Baywolfe wrote:

The biggest would be messiah and dictator of the 20th century, Adolph Hitler, killed himself in his bunker on April 30, 1945.

We can only hope the would be messiah and dictator of the 21st century, Donald Trump, follows suit before he can unleash a similar world burn.

Not a chance, not that narcissist.

I wake up each morning hoping he doesn't.

Jesus, how to know when you've pissed off the SEC.

The SEC imposed a severe penalty against BF Borgers, permanently suspending the firm from practicing as accountants before the agency effective immediately. The firm and its owner, Benjamin Borgers, also agreed to pay $14 million collectively in fines.

“Borgers and his sham audit mill have been permanently shut down,” Gurbir Grewal, director of the SEC’s enforcement division, said in a press release.

Public companies that have hired BF Borgers will need to find new accounting firms, the SEC alerted companies in a separate statement on Friday.

JetRx wrote:

https://cruelery.com/uploads/thumbs/307_img_4099.jpeg

Do try to keep up with the rest of us.

Inside Biden’s decision to go public with his ultimatum to Israel over Rafah

I know that logic or making sense was never Mitt Romney's strong point but this...

Romney says if he were president he would have immediately pardoned Trump

By Rashard Rose and Jack Forrest, CNN
Updated: 9:33 PM EDT, Wed May 15, 2024
Source: CNN

Utah GOP Sen. Mitt Romney said that if he were President Joe Biden he would have “immediately pardoned” former President Donald Trump.

“Had I been President Biden, when the Justice Department brought on indictments, I would have immediately pardoned him,” Romney told MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle” in an interview set to air Wednesday. “I’d have pardoned President Trump. Why? Well, because it makes me, President Biden, the big guy and the person I pardoned a little guy.”

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, faces 88 charges over four criminal indictments in Georgia; New York; Washington, DC; and Florida — with the latter two being federal cases prosecuted by Special Counsel Jack Smith.

While the longtime Trump critic disagreed with Biden’s handling of the federal cases, Romney also criticized Trump’s attacks on the courts and called out Republicans who are trying to curry favor with the former president amid his hush money trial in Manhattan.

The former president, who has pleaded not guilty to all charges, has repeated the baseless claim that Biden has weaponized the Justice Department against his 2024 presidential election rival. He has also continuously attacked the judges overseeing his cases, giving rise to security concerns with some receiving threats.

“I think it’s a terrible fault for our country to see people attacking our legal system, that’s an enormous mistake,” Romney stated.

Allies of the former president have been flocking to the Manhattan criminal courthouse to display their support for Trump, including North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who are both under consideration to be Trump’s running mate.

“I think it’s also demeaning for people to quite apparently try and run for vice president by donning a red tie and standing outside the courthouse. It’s just, I’d have felt awkward,” Romney said.

The politicians coming to the former president’s defense — who have also included Florida Reps. Byron Donalds and Cory Mills and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy — are attacking the people Trump is barred from publicly speaking about due to a gag order issued by the judge in the ongoing Manhattan hush money trial.

Romney has long been a critic of Trump and has often criticized his Republican colleagues for their continued loyalty to the former president. He found Trump guilty of abuse of power during Trump’s first impeachment trial in the Senate, becoming the first senator in US history to vote to remove from office a president from the same party. And a year later, he voted with six other Republicans to convict Trump of inciting an insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 during the former president’s second impeachment trial. Romney has said he did not vote for Trump, his party’s nominee, in 2020 and has said he will not vote for him in 2024.

The 77-year-old senator as the Republican Party nominee in the 2012 presidential race, losing to Democratic incumbent Barack Obama. Romney, known for his distinctive voice in the Senate as a lawmaker willing to take on his own party, announced last year he would not seek reelection to his seat.

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
--Maya Angelou

Trump posts video referencing ‘unified Reich’ if reelected

By Colin McCullough, CNN
Updated: 9:22 AM EDT, Tue May 21, 2024
Source: CNN

Former President Donald Trump posted a video on Monday showing images of a fake newspaper article that references a “unified Reich” if he’s reelected in 2024.

The video details “what happens after Donald Trump wins” with a narrator reading hypothetical headlines like “Economy Booms!” and “Border is closed,” styled as World War I-era newspaper clippings. Under one headline that reads “What’s next for America?” is a reference to the “creation of a unified Reich.”

Another headline in the video states “15 Million Illegal Aliens Deported” next to the start and end days of World War I.

The term “reich” is often associated Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, who designated Germany a “Third Reich” from 1933 to 1945.

The video was removed from Trump’s Truth Social account Tuesday morning.

Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said in a statement that the video was not created by the campaign and was “reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the President was in court.”

The Biden campaign, meanwhile, blasted an email statement hammering Trump over the use of the word “reich.” Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer said in the statement that Trump intends to rule as a “dictator.”

“America, stop scrolling and pay attention. Donald Trump is not playing games; he is telling America exactly what he intends to do if he regains power: rule as a dictator over a ‘unified reich,’” said Singer.

Trump has previously played into antisemitic tropes, drawing broad condemnation for lashing out at Jewish Americans he says don’t support him and Israel enough. His rhetoric – including claiming undocumented migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and referring to his political opponents as “vermin” – have drawn comparison to the language used by Hitler.

At a rally in December, Trump pushed back on criticism that his rhetoric has echoed Hitler, telling a crowd in Iowa that he’s never read “Mein Kampf.”

DmtDusty wrote:

Baywolfe wrote:

https://cruelery.com/uploads/157_428345 … 0790_n.jpg

The one on the left (yes wax) still looks more human.

Give that MTG is really just a couple of goblins in a human suit, the model IS more human.

But I wonder, does the Space Force use black helicopters?

You know we're living in the most fucked-up of times when the Secret Service is confiscating rubber chickens at the Libertarians' national convention...

Thats, Guilty, GUILTY, GUILTY!!!

Trump guilty on all 34 felony charges

Donald Johann Drumph (666) can no longer vote or own a gun.  Wonder how many rallies it will take to pull him out of depression?

"I never said all those things I said.'"
-- Yogi Berra  Donald Drumpf
https://twitter.com/i/status/1797386679608881318

Last edited by Baywolfe (2024-06-04 11:24:52)

The Loneliness of Donald Trump
On the Corrosive Privilege of the Most Mocked Man in the World
By Rebecca Solnit
May 31, 2024

Once upon a time, a child was born into wealth and wanted for nothing, but he was possessed by bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting, and wanted more, and got it, and more after that, and always more. He was a pair of ragged orange claws upon the ocean floor, forever scuttling, pinching, reaching for more, a carrion crab, a lobster and a boiling lobster pot in one, a termite, a tyrant over his own little empires. He got a boost at the beginning from the wealth handed him and then moved among grifters and mobsters who cut him slack as long as he was useful, or maybe there’s slack in arenas where people live by personal loyalty until they betray, and not by rules, and certainly not by the law or the book. So for seven decades, he fed his appetites and exercised his license to lie, cheat, steal, and stiff working people of their wages, made messes, left them behind, grabbed more baubles, and left them in ruin.

He was supposed to be a great maker of things, but he was mostly a breaker. He acquired buildings and women and enterprises and treated them all alike, promoting and deserting them, running into bankruptcies and divorces, treading on lawsuits the way a lumberjack of old walked across the logs floating on their way to the mill, but as long as he moved in his underworld of dealmakers the rules were wobbly and the enforcement was wobblier and he could stay afloat. But his appetite was endless, and he wanted more, and he gambled to become the most powerful man in the world, and won, careless of what he wished for.

Thinking of him, I think of Pushkin’s telling of the old fairytale of The Fisherman and the Golden Fish. After being caught in the old fisherman’s net, the golden fish speaks up and offers wishes in return for being thrown back in the sea. The fisherman asks him for nothing, though later he tells his wife of his chance encounter with the magical creature. The fisherman’s wife sends him back to ask for a new washtub for her, and then a  second time to ask for a cottage to replace their hovel, and the wishes are granted, and then as she grows prouder and greedier, she sends him to ask that she become a wealthy person in a mansion with servants she abuses, and then she sends her husband back. The old man comes and grovels before the fish, caught between the shame of the requests and the appetite of his wife, and she becomes tsarina and has her boyards and nobles drive the husband from her palace. You could call the husband consciousness—the awareness of others and of oneself in relation to others—and the wife craving.

Finally she wishes to be supreme over the seas and over the fish itself, endlessly uttering wishes, and the old man goes back to the sea to tell the fish—to complain to the fish—of this latest round of wishes. The fish this time doesn’t even speak, just flashes its tail, and the old man turns around to see on the shore his wife with her broken washtub at their old hovel. Overreach is perilous, says this Russian tale; enough is enough. And too much is nothing.

The child who became the most powerful man in the world, or at least occupied the real estate occupied by a series of those men, had run a family business and then starred in an unreality show based on the fiction that he was a stately emperor of enterprise, rather than a buffoon barging along anyhow, and each was a hall of mirrors made to flatter his sense of self, the self that was his one edifice he kept raising higher and higher and never abandoned.

I have often run across men (and rarely, but not never, women) who have become so powerful in their lives that there is no one to tell them when they are cruel, wrong, foolish, absurd, repugnant. In the end there is no one else in their world, because when you are not willing to hear how others feel, what others need, when you do not care, you are not willing to acknowledge others’ existence. That’s how it’s lonely at the top. It is as if these petty tyrants live in a world without honest mirrors, without others, without gravity, and they are buffered from the consequences of their failures.

“They were careless people,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of the rich couple at the heart of The Great Gatsby. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Some of us are surrounded by destructive people who tell us we’re worthless when we’re endlessly valuable, that we’re stupid when we’re smart, that we’re failing even when we succeed. But the opposite of people who drag you down isn’t people who build you up and butter you up.  It’s equals who are generous but keep you accountable, true mirrors who reflect back who you are and what you are doing.

“He is, as of this writing, the most mocked man in the world.”
We keep each other honest, we keep each other good with our feedback, our intolerance of meanness and falsehood, our demands that the people we are with listen, respect, respond—if we are allowed to, if we are free and valued ourselves. There is a democracy of social discourse, in which we are reminded that as we are beset with desires and fears and feelings, so are others; there was an old woman in Occupy Wall Street I always go back to who said, “We’re fighting for a society in which everyone is important.” That’s what a democracy of mind and heart, as well as economy and polity, would look like.

This year Hannah Arendt is alarmingly relevant, and her books are selling well, particularly On the Origins of Totalitarianism. She’s been the subject an extraordinary essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books and a conversation between scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge and Krista Tippett on the radio show “On Being.” Stonebridge notes that Arendt advocated for the importance of an inner dialogue with oneself, for a critical splitting in which you interrogate yourself—for a real conversation between the fisherman and his wife you could say: “People who can do that can actually then move on to having conversations with other people and then judging with other people. And what she called ‘the banality of evil’ was the inability to hear another voice, the inability to have a dialogue either with oneself or the imagination to have a dialogue with the world, the moral world.”

Some use their power to silence that and live in the void of their own increasingly deteriorating, off-course sense of self and meaning. It’s like going mad on a desert island, only with sycophants and room service. It’s like having a compliant compass that agrees north is whatever you want it to be. The tyrant of a family, the tyrant of a little business or a huge enterprise, the tyrant of a nation. Power corrupts, and absolute power often corrupts the awareness of those who possess it. Or reduces it: narcissists, sociopaths, and egomaniacs are people for whom others don’t exist.

We gain awareness of ourselves and others from setbacks and difficulties; we get used to a world that is not always about us; and those who do not have to cope with that are brittle, weak, unable to endure contradiction, convinced of the necessity of always having one’s own way. The rich kids I met in college were flailing as though they wanted to find walls around them, leapt as though they wanted there to be gravity and to hit ground, even bottom, but parents and privilege kept throwing out safety nets and buffers, kept padding the walls and picking up the pieces, so that all their acts were meaningless, literally inconsequential. They floated like astronauts in outer space.

Equality keeps us honest. Our peers tell us who we are and how we are doing, providing that service in personal life that a free press does in a functioning society. Inequality creates liars and delusion. The powerless need to dissemble—that’s how slaves, servants, and women got the reputation of being liars—and the powerful grow stupid on the lies they require from their subordinates and on the lack of need to know about others who are nobody, who don’t count, who’ve been silenced or trained to please. This is why I always pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation. When you don’t hear others, you don’t imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters. This is about a need for which we hardly have language or at least not a familiar conversation.

A man who wished to become the most powerful man in the world, and by happenstance and intervention and a series of disasters was granted his wish. Surely he must have imagined that more power meant more flattery, a grander image, a greater hall of mirrors reflecting back his magnificence. But he misunderstood power and prominence. This man had bullied friends and acquaintances, wives and servants, and he bullied facts and truths, insistent that he was more than they were, than it is, that it too must yield to his will. It did not, but the people he bullied pretended that it did. Or perhaps it was that he was a salesman, throwing out one pitch after another, abandoning each one as soon as it left his mouth. A hungry ghost always wants the next thing, not the last thing.

This one imagined that the power would repose within him and make him great, a Midas touch that would turn all to gold. But the power of the presidency was what it had always been: a system of cooperative relationships, a power that rested on people’s willingness to carry out the orders the president gave, and a willingness that came from that president’s respect for rule of law, truth, and the people. A man who gives an order that is not followed has his powerlessness hung out like dirty laundry. One day earlier this year, one of this president’s minions announced that the president’s power would not be questioned. There are tyrants who might utter such a statement and strike fear into those beneath him, because they have installed enough fear.

A true tyrant does not depend on cooperative power but has a true power of command, enforced by thugs, goons, Stasi, the SS, or death squads. A true tyrant has subordinated the system of government and made it loyal to himself rather than to the system of laws or the ideals of the country. This would-be tyrant didn’t understand that he was in a system where many in government, perhaps most beyond the members of his party in the legislative branch, were loyal to law and principle and not to him. His minion announced the president would not be questioned, and we laughed. He called in, like courtiers, the heads of the FBI, of the NSA, and the director of national intelligence to tell them to suppress evidence, to stop investigations and found that their loyalty was not to him. He found out to his chagrin that we were still something of a democracy, and that the free press could not be so easily stopped, and the public itself refused to be cowed and mocks him earnestly at every turn.

A true tyrant sits beyond the sea in Pushkin’s country. He corrupts elections in his country, eliminates his enemies with bullets, poisons, with mysterious deaths made to look like accidents—he spread fear and bullied the truth successfully, strategically. Though he too had overreached with his intrusions into the American election, and what he had hoped would be invisible caused the whole world to scrutinize him and his actions and history and impact with concern and even fury. Russia may have ruined whatever standing and trust it has, may have exposed itself, with this intervention in the US and then European elections.

The American buffoon’s commands were disobeyed, his secrets leaked at such a rate his office resembled the fountains at Versailles or maybe just a sieve (this spring there was an extraordinary piece in the Washington Post with thirty anonymous sources), his agenda was undermined even by a minority party that was not supposed to have much in the way of power, the judiciary kept suspending his executive orders, and scandals erupted like boils  and sores. Instead of the dictator of the little demimondes of beauty pageants, casinos, luxury condominiums, fake universities offering fake educations with real debt, fake reality tv in which he was master of the fake fate of others, an arbiter of all worth and meaning, he became fortune’s fool.

He is, as of this writing, the most mocked man in the world. After the women’s march on January 21st, people joked that he had been rejected by more women in one day than any man in history; he was mocked in newspapers, on television, in cartoons, was the butt of a million jokes, and his every tweet was instantly met with an onslaught of attacks and insults by ordinary citizens gleeful to be able to speak sharp truth to bloated power.

He is the old fisherman’s wife who wished for everything and sooner or later he will end up with nothing. The wife sitting in front of her hovel was poorer after her series of wishes, because she now owned not only her poverty but her mistakes and her destructive pride, because she might have been otherwise, but brought power and glory crashing down upon her, because she had made her bed badly and was lying in it.

The man in the white house sits, naked and obscene, a pustule of ego, in the harsh light, a man whose grasp exceeded his understanding, because his understanding was dulled by indulgence. He must know somewhere below the surface he skates on that he has destroyed his image, and like Dorian Gray before him, will be devoured by his own corrosion in due time too. One way or another this will kill him, though he may drag down millions with him. One way or another, he knows he has stepped off a cliff, pronounced himself king of the air, and is in freefall. Another dungheap awaits his landing; the dung is all his; when he plunges into it he will be, at last, a self-made man.

That "same suit" thing was kinda gay.  There's a lot of latent homosexuality in the GOP.  No wonder they're so angry, they hate themselves.

Oh, that is trolling to the highest degree!

BorderCount wrote:

Has anyone else noticed how all the cultists never seem to have 'a' Trump flag, or 'a' Trump sign? They always have several. It's like they have some need to show off to everyone just how much they love their Dear Leader...

No armbands yet though, that's a surprise.  If "they" want to have a war against "us" (as they continually tell us they will do if Donald fails again) it's probably not prudent to make yourself easily identified. 

I have noticed that there are less and less Trump 2024 flags as time goes by as Donald does what we always knew he would, attack his own base for not loving him exclusively.  That "cease and desist using my name or likeness" order he sent to House Rep Bob Good's campaign staff is a "chef's kiss".  And his daughter-in-law (who seems to be about the same amount of retard as her husband) is willing to bankrupt the GOP to pay daddy's legal bills.

For me, it's now a little more personal since I'm now an Official Target of the modern GOP, and I legitimately worry that the only thing that can stop Donald Trump is for him to stop breathing. I cannot stress enough how much I genuinely hope I wake up one morning to find that he didn't.

I'm no expert but I know enough.  The MoronsAgainstGoodAdvice idiots went out and bought shares to support their glorious leader who had a bad case of sad.  The shorts said "thanks, much!" and caused the first spike down, then people started panicking that it might be crashing like last time.  All in all a very bad seven days for Donald.

I have highlighted the market capitalization because that tells a story most folks don't understand.  To calculate market cap, you take the total number of a company's shares outstanding (owned by shareholders and others)  and multiply that number by the company's current stock price. In this case it comes out to 177 million shares @ $39.31.  Since most of those shares are probably owned by the principles including Donald, when September comes and they can sell out the stock isn't just going to implode, it's going to be pulled to the very depths of hell.  Just another scam.

Last edited by Baywolfe (2024-06-11 18:26:44)

Yes, the corporation has to buy them back. If they don't have the money, that's called a "margin call" and is usually followed by seizure of assets.  You think that orange asshole cares about the company at that point?  This thing is already a money pit, their financials from last year were abysmal.  Also, and I'm not sure why, Donald actually has two corporations DJT, which is the one above, and DJTWW which is on the same trajectory but is about 10 dollars a share cheaper. 

It's the shorts that are driving Donald crazy(er) when the stock was manipulated up to $50 a while back, they took their sell position and waited for it to tank to buy.  It's not only perfectly legal but serves the same function as predatory animals and carrion feeders do in the wild.  They kill the weak and make the rest stronger.

Last edited by Baywolfe (2024-06-11 20:11:21)

Truth Social Stock update.  DTJ continues to fall down from Tuesday until today going from $39.31 to $37.05, a Market Capitalization loss of around $400 million dollars. His felony convictions and the recent uptick of general craziness is to blame.  If this stock suddenly shoots back up to 50 or even 40, there should probably be an investigation.