“lost_in_chaos” — Fediverse search results on home.social

bok @[email protected] · 2025-10-20 · 23:18 UTC

●●●●○ Gypsy - Poul Anderson (ss) 1950
Traveler was one of the first interstellar colonization ships to use the newly-discovered hyperdrive engine. It was supposed to take eight days to get to Alpha Centauri. Except the engine exploded when it was activated, and the ship ended up in a distant part of the galaxy, beyond the ship's ability to find Earth.

For twenty years the ship sought Earth or another habitable planet, before discovering Harbor, on which the crew and passengers settled. But after a decade, some colonists were getting restless. While most people wanted to build homes and spread out, some missed traveling: the new systems to explore every week or three, the exciting planets and moons, the glorious views.

So a quarter of the population decided to say goodbye to their planet-loving neighbors, and set forth on their wanderings again. The story follows one man who admits he's of a journeying disposition and has pretended otherwise for a decade, and his wife who pretends she's not the stay-at-home type, that she'll be happy wherever her husband goes.

●●●◐○ Sea Siege - Andre Norton (nov) 1957
International tensions are high. Open-air atom-bomb tests are common. There's a radioactive red algal scum spreading on the oceans, which marine biologist Gunston and his colleague Hughes were investigating from their base on (the fictional) Caribbean island San Isadore. Griff Gunston, the head scientist's 15-year-old son, also lived on the island with his widowed father.

Griff was one of the first to notice that octopuses near the island were acting oddly, with more intelligence and less fear of humans. Some types were also getting vastly larger. The island also experienced a Nessie-like sea serpent that had threatened some fishing boats. Other boats were lost, and when found, were intact, though they were missing all crew, but no lifeboats.

A group from the US Navy was building… something… on the west end of the British island. Then all radio contact was lost with the rest of the worlds, and days of radioactive rain fell. A volcano was also born near the island. This is the story of Griff and the islanders and the Navy surviving what was probably a distant World War Three, and may also have been an alien invasion.

●●◐○○ The Legendary Ship - Edward Page Mitchell (ss) 1885
In 1880, a historian is forced to deal with a manuscript. By the precepts of his trade, he should believe it. It was written by a minister known to be rational and truthful, and the handwriting matched other papers the cleric had written. It was a first-hand account, confirmed by other documents. But the events detailed within were not rational as the historian understood reality. Thus:

Unlike some other colonies, the New Haven colony survived on trade, and in 1646 that flagged, threatening the city's survival. So the town elders decided to build a great trading ship to directly take up trade with Mother England, rather than depend on others. An early frost froze the newly-built ship in at its river dock, meaning it had to back out of the ice: a bad omen.

The ship launched, and presumably crossed the Atlantic. When the time came that it should return, it did not. For a month, the townsfolk prayed to have some news of what had transpired, for they were of an "as God wills" nature and wouldn't ask for the ship's return. Then the ship did return, with no one visible on deck.

The ship stopped some distance from land, and a crowd gathered ashore. After a short time, the crowd witnessed the effects of a great storm, though there was no wind or rain. Sails were tattered, and masts snapped; then the keel broke. A small bank of fog blew past, and when it was gone a minute later, so was the ship. And the people gave thanks to God for him showing them the fate of the ship.

●●●○○ Deadly Afternoon - Stan Muir (ss) 2020
Reading the anthology Murder in the Nudist Colony has been a bit slow, so I'm speeding it up by splitting out the individual stories. This one is set in a nudist village in the South of France, where a woman is found sunbathing on a beach, hours after sundown. She's dead.

The woman asphyxiated. Cause: a nerve agent. Officer Simon Persan began interviewing people about Myriam Boyer. He visits various neighbors and shopkeepers, and they answer his questions, all of them ending their interviews with a remark that he should not be going around clothed, because it disrespects the naturist village's people.

The case is solved at the end, and as Simon is putting away evidence for the trial, he opens a leaflet that a real estate agent whom Myriam had been in discussion with gave him. It's about #naturism and the village, and Simon decides to rent a cottage and give it a try.

●●◐○○ The Tachypomp - Edward Page Mitchell (ss) 1874
Professor Surd, mathematician, teaches a lecture class: “seventy young men who, individually and collectively, preferred x to XX; who had rather differentiate than dissipate”.¹ The seventy-first student is Tom Furnace, who is a mathematical dullard.

Tom wishes to begin courting Abscissa Surd, the professor's daughter. The professor says Tom must prove his mathematical worth to do so. Surd considers that Furnace must square the circle, but decides that's too easy, so he sets Furnace a task of saying how, mathematically, a train could travel sixty miles in one minute, at a time it took trains an hour to cover that distance.

Tom goes to an older friend. Rivarol says it's a shame that Surd hadn't stuck with his earlier idea, since he himself had squared the circle years ago, and had the proof around somewhere in his cluttered apartment. Rivarol tells Furnace he must think, and a week later calls him back to tell him the solution to the problem, which the text goes over at some length. The tale concludes with a twist ending.

●●●◐○ The Alternative Lives of Aiden Anderson {Middle Falls 14} - Shawn Inmon (nov) 2021
In the first eleven books of the Middle Falls series, the rules were unchanging. A person died, then woke up at some earlier point in their life, and lived again, always resetting to the same point if they died again, until in one final life they achieved emotional maturity and moved on.

Occasionally there was a nudge by — call it an angel, though they're really more techs — who took physical form to have a conversation with a looper. But there was no other interference, and the reset point stayed the same.

In Book Twelve, a deeper change was made to a looper's life, to spare him pain from the cancer that was killing him, so that he could have a chance of progress in the short 26-day loop he was stuck in. And when he made sufficient progress, his cancer magically vanished and he was allowed to live out that life.

In Book Thirteen, Charles of the short loops, now a tech in the Universal Life Center, made a single change in the reset point of the current looper whose quasi-reincarnation were being told. By Book Fourteen, Charles was making multiple changes.

Aiden, who died in an auto accident at 55 and came back at age 8, came back at 18 after dying in another auto accident at 17. And then had an interlude at 55 again, after dying from truck kun again at 35. But then an angel sent him back to age 17. And we're told by The Machine, koan-obliquely, that more random resets will be the rule going forward.

And I've told you nothing about the plot or main character of this book. But Aiden was a middling student who was a decent musician. His first life, he and some others formed a band that had one semi-successful album and than a less-successful one before breaking up. Aiden went on to become a backup musician for other bands.

In his first re-life, he tried to start an earlier, better musical career, but died just after his first failure. In his third life, he formed a business flipping houses with the parents of his best friend, who took him in after his mother died of cancer, a loss Aiden never really recovered from, and was never able to change.

In his next life he did the same, but this time he was able to save his girlfriend and her family from a house fire, and married. He was later able to incorporate music into his life, and this is the one that got him past the pervasive grief of never having a father, and losing both grandparents, his mother, and his girlfriend while young.

●●●●○ Tiger by the Tail - Poul Anderson (ss) 1951
The Terran Empire was decadent and declining, so no surprise that the younger and smaller Scothani Empire dreamed of conquering it. And having some inside information would be a help toward that aim, so they kidnapped Captain Dominic Flandry, the Terran Empire's top intelligence agent. That's where their plan went wrong.

In his year of captivity at the Scothani Court – for the Scothani were really a feudal people, and had only obtained ultra-drive from alien traders – Flandry talked to many people, and was able to turn various factions against each other, and even brother against brother, getting the royal second son to conspire against the heir apparent. And at the end, he got a message to his superiors. Even well past its prime, the Terran Empire was able to crush the Scothani Imperium.

●●●●○ Uncovered {Emma Nelson 4} - P.Z. Walker (nov) 2023
The final Emma Nelson naturist mystery. In this volume, Amarika reveals why she created three powered individuals (sees-through-walls Emma, light-from-his-hands Brody, and finger-cuts-metal Madison): to break a particular man out of prison while he's being transferred to another facility.

The cops manage to catch the gang involved, though Emma is shot in the arm during the chaos. Amarika is killed, and now no one will know how she – whom the man in the prison transport called a 'bruja' when he saw her – gave people powers.

On the semi-police front, a buried chest is found on a farm, and then a skeleton near it, and police officers Emma and Jeff are called in to check it out, since the couple are nudists and the big farm family who own the land are as well.

This gets the couple involved with the family. The nudist part of the book also sees Emma and Jeff's cop friend Jo-Anne involved in the trunk case. She becomes close to one of the naturist men there, to the extent that she and her five-year-old son, Oliver, begin visiting and adopt naturism, which Emma and Jeff have been saying she should try since Book One. There were also some naturist hikes, and the opening of the new nudist health center.

●●◐○○ Lefty Feep Gets Henpecked {Lefty Feep 21} - Robert Bloch (ss) 1945
It's once more time for Lefty Feep to go on vacation to avoid his creditors. Fortunately for him his scientist friends Mordecai Meetch and Sylvester Veetch have invented an elixir to make hens grow bigger, and Lefty agrees to go on the road and peddle it to chicken farmers.

He promptly meets a lovely farmer's daughter, whose chicken-raising father's farm has been having trouble with chicken thieves and stolen eggs. The son of the county's richest man holds their mortgage, and is threatening to foreclose unless Daisy Falfa marries him. Lefty gets drunk with her father, and when the bottle's empty, goes out to get another one. In the rain and dark, he mistakenly grabs a bottle of Rooster Booster, and takes a couple of big swigs on the way in.

The next morning, Lefty wakes up a four-foot-tall rooster. He gets shooed out to the chicken pen, and that night he's chicken-napped by Luke the mortgage-holder, who's leaving nothing to chance. Lefty, along with some super-sized chickens he got to drink the elixir, saves the day, and the potion wore off, letting Lefty return to the city and tell his tall tale.

●●●○○ The Beautiful People - Charles Beaumont (ss) 1952
[This story is the basis of the Twilight Zone episode “Number 12 Looks Just Like You”.] At age nineteen, all humans on the Stations undergo the Transformation, whereby they're surgically and chemically remade into tall, slim, perfect-skin, model-attractive adults.

Mary's mother takes the 18-year-old girl to the psychiatrist. He assumes the problem is that Mary can't understand why she can't become as perfect as her older friends now, and has to wait. In fact, Mary doesn't want to undergo the Transformation at all, inchoately wondering where the real her will be after everything?

This situation is unprecedented, and the authorities hold hearings to investigate. In the end they, supported by public petitions, make their decision on what's to be done with Mary.

●●●●◐ Crawlies - Annie Bellet (ss) 2012
An intelligent but uneducated girl who belongs to a youth-gang led by a more-violent Fagin-figure, hides from trouble in a packing case. Waking from sleep, Sadie finds she is no longer on her space station, but has unwittingly stowed away on a spaceship crewed by the land-squid Teuthiads, popularly called Crawlies. She passes out, but is found in time to escape oxygen poisoning.

Then her troubles get bigger when the trading ship she's on is attacked by a human-crewed pirate ship. Sadie ends up helping the Teuthiad crew against the pirates, and they give her what she wants, a ride to Mirzam Station, a nicer station place where she can get a starter job on a freighter, and work up to a better life.

━━━━━━━━━━
Cumulative 2025 totals as of Week Forty-Two:
253 ss | 27 nvt | 05 nva | 106 nov | #books
━━━━━━━━━━

[1] That women have XX chromosomes was known in 1874? What I've seen online suggests that Mendel studied heritable units in the 1860s, but that particular chromosomes determined sex was only discovered in 1903. So I don't know where Mitchell is getting this nomenclature.

#reading #bokbooks #naturism #books

fanf42 @[email protected] · 2024-06-11 · 20:08 UTC

Update on French politics : chaos will be added until moral improves.

Ciotti, a mad fascist, and also The leader of Les Républicains, the historical De Gaulle party (you know, the one who was fighting nazis in the 40s), asked for an alliances with the extrem right Rassemblement National (founded by an actual nazi). Member of Les Republicains are asking for his head, and militants, the ones loving pyramidal hierarchical power structures, are actually rebelling. This is unbelievable.

The extrem right is itself divided, Marion Maréchal LePen being outlawed in LePen family for supporting Zemmour. We also learn that French Israelis voted at fucking **90%* for extrem rights parties, if anyone had the least doubt about the fact that current mood is fascist there. Posting the photo b/c 😱

The left seems to be reaching an herd of cats agreement, and everyone is funking hoping it will last the 3 needed weeks. 🤞🤞🤞

Everyone but Glucksman, the hero of the old dying betrayer PS, who is sending absolutely obvious signals to Macron, asking for an alliance with a "true European party" not like those lefties from LFI (the biggest left party in France before Europeans elections). Demonstrating that the PS definitely lost its north and what worker interests are.
Still hoping the Front De Gauche, 2024 Ed, last 3 weeks.

And if you turn your head 3 minutes, new chaos happens.

The only ca'm place is around Macron, who is alone with nobody actually alleging to him. Perhaps the bezzle finally reached its conclusion.

#France #Politics #extremRight #frontDeGauche #Macron

#france #politics #extremright #frontdegauche #macron

fanf42 @[email protected] · 2024-06-11 · 20:08 UTC

Update on French politics : chaos will be added until moral improves.

Ciotti, a mad fascist, and also The leader of Les Républicains, the historical De Gaulle party (you know, the one who was fighting nazis in the 40s), asked for an alliances with the extrem right Rassemblement National (founded by an actual nazi). Member of Les Republicains are asking for his head, and militants, the ones loving pyramidal hierarchical power structures, are actually rebelling. This is unbelievable.

The extrem right is itself divided, Marion Maréchal LePen being outlawed in LePen family for supporting Zemmour. We also learn that French Israelis voted at fucking **90%* for extrem rights parties, if anyone had the least doubt about the fact that current mood is fascist there. Posting the photo b/c 😱

The left seems to be reaching an herd of cats agreement, and everyone is funking hoping it will last the 3 needed weeks. 🤞🤞🤞

Everyone but Glucksman, the hero of the old dying betrayer PS, who is sending absolutely obvious signals to Macron, asking for an alliance with a "true European party" not like those lefties from LFI (the biggest left party in France before Europeans elections). Demonstrating that the PS definitely lost its north and what worker interests are.
Still hoping the Front De Gauche, 2024 Ed, last 3 weeks.

And if you turn your head 3 minutes, new chaos happens.

The only ca'm place is around Macron, who is alone with nobody actually alleging to him. Perhaps the bezzle finally reached its conclusion.

#France #Politics #extremRight #frontDeGauche #Macron

#france #politics #extremright #frontdegauche #macron

fanf42 @[email protected] · 2024-06-11 · 20:08 UTC

Update on French politics : chaos will be added until moral improves.

Ciotti, a mad fascist, and also The leader of Les Républicains, the historical De Gaulle party (you know, the one who was fighting nazis in the 40s), asked for an alliances with the extrem right Rassemblement National (founded by an actual nazi). Member of Les Republicains are asking for his head, and militants, the ones loving pyramidal hierarchical power structures, are actually rebelling. This is unbelievable.

The extrem right is itself divided, Marion Maréchal LePen being outlawed in LePen family for supporting Zemmour. We also learn that French Israelis voted at fucking **90%* for extrem rights parties, if anyone had the least doubt about the fact that current mood is fascist there. Posting the photo b/c 😱

The left seems to be reaching an herd of cats agreement, and everyone is funking hoping it will last the 3 needed weeks. 🤞🤞🤞

Everyone but Glucksman, the hero of the old dying betrayer PS, who is sending absolutely obvious signals to Macron, asking for an alliance with a "true European party" not like those lefties from LFI (the biggest left party in France before Europeans elections). Demonstrating that the PS definitely lost its north and what worker interests are.
Still hoping the Front De Gauche, 2024 Ed, last 3 weeks.

And if you turn your head 3 minutes, new chaos happens.

The only ca'm place is around Macron, who is alone with nobody actually alleging to him. Perhaps the bezzle finally reached its conclusion.

#France #Politics #extremRight #frontDeGauche #Macron

#france #politics #extremright #frontdegauche #macron

fanf42 @[email protected] · 2024-06-11 · 20:08 UTC

Update on French politics : chaos will be added until moral improves.

Ciotti, a mad fascist, and also The leader of Les Républicains, the historical De Gaulle party (you know, the one who was fighting nazis in the 40s), asked for an alliances with the extrem right Rassemblement National (founded by an actual nazi). Member of Les Republicains are asking for his head, and militants, the ones loving pyramidal hierarchical power structures, are actually rebelling. This is unbelievable.

The extrem right is itself divided, Marion Maréchal LePen being outlawed in LePen family for supporting Zemmour. We also learn that French Israelis voted at fucking **90%* for extrem rights parties, if anyone had the least doubt about the fact that current mood is fascist there. Posting the photo b/c 😱

The left seems to be reaching an herd of cats agreement, and everyone is funking hoping it will last the 3 needed weeks. 🤞🤞🤞

Everyone but Glucksman, the hero of the old dying betrayer PS, who is sending absolutely obvious signals to Macron, asking for an alliance with a "true European party" not like those lefties from LFI (the biggest left party in France before Europeans elections). Demonstrating that the PS definitely lost its north and what worker interests are.
Still hoping the Front De Gauche, 2024 Ed, last 3 weeks.

And if you turn your head 3 minutes, new chaos happens.

The only ca'm place is around Macron, who is alone with nobody actually alleging to him. Perhaps the bezzle finally reached its conclusion.

#France #Politics #extremRight #frontDeGauche #Macron

#macron #frontdegauche #extremright #politics #france

fanf42 @[email protected] · 2024-06-11 · 20:08 UTC

Update on French politics : chaos will be added until moral improves.

Ciotti, a mad fascist, and also The leader of Les Républicains, the historical De Gaulle party (you know, the one who was fighting nazis in the 40s), asked for an alliances with the extrem right Rassemblement National (founded by an actual nazi). Member of Les Republicains are asking for his head, and militants, the ones loving pyramidal hierarchical power structures, are actually rebelling. This is unbelievable.

The extrem right is itself divided, Marion Maréchal LePen being outlawed in LePen family for supporting Zemmour. We also learn that French Israelis voted at fucking **90%* for extrem rights parties, if anyone had the least doubt about the fact that current mood is fascist there. Posting the photo b/c 😱

The left seems to be reaching an herd of cats agreement, and everyone is funking hoping it will last the 3 needed weeks. 🤞🤞🤞

Everyone but Glucksman, the hero of the old dying betrayer PS, who is sending absolutely obvious signals to Macron, asking for an alliance with a "true European party" not like those lefties from LFI (the biggest left party in France before Europeans elections). Demonstrating that the PS definitely lost its north and what worker interests are.
Still hoping the Front De Gauche, 2024 Ed, last 3 weeks.

And if you turn your head 3 minutes, new chaos happens.

The only ca'm place is around Macron, who is alone with nobody actually alleging to him. Perhaps the bezzle finally reached its conclusion.

#France #Politics #extremRight #frontDeGauche #Macron

#france #politics #extremright #frontdegauche #macron

Belgian Ecclesia Brussel - Leuven @[email protected] · 2016-10-12 · 15:00 UTC

The 1st Adam in the Hebrew Scriptures #2 Beginning of mankind

Monyash Well Dressing 2009, In the Beginning God Created Man. Clay tablet decorated with coloured petals and stones.

After the fifth period in creation the sixth session brought forth ‘living souls‘ or ‘living things’ or ‘living beings’ which could multiply, making the earth having more of their sort. They were not in the image of God, but on the ‘sixth day‘ the Divine Creator decided to make some living being after His image.

This image and likeness of God in man is expounded, Ephesians 4:24, where it is written that man was created after God in righteousness and true holiness, meaning by these two words, all perfection, as wisdom, truth, innocence, power, etc. (Annotations in the 1599 Geneva Patriot’s Edition)
24 And put on the new man, which 1after God is created unto 2righteousness, and 3true holiness.
1 After the image of God.
2 The effect and end of the new creation.
3 Not fained nor counterfeit. (Annotations in the 1599 Geneva Patriot’s Edition)

Man had received everything in him to be happy living for always. Though he was not immortal. The first living being, “a soul” that would be called “man”, was receiving a higher status than the previous created living beings. Man was made in the image of God, indicating that Adam had some similar elements of God and being in the likeness of the Most High Elohim he received in this way a sort of “royal authority” to govern over God’s creation.

All over the world we can find creation myths, showing that the “being” of it makes only sense when there is a reason for “being”. It is that sense of life so many people are looking for. Genesis uses a similar approach found in other ancient documents: Existence depends on function.

Jackson Wu looks at creation and John H. Walton’s view in this way

Genesis indeed explains the origins of the world but it tells a particular kind of story. It provides a “functional” (rather than a “material”) account of the world origins.

and continues with a good example

If I move beds and dressers out of a “bedroom” and replace it with a desk and file cabinets, what would we say? A “bedroom” no longer exists. I have now “created” a office or study.
Similarly, Genesis 1 explains how God created the world to be a sacred space, a Temple where He would dwell with his people. This view of Genesis helps us to see who God is, who we are, and God’s design for the world. {When Did God Make China?}

That original manly being was “to be red” (=Adam). Adam occurs approximately 500 times with the meaning of mankind. In the opening chapters of the Bereshith (the Book of the Beginnings or Genesis), with three exceptions (1:26; 2:5,20) it has the definite article indicating “man” or “the man” rather than “Adam”.
The first undisputed occurrence of the name of Adam is in the genealogy of Genesis 5:1-5.

Adam and Eve with Cain and Abel – Catacomb of the Via Latina
1 This is the 1book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created Adam, in the 2likeness of God made he him,
2 Male and female created he them, and blessed them, and called their name 1Adam in the day that they were created.
3 Now Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a child in his own 1likeness after his image, and called his name Seth.
4 aAnd the days of Adam, after he had begotten Seth, were eight hundred years, and he begat sons and daughters.
5 So all the days that Adam lived, were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.

The 1st Adam indicates to be the first living creature of “red blood” (hence red blooded or adam), flesh and bones. Of necessity that first fleshly creature out of which mankind would grow could be called the first created man or “the man” and the designation is equivalent to a proper name: Adam.

This first soul or living being, came from the earth, and by receiving the Breath of God came to live. Animated by the divine breath created in the image of God was allowed to have dominion over all other life, animate and inanimate. He is other than God, with no actual physical descent from the Supreme Being or from any inferior deity. Notice also how only by the creation of this human being is mentioned that God “breathed … the breath of life”

Genesis 2:

7 The Lord God also 1made the man 2of the dust of the ground, and breathed in his face breath of life, band the man was a living soul.
8 And the Lord God planted a garden Eastward in 1Eden, and there he put the man whom he had made.
9 (For out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree pleasant to the sight, and good for meat: the 1tree of life also in the midst of the garden, 2and the tree of knowledge of good and of evil.

Genesis 1:

Satan Watching the Caresses of Adam and Eve — William Blake (1757-1827); William Blake’s illustrations of “Paradise Lost”, 1808.
27 Thus God created the man in his image: in the image of God created he him: he created them imale and female.
28 And God 1blessed them, and God said to them, jBring forth fruit, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heaven, and over every beast that moveth upon the earth.
29 And God said, Behold, I have given unto you 1every herb bearing seed, which is upon all the earth, and every tree, wherein is the fruit of a tree bearing seed: kthat shall be to you for meat.
30 Likewise to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the heaven, and to everything that moveth upon the earth, which hath life in itself, every green herb shall be for meat, and it was so.
31 lAnd God saw all that he had made, and lo, it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Genesis 2:

18 Also the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be himself alone: I will make him an help 1meet for him.
19 So the Lord God formed of the earth every beast of the field, and every fowl of the heaven, and brought them unto the 1man to see how he would call them: for howsoever the man named the living creature, so was the name thereof.
20 The man therefore gave names unto all cattle, and to the fowl of the heaven, and to every beast of the field: but for Adam found he not an helper meet for him.
21 Therefore the Lord God caused an heavy sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in stead thereof.
22 And the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man, 1made he a 2woman, and brought her to the man.
23 Then the man said, cThis now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called 1woman, because she was taken out of the man.
24 dTherefore shall man leave 1his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh.
25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not 1ashamed.

Man Made in the Image of God, as in Genesis 1:26 to 2:3, illustration from a Bible card published 1906 by the Providence Lithograph Company (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Divine Creator had out of nothing or out of the blackness created elements which became ordered and received a function. As such the Most High Elohim Jehovah is the One God Who brings order out of (primordial) chaos and as such also being the God of order. [Chaos representing “non-order,” not “disorder.”]

Man being set in God’s Garden, the Garden of Eden, got the allowance to name the other things but also got the obligation of obedience to the divine Will, in connection with the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

When you follow the storytelling of creation you shall find God speaking or bringing out words, and then matter came into being. Every time it was God’s Word that brought action and life. Each stage of creation is also approved with the words

“And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1: 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, cf. 31),

and the inference is that the creation of man was its consummation and climax.

God wanted to have His Kingdom full of plants, animals and human beings in his likeness. He wanted to see a beautiful world where all of His creatures could live in peace with each other.

The first Adam wanted a partner and God made him one. This person taken out of man, the mannin became the first woman and was to be Adam’s partner giving him children as part of God’s family.

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* Bible quotes from 1599 Geneva Patriot’s Edition

Preceding article: The 1st Adam in the Hebrew Scriptures #1 Beginning of everything

Next: The 1st Adam in the Hebrew Scriptures #3 With his partner

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Belgian Ecclesia Brussel - Leuven @[email protected] · 2016-10-12 · 15:00 UTC

The 1st Adam in the Hebrew Scriptures #2 Beginning of mankind

Monyash Well Dressing 2009, In the Beginning God Created Man. Clay tablet decorated with coloured petals and stones.

After the fifth period in creation the sixth session brought forth ‘living souls‘ or ‘living things’ or ‘living beings’ which could multiply, making the earth having more of their sort. They were not in the image of God, but on the ‘sixth day‘ the Divine Creator decided to make some living being after His image.

This image and likeness of God in man is expounded, Ephesians 4:24, where it is written that man was created after God in righteousness and true holiness, meaning by these two words, all perfection, as wisdom, truth, innocence, power, etc. (Annotations in the 1599 Geneva Patriot’s Edition)
24 And put on the new man, which 1after God is created unto 2righteousness, and 3true holiness.
1 After the image of God.
2 The effect and end of the new creation.
3 Not fained nor counterfeit. (Annotations in the 1599 Geneva Patriot’s Edition)

Man had received everything in him to be happy living for always. Though he was not immortal. The first living being, “a soul” that would be called “man”, was receiving a higher status than the previous created living beings. Man was made in the image of God, indicating that Adam had some similar elements of God and being in the likeness of the Most High Elohim he received in this way a sort of “royal authority” to govern over God’s creation.

All over the world we can find creation myths, showing that the “being” of it makes only sense when there is a reason for “being”. It is that sense of life so many people are looking for. Genesis uses a similar approach found in other ancient documents: Existence depends on function.

Jackson Wu looks at creation and John H. Walton’s view in this way

Genesis indeed explains the origins of the world but it tells a particular kind of story. It provides a “functional” (rather than a “material”) account of the world origins.

and continues with a good example

If I move beds and dressers out of a “bedroom” and replace it with a desk and file cabinets, what would we say? A “bedroom” no longer exists. I have now “created” a office or study.
Similarly, Genesis 1 explains how God created the world to be a sacred space, a Temple where He would dwell with his people. This view of Genesis helps us to see who God is, who we are, and God’s design for the world. {When Did God Make China?}

That original manly being was “to be red” (=Adam). Adam occurs approximately 500 times with the meaning of mankind. In the opening chapters of the Bereshith (the Book of the Beginnings or Genesis), with three exceptions (1:26; 2:5,20) it has the definite article indicating “man” or “the man” rather than “Adam”.
The first undisputed occurrence of the name of Adam is in the genealogy of Genesis 5:1-5.

Adam and Eve with Cain and Abel – Catacomb of the Via Latina
1 This is the 1book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created Adam, in the 2likeness of God made he him,
2 Male and female created he them, and blessed them, and called their name 1Adam in the day that they were created.
3 Now Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a child in his own 1likeness after his image, and called his name Seth.
4 aAnd the days of Adam, after he had begotten Seth, were eight hundred years, and he begat sons and daughters.
5 So all the days that Adam lived, were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.

The 1st Adam indicates to be the first living creature of “red blood” (hence red blooded or adam), flesh and bones. Of necessity that first fleshly creature out of which mankind would grow could be called the first created man or “the man” and the designation is equivalent to a proper name: Adam.

This first soul or living being, came from the earth, and by receiving the Breath of God came to live. Animated by the divine breath created in the image of God was allowed to have dominion over all other life, animate and inanimate. He is other than God, with no actual physical descent from the Supreme Being or from any inferior deity. Notice also how only by the creation of this human being is mentioned that God “breathed … the breath of life”

Genesis 2:

7 The Lord God also 1made the man 2of the dust of the ground, and breathed in his face breath of life, band the man was a living soul.
8 And the Lord God planted a garden Eastward in 1Eden, and there he put the man whom he had made.
9 (For out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree pleasant to the sight, and good for meat: the 1tree of life also in the midst of the garden, 2and the tree of knowledge of good and of evil.

Genesis 1:

Satan Watching the Caresses of Adam and Eve — William Blake (1757-1827); William Blake’s illustrations of “Paradise Lost”, 1808.
27 Thus God created the man in his image: in the image of God created he him: he created them imale and female.
28 And God 1blessed them, and God said to them, jBring forth fruit, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heaven, and over every beast that moveth upon the earth.
29 And God said, Behold, I have given unto you 1every herb bearing seed, which is upon all the earth, and every tree, wherein is the fruit of a tree bearing seed: kthat shall be to you for meat.
30 Likewise to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the heaven, and to everything that moveth upon the earth, which hath life in itself, every green herb shall be for meat, and it was so.
31 lAnd God saw all that he had made, and lo, it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Genesis 2:

18 Also the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be himself alone: I will make him an help 1meet for him.
19 So the Lord God formed of the earth every beast of the field, and every fowl of the heaven, and brought them unto the 1man to see how he would call them: for howsoever the man named the living creature, so was the name thereof.
20 The man therefore gave names unto all cattle, and to the fowl of the heaven, and to every beast of the field: but for Adam found he not an helper meet for him.
21 Therefore the Lord God caused an heavy sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in stead thereof.
22 And the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man, 1made he a 2woman, and brought her to the man.
23 Then the man said, cThis now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called 1woman, because she was taken out of the man.
24 dTherefore shall man leave 1his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh.
25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not 1ashamed.

Man Made in the Image of God, as in Genesis 1:26 to 2:3, illustration from a Bible card published 1906 by the Providence Lithograph Company (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Divine Creator had out of nothing or out of the blackness created elements which became ordered and received a function. As such the Most High Elohim Jehovah is the One God Who brings order out of (primordial) chaos and as such also being the God of order. [Chaos representing “non-order,” not “disorder.”]

Man being set in God’s Garden, the Garden of Eden, got the allowance to name the other things but also got the obligation of obedience to the divine Will, in connection with the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

When you follow the storytelling of creation you shall find God speaking or bringing out words, and then matter came into being. Every time it was God’s Word that brought action and life. Each stage of creation is also approved with the words

“And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1: 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, cf. 31),

and the inference is that the creation of man was its consummation and climax.

God wanted to have His Kingdom full of plants, animals and human beings in his likeness. He wanted to see a beautiful world where all of His creatures could live in peace with each other.

The first Adam wanted a partner and God made him one. This person taken out of man, the mannin became the first woman and was to be Adam’s partner giving him children as part of God’s family.

+

* Bible quotes from 1599 Geneva Patriot’s Edition

Preceding article: The 1st Adam in the Hebrew Scriptures #1 Beginning of everything

Next: The 1st Adam in the Hebrew Scriptures #3 With his partner

++

Additional reading:

+++

Further reading of interest

+++

Save

Related articles

Save

Rate this:

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Belgian Ecclesia Brussel - Leuven @[email protected] · 2016-10-12 · 15:00 UTC

The 1st Adam in the Hebrew Scriptures #2 Beginning of mankind

Monyash Well Dressing 2009, In the Beginning God Created Man. Clay tablet decorated with coloured petals and stones.

After the fifth period in creation the sixth session brought forth ‘living souls‘ or ‘living things’ or ‘living beings’ which could multiply, making the earth having more of their sort. They were not in the image of God, but on the ‘sixth day‘ the Divine Creator decided to make some living being after His image.

This image and likeness of God in man is expounded, Ephesians 4:24, where it is written that man was created after God in righteousness and true holiness, meaning by these two words, all perfection, as wisdom, truth, innocence, power, etc. (Annotations in the 1599 Geneva Patriot’s Edition)
24 And put on the new man, which 1after God is created unto 2righteousness, and 3true holiness.
1 After the image of God.
2 The effect and end of the new creation.
3 Not fained nor counterfeit. (Annotations in the 1599 Geneva Patriot’s Edition)

Man had received everything in him to be happy living for always. Though he was not immortal. The first living being, “a soul” that would be called “man”, was receiving a higher status than the previous created living beings. Man was made in the image of God, indicating that Adam had some similar elements of God and being in the likeness of the Most High Elohim he received in this way a sort of “royal authority” to govern over God’s creation.

All over the world we can find creation myths, showing that the “being” of it makes only sense when there is a reason for “being”. It is that sense of life so many people are looking for. Genesis uses a similar approach found in other ancient documents: Existence depends on function.

Jackson Wu looks at creation and John H. Walton’s view in this way

Genesis indeed explains the origins of the world but it tells a particular kind of story. It provides a “functional” (rather than a “material”) account of the world origins.

and continues with a good example

If I move beds and dressers out of a “bedroom” and replace it with a desk and file cabinets, what would we say? A “bedroom” no longer exists. I have now “created” a office or study.
Similarly, Genesis 1 explains how God created the world to be a sacred space, a Temple where He would dwell with his people. This view of Genesis helps us to see who God is, who we are, and God’s design for the world. {When Did God Make China?}

That original manly being was “to be red” (=Adam). Adam occurs approximately 500 times with the meaning of mankind. In the opening chapters of the Bereshith (the Book of the Beginnings or Genesis), with three exceptions (1:26; 2:5,20) it has the definite article indicating “man” or “the man” rather than “Adam”.
The first undisputed occurrence of the name of Adam is in the genealogy of Genesis 5:1-5.

Adam and Eve with Cain and Abel – Catacomb of the Via Latina
1 This is the 1book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created Adam, in the 2likeness of God made he him,
2 Male and female created he them, and blessed them, and called their name 1Adam in the day that they were created.
3 Now Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a child in his own 1likeness after his image, and called his name Seth.
4 aAnd the days of Adam, after he had begotten Seth, were eight hundred years, and he begat sons and daughters.
5 So all the days that Adam lived, were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.

The 1st Adam indicates to be the first living creature of “red blood” (hence red blooded or adam), flesh and bones. Of necessity that first fleshly creature out of which mankind would grow could be called the first created man or “the man” and the designation is equivalent to a proper name: Adam.

This first soul or living being, came from the earth, and by receiving the Breath of God came to live. Animated by the divine breath created in the image of God was allowed to have dominion over all other life, animate and inanimate. He is other than God, with no actual physical descent from the Supreme Being or from any inferior deity. Notice also how only by the creation of this human being is mentioned that God “breathed … the breath of life”

Genesis 2:

7 The Lord God also 1made the man 2of the dust of the ground, and breathed in his face breath of life, band the man was a living soul.
8 And the Lord God planted a garden Eastward in 1Eden, and there he put the man whom he had made.
9 (For out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree pleasant to the sight, and good for meat: the 1tree of life also in the midst of the garden, 2and the tree of knowledge of good and of evil.

Genesis 1:

Satan Watching the Caresses of Adam and Eve — William Blake (1757-1827); William Blake’s illustrations of “Paradise Lost”, 1808.
27 Thus God created the man in his image: in the image of God created he him: he created them imale and female.
28 And God 1blessed them, and God said to them, jBring forth fruit, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heaven, and over every beast that moveth upon the earth.
29 And God said, Behold, I have given unto you 1every herb bearing seed, which is upon all the earth, and every tree, wherein is the fruit of a tree bearing seed: kthat shall be to you for meat.
30 Likewise to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the heaven, and to everything that moveth upon the earth, which hath life in itself, every green herb shall be for meat, and it was so.
31 lAnd God saw all that he had made, and lo, it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Genesis 2:

18 Also the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be himself alone: I will make him an help 1meet for him.
19 So the Lord God formed of the earth every beast of the field, and every fowl of the heaven, and brought them unto the 1man to see how he would call them: for howsoever the man named the living creature, so was the name thereof.
20 The man therefore gave names unto all cattle, and to the fowl of the heaven, and to every beast of the field: but for Adam found he not an helper meet for him.
21 Therefore the Lord God caused an heavy sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in stead thereof.
22 And the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man, 1made he a 2woman, and brought her to the man.
23 Then the man said, cThis now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called 1woman, because she was taken out of the man.
24 dTherefore shall man leave 1his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh.
25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not 1ashamed.

Man Made in the Image of God, as in Genesis 1:26 to 2:3, illustration from a Bible card published 1906 by the Providence Lithograph Company (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Divine Creator had out of nothing or out of the blackness created elements which became ordered and received a function. As such the Most High Elohim Jehovah is the One God Who brings order out of (primordial) chaos and as such also being the God of order. [Chaos representing “non-order,” not “disorder.”]

Man being set in God’s Garden, the Garden of Eden, got the allowance to name the other things but also got the obligation of obedience to the divine Will, in connection with the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

When you follow the storytelling of creation you shall find God speaking or bringing out words, and then matter came into being. Every time it was God’s Word that brought action and life. Each stage of creation is also approved with the words

“And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1: 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, cf. 31),

and the inference is that the creation of man was its consummation and climax.

God wanted to have His Kingdom full of plants, animals and human beings in his likeness. He wanted to see a beautiful world where all of His creatures could live in peace with each other.

The first Adam wanted a partner and God made him one. This person taken out of man, the mannin became the first woman and was to be Adam’s partner giving him children as part of God’s family.

+

* Bible quotes from 1599 Geneva Patriot’s Edition

Preceding article: The 1st Adam in the Hebrew Scriptures #1 Beginning of everything

Next: The 1st Adam in the Hebrew Scriptures #3 With his partner

++

Additional reading:

+++

Further reading of interest

+++

Save

Related articles

Save

Rate this:

#1Adam #Adam #AdamAndEve #BeginningOfTheUniverse #BookOfGenesis #Chaos #Creation #CreationMyth #DivineCreator #Eve #GardenOfEden #Genesis #Genesis1 #GodOfOrder #GodSpeaking #Human #HumanBeing #Image #ImageOfGod #InImageOfGod #LivingBeing #LivingCreature #LivingSoul #Man #ManninOr1Woman #ObedienceToGod #OriginOfTheUniverse #Temple #TempleOfGod #TreeOfKnowledgeOfGoodAndEvil #Universe #WordOfGod

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Belgian Ecclesia Brussel - Leuven @[email protected] · 2016-10-12 · 15:00 UTC

The 1st Adam in the Hebrew Scriptures #2 Beginning of mankind

Monyash Well Dressing 2009, In the Beginning God Created Man. Clay tablet decorated with coloured petals and stones.

After the fifth period in creation the sixth session brought forth ‘living souls‘ or ‘living things’ or ‘living beings’ which could multiply, making the earth having more of their sort. They were not in the image of God, but on the ‘sixth day‘ the Divine Creator decided to make some living being after His image.

This image and likeness of God in man is expounded, Ephesians 4:24, where it is written that man was created after God in righteousness and true holiness, meaning by these two words, all perfection, as wisdom, truth, innocence, power, etc. (Annotations in the 1599 Geneva Patriot’s Edition)
24 And put on the new man, which 1after God is created unto 2righteousness, and 3true holiness.
1 After the image of God.
2 The effect and end of the new creation.
3 Not fained nor counterfeit. (Annotations in the 1599 Geneva Patriot’s Edition)

Man had received everything in him to be happy living for always. Though he was not immortal. The first living being, “a soul” that would be called “man”, was receiving a higher status than the previous created living beings. Man was made in the image of God, indicating that Adam had some similar elements of God and being in the likeness of the Most High Elohim he received in this way a sort of “royal authority” to govern over God’s creation.

All over the world we can find creation myths, showing that the “being” of it makes only sense when there is a reason for “being”. It is that sense of life so many people are looking for. Genesis uses a similar approach found in other ancient documents: Existence depends on function.

Jackson Wu looks at creation and John H. Walton’s view in this way

Genesis indeed explains the origins of the world but it tells a particular kind of story. It provides a “functional” (rather than a “material”) account of the world origins.

and continues with a good example

If I move beds and dressers out of a “bedroom” and replace it with a desk and file cabinets, what would we say? A “bedroom” no longer exists. I have now “created” a office or study.
Similarly, Genesis 1 explains how God created the world to be a sacred space, a Temple where He would dwell with his people. This view of Genesis helps us to see who God is, who we are, and God’s design for the world. {When Did God Make China?}

That original manly being was “to be red” (=Adam). Adam occurs approximately 500 times with the meaning of mankind. In the opening chapters of the Bereshith (the Book of the Beginnings or Genesis), with three exceptions (1:26; 2:5,20) it has the definite article indicating “man” or “the man” rather than “Adam”.
The first undisputed occurrence of the name of Adam is in the genealogy of Genesis 5:1-5.

Adam and Eve with Cain and Abel – Catacomb of the Via Latina
1 This is the 1book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created Adam, in the 2likeness of God made he him,
2 Male and female created he them, and blessed them, and called their name 1Adam in the day that they were created.
3 Now Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a child in his own 1likeness after his image, and called his name Seth.
4 aAnd the days of Adam, after he had begotten Seth, were eight hundred years, and he begat sons and daughters.
5 So all the days that Adam lived, were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.

The 1st Adam indicates to be the first living creature of “red blood” (hence red blooded or adam), flesh and bones. Of necessity that first fleshly creature out of which mankind would grow could be called the first created man or “the man” and the designation is equivalent to a proper name: Adam.

This first soul or living being, came from the earth, and by receiving the Breath of God came to live. Animated by the divine breath created in the image of God was allowed to have dominion over all other life, animate and inanimate. He is other than God, with no actual physical descent from the Supreme Being or from any inferior deity. Notice also how only by the creation of this human being is mentioned that God “breathed … the breath of life”

Genesis 2:

7 The Lord God also 1made the man 2of the dust of the ground, and breathed in his face breath of life, band the man was a living soul.
8 And the Lord God planted a garden Eastward in 1Eden, and there he put the man whom he had made.
9 (For out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree pleasant to the sight, and good for meat: the 1tree of life also in the midst of the garden, 2and the tree of knowledge of good and of evil.

Genesis 1:

Satan Watching the Caresses of Adam and Eve — William Blake (1757-1827); William Blake’s illustrations of “Paradise Lost”, 1808.
27 Thus God created the man in his image: in the image of God created he him: he created them imale and female.
28 And God 1blessed them, and God said to them, jBring forth fruit, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heaven, and over every beast that moveth upon the earth.
29 And God said, Behold, I have given unto you 1every herb bearing seed, which is upon all the earth, and every tree, wherein is the fruit of a tree bearing seed: kthat shall be to you for meat.
30 Likewise to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the heaven, and to everything that moveth upon the earth, which hath life in itself, every green herb shall be for meat, and it was so.
31 lAnd God saw all that he had made, and lo, it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Genesis 2:

18 Also the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be himself alone: I will make him an help 1meet for him.
19 So the Lord God formed of the earth every beast of the field, and every fowl of the heaven, and brought them unto the 1man to see how he would call them: for howsoever the man named the living creature, so was the name thereof.
20 The man therefore gave names unto all cattle, and to the fowl of the heaven, and to every beast of the field: but for Adam found he not an helper meet for him.
21 Therefore the Lord God caused an heavy sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in stead thereof.
22 And the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man, 1made he a 2woman, and brought her to the man.
23 Then the man said, cThis now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called 1woman, because she was taken out of the man.
24 dTherefore shall man leave 1his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh.
25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not 1ashamed.

Man Made in the Image of God, as in Genesis 1:26 to 2:3, illustration from a Bible card published 1906 by the Providence Lithograph Company (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Divine Creator had out of nothing or out of the blackness created elements which became ordered and received a function. As such the Most High Elohim Jehovah is the One God Who brings order out of (primordial) chaos and as such also being the God of order. [Chaos representing “non-order,” not “disorder.”]

Man being set in God’s Garden, the Garden of Eden, got the allowance to name the other things but also got the obligation of obedience to the divine Will, in connection with the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

When you follow the storytelling of creation you shall find God speaking or bringing out words, and then matter came into being. Every time it was God’s Word that brought action and life. Each stage of creation is also approved with the words

“And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1: 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, cf. 31),

and the inference is that the creation of man was its consummation and climax.

God wanted to have His Kingdom full of plants, animals and human beings in his likeness. He wanted to see a beautiful world where all of His creatures could live in peace with each other.

The first Adam wanted a partner and God made him one. This person taken out of man, the mannin became the first woman and was to be Adam’s partner giving him children as part of God’s family.

+

* Bible quotes from 1599 Geneva Patriot’s Edition

Preceding article: The 1st Adam in the Hebrew Scriptures #1 Beginning of everything

Next: The 1st Adam in the Hebrew Scriptures #3 With his partner

++

Additional reading:

+++

Further reading of interest

+++

Save

Related articles

Save

Rate this:

#1Adam #Adam #AdamAndEve #BeginningOfTheUniverse #BookOfGenesis #Chaos #Creation #CreationMyth #DivineCreator #Eve #GardenOfEden #Genesis #Genesis1 #GodOfOrder #GodSpeaking #Human #HumanBeing #Image #ImageOfGod #InImageOfGod #LivingBeing #LivingCreature #LivingSoul #Man #ManninOr1Woman #ObedienceToGod #OriginOfTheUniverse #Temple #TempleOfGod #TreeOfKnowledgeOfGoodAndEvil #Universe #WordOfGod

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Sky Dancing @[email protected] · 2026-05-18 · 18:20 UTC

Mostly Monday Reads: The Chaos Journal

“Upon further reflection, the Rededicate 250 National Prayer thing now makes huge sense. He Is Risen!” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

The one thing you can depend on every time Orange Caligula gets the reins of government is that things will always get worse, except for democracy backsliding. It’s just a matter of how shocking the next thing is. How many of us are in a constant state of being stunned that we aren’t the least bit surprised by the news, even though we still find the actions stomach-churning? Well, hang on! It’s been a week of WTF moments.

Today’s Tit-for-Tat announcement shows just how brazen the entire administration has gotten. This is from Time Magazine. It’s reported by Rebecca Schneid. What kind of monster thinks these things up?

President Donald Trump has withdrawn his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) amid reports that he struck a deal with his own Justice Department to create a $1.7 billion fund to compensate political allies who claim they were wrongly targeted by the Biden Administration.
The alleged plan, first reported by the New York Times and ABC News, would be paid for with taxpayer funds and is being fast-tracked, but has yet to be officially approved. If approved, the fund would be used to pay damages to people who say they were harmed by the Biden Administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Court documents showed Trump withdrew his lawsuit against the IRS, a move that could herald a private deal between the president and the agency he controls, while skirting legal oversight of the deal.
In a lawsuit filed in a Miami federal court in January, Trump and other plaintiffs accused federal agencies of failing in their duty of stopping a former IRS contractor from illegally obtaining and disclosing tax returns to the New York Times, ProPublica, and “other left-wing media outlets,” between May 2019 and September 2020.
The funds would also be used to settle his request for $230 million in legal claims from the Justice Department for the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and investigation into alleged ties between his campaign and Russia
As part of the settlement, Trump would also reportedly ask the IRS to public1pologize for the disclosure of his personal financial records and to waive an IRS audit
According to the Times, the Justice Department would model the program after the historic $760 million settlement fund stemming from the Keepseagle v. Vilsack class-action lawsuit, settled in 2011, which alleged that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) systematically discriminated against Native American farmers and ranchers in its farm loan and loan servicing program.

We know someone who can sum this up nicely. This is how Hillary put it this morning.

Trump didn’t just pardon his followers who stormed the U.S. Capitol. He’s now set them up for payments through a slush fund he created to reward his allies—out of your tax dollars. You could not make this up.
— Hillary Rodham Clinton (@hillaryclinton.bsky.social) 2026-05-18T16:29:16.603Z

Robert Reich had some additional thoughts and analysis. He elucidated them on his SubStack this morning. “Has Trump’s Republican Party Become a Criminal Enterprise? Trump’s purge of all political opponents, including Senator Bill Cassidy, leaves it with no purpose other than helping Trump achieve his lawless goals.” Trump puts us in a Mafia State every time he’s elected. Grifting is his only talent, and he’s been rich and influential enough to find ambitious and greedy toadies to carry out his wishes. We’ve known this forever here.

robertreich.substack.com/p/is-trumps-…
— @democracy4u.bsky.social 2026-05-18T16:32:07.768Z

On Saturday, Trump took revenge on Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy for Cassidy’s vote five years ago to convict Trump, in his second impeachment, for instigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Cassidy thereby became the first GOP senator defeated by a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary. (Other Republican senators who have stood up to Trump — such as North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Utah’s Mitt Romney — saw the writing on the wall and didn’t seek reelection.)
Trump’s purge of Cassidy comes in the wake of Trump’s purges of House Republicans who stood up to him, such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney.
Trump’s next Republican target in the House is Kentucky representative Thomas Massie, who had the guts to oppose U.S. military involvement in Iran, demand release of the Epstein files, and criticize Trump’s spending bills for adding to the national debt. Massie appears likely to be defeated by a Trump-backed opponent in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary.
Trump has also purged state legislators who have refused to do his bidding, such as the seven Indiana Republicans who refused to redistrict the state as Trump demanded they do, and who Trump insured were defeated in their recent primaries.
The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out.
In his concession speech Friday night, Cassidy stated the obvious reference to Trump:
“Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”
Nicely put but sadly irrelevant because Trump — who’s clearly serving himself rather than the American public — now possesses all levers of power in the official Republican Party.
As Republican senator Lindsey Graham said yesterday on Meet the Press, “There’s no room in this party to destroy [Trump’s] agenda.”

There’s more at the link. My question is, what the hell can the rest of us who don’t support him do? I voted Saturday morning, wondering which candidate I had voted for would even have a chance under the new gerrymandering. That doesn’t even consider that we couldn’t even vote for our Congressional representatives, given the Supreme Court decision and the quick fix redraw of our map to ensure maybe one black person will retain their seat. The only good news to come out of the election was that all five constitutional amendments proposed by Governor Klandry were voted down.

Will these latest bits of news set up another J-6 self-coup? There will certainly be a rabid MAGA candidate sitting in Cassidy’s seat come next January. This is from NPR. “Louisiana senator who voted to convict Trump loses Republican primary.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, one of seven Republican senators who voted to remove President Trump from office after the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, lost his bid for reelection.
Louisiana’s Senate primary on Saturday was the latest test of Trump’s hold on his party. The president recruited a challenger, Rep. Julia Letlow, and urged supporters to defeat Cassidy over his vote.
“His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now part of legend,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post about Cassidy. “And it’s nice to see his political career is OVER.”
Cassidy finished third in a three-way race, according to the Associated Press. Letlow and another candidate, state Treasurer John Fleming, will advance to a June 27 runoff.
In conceding the race, Cassidy hinted that he would not finish his second term quietly. But in an apparent dig at Trump, he also said he wouldn’t contest his loss.
“You don’t pout, you don’t whine, you don’t claim that the election was stolen,” Cassidy told supporters on Saturday night. “You thank the voters for the privilege of representing the state or the country for as long as you’ve had that privilege. And that’s what I’m doing right now.”
Cassidy told voters they should cast their ballot based on the present and the future, not the past, a subtle discouragement from re-litigating the 2020 election six years on. But for many primary voters, Cassidy’s move to convict felt like a betrayal, and Trump’s endorsement was paramount.
“I’m the type of person, if you cross me, I probably won’t trust you anymore,” retired sheriff deputy Kevin Dupree said earlier this month. “I think his political career in Louisiana is finished.”

My friend Robert Mann, a former Journalism Professor at LSU, has something poignant to say about the loss. This is from his SubStack. “Enjoy your tarnished legacy, Bill Cassidy. You earned it.” It’s a good lesson: while all politics is local, it can be influenced by a cult of personality.

Although he pandered shamelessly to Trump and MAGA to the bitter end, Sen. Bill Cassidy could have written a different ending to his political career.
He could have left office with his head held high, proud and satisfied that he’d remained true to his principles and the Hippocratic Oath.
He could have protected our families by blocking Trump’s efforts to destroy our public health system.
He could have legislated (and campaigned) as the moderate he told me and others he truly was.
He could have put the state of Louisiana — and the nation — ahead of his desire for another U.S. Senate term.
He could have been our senator, not Donald Trump’s.
He could have done all this and more, but Cassidy lacked the courage, the imagination, and the decency to put you and me ahead of his political ambition.
To quote James Carville in the New York Times earlier this week, “Bill Cassidy sold his soul to the Devil, and he didn’t get anything for it.”
Except that’s not entirely true.
What Cassidy received in return for his soul is eternal shame and a well-earned legacy of cravenness.
I hope Cassidy enjoys his earnings.
I hope he also feels the harsh judgment of history that will be reserved for a Trump critic turned shameless toady who sold out to the worst, most corrupt president in American history—and still lost.
Bill Cassidy could have written a different story for himself and his state, but he just didn’t have it in him.

Speaking of Mafia-like behavior, here’s a little something on the Don’s Greenland Grab. This is from the New York Times. “In Closed-Door Talks, U.S. Demands a Major Role in Greenland. Greenlandic officials worry about the direction of the negotiations aimed at defusing President Trump’s threats to seize their island. But they have little leverage.” The story has a number of contributing reporters.

With the conflict in Iran still smoldering, President Trump’s obsession with Greenland seems like a forgotten sideshow.

But for the past four months, negotiators from the United States, Greenland and Denmark, which controls Greenland’s foreign affairs, have been holding confidential talks in Washington about Greenland’s future.

The talks were meant to give Mr. Trump an offramp to his threats of a military takeover of Greenland and to scale back a crisis that risked breaking apart the NATO alliance. But Greenlandic leaders are worried about what is being proposed, which is a much larger U.S. role on the Arctic island. And they fear that if the conflict with Iran winds down, the president will swing his aggression back on them.

Some Greenlandic politicians say they have even circled a date on their calendars to be wary: June 14, Mr. Trump’s birthday.
An investigation by The New York Times, based on interviews with officials in Washington, Copenhagen and Greenland, has discovered:
The United States is trying to modify a longstanding military arrangement to ensure American troops can stay in Greenland indefinitely, even if Greenland becomes independent. The notion is basically a forever clause, and Greenlanders do not like it.
The United States has pushed the talks beyond military matters and wants effective veto power over any major investment deals in Greenland to box out competitors like Russia and China. Greenlanders and Danes strongly object to this.
The United States is discussing cooperation with Greenland on natural resources. The island is loaded with oil, uranium, rare earths and other critical minerals, though much of it is buried deep beneath Greenland’s ice.
The Pentagon is rapidly moving ahead on plans for a military expansion and recently sent a Marine Corps officer to Narsarsuaq, a town in southern Greenland, to inspect the World War II-era airport, the harbor and places where American troops could be housed.
The American demands are so steep, Greenlandic officials fear, that they amount to a major imposition on their sovereignty. Despite all of the talk from Danish and American officials that Greenland’s future is up to the island’s 57,000 people, Greenlandic officials said the American demands would tie their hands for generations.
If the Americans get everything they want, said Justus Hansen, a member of Greenland’s Parliament, there will never be any “real independence.”
“We might as well raise our own flag halfway,” he said.

There’s a lot more at that gifted link. Jeer Heeter has this description of our Grifter-in-Chief in his article in The Nation. “Trump Gloats About “Making a Fortune” While Americans Suffer. As his war in Iran wreaks havoc, Trump is fixated on personal glory and enrichment.”

Donald Trump is annoyed that he can’t celebrate the massive profits oil companies are making due to the war he launched in the Middle East. Left to his own druthers, Trump would be exulting in the hundreds of billions of dollars produced by skyrocketing oil prices—if it weren’t for the pesky fact that it comes at the expense of ordinary Americans, who are now paying roughly 40 percent more every time they fill up the gas tank than they were before Trump started bombing Iran nearly three months ago.
We know this thanks to Trump’s endless dedication to saying the quiet part out loud. Speaking with Sean Hannity of Fox News on Thursday, Trump chortled that because far less oil was coming out of the Middle East, “people are finding other places to buy oil, like Texas.” Trump added, “So I don’t want to say we’re making a fortune, you understand that? Because if I say that, they’re going to say ‘oh, he forgets about the little man with the $4 gasoline.’”
The juxtaposition between “making a fortune” and the “little man” suffering at the gas station underscores just how obtuse Trump and his allies have become in their economic message. Their response to the harm caused by Trump’s policies is not to reverse those policies, or even to appear sympathetic about their effects. It’s to express their total indifference to the suffering of the American people. At the same time, Trump is obsessively focused on his real priorities: enriching himself and his family, and creating gaudy monuments to himself such as a new White House ballroom and a Triumphal Arch that will squat in the middle of Washington, DC. In response to a reporter’s query as to whom the arch would celebrate, Trump pointed to himself and said “me.”
Trump twice won the White House on a message of economic populism, promising in his 2025 inauguration that he would “bring prices down.” Today, he sings a very different tune, with a message that amounts to the apocryphal words misattributed to the French Queen Marie Antoinette: “Let them eat cake.”
Speaking to reporters last Monday, Trump said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.” He also said that concern for the financial suffering of Americans would not be a factor in making a deal with Iran “not even a little bit.”
Under normal political circumstances, the Republican Party would be wise to separate itself from Trump’s callousness. But the GOP has become a hollowed-out operation mainly concerned with tending to Trump’s cult of personality. On Saturday, Trump won a major victory against critics in the party when Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy came in third in his party’s Senate primary race, losing to a candidate Trump had supported. Cassidy’s loss underscores a lesson Trump has taught the GOP again and again over the last decade: There is no future in the party for anyone who defies his will.
So, rather than distancing themselves from Trump’s “let them eat cake” message, Republicans are embracing the president’s self-defeating rhetoric. On Thursday, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan told CNN that oil prices were “were coming down until we had to deal with this situation, but, you know, that’s life, that’s dealing with…the world we live in.”

It’s going to take hard work and a lot of voting to get rid of this monster and all the dregs of humanity he’s put in charge of the country. It appears they have all been profiting from insider news on the Iran War.

1. What I found in Trump's new 113-page financial disclosure report. It doesn't look good.
— Judd Legum (@juddlegum.bsky.social) 2026-05-18T13:58:00.133Z

This is from Jude Legum’s SubStack. “The smoking guns in Trump’s new financial disclosure, Trump publicly praised companies the same day he bought their stock.”

On March 11, President Trump took a tour of a manufacturing facility in Reading, Ohio, owned by Thermo Fisher Scientific, a medical supply company. During the tour, Trump lavished praise on Thermo Fisher which uses the facility to manufacture prescription drugs on a contract basis. “It’s a great honor being here. It’s a great company,” Trump said, appearing alongside CEO Marc Casper. “You have done a fantastic job and I’d like to congratulate you.”
Later, Trump asked another Thermo Fisher executive to share “some great information about this incredible company.” The executive talked about how Thermo Fisher is producing drugs for Merck and others at the facility. Trump then explicitly encouraged other pharmaceutical companies to contract with Thermo Fisher to “on-shore” more jobs. He claimed that some pharmaceutical companies were building their own U.S. manufacturing facilities but said “they can get here a lot faster by using this great company.”
Trump did not mention that, the same day of the tour, March 11, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock. (Federal disclosure rules only require filers to list their transactions in broad ranges.) Trump did not publicly disclose the purchase until May 14. It was listed on page 38 of a 113-page document cataloging Trump’s stock purchases in 2026.

Trump also purchased between $51,000 and $115,000 worth of Thermo Fisher stock about one month before his visit on February 12. He made another purchase of Thermo Fisher valued between $15,000 and $50,000 on March 2. So at the time of Trump’s effusive remarks about Thermo Fisher, he had purchased as much as $215,000 worth of the company’s stock over the previous month.
The fact that Trump visited a Thermo Fisher facility on the same day he purchased the company’s stock — and bought Thermo Fisher stock repeatedly in the weeks before his visit — has not previously been reported.
The disclosures reveal that Trump has been a highly active trader in 2026, executing thousands of transactions — many in individual stocks impacted by his administration’s policies. In response to criticism, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization claimed that the trades were completely separate from Trump’s official duties and managed by an independent outside financial advisor. “President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions,” the spokesperson said. “Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions.”
The fact that Trump purchased stock in Thermo Fisher the same day that he toured its facility undercuts this claim. Further, the March 11 purchase of Thermo Fisher stock was marked “UNSOLICITED” in the document. An “unsolicited” trade is one that is not recommended by a broker, but initiated by the customer.

At least three immigrant children were taken into custody and restrained with zip ties at the San Antonio Immigration Court. The children were between the ages of 9 and 12.https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/a…
— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) 2025-06-07T14:26:03.649Z

Brookings reminds us that there are still thousands of families with children experiencing horrible detentions and deportations because of the MAGA obsession with keeping America as white as possible. “The administration has detained 400,000 immigrants: What do we know about their children?” Is this really the kind of country you want to live in and that you thought you grew up in?

The Trump administration has made detention and deportation the centerpieces of its immigration policy. Around 60,000 people are being held in detention currently, and around 400,000 people have been booked into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention from an interior arrest since the administration began. Detention capacity is likely to expand, with $45 billion allocated to expanding detention facilities in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Though it is mostly adults who are detained and deported, many children are impacted by separation from their parents. However, there are no reliable data on how many detainees or deportees have children in the U.S., nor on what happens to them once their parent is taken into custody. Here we focus on detainees, about whom we have better information than deportees. Even a short separation from a parent is likely traumatic for a child, but a majority of detentions are not short-lived separations. A ProPublica study following ICE arrests of mothers of U.S. citizen children over the first seven months of the administration found that 60% had been removed and 17% remained in custody at the study’s conclusion.
To estimate the number of children affected by parental detention, we rely on demographic characteristics of detainees matched with likely unauthorized immigrants in the American Community Survey. Our analysis (detailed below) suggests that more than 145,000 U.S. citizen children have likely experienced a parent booked into detention since the administration began, with more than 22,000 of those experiencing detention of all their co-resident parents. In the accompanying interactive, we allow users to explore how the estimates change when the underlying assumptions are varied. Regardless of the assumptions used, it is clear that tens of thousands of children have faced parental detention since January 2025.

Please use the link to read the details. The time and research it took to find out all this was amazing and hard to believe.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?

I can’t even explain what kind of crush I had on Cat Stevens in ninth grade. I could basically play his entire songbook. He’s an amazing songwriter and musician.

#JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #CadetBonespurSIranWar #DonTheCon #IcelandGrab #SenatorBillCassidy #SlushFundForJ6Traitors #TheTrumpFamilyCrimeSyndicate #TrumpSIRSLawsuit #TrumpSRepublicanParty #WhereDoTheChildrenPlay

#johnbussbskysocialjohnbuss #cadetbonespursiranwar #donthecon #icelandgrab #senatorbillcassidy #slushfundforj6traitors

Sky Dancing @[email protected] · 2026-05-18 · 18:20 UTC

Mostly Monday Reads: The Chaos Journal

“Upon further reflection, the Rededicate 250 National Prayer thing now makes huge sense. He Is Risen!” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

The one thing you can depend on every time Orange Caligula gets the reins of government is that things will always get worse, except for democracy backsliding. It’s just a matter of how shocking the next thing is. How many of us are in a constant state of being stunned that we aren’t the least bit surprised by the news, even though we still find the actions stomach-churning? Well, hang on! It’s been a week of WTF moments.

Today’s Tit-for-Tat announcement shows just how brazen the entire administration has gotten. This is from Time Magazine. It’s reported by Rebecca Schneid. What kind of monster thinks these things up?

President Donald Trump has withdrawn his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) amid reports that he struck a deal with his own Justice Department to create a $1.7 billion fund to compensate political allies who claim they were wrongly targeted by the Biden Administration.
The alleged plan, first reported by the New York Times and ABC News, would be paid for with taxpayer funds and is being fast-tracked, but has yet to be officially approved. If approved, the fund would be used to pay damages to people who say they were harmed by the Biden Administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Court documents showed Trump withdrew his lawsuit against the IRS, a move that could herald a private deal between the president and the agency he controls, while skirting legal oversight of the deal.
In a lawsuit filed in a Miami federal court in January, Trump and other plaintiffs accused federal agencies of failing in their duty of stopping a former IRS contractor from illegally obtaining and disclosing tax returns to the New York Times, ProPublica, and “other left-wing media outlets,” between May 2019 and September 2020.
The funds would also be used to settle his request for $230 million in legal claims from the Justice Department for the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and investigation into alleged ties between his campaign and Russia
As part of the settlement, Trump would also reportedly ask the IRS to public1pologize for the disclosure of his personal financial records and to waive an IRS audit
According to the Times, the Justice Department would model the program after the historic $760 million settlement fund stemming from the Keepseagle v. Vilsack class-action lawsuit, settled in 2011, which alleged that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) systematically discriminated against Native American farmers and ranchers in its farm loan and loan servicing program.

We know someone who can sum this up nicely. This is how Hillary put it this morning.

Trump didn’t just pardon his followers who stormed the U.S. Capitol. He’s now set them up for payments through a slush fund he created to reward his allies—out of your tax dollars. You could not make this up.
— Hillary Rodham Clinton (@hillaryclinton.bsky.social) 2026-05-18T16:29:16.603Z

Robert Reich had some additional thoughts and analysis. He elucidated them on his SubStack this morning. “Has Trump’s Republican Party Become a Criminal Enterprise? Trump’s purge of all political opponents, including Senator Bill Cassidy, leaves it with no purpose other than helping Trump achieve his lawless goals.” Trump puts us in a Mafia State every time he’s elected. Grifting is his only talent, and he’s been rich and influential enough to find ambitious and greedy toadies to carry out his wishes. We’ve known this forever here.

robertreich.substack.com/p/is-trumps-…
— @democracy4u.bsky.social 2026-05-18T16:32:07.768Z

On Saturday, Trump took revenge on Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy for Cassidy’s vote five years ago to convict Trump, in his second impeachment, for instigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Cassidy thereby became the first GOP senator defeated by a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary. (Other Republican senators who have stood up to Trump — such as North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Utah’s Mitt Romney — saw the writing on the wall and didn’t seek reelection.)
Trump’s purge of Cassidy comes in the wake of Trump’s purges of House Republicans who stood up to him, such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney.
Trump’s next Republican target in the House is Kentucky representative Thomas Massie, who had the guts to oppose U.S. military involvement in Iran, demand release of the Epstein files, and criticize Trump’s spending bills for adding to the national debt. Massie appears likely to be defeated by a Trump-backed opponent in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary.
Trump has also purged state legislators who have refused to do his bidding, such as the seven Indiana Republicans who refused to redistrict the state as Trump demanded they do, and who Trump insured were defeated in their recent primaries.
The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out.
In his concession speech Friday night, Cassidy stated the obvious reference to Trump:
“Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”
Nicely put but sadly irrelevant because Trump — who’s clearly serving himself rather than the American public — now possesses all levers of power in the official Republican Party.
As Republican senator Lindsey Graham said yesterday on Meet the Press, “There’s no room in this party to destroy [Trump’s] agenda.”

There’s more at the link. My question is, what the hell can the rest of us who don’t support him do? I voted Saturday morning, wondering which candidate I had voted for would even have a chance under the new gerrymandering. That doesn’t even consider that we couldn’t even vote for our Congressional representatives, given the Supreme Court decision and the quick fix redraw of our map to ensure maybe one black person will retain their seat. The only good news to come out of the election was that all five constitutional amendments proposed by Governor Klandry were voted down.

Will these latest bits of news set up another J-6 self-coup? There will certainly be a rabid MAGA candidate sitting in Cassidy’s seat come next January. This is from NPR. “Louisiana senator who voted to convict Trump loses Republican primary.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, one of seven Republican senators who voted to remove President Trump from office after the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, lost his bid for reelection.
Louisiana’s Senate primary on Saturday was the latest test of Trump’s hold on his party. The president recruited a challenger, Rep. Julia Letlow, and urged supporters to defeat Cassidy over his vote.
“His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now part of legend,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post about Cassidy. “And it’s nice to see his political career is OVER.”
Cassidy finished third in a three-way race, according to the Associated Press. Letlow and another candidate, state Treasurer John Fleming, will advance to a June 27 runoff.
In conceding the race, Cassidy hinted that he would not finish his second term quietly. But in an apparent dig at Trump, he also said he wouldn’t contest his loss.
“You don’t pout, you don’t whine, you don’t claim that the election was stolen,” Cassidy told supporters on Saturday night. “You thank the voters for the privilege of representing the state or the country for as long as you’ve had that privilege. And that’s what I’m doing right now.”
Cassidy told voters they should cast their ballot based on the present and the future, not the past, a subtle discouragement from re-litigating the 2020 election six years on. But for many primary voters, Cassidy’s move to convict felt like a betrayal, and Trump’s endorsement was paramount.
“I’m the type of person, if you cross me, I probably won’t trust you anymore,” retired sheriff deputy Kevin Dupree said earlier this month. “I think his political career in Louisiana is finished.”

My friend Robert Mann, a former Journalism Professor at LSU, has something poignant to say about the loss. This is from his SubStack. “Enjoy your tarnished legacy, Bill Cassidy. You earned it.” It’s a good lesson: while all politics is local, it can be influenced by a cult of personality.

Although he pandered shamelessly to Trump and MAGA to the bitter end, Sen. Bill Cassidy could have written a different ending to his political career.
He could have left office with his head held high, proud and satisfied that he’d remained true to his principles and the Hippocratic Oath.
He could have protected our families by blocking Trump’s efforts to destroy our public health system.
He could have legislated (and campaigned) as the moderate he told me and others he truly was.
He could have put the state of Louisiana — and the nation — ahead of his desire for another U.S. Senate term.
He could have been our senator, not Donald Trump’s.
He could have done all this and more, but Cassidy lacked the courage, the imagination, and the decency to put you and me ahead of his political ambition.
To quote James Carville in the New York Times earlier this week, “Bill Cassidy sold his soul to the Devil, and he didn’t get anything for it.”
Except that’s not entirely true.
What Cassidy received in return for his soul is eternal shame and a well-earned legacy of cravenness.
I hope Cassidy enjoys his earnings.
I hope he also feels the harsh judgment of history that will be reserved for a Trump critic turned shameless toady who sold out to the worst, most corrupt president in American history—and still lost.
Bill Cassidy could have written a different story for himself and his state, but he just didn’t have it in him.

Speaking of Mafia-like behavior, here’s a little something on the Don’s Greenland Grab. This is from the New York Times. “In Closed-Door Talks, U.S. Demands a Major Role in Greenland. Greenlandic officials worry about the direction of the negotiations aimed at defusing President Trump’s threats to seize their island. But they have little leverage.” The story has a number of contributing reporters.

With the conflict in Iran still smoldering, President Trump’s obsession with Greenland seems like a forgotten sideshow.

But for the past four months, negotiators from the United States, Greenland and Denmark, which controls Greenland’s foreign affairs, have been holding confidential talks in Washington about Greenland’s future.

The talks were meant to give Mr. Trump an offramp to his threats of a military takeover of Greenland and to scale back a crisis that risked breaking apart the NATO alliance. But Greenlandic leaders are worried about what is being proposed, which is a much larger U.S. role on the Arctic island. And they fear that if the conflict with Iran winds down, the president will swing his aggression back on them.

Some Greenlandic politicians say they have even circled a date on their calendars to be wary: June 14, Mr. Trump’s birthday.
An investigation by The New York Times, based on interviews with officials in Washington, Copenhagen and Greenland, has discovered:
The United States is trying to modify a longstanding military arrangement to ensure American troops can stay in Greenland indefinitely, even if Greenland becomes independent. The notion is basically a forever clause, and Greenlanders do not like it.
The United States has pushed the talks beyond military matters and wants effective veto power over any major investment deals in Greenland to box out competitors like Russia and China. Greenlanders and Danes strongly object to this.
The United States is discussing cooperation with Greenland on natural resources. The island is loaded with oil, uranium, rare earths and other critical minerals, though much of it is buried deep beneath Greenland’s ice.
The Pentagon is rapidly moving ahead on plans for a military expansion and recently sent a Marine Corps officer to Narsarsuaq, a town in southern Greenland, to inspect the World War II-era airport, the harbor and places where American troops could be housed.
The American demands are so steep, Greenlandic officials fear, that they amount to a major imposition on their sovereignty. Despite all of the talk from Danish and American officials that Greenland’s future is up to the island’s 57,000 people, Greenlandic officials said the American demands would tie their hands for generations.
If the Americans get everything they want, said Justus Hansen, a member of Greenland’s Parliament, there will never be any “real independence.”
“We might as well raise our own flag halfway,” he said.

There’s a lot more at that gifted link. Jeer Heeter has this description of our Grifter-in-Chief in his article in The Nation. “Trump Gloats About “Making a Fortune” While Americans Suffer. As his war in Iran wreaks havoc, Trump is fixated on personal glory and enrichment.”

Donald Trump is annoyed that he can’t celebrate the massive profits oil companies are making due to the war he launched in the Middle East. Left to his own druthers, Trump would be exulting in the hundreds of billions of dollars produced by skyrocketing oil prices—if it weren’t for the pesky fact that it comes at the expense of ordinary Americans, who are now paying roughly 40 percent more every time they fill up the gas tank than they were before Trump started bombing Iran nearly three months ago.
We know this thanks to Trump’s endless dedication to saying the quiet part out loud. Speaking with Sean Hannity of Fox News on Thursday, Trump chortled that because far less oil was coming out of the Middle East, “people are finding other places to buy oil, like Texas.” Trump added, “So I don’t want to say we’re making a fortune, you understand that? Because if I say that, they’re going to say ‘oh, he forgets about the little man with the $4 gasoline.’”
The juxtaposition between “making a fortune” and the “little man” suffering at the gas station underscores just how obtuse Trump and his allies have become in their economic message. Their response to the harm caused by Trump’s policies is not to reverse those policies, or even to appear sympathetic about their effects. It’s to express their total indifference to the suffering of the American people. At the same time, Trump is obsessively focused on his real priorities: enriching himself and his family, and creating gaudy monuments to himself such as a new White House ballroom and a Triumphal Arch that will squat in the middle of Washington, DC. In response to a reporter’s query as to whom the arch would celebrate, Trump pointed to himself and said “me.”
Trump twice won the White House on a message of economic populism, promising in his 2025 inauguration that he would “bring prices down.” Today, he sings a very different tune, with a message that amounts to the apocryphal words misattributed to the French Queen Marie Antoinette: “Let them eat cake.”
Speaking to reporters last Monday, Trump said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.” He also said that concern for the financial suffering of Americans would not be a factor in making a deal with Iran “not even a little bit.”
Under normal political circumstances, the Republican Party would be wise to separate itself from Trump’s callousness. But the GOP has become a hollowed-out operation mainly concerned with tending to Trump’s cult of personality. On Saturday, Trump won a major victory against critics in the party when Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy came in third in his party’s Senate primary race, losing to a candidate Trump had supported. Cassidy’s loss underscores a lesson Trump has taught the GOP again and again over the last decade: There is no future in the party for anyone who defies his will.
So, rather than distancing themselves from Trump’s “let them eat cake” message, Republicans are embracing the president’s self-defeating rhetoric. On Thursday, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan told CNN that oil prices were “were coming down until we had to deal with this situation, but, you know, that’s life, that’s dealing with…the world we live in.”

It’s going to take hard work and a lot of voting to get rid of this monster and all the dregs of humanity he’s put in charge of the country. It appears they have all been profiting from insider news on the Iran War.

1. What I found in Trump's new 113-page financial disclosure report. It doesn't look good.
— Judd Legum (@juddlegum.bsky.social) 2026-05-18T13:58:00.133Z

This is from Jude Legum’s SubStack. “The smoking guns in Trump’s new financial disclosure, Trump publicly praised companies the same day he bought their stock.”

On March 11, President Trump took a tour of a manufacturing facility in Reading, Ohio, owned by Thermo Fisher Scientific, a medical supply company. During the tour, Trump lavished praise on Thermo Fisher which uses the facility to manufacture prescription drugs on a contract basis. “It’s a great honor being here. It’s a great company,” Trump said, appearing alongside CEO Marc Casper. “You have done a fantastic job and I’d like to congratulate you.”
Later, Trump asked another Thermo Fisher executive to share “some great information about this incredible company.” The executive talked about how Thermo Fisher is producing drugs for Merck and others at the facility. Trump then explicitly encouraged other pharmaceutical companies to contract with Thermo Fisher to “on-shore” more jobs. He claimed that some pharmaceutical companies were building their own U.S. manufacturing facilities but said “they can get here a lot faster by using this great company.”
Trump did not mention that, the same day of the tour, March 11, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock. (Federal disclosure rules only require filers to list their transactions in broad ranges.) Trump did not publicly disclose the purchase until May 14. It was listed on page 38 of a 113-page document cataloging Trump’s stock purchases in 2026.

Trump also purchased between $51,000 and $115,000 worth of Thermo Fisher stock about one month before his visit on February 12. He made another purchase of Thermo Fisher valued between $15,000 and $50,000 on March 2. So at the time of Trump’s effusive remarks about Thermo Fisher, he had purchased as much as $215,000 worth of the company’s stock over the previous month.
The fact that Trump visited a Thermo Fisher facility on the same day he purchased the company’s stock — and bought Thermo Fisher stock repeatedly in the weeks before his visit — has not previously been reported.
The disclosures reveal that Trump has been a highly active trader in 2026, executing thousands of transactions — many in individual stocks impacted by his administration’s policies. In response to criticism, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization claimed that the trades were completely separate from Trump’s official duties and managed by an independent outside financial advisor. “President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions,” the spokesperson said. “Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions.”
The fact that Trump purchased stock in Thermo Fisher the same day that he toured its facility undercuts this claim. Further, the March 11 purchase of Thermo Fisher stock was marked “UNSOLICITED” in the document. An “unsolicited” trade is one that is not recommended by a broker, but initiated by the customer.

At least three immigrant children were taken into custody and restrained with zip ties at the San Antonio Immigration Court. The children were between the ages of 9 and 12.https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/a…
— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) 2025-06-07T14:26:03.649Z

Brookings reminds us that there are still thousands of families with children experiencing horrible detentions and deportations because of the MAGA obsession with keeping America as white as possible. “The administration has detained 400,000 immigrants: What do we know about their children?” Is this really the kind of country you want to live in and that you thought you grew up in?

The Trump administration has made detention and deportation the centerpieces of its immigration policy. Around 60,000 people are being held in detention currently, and around 400,000 people have been booked into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention from an interior arrest since the administration began. Detention capacity is likely to expand, with $45 billion allocated to expanding detention facilities in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Though it is mostly adults who are detained and deported, many children are impacted by separation from their parents. However, there are no reliable data on how many detainees or deportees have children in the U.S., nor on what happens to them once their parent is taken into custody. Here we focus on detainees, about whom we have better information than deportees. Even a short separation from a parent is likely traumatic for a child, but a majority of detentions are not short-lived separations. A ProPublica study following ICE arrests of mothers of U.S. citizen children over the first seven months of the administration found that 60% had been removed and 17% remained in custody at the study’s conclusion.
To estimate the number of children affected by parental detention, we rely on demographic characteristics of detainees matched with likely unauthorized immigrants in the American Community Survey. Our analysis (detailed below) suggests that more than 145,000 U.S. citizen children have likely experienced a parent booked into detention since the administration began, with more than 22,000 of those experiencing detention of all their co-resident parents. In the accompanying interactive, we allow users to explore how the estimates change when the underlying assumptions are varied. Regardless of the assumptions used, it is clear that tens of thousands of children have faced parental detention since January 2025.

Please use the link to read the details. The time and research it took to find out all this was amazing and hard to believe.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?

I can’t even explain what kind of crush I had on Cat Stevens in ninth grade. I could basically play his entire songbook. He’s an amazing songwriter and musician.

#JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #CadetBonespurSIranWar #DonTheCon #IcelandGrab #SenatorBillCassidy #SlushFundForJ6Traitors #TheTrumpFamilyCrimeSyndicate #TrumpSIRSLawsuit #TrumpSRepublicanParty #WhereDoTheChildrenPlay

#johnbussbskysocialjohnbuss #cadetbonespursiranwar #donthecon #icelandgrab #senatorbillcassidy #slushfundforj6traitors

Sky Dancing @[email protected] · 2026-05-18 · 18:20 UTC

Mostly Monday Reads: The Chaos Journal

“Upon further reflection, the Rededicate 250 National Prayer thing now makes huge sense. He Is Risen!” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

The one thing you can depend on every time Orange Caligula gets the reins of government is that things will always get worse, except for democracy backsliding. It’s just a matter of how shocking the next thing is. How many of us are in a constant state of being stunned that we aren’t the least bit surprised by the news, even though we still find the actions stomach-churning? Well, hang on! It’s been a week of WTF moments.

Today’s Tit-for-Tat announcement shows just how brazen the entire administration has gotten. This is from Time Magazine. It’s reported by Rebecca Schneid. What kind of monster thinks these things up?

President Donald Trump has withdrawn his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) amid reports that he struck a deal with his own Justice Department to create a $1.7 billion fund to compensate political allies who claim they were wrongly targeted by the Biden Administration.
The alleged plan, first reported by the New York Times and ABC News, would be paid for with taxpayer funds and is being fast-tracked, but has yet to be officially approved. If approved, the fund would be used to pay damages to people who say they were harmed by the Biden Administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Court documents showed Trump withdrew his lawsuit against the IRS, a move that could herald a private deal between the president and the agency he controls, while skirting legal oversight of the deal.
In a lawsuit filed in a Miami federal court in January, Trump and other plaintiffs accused federal agencies of failing in their duty of stopping a former IRS contractor from illegally obtaining and disclosing tax returns to the New York Times, ProPublica, and “other left-wing media outlets,” between May 2019 and September 2020.
The funds would also be used to settle his request for $230 million in legal claims from the Justice Department for the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and investigation into alleged ties between his campaign and Russia
As part of the settlement, Trump would also reportedly ask the IRS to public1pologize for the disclosure of his personal financial records and to waive an IRS audit
According to the Times, the Justice Department would model the program after the historic $760 million settlement fund stemming from the Keepseagle v. Vilsack class-action lawsuit, settled in 2011, which alleged that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) systematically discriminated against Native American farmers and ranchers in its farm loan and loan servicing program.

We know someone who can sum this up nicely. This is how Hillary put it this morning.

Trump didn’t just pardon his followers who stormed the U.S. Capitol. He’s now set them up for payments through a slush fund he created to reward his allies—out of your tax dollars. You could not make this up.
— Hillary Rodham Clinton (@hillaryclinton.bsky.social) 2026-05-18T16:29:16.603Z

Robert Reich had some additional thoughts and analysis. He elucidated them on his SubStack this morning. “Has Trump’s Republican Party Become a Criminal Enterprise? Trump’s purge of all political opponents, including Senator Bill Cassidy, leaves it with no purpose other than helping Trump achieve his lawless goals.” Trump puts us in a Mafia State every time he’s elected. Grifting is his only talent, and he’s been rich and influential enough to find ambitious and greedy toadies to carry out his wishes. We’ve known this forever here.

robertreich.substack.com/p/is-trumps-…
— @democracy4u.bsky.social 2026-05-18T16:32:07.768Z

On Saturday, Trump took revenge on Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy for Cassidy’s vote five years ago to convict Trump, in his second impeachment, for instigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Cassidy thereby became the first GOP senator defeated by a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary. (Other Republican senators who have stood up to Trump — such as North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Utah’s Mitt Romney — saw the writing on the wall and didn’t seek reelection.)
Trump’s purge of Cassidy comes in the wake of Trump’s purges of House Republicans who stood up to him, such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney.
Trump’s next Republican target in the House is Kentucky representative Thomas Massie, who had the guts to oppose U.S. military involvement in Iran, demand release of the Epstein files, and criticize Trump’s spending bills for adding to the national debt. Massie appears likely to be defeated by a Trump-backed opponent in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary.
Trump has also purged state legislators who have refused to do his bidding, such as the seven Indiana Republicans who refused to redistrict the state as Trump demanded they do, and who Trump insured were defeated in their recent primaries.
The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out.
In his concession speech Friday night, Cassidy stated the obvious reference to Trump:
“Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”
Nicely put but sadly irrelevant because Trump — who’s clearly serving himself rather than the American public — now possesses all levers of power in the official Republican Party.
As Republican senator Lindsey Graham said yesterday on Meet the Press, “There’s no room in this party to destroy [Trump’s] agenda.”

There’s more at the link. My question is, what the hell can the rest of us who don’t support him do? I voted Saturday morning, wondering which candidate I had voted for would even have a chance under the new gerrymandering. That doesn’t even consider that we couldn’t even vote for our Congressional representatives, given the Supreme Court decision and the quick fix redraw of our map to ensure maybe one black person will retain their seat. The only good news to come out of the election was that all five constitutional amendments proposed by Governor Klandry were voted down.

Will these latest bits of news set up another J-6 self-coup? There will certainly be a rabid MAGA candidate sitting in Cassidy’s seat come next January. This is from NPR. “Louisiana senator who voted to convict Trump loses Republican primary.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, one of seven Republican senators who voted to remove President Trump from office after the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, lost his bid for reelection.
Louisiana’s Senate primary on Saturday was the latest test of Trump’s hold on his party. The president recruited a challenger, Rep. Julia Letlow, and urged supporters to defeat Cassidy over his vote.
“His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now part of legend,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post about Cassidy. “And it’s nice to see his political career is OVER.”
Cassidy finished third in a three-way race, according to the Associated Press. Letlow and another candidate, state Treasurer John Fleming, will advance to a June 27 runoff.
In conceding the race, Cassidy hinted that he would not finish his second term quietly. But in an apparent dig at Trump, he also said he wouldn’t contest his loss.
“You don’t pout, you don’t whine, you don’t claim that the election was stolen,” Cassidy told supporters on Saturday night. “You thank the voters for the privilege of representing the state or the country for as long as you’ve had that privilege. And that’s what I’m doing right now.”
Cassidy told voters they should cast their ballot based on the present and the future, not the past, a subtle discouragement from re-litigating the 2020 election six years on. But for many primary voters, Cassidy’s move to convict felt like a betrayal, and Trump’s endorsement was paramount.
“I’m the type of person, if you cross me, I probably won’t trust you anymore,” retired sheriff deputy Kevin Dupree said earlier this month. “I think his political career in Louisiana is finished.”

My friend Robert Mann, a former Journalism Professor at LSU, has something poignant to say about the loss. This is from his SubStack. “Enjoy your tarnished legacy, Bill Cassidy. You earned it.” It’s a good lesson: while all politics is local, it can be influenced by a cult of personality.

Although he pandered shamelessly to Trump and MAGA to the bitter end, Sen. Bill Cassidy could have written a different ending to his political career.
He could have left office with his head held high, proud and satisfied that he’d remained true to his principles and the Hippocratic Oath.
He could have protected our families by blocking Trump’s efforts to destroy our public health system.
He could have legislated (and campaigned) as the moderate he told me and others he truly was.
He could have put the state of Louisiana — and the nation — ahead of his desire for another U.S. Senate term.
He could have been our senator, not Donald Trump’s.
He could have done all this and more, but Cassidy lacked the courage, the imagination, and the decency to put you and me ahead of his political ambition.
To quote James Carville in the New York Times earlier this week, “Bill Cassidy sold his soul to the Devil, and he didn’t get anything for it.”
Except that’s not entirely true.
What Cassidy received in return for his soul is eternal shame and a well-earned legacy of cravenness.
I hope Cassidy enjoys his earnings.
I hope he also feels the harsh judgment of history that will be reserved for a Trump critic turned shameless toady who sold out to the worst, most corrupt president in American history—and still lost.
Bill Cassidy could have written a different story for himself and his state, but he just didn’t have it in him.

Speaking of Mafia-like behavior, here’s a little something on the Don’s Greenland Grab. This is from the New York Times. “In Closed-Door Talks, U.S. Demands a Major Role in Greenland. Greenlandic officials worry about the direction of the negotiations aimed at defusing President Trump’s threats to seize their island. But they have little leverage.” The story has a number of contributing reporters.

With the conflict in Iran still smoldering, President Trump’s obsession with Greenland seems like a forgotten sideshow.

But for the past four months, negotiators from the United States, Greenland and Denmark, which controls Greenland’s foreign affairs, have been holding confidential talks in Washington about Greenland’s future.

The talks were meant to give Mr. Trump an offramp to his threats of a military takeover of Greenland and to scale back a crisis that risked breaking apart the NATO alliance. But Greenlandic leaders are worried about what is being proposed, which is a much larger U.S. role on the Arctic island. And they fear that if the conflict with Iran winds down, the president will swing his aggression back on them.

Some Greenlandic politicians say they have even circled a date on their calendars to be wary: June 14, Mr. Trump’s birthday.
An investigation by The New York Times, based on interviews with officials in Washington, Copenhagen and Greenland, has discovered:
The United States is trying to modify a longstanding military arrangement to ensure American troops can stay in Greenland indefinitely, even if Greenland becomes independent. The notion is basically a forever clause, and Greenlanders do not like it.
The United States has pushed the talks beyond military matters and wants effective veto power over any major investment deals in Greenland to box out competitors like Russia and China. Greenlanders and Danes strongly object to this.
The United States is discussing cooperation with Greenland on natural resources. The island is loaded with oil, uranium, rare earths and other critical minerals, though much of it is buried deep beneath Greenland’s ice.
The Pentagon is rapidly moving ahead on plans for a military expansion and recently sent a Marine Corps officer to Narsarsuaq, a town in southern Greenland, to inspect the World War II-era airport, the harbor and places where American troops could be housed.
The American demands are so steep, Greenlandic officials fear, that they amount to a major imposition on their sovereignty. Despite all of the talk from Danish and American officials that Greenland’s future is up to the island’s 57,000 people, Greenlandic officials said the American demands would tie their hands for generations.
If the Americans get everything they want, said Justus Hansen, a member of Greenland’s Parliament, there will never be any “real independence.”
“We might as well raise our own flag halfway,” he said.

There’s a lot more at that gifted link. Jeer Heeter has this description of our Grifter-in-Chief in his article in The Nation. “Trump Gloats About “Making a Fortune” While Americans Suffer. As his war in Iran wreaks havoc, Trump is fixated on personal glory and enrichment.”

Donald Trump is annoyed that he can’t celebrate the massive profits oil companies are making due to the war he launched in the Middle East. Left to his own druthers, Trump would be exulting in the hundreds of billions of dollars produced by skyrocketing oil prices—if it weren’t for the pesky fact that it comes at the expense of ordinary Americans, who are now paying roughly 40 percent more every time they fill up the gas tank than they were before Trump started bombing Iran nearly three months ago.
We know this thanks to Trump’s endless dedication to saying the quiet part out loud. Speaking with Sean Hannity of Fox News on Thursday, Trump chortled that because far less oil was coming out of the Middle East, “people are finding other places to buy oil, like Texas.” Trump added, “So I don’t want to say we’re making a fortune, you understand that? Because if I say that, they’re going to say ‘oh, he forgets about the little man with the $4 gasoline.’”
The juxtaposition between “making a fortune” and the “little man” suffering at the gas station underscores just how obtuse Trump and his allies have become in their economic message. Their response to the harm caused by Trump’s policies is not to reverse those policies, or even to appear sympathetic about their effects. It’s to express their total indifference to the suffering of the American people. At the same time, Trump is obsessively focused on his real priorities: enriching himself and his family, and creating gaudy monuments to himself such as a new White House ballroom and a Triumphal Arch that will squat in the middle of Washington, DC. In response to a reporter’s query as to whom the arch would celebrate, Trump pointed to himself and said “me.”
Trump twice won the White House on a message of economic populism, promising in his 2025 inauguration that he would “bring prices down.” Today, he sings a very different tune, with a message that amounts to the apocryphal words misattributed to the French Queen Marie Antoinette: “Let them eat cake.”
Speaking to reporters last Monday, Trump said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.” He also said that concern for the financial suffering of Americans would not be a factor in making a deal with Iran “not even a little bit.”
Under normal political circumstances, the Republican Party would be wise to separate itself from Trump’s callousness. But the GOP has become a hollowed-out operation mainly concerned with tending to Trump’s cult of personality. On Saturday, Trump won a major victory against critics in the party when Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy came in third in his party’s Senate primary race, losing to a candidate Trump had supported. Cassidy’s loss underscores a lesson Trump has taught the GOP again and again over the last decade: There is no future in the party for anyone who defies his will.
So, rather than distancing themselves from Trump’s “let them eat cake” message, Republicans are embracing the president’s self-defeating rhetoric. On Thursday, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan told CNN that oil prices were “were coming down until we had to deal with this situation, but, you know, that’s life, that’s dealing with…the world we live in.”

It’s going to take hard work and a lot of voting to get rid of this monster and all the dregs of humanity he’s put in charge of the country. It appears they have all been profiting from insider news on the Iran War.

1. What I found in Trump's new 113-page financial disclosure report. It doesn't look good.
— Judd Legum (@juddlegum.bsky.social) 2026-05-18T13:58:00.133Z

This is from Jude Legum’s SubStack. “The smoking guns in Trump’s new financial disclosure, Trump publicly praised companies the same day he bought their stock.”

On March 11, President Trump took a tour of a manufacturing facility in Reading, Ohio, owned by Thermo Fisher Scientific, a medical supply company. During the tour, Trump lavished praise on Thermo Fisher which uses the facility to manufacture prescription drugs on a contract basis. “It’s a great honor being here. It’s a great company,” Trump said, appearing alongside CEO Marc Casper. “You have done a fantastic job and I’d like to congratulate you.”
Later, Trump asked another Thermo Fisher executive to share “some great information about this incredible company.” The executive talked about how Thermo Fisher is producing drugs for Merck and others at the facility. Trump then explicitly encouraged other pharmaceutical companies to contract with Thermo Fisher to “on-shore” more jobs. He claimed that some pharmaceutical companies were building their own U.S. manufacturing facilities but said “they can get here a lot faster by using this great company.”
Trump did not mention that, the same day of the tour, March 11, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock. (Federal disclosure rules only require filers to list their transactions in broad ranges.) Trump did not publicly disclose the purchase until May 14. It was listed on page 38 of a 113-page document cataloging Trump’s stock purchases in 2026.

Trump also purchased between $51,000 and $115,000 worth of Thermo Fisher stock about one month before his visit on February 12. He made another purchase of Thermo Fisher valued between $15,000 and $50,000 on March 2. So at the time of Trump’s effusive remarks about Thermo Fisher, he had purchased as much as $215,000 worth of the company’s stock over the previous month.
The fact that Trump visited a Thermo Fisher facility on the same day he purchased the company’s stock — and bought Thermo Fisher stock repeatedly in the weeks before his visit — has not previously been reported.
The disclosures reveal that Trump has been a highly active trader in 2026, executing thousands of transactions — many in individual stocks impacted by his administration’s policies. In response to criticism, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization claimed that the trades were completely separate from Trump’s official duties and managed by an independent outside financial advisor. “President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions,” the spokesperson said. “Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions.”
The fact that Trump purchased stock in Thermo Fisher the same day that he toured its facility undercuts this claim. Further, the March 11 purchase of Thermo Fisher stock was marked “UNSOLICITED” in the document. An “unsolicited” trade is one that is not recommended by a broker, but initiated by the customer.

At least three immigrant children were taken into custody and restrained with zip ties at the San Antonio Immigration Court. The children were between the ages of 9 and 12.https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/a…
— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) 2025-06-07T14:26:03.649Z

Brookings reminds us that there are still thousands of families with children experiencing horrible detentions and deportations because of the MAGA obsession with keeping America as white as possible. “The administration has detained 400,000 immigrants: What do we know about their children?” Is this really the kind of country you want to live in and that you thought you grew up in?

The Trump administration has made detention and deportation the centerpieces of its immigration policy. Around 60,000 people are being held in detention currently, and around 400,000 people have been booked into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention from an interior arrest since the administration began. Detention capacity is likely to expand, with $45 billion allocated to expanding detention facilities in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Though it is mostly adults who are detained and deported, many children are impacted by separation from their parents. However, there are no reliable data on how many detainees or deportees have children in the U.S., nor on what happens to them once their parent is taken into custody. Here we focus on detainees, about whom we have better information than deportees. Even a short separation from a parent is likely traumatic for a child, but a majority of detentions are not short-lived separations. A ProPublica study following ICE arrests of mothers of U.S. citizen children over the first seven months of the administration found that 60% had been removed and 17% remained in custody at the study’s conclusion.
To estimate the number of children affected by parental detention, we rely on demographic characteristics of detainees matched with likely unauthorized immigrants in the American Community Survey. Our analysis (detailed below) suggests that more than 145,000 U.S. citizen children have likely experienced a parent booked into detention since the administration began, with more than 22,000 of those experiencing detention of all their co-resident parents. In the accompanying interactive, we allow users to explore how the estimates change when the underlying assumptions are varied. Regardless of the assumptions used, it is clear that tens of thousands of children have faced parental detention since January 2025.

Please use the link to read the details. The time and research it took to find out all this was amazing and hard to believe.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?

I can’t even explain what kind of crush I had on Cat Stevens in ninth grade. I could basically play his entire songbook. He’s an amazing songwriter and musician.

#JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #CadetBonespurSIranWar #DonTheCon #IcelandGrab #SenatorBillCassidy #SlushFundForJ6Traitors #TheTrumpFamilyCrimeSyndicate #TrumpSIRSLawsuit #TrumpSRepublicanParty #WhereDoTheChildrenPlay

#wheredothechildrenplay #trumpsrepublicanparty #trumpsirslawsuit #thetrumpfamilycrimesyndicate #slushfundforj6traitors #senatorbillcassidy

Sky Dancing @[email protected] · 2026-05-18 · 18:20 UTC

Mostly Monday Reads: The Chaos Journal

“Upon further reflection, the Rededicate 250 National Prayer thing now makes huge sense. He Is Risen!” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

The one thing you can depend on every time Orange Caligula gets the reins of government is that things will always get worse, except for democracy backsliding. It’s just a matter of how shocking the next thing is. How many of us are in a constant state of being stunned that we aren’t the least bit surprised by the news, even though we still find the actions stomach-churning? Well, hang on! It’s been a week of WTF moments.

Today’s Tit-for-Tat announcement shows just how brazen the entire administration has gotten. This is from Time Magazine. It’s reported by Rebecca Schneid. What kind of monster thinks these things up?

President Donald Trump has withdrawn his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) amid reports that he struck a deal with his own Justice Department to create a $1.7 billion fund to compensate political allies who claim they were wrongly targeted by the Biden Administration.
The alleged plan, first reported by the New York Times and ABC News, would be paid for with taxpayer funds and is being fast-tracked, but has yet to be officially approved. If approved, the fund would be used to pay damages to people who say they were harmed by the Biden Administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Court documents showed Trump withdrew his lawsuit against the IRS, a move that could herald a private deal between the president and the agency he controls, while skirting legal oversight of the deal.
In a lawsuit filed in a Miami federal court in January, Trump and other plaintiffs accused federal agencies of failing in their duty of stopping a former IRS contractor from illegally obtaining and disclosing tax returns to the New York Times, ProPublica, and “other left-wing media outlets,” between May 2019 and September 2020.
The funds would also be used to settle his request for $230 million in legal claims from the Justice Department for the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and investigation into alleged ties between his campaign and Russia
As part of the settlement, Trump would also reportedly ask the IRS to public1pologize for the disclosure of his personal financial records and to waive an IRS audit
According to the Times, the Justice Department would model the program after the historic $760 million settlement fund stemming from the Keepseagle v. Vilsack class-action lawsuit, settled in 2011, which alleged that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) systematically discriminated against Native American farmers and ranchers in its farm loan and loan servicing program.

We know someone who can sum this up nicely. This is how Hillary put it this morning.

Trump didn’t just pardon his followers who stormed the U.S. Capitol. He’s now set them up for payments through a slush fund he created to reward his allies—out of your tax dollars. You could not make this up.
— Hillary Rodham Clinton (@hillaryclinton.bsky.social) 2026-05-18T16:29:16.603Z

Robert Reich had some additional thoughts and analysis. He elucidated them on his SubStack this morning. “Has Trump’s Republican Party Become a Criminal Enterprise? Trump’s purge of all political opponents, including Senator Bill Cassidy, leaves it with no purpose other than helping Trump achieve his lawless goals.” Trump puts us in a Mafia State every time he’s elected. Grifting is his only talent, and he’s been rich and influential enough to find ambitious and greedy toadies to carry out his wishes. We’ve known this forever here.

robertreich.substack.com/p/is-trumps-…
— @democracy4u.bsky.social 2026-05-18T16:32:07.768Z

On Saturday, Trump took revenge on Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy for Cassidy’s vote five years ago to convict Trump, in his second impeachment, for instigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Cassidy thereby became the first GOP senator defeated by a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary. (Other Republican senators who have stood up to Trump — such as North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Utah’s Mitt Romney — saw the writing on the wall and didn’t seek reelection.)
Trump’s purge of Cassidy comes in the wake of Trump’s purges of House Republicans who stood up to him, such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney.
Trump’s next Republican target in the House is Kentucky representative Thomas Massie, who had the guts to oppose U.S. military involvement in Iran, demand release of the Epstein files, and criticize Trump’s spending bills for adding to the national debt. Massie appears likely to be defeated by a Trump-backed opponent in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary.
Trump has also purged state legislators who have refused to do his bidding, such as the seven Indiana Republicans who refused to redistrict the state as Trump demanded they do, and who Trump insured were defeated in their recent primaries.
The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out.
In his concession speech Friday night, Cassidy stated the obvious reference to Trump:
“Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”
Nicely put but sadly irrelevant because Trump — who’s clearly serving himself rather than the American public — now possesses all levers of power in the official Republican Party.
As Republican senator Lindsey Graham said yesterday on Meet the Press, “There’s no room in this party to destroy [Trump’s] agenda.”

There’s more at the link. My question is, what the hell can the rest of us who don’t support him do? I voted Saturday morning, wondering which candidate I had voted for would even have a chance under the new gerrymandering. That doesn’t even consider that we couldn’t even vote for our Congressional representatives, given the Supreme Court decision and the quick fix redraw of our map to ensure maybe one black person will retain their seat. The only good news to come out of the election was that all five constitutional amendments proposed by Governor Klandry were voted down.

Will these latest bits of news set up another J-6 self-coup? There will certainly be a rabid MAGA candidate sitting in Cassidy’s seat come next January. This is from NPR. “Louisiana senator who voted to convict Trump loses Republican primary.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, one of seven Republican senators who voted to remove President Trump from office after the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, lost his bid for reelection.
Louisiana’s Senate primary on Saturday was the latest test of Trump’s hold on his party. The president recruited a challenger, Rep. Julia Letlow, and urged supporters to defeat Cassidy over his vote.
“His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now part of legend,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post about Cassidy. “And it’s nice to see his political career is OVER.”
Cassidy finished third in a three-way race, according to the Associated Press. Letlow and another candidate, state Treasurer John Fleming, will advance to a June 27 runoff.
In conceding the race, Cassidy hinted that he would not finish his second term quietly. But in an apparent dig at Trump, he also said he wouldn’t contest his loss.
“You don’t pout, you don’t whine, you don’t claim that the election was stolen,” Cassidy told supporters on Saturday night. “You thank the voters for the privilege of representing the state or the country for as long as you’ve had that privilege. And that’s what I’m doing right now.”
Cassidy told voters they should cast their ballot based on the present and the future, not the past, a subtle discouragement from re-litigating the 2020 election six years on. But for many primary voters, Cassidy’s move to convict felt like a betrayal, and Trump’s endorsement was paramount.
“I’m the type of person, if you cross me, I probably won’t trust you anymore,” retired sheriff deputy Kevin Dupree said earlier this month. “I think his political career in Louisiana is finished.”

My friend Robert Mann, a former Journalism Professor at LSU, has something poignant to say about the loss. This is from his SubStack. “Enjoy your tarnished legacy, Bill Cassidy. You earned it.” It’s a good lesson: while all politics is local, it can be influenced by a cult of personality.

Although he pandered shamelessly to Trump and MAGA to the bitter end, Sen. Bill Cassidy could have written a different ending to his political career.
He could have left office with his head held high, proud and satisfied that he’d remained true to his principles and the Hippocratic Oath.
He could have protected our families by blocking Trump’s efforts to destroy our public health system.
He could have legislated (and campaigned) as the moderate he told me and others he truly was.
He could have put the state of Louisiana — and the nation — ahead of his desire for another U.S. Senate term.
He could have been our senator, not Donald Trump’s.
He could have done all this and more, but Cassidy lacked the courage, the imagination, and the decency to put you and me ahead of his political ambition.
To quote James Carville in the New York Times earlier this week, “Bill Cassidy sold his soul to the Devil, and he didn’t get anything for it.”
Except that’s not entirely true.
What Cassidy received in return for his soul is eternal shame and a well-earned legacy of cravenness.
I hope Cassidy enjoys his earnings.
I hope he also feels the harsh judgment of history that will be reserved for a Trump critic turned shameless toady who sold out to the worst, most corrupt president in American history—and still lost.
Bill Cassidy could have written a different story for himself and his state, but he just didn’t have it in him.

Speaking of Mafia-like behavior, here’s a little something on the Don’s Greenland Grab. This is from the New York Times. “In Closed-Door Talks, U.S. Demands a Major Role in Greenland. Greenlandic officials worry about the direction of the negotiations aimed at defusing President Trump’s threats to seize their island. But they have little leverage.” The story has a number of contributing reporters.

With the conflict in Iran still smoldering, President Trump’s obsession with Greenland seems like a forgotten sideshow.

But for the past four months, negotiators from the United States, Greenland and Denmark, which controls Greenland’s foreign affairs, have been holding confidential talks in Washington about Greenland’s future.

The talks were meant to give Mr. Trump an offramp to his threats of a military takeover of Greenland and to scale back a crisis that risked breaking apart the NATO alliance. But Greenlandic leaders are worried about what is being proposed, which is a much larger U.S. role on the Arctic island. And they fear that if the conflict with Iran winds down, the president will swing his aggression back on them.

Some Greenlandic politicians say they have even circled a date on their calendars to be wary: June 14, Mr. Trump’s birthday.
An investigation by The New York Times, based on interviews with officials in Washington, Copenhagen and Greenland, has discovered:
The United States is trying to modify a longstanding military arrangement to ensure American troops can stay in Greenland indefinitely, even if Greenland becomes independent. The notion is basically a forever clause, and Greenlanders do not like it.
The United States has pushed the talks beyond military matters and wants effective veto power over any major investment deals in Greenland to box out competitors like Russia and China. Greenlanders and Danes strongly object to this.
The United States is discussing cooperation with Greenland on natural resources. The island is loaded with oil, uranium, rare earths and other critical minerals, though much of it is buried deep beneath Greenland’s ice.
The Pentagon is rapidly moving ahead on plans for a military expansion and recently sent a Marine Corps officer to Narsarsuaq, a town in southern Greenland, to inspect the World War II-era airport, the harbor and places where American troops could be housed.
The American demands are so steep, Greenlandic officials fear, that they amount to a major imposition on their sovereignty. Despite all of the talk from Danish and American officials that Greenland’s future is up to the island’s 57,000 people, Greenlandic officials said the American demands would tie their hands for generations.
If the Americans get everything they want, said Justus Hansen, a member of Greenland’s Parliament, there will never be any “real independence.”
“We might as well raise our own flag halfway,” he said.

There’s a lot more at that gifted link. Jeer Heeter has this description of our Grifter-in-Chief in his article in The Nation. “Trump Gloats About “Making a Fortune” While Americans Suffer. As his war in Iran wreaks havoc, Trump is fixated on personal glory and enrichment.”

Donald Trump is annoyed that he can’t celebrate the massive profits oil companies are making due to the war he launched in the Middle East. Left to his own druthers, Trump would be exulting in the hundreds of billions of dollars produced by skyrocketing oil prices—if it weren’t for the pesky fact that it comes at the expense of ordinary Americans, who are now paying roughly 40 percent more every time they fill up the gas tank than they were before Trump started bombing Iran nearly three months ago.
We know this thanks to Trump’s endless dedication to saying the quiet part out loud. Speaking with Sean Hannity of Fox News on Thursday, Trump chortled that because far less oil was coming out of the Middle East, “people are finding other places to buy oil, like Texas.” Trump added, “So I don’t want to say we’re making a fortune, you understand that? Because if I say that, they’re going to say ‘oh, he forgets about the little man with the $4 gasoline.’”
The juxtaposition between “making a fortune” and the “little man” suffering at the gas station underscores just how obtuse Trump and his allies have become in their economic message. Their response to the harm caused by Trump’s policies is not to reverse those policies, or even to appear sympathetic about their effects. It’s to express their total indifference to the suffering of the American people. At the same time, Trump is obsessively focused on his real priorities: enriching himself and his family, and creating gaudy monuments to himself such as a new White House ballroom and a Triumphal Arch that will squat in the middle of Washington, DC. In response to a reporter’s query as to whom the arch would celebrate, Trump pointed to himself and said “me.”
Trump twice won the White House on a message of economic populism, promising in his 2025 inauguration that he would “bring prices down.” Today, he sings a very different tune, with a message that amounts to the apocryphal words misattributed to the French Queen Marie Antoinette: “Let them eat cake.”
Speaking to reporters last Monday, Trump said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.” He also said that concern for the financial suffering of Americans would not be a factor in making a deal with Iran “not even a little bit.”
Under normal political circumstances, the Republican Party would be wise to separate itself from Trump’s callousness. But the GOP has become a hollowed-out operation mainly concerned with tending to Trump’s cult of personality. On Saturday, Trump won a major victory against critics in the party when Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy came in third in his party’s Senate primary race, losing to a candidate Trump had supported. Cassidy’s loss underscores a lesson Trump has taught the GOP again and again over the last decade: There is no future in the party for anyone who defies his will.
So, rather than distancing themselves from Trump’s “let them eat cake” message, Republicans are embracing the president’s self-defeating rhetoric. On Thursday, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan told CNN that oil prices were “were coming down until we had to deal with this situation, but, you know, that’s life, that’s dealing with…the world we live in.”

It’s going to take hard work and a lot of voting to get rid of this monster and all the dregs of humanity he’s put in charge of the country. It appears they have all been profiting from insider news on the Iran War.

1. What I found in Trump's new 113-page financial disclosure report. It doesn't look good.
— Judd Legum (@juddlegum.bsky.social) 2026-05-18T13:58:00.133Z

This is from Jude Legum’s SubStack. “The smoking guns in Trump’s new financial disclosure, Trump publicly praised companies the same day he bought their stock.”

On March 11, President Trump took a tour of a manufacturing facility in Reading, Ohio, owned by Thermo Fisher Scientific, a medical supply company. During the tour, Trump lavished praise on Thermo Fisher which uses the facility to manufacture prescription drugs on a contract basis. “It’s a great honor being here. It’s a great company,” Trump said, appearing alongside CEO Marc Casper. “You have done a fantastic job and I’d like to congratulate you.”
Later, Trump asked another Thermo Fisher executive to share “some great information about this incredible company.” The executive talked about how Thermo Fisher is producing drugs for Merck and others at the facility. Trump then explicitly encouraged other pharmaceutical companies to contract with Thermo Fisher to “on-shore” more jobs. He claimed that some pharmaceutical companies were building their own U.S. manufacturing facilities but said “they can get here a lot faster by using this great company.”
Trump did not mention that, the same day of the tour, March 11, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock. (Federal disclosure rules only require filers to list their transactions in broad ranges.) Trump did not publicly disclose the purchase until May 14. It was listed on page 38 of a 113-page document cataloging Trump’s stock purchases in 2026.

Trump also purchased between $51,000 and $115,000 worth of Thermo Fisher stock about one month before his visit on February 12. He made another purchase of Thermo Fisher valued between $15,000 and $50,000 on March 2. So at the time of Trump’s effusive remarks about Thermo Fisher, he had purchased as much as $215,000 worth of the company’s stock over the previous month.
The fact that Trump visited a Thermo Fisher facility on the same day he purchased the company’s stock — and bought Thermo Fisher stock repeatedly in the weeks before his visit — has not previously been reported.
The disclosures reveal that Trump has been a highly active trader in 2026, executing thousands of transactions — many in individual stocks impacted by his administration’s policies. In response to criticism, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization claimed that the trades were completely separate from Trump’s official duties and managed by an independent outside financial advisor. “President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions,” the spokesperson said. “Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions.”
The fact that Trump purchased stock in Thermo Fisher the same day that he toured its facility undercuts this claim. Further, the March 11 purchase of Thermo Fisher stock was marked “UNSOLICITED” in the document. An “unsolicited” trade is one that is not recommended by a broker, but initiated by the customer.

At least three immigrant children were taken into custody and restrained with zip ties at the San Antonio Immigration Court. The children were between the ages of 9 and 12.https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/a…
— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) 2025-06-07T14:26:03.649Z

Brookings reminds us that there are still thousands of families with children experiencing horrible detentions and deportations because of the MAGA obsession with keeping America as white as possible. “The administration has detained 400,000 immigrants: What do we know about their children?” Is this really the kind of country you want to live in and that you thought you grew up in?

The Trump administration has made detention and deportation the centerpieces of its immigration policy. Around 60,000 people are being held in detention currently, and around 400,000 people have been booked into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention from an interior arrest since the administration began. Detention capacity is likely to expand, with $45 billion allocated to expanding detention facilities in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Though it is mostly adults who are detained and deported, many children are impacted by separation from their parents. However, there are no reliable data on how many detainees or deportees have children in the U.S., nor on what happens to them once their parent is taken into custody. Here we focus on detainees, about whom we have better information than deportees. Even a short separation from a parent is likely traumatic for a child, but a majority of detentions are not short-lived separations. A ProPublica study following ICE arrests of mothers of U.S. citizen children over the first seven months of the administration found that 60% had been removed and 17% remained in custody at the study’s conclusion.
To estimate the number of children affected by parental detention, we rely on demographic characteristics of detainees matched with likely unauthorized immigrants in the American Community Survey. Our analysis (detailed below) suggests that more than 145,000 U.S. citizen children have likely experienced a parent booked into detention since the administration began, with more than 22,000 of those experiencing detention of all their co-resident parents. In the accompanying interactive, we allow users to explore how the estimates change when the underlying assumptions are varied. Regardless of the assumptions used, it is clear that tens of thousands of children have faced parental detention since January 2025.

Please use the link to read the details. The time and research it took to find out all this was amazing and hard to believe.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?

I can’t even explain what kind of crush I had on Cat Stevens in ninth grade. I could basically play his entire songbook. He’s an amazing songwriter and musician.

#JohnbussBskySocialJohnBuss #CadetBonespurSIranWar #DonTheCon #IcelandGrab #SenatorBillCassidy #SlushFundForJ6Traitors #TheTrumpFamilyCrimeSyndicate #TrumpSIRSLawsuit #TrumpSRepublicanParty #WhereDoTheChildrenPlay

#johnbussbskysocialjohnbuss #cadetbonespursiranwar #donthecon #icelandgrab #senatorbillcassidy #slushfundforj6traitors

SPÖ Texingtal @[email protected] · 2026-02-25 · 15:01 UTC

Wenn Menschen den ganzen Tag an Bahnhöfen herumsitzen, ist das nicht in Ordnung. Das ist Chaos.

Aber das löst man nicht durch Spaltung. Das löst man, indem man Menschen eine Perspektive gibt.

Durch schnellen Zugang zum Arbeitsmarkt.

#spoe
#OrdnenStattSpalten
#Österreich

#spoe #ordnenstattspalten #osterreich

DrWeb @[email protected] · 2025-11-28 · 22:21 UTC

60 Attorneys on the Year of Chaos Inside Trump’s Justice Department – The New York Times Magazine

“They didn’t want the ethics office calling them up and telling them what to do.”
Joseph Tirrell, former director of the Departmental Ethics Office“If we’re indicting people because the president hates them, that’s counter to the whole point of doing my job.” Mike Romano, former prosecutor in the Public Integrity Section“Our job wasn’t to engage in fact-finding investigations; our job was to find the facts that would fit the narrative.” Dena Robinson, former lawyer in the Civil Rights Division

The Unraveling of the Justice Department, New York Times Magazine

Sixty attorneys describe a year of chaos and suspicion.

By Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser, Photographs by Stephen Voss, Nov. 16, 2025

President Trump’s second term has brought a period of turmoil and controversy unlike any in the history of the Justice Department. Trump and his appointees have blasted through the walls designed to protect the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency from political influence; they have directed the course of criminal investigations, openly flouted ethics rules and caused a breakdown of institutional culture. To date, more than 200 career attorneys have been fired, and thousands more have resigned. (The Justice Department says many of them have been replaced.)

What was it like inside this institution as Trump’s officials took control? It’s not an easy question to answer. Justice Department norms dictate that career attorneys, who are generally nonpartisan public servants, rarely speak to the press. And the Trump administration’s attempts to crack down on leaks have made all federal employees fearful of sharing information.

But the exodus of lawyers has created an opportunity to understand what’s happening within the agency. We interviewed more than 60 attorneys who recently resigned or were fired from the Justice Department. Much of what they told us is reported here for the first time.

Beginning with Trump’s first day in office, the lawyers narrated the events that most alarmed them over the next 10 months. They described being asked to drop cases for political reasons, to find evidence for flimsy investigations and to take positions in court they thought had no legitimate basis. They also talked about the work they and their colleagues were told to abandon — investigations of terrorist plots, corruption and white-collar fraud.

Some spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation against them or their new employers. We corroborated their accounts with multiple sources, interviewing their colleagues to confirm the details of what they described and reviewing court documents and contemporaneous notes. We also sent a list of questions to the Justice Department and the White House. “This story is a useless collection of recycled, debunked hearsay from disgruntled former employees,” a spokeswoman for the D.O.J. responded in an email. “Targeting the department’s political leadership while ignoring the questionable conduct of former attorneys who do not have the American people’s best interest at heart shows exactly how biased this story is, and further illustrates why Americans are turning away from biased, outdated legacy media platforms.”

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, sent this statement: “These are nothing more than pathetic complaints lodged by anti-Trump government workers. President Trump is working on behalf of the millions of Americans who voted for him all across the country, not the D.C. bureaucrats who try to stymie the American people’s agenda at every turn.”

The attorneys who spoke to us for this project, many of whom have spent decades in government service, disagree.

On his first day in office, President Trump made it clear that lawyers loyal to him would lead the Justice Department. One of his personal defense attorneys, Emil Bove, became the temporary No. 2, and Trump nominated another of his lawyers, Todd Blanche, to take the position permanently once the Senate confirmed him.

Trump also undid one of the largest investigations in the Justice Department’s history by pardoning or commuting the sentences of the nearly 1,600 rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The group included more than 200 defendants who were convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers.

Prosecutors said they were in disbelief when President Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of Jan. 6 rioters. Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times.

Ryan Crosswell, Public Integrity Section, which handles corruption cases: When I saw it was Blanche and Bove, I was actually relieved. OK, it’s gross that they were Trump’s personal attorneys, but before that they were federal prosecutors in New York. They’ve done the job. They know the prosecutors’ code. We’re the only lawyers whose job is not to get the best result for our client. Our job is to get justice. Sometimes that means losing or walking into court and saying we made a mistake.

But then things were 10 times worse than I thought they would be.

Liz Oyer, pardon attorney: We had no knowledge that the Jan. 6 pardons were coming on Day 1. Everybody was concerned that our office was being completely sidelined from the review process.

Gregory Rosen, chief of the breach and assault unit of the Capitol Siege Section, which prosecuted the Jan. 6 rioters: When I was alerted to the pardons, a lot of thoughts ran through my head about how absurd this could get, but first I had to do my job. We had to ask, Did we believe the order was lawful and constitutional?

My team and I determined that it was. The president has the right to pardon people and commute their sentences. So then it was a blitzkrieg of hundreds of cases. We stepped to it.

I was numb. As career prosecutors, we don’t talk about our feelings. We’re not partisans. We’re public servants just doing the job. Early on, we stayed away from using emotional language about our own reactions.

Mike Romano, Jan. 6 prosecutor: Anyone who spent any time working on Jan. 6 cases saw how violent a day that was. I’d spent four years living with that day, the things done to people. It’s incredibly demoralizing to see something you worked on for four years wiped away by a lie — I mean the idea that prosecution of the rioters was a grave national injustice. We had strong evidence against every person we prosecuted. And I knew that if they’re going to wipe all of that away based on a lie, either I’ll be fired as retaliation or pretext or asked to do something unethical. Or both.

Until that point, I’d hoped the second Trump term would be similar to the first one, or similar enough for a while. Then the pardons came down and I knew, in light of that, there is no way I can stay.

Trump appointed Ed Martin, another longtime ally, as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Martin had promoted Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud in 2020 and then turned to the cause of defending the Jan. 6 rioters. He had never worked as a prosecutor.

Martin soon fired 15 attorneys in the Capitol Siege Section who prosecuted the Jan. 6 defendants. They joined more than a dozen other prosecutors fired for working under the special counsel, Jack Smith, on the criminal investigations of President Trump. According to the D.O.J.’s new leadership, they could not be trusted to “faithfully implement” the president’s agenda.

Gregory Rosen, Capitol Siege Section: When 15 employees were fired from the Capitol Siege Section, I was the angriest I’ve ever been. Most of them were younger attorneys. I’d hired them. They came from firms, federal and state government, all over. But some naïve part of me thought, Maybe this is the new leadership’s “pound of flesh.”

Prosecutor, Capitol Siege Section: It was inconceivable to me they’d fire people for no reason except they’d worked on cases that were now disfavored. People like me, who are career attorneys, work within a structure. We don’t have much latitude. To be told that you are being punished for your decisions, when you were following guidance created by very talented and skilled prosecutors above you, which judges blessed for the most part — it’s completely bizarre. It flipped the culture of the institution. It’s a culture now of fear. And they are losing people all the time, very good people, who were the future of the department.

Editor’s Note: Please look at and read the narratives and share the post as you can. This is a case study of how Democracy is lost; how Justice in America is corrupted; by one man, one party, one President who is unfit for office. This is not the people’s DOJ any longer.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: 60 Attorneys on the Year of Chaos Inside Trump’s Justice Department – The New York Times

Tags: 2021, 60 Attorneys, Fired by DOJ, Firing DOJ Lawyers, January 6 Attack on U. S. Capitol, January 6th Attorneys, Resigned, Riot January 6th, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Trump Pardons Rioters, Trump's Justice Department, Unraveling DOJ, Year of Chaos

#2021 #60Attorneys #firedByDoj #firingDojLawyers #january6AttackOnUSCapitol #january6thAttorneys #resigned #riotJanuary6th #theNewYorkTimes #theNewYorkTimesMagazine #trumpPardonsRioters #trumpsJusticeDepartment #unravelingDoj #yearOfChaos

#60attorneys #firedbydoj #firingdojlawyers #january6attackonuscapitol #january6thattorneys #resigned