Apple CEO's visit to Mar-a-Lago caused my iPhone to throw up on my Mac laptop, by Hal M/ Brown

This was the the top HuffPost story this morning.

It prompted me to spend some time using AI to create an illustration of Cook bending at the knees before King Trump. AI created a king and I added Trump's rather large head. Oddly, the gods of AI made the man on his knees resemble Tim Cook so I left this alone.

On the left is the original AI image:

This is what I posted on BlueSky:

I was hoping to upgrade my iPhone and Mac laptops in a year or so to the newest Apple devices. Now I am rethinking this. If another company becomes the BlueSky of tech I may buy those products. 

I can see a company which makes cell phones and laptops, probably a much smaller company than Apple, promoting themselves as a company not beholden to the autocratic leader of the United States. 

Some day in the not too distant future we may look back at these people the way the industrialists who collaborated with the Nazi's are viewed today. Consider the following sample of articles about this:

In the Room Where German Tycoons Agreed to Fund Hitler’s Rise To Power

Hitler's millionaire backers: how Germany's elite facilitated the rise of the Nazis

How Big Business Bailed Out the Nazis

A tragic tale of what can go wrong when profits are entangled with politics.

Secret Meeting of 20 February 1933 from Wikipedia

Addendum:

In case you missed it: Trump Taps Anti-Trans Lawyer Harmeet Dhillon to Lead DOJ Civil Rights Post

If you aren't familiar with BlueSky, here's an article from Z NET: 

7 things to know about Bluesky before you join - and why you should

Yesterday I wrote a science fiction fantasy about the drones really being an advance force from an alien civilization preparing humans for an intervention which would reset our world and set it back on a course of peaceful coexistence between neighbors and countries. Today there are reports of more sightings and there has been no explanation as to what they are. Could it be that after decades of sci-fi writers speculating about what form an alien invasion would take it is finally happening? Read the blog here:

Previous list of  all blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)

The delightful distraction of the dastardly drones, by Hal M. Brown

 

Constructed by the autocratic Galactic Empire, the Death Star was capable of obliterating entire planets. It served to enforce the Empire's reign of terror. It was protected by twin ion fighters (below) which the heros of the Star Wars stories had to battle in their Jedi Starfighters in space dog fights.

Now we have these drone sightings in New Jersey making the news. Marjorie Taylor Greene is speculating that they are coming from an Iranian mother ship. 

We are hearing that they may be remotely operated drones or, like the Empire fighters, that they could be manned.

Now America is on the brink of becoming something like the autocratic Galactic Empire with its own version of Darth Vader leading it. 

I find making up a science fiction alternative story can be a delightful distraction to thinking about the horror show about to come. 

I've put together this tall tale about these to spin a science fiction scenario.

Maybe at long last aliens, not the ones Trump wants to deport, but the ones from a galaxy far, far, away, have gotten fed up with the United States and other autocracies and decided to intervene once again. 

Once again, you might ask. 

The first time could have been when they seeded Earth and planted the ocean with the DNA that led to the first life forms coming out of the primal ooze. 

The second would be when, as depicted at the beginning of 2001, they gave primates human intelligence. 

The third could have been when they sent several shape shifters (Jesus, the great philosophers and religious leaders, and perhaps Einstein) to try to make a difference. 

It is possible that the current plethora of drones over New Jersey (shown below) are being controlled by Bruce Springsteen, the alien primary shape shifter on Earth today and soon to be emissary from his home in Northern New Jersey.

Now perhaps they are trying again to prepare for an outright invasion, or better call it an intervention, by preparing earthlings to accept that they must change their ways or else... which brings us to the Death Star. 

What if these so-called drones are the advance scouts for numerous mother ships all with planet destroying capabilities. 

I don't think these aliens want to cause human suffering or annihilate us, but since they've been studying earthlings since the dawn of mankind they know how set in our beliefs we are. 

They know about every human atrocity.

I think they are aware that a demonstration would be necessary to convince skeptical humans, so the next step would be having these drones demonstrate alien capabilities proving them to be extraterrestrial. This hasn't happened yet. This is phase one. 

Phase two should be occurring soon. They may have a drone hover a few feet above the podium during Trump's inauguration while the Secret Service tries to shoot it down in a fusillade of bullets to no avail. Then it would take off straight up with blinding speed. It would be an image seen around the world. I'd like to see Trump raising his fist defiantly after this.

The aliens would then take over all media and in all languages lay out their demands for reform. The demands would sound very much like the "love thy neighbor" and "do unto others as you would have them do to you" messages of Christianity and all the world's great religions.

If this didn't lead to an end to cruel inhumane autocratic regimes the next phase would be to have the actual motherships appear over all major cities like in the TV Series V.

The aliens would give humans one final chance to peacefully coexist with each other. They might have to demonstrate that they aren't kidding around. Vaporizing the Moon into dust as dramatic as this would be might do it but there would be major consequences (read article) such the disruption of the tides which would cause loss of human and aquatic life.

Better they announce they will vaporize Mars giving time to the media to assure they have powerful telescopes televising the event.

Yesterday:

Recent blogs: A decidely unempathic fantasy about what I wish for Trump voters, addressing Hegseth and his toxic masculinity, another about Trump and MAGA toxic masculinity, and a sign Trump may have dementia.

Previous list of  all blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)

Maybe writers should dispense with words and just use emojis to express opinions, By Hal M. Brown

 

In today's blog I take a break from pure poltics and write about about linguistics, language, words, and writing.

There was an article about Kari Lake being selected to lead the Voice of America which was shown on the top of the page in HuffPost (above with arrow). It didn't offer any opinion. All it said was the following:

The president-elect named Kari Lake, the failed Arizona Senate and gubernatorial candidate, to be the next director of Voice of America. The media network is funded by the U.S. government and is meant to be an unbiased source of news for people around the planet.

VOA provides news in nearly 50 languages and reaches a weekly audience of more than 350 million people, according to its website.

Lake, Trump said, will “ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.”

Lake is a fierce denier of the 2020 presidential election results and refused to concede her race for Arizona governor in 2022.

The title was preceded by the thinking face emoji. This is the "yellow face with furrowed eyebrows looking upwards with thumb and index finger resting on its chin. It is intended to show a person pondering or deep in thought. Often used to question or scorn something or someone, as if saying Hmm, I don't know about that. Tone varies, including earnest, playful, puzzled, skeptical, and mocking." Reference.

At the most recent count I could find there are 1874 emojis in 10 categories and 100 subcategories. While some are objects, activites, and symbols many convey a range of emotions (see here).  You can find all of the emojis here.

I can see a time when some writers who are tired of putting together words decide simply to report what Trump and his allies are doing and the consequences for the country without offering an opinion. There are enough emojis to do this.

Here's one example:

Meaning of 😤 Face With Steam From Nose Emoji 

The 😤 Face With Steam From Nose emoji is often depicted as a frowning face with closed 👀 Eyesand steam coming out of its 👃 Nose, which typically represents extreme anger (similar to mad bulls in cartoons). This is why its most common meaning is related to 💢 Anger, aggression, and frustration. It is often used to symbolize someone struggling to manage their intense negative emotions.

As anyone who has used them knowsm combining emojis can elaborate on a reaction or what they want to express. For example, follow the steaming nose emoji with this one:

Meaning of 🤯 Exploding Head Emoji 

The 🤯 Exploding Head emoji is a face with the head removed to reveal a 🍄 Mushroom ☁️ Cloud. It's commonly used to express the feeling of being mind-blown after learning or discovering something new. It's okay to have those moments of confusion because it's always 😄 Fun to learn something new. 

If you want to show your confusion towards your new discovery, you can send this emoji along with a ❓ Question Mark emoji. But for a little fun, you can use the 🧠 Brain emoji and the 💣 Bomb emoji instead to show that your latest realization blows your mind. 

It's basically used to show that you don't understand something because someone said too many things.

Many of the articles warning about what Trump plans to do to the country and the world go on and on and on. Word and after word after word, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph. I don't know how many people actually read every word in an article. For that matter I don't know how many people read every word of my blogs and I usually intersperse text with illustrations.

How many people who need to be enlightened about Trump actually read books like these six from 2020 (reviewed here)?

Maybe Kash Patel had a good idea reducing his nasty ideas to three books for children. He may grasp that everything has to be dumbed down to reach the people who need to be reached in Trumpworld.

I expect that lovers of language lament the prospect of the literary landscape being overrun with emjois replacing words and phrases expressing nuanced and complex ideas and emotions previously expressed with, well, you remember them, words.

I haven't succumbed to the temptation to use emojis, but in the blogs and substacks I read I haven't found any that use illustrations the way I do.

I am seeing more artwork, some created by AI, used as primary illustrations. In fact, back to Kash Patel's book, the illustration in Alexandra Petri's column (here, subscription) was animated.

This Washington Post column is also animated:

My point is that in order to get some people to pay attention and keep to them engaged you have to use various tricks. The so-called "gray lady" New York Times didn't even use color photographs until 1997.

Before that a typical front page looked like this:

Occassionally they would include illustrations:

Here's today's front page.

This is The New York Times. How many Trump voters even read The New York Times? If they read any print newspaper at all if they are New Yorkers they probably read Rupert Murdoch's New York Post.

Trump got away with convincing people that speaking gibberish was something he called the weave and that it was brilliant. Trump dumbed everything down and managed to convince people he was someone he clearly wasn't. One Trump voter told The New York Times he thought Trump was compassionate and a believer in Christ. I wrote about this yesterday.

According to this article you can use emojis on Truth Social but I don't know if Trump has ever used them or, for that matter, if he even knows how to use them. I looked at about 20 of his Truth Social posts and didn't see any emojis. Along with images and GIFs they are very easy to use on X and BlueSky.

It is no surprise that the role of emojis and how they effect language is the subject of learned discussion. For example in "Emoticons and symbols aren’t ruining language – they’re revolutionizing it" from The Conversation back in 2015.

I am one of many who have said that the Democrats are lousy at reaching low information and uncritical voters. I'm not really saying we should replace words with emojis but we damn well better learn how to get our message across to people who may be amenable to hearing our side of the story.

Recent blogs: A decidely unempathic fantasy about what I wish for Trump voters, addressing Hegseth and his toxic masculinity, another about Trump and MAGA toxic masculinity, and a sign Trump may have dementia.

Previous list of  all blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)

Am I unempathic in wishing the worst for some Trump voters? By Hal M. Brown

There's a part of me that I don't really know what to make of when it comes to wishing the absolute worst for the country during the next four years so people who voted for Trump suffer.  In order for this to happen lots of good people will also suffer. In fact it is the good people will initially suffer more than the typical Trump voter. I don't want to see people suffer, not just know they are suffering, but literally see them suffering on television. But for the country to turn around this has to happen.

I offer for your consideration my Trump Tesla analogy.

I know that the people who thought Trump would usher in a a world of bluebirds and happiness for them personally are going to at some time be poleaxed with the realization that they bought the lemon of all lemon cars from a slick psychopathic salesman. The Trump car, let's say for obvious reasons that it is a Tesla, looked great in the showroom. Maybe they took it on a test drive and were impressed with the head snapping acceleration (one model will do 0-60 in less than two seconds and has a top speed of 200) and all electonic gewgaws. 

Perhaps in time these buyers will eventually discover the transmission had a nasty habit of freezing up. They might discover the hard way that there were faulty airbags, that the navigation system didn't know north from south, that the air conditioning is faulty, and there's a glitch in the automatic locking system that may engage trapping them inside. Back to the consequences of this at the end of the blog.

Here's what led me to think of this:

I read an article in yesterday's NY Times, These 14 Voters Think Trump Has One Mandate Above All, and It’s Not About the Economy. It is by Patrick Healy, Margie Omero and Adrian J. Rivera. Mr. Healy is the deputy Opinion editor. Ms. Omero is a pollster. Mr. Rivera is an editorial assistant in Opinion.

I was stuck by some the impressions which these people who voted for Trump had of him. 

For example these three were at the start of the article:

I can see the person why one person said "change" in response to the question "What’s one word that describes how you see Donald Trump today?" However common sense and patriotism, give me a break. Where are the heads of these people if not in the sand or some other place where the sun doesn't shine?

One word in the following got to me. Can you guess what it was?

If you guessed "compassion" (which I assume you did) you are right. This comes from a 62 year old Black truck driver. 

He expanded on this as follows answering the question about why he voted for Trump.

I served in the military. I’ve been a police officer. We spend lots of money in countries that most people couldn’t find on a map, and we have people that are starving in the streets of L.A. Trump believes in this country. He believes in Christ. He loves this country.

Of all the people I would like to talk to of the 14 people interviewed for this article it is Kenneth. I want to understand what characteristics he sees in Donald Trump that he would see as demonstrating that he is a compassionate person. I would remind him that the definition of compassion is sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others. I want to ask him what makes him think Trump believes in Christ.

This was Kenneth's view on supporting Ukraine: "I don’t think we should be focusing on a country that has nuclear warheads, as Russia does, in the name of defending Ukraine." Where, I wonder, is his compassion for the people of Ukraine? How is this Christian?

Eight of the 14 interviewed said they supported mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Kenneth was one of them. Again, I wonder about his feelings of compassion.

He was asked specifically about Jan. 6th and Trump pardons. He seemed to make more sense regarding this.

I’m kind of in the middle. The ones that were actually lawbreakers shouldn’t be pardoned. When they went into the Capitol building, some were just there, peaceful protesters. Maybe those people can get some type of pardon or commute their sentences. They shouldn’t be serving 15 years for just walking into the Capitol building. The ones that were violent and actually went in and took over in the Capitol building, they shouldn’t be pardoned.

Of course nobody was sentenced to 15 years for just walking into the Capitol.

I hope that the authors of this article continue to interview their subjects on a regular basis. I want to see what they say when they see their optimism is shattered into pieces.

Fasten you seatbelts, here's my Trump Tesla vacation analogy:

I want to see Trump supports take off for a vacation on a sweltering hot day in their shiny Trump car. I want them to have the transmission give out suddenly while they are driving on the crowded expressway to a destination in the opposite direction that they wanted to go because of faulty navigation, have the air conditioning stop, and the locks on the car engage trapping them inside barely on the shoulder while other cars are speeding by. Let's add that their blinker lights aren't working and a torrential rainstorm has just begun... and to add insult to the fears of serious injury the radio is stuck on high volume on a station that plays nothing but Chinese opera.

I like to think I am a kind and empathetic person, albeit with some lapses which I later regret. These fantasies don't sit well with me. It bothers me that I enjoyed thinking about my Trump Tesla breaking down in traffic analogy and that I enjoyed writing about it. 

The pragmatic part of me knows that for the country to change and for compassionate democracy and a moral society to be embraced by enough voters to swing the next two elections to Democrats things have to go very very badly for those who voted for Trump. The Trump promised shiny new Trump Tesla has to be expossed as a junker. Things not only have to go so badly that the Democrats take control of Congress in two years and the presidency in four, but enough of the conservatives on the Supreme Court also must realize what evil they have enabled and the court has to take steps to put America back on course.

There... for now I got this out of my system.

Previous list of blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)

For some MAGA manly men, Hegseth's sexual assault and drinking charges are badges of honor worthy of a medal, by Hal M. Brown

Click above to enlarge images of medal Hegseth might have been awarded.

 

Republicans Look Past Sexual Assault, Alcohol Allegations Against Pete Hegseth

Reading this led me to react the with title of this blog and to spend some time trying to make medals to illustrate it (above) to show the kind soldiers in a sick toxically masculine military might be awarded for sexual assault and drunken behavior. Trump and card carrying members of the phallocentric manosphere encountering soldiers sporting these medals would shake their hands and say "thank you for your service."

Popular culture has glamorized the hard drinking womanizing man whether a he's a soldier, detective, or some other heroic figure who solves the crime and catches the bad guys or makes a ton of money.

This is all related to Trump's phallocentric beliefs. I wrote about this here: Trump is a delusional unhinged sadist living in a phallocentric manosphere.

I have no way of knowing for sure what rocks Pete Hegseth's boat, if you'll excuse an expression more appropriate for a former Navy man. My impression of him is that he is like many men who consider heavy drinking to be a sign of masculinity. I also think he believes that women exist to satisfy the needs of men. I don't know whether he thinks their role in life is to wait on men hand and foot or gratifying male sexual desires.

How he fits into the concept of toxic masculinity remains to be seen. Wikipedia's definition of toxic masculinity begins:

The concept of toxic masculinity is used in academic and media discussions to refer to those aspects of hegemonic masculinity that are socially destructive, such as misogyny, homophobia, and violent domination. These traits are considered "toxic" due in part to their promotion of violence, including sexual assault and domestic violence. Socialization of boys sometimes also normalizes violence, such as in the saying "boys will be boys" about bullying and aggression.

I wonder what he'd say if someone asked him what he thought about the photos related to his hero below:

What does it say about someone (usually a man, Marjorie Taylor Greene is an exception) who finds excuses to show off their muscles?

For that matter, what does it say about RFK Jr.? Of course he's not in line to become Secretary of Defense.

Trump isn't about to pull a Hulk Hogan and rip off his shirt on TV. I am sure he wishes he could. He has to content himself with issuing AI created images of himself and seeing people waving flags with him as a Rambo character on them. He has to pleasure himself with being able to inflict his toxic masculinity on the nation. 

It isn't just muscles, or even gender, that makes someone toxically masculine. It is a set of beliefs that might makes right. It is an abiding desire to exercise authority over others. We can speculate that it is rooted in feelings of inferiority which began in childhood, but this hardly maters when these people get power. 

Kash Patel and Steven Miller, just for two examples, aren't muscle bound hunks. Women like Pam Bondi and Linda McMahon may have many characteristics of toxically masculine men. At its worst toxic masculinity can include a sadistic personality. This is when cruelty, inflicting pain on enemies, becomes the point.

Previous list of blogs here.

Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)