sociopath

What This War Is All About


POST 1268

A Little News Wrap-Up
  1. As detailed in Rolling Stone, 17% of young Republicans are Hitler loving Nazis, John Avalon reported on Morning Joe on Monday, March 16.
  2. The Chairman of the FCC and Trump are threatening broadcast networks that they’ll take action against those outlets which report news and opinion about the war that Trump doesn’t like. You’re right: that violates the First Amendment. Trump will do so to get his way through intimidation. See Timothy Snyder’s First Lesson in On Tyranny: Don’t obey in advance.
  3. Hegseth says we’re winning and doing so “without mercy” and “we will show no quarter for our enemies.” That means we will take no prisoners and instead we’ll kill everyone, including those who surrender. How very chest puffy of Hegseth to declare that. Other than the moral repugnance of such a thing, intentional cruelty and murder violate our own Uniform Code of Military justice. That means it’s a crime according to our own laws to follow Hegseth’s direction. And it’s a war crime, too. So, any U.S. military personnel who act according to Hegseth’s dictum will be international criminals.
  4. For an excellent explainer, read Sheila Markin’s post here.
War Update

Trump ignored warnings about likely Iranian opposition to a U.S. initiated war and did scant planning for it, even to the point of having no clear, achievable objectives.

The U.S. military doesn’t have the capacity to guard all regions of the globe, commit various offensive actions against Iran and also escort 130 – 150 ships per day through the Strait of Hormuz to protect them from Iranian missile and drone attacks. So, Trump is now trying to strong-arm other nations into filling the gaps in U.S. preparedness.

After harming them with tariffs, Trump has repeatedly threatened, disrespected and coerced members of NATO to help. In fact, now he is alternately begging and dismissing them regarding sending their warships to the Strait of Hormuz.

Stable genius Trump’s demand has been rejected or ignored by over a dozen countries. He said that if they won’t support his war, “I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO.”

Let’s be clear that the United States attacked Iran, not the other way around. The NATO charter doesn’t require any support for a member nation that violates international laws regarding other nations’ rights and sovereignty. Nothing is promised to a nation which goes to war because its leader had “a feeling,” apparently based upon no evidence, that some unnamed bad thing was about to happen.

I swear it’s true that Trump posted this plainly self-contradictory idiocy:

“We have already destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability, but it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close range missile somewhere along, or in, this Waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are.”

This is the person who started a war based on “a feeling.”

Insufficient and Insecure Being

On Thursday, with the Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi sitting next to him, Trump made a cringe worthy comparison of his sneak attack on Iran to the Pearl Harbor attack. That was in response to a question about his failing to notify our allies in advance of his ambush. Said Trump,

“We didn’t tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan, okay?

Turning to her, he asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor, okay?”

We shake off the willies and go on.

In the preface to Brother Wayne Teasdale’s book, The Mystic Heart, Dr. Beatrice Bruteau makes an insightful comment that applies to our time, writing,

Consider that domination, greed, cruelty, violence and all our other ills arise from a sense of insufficient and insecure being. I need more power, more possessions, more respect and admiration. But it’s never enough; the fear always remains. It comes from every side; from other people; from economic circumstances; from ideas, customs, and belief systems; from the natural environment; from our own bodies and minds. All these others intimidate us, threaten us, make us anxious. We can’t control them.

Hence, our sociopath.

Trump’s effrontery, like that dumped on the Japanese PM, and all of his anti-social exhibitions play out in his domination, greed, cruelty, violence and the rest, as they inevitably “arise from a sense of insufficient and insecure being,” He harms and kills others in his desperate clawing to fill his emptiness. But he’ll never fill that void. Never.

That explains, but it doesn’t excuse. And now we are in yet another intractable war that should never have been started. People are dying and people are suffering and it’s of no consequence to Trump. But it is to us.

Just get that all the outrageous narcissism is about Trump trying to fill his bottomless neediness and we are the now hapless victims of that. It’s about his deadly coverup, too. See the final sentence in this post.

Follow Up

Last Wednesday in my post Winning I detailed some of what should be wins for We The People but instead they are abject, painful losses for us. Here’s an important addition that’s critical to that list for a lot of people.

Two and a half years ago there was a freak and violent hurricane that hit the Asheville area of North Carolina. The residents looked to FEMA for help and there was very little. Then Trump took office and ravaged the agency, making things far worse. There are lots of people in that devastated area still paying mortgages on houses they cannot live in, while simultaneously paying for housing elsewhere. And FEMA is nowhere to be found.

To be fair to FEMA, it is sorely hobbled by a huge percentage of its people having been DOGEed by Chainsaw Musk, so those remaining are unfairly challenged. There’s no way to distribute desperately needed cash to desperate people if there’s nobody there to do the job. Do you think the folks in Asheville feel like they’re winning?

Report From The Snark Department

Perhaps you’ve wondered how MAGAs could remain in thrall to Trump in the face of his anti-patriotic bluster. They vote against their own best interests and even thump chests about that.

I’ve repeatedly cautioned that such people have valid grievances. Their blockage is that they are ruled by their anger and that blanks their ability to think clearly and critically. They are limited to rage and hatred and they are unable to oppose what is actually abhorrent to themselves.

Watch this rant from Cliff Cash.

CAUTION: There is a lot of potty mouth in this rant. If nasty words offend you, don’t watch the video.

Speak Up This Saturday!

Click here to find a No Kings rally near you. Then show up on March 28. Change our atmosphere that has been poisoned by our home grown fascists. Make it clear that the they are the minority and we are the majority.

The cure for hopelessness is action.
What It’s All About

DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT let Trump’s war distract you from his culpability in the Epstein crimes. Trump trying to cloud your eyes is what this war is all about.

  • Time for action is dwindling

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    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not necessarily mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine, but I do wish that I could blame someone else. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Book links to Amazon or Barnes & Noble are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.
    5. Clicking on most pics in these posts will take you to the source information.
    6. Comments offered by readers, whether in agreement with my opinions or opposing, are encouraged and greatly appreciated. All are reviewed prior to going live. I reserve the right to edit for readability, punctuation, typos, voluntary idiocy and to exclude those comments I deem inappropriate.
    7. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine. Unless it’s a guest essay, in which case, blame the guest.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2026 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

America Today


Post 1,013

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Put ‘Em Up

Markwayne Mullin is a brand new Republican Senator from Oklahoma. He stood vainly proud a couple of weeks ago for all Americans to see and emulate.

He was challenged by Teamsters boss Sean O’Brien, himself not an exemplar of gentlemanly conduct. Not one to let a stupid challenge go, Mullin challenged back, stood and took off his ring, daring O’Brien to a fist fight right there in the Senate hearing room. It took all the power committee chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders could muster to stop the idiocy.

Mullin exemplifies much of our national leadership, where differences are worked out with fists, just as they were on the playground in 7th grade. These are the people setting an example for the rest of us. These are the people telling Americans that physical violence is not just appropriate, but that it’s good.

These are the people leading the way to thugocracy, where elbows to the kidneys rule in the Rotunda, where laws mean nothing, where shouting down neighbors in a school board meeting proves that you can out-volume everyone else to get your way. They pave the path to where death threats and mass shootings are the stuff of real Americans, the currency of the realm. They make sure that the biggest bully gets to be President.

Mothers and fathers, teach your children well so that they have the sense not to follow these thugs. Our nation is counting on you.

The Supreme Court

After multiple exposés of big money from extremely wealthy Republican donors falling into the laps of 2 or 3 Supreme Court Justices and the public outrage these scandals caused, the Court has bravely issued its own ethics guidelines. It is a code of conduct much like that which applies to lower courts, but it differs in one key respect: The Supreme Court ethics rules offer absolutely no method of enforcement. It’s essentially a statement of, “Here’s how we should behave, but we don’t have to and you can’t make us. Nya-nya.”

Court watcher Dahlia Lithwick said that this new code appears to have been “principally drafted with the intention of instructing us that they still can’t be made to do anything.”

So, enjoy the Court’s disingenuous “there, there” pat on the back of your hand over their scandalous behavior. They are saying that their ethics rules mean nothing more than that you should ignore their possibly illegal behavior and just shut up about Court scandals.

Should we allow them their continuous self-pardon, the Court, the final arbiter of the law, will officially be the only place in all of America that is formally allowed to ignore the rule of law.

Oh, wait – that’s how it’s always been. What have we done?

The Rule of Law

Last Wednesday was the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. That caused me to remember various events of his foreshortened presidency, including the much resisted admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi in 1962.

Governor Ross Barnett did everything he could to prevent the integration of Ole Miss, including appointing himself registrar of the university so that he could personally reject Meredith’s application. At last President Kennedy federalized the Mississippi National Guard to enforce the Supreme Court decision that Meredith must be admitted to the university. Not long after that Kennedy addressed the nation. Here is part of what he had to say.

For our nation is founded on the principle that observance of the law is the eternal safeguard of liberty – – and defiance of the law is the surest path to tyranny. The law which we obey includes the final rulings of our courts as well as the enactments of our legislative bodies. Even among law-abiding men, few laws are universally loved – – but they are uniformly respected and not resisted.

Americans are free, in short, to disagree with the law – – but not to disobey it. For in a government of laws, and not of men, no man – – however prominent or powerful – – and no mob – – however unruly or boisterous – – is entitled to defy a court of law. If this country should ever reach the point where any man or group of men, by force or threat of force, could long defy the commands of our courts and Constitution, then no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his writ and no citizen would be safe from his neighbors.

That was 60 years ago and Kennedy is still right.

We have plenty of people breaking the law right now as flagrantly as Gov. Barnett did back then, although they’re often sneakier and more destructive of our democracy and the Constitution today. Think:

– January 6: Both the riot and all the criminal machinations to steal the election to keep Trump in power. You can add in Kari Lake in Arizona and all the other lying, self-centered, election denying defrauders.

– Trump’s promise that if elected in 2024 he will take all federal power for himself and remove all  public servants who aren’t loyal solely to him.

– Project 2025, a lofty language guide from the starch-in-their-underwear Heritage Foundation to dismantle the Constitution and all traditional American values and to give all power to a small cabal of rich people.

– The promised return of Trump’s Muslim ban and cruelty to dark skin people at our southern border, including the theft of their babies.

Lawlessness is not new, but we are at a point of dis-integration, where elected leaders gaslight us and incite us to break the law and where destruction fails to raise many eyebrows. The history books tell us what will happen if this progresses. Indeed, with the violence that happens every day, we are already at the point where “no citizen would be safe from his neighbors.” Ask any of the survivors or loved ones of the slain from our daily mass shootings how they’re feeling about their neighbors.

From Steve Schmidt:

We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but in The Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout reveals that a shocking 4 percent of ordinary people—one in twenty-five—has an often undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to feel shame, guilt, or remorse. One in twenty-five everyday Americans, therefore, is secretly a sociopath. They could be your colleague, your neighbor, even family. And they can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no guilt.

Given the constant presence of those who would demolish the rule of law, perhaps it’s time to reinvigorate our dedication to it. That will most certainly mean that we elect people who think the rule of law, democracy and majority rule are pretty good things. We’ll need people who have a conscience and possess the ability to feel guilt and shame. Perhaps it’s time that we refuse and eject from office all who think power for themselves is all that matters.

Today is a good day to be the light

_____________________________

  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


  • Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2026 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

A Modest Proposal – v5.0


Sports First

The Bahamas Bowl, certainly the grand daddy of them all, was played on Friday in Nassau, Bahamas. Who knew there was a football stadium there?

My beloved Miami University (OH) Redhawks battled the Blazers of the University of Alabama – Birmingham. Both teams came to the game following inspiring 6 – 6 seasons. UAB won 24 – 20 in an epic see-saw battle played in a nearly empty stadium.

While watching the game I learned from ESPN that there will be 42 bowl games this year. I think, though, that they overlooked one.

The Toilet Bowl
.

With our ongoing national struggles with anger, violence, grievance, absurd, hateful conspiracies and loony anti-democratic fantasies we could surely cobble together a team led by Marjorie Taylor Green (“if Steve Bannon and I had organized [the January 6 insurrection], we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed”). She can recruit Jim Jordan, John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Kari Lake and the rest of the delusionals for the Bile-Based-On-BS Wing of the Republican Party team. They can face off against the team of Spineless Republicans, those who aren’t delusional but who refuse to stand up for the Constitution and reality.

Somebody please flush.

Now on to Modest Proposal v5.0.

Trump Isn’t the Problem

The long knives of the law are sharpened. They are even now carving air in preparation for serial prosecutions. Indeed, the slicing and dicing has already begun and tomorrow at high noon EST we’ll learn of the recommendations for prosecution that the January 6 Committee will be passing along to Merrick Garland and Jack Smith at the Department of Justice. If Trump was ever the problem, that problem is going away.

The real problem is the voluntary and eager belief in Trump’s frauds by his public. It’s their willing acceptance and often their adulation for his public dishonesty and his grifts. It’s their mutual embrace of ignorance. His followers enthusiastically applaud his wearing of the mantle of victim and they embrace their own victim-hood at his direction.

Many Americans – perhaps as many as 20% of us – are ready to fall for any nonsense-spewing mouthpiece who tells us we’ve been treated unfairly or how we’re disrespected by others. These are the people Lincoln said can be fooled all of the time. Here’s an example.

Covid came ’round for a permanent visit and many of these easy-to-manipulate people fell for Trump’s lie that Covid would magically disappear. Then they fell for the nonsense that masks, distancing and lock downs are abridgements of their freedom. Trump told them to inject bleach and Lysol into their veins, take Ivermectin and do other self-harming things and they said, “Okay.”

Then the magical vaccines arrived (the ones Ron DeSantis gladly took and advocated for and is now making criminal accusations against). Conspiracy bad guys filled the blab-o-sphere with insane claims of nanobots, sterility and sickness from the vaccines.

And people were fooled. They believed that stuff.

Such things are tenets of their near-religious beliefs that fuels their hatred for “the establishment,” the “deep state.” There’s no convincing them otherwise using such stuffy, old-fashioned things as facts and logic. And now over a million Americans have died from Covid, nearly all of whom could have been saved, but for their slavishly listening to Trump.

And it gets worse, as many of these people have again been fooled and believe the calls to hatred and violence. That leads to innocent people being hurt or killed. This cannot go on. Fortunately, I have .  .  .

The Solution

Since we cannot convince these people of the existence of reality, they will remain a danger to us all. We must not allow them to live among us creating havoc and destruction. The obvious solution is to remove them to an isolated place of their own where they can no longer harm the rest of us.

We have vast, mostly uninhabited regions of our southwestern states that could be turned into internment camps for the politically fooled. Or perhaps we can do what Trump tried to do: we’ll buy Greenland from the Danes and put them there. Maybe just the northern half.

I can hear you wailing patriotically, “But what about their rights?” Good question, and I’ll use one of their tools – whataboutism – and ask, “What about our rights? Like the right not to be shot by one of those crazies. Like the right not to be assaulted by their hatred. Like the right to not be terrorized by death threats. Like the right not to be infected in public by their deadly, virus-laden exhales.

These people are a clear and present danger to us and to our nation. Remove them and we’ll remove the danger to our election workers and to Jews in synagogues and to parishioners at the Mother Emanuel AME Church and to partiers at Club Q and to first graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School and to shopping grannies at Tops Friendly Market and at Walmart. Hate crimes would largely disappear.

So, give them far south Arizona and New Mexico. We’ll put up a big, strong wall, a wall like you’ve never seen before. It will run along our southern border, so maybe we can get Mexico to pay for it.

Trump himself said we should shred the Constitution, so c’mon, Americans. Time to do the right thing.

If all that hasn’t convinced you, read Adam Serwer’s explainer about the Republicans, The Cruelty Is the Point. After that you’ll know why these people must be separated from the rest of us.

And read Tom Nichols’ Why Did The Oathkeepers Do It? You’ll see our malcontents in a new and useful light.

  • ————————————

Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:

Fire the bastards!

The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.

Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take a lot of us to get the job done.

And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

Thanks!

The Fine Print:

  1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings, so don’t bug me about it.
  2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
  3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
  4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
  5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

JA

 


Copyright 2026 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Guest Essay – The Real Reason


Reading time – 4:35  .  .  .

Reader Dan Wallace has an insightful take on our American condition that is happily devoid of the hystrionics, name calling and partisan posturing of many. He offered it as a comment to my Hoping for Clarity From Sunday Times Readers post, but it was likely missed by many. His views are too important to be missed, so his essay is presented here. Read it and nod affirmatively and enthusiastically. JA

I was not a Trump voter for the reason given below. But it was, and I believe remains, the primary reason not to vote for him.

Simply put, comparing Trump’s publicly visible behavior to the available checklists for psycho/sociopathology, all indications are that he is psychopath, a sociopath, a person experiencing anti-social personality disorder, a malignant narcissist, or something along those lines. The exact term does not matter. That there is something seriously wrong with this guy is obvious and does matter. The right answer for someone like this is to feel sorry for him and to help him if we can, while minimizing the damage he can do. It is not to elect him (or keep him as) President of the United States.

For some reason it is considered unseemly to talk about this. I do not understand why. Choosing not to talk about it is like sitting down to dinner at a table that has a giant moose on it and pretending there’s no moose. There is. Step one in getting rid of the moose is admitting there’s a moose.

The view that there is something seriously wrong with Donald Trump is held by people as diverse as George Conway and Keith Olbermann. Unlike them, I am not a newcomer to it. I was virulently anti-Hillary in 2016. But I argued at the time, and I still do, that given a choice between venal and crazy, the right answer is to put 100 clothespins on your nose and vote for venal because it is at least predictable and is not necessarily oriented toward tyranny. While not all psychopaths become tyrants, all tyrants start as psychopaths.

Every now and then the American people make the mistake of putting into office someone with a severe mental disease or defect. The last time we did that was 1968. It took 6 years, but the institutions ultimately worked and we removed him from office.

We need to do that again, but the stakes are far higher now. We have an enormous division between those who have been left behind by globalization and those who have not. We have not figured out how we as a nation will compete in a truly globalized world. We have enacted policies that have driven the disparity of wealth to the sort of level that provokes insurrection. We have the least efficient healthcare system of any industrialized nation and continue to play the fiddle while it threatens to bankrupt us. In order to avoid dealing with those unpleasant realities, we have given ourselves a false sense of prosperity by fueling our economy with debt, something in which both parties have been equally and joyfully complicit. That accumulated debt is now so large that resolution of it likely will eventually require devaluation of the dollar, which will turn us into something like Greece or Venezuela. Meanwhile, we are experiencing a change in our environment that has the capacity ultimately to threaten the survival of our species (Moose #2).

These are serious issues and we should get about the business of addressing them in a serious way. The solutions will not be simple. There is plenty of demagoguery to go around, on both the left and the right. None of it helps. But one thing we should all be able to agree on: Having a psychopathic buffoon in the White House makes all of this worse, not better.

Addendum

On Wednesday of last week, Trump “met with” a group of about 25 refugees in the Oval Office. Presumably, this was a photo op intended to make him look empathetic. The problem is that it was captured on video, and one thing he clearly is not is empathetic.

The video shows Trump’s interaction with Nadia Murad, a Yazidi refugee who won the 2018 Nobel Peace prize for bringing her horrific story to the world and for fighting to stop the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. Her story includes ISIS raiding her village, killing her mother and six of her brothers, taking her captive, holding her as a sex slave and subjecting her to rape and torture.

The remarkable thing about this video is not Trump’s abject ignorance, unpreparedness and stupidity (after Murad tells him twice that ISIS killed her family, he asks, “So where are they now?” – Yes, really – watch the video.). Rather, it is that the President of the United States can listen to this story and show absolutely no empathy for the human being standing in front of him and for the appalling suffering and loss she experienced. If that lack of empathy doesn’t make someone a psychopath, then what the hell does?


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Copyright 2026 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

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