Invisible Hands Make Evil Magic

 

A provision tucked into the proposed budget passed by the North Carolina House of Representatives last week would apply only to Buncombe and to Watauga counties. The provision would create an exemption from local codes for state building projects at UNC-Asheville and Appalachian State University -- only, of all the universities in the state.

According to Jack Evans in the Asheville Watchdog, the exemption provision first applied uniquely only to UNC-A; Watauga got added mysteriously as "part of a package" when the bill went through amendments in the House Appropriations Committee.

There's currently a controversy going on in Buncombe over UNC-A's administration's announcement earlier this year that it will seek to tear down a wooded area on campus in pursuit of an as-yet-unannounced project, which triggered a movement among Asheville voters to quash the development via zoning laws. Oops. This secret budget provision takes care of that -- by rendering public opinion, let alone local development ordinances, of no consequence whatsoever.

Bring It

 

Yellowstone National Park is actually a very active supervolcano that last blew its top some 631,000 years ago, creating the current caldera that is approximately 45 miles wide in one place and 30 miles in another, taking up space in three Western states -- Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana -- and making the Yellowstone supervolcano one of the biggest in the world. Hyper-active with hot spots, geysers and bubbling mud and other emanations. The ground under Yellowstone is constantly deforming, swelling up inches and then declining, as though the supervolcano were breathing deep, like an old man trying to calm himself down. Two magma chambers underlie Yellowstone roughly 5-7 miles underground, each measuring 30-plus miles across.

If Yellowstone exploded it would put enough ash into the air to stop all air travel, blot out the sun world-wide, kill most plant life including food crops, introduce a perpetual winter, and it would end Donald J. Trump. Like maybe nothing else can. Congress is worthless. The Supreme Court is squishy, the rest of the judiciary under constant threat.

Like maybe nothing else can.  Well, there's one thing -- a reconstituted Congress. That's the midterm challenge for next year. Put Virginia Foxx back in the god-blessed minority.

Lotta Love For Doomsday

The English Pilgrims who famously landed at Plymouth Rock were essentially a doomsday cult.

--Jane Borden, "Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America"

Borden attributes to those Pilgrims seven key elements of belief that have shaped America. I'm not saying which of these seven apply very much to moi, but some do. Because I evolved from the same social reality as everyone else. Our history shapes our propensity for self-destruction. (I've used as a source an interview with Borden by Paul Rosenberg in Salon.)

1. "Our innate desire for a strongman to fix our problems and punish those who aggrieve us."

The story so far: "A small Edenic community is under threat and unable to save itself. The police are inept. The politicians are corrupt. What are we going to do? Then suddenly out of nowhere appears this outsider, or sometimes this loner from within the community. This person saves the community through violence."

 2. "The temptation to feel chosen."

The idea of being a chosen people.

The whole of exceptionalism.

God wants us to help get there, and we have the ability to do so.

If we listen to and follow our Fathers.

3. "Both knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism."

"Classic American conspiracy theory always has an evil leader or group of leaders behind it, who are unfathomably powerful, typically world leaders -- a.k.a., the story of the Antichrist. These evildoers are also brainiacs, apparently incredibly intelligent. They use that intelligence — which is part of what corrupted them — to prey on more simpleminded folk who are virtuous."

But there's something the simpleminded folk can do about it, dammit.

 

After all, the word protest is the base of Protestant.

4. "Our impulse to buy and sell salvation on the open market."

"The Puritans were also obsessed with self-investigation. They literally made themselves sick with the practice -- mostly self-investigating to figure out if they were chosen. They believed no one knew who was and wasn't chosen, but they were pretty sure they were, and that they could find out if they just looked within. So these trials of self-investigation have always been with us and self-help is now a $5 billion industry."

5.  "Hard work is holy, while idleness is a sin."

"This idea that work is holy became a justification for acquisitiveness. Because if you're working a lot to show how much you love God, you're naturally going to accrue wealth. Isn't that wealth just a sign also that God loves you in turn? And if that's true, wouldn't it also be true that those who don't have money are not loved by God, or are not working enough to worship God?"

Sin should be punished, not rewarded. The down-and-out caused their own poverty. 

The flipside -- the wealthy deserve what they have.

"I believe the American dream has become a pyramid scheme. I don't think it was always that way. I think the American dream used to be realizable by a huge and booming middle class, and that's been pilfered. We see this in a variety of ways — lobbying for tax breaks and removing regulations for risky behavior, moving manufacturing overseas. All these things that facilitated the redistribution of wealth occurred, in my opinion, because of this doctrine that work is holy and therefore wealth is a sign of being chosen and poverty is a sign of sin."

6. "How quickly and easily we fall into us-versus-them thinking."

"The first thing to acknowledge is that cults increase during times of crisis. Times of technological upheaval, social upheaval, general crisis, natural disasters -- all these things that cause someone's world to wobble and shift can lead us to cult-like thinking."

"When cult-like thinking is being utilized, it's usually by a demagogue who's just trying to activate people to behave in a way that benefits the person pushing those buttons."

"We evolved in kin-based communities, usually with one patriarch or small group of patriarchs in charge. Those kin-based communities had an instinct to fear outsiders, and they managed firm boundaries. Kin-based communities were and are very cult-like. We evolved as a species in these kinds of groups."

7. "An innate need for order, which makes us vulnerable to anyone screaming, 'Chaos!' and then offering control."

Sadist

 

Last Friday, what's left of Trump's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) slammed the door in North Carolina's face, saying that Gov. Josh Stein's request for an extension of 100% of the federal cost share for debris removal and emergency protective measures in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene were "not warranted."

The president and his henchmen have swept away so much that was good about the Federal government. They did so with relish, with obvious joy at the destruction. The man himself always gloats when he causes others much pain. Take his Oval Office ambushes of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Cyril Ramaphosa, meant to inflict the maximum of embarrassment and discomfort and actual anguish. That's what he loves: the embarrassment and discomfort and actual anguish of others.

We call that sadism, the delight in the pain that can be induced in others. I have little capacity for understanding why a man this twisted has become the idol of millions, worshipped not for his good deeds but for the size of other people's misery. Until we vote. Until we vote.

Until we vote I go to my garden and bury my hands in soil. On my knees I take care of plants. But don't be fooled by my kneeling posture, because I am only bending to nurture, not bending to the sadist, this evil, incredibly evil man. I am praying to all the earth gods and the sky gods to give me and every other resister in this nation the resolve to stand when the time comes and vote against every person who holds allegiance to that man by belonging to the same sadist party.

I know no other way to salvage any goodness in this world.

Crooked as a Dog's Hind Leg

 

Reporting by David Yaffe-Bellany and Eric Lipton:

STERLING, Va.President Trump gathered Thursday evening at his Virginia golf club with the highest-paying customers of his personal cryptocurrency, promising that he would promote the crypto industry from the White House as protesters outside condemned the event as a historic corruption of the presidency.

The gala dinner held at the Trump National Golf Club in suburban Washington, where Mr. Trump flew from the White House on a military helicopter, turned into an extraordinary spectacle as hundreds of guests arrived, many having flown to the United States from overseas.

At the club’s entrance, the guests were greeted by dozens of protesters chanting “shame, shame, shame.”

It was a spectacle that could only have happened in the era of Donald J. Trump. Several of the dinner guests, in interviews with The New York Times, said that they attended the event with the explicit intent of influencing Mr. Trump and U.S. financial regulations....

Mr. Trump and his business partners organized the dinner to promote sales of his $TRUMP cryptocurrency, a memecoin launched just days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration. A memecoin is a type of digital currency tied to an online joke or mascot; it typically has no function beyond speculation. But Mr. Trump’s coins have become a vehicle for investors, including many foreigners, to funnel money to his family....

Maybe 2026 Will Be the Year of the Blue Collar

 

I tend to think that a lot of the Democrats’ problems can be solved through candidate recruitment, and just recruiting people who come from the communities that they want to represent, who sort of are fluent in the cultural norms of the places that they come from.

--Michelle Goldberg

Dan Osborn

Goldberg brought Nebraskan Dan Osborn to my attention. A tough ex-Navy and rock-hard union man whose social compact virtues make him also attractive to the Left (in a state where there's barely any Left left) -- he's liberal on abortion and on the rights of organized labor -- yet he ran for Federal office as a hard-nosed critic of both Democratic and Republican machines and said he agreed with Trump about the border and about confronting China. He presented as an irritable independent, a somewhat shocking emanation of working-class anger, running for US Senate in Nebraska in 2024 against a two-term Republican incumbent, Deb Fischer. No one took him seriously at first. The Democratic Party was initially more than merely cool toward him, but with no Democratic candidate on the ballot, the Party reportedly offered to endorse Osborn. Osborn rejected it. His determination not to be beholden to any damn clique was the final straw for the Democratic Party establishment, but many registered Democrats nevertheless discreetly flocked to his campaign. Osborn became a phenomenal money-raiser -- almost $8 million, just from out-of-state donors alone. How did he do that? (And by the way and to give away the ending, Osborn scared the wits out of Sen. Fischer and took 46.52% of the vote in 2024. He's already formed a campaign to try again in '26 against the other incumbent Republican Senator, Pete Ricketts.) 

Osborn set out to hold a series of at least two and possibly three in-person events in every single county in Nebraska, getting out among the people in a way his Republican opponent never did. The breakthrough came in September, in the heat of the campaign. A new poll suddenly put Osborn ahead of Fischer, turning a lot of heads. Boom! Osborn is appearing in a lengthy interview on MSNBC, and everybody wants to get him on camera. Money came in.

A beneficent cash-flow allows you to compete, and Osborn didn't pull punches in his TV ads.

Not only is Osborn running again in '26 -- a recent 2025 poll showed him leading the incumbent Ricketts -- but he's also now financing other authentic working-class candidates with a new PAC, the Working Class Heroes Fund, aimed at candidate recruitment, whether Republican, Independent, or Democratic. The Fund is "dedicated to uniting and mobilizing working people across party lines to give the working class a seat at the table" (website).

 

Shit-Canning Donald J. Trump

 

The most common modern usage of “86” is as a verb, meaning to throw out, dismiss or eject. Customers who are tossed out of an establishment for being too drunk, having a history of walking out on the check or generally acting obnoxious, for example, are said to be 86’d.

--"What Does '86' Mean?" 

Former FBI Director James Comey took a photo of some shells arranged on a beach and understood it as a political message about Donald J. Trump. He posted the picture. The MAGA crowd went nuts, including Watauga Watch's own resident troll Wolf's Head. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, who oversees the Secret Service, described the post on Thursday as a “threat” and a call to assassinate Trump. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said on Fox News that Comey should be put behind bars. By Friday, the Secret Service had launched an investigation and interviewed Comey in D.C. FBI Director Kash Patel said his agency would “provide all necessary support” as part of the investigation.

The accusations are preposterous bullshit. This isn't about anything but the suppression of speech and Trump's "retribution" tour to get even with people who have crossed him or proved insufficiently subservient.

Pot, meet kettle. Last year Trump posted a video on social media showing an image of President Joe Biden tied up in the back of a truck, a much more direct and palpable threat of violence against a sitting president. Did the Biden Justice Department rush to open an investigation over that speech?

Bi-partisanship Worth Praise

 

I'm a partisan Democrat. Never tried to deny it. My druthers are totally out in the open. But I hope I'm not a "partisan hack" -- one of those robotic hatchet-men who can always be depended on to cheerlead the Party, no matter how wack, and attack the other side, no matter how sensible and sane. Partisan as I am, I know a really good bi-partisan deed when I see one.

The best recent example: The agreement between the Watauga County Commission and the Boone Town Council to build a bridge at Brookshire Park to link the county's walking path with the Town's 30 acres of public land, which will have trails and plantings along the South Fork of the New River. A good idea, well executed.

Chair Braxton Eggers led the initiative on the County Commission, and Boone Mayor Pro Tem Dalton George led the Town Council. This proposed new infrastructure will benefit the wide population who enjoy the outdoors at Brookshire Park and the adjacent soccer fields.