The Right Amount of Crazy by Fintan O'Toole

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 Source: New York Review of Books

In January, when The New York Times asked DonaldTrump whether there were any limits on his global powers, he replied, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind.” Since whatever morality he ever possessed has long since departed, the remaining question is whether he has also lost his mind. Given that, in the course of his war on Iran, he has chosen to present himself to the world as a genocidal maniac—posting on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will”—the answer may seem all too obvious.

Yet to arrive at it we have to tease out the relationships that are always at the heart of his persona: the complex connections between performance and reality, method and madness, bombast and bombs. With Trump, these oppositions are never absolute. The borders between them are always porous. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that in Trump’s chaotic mind there lurks the Madman Theory, a belief that acting crazy is a rational strategy. Richard Nixon coined the phrase for his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, during the Vietnam War:

I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button”—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.

The belief that Trump has been following Nixon’s playbook in relation to Iran has been a staple of recent media analysis. It is certainly valid. Yet it raises a further question: Is it possible for someone to act the lunatic while actually being one? We are faced with a vastly more consequential version of a Catch-22. In Joseph Heller’s novel, claiming to be crazy is taken as evidence of sanity. Likewise the only evidence that Trump might not be crazy is his obvious determination to seem so.

To get our bearings in this maze we might begin with Irving. He appears, shorn of a surname, in the book Tony Schwartz ghostwrote for Trump, The Art of the Deal (1987). While still at college, Trump has done his first deal, buying with his father and refurbishing an apartment complex in Cincinnati. He hires Irving to manage the project. Trump suspects that he is a thief and calls him “a short, fat, bald-headed guy with thick glasses and hands like Jell-O, who’d never lifted anything in his life beside a pen, and who had no physical ability whatsoever.”

But his saving grace is “an incredible mouth.” According to Trump, Irving would collect rents from the most recalcitrant tenants by putting on a show of frenzy:

He’d ring the doorbell, and when someone came to the door, he’d go crazy. He’d get red in the face, use every filthy word he could think of, and make every threat in the book. It was an act, but it was very effective: usually they paid up right then and there.

One day, while Irving was on his rounds, he knocked on a door, and a little ten-year-old girl answered. Irving said, “You go tell your father to pay his f—ing rent or I’m going to knock his ass off.”

Irving, says Trump, “left a very vivid impression on me.” Trump learned early on that screaming obscenities at ten-year-old girls and making every threat in the book was a good way to get what he wanted. There would seem to be a clear path from Irving to the flamboyantly demented Trump of his Easter Sunday morning post: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

For Trump’s apologists, he is thus not a mad King Lear, an (almost) eighty-year-old monarch raving on the heath. He is a Hamlet who has chosen “to put an antic disposition on,” the better to achieve his purposes. There’s every reason to believe that this is the way Trump sees himself. William Barr, who served as Trump’s attorney general in the latter part of his first term, recalls in his memoir, One Damn Thing After Another (2022), an occasion when Trump wished to make a public claim of vindication:

Then, studying me, with a twinkle in his eye, he added, “I am going to go and tweet about this.”

I glanced up with a look of discomfort. He smiled playfully. “Do you know what the secret is of a really good tweet?” he asked, looking at each of us one by one. We all looked blank. “Just the right amount of crazy,” he said.

Likewise, Nikki Haley recalled that when she was serving as his ambassador to the United Nations, Trump told her how to deal with the North Koreans: “Tell them you just talked to the president…. Make them think I’m crazy.” In 2017 Axios reported an exchange between Trump and his trade representative Robert Lighthizer, who was negotiating with South Korea: “I’ll tell the Koreans they’ve got 30 days,” Lighthizer said. Trump rebuked him: “No, no, no. That’s not how you negotiate. You don’t tell them they’ve got 30 days. You tell them, ‘This guy’s so crazy he could pull out any minute.’” In 2024 Trump told The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board that he would not have to use military force to prevent a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, because President Xi “respects me and he knows I’m f—crazy.”

The conviction that putting on an antic disposition is a winning geopolitical strategy has a long history. Henry Kissinger articulated it in a lecture in Peshawar in 1962. In the cold war confrontation with the Soviet Union, he said,

the only way one can communicate one’s determination, I think, is by conducting a policy in which one indicates a high capacity for irrationality. What one has to do is prove that in certain situations one is likely to go out of control, and that regardless of what sober calculation would show one is simply so nervous that the gun is going to go off. A madman who is holding a hand grenade in his hand has a very great bargaining advantage.

In this theater of bluff, the president of the United States is Irving writ large. If he goes red in the face, uses every filthy word he can think of, and makes vile threats, he is in fact being coldly calculating and lucidly shrewd. According to this line of thinking, there is not just a gap between appearance and reality—the two are complete opposites. The rationale is that the higher the seeming capacity for irrationality, the more rational the president is because the more probable it is that the enemy will be terrified and make large concessions. By this logic, Trump’s genocidal ravings at Iran are proof that he really is, as he insists, a very stable genius.

The Chinese, of course, have a dismissive phrase of their own for the Madman Theory: paper tiger. Like all performances, the crazy act must be able to command at least a suspension of disbelief. In Trump’s case, his infinite hype produces diminishing returns of credibility. His warning in 2017 that “we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” whose threats would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen,” was followed the next year by his declaration that he and Kim Jong Un “fell in love” after exchanging letters. The paper tiger went into the shredder.

The odd thing, though, is that these two realities—that Trump is playing out his own version of the Madman Theory and that his act has long worn thin—seem to point toward the same apparent conclusion. The first appeals to his fans, the second to his detractors. But both suggest that there is only the show. Some think it’s a great show, some think it’s terrible. Yet the truth is that Trump is always acting in both senses. There is no border between pretense and practice, shadow and substance.

Shakespeare gives us more than Lear or Hamlet, real or feigned mental derangement. There is a third possibility. Titus Andronicus begins by pretending to be mad and then becomes so in reality. To translate this into the history of the American presidency, we need only return to Nixon. Just because you’ve invented and acted on the Madman Theory doesn’t mean you can’t go mad: Nixon’s paranoia, enemies lists, conspiracy theories, and seemingly drunken order to nuke North Korea do not speak of robust mental health. The Madman Theory, it seems, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Trump’s genocidal threats are a much madder version of the theory than anyone previously had in mind. They go against two of its basic requirements. When Kissinger set it out in 1962, he added that unfortunately, “given the public opinion of Western democracy, this is not a policy that can be conducted.” The Madman Theory, even when put into practice by Nixon, is a strictly limited form of coterie theater. The performance is only for hostile governments. It must be kept from one’s own citizens because public opinion matters; the leader of a democracy does not want his voters to think he has truly lost his marbles.

Second, Kissinger suggested that since there were such limits on democratically elected leaders’ use of the strategy, the alternative for the US was to transform its alliances “from what were in effect unilateral American guarantees” into “efforts of real cooperation to prevent threats to countries from being overrun.” The US can’t have its allies thinking that its president has gone crazy either. So it must instead offer them real cooperation in joint efforts to deter invaders.

Trump’s homicidal hysteria breaks both of these rules. It is not a private performance for the benefit of a highly select audience (in this case the members of the Iranian regime). It is a stadium spectacular, simulcast live to the whole world. It displays psychosis to American voters and to America’s allies. It sunders any common interest with friendly European and Anglophone nations. It is thus unmoored from the constraints either of democracy or of alliance.

This does not merely indicate “a high capacity for irrationality.” It is actually and wildly irrational. It makes a kind of sense only if one’s own voters and one’s supposed international allies are also legitimate targets of the mad threats, if they too are to be terrorized by the specter of the deranged emperor. Trump’s mad act has a logic only if the performer this time really sees both voters and allies as enemies to be overawed.

Trump told Barr that a good tweet has “the right amount of crazy.” His capacity for that kind of calibration has never been impressive: if the original benchmark is screaming obscenities at ten-year-old girls, fine gradations are probably not in his skillset. But however skilled he may once have been, it is now obvious that he can no longer control the dosage. Threatening genocide is the wrong amount of crazy—wrong in itself but also wrong because it tells those at whom the threat is aimed that they have nothing left to lose. They may as well bring as many of their enemies down with them as they can.

It would be impertinent to offer a clinical diagnosis of Trump, though that is not a courtesy he has afforded others. He reportedly called his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, “mentally retarded”; repeatedly cast doubt on whether Joe Biden was “mentally fit to be president”; said his chief of staff John Kelly “wasn’t mentally fit for the job”; claimed that “Kamala Harris doesn’t have the mental capacity to do a REAL Debate against me”; and called his former national security adviser John Bolton a “total & unhinged WARMONGER, the red faced ‘boiler ready to explode’ was one of those very stupid voices that got us into the Middle East quicksand.”

But whatever its clinical definition, the political diagnosis of Trump’s form of madness was made a long time ago by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan:

The Passion, whose violence, or continuance maketh Madnesse, is either great Vaine-Glory; which is commonly called Pride, and Selfe-Conceipt…. Pride, subjecteth a man to Anger, the excesse whereof, is the Madnesse called RAGE, and FURY.

Or, in this case, Operation Epic Fury.

Fury, Hobbes wrote, arises when a belief that one is uniquely inspired clashes with the refusal of others to bend to this exceptional insight: “If there were nothing else that bewrayed their madnesse; yet that very arrogating such inspiration to themselves, is argument enough.” While sane people “would be unwilling the vanity and Extravagance of their thoughts…should be publiquely seen,” those in the grip of this delusion are all too happy to put them on display. Hobbes pointed out that if someone were to tell you that he “were God the Father,” you would require no further proof of madness. When Pope Leo XIV recently denounced “the delusion of omnipotence,” Trump replied by posting an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus healing a sick man in a bed while a soldier and a nurse look on in awe. Trump is the Savior whom Leo is pledged to serve—the ultimate in one-upmanship.

Rage and fury are the words Shakespeare most often associates with madness. We know that as soon as Trump was elected in 2016, those Republicans who saw him up close began to dread the eruption of his unbridled temper. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in Peril (2021), the then speaker of the house Paul Ryan felt it necessary to read up on narcissistic personality disorder: “Ryan’s main takeaway: Do not humiliate Trump in public. Humiliating a narcissist risked real danger, a frantic lashing out if he felt threatened or criticized.”

This frantic lashing out has been described over and over by those who worked with Trump in the White House during his first administration. “I thought about Trump’s anger. I heard his voice screaming in my head,” recalled the loyal White House aide Cliff Sims. “Trump was railing about everyone at that time. He called Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell ‘a dirty bastard, that motherfucker,’” recalls the former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham in I’ll Take Your Questions Now (2021). The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley “was certain Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the [2020] election, with Trump now all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies.”

The relevant point about these maniacal outbursts is that they are not performative. They are not strategic enactments of the Madman Theory. They are merely the way he is. Grisham believed that Trump’s public rages were performative until she experienced them in private:

I was not prepared for the way he spoke to or yelled at people, which I know sounds crazy when you consider his Twitter account or even his interviews with the press. But when I began to see how his temper wasn’t just for shock value or the cameras, I began to regret my decision to go to the West Wing.

This fury—constantly compared by those who worked with him to the tantrums of a toddler—is, as Ryan realized, dangerous, and all the more so when allied to another aspect of his character: his loss of a connection to objective reality. Rage has to be controlled when it comes up against outside limitations, but there is a sense in which, for Trump, there is no outside. According to The Divider (2022), Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s history of Trump’s first term, John Kelly and “other top officials who served during the Trump administration came to believe that Trump was mentally ill, unable or unwilling to process basic information necessary to do his job, and dangerously uninformed.” Kelly himself “considered Trump a pathological liar, not just someone disconnected from reality but someone who did not even seem to understand that there was a reality other than what he decided it was.”

These, bear in mind, are testimonies from Trump’s first term, when he was a younger man and showed fewer signs of cognitive decline. The fury of thwarted narcissism and the lack of any sense of an external reality can only be more dangerous in a second term, when Trump is even more disinhibited, hearing only voices that, in all their sycophantic echoing of his own desires, might as well be inside his head.

The case for invoking the Constitution’s Twenty-Fifth Amendment and removing Trump from power is strong, and Trump himself joked about it during a cabinet meeting in late March. “I can’t say what we’re going to do, because if I did, I wouldn’t be sitting here for long. They’d probably—what is it called? The Twenty-Fifth Amendment?” Democrats in Congress have become much more willing to call openly for Trump’s ejection on the grounds of his mental incapacity to govern. But the same Republican obsequiousness that has made Trump’s madness ever more dangerous makes his removal a practical impossibility.

The madness, after all, is not just personal. It is structural. When the balance of power is lost and democratic accountability is replaced by a cult of the divinely inspired leader, the conditions that exacerbate derangement become the principles of governance. Writing of the Nixon White House, Arthur Schlesinger remarked:

In such conditions wish tended to rule fact and, in George McGovern’s phrase, government fell prey “to its own delusions and fantasies.” At the far end of this road lay the madness of totalitarian government, where leaders tried to remold reality by force of personality and terror.

Nixon fell, but the American republic itself fell prey to the delusion that the far end of that road could never be reached. The remolding of America and the world through the force of personality and terror is what Trump offered the American electorate in 2024, after the Madman Theory had been put into practice in the violent theater of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. When a majority of voters decided to accept that this was just the right amount of crazy, they would have been mad not to expect an ever deeper derangement.

 

Chris Hedges: Trump The God

 Source: CHR

 

During the two years I spent writing “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” I encountered numerous mini-Trumps. These self-proclaimed pastors — very few had any formal religious training — preyed on the despair of their congregants. They were surrounded by sycophants and could not be questioned. They merged fact with fiction, peddled magical thinking and enriched themselves at the expense of their followers. They claimed their wealth and ostentatious lifestyle, including mansions and private jets, was a sign of being blessed. They insisted they were divinely inspired and anointed by God. They were, within their hermetic circles of their megachurches, omnipotent.

These cult pastors promised to use their omnipotence to crush the demonic forces that had created misery in the lives of their followers — unemployment and underemployment, evictions, bankruptcies, poverty, addiction, sexual and domestic abuse, and crippling despair. The more power the cult leaders possess — according to their followers — the more certain is a promised paradise. Cult leaders stand above the law. Those who desperately place their faith in them want them to be above the law.

Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious adulation and total obedience. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claim that Donald Trump is able to draw a “perfect map” of the Middle East, or White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s statement that Trump is always the “most well-read person in the room,” are two of innumerable examples of the abject fawning required by those in a cult leader’s inner circle. Blind loyalty matters more than competence.

Cult leaders are immune from rational and fact-based critiques amongst those who invest hope in them. This is why Trump’s hardcore followers have not abandoned him and will not abandon him. All the chatter about fissures in the MAGA universe misreads Trump cultists.

All cults are personality cults. They are extensions of the prejudices, worldview, personal style and ideas of the cult leader. Trump, with his faux “Trump crest,” revels in Louis XVI-inspired tasteless kitsch awash in gold Rococo and glittering chandeliers. The women in Trump’s court have “Mar-a-Lago Faces” – overinflated lips, taut, wrinkle-free skin, silicone gel-filled breast implants and chiseled cheekbones, capped off by gobs of make-up. They wear stiletto heels and garish outfits that Trump finds appealing. Trump’s men, who in his eyes must be telegenic and from “Central casting,” dress like 1950s advertising executives. They sport Trump-gifted Florsheim black shoes, specifically $145 Lexington Cap Toe Oxfords.

Cults impose dress codes that mirror the style and taste of the cult leader.

The followers of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, also known as Osho, dressed in red and orange robes, often combined with a turtleneck and beads. Heaven’s Gate members wore Nike Decade trainers and black jogging bottoms. Men in the Unification Church, known as Moonies, wore crisp white shirts and pressed slacks. Women wore dresses. They looked as if they were on their way to Sunday School.

Like Jim Jones, who convinced or forced over 900 of his followers — including 304 children aged 17 and younger — to die by ingesting a cyanide-laced drink, Trump is aggressively courting our collective suicide.

Trump dismisses the climate crisis as a hoax. He unilaterally withdraws from nuclear arms agreements and treaties. He antagonizes nuclear powers, such as Russia and China. He impetuously launches wars. He alienates and insults U.S. allies. He dreams of annexing Greenland and Cuba. He embraces holy crusade against Muslims. He attacks his political opponents as enemies and traitors, belittling them with crude insults. He slashes social programs designed to sustain the vulnerable. He expands an internal security apparatus — masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons — to terrorize the public. Cults do not nurture and protect. They subjugate, annihilate and destroy.

Trump employs the U.S. military without oversight or constraint. He presides, for this reason, over what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called a “world-destroying cult.” Lifton lists eight characteristics of “world-destroying cults” that implant what he calls “totalistic environments.”

These eight characteristics are:

1. Milieu control. The total control of communication within the group.

2. Loading the language. Using “groupspeak” to censor, edit and shut down criticism or opposing ideas. Followers must mouth the mindless Trump-approved clichés and cult jargon.

3. Demand for purity. An us-versus-them view of the world. Those who oppose the group are wrong, unenlightened and evil. They are irredeemable. They are contaminants. They must be eradicated. Any action is justified to protect this purity. The goal of all cult leaders is to widen and make irreconcilable social divisions.

4. Confession: The public confession of past wrongs. In the case of Trump supporters, this includes the disavowal, as U.S. Vice President JD Vance and others have done, of past criticism of Trump, with public admission of their former wrong-thinking.

5. Mystical manipulation. The belief that those in the group are specially chosen with a higher purpose. Those in Trump’s orbit act as though they are divinely elected. They convince themselves that they are not coerced to embrace Trump’s lies and vulgarities — or repeat cult jargon — but do so voluntarily.

6. Doctrine over person. The rewriting and fabrication of personal history to conform to Trump’s interpretation of reality.

7. Sacred Science. Trump’s absurdities — global temperatures are declining rather than rising, the noise from wind turbines cause cancer and ingesting disinfectants such as Lysol is an effective treatment for the coronavirus — are presented as grounded in science. This scientific patina means Trump’s ideas apply to everyone. Those who disagree are unscientific.

8. Dispensing of existence. Nonmembers are “lesser or unworthy beings.” Meaningful existence means being part of the Trump cult. Those outside the cult are worthless. They do not deserve moral consideration.

Trump is no different from past cult leaders, including Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles — the founders of the Heaven’s Gate cult — the Rev. Sun Myung Moon — who led the Unification Church — Credonia Mwerinde — who led the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda — Li Hongzhi — the founder of Falun Gong, and David Koresh, who led the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas.

Cult leaders are deeply insecure, which is why they lash out with fury at the slightest criticism. They mask this insecurity with cruelty, hypermasculinity and bombastic grandiosity. They are paranoid, amoral, emotionally crippled and physically abusive. Those around them, including children, are objects to be manipulated for their enrichment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment.

Cults are characterized by pedophilia and sexual abuse. Those, including Trump, who were frequently in the orbit of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, replicated the abuse endemic in cults.

“People’s Temple children were frequently sexually abused,” writes Margaret Singer in “Cults In Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace.” “While the group was still in California, teenage girls as young as fifteen had to provide sex for influential people courted by Jones. A supervisor of children at Jonestown had a history of child sexual abuse, and Jones himself assaulted some of the children. If husbands and wives were caught talking privately during a meeting, their daughters were forced to masturbate publicly or to have sex with someone the family didn’t like before the entire Jonestown population, children as well as adults.”

Cults, Singer writes, are “a mirror of what is inside the cult leader.”

“He has no restraints on him,” she writes of the cult leader:

    He can make his fantasies and desires come alive in the world he creates around him. He can lead people to do his bidding. He can make the surrounding world really his world. What most cult leaders achieve is akin to the fantasies of a child at play, creating a world with toys and utensils. In that play world, the child feels omnipotent and creates a realm of his own for a few minutes or a few hours. He moves the toy dolls about. They do his bidding. They speak his words back to him. He punishes them any way he wants. He is all-powerful and makes his fantasy come alive. When I see the sand tables and the collections of toys some child therapists have in their offices, I think that a cult leader must look about and place people in his created world much as the child creates on the sand table a world that reflects his or her desires and fantasies. The difference is that the cult leader has actual humans doing his bidding as he makes a world around him that springs from inside his own head.

The language of the cult leader is rooted in verbal confusion. Lies, conspiracy theories, outlandish ideas and contradictory statements, often made in the same statement or only minutes apart, paralyzing those attempting to read the cult leader rationally. Absurdism is the point. The cult leader does not take his or her statements seriously. They often deny ever making them, although they are documented. Lies and truth are irrelevant. The cult leader is not seeking to impart information or truth. The cult leader is seeking to appeal to the emotional needs of cult members.

“Hitler kept his enemies in a state of constant confusion and diplomatic upheaval,” Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control and Menticide.” “They never knew what this unpredictable madman was going to do next. Hitler was never logical, because he knew that that was what he was expected to be. Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot – it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason. While the enemy is still searching for a reasonable counterargument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault him with another.”

It does not matter how many lies uttered by Trump are meticulously documented. It does not matter that Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself by an estimated $1.4 billion over the last year, according to Forbes. It does not matter that he is inept, lazy and ignorant. It does not matter that he stumbles from one disaster to the next, from tariffs, to the war on Iran.

The traditional establishment, whose credibility has been destroyed because of its betrayal of the working class and subservience to the billionaire class and corporations, has little power over Trump’s supporters. Their vitriol only increases his popularity. Political cults are the bastard children of a failed liberalism. Trump’s approval rating may be at around 40 percent, as of April 20 — according to an average of multiple polls collated by The New York Times — but his base remains unmovable.

The Democratic Party, rather than pivot to address the social inequality and abandonment of the working class — which it helped orchestrate — has hit upon tax cuts as a road to regaining power. It will, once again, reduce our social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It will offer no reforms to rectify our failed democracy. This is a gift to Trump and his followers. By refusing to acknowledge responsibility for inequality and proposing programs to ameliorate the suffering it has caused, Democrats engage in the same kind of magical thinking as Trump cultists.

There is no way out of this political dysfunction unless popular movements rise to cripple the machinery of government and commerce on behalf of a betrayed public. But time is running out. Trump and his goons are serious about invaliding or cancelling the midterm elections if they perceive defeat. If that happens, the cult of Trump will be unassailable.

 

Musings

 

Musings

 

Professor Steve Keen: “You Have No Idea What’s Coming”

 

 

  

The economist who predicted the 2008 financial crash reveals why the Iran war is not just about oil prices but is about to hit the global food supply within months. Professor Steve Keen explains that 20 to 30 percent of the world's fertiliser passes through the Strait of Hormuz, a 21-kilometre chokepoint that Iran now controls, and that without fertiliser the planet can only support between one and two billion people.

He warns that India could run out of fertiliser within two to three months, triggering a famine in a country of over a billion people, and that global food production could fall by 10 to 25 percent, creating a famine the world has never experienced before. He reveals that Australia has only 30 days of oil supply, meaning food cannot get from farms to cities once that runs out.

Musings

 

The American Christian Death Cult

 

We live in a twilight world......

Trump Has No Soul by Chris Hedges

 

Source: Chris Hedges Report

The most profound realities of human existence are often the ones that can never be measured or quantified. Wisdom. Beauty. Truth. Compassion. Courage. Love. Loneliness. Grief. The struggle to face our own mortality. A life of meaning.

But perhaps the greatest conundrum is the concept of a soul. Do we have a soul? Do societies have souls? And, most basically, what is a soul?

Philosophers and theologians, including Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Arthur Schopenhauer, have all grappled with the concept of a soul, with Schopenhauer preferring to define the mystical force within us as will. Sigmund Freud used the Greek word psyche. But most have accepted, whatever the definition, some version of a soul’s existence.

While the concept of the soul is opaque, soullessness is not. Soullessness means something inside of us is dead. Basic human feelings and connections are shut down. Those without souls lack empathy. I saw the soulless in war. Those so calcified inside they kill without any demonstrable feeling or remorse.

The soulless exist in a state of insatiable self-worship. The idol they have erected to themselves must be constantly fed. It demands a never-ending stream of victims. It demands abject obedience and subservience, publicly on display at Trump cabinet meetings.

Psychologists, I expect, would define the soulless as psychopathic.

I write this not to get into an esoteric debate about the soul, but to warn what happens when those without souls seize power. I want to write about what is lost and the consequences of that loss. I want to caution you that death, our death — as individuals and as a collective — mean nothing to those without souls.

This makes the soulless very, very dangerous.

Those who lack souls have no concept of their own limitations. They feed off a bottomless and self-delusional optimism, giving to their cruelest deeds and bitterest defeats, the patina of goodness, success and morality.

Those without souls — as Paul Woodruff writes in his small masterpiece “Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue” — do not have the capacity for reverence, awe, respect and shame. They believe they are gods.

The soulless cannot respond rationally to reality. They live in self-constructed echo chambers. They hear only their own voice. Civic, familial, legal and religious rituals and ceremonies that transport those with souls into the realm of the sacred, into a space where we acknowledge our shared humanity, forcing us, at least for a moment, to humble ourselves, are meaningless to those without souls. Those without souls cannot see because they cannot feel.

The soulless, enslaved by narcissism, greed, a lust for power and hedonism, cannot make moral choices. Moral choices for them do not exist. Truth and falsehoods are identical. Life is transactional. Is it good for me? Does it make me feel omnipotent? Does it give me pleasure? This stunted existence banishes them from the moral universe.

Human beings, including children, are commodities to the soulless, objects to exploit for pleasure or profit or both. We saw this soullessness displayed in the Epstein Files. And it was not only Epstein. Huge sections of our ruling class including billionaires, Wall Street financiers, university presidents, philanthropists, celebrities, Republicans, Democrats and media personalities, consider us worthless.

Thucydides understood. Reverence is not a religious virtue but a moral virtue. Woodruff went so far as to define it as a political virtue. Reverence for shared ideals, Woodruff writes, is the only thing that can bind us together. It is the only attribute that ensures mutual trust. Reverence allows us to remember what it means to be human. It reminds us that there are forces we cannot control, forces that we will never understand, forces of life that we did not create and must honor and protect — including the natural world — and forces that allow us moments of transcendence, or what in religious terms, we call grace.

“If you desire peace in the world, do not pray that everyone share your beliefs,” Woodruff writes. “Pray instead that all may be reverent.”

Trump’s celebration of himself is made manifest in his stunted vocabulary of superlatives and his rebranding of national monuments. He tears down the East Wing to construct his gaudy and oversized $400 million ballroom. He proposes a 250-foot-tall memorial arch, adorned with gilded statues and eagles, in honor of himself, an arch that will be bigger than the Arch of Triumph erected by North Korean dictator Kim II Sung in Pyongyang. He is planning a “National Garden of American Heroes” that will include life-size statues of celebrities, sports figures, political and artistic figures deemed by Trump to be politically correct, along with, of course, himself. His face adorns the sides of federal buildings on huge, well-lit banners. He changed the name of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts to the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. He added his name to the headquarters of the U.S. Institute of Peace. He has announced a new fleet of U.S. naval vessels called Trump-class battleships.

These are monuments not only to Trump, but to a perverted ethic, to the insatiable self-worship that defines the inner void of the soulless. Monuments, houses of worship and national shrines dedicated to justice, self-sacrifice and equality, which demand from us humility and introspection, which require the capacity for reverence, mystify the soulless.

The soulless have no sense of aesthetics. They have no sense of balance, symmetry and proportion. The bigger, the gaudier, the more encrusted in gold leaf, the better. They seek to shut out everything and everyone else, to herd us with offerings to the feet of Moloch.

When the soulless wage war it is part of this perverted drive to build a monument to themselves. When war goes badly, as it is going in Iran, the soulless, unable to read reality, demand greater levels of violence and destruction. The more they fail, the more they are convinced everyone has betrayed them, the more they descend into a tyrannical rage.

Trump, potentially facing a humiliating debacle in Iran, will lash out like a wounded beast. It does not matter how many suffer and die. It does not matter what weapons, including nuclear weapons, must be employed. He must triumph, or at least appear to triumph.

“Fathers and teachers, I ponder, ‘What is hell?’” Father Zossima asks in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” “I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

This is the plight of the soulless. They seek, in their misery, to make their hell our own.

A Planetary Turning Point w/Sebastian Dienst

 

17 Reasons to Tell Trump: “You’re Fired!” by Ralph Nader

Source: Common Dreams

Tyrant Trump’s favorite snarl is “You’re Fired!” That was his bellow on “The Apprentice” television program. Subsequently, he told hundreds of thousands of federal civil servants and contractors, “You’re Fired!” Shame on the pitiful Democratic Party that allowed him to regain the presidency last year.

It is long overdue for the Democrats in Congress to lay the groundwork for impeaching President Donald Trump and removing him from office. Trump provides them with the impeachable evidence openly and brazenly every day. No president in history has ever declared that “then I have Article II, where I have the right to do anything I want as president.” No president has ever dared to say, as did Trump in an interview with Reuters on January 15, 2026, that “…when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election” and meant it.

Based on their detailed declaration against King George III in the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the congressional safeguards in the Constitution drafted in 1787, our Founders, were they members of Congress today, would unanimously vote articles of impeachment against Trump for rampant constitutional lawlessness.

Here are 17 articles of Impeachment against dictator Trump that many constitutional law scholars would endorse, drafted by constitutional law specialist and practitioner, Bruce Fein. (For the full text of the articles of Impeachment, here.)

ARTICLE 1—WAR POWER-MURDER-PIRACY

ARTICLE 2—MILITARIZATION OF DOMESTIC LAW ENFORCEMENT

ARTICLE 3—SERIAL UNCONSTITUTIONAL DETENTIONS AND DEPORTATIONS

ARTICLE 4—BRIBERY

ARTICLE 5—RETALIATION AGAINST CONSTITUTIONALLY PROTECTED SPEECH OR ASSOCIATION

ARTICLE 6—ABUSE OF THE PARDON POWER—SABOTAGING THE RULE OF LAW

ARTICLE 7—ILLEGALLY CRIPPLING OR DEFUNDING PROGRAMS TO PROTECT CONSUMERS, THE NEEDY, WORKERS, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

ARTICLE 8—USURPATION OF THE CONGRESSIONAL POWER OF THE PURSE

ARTICLE 9—CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS—SECRET GOVERNMENT

ARTICLE 10—PERVERTING LAW ENFORCEMENT TO PERSECUTE POLITICAL OPPONENTS AND BENEFIT FRIENDS

ARTICLE 11—SUSPENDING OR DISPENSING WITH LAWS

ARTICLE 12—FLOUTING SECTION 1 OF THE 14TH AMENDMENT

ARTICLE 13—SPECIOUS NATIONAL EMERGENCY—FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION DECLARATIONS

ARTICLE 14—DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN EMOLUMENTS CLAUSES

ARTICLE 15—CHRONIC DECEIT AIMING AT DICTATORSHIP

ARTICLE 16—TREASON

ARTICLE 17—MEGALOMANIA-HUBRIS

Already, a growing majority of the American people want Trump Impeached. They are feeling the impact where they live, work, and raise their families of Trump’s dictatorial, corporatist regime, which is endangering, weakening, and wrecking America! The criminal, illegal, unconstitutional war against Iran and the continuing full backing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocide against the Palestinians and the Israeli bombing of Lebanon’s civilian population and occupying southern Lebanon will only increase the hardships on the American people. US soldiers are also being ordered to illegally obey illegal orders. Six Members of Congress who served in the military issued a video statement that said, “You must refuse illegal orders.” Representatives said in the video, “No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

Send these articles of Impeachment with your own thoughts and demands to your two senators and your representative by letter, email, or voicemail. (The Congressional switchboard number is 202-224-3121). You can also call local congressional offices to voice your concerns to your member of Congress. Ask them when will they exercise their constitutional duties. What further criminal outrage, program, and police state power will move them to catch up with the demands of the people back home?

Ask these lawmakers if they are waiting for Trump to use the Insurrection Act to order the military to seize the state voting machinery and repress the vote in the contested states or districts? He has already noted this limitless power in his first term and more recently.

There are only 535 members of Congress. Flood them with your demands to literally save our Republic and the Constitution for which it stands. Otherwise, WITH TRUMP AND HIS DANGEROUSLY UNSTABLE PERSONALITY, IT IS ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE, MUCH WORSE, HERE AND ABROAD.

Take charge, people, one by one, citizen group by citizen group! Use your sovereign power under the Constitution.

FIND YOUR STATE REP HERE & EMAIL THE 17 ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT -  FIGHTING FOR & DEFENDING OUR DEMOCRACY IS A CRITICAL NATIONAL EMERGENCY!!

The Chris Hedges Report: The Trillion Dollar War Machine

 

 

 The military-industrial-complex has grown into a monster so influential and powerful that even its earliest critics likely never foresaw its evolution. Where will it go from here, and can anything stop it? 

Susan Abulhawa: Rage Is a Responsibility, Resistance Is a Right

 

0:00 – Intro 2:05 – Why Susan went to Gaza 6:15 – Gaza as the future of humanity 10:42 – The psychology of helplessness & control 16:30 – Why rage is a responsibility 22:45 – Refusing euphemisms: naming genocide 28:10 – Roots vs. “death technology” 34:40 – Resistance and the right to fight back 42:12 – Betrayal and Arab complicity 48:25 – What sustains hope in Gaza 53:50 – Channeling rage into responsibility 1:00:20 – Susan’s upcoming books & Gaza anthology 1:05:00 – Closing reflections