Sunday, July 5, 2026

Trump rewrites Dec. of Independence in appalling speech

                   

LOTS OF POSTS IGNORED BY BLOGGER.....

OR REMOVED ON THEIR WHIM!

ALL POSTS ARE AVAILABLE ON

MIDDLEBORO REVIEW AND SO ON

BLOGGER DOESN'T LIKE TRUTH OR FACTS!

BLOGGER DOESN'T LIKE FUND RAISERS AND DELETES

POSTS THAT INCLUDE FUNDRAISING THAT 'VIOLATES THEIR

UNDEFINED COMMUNITY STANDARDS SO ALL 'FUND RAISING'

IS DELETED - CONTRIBUTE AS YOU ARE INCLINED TO SUPPORT

IMPORTANT ISSUES! THESE ARE NOT SOLICITATIONS



Daily Dose of Democracy

Fire Kash Patel for his corruption and incompetence immediately!

Sunday Dose of Democracy:

photo
Trump misquotes key passage of Declaration of Independence to make it more MAGA
During Donald Trump's combative and wildly inappropriate speech commemorating America's 250th birthday, the president chose to rewrite one particular passage of the Declaration: “And as our Declaration of Independence tells us, we are all made in the image of one almighty god. And a communist will never say that!” That is not what it says. What it DOES say is that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," but seeing as Trump does not see all men as equal nor that we should have unalienable rights, it's no wonder he decided on a different version that centers his MAGA Christian nationalism. A complete and utter disgrace on what should have been a triumphant occasion for our once-great nation.

photo
VIDEO OF THE DAY: FBI makes insane new announcement ahead of election
Brian Tyler Cohen breaks down the stunning news that Kash Patel's FBI is dedicating serious resources and manpower to hunting for 2020 election fraud evidence...that doesn't exist.

photo
Trump gets nightmare news as his top impeachment witness launches run for Senate
Alexander Vindman for Senate: Alexander Vindman made history as one of the star witnesses in the first impeachment case against Trump — and now he’s running for Senate so he can hold the wannabe dictator accountable from the halls of Congress. Vindman has vowed to take on "a Republican Party that’s failing to deliver accountability and underwriting chaos and corruption," but to win in Florida, he’s going to need some help. Can you chip in to help kick-start his run?

Donald Trump Is a treacherous, idolatrous, know-nothing anti-patriot
Michael Tomasky, The Nation: "History—in this case, through the pen of James Boswell—does not record for us the context in which Samuel Johnson offered up the famous quote that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” As we watch (or avoid watching) Donald Trump trying to turn the celebration of the United States’s 250th birthday into a celebration of Donald Trump, we would do well to remember Dr. Johnson’s thoughts. The real hallmarks of Trump’s false patriotism are the things that make his tenure such a horrific embarrassment and civic tragedy to so many millions of Americans. The constant lies meant to glorify him and his reign. The toxic hatred of so many of the people he was elected to serve. The petty and immoral pursuit of his political enemies. The operatic and open corruption.

These are venal acts. But as July 4 approaches, it behooves us to remember specifically that they are unpatriotic. Or worse: They are aggressively anti-patriotic. Real patriotism is truthful and humble; it tolerates and even welcomes dissent, and, understanding that the people rule in a democracy, it serves supporters and detractors equally; it seeks justice rather than revenge; and it understands that to seek profit from office is abhorrent.

That’s Trump. A treacherous, know-nothing anti-patriot. The image that sticks with me, the photo that made me both roll my eyes and gasp in horror when I first saw it, was the one of Trump kissing an American flag. What a grotesque act of civil idolatry; in fact, let’s throw “idolatrous” in there too. And if you don’t understand why kissing a flag is an act of grotesque civic idolatry, then you, my friend, are part of the problem.

The AI industry is losing
Ed Zitron, Where's Your Ed At: "In April of last year, I outlined how the failure of one model lab, OpenAI, would have seismic effects down its supply chain, delivering body blow after body blow to NVIDIA, Oracle, Microsoft, and the various Neoclouds that serve its compute. And Oracle, as I’ve noted previously, is a company that, even before the AI bubble, was massively indebted. It just so happens that, as a result of its tryst with OpenAI, Larry Ellison saw fit to twist the debt knob to eleven. Oracle’s spending has already pushed its free cash flow into negative territory — minus $23.7 billion, as of the end of FY 2026 — and at the end of May, it had $129.5 billion in outstanding debt. This doesn’t include its various lease commitments, which add up to nearly $38 billion , nor the additional $260 billion in lease commitments that have been signed, but haven’t actually started yet.

All of this is to say that Oracle has massively leveraged itself for the benefit of one company, OpenAI, and if that company can’t pay its bills, it’s fucked. Oracle’s existence — and Larry Ellison’s personal wealth — hinges on whether OpenAI can make good on its promise to spend $300bn in compute.

This is both the most-obvious and under-discussed part of the AI bubble — that the trillion-plus dollars of hyperscaler capex [capital expenditure] is feeding a massive semiconductor boom based on, at best, the very small likelihood that large language models will turn into something completely different. I need to state how fucking silly it is that anybody considered said semiconductor boom anything other than a brief chance to fill their boots before a global equity catastrophe so severe that the Futurum Group will be on suicide watch.

There is no cogent or rational argument in favor of continued capital expenditures, at least not one without a tacit acceptance that much of the current spend has been a waste outside of pumping equities and incubating two different large, unprofitable AI labs. Those millions of H100 and B200 and B300 GPUs are not going to usher in a digital God, they are not going to create recursive self-improvement, they are not going to be the fulcrum to adding $600 billion or more in brand new revenue to current services, and the only revenue they’re generating is compute spend from Anthropic and OpenAI, which I estimate makes up 20% or more of cloud revenues for Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Anyone investing in data centers is building speculative capacity for demand that does not exist outside of Anthropic and OpenAI.

Let me put it even simpler: those hundreds of billions of dollars of data centers are being built for no-one, and the only companies that can “afford” to pay for even a fraction of the compute are unprofitable AI companies propped up by hyperscalers."

photo
Pre-order Brian Tyler Cohen's new book today!
The Day After: Some exciting news from our friend, Brian Tyler Cohen. His new book, The Day After, is now available for pre-order! The book explores how Republicans have abused power, how Democrats have failed to effectively wield it, and finally, what Democrats must do when they get power back. It's a blueprint for progressives who are not satisfied with the status quo. Please support independent media by pre-ordering here — and grab tickets to his book tour in NYC, DC, Chicago, San Francisco, or LA.

Upgrade to paid

Food for thought

The Sunday wrap-up

Hope...

Upgrade to paid

Sunday Funnies

Sunday Funny
Sunday Funny
Sunday Funny
Sunday Funny
Upgrade to paid

PS — Please don't forget to sign the petition to fire Kash Patel for his corruption and incompetence immediately, and be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Good Influence on Instagram.



- No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,

He Joked About 15-Year-Olds. He Now Controls Foreign Policy. FLORIDA DESERVES BETTER!

                  

LOTS OF POSTS IGNORED BY BLOGGER.....

OR REMOVED ON THEIR WHIM!

ALL POSTS ARE AVAILABLE ON

MIDDLEBORO REVIEW AND SO ON

BLOGGER DOESN'T LIKE TRUTH OR FACTS!

BLOGGER DOESN'T LIKE FUND RAISERS AND DELETES

POSTS THAT INCLUDE FUNDRAISING THAT 'VIOLATES THEIR

UNDEFINED COMMUNITY STANDARDS SO ALL 'FUND RAISING'

IS DELETED - CONTRIBUTE AS YOU ARE INCLINED TO SUPPORT

IMPORTANT ISSUES! THESE ARE NOT SOLICITATIONS


       SHARED FOR INFORMATION AND EDUCATION ABOUT CANDIDATES 

              RUNNING IN FLORIDA!  



- No comments:
Labels: , ,

Sunday Pages: "The Black Paintings"

                 

LOTS OF POSTS IGNORED BY BLOGGER.....

OR REMOVED ON THEIR WHIM!

ALL POSTS ARE AVAILABLE ON

MIDDLEBORO REVIEW AND SO ON

BLOGGER DOESN'T LIKE TRUTH OR FACTS!

BLOGGER DOESN'T LIKE FUND RAISERS AND DELETES

POSTS THAT INCLUDE FUNDRAISING THAT 'VIOLATES THEIR

UNDEFINED COMMUNITY STANDARDS SO ALL 'FUND RAISING'

IS DELETED - CONTRIBUTE AS YOU ARE INCLINED TO SUPPORT

IMPORTANT ISSUES! THESE ARE NOT SOLICITATIONS


Sunday Pages: "The Black Paintings"

Fourteen paintings by Francisco de Goya


They march at night.

Every piece at PREVAIL is free to read and always will be. No paywalls, ever. Your generous support keeps it that way. Thank you!


Dear Reader,

Madrid, the beautiful and vibrant city where I sit typing this, was founded in the mid-ninth century by the Emir of Córdoba. The name is a corruption of Maŷriţ, a derivation of the Arabic word for stream. That was during the Islamic period, before Ferdinand III of Castile “reconquered” the Iberian peninsula, repulsing the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212.

He was a pious king, was Ferdinand III, but he was not a fanatic. He recognized that the diversity of his dominions was Spain’s superpower. He took the land from the Almohads but did not try to stamp out their faith. He openly crowed about Spain being a kingdom of three great religions.

Despite three centuries of proof of concept, his namesake, Ferdinand II of Aragon, did not agree. In 1478, a few years after jointly taking the throne, he and his wife, Isabella of Castile, established the Spanish Inquisition; they were the first secular monarchs to be granted Papal authority to do so.¹ Then, in 1492, as the sociopathic Italian “explorer” whose voyage the king and queen subsidized “discovered” America, Ferdinand and Isabella decreed that all Jews must convert to Catholicism or leave Spain.

Hey, Siri: What happens when a rich, powerful nation invests most of its wealth, energy, and human resources into terrorizing, rounding up, imprisoning, torturing, slaughtering, and driving out its own citizens—the very people most responsible for its economic success—because they are not straight white Christians? Would that the answer was not so relevant to us in the U.S. in 2026.

What followed in Spain was a period of paranoia, despotism, and corruption on the home front, while in the New World, conquistadors established the African slave trade, plundered the land, and slaughtered those Native Americans who did not die of the plague the Europeans brought with them—a genocide so brutal, so heartless, and so systematically effective that it would make the IDF tip its collective cap. The extraction of silver from the mines of Bolivia and Peru kept Spain in the black while its kings grew more inbred and its empire fell helplessly behind France and Britain. Four and a half centuries later, Spain would be a hotbed of fascism and, with the founding of Opus Dei, Catholic extremism of the 20th century variety.

There is no more appropriate foreign country in which to spend the 250th anniversary of the birth of the United States than Spain. First, because there are lessons to be learned here—about diversity, about “own goals,” about religious toleration, about the defeat of fascism, about managing an empire in decline. And second, because without Spain, there would be no Semiquincentennial; it is an underreported fact of the Revolutionary War, but the ragtag American colonists would never have defeated the British a quarter millennium ago without Spanish aid—a kindness we repaid in our lovely American way by ending the Spanish Empire in 1898.

(Because I am in Madrid for a coin show, I am obliged to mention that U.S. currency was pegged to the Spanish silver dollar from the founding of the nation until the Coinage Act of 1857. “Pieces of eight” are silver eight real coins—Spanish dollars.)

Any great nation that endures for so many centuries has shameful moments in its history. Spain, as we’ve discussed, is no exception. If a country could be said to have a conscience, Spain’s would be in torment. And if an artist could somehow take on the tormented conscience of the entire Spanish nation, that artist would be Francisco de Goya.

Before I went to the Prado yesterday afternoon, I didn’t know much about Goya—in fact, I kept getting him mixed up with El Greco, even though they are nothing alike—other than he made flattering portraits of doofy-looking kings.

The museum, set in a building Napoleon used as cavalry barracks, was both not claustrophobic in layout and surprisingly not crowded. I was delighted to learn that Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” was on exhibit, and I spent a good half hour looking at that and a few other of his triptychs, which are stunning IRL.

Sunday Pages: "The Garden of Earthly Delights"

Sunday Pages: "The Garden of Earthly Delights"

Greg Olear
·
November 2, 2025
Read full story

I fully intended to write about one of “El Bosco’s” other works, if not just a travelogue of Madrid generally. And then I stumbled into the dimly-lit room that houses Goya’s so-called “Black Paintings,” and my plans immediately changed. The works themselves are so tortured, so weird, so nightmarish, that they immediately stand out. But once I learned the context of the paintings—when they were painted, and where, and how, and by whom, and also how they came to be moved to the Prado in the first place—I became fixated. It was like bingeing a limited series on Netflix. I bought two books about it in the gift shop—one in Spanish, which I do not speak a word of—and set about studying Goya’s later years.

The span of Goya’s long life—1746 to 1828—included some of the most important and cataclysmic events in European history: the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and, in Spain, the war of independence against the French, the constitution of 1812, and the subsequent crackdown of liberalism by another shitty king named Ferdinand. Goya’d managed to adroitly manage the perilous politics, earning a good living producing portraits for the royal court, while at the same time quietly opposing despotism.

But something about the Restoration broke him. In 1819, Goya bought a country estate outside of Madrid, the Quinta del Sordo—the “House of the Deaf Man.” His wife had died a few years before. Although he was not the eponymous deaf man, he had himself gone deaf during a mysterious illness in the winter of 1792-3. And he was 73 years old—for that time, a veritable Spanish Methuselah.

Old, deaf, disillusioned, and tormented, it seems, by inner demons, Goya repaired to the country house, where he almost immediately fell deathly ill, only for his life to be saved by the ministrations of his dear friend, who happened to be a physician. Once his strength returned, he began work on the Black Paintings, which he produced between 1820 and 1823.

But here’s the thing: he painted them on the walls of the Quinta del Sordo. The plaster walls. These visions of anguish and nightmare were what he chose to look at in his own house—his personal décor. He did not receive many visitors; he lived in the house with Leocadia Weiss, his much younger caretaker, who may also have been his lover, and her children—one of whom, the painter Rosario Weiss Zorilla, rumored to have also been his. (His guilt about the living arrangement is evident in some of the paintings and likely contributed to his internal agony.)

Goya did not talk about the paintings to anyone. He did not write about them to anyone. He did not mention them anywhere. He did not give them titles. And because they were rendered on crumbling plaster, he did not intend for anyone else to see them. As the art critic Fred Licht wrote, the Black Paintings “are as close to being hermetically private as any that have ever been produced in the history of Western art.”

Salvador Martínez Cubells, an artist and art restorer, supervised a process of taking the paintings from the plaster and moving them onto canvas, which I did not think was possible, decades later—after the invention of photography, thank God. That’s what I was looking at in that dim room at the Prado: 14 works the artists never wanted me, or anyone else, to see—faithfully restored, but damaged in the process.

The word nightmarish is often used to describe these paintings. I’ve already used it a few times myself. But that suggests, to our modern ears, something from a stylized horror film—or, in the art world, a Dali or a Picasso (also Spaniards, for what it’s worth). The Black Paintings are like actual nightmares—not the kind rendered in comic books and TV shows, not Goth and cool, but the dreams we wake up from in a cold sweat and want to forget about as soon as possible.

Here is a painting of the god Saturn eating one of his children, per the Greek myth. At least, that’s what we think it is. He didn’t give it that title. We don’t really know what was going through Goya’s mind here—and I’m not sure we want to:

Between that and this one…

…there’s perhaps more Epstein Files foreshadowing than I’d care to contemplate.

The painting at the top of the page has been titled “A Pilgrimage to San Isidro.” It’s a Bizarro World inversion of a happier painting of a similar pilgrimage Goya produced 30 years prior. That was the one I stared at the longest. In person, the aspect ratio is odd—it’s probably 4 feet high by 12 feet wide, longer and narrower than letterbox, so the right side of the painting sort of slinks away like a lizard’s tail. And these faces, my God:

The only certainty about this painting is that the background is the view of Madrid from Goya’s estate; these people—zombie-like, demented, creepy, and all open-mouthed, which is not something you generally see in art from that period—are coming right up to his door, as if trick-or-treating. I shall defer to John J. Ciafalo on this one; in The Self-Portraits of Francisco Goya, he writes, “It is Goya whom they have come to see.” This part made me gasp: “And to serenade: for what does it matter to a deaf man that the guitar has no strings?”

If I lined up all 14 paintings and told you to pick out the one that doesn’t belong, you are almost certain to land on “The Dog,” also known as “The Drowning Dog.” It is the only one that doesn’t have the same nightmarish quality—making it, paradoxically, the most terrifying of the lot:

Stephen Phelan wrote about this in The Guardian a few years ago:

And I keep coming back to “The Drowning Dog,” which is funny only in the sense that it makes me cry in public. What long-dead pet served as Goya’s model? The artist loved dogs and wrote about them often in his letters. It reminds me of my own dog, now old and grey around the snout. How long do we have left together? I look at this painting and I see in that poor animal our condition in general, and our historical moment in particular. I’m the dog and you’re the dog, our heads held just above a dark, rising tide.

The dog is Goya. The dog is Phelan. The dog is you, the dog is me. The dog is Spain, the dog is the United States. The dog is all of us, innocent and trusting, small and insignificant, and ultimately helpless against the omnipotent forces against us.

And yet for more than 200 years now, that dog has stayed alive.

It’s not a drowning dog, not really.

It’s a rescue dog.

I happened to come to Madrid during the Gay Pride festival, the hub of which is two blocks from my hotel. There are rainbow flags on everything—even the Bank of Spain has an enormous rainbow banner on its otherwise austere stone wall. People are out in the street, walking, singing, dancing, parading, having a good time—gay and straight, young and old, Spanish and foreign, Catholic and not, many races, many genders, all together, all united. I’d expected this city to be somewhat conservative, so this is lovely to behold.

The lesson from Spain is that it’s possible to survive and thrive after an empire falls. The thing about losing your status as a hegemonic world superpower is that you can stop worrying about losing your status as a hegemonic world superpower. Or, as Ben Reilly says in Spider-Noir, “With no power comes no responsibility.”

This is a country that has known empire. This is a country that has lost empire. And this is a country that shows us that an empire in decline is not necessarily a bad thing.

There are beautiful people here in Madrid. And I don’t mean beautiful in the sense of physical attractiveness (although there is plenty of that). I mean beautiful as in the vibe, the energy, the passion for having a good time.

If this is what life is like post empire, sign me up.


1

It’s hard to overstate how historically astonishing it is that our current Pope strongly advocates so passionately for religious freedom.




- No comments:
Labels:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

Trump rewrites Dec. of Independence in appalling speech

                    LOTS OF POSTS IGNORED BY BLOGGER..... OR REMOVED ON THEIR WHIM! ALL POSTS ARE AVAILABLE ON MIDDLEBORO REVIEW AND SO ON B...