Mike 03
Mike 03's JournalLately, some dreams about DU
I think because I'm spending so much time here. They always are short and usually involve me making a mistake, or fearing making a mistake, like posting an OP and forgetting to post the link, or forgetting to Rec a post, or posting a duplicate, or making a post and seeing someone else has made the exact same post right before I did and racing to delete it and for some reason being unable to delete it... It's silly and strange, but I'm serious.
More generally, I still have dreams about college, specifically cutting classes and flunking tests, which is incredibly strange because I never cut classes and did well on exams. I also have dreams about not being able to find a place that I'm looking for. I also have a recurring dream that I'm house-sitting in a home that is so big that I can't really get a handle on the house. One time the house had a huge mall in it. Other times, the house has bridges and tropical forests inside it. The last time I had this dream, there were a lot of large dogs in the house. Sometimes I just get lost inside the house.
I wonder what an expert on dreams would say about some of those recurring dreams. Anxiety, I guess.
Yes, I'm very concerned about the RW Christian "machine" that
takes credit for elevating Trump (even at the expense of their other darling, Ted Cruz, whom they abandoned in a second for Trump). They are global and incredibly well funded, and pundits keep declaring them dead but they are not even close to it.
Remember, those organizations have their own media empire and it cannot be shamed into changing. The only hope is to deplatform it financially by making their congregants aware of how deceptive the teachings are. I think good Christians and their organizations need to take them on, and some are.
I appreciate what you're saying.
I think Trump is an inherently amoral man whose amorality leads him to take immoral actions.
But then one has to grapple with the sadistic element. He learns that something is hurting people, and he either continues to do it or makes it worse. That's where the immorality comes in. In his mind he is exacting revenge against people who don't appreciate him. So now we've added anger to the mix. At that point, IMO, his behavior transmogrifies into actual immorality. But if you asked him about it, he'd just shrug and say "they deserve it."
In other words, I don't think he appreciates that his actions are immoral. I'm not even sure he is capable of judging whether or not his own behavior is moral or immoral.
Someone like Stephen Miller is easier to figure out because he's just immoral.
I'm really glad he said this.
For anyone who doesn't know, Miles Taylor has been "out" doing very important interviews and editorials since mid August. He didn't just materialize today and say, "Hello there, I am Anonymous!"
He did exactly what he promised to do in his book. He said he would "make himself known" before the election, and he made himself known more than two months ago. And he brought other people along with him. Just not Kirstjen Nielsen, which some of us were hoping for.
We have to keep doing our part, not just dump it all on Joe and Kamala.
I'll be supporting legal organizations going after the Christian Nationalists. They are extremely powerful and while organizations are hawking the White Supremacists and "militias", not enough people IMO are concerned about the Christian Nationalists, who are better funded, more influential and more dangerous. That movement is global now.
We have to be more like the Republicans in terms of playing the long game. Our job can't be over after the votes are counted. We have to be patient and persistent and put up a fight.
Can the GOP divorce itself from these most powerful and influential interests?
They have some tough decisions to make. The money flows into the GOP from corporate interests but also the Far Right Christian organizations that have amassed tons of money and use the carrot and stick approach. If you go against them, you are going to experience pain. This mix of pressure and ostracism is one of the key reasons the Republicans have moved so far to the right. And it is now a global phenomenon.
Two superb books on this topic:
Unholy by Sarah Posner
The Power Worshippers by Katherine Stewart
Dasheng DTC3X N95 particulate respirator
They come in boxes of 30 and the people I've given them to say they fit well and are more comfortable than the (hard to find) 3M N95s. They are also NIOSH N95 approved.
I learned about them from a tip from another DUer and was very happy to see they were not hard to find. I found them on Amazon but they are/were also available on other websites.
One downside to the Dashengs is that they are not individually wrapped.
I also think 4 years of excruciating anxiety are going to pour out of me
too if we win this. But there will also be a lot of happiness and gratitude. Our country's self-respect will be back. We'll be in good hands. But we have to have Joe's and Kamala's backs, too. Because this won't be easy.
Review of "Twilight of the Gods" by Ian Toll, Vol. 3 of his Pacific War trilogy (NYT)
New York Times
Review by (historian) Mark Perry
Excerpt: (I tried to select the 4 most important paragraphs, which are the last)
This makes Toll the fitting inheritor of a tradition of writing that began with the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who in 1942 suggested to Franklin Roosevelt that he be assigned to document the Navy’s World War II battles as a “seagoing historiographer.” Unlike the Army, which sponsored the 78 invaluable volumes of “U.S. Army in World War II,” the Navy has never been keenly interested in its own history, which is why it hesitantly acquiesced to Morison’s request, and only because Roosevelt thought it a good idea. The Navy put Morison in uniform, made him a lieutenant commander, then dispatched him to the North Atlantic and Pacific as their official historian. While Morison’s resulting 15-volume “History of United States Naval Operations in World War II” is celebrated as classic and definitive, it is neither. Rather, it is overly triumphalist — and long. Toll’s trilogy is a departure: It is exhaustive and authoritative and it shows the Navy in World War II as it really was, warts and all.
But no history of the Pacific War can be complete without presenting an intimate knowledge of Japanese naval and political decision-making. Toll does this too, showing a tactile command of the subject that puts Japan’s war in its proper perspective — as an unnecessary fight that, in retrospect, looks like a suicide mission. For the first five decades after the end of World War II, American historians debated whether the turning point in the Pacific War resulted from the Japanese Imperial Navy’s defeat at the Battle of Midway (the preferred choice) or the Marine Corps victory at Guadalcanal — which has recently gained an increasing number of adherents.
Still, time, reflection and a growing appreciation for the sheer weight of American resources (and now Toll’s three-volume work) have once again shifted that debate. Japan lost the Pacific War, as Toll suggests, from the moment the first bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor. In the war’s aftermath, the Japanese people, Toll writes, realized this when it was revealed that many of those who took them to war not only foresaw, but actually predicted, its outcome — and went to war anyway. The decision, Toll writes, was based on the assumption that the American people were too “soft” to wage war and, once attacked, would look for a way out. It was the most egregiously false assumption in the history of warfare — as Toll’s trilogy eloquently shows.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/28/books/review/twilight-of-the-gods-ian-w-toll.html?searchResultPosition=3
Book information:
Mark Perry is the author of 10 books, including “The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur.”
TWILIGHT OF THE GODS
War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945
By Ian W. Toll
Illustrated. 944 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $40.
From Aug 28
"The median age of Fox News viewers is 65"
Getting away from the median doesn’t change the picture much. More than half of the Fox News audience is older than 65. If you go by raw numbers, of the 3.3 million households taking in Sean Hannity’s show on a nightly basis in 2018, just south of 2 million would have been senior citizens.
https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/how-old-is-the-average-fox-news-viewer-in-america.html/
Profile Information
Gender: MaleHometown: Modesto California
Home country: United States
Current location: Arizona
Member since: Mon Oct 27, 2008, 06:14 PM
Number of posts: 16,616
