. The little people will become even less substantial and be viewed as more of an unwanted burden.

The more he can eliminate from the bottom of the economic hierarchy, the more he can upgrade his toilets from gold to platinum.

Are big companies more likely to experience fraud?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Are big companies likely to experience more fraudulent and mismanagement issues than small companies?”

This question touches on the core of the privatization argument, where people claim government inefficiency justifies a privatized alternative to a government service.

The larger the organization, the more people must be coordinated, and the more complex and inefficient it will naturally be. Whether it is a government operation or a privatized one.

Opportunities for corruption increase at scale per the degree of complexity of operation, which can hide corruption and the degree of reward available for effort expended.

The more opportunity there is for flying under the radar, the more attractive an environment becomes to the corrupt. The greater the reward, the more the corrupt will risk detection.

The larger the organization, the more vulnerable it becomes to corruption because the rewards are more significant, the chance of detection is reduced, and the effort expended is minimized.

For example, in a generic scenario, because it happens pretty often, it is a common tactic of fraudulent billing to a large company for non-rendered services by a non-existent company.

The larger the organization, the more significant the number of invoices it must handle. All are being funneled through a finance department with a large contingent of staff who cannot know the specific details of each bill passing through their office. They superficially review each invoice to determine veracity and establish a threshold at which the review process intensifies.

For example, if their threshold is $1000.00, the fraud can create a fictional company, send monthly bills under that threshold, and collect a monthly sum that can go undetected for extended periods. They will often be discovered when someone investigates the bill in detail, which may or may not result in charges, depending on how well one has covered their tracks.

In an accounts payment office handling dozens of bills per day, it can be easy to overlook something like copier maintenance invoices.

Setting all of that up requires inside knowledge of a specific operation, so I am not sharing this as an endorsement, only as a generic description of the type of fraud that can occur and does so in large organizations that would not happen in a small one.

The larger the organization, the greater the financial reward, which exposes larger organizations to ladder-climbing strategists more than smaller organizations, attracting people more interested in the quality of work, flexibility of challenges, broader scope of responsibilities, and deeper interpersonal relationships.

Larger organizations can become quite politically toxic, but that doesn’t mean smaller organizations don’t fall prey to the same levels of incompetence.

All of these are basic human behaviours we see throughout society, and ironically, they’re not much different than those we witnessed during our high school years. Sometimes, they are just as juvenile in their manifestations. More often than not, however, in large organizations, those underlying attitudes and behaviours one experiences within high school cliques are more subtle and sophisticated because they are more often among people with higher levels of education.

What should Americans know about Canada?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What are things that Americans should know about Canada, so that they better understand why Canada is so resolutely against being annexed to the USA?”

This Canadian’s view is that any American who needs an explanation to understand how obnoxiously offensive their confusion is over this matter is precisely the delusional arrogance that has made America the dysfunctional dystopia that it is today.

It’s like the bullying asshole who steals candy from a baby, being incapable of understanding how that’s precisely what qualifies them as a bullying asshole.

We see precisely this behaviour being played out when Musk claims social security is a Ponzi scheme, but can’t understand why the people who depend on it to stay alive are so angry with him for taking it away.

Elon Musk embodies precisely what is wrong with America today.

He deliberately provokes the entire world with a Nazi salute and, when criticized for it, doubles down with childish stupidity to mock people over it and then starts complaining about being hated for being a Nazi while scratching his head over what he thinks is wrong with other people.

There is no self-awareness on his behalf, nor empathy or compassion demonstrated toward others, but he expects sympathy to be expressed toward him.

Elon IS America with this behaviour and attitude.

America made 9/11 happen, then stood tall and declared the 9/11 responders to be heroes whose sacrifices should never be forgotten but then tossed them out like yesterday’s garbage to suffer.

Americans routinely declare how much they value those who shed blood on behalf of defending the nation and its values but then show them what those values actually are by treating their veterans like yesterday’s dogshit.

Then you wonder why people hate you.

That’s the core of what is wrong with America.

You people are sick, and you need help.

You must admit, like every AA member does, that you can’t go it alone. You need to open up to a world that is more than willing to help you get better.

You have to stop stealing their stuff and bullying your way through their lives while treating people like dogshit.

You can’t spread democracy by the point of a gun. You can only show people an example of how it makes your lives better. Right now, however, you’re showing the world how easily corrupted your democracy can become when you don’t restrain the individuals within your nation who have too much power.

You have forgotten how the greatness of a nation is found within how it treats its most vulnerable.

Admit that you need help.

That’s the first step every addict must take to get on the road to their recovery.