October 19, 2025

If a Substack falls into cyberspace and nobody reads it, is it really there? What I learned from an X tweet about Pam Bondi that had over 58,000 vists after Gavin Newsom quoted it. By Hal M. Brown

Okay, this Sunday afternoon post is an indulgence and a bit of self-promotion. It is about a missed opportunity I had to, putting it bluntly, get more people to subscribe to my Substack. My title here is, of course, a version of the well known philosophical question “if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” It can be answered differently depending on how one defines sound. It could be a physical event like a tree falling or something you percieve like the message of a Substack.

I am writing this as a follow-up to an addendum I posted on this morning’s Substack under the topic:

This is what I posted:

I just came across this from something I posted on Twitter in August:

I don’t know how Gov. Newsom found it. It was in response to my tweet:

Amazingly over 58,000 people viewed it. I rarely post on X. I never looked at how many people viewed that tweet.

Here are the replies to the X tweet from August.

This may not seem like a lot, but it is probably a record number for anything I ever tweeted.

While I was really pleased so many people saw my image and that Gavin Newsom was one of them, and of course that he saw fit to quote it with his own comment, I wish in retrospect that I’d included this magic link:

I have no way of knowing how many, if any, new subcribers, and eventually how many regular readers I would have gotten if I’d done this. After all, of 58,000 people who saw my tweet I’d assume a few of them would have been curious enough to check it out and maybe liked what they saw enough to both subscribe and read what I wrote on a regular basis. Who knows? I may have gotten 10 regular readers, 100, or none. Since many people subscribe to 50, 100, or more Substacks I doubt they read them all.

Looking back, had I known how many people, including Gov. Newsom, would have seen that tweet I would have done a better job with the illustration of Pam Bondi. For one thing I would have used the hat from a real Washington, DC police chief instead of a regular police officers hat.

I might have embellished her jacket with a badge too.

After all, why not? If anyone is full of themselves it is Chief Pam Bondi. If she decided to wear a unform it might look like these:

The Honorable Pamela Jo Bondi, the U.S. Attorney General who is the chief law enforcement officer of the federal government and who oversees the Department of Justice which includes the FBI, and who also serve as the principal legal advisor to the President of the United States, hasn’t gotten my attention since she visted my (supposedly burning) city of Portland earlier this month and afterwards said “I was in Portland and had the chance to visit with the governor of Oregon and also the mayor there in town, and they are absolutely covering up the terrorism that is hitting their streets.”

Who knows what tomrrow will bring? She competes with Pete Hegseth, who actually has a much larger contingent of people with guns he can order around, for the limelight so it’s anybody’s guess what she’ll do to outdo the guy who can bomb boats in the Caribbean.

This is some serious sh*t! We know it, Robert DeNiro knows it, but when will the country hit a critical mass? By Hal M. Brown

As I was thinking of what to include in this Substack Robert DeNiro was praising Leticia James for saying “fuck you” to Trump. He said that live on national TV. I wish his being a vocal spokesperson telling it like it is was enough. I wish it could be one person. I mean, 82 year old Robert “Raging Bull” DeNiro (my age) for God’s sake! It should be enough!

Read previous Substacks

Now let’s get into some science, hard science and social science:

There are several defintions of “critical mass.”

The smallest mass of a fissionable material that will sustain a nuclear chain reaction at a constant level.
The total mass of matter needed to generate sufficient gravitational force to halt the current expansion of the universe.
An amount or level needed for a specific result or new action to occur.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition • More at Wordnik

If you’re old enough you probably remember the ping pong ball experiment. This simulates a nuclear fission chain reaction using mousetraps and ping pong balls. Each trap represents a fissile atom and the balls represent neutrons. When a ball is dropped onto a trap, it triggers a chain reaction, demonstrating how one fission event can lead to many more, similar to a nuclear explosion. The photos on the top of the page are from this website.

Consider that each ping pong ball on a mousetrap represents a million Americans. In the first photo, pre-Trump 47, they are at rest going about their daily lives. Then Trump becomes president and he finally does something so egregiously horrible that it sets them off. That’s when the chain reaction occurs. It reaction isn’t the No Kings protests yesterday. Alas, seven million people mobilizing to protest isn’t enough. These are people that were by and large anti-Trump and against MAGA and the whole Project 2025 agenda.

For the nuclear triggering event people like the shit-faced grinning sniveling sycophant Mike Johnson, who said that “if Trump were a king America would be open right now” ( and Jonathan LeMire called it B.S.) would need to be convinced.

This ideally would lead to defintion number 3 of critical mass:

There may or may not be such a trigger. If there is I think it will have to be some serious shit.

The action would, of course, be for Trump somehow to be dethroned and American democracy to be restored.

You know this needs to happen. Robert DeNiro, who also ended his interview on MSNBC saying that Trump had no plans to leave the White House no matter what happens in 2028, also knows this.

My friend Sabrina Haake knows it even though she may not have been recognizable at the Chicago No Kings protest dressed in a bear costume.

Excerpt:

This week, blind to Constitutional law and US history, Trump’s Border Czar Tom Homan said that protests at ICE raids “could lead to bloodshed and people dying.” Suggesting that masked ICE agents might kill protestors for simply shouting hateful slogans at them, Homan was building the permission structure for federal agents to use “full force”violence against non-violent protestors.

Here’s my Substack from last night about the No Kings protest we went to in our Portland suburb.

You can see we decided to use signs I had custom made with an orange hair Hitler on them. That’s how bad we think it is.

October 18, 2025

I'm not a historian, but I think Trump I is worse than George III,

I’ll leave it to the likes of John Meacham, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, who are actually historians, to go deeply into a comparision between King George III and Donald Wannabe King Trump.

However, on the morning of this No Kings protest day I do want to spitball some differences that came to mind as I was falling asleep last night.

Going back to the time of the American Revolution we had the colonists, most of whom hailed from England, deciding they’d had enough of British rule and things like taxation without representation. They decided to fight back with muskets and and artillery.

Looking at this from King George’s perspective the American were a group of ungrateful nere-do-wells who dared to challenge the rule of their rightful king. Britain was an empire, it was The British Empire! Consider how many countries they ruled and how long it took for them to gain independence.

Click to see enlarged image.

As I see it there was no other option for King George than to put down this rebellion with the mighty British Army and Navy. He probably thought it would be easy.

What he didn’t take into account was the tenaciousness and resourcefulness of the patriots and brilliant leadership of our Commander in Chief George Washington and his generals.

Now Trump wants to be a show-off and celebrate the coming 250th anniversary of our independence from England. If you missed this one:

Excerpt:

A senior White House official told CNN the arch was Trump’s idea.
“He came up with the design and has been part of the process every step of the way,” the official said.
Trump remains deeply attuned to his background as a real estate developer and has taken major steps since returning to office to apply his aesthetic vision to Washington, DC: paving over the White House Rose Garden and decorating it to mirror his Mar-a-Lago patio; adorning the Oval Office, Cabinet Room, and West Colonnade with gilded features; and launching a major ballroom expansion.
Last week, AFP photographer Jim Watson captured images of a pair of three-dimensional models of the proposed arch atop Trump’s desk in the Oval Office as the president met with his Finnish counterpart, President Alexander Stubb. Canadian Minister of Energy Tim Hodgson also posted a photo of Trump showcasing one of the models to a group of Canadian officials. The models were on the president’s desk again on Wednesday as he hosted an event on crime statistics.

Apparently he favors the larger version shown in the drawing above.

This photo is from NPR:

Of course the Lady Liberty statue on top is gold.

It is something of a no-brainer to note the nauseating irony that Trump wants to celebrate our independence from a king when he wants to be one himself.

I am surprised he doesn’t try to outdo King George III and have a statue (like the one shown below) commemorating himself. It would, of course, be much bigger than Kings Statue in Weymouth, Dorset. That was installed in 1809 in honor of the Golden Jubilee of King George III who died in 1820. Trump wouldn’t want a giant monument erected after he’s dead. He want to see it.

Getting back to the comparison between the two kings, the one who actually had a crown (though he only wore it on state occasions).

Prior to independence the colonists were British. Today most people who live here are American citizens. Those to actually reside here and aren’t just visiting aspire to be citizens. Trump wants them to self-deport. If they won’t do this he plans to round them up brutalizing them in the process along with any actual citizens that end up targetted by ICE by mistake.

He also is in the process of trying to imprison all of his enemies starting with those who have pissed him off the most and working his way down to anyone who challenges his right to be king.

Instead of conquering colonists like King George III fought a war in a failed attempt to do, Trump has started a war against more than half the country.

This is why I think Trump is worse that King George III.

Addendum:

I think that No Kings, while a good name, doesn’t fit what Trump is doing. After all, compared to Trump, King George III was a pussycat.

The No Kings toolkit from Indivible now has “No Dictator” signs:

Perhaps by the time we have another national protest the notion of Trump being a king will be passé and we will be having No Dictator demonstrations.

Addendum: It is beyond words to describe how horrible it is that HUFFPOST is justifed in publishing “Taking Photos And Videos At A Trump Protest Could Have Alarming Consequences.”

I am posting this again today. However I am a citizen. If I am arrested or brutalized by ICE or MAGA provocateurs the headlines can emphasize that I am 81 years old.

Addendum:

One thing King George III and King Trump I have in common is that both manifest signs of being mentally ill. This is from ‘I FEAR I AM NOT IN MY PERFECT MIND’: 7 MENTALLY-ILL MONARCHS FROM HISTORY:

George had already been on the throne for 28 years when he was struck down by his first prolonged bout of mental illness in 1788. Gibbering for hours on end and foaming at the mouth, the king’s illness was deemed serious enough for a bill to be drawn up in Parliament for his son, George IV, to become regent. Before the bill could pass, George recovered his senses and all was well with the king for the next eleven years. Then, in 1810, his mental illness came roaring back, and this time it was here to stay.
Already blind thanks to cataracts, George deteriorated rapidly. He would babble on for hours, lost the ability to walk and eventually succumbed to dementia. Towards the end of his life, he was incapable of understanding anything, such as the death of his beloved wife Charlotte in 1818 and lived as a deluded, long-haired recluse in Windsor Castle until his death from pneumonia in 1820. For the last nine years of his life, his son George ruled as regent in his stead.

Lots has been written about Trump’s mental condition. This is the most recent: ‘He’s completely nuts’: George Conway gobsmacked by Trump’s commutation of ‘fraudster’.

I have seen a few of these but have heard them many times. They are loud. The do not sound like ordinary helicopters. Read article.

Hal Brown's Substack (fomerly Hal Brown's Blog)

October 19, 2025

If a Substack falls into cyberspace and nobody reads it, is it really there? What I learned from an X tweet about Pam Bondi that had over 58,000 vists after Gavin Newsom quoted it. By Hal M. Brown

This is some serious sh*t! We know it, Robert DeNiro knows it, but when will the country hit a critical mass? By Hal M. Brown

October 18, 2025

I'm not a historian, but I think Trump I is worse than George III,

I have seen a few of these but have heard them many times. They are loud. The do not sound like ordinary helicopters. Read article.

If a Substack falls into cyberspace and nobody reads it, is it really there? What I learned from an X tweet about Pam Bondi that had over 58,000 vists after Gavin Newsom quoted it. By Hal M. Brown

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