He can't sue, cheat, bribe, or con his way out of death

I finished the book You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian. It’s a gay romance. The setting is New York City in 1960. Mark, 28, nominally works for the Chronicle newspaper but hasn’t done much actual work since his lover William died 18 months before. The paper doesn’t pay him but does allow him to use a desk. The lack of pay isn’t an issue because William left him lots of money. Eddie, 22, is a Major League Baseball player. He had a great rookie year, then was traded to an expansion team, the New York Robins. His fielding stayed good but his hitting dropped to almost zero. The title is in part because baseball streaks and slumps are frequently attributed to good or bad luck. Mark and Eddie meet because Mark’s editor proposes he do a weekly “diary” of Eddie, of what life in the big leagues is like. Eddie appreciates that Mark is someone who is interested in Eddie the person, rather than Eddie the kid who can’t hit the ball. Since this is 1960 Eddie can’t be seen as gay. He’d lose his job. Mark is tired of being William’s secret and wants to live openly. But Mark seems more concerned about Eddie’s reputation than Eddie is. The formula for a romance novel, straight or gay, is the couple falls in love, they hit a difficulty, and they overcome it. Homophobia is the difficulty and at the time it isn’t easily overcome. I enjoyed it, though I see again that many romance novels don’t have a lot of depth. Lobachevsky of the Daily Kos community wrote:

At 79, Donald Trump isn't just showing physical signs of decline—he's exhibiting the psychological collapse of a malignant narcissist confronting his own mortality. And that makes him more dangerous than ever.

Lobachevsky lists physical evidence of the bruises on the nasty guy’s hands and the announced diagnoses of chronic venous insufficiency. The psychological evidence is him telling Fox News he is trying to get to heaven. He’s “fixated on legacy, mortality, and divine judgment—classic signs of what psychologists call ‘narcissistic mortification.’” The nasty guy has a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder. When “narcissists confront mortality—the one thing they can't control, sue, or bribe their way out of—the psychological impact is devastating.” Since he can’t escape death he lashes out at everything else.

His inner circle knows it. That's why they're sprinting to consolidate power before Trump's decline makes it impossible. When desperate men feel humiliated and terrified, they don't go quietly. They try to burn everything down.

History shows (though other dictators and countries are not named) that a leader in psychological collapse drags their country down with them, creating a political crisis for millions. Lobachevsky lists his sources at the end: The Independent, BBC, TIME, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and PsyPost. Lobachevsky also linked to a thread on X, which I found on Thread Reader. It is by Andrew Wortman, a psychologist. A bit of it:

For Trump, the trigger is being faced with his own mortality. He can’t sue death. He can’t cheat it, bribe it, or con his way out of it. It’s inescapable. And for the first time in his life, he’s powerless — and the panic shows in every crazed rant/wild attempt to project control. That’s why you see him suddenly fixated on things like getting in to heaven (LMAO NEVER going to happen, Don), legacy, and being remembered. Humiliation is the narcissist’s deepest wound — and nothing humiliates more than colliding with the truth that you can’t escape the end. The Epstein files serve to make this terror far worse. Not only do they expose what he’s spent 30+ years concealing, but if they surface after he’s gone, he can’t spin them. The thought of being defined by that humiliation — with no power to control the narrative — is devastating.

Stephanie Armour for KFF Health News in an article posted on Kos, reported that Robert Kennedy Jr. is targeting the federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Because vaccine makers were afraid that they wouldn’t be able to afford lawsuits against them, Congress created the VICF in 1988. A vaccine can harm people through anaphylaxis – a life-threatening allergic reaction – and in other ways. If the vaccine maker got sued for every harm they couldn’t afford to make the vaccine. The VICP, funded by a small tax, steps in to pay the injured. They work from a list of injuries that each vaccine is known to cause. Watchers are sure that Kennedy is laying the groundwork to overload the VICP. He announced a massive study to identify the cause of autism (which I wrote about recently). He fired the boards at the CDC and HHS that approve vaccines and replaced them with people who believe the conspiracies he promotes. He has revoked recommendations for vaccines. He has killed grants to develop more mRNA vaccines. And he wants to add autism to the list of known vaccine harms, though science had debunked the claim. The rising number of autism cases would bankrupt the VICP. No VICP and companies can’t afford to make vaccines.

“Make no mistake, this is a revolution that will change the face of public health policy,” Tony Lyons, president of MAHA Action, said in a statement. “Americans are demanding radical transparency and gold standard science.”

No, Americans are not demanding radical transparency. They’re pretty much ignoring where vaccines come from. Keep me well and I’m good. No, this is not “gold standard science.” High quality science proves that vaccines are generally safe and highly effective. Both parts of that statement hide the true intent. Yes, it will change the face of public health policy because preventable diseases, or some new disease, will cause a great deal more death and disability than they need to. Oliver Willis of Kos writes a regular column Explaining the Right the title of which begins “Why Republicans...” Sometimes I like his answer, sometimes I think he doesn’t really explain his point. The one from last Saturday is titled, Why Republicans keep saying slavery was great. You can guess that this is one that I think doesn’t quite make it. Willis gives several examples over the years in which Republicans praise slavery or say it wasn’t all that bad. Then he wrote:

Conservative politics has for decades been focused on pushing white voters with racist sympathies to vote red. This has led the GOP to emphasize that group’s grievances, including praise for the Confederacy and made-up issues like “white genocide.” Arguing that slavery wasn’t all bad or at a minimum arguing that there was something positive about keeping millions of Black people as property fits within that morally bankrupt paradigm. Conservative leaders and Republican voters have made it clear for a long time that they prefer fairy tale narratives about America’s past over the truth—because that truth could expose the legacy of white supremacy.

While all that is true I think there is a more basic reason for their praise of slavery. As supremacists they need to oppress people to give value to their own lives. They praise slavery because they want to reinstitute slavery. In Wednesday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Jordan Weissmann of The Argument:

Trump’s monetary policy preferences seem like a recipe for higher inflation. The president has berated Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, urging him to lower interest rates, despite the central bank’s concerns that the administration’s tariffs could put upward pressure on consumer prices. He seems to be doing so in part out of a desire to lower mortgage costs and give the economy a jolt. But Trump has also made it clear he thinks the Fed should lower rates in order to keep federal borrowing costs low. “If they were doing their job properly, our Country would be saving Trillions of Dollars in Interest Cost,” he recently posted on Truth Social. That’s the sort of thing that makes economists’ and central bankers’ blood run cold: After all, once you’re keeping interest rates low in order to make borrowing cheap for the government, you can’t use them to keep prices in check. The technical term for this sad state of affairs is “fiscal dominance,” and it’s the kind of thing that can lead to much higher long-term inflation and potentially a rapid spiral.

In the comments is a meme posted by paulpro. It shows a young man booting a rich guy holding a sack of money. The meme says, “Refugees didn’t take away affordable housing. Rich landlords and greedy politicians did.” A cartoon by Naked Pastor marks the recent death of James Dobson. It shows two men with coffee and one says, “Actually, James Dobson helped me embrace being gay because I figured God could not possibly that heartless and cruel just for being who I am.” In today’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted several pundits discussing the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina that devastated New Orleans and significantly damaged much of the surrounding area. Eighteen months after Katrina I went on a weeklong work mission to Biloxi, Mississippi to put a roof on a house still being restored. One of Kev’s quotes was by Mark Bonner and Matthew Sanders of the New York Times:

Today, New Orleans is smaller, poorer and more unequal than before the storm. It hasn’t rebuilt a durable middle class, and lacks basic services and a major economic engine outside of its storied tourism industry. The core problem was the inability to turn abundant resources into a clear vision backed by political will. Federal dollars were funneled into a maze of state agencies and local governments with clashing priorities, vague metrics and near-zero accountability. Billions went to contractors and government consultants services such as schools, transit, health care and housing were neglected. For example, one firm, ICF International, received nearly $1 billion to administer Road Home, the oft-criticized state program to rebuild houses. The focus of the effort became replacing what was lost, not building something stronger and better. For example, public funds poured into several flood-prone neighborhoods below sea level, while smarter plans reimagining New Orleans as a modern, sustainable, water-resilient city remain neglected. Countless ribbon cuttings gave an impression of vigorous recovery, belying the reality that they failed to lay the foundation for long-term growth. [...] Today New Orleans ranks near the bottom among major U.S. cites for G.D.P. per capita and is one of the nation’s weakest employment markets. Its population is roughly 23 percent smaller than it was in 2000, with about 37 percent fewer Black residents. Economic output per person lags the national average, and while the city has seen modest recent job gains, job growth remains uneven and slow overall.

Yesterday there was another mass shooting, this time the shooter shot through the windows of a church to strike children inside. Two children died. Fourteen more children and three adults went to the hospital and all are expected to recover, though they’ll have to deal with trauma. In the comments are two items related to the shooting. Dennis Gorlis posted a cartoon showing children with their school backpacks at the Gate of Heaven. St. Peter says, “They just loved their guns more, that’s all.” Denise Oliver Velez posted an excerpt from the NYT article. It says the shooter was a transgender female. At her death she was 23. At 17 she applied to change her name from Robert to Robin. It also said:

On social media, some conservative activists have seized on the shooter’s gender identity to broadly portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill. The police did not provide any motive for the attack, but Ms. Westman’s extensive social media history was a contradictory catalog of anger and grievance. In seemingly stream-of-consciousness videos that she posted, she fixated on guns, violence and school shooters. She displayed her own cache of weapons, bullets and what appear to be explosive devices, scrawled with antisemitic and racist language and threats against President Donald Trump. The videos also show pages from a diary, with long entries describing self hatred, violence against children, and a desire to inflict harm on herself.

As has been noted many times before, when a white guy commits a horrific act he is described as a “lone wolf.” But when a black man or woman or, as is this case, a transgender person does it, they are portrayed as a representative of their kind who are described as all being similarly violent or mentally ill. And here we are again. Yes, Robin was mentally ill. But that does not imply anyone like her is or is not.