Looks more and more likely Trumpolini's Big Ugly Bill will pass, which means now the question is how it will all end up playing out.  Obviously the 16M people about to lose their Medical Coverage will be none too happy, but since they're low income people with zero political power their complaints won't bother his Trumpness much.  More bothersome will be how the Bond Vigilantes react to the additional $3T in debt he'll have to sell to pay for making the rich richer?  Who wwill buy this toilet paper?  Perhaps with the Trump brand name plastered on the bonds the MAGAotts will buy them as collector's items?

Anyhow, the operative word of the week is UGLY.  It's gonna get ugly out there.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/03/trump-budget-bill

'It's harsh. I mean, brutal': Trump bill to cause most harm to America's poorest

RE

The trapper was sent into the wilderness to find where a sawmill would be built. The trapper had to winter there, the third cataract.  He had traps for meat. The Natives had no money to buy traps, so the trapper trapped more meat than he could eat. The extra meat was left in a few traps for the natives as he collected the others.  They followed him, and did not steal the traps.

He went back east, and the next year, he returned with others to build the sawmill. All settlers received land as part of a government claim. The trapper had land—he had been born in New England and knew wood. He did not have to work the land because the sawmill was on the corner.

Natives hunted the land, but other landowners would drive them away. Some of the Natives spoke French. It turned out the land was in a zone between the Sioux and the Cherokee. The tribes warred but could not kill each other in this DMZ. The trapper, a mill owner during working hours, had good relations with the natives who extended to him the no kill policy.  He understood their plight.

A generation later, the family name was well known to the Sioux. One of the trapper's nephews, born on the land had a farm not far away. A posse rode out to fetch him one day because the only real Indian war Minnesota ever had was about to start. Warned, the nephew told them to go away.  He had nothing to fear from his friends.

But he was tied up, thrown over a horse, and taken to town. That was a good thing, too, because when the war party came through, they killed all the whites they could find. The war party had men from more than a hundred miles away.  The local Indians feared for their lives.  Any young Sioux men found were given the choice to fight in the war party or die.  Mothers hid their children.  The nephew would have been killed.

The first part of this story was told to me by my grandmother more than a century later. The second part was told to me by my mother, who has the same maiden name as the trapper. I am descended from that trapper.  With me, the story dies.

There is a town where the sawmill was.  It has the same last name.

My automatic transcript generator is  only half done.  The hard part is finished.  But I am not in the mood to work on it today.

And I don't want to do it peacemeal, I am just watching it.

Election WIN STICKS The DAGGER in Trump & MAGA in Wisconsin

Wisconsin codified a woman's right to choose.

A proper socialist party would call a rally somewhere and have a speaker or two with posters.  Much literature would be distributed.

First Amendment advocates say they've never seen freedom of speech under attack the way it has been in Trump's second term.

Trump has threatened Democratic members of Congress with investigation for criticizing conservatives, pulled federal grants that include language it opposes, sanctioned law firms that represent Trump's political opponents and arrested the organizer of student protests that Trump criticized as "anti-Semitic, and anti-American.

And that is what we know about.  What the Heritage Foundation is doing is far more than what we know about.

Your right to say something depends on what the administration thinks of it, and this is no free speech at all. 

Who does it.

Russell Vought (Director of the Office of Management and Budget)
Oversees federal spending and agency budgets, including defunding programs deemed to engage in "anti-conservative censorship."
Pushed to revoke federal advertising dollars from platforms like YouTube if they were accused of bias, leveraging the "Restoring Free Speech" executive order (Jan. 2025) to cut taxpayer funding for "censorship-enabling" entities.

Stephen Miller (Deputy Chief of Staff)
Architect of hardline immigration and culture-war policies.  Advocated for using the "Take It Down Act" (pending in Congress as of 2025) to pressure platforms to remove content critical of Trump, including under broad definitions of "non-consensual intimate imagery".

Pam Bondi (Attorney General)
Led DOJ efforts to challenge tech platforms' moderation policies.
Investigated YouTube under antitrust and Section 230 reform proposals, arguing its moderation constituted "anti-conservative editorial control" 69.
Supported lawsuits against platforms for "censorship," mirroring Trump's 2021 lawsuits against Facebook and Google.

John Ratcliffe (CIA Director)
Expanded surveillance and counter-misinformation programs.
Pressured platforms to remove content labeled "foreign disinformation," which critics argued targeted left-leaning and anti-Trump voices disproportionately.

Kevin Roberts (Heritage Foundation President)
Primary author of Project 2025, which called for reclassifying social media as "common carriers" to limit their moderation powers.
Lobbied for Schedule F to replace federal tech regulators with Trump loyalists who would enforce stricter speech controls.




First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemöller

Trumpolini is giving ICE a budget of $200B to set up one of these DEATH CAMPS in every state!  Forget needing gas chambers and ovens, disease & malnutrition will  do the job of killing the desaperecido, and they can dispose of the meat packages feeding the alligators in the swamp.  Virtually no oversight and no medical care on site with access only by plane.  The Trumpenator makes Hitler look like an amateur.  Barely a ripple of outrage from the average Amerikan.  Clearly we now know that morality is the leading edge of civilization collapse.

https://newrepublic.com/article/197508/alligator-alcatraz-trump-concentration-camp

The Grand Opening of an American Concentration Camp

RE

We're coming down to the wire on Trumpolini's "Big Beautiful Ugly Bill", which besides cutting taxes for the rich will eviscerate Medicaid, which a huge number of low income people depend on to supplement Medicare, particularly in Alaska.  It remains to be seen whether Lisa Murkowski will vote against it, but even if she does it will take an additional 2 as yet unidentified Repugnants to vote no to crash the bill.

Yours truly of course is one of the folks depending on Medicaid. and I have no idea how it plays out for me if it passes.  No idea where the line will be drawn on who gets cut or whether the state will cough up money to fill in.  I do know if I get cut it will also cut many of the other residents of the Gulag with me, and how this place would stay open is a mystery.  Very exciting. lol.

https://alaskabeacon.com/2025/06/30/senate-moves-toward-final-vote-on-big-budget-bill-with-alaska-at-the-forefront/

US Senate moves toward final vote on big budget bill, with Alaska at the forefront

RE

Sandy at the Environmental Coffeehouse is experiencing what Trump thinks of doom, granola eaters and saving da planet.

More detail here

Sandy was going after project 2025 so 'they' * identified her as one of Satan's children.  She has been Trumped big time.  YouTube is owned by Google, which is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.,  which works for Fascism Lite.  Without your own platform,you are not free.  With one you are very very lonely.  Most people are quite happy not being free.  Lonely can be a fate worse than death.

Deported to digital Siberia.

* MIB

Big surprise.  Of course the Fed investigators will find Harvard is antisemiitic, since it's the Fed that is making the accusation.  Real impartiality here. Not.  The whole concept is absurd, since probably 3/4s of the STEM professors who aren't Chinese are Jewish.  As long as Israel continues to successfully define being anti-Israeli policy as automatically making you antisemitic this stupidity will continue.  That canard has to be deconstructed and hammered on in every speech by everybody concerned with Palestinian genocide.  The Isaeli state is the #1 Terrorist organization in the world, far more violent and deadly than Hamas.  Their body count exceeds Hamas by at least 2 orders of magnitude.

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5451732/trump-harvard-civil-rights-jewish-students-investigation

Federal investigation finds Harvard violated civil rights law

RE

What is Dialectical Materialism?

To put it briefly, it is the philosophy of Marxism—the worldview that animates how we understand and know the world. It is composed of two main parts: an ontology and an epistemology. In this essay, I will cover what the ontology of dialectical materialism is.
The Ontology of Dialectical Materialism

The ontology of dialectical materialism refers to the objective claims the worldview makes about the world—in other words, the way in which Marxism thinks the world objectively operates. The ontology of dialectical materialism is what Frederick Engels, the co-developer of Marxism along with Marx, called objective dialectics.

Ontologically, dialectical materialism holds that:

Everything is in a constant state of flux, of change, propelled by internal contradictions.  Everything is interconnected to everything around it.  Everything exists in ever-evolving totalities or wholes.

This basic framework was already present in the work of Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, and in the 19th century in the work of G.W.F. Hegel, who said that there was no proposition of Heraclitus that he did not include in his logic. It composes the most basic—and in that sense, abstract—propositions that the dialectical worldview makes about the world.

With Hegel, and later with Marx and Engels, the notion that the world is in constant flux is concretized, meaning it is more determinate and refined—it develops. This is done through the understanding of what Engels called the laws of the dialectics, which for Hegel were simply various moments in the development of the concept in his logic.
The Three Laws of Dialectics

1. The Law of Universal Contradiction (Unity and Struggle of Opposites)

For Lenin, the most fundamental of these laws was the law of universal contradiction, also called the law of the unity and struggle of opposites.

For dialectical materialism, contradictions are not—as they are in traditional Aristotelian logic—a sign of falsity, of the "way of opinion" (as Parmenides would have said). Instead, contradictions are the locus of the tension present in heterogeneous objects and the processes they are embedded in.

Everything in nature, society, and thought contains a multiplicity of forces within it—a unity of opposites whose tension shapes the development of the entity or whole that it is a part of.

For example:

Capitalism contains within it two classes with antagonistic interests: the workers and the capitalists.

The development of the struggle between these two great classes constitutes one of the basic contradictions driving the development of the form of life as a whole.

Both of these classes, while engaged in a ruthless struggle, are nonetheless united within the same system and are not only interdependent but mutually constitutive.

It is through the relationship to the worker that the capitalist is a capitalist.

It is through the relationship with the capitalist that the worker becomes the modern proletariat.

Dialectical materialism, as you should already be able to see, is fundamentally a relational and dynamic form of thinking, matching the interconnected and processual character of the world itself.

2. The Negation of the Negation

This might sound like unnecessary jargon, but it captures a very important insight into how change occurs—one that was already present in the philosophy of Aristotle.

The law of the negation of the negation holds that:

Through the process of an entity or totality's development, it eventually confronts—through the very unfolding of the contradictions—the need to negate itself.

Part of itself is canceled out so that another part can be transformed into something new.

This law is another way of speaking about sublation (the English term for the German word Aufhebung). This refers to a process whereby:

In the development of an entity, something is simultaneously elevated and sustained into that which it is becoming.

Meanwhile, something else is fizzled out (what Hegel called ceasing to be).

To speak of sublation is to speak of being as becoming, as coming and ceasing to be. It is to understand that the very notion of change—this universal ontological reality—contains within it its opposite: the fact that for something to change, on a very immediate level, something must also stay the same (and the opposite is also true).

3. The Transition of Quantity to Quality (and Vice Versa)

This law refers to a way of thinking about the great leaps that occur throughout nature, society, and thinking when the development of a thing reaches what is called a nodal point.

For example:

In nature, if the temperature of water drops from 40°F to 32°F, at this nodal point of 32°F, there is a qualitative leap in the form the water takes—it transitions from a liquid to a solid.

Here, quantitative accumulation (degrees dropped) at a certain nodal point produces a qualitative leap into something new.

In modern political philosophy (from John Locke onward), it is understood that if you accumulate oppression on a people, at a certain nodal point, they will explode and overthrow the forces dominating them.

Again, quantitative accumulation (oppression) at a certain nodal point produces a qualitative leap—a new situation with its own process of quantitative accumulation based on the new arrangement of forces and contradictions.

Conclusion:

The basic principles of the ontology of dialectical materialism—as well as its three basic laws—are precisely just that: the most basic (and therefore abstract) components of the worldview. Nonetheless, they force us to remember that whenever we study anything, we should:

Be wary of isolating things from each other.

Avoid considering things as static.

Never assume that within them, there is no multiplicity of forces at work.

Sure, there is a place for abstract thinking rooted in traditional logic (e.g., basic computer science, which is based in binary traditional logic). But this is not the sort of thinking that provides meaningful or comprehensive knowledge when it operates alone—it merely gives us atoms of information that must later be incorporated into a more dialectical analysis to become meaningful.

With this, I conclude this very basic sketch of the ontology at the foundation of dialectical materialism. In a later discussion, we will cover:

The epistemology (or method) of dialectical materialism.

How Mao refined the understanding of contradictions with his development of the particularities of contradiction.

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