Denmark

I do wish the United States would join much of the rest of the world and offer a universal health care system, but we have allowed private health insurance companies to weasel their way into our health care and now they are so entrenched it will be hard to uproot them. Seems like a no-brainer to me to create a universal system here and hire most of the employees in private health insurance to work in the public sector. We've done hard things before, and we can do this too.

High taxes are pure bliss!

Alright, here we go again!

Every single time a stray, freedom-obsessed fundamentalist from Texas stumbles into our little corner of the internet, we have to endure the exact same endless lamentation:

"B-but Denmark is a socialist hellhole where the government steals 50 percent of your cash, leaving you only able to afford a rusty bicycle!"

Now listen up, crazy friends across the pond. Take a deep breath, gently set down your assault rifles for just a moment, and let’s spell this out in crayon so even a Wall Street broker can wrap his head around it:

Our sky-high taxes are not a communist assault. It is, in fact, the single most brilliant capitalist business model on Earth!

First and foremost:

The marginal propensity to consume!

Yes, we know it sounds like something you need a PhD to pronounce without choking on your Pinot Noir, but the logic is embarrassingly simple.

How many flat screens do you genuinely think Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos buy for their living rooms? One. Maybe two. Or hell, let’s say fifty, if they have an exceptionally vulgar guest bathroom in every single guest suite.

A multibillionaire does not buy 500,000 flat screens, no matter how much gold he hoards in his cave like Smaug the dragon.

An economy does not thrive on a handful of oligarchs; it thrives on a massive, solvent middle class with actual purchasing power to buy flat screens, hit the cafés, hire contractors, and buy designer lamps, bicycles, EVs, groceries, and so on and so forth.

When we redistribute wealth, it gets pumped straight back into the economic bloodstream as pure consumer demand.

Second:

We don’t let half our talent pool rot away in poverty.

Instead of forcing a gifted girl from a trailer park to pawn her kidneys just to afford medical school...

...our government covers tuition for everyone, regardless of background.

We even pay students about $1,000 a month in what critics love to call "coffee money" simply for showing up to get educated.

And when that doctor has a baby, we provide tax-subsidized daycare so she can get right back to the hospital and save lives, instead of being chained to a kitchen.

We have quite simply mobilized our entire workforce to generate massive wealth for everyone’s benefit.

And the absolute best part? It creates trust!

We don’t need private security details, razor wire around our suburban subdivisions, or an army of corporate lawyers every time we make a simple handshake deal. We have quite literally bought ourselves freedom.

Taxes in Denmark are not theft; they are an exclusive VIP subscription to a fully functional, civilized society!

So, dear foreigners:

We don’t pay taxes because we are self-effacing saints in Birkenstocks.

We do it because we are hard-nosed pragmatists who figured out a long time ago that a society where everyone can afford to live is, funny enough, a society where we all end up vastly, undeniably richer.

Feel free to share

#DSA

#democracy

#DemocraticSocialism

#NordicModel

Mike Nellis

Mike Nellis is a Democratic strategist and entrepreneur who has raised over $1 billion for Democratic campaigns and causes. He’s the founder of Authentic.org, an award-winning fundraising and advertising agency, and a former Senior Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris. This Substack is where he writes with endless urgency about the issues of the day—and how we can save the Democratic Party and our democracy.

Trump’s Latest Temper Tantrum Tells You Everything

Because this was never just about the Kennedy Center.

MIKE NELLIS AUG 26

Hey folks,

I want to spend a minute talking about what a petulant child the president of the United States is. This is a man who simply has no self-control and throws wild tantrums whenever he doesn’t get his way.

That’s not news, of course. But I was struck yesterday by the sheer absurdity of Trump’s legal team telling a federal court that if they don’t get their way on renaming the Kennedy Center after Donald Trump, they intend to tear it down and replace it with an outdoor amphitheater.

Read that again. Trump’s plan is to hold the Kennedy Center hostage unless he gets to rename it and remake it after himself. 

And I think that’s a great preview of what happens to basically every public institution in America that Trump can’t put his name on or twist into whatever bizarre shape he and his people want. It’s how he took over the Republican Party, too. He promised he’d burn the whole thing to the ground unless they remade themselves in his image, and now they’re virtually gone as a party. The once-great Republican Party of states’ rights and personal freedom has become a big-government party shoving a scammy, radical Christian nationalist agenda down our throats while letting Big Tech and corrupt billionaires do whatever the hell they want with this country.

The other piece of news that struck me yesterday, is that Trump’s administration is trying to make it actively harder for you to know when and where they’re planning to build AI data centers. The EPA wants to strip the public’s right to give feedback. No notice. No comment period. Nothing. You don’t get a say in what’s best for your community and your kids. That might sound like a completely different story from the Kennedy Center. It's not. It's the same instinct: if something stands between them and what they want, it either bends or it breaks.

That’s what’s amazing to me. If they don’t pass that rule, if this community won’t take an AI data center, if they don’t get to rename this thing after Trump, if the MAGA movement doesn’t get exactly what it wants, they promise to just burn it all down. At this point you’re basically negotiating with terrorists. These are not people governed by a core set of fundamental values and beliefs beyond self-enrichment, accumulating power, owning their political enemies, and most of all, winning. And once winning becomes the only value, there is basically nothing you can't justify.

It’s not too dissimilar from what I told you yesterday about Pennsylvania Republicans suddenly having a positive opinion of John Fetterman. The only reason they like Fetterman is that people like me hate him. It’s not because his politics have changed that much. He still votes with Democrats 85 percent of the time. They like him more than they like Dave McCormick, their own Republican senator who votes with Trump 100 percent of the time. It just flows on down.

Trump is very much a symptom of broader diseases in American society today: the lack of accountability for a very wealthy class of people, our broken campaign finance laws, an institutional rot and malaise that has allowed people to get lazy and refuse to modernize and recognize that we are living in a very different time, where the way people operate is very different. He didn’t create all of this. But he figured out how to exploit it, and he accelerates it. And he’s also somebody who corrupts everything and everyone around him just by the way he acts. People get enamored by his glow and corrupted by the access to power and opportunity it brings.

I mean, those lawyers arguing in court right now that they’ll tear the Kennedy Center down if they can’t rename it after him? Those people probably didn’t go to law school intending to argue for shit like that. I simply can’t believe anybody begins a career that way. So how does somebody become so worn down and characterless over time that they end up trapped in a movement like this? Are they so thirsty for power and money and access that they’ll argue and say whatever? I think that’s probably the answer. Occam’s razor. The simplest answer is usually the correct one. You compromise one thing, then another, then another, until eventually you’re standing in federal court, arguing that the president should be allowed tear down a national cultural institution that has belonged to the American people for generations, all because he can’t put his name on it. It’s disgusting.

I’ll end this rant with this: We have to fight like hell to make sure the Democratic Party does not become a mirror-image reverse of what the Republican Party has become. There are a lot of people in the party right now propagating slop and trying to convince you that we should give up and abandon our values, the people we fight for, and the country we want to build together, all in order to beat these guys. But winning cannot be the only value. That’s exactly how people end up where Trump’s Republican Party is today. It needs to be deeper than that. If we beat the MAGA movement in November, if we beat Donald Trump and his handpicked successor in 2028, but we do it in a way that abandons our core Democratic Party values, we’re not going to build a government that can actually solve the fundamental crises we have in this country. We won’t get real accountability. We won’t fix a broken economy. We won’t clean up our broken campaign finance laws. We won’t remake this country in the way I believe we really can.

And we have such an opportunity. Every crisis is an opportunity. I’d rather we weren’t in this crisis right now. I’d rather Kamala Harris had won the 2024 election. I was proud to support her. But let’s take this for the opportunity it is. Trump has shined a light on everything that’s broken in American politics today. The brazenness of the Epstein class, these corrupt billionaires, these failed politicians on both sides, frankly, have given us an opening to turn this country around and remake it the same way both Roosevelts did, the way Lincoln did. Not just to defeat something. To build something better in its place. To win in service of something greater than ones self or party. That’s a generational opportunity. It comes along maybe once, maybe twice in a lifetime. And it’s right in front of us.

So my advice to everybody: find the thing you’re good at. Find the way you can be useful, to your community, to your family, to your friends. Let’s take this moment and turn it around. Because I think we can take the darkness of this moment and the petulant nature of our president and build something pretty goddamn special, something we can all look back on and be proud of, the way past generations turned around rampant corruption and economic calamity and stupid foreign wars. We can do that again.

The pendulum swings, my friends.

Let’s fucking go.

With urgency, 

—Mike Nellis

Kennedy Center

Trump is so pissed about having his name removed from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (and it should never have been there in the first place, duh) that he is threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center unless he is allowed to renovate it, AND put his name back up there. This kind of childish behavior has become typical of Trump. What a fucking spoiled brat. His end cannot come soon enough.

Now Donald Trump is threatening to "demolish" the Kennedy Center — and that's not a joke — unless he's allowed to continue with the renovations and put his name on the building, which he's trying to force through.

All because this man-baby was forced to remove his name from the building after he disgraced a memorial dedicated to the late John F. Kennedy.

The Trump administration is now claiming that the facility might need to be torn down because it won't be "structurally safe" without these renovations — which Trump now wants to use as a way to get his name on the center by adding "Renovations by Donald Trump."

This is how f*cking pathetic, insecure, weak, petty, and mentally unhinged this lowlife piece of crap is.

Trump is now threatening to tear down this memorial because he's not getting his way when it comes to putting his name on the building.

He's such a loser.

There really aren't words to adequately describe how pathetic Trump is. He's an 80-year-old who literally has the mindset of a toddler who would throw themselves on the dirty ground and have a cataclysmic-style hissy fit because they didn't get a piece of candy at the grocery store.

And what he wants here is to desecrate a memorial dedicated to a president who was killed while in office.

He's such a disgusting creature. I'm counting down every day because each day we move forward is one less day this orange diaper stain is president — and his last day in office can't come soon enough.

Anyone continuing to defend this bottom-feeder really is the lowest of the low. Willfully ignorant, brainwashed fools with no principles or morals other than blind worship of one of the worst, most detestable human beings to have ever lived.

History will not be kind to Donald Trump or the people who've supported and enabled his disgusting behavior.

I cannot wait until 2028, when we hopefully elect a Democrat and they erase everything this piece of crap has tarnished with his name. Every building, statue, piece of granite — everything, gone.

That day can't come soon enough.

Allen Clifton

climate terror

John Scheve has a few things to say about our current climate chaos. We were making some progress (not much, but some) towards lessening the climate chaos, until the orange egomaniac started reversing our progress.

No one wants to say this but the Mediterranean and even the Bay of Biscay will soon be mostly dead marine biomes as well as enhanced catalysts for severe thunderstorms, torrential flooding rains, tornadoes, stronger mid latitude cyclones, heavier winter snowfall and even Medicanes in late summer.

Marine Heat Waves (MHWs) are becoming perpetual though annually oscillating in intensity and are generally amplifying year to year. The more sheltered and shallow the body of water the more rapid the heating in calm sunny conditions. When the uppermost ocean is highly stratified as it is increasingly, MHWs can intensify stunningly fast even in the open deep Pacific. The North Pacific marine heatwave which is worst in the NW Pacific now, has recently warmed at a staggering 1 to 2 degrees C per week under calm sunny conditions with sinking air under an atmospheric high pressure dome. These conditions are increasing over the oceans in tandem with MHWs in an amplifying mutual feedback.

Generally speaking, climate and marine feedbacks and mutual amplifications are kicking in with ferocious speed now as global atmospheric warming accelerates - both far faster than modeling predicted. Climate models ignore many feedbacks and amplifications and use linear extrapolations for others which has rendered them useless. Plus climate sensitivity is likely 2 to 3 times greater than modeled due to the accelerating Earth Energy Imbalance caused by our increasing greenhouse gas emissions and the surprising relative reduction of outgoing long wave energy from the upper atmosphere associated with cloud reduction and cloud dimming over warmer ocean surfaces and higher levels of water vapor (the most powerful greenhouse gas).

If we don’t find a way to stop the accelerating heat absorption of the world ocean we will not stop the trajectory towards extinction we are now in.

Image: Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies (SSTAs) showing an SSTA for the date of + 5.2 degrees C (+ 9.4 degrees F) in the open Mediterranean Sea as of yesterday from earth.nullschool.net

John Scheve

RU liberal?

Are you a liberal? Douglas Wood has a metric.

YOU’RE A LIBERAL IF: Perhaps you were raised, as I was, in a Republican household. You may have even, in years and decades past, voted for Republican candidates, even for President. And you may have thought yourself a somewhat ‘moderate,’ middle-of-the-road, plain-old-vanilla good citizen.

If so, then it may come as quite a shock to learn that you have become, in the age of MAGA, a lib’rul. Or, worse than that a f—ing lib’rul. Or a r—tard. Or a f—-ing r—tard. Or a f—tard. Or a socialist, or a commie, or scum or vermin or an ‘enemy of the people.’

Well. Be not confused, my friends. It’s alright. Turns out that it’s not that hard, in the world of MAGA, (which has the intellectual depth of a rain puddle) to identify what a liberal is now. (Yeah, we’ll just stack all those other names under the same liberal category.) So here we go. YOU are now a liberal if…..

If you read.

Books.

If you think.

If you believe in the Constitution.

If you are somewhere ‘left’ of fascist.

If you don’t beat Capitol Police with ball-bats.

Or spear them with flagsticks.

Or spray them with mace.

Or try to hang a vice-president.

If you believe in elections.

And don’t try to overturn them.

If you don’t believe in pardoning—and paying off—violent insurrectionists.

If you think black people and brown people and any people who aren’t *president should still have the same voting rights.

If you believe voting actually IS a right.

If you think immigrants are human beings.

If you think the United States of America should not be building concentration camps.

If you think that public lands should be in public hands.

If you believe in education.

If you realize that vaccinations have saved approximately 154 million human lives, with a 40% global decline in infant mortality.

If you have a trans friend or member of the family.

If you think that women—like men—should have control of their own bodies.

If you think that Christianity (like others) is a fine religion—but is to be found in the Bible and in the hearts of believers, not coming out of the braggart mouths of idiots and bigots and a former Fox talking head now renamed the ‘Secretary of War.’

Good God.

If you think that war is a deadly serious business.

And not a game.

Or a propaganda exercise.

If you think for yourself and don’t let a cult leader do your ‘thinking’ for you.

If you have a spine and a brain.

If you honor the memories, lives, deaths, and sacrifices of generations before—many of whom fought fascism, and who the current ‘commander in chief’ labels as losers.

If you believe that bone spurs are not the same as military medals.

If you think that governmental corruption on an industrial scale is a bad thing.

Along with nepotism.

And galactic stupidity.

If you think that Air Force One should be an American plane and not a ‘gift’ from Qatar.

If you think reporters and cabinet members are not ‘decoys.’

If you think that democratic South Korea is a better ally than communist dictatorship North Korea.

If you value clean air, clean water, wild things and wild spaces for future generations.

If you think our United States protected wilderness areas should not be handed over to multi-national, corrupt corporations.

If you think that Abraham Lincoln was a better President than the Creature currently in the White House.

If you know who you are.

And don’t need a cult leader to tell you.

Yeah, there’s more. Lots more. But that’s probably enough to tell you if, in this strange new world, you are now a proud, flag-waving liberal. So, my advice… embrace it. Own it. Wear it like a badge of honor. Get a button. Write it on your hat. Or a lawn sign. And don’t let anybody—any mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, Fox-watching, election-denying, fascist-loving, civics-flunking, America-destroying ‘conservative’ tell you otherwise. And, Oh! Remember. There was a time when the name/label Conservative also meant something as well. Something good and decent and intelligent and patriotic. No more. But maybe, someday.

Someday….

(This is my latest Substack post. You can support/subscribe to me there at Notes From The Campfire@douglaswoodauthor. Thanks!)

Douglas Wood is an American author, speaker, musician, and wilderness guide.

BlueRev

Travel with Natalie. The Group of Pedophiles (GOP) is losing its mind about what Jon Ossoff recently said on the campaign trail. LOL. Who knew the GOP was such a clusterfuck of snowflakes? Do they all have dirty minds? What are they hiding? This one appeared on the Blue Revolution (Blue Rev) site.

Day 2 of the 1000% completely manufactured faux-outrage at Jon Ossoff and the entire Democratic Party for the subtle, kinda weird and funny suggestion that Trump likes traveling with a White House aide, and they write weird letters to each other. 

I think at this point they've moved on from the psychological warfare on you, and the media, which entailed making you feel absolutely crazy for having to listen to levels of hypocrisy this staggering. 

I think they're now trying to make sure that the MAGA base dutifully repeats that Jon Ossoff is some kind of misogynist, over and over again, until they don't remember why they've even saying it, but that all the other drooling idiots around them keep saying it. 

I think they see Ossoff as a potential threat. In 2 years from now, most Americans will not remember why MAGA attacks him for this. But MAGA leaders know that all you have to do is repeat something over, and over, and over again, so that people get more confident in repeating it, and so that maybe a sizable number of people who pay no attention to politics and have zero media literacy will shrug, and think to themselves "well, there must be something to this, since everyone yells about it all the time." 

This is what "Hillary's emails" were about. Ask a random MAGA, or even a non-MAGA person who pays little attention to politics, and they have no idea what the phrase is even referring to...but they also somehow know that she's corrupt for it. 

We need to fight back at this psychological warfare, not by lying like they do, but by telling the truth. And we need to say it over and over and over again, even after we're sick of it, because this is what they've done, to great effect. 

And here is that truth...yes, again...

Donald Trump was court-ordered to pay $5 million to his rape victim last month. Dozens of women have accused him of sexual assault, long before he ran for office, which he is on tape bragging about. He routinely berates female reporters and female politicians in the most sexist ways imaginable, including by yelling "Quiet Piggy" when they ask legit questions (he did this THE SAME DAY as Ossoff's alleged offense). 

He is on record, for decades, saying he loves hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, that he likes the same kind of girls "on the younger side." Trump is on video dancing at parties with Epstein while he gawks at young girls. He wrote Epstein a birthday card mentioning their "wonderful secret" together. 

The White House, for some reason, called it "a hostile act" for congress to release the Epstein Files, which they then fought for a year, and then a heavily-redacted document came out showing he was in them 38,000 times. 

As everyone here knows, we could go on for several more paragraphs. 

Ok so, again, what did Jon Ossoff say? That Trump likes traveling with his White House aide. 

There is no contest here. 

There is no substance whatsoever to MAGA's assertions here. 

There is an attempt to gaslight you so that you come off as having "TDS" for pointing out facts. And there is a concerted effort to train the cult on what exactly to say. 

Realize that this is psychological warfare from these people. If you are a person of substance who is willing to entertain arguments from all kinds of people, they will use your tolerance and intellectual curiosity against you. They will do and say anything...ANYTHING to protect their emperor, and allow him to do and say and act however he wants. 

That's what this is. 

Let's be clear. And let's keep being clear.

And if you haven’t yet, folks, and you want to feel productive, please please sign up for postcards to flip congress. We might run out soon. Click here: bit.ly/BRPC26

Blue Revolution

electric gloves?

So now ICE thinks they need electric-shock gloves to help them "control" their victims. These gloves won't stop their lying about what they do and how their "victims" react. With all the billions ICE has been given by the Vichy Republicans, you'd think maybe they would outfit them with body cams. But, fuck no, they don't want a lasting record of how they are abusing their victims. ICE has become Trump's personal police force, his brownshirts, his SS. And so much of the US is in denial.

Dear Porkchop,

You miserable fucking apostle of human misery.

We thought we’d reached the bottom of your particular moral septic tank somewhere between family separation, CECOT, Alligator Alcatraz, mass detention, deportation raids, threats against sanctuary cities, and your remarkable insistence that physical appearance can enter the “totality of the circumstances” when immigration agents develop reasonable suspicion.

And now?

Electric-shock gloves.

t’s been widely reported that ICE intends to spend as much as $20 million putting electric-shock gloves directly onto immigration officers’ hands, and naturally your furious oversized head emerged from the federal enforcement machine to defend the idea. Because somewhere in America, Porkchop, there apparently remains a human being insufficiently terrified of ICE, and you simply cannot fucking have that.

You explained that the devices provide officers another option short of deadly force.

Then you opened your mouth and reminded everybody exactly who we’re dealing with: “It’s another device to help someone get compliant when they are not.”

Compliant.

There it fucking is.

That word could be carved into the monument eventually erected to this obscene chapter of American history because compliance is the gravitational center of the Tom Homan universe.

Government commands, human complies.

Government grabs, human complies.

Government detains, human complies.

Government separates parent from child, human complies.

Government puts you on an airplane, locks you in a concentration camp, or removes you to foreign confinement while lawyers race desperately through American courts trying to determine what remedies remain available, and human fucking complies.

Now ICE wants electricity available literally at its agents’ fingertips.

This isn’t some philosophical exercise involving a hypothetical future government. You helped develop the deterrence logic behind family separation and Donald Trump’s administration turned it into international infamy. You’ve championed mass deportation, defended the administration’s CECOT removals, and spent years treating sanctuary jurisdictions like nests of sedition because local officials possess the apparently radical belief that municipal government doesn’t exist to function as your fucking DoorDash for deportees.

At some point, the pattern stops requiring interpretation. You believe deeply in the coercive power of government. You believe consequences deter behavior. You believe fear works. You have acknowledged believing family separation could affect migration decisions.

Whenever Americans recoil from where that philosophy leads, there you are again, face crimson, jaw clenched, that neck vein pounding against your collar like it’s trying to escape, explaining that everybody simply needs to follow the law.

That’s your magic trick. You take human suffering and run it through the bureaucratic meat grinder until it comes out sounding administrative.

A terrified father becomes an alien.

A crying child becomes a dependent.

A raid becomes an enforcement operation.

A cage becomes detention capacity.

A deportation becomes a removal.

A foreign prison becomes a destination.

Pain becomes compliance.

Somewhere inside that linguistic slaughterhouse, the human being disappears.

That’s what makes you dangerous, Porkchop. It isn’t the yelling. The yelling is almost funny. It isn’t your appearance, even though every vein north of your sternum appears to be holding an emergency meeting.

Your words should frighten anyone who understands why constitutional restraints exist. Constitutional rights weren’t invented for people the government likes.

Due process isn’t necessary when everybody agrees.

Habeas corpus isn’t important when nobody is wrongfully detained.

The Fourth Amendment isn’t particularly useful when every officer is correct.

These protections exist precisely because governments make mistakes, abuse power, become frightened, become angry, lie, and often become populated by men so absolutely convinced of their righteousness that they begin mistaking obedience for justice.

History will have questions about this era. It will ask about separated families, the deaths in these camps, due process strained by accelerated removals, the private companies making fortunes from expanded detention, wrongful arrests, deportations, and a government purchasing electric-shock gloves for immigration enforcement.

Eventually it will encounter your name: Thomas Douglas Homan, career immigration officer, former acting director of ICE, White House border czar, and relentless salesman for the proposition that government-inflicted suffering becomes morally clean once somebody stamps ENFORCEMENT across the paperwork.

So keep screaming, Porkchop. Keep telling America everything is necessary, lawful, controlled, professional, and absolutely nothing like what our own fucking eyes are telling us. Your neck vein can keep hammering against your collar like a hostage tapping Morse code against a radiator. We’ll keep documenting, because beneath the uniforms, acronyms, contracts, detention beds, airplanes, concentration camps, foreign prisons, and electrified gloves remains one stubborn fact your philosophy seems incapable of processing:

Those are human beings. Not inventory. Not statistics. Not beds. Not targets. Not removals. Not fucking units requiring compliance.

Human beings.

And no amount of yelling can make us forget it.

Sincerely,

The people you haven’t managed to make compliant.

Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge