'Cold Rain and Snow'

Salvage the sweetness.

That is what I think to myself as I look out upon a wintry New England landscape and watch crimson cardinals, soft grey mourning doves and red-headed woodpeckers search for seeds beneath the freshly fallen snow.

I always spill a little extra bird seed on the ground beneath the feeders for the squirrels and chipmunks. The bright and varied colors of the avian feathers contrasts beautifully against the pure white frozen backdrop.

Nature seems to celebrate the differences and accept the circumstances we so readily fear.

I’ve watched birds of all shapes and sizes and I notice that when they find a full feeder, they invariably let out a song to alert other creatures in the area. I witness this behavior often and it always sticks out, as it seems the opposite of most human habits.

Sharing seems to come naturally to them; the desire to hoard or keep secret a new discovery of a cache of food on a cold winter’s day is entirely absent from their behavior.

The need to rejoice in abundance and share good fortune seems to outweigh any sort of fear of scarcity. The individual seems always ready to include others.

As if there is a deep faith that the natural world will provide for their needs, even in adverse conditions. The birdsong is a reminder to me of what really matters in this life.

The world seems still and at peace in this moment.

A respite from the roiling storms of mad kings and cowards. The endless grift and calculated destruction that is lurching our planet toward the abyss.

Every pillar of human progress feels under attack in this age of over-consumption and ego. Where billionaires are elevated and celebrated - and allowed to use our government and its institutions as playthings, before moving on out of boredom.

Musk paid Trump handsomely for the privilege of destroying the agencies that would stand in the way of his business pursuits, which ironically rely on government subsidies to make a profit.

He also stole Americans personal data while his DOGE hackers were illegally installed in our government agencies. A heist we have yet to see the full results of but will come back to haunt us in ways we probably cannot yet fully imagine. Especially now that all the watchdogs have been exiled and federal consumer protections were consumed in the raging dumpster fire that was the year 2025.

Musk was rewarded for his election interference by being offered a canned hunt of sorts, where he and a few teenagers could attack and maim anything that tickled their racist intentions and technocentric worldview.

He of course went after Africa first, the continent on which Musk was raised within the benefits of an abhorrent apartheid system that allowed mediocre white men to prosper by subjugating, exploiting and abusing Black people.

Elon is perfect example of the sort of monsters that can be created when we don’t learn and grow from the past.

Now mothers in Kenyan refugee camps have to choose which children to feed now that USAID-funded initiatives to fight hunger have been dismantled and eliminated.

Children are literally starving to death by the thousands while Musk became the wealthiest person in human history this past year (Larry Page and Jeff Bezos are right behind him and also working tirelessly on behalf of Trump and MAGA’s dismantling of all that is decent and democratic).

Musk may be among the world’s poorest men when it comes to spirit however, along with his fellow Epstein associate, Donald Trump. Both of whom have benefited from an expansive cover-up that has stretched on for decades, designed to protect wealthy abusers from the law while preserving both their prosperity and freedom.

Powerful white men whose sexual deviancy and abuse of underage girls became a sport of sorts for the modern billionaire class and the politicians, legal and financial institutions and media organizations who covered for them.

The recent smelting of CBS news into a cauldron of disinformation via Bari Weiss-led censorship and right wing agitprop (an Erika Kirk ‘town hall’ is not newsworthy and Turning Point USA is nothing more than a stochastic terrorist organization backed by reactionary billionaires who want to dismantle liberal education in favor of Christofascist dogma) is no accident.

It is much more likely that the real objective is to eliminate any threat of an effective news media with the resources and ability to hold men like Trump and Musk accountable for their sexual predation; as it is any specific attempt to hide the Trump administration’s human rights abuses surrounding migrant detention in places like CECOT, which is such a low point in the American experiment that college courses will be taught on it someday, if our republic survives.

It is almost unfathomable that ’60 Minutes’ would have a segment cut so close to air time; what it says about how far the networks have gone in caving to Trump in the space of a single year is embarrassing to anyone who ever worked in the television industry.

What is being done by the Trump administration is abhorrent and inexcusable - and the men and women behind it know they have already neutered their base enough to not to care. The most dangerous element of the MAGA phenomenon that has so imperiled our nation is its ability to separate its followers from their own humanity.

This is the dynamic that does lasting damage.

MAGA diehards and ‘America First’ ideologues have become so numb to the suffering of others that they see Trump’s transgressions and human rights abuses as cause for celebration rather than deep national scars and misdeeds for which we will someday be forced to atone.

Has any nation ever drifted so far, so fast from how it viewed itself historically? I dare say a substantial amount of our fellow Americans are still unwilling to honestly appraise what we have become in such a short period of time.

Trump is the emergency.

Every day that he remains in power represents a direct threat to life on this planet. His corruption and deviant behavior are so fully outside of the norms of morality and common decency that the entire world should make removing him from office a top priority.

Putin only grows stronger while Trump is in office. NATO and the rest of the free world should make this sad fact central to their strategic planning.

POTUS not only possesses zero ethical guardrails and boundaries, he luxuriates in his ineptitude and corruption.

The man who is beginning his second week of Christmas holiday at his private Palm Beach resort is summoning Zelensky to Mar-a-Lago in an attempt to force him into accepting a peace deal that heavily favors Russia and Putin’s despotic instincts.

At the same time, Putin himself has spent the past week launching missile and drone attacks on civilians in the middle of the night while they sleep in their apartment buildings and hospitals.

Knocking out power stations in the middle of winter to maximize human suffering while Trump sits poolside at his ‘Winter White House’ and launches attacks on Nigeria as a ‘Christmas Day’ message for his fascist fans (who seem not to realize that the innocent Ukrainians dying every day are also in fact mostly Christians).

Trump’s attacks in Nigeria appear to be another inept attempt at distraction, while posing no strategic benefit to the U.S.A.

Not to mention the now routine murder of the folks inhabiting fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela that have to contend with a U.S. Navy enacting orders of ‘no quarter’ given by a dry drunk frat boy and former Fox News show host (and prolific sexual predator) cosplaying as a Secretary of Defense (I refuse to use the silly ‘Secretary of War’ honorific, which seems designed to appeal to Joe Rogan listeners and the sort of toxically masculine folks who watch UFC fights).

We mustn’t become numb to what they are doing in our name. We have to counter their evil acts with compassion and awareness.

Trump is a lifelong criminal and far more entrenched in Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation than most folks outside of his immediate circle and family realized.

His sexual predation was never a secret. He used to prowl the lobby of Trump Tower and hit on middle school girls stopping in to use the public restrooms.

There are easy to find videos of these encounters. He did stuff like this all the time.

This obvious predation was how Trump behaved in public for decades and he was never alone. Usually in the presence of an off-duty, retired NYPD officer working as his private protection detail. I am sure he had security outside of the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room when he attacked the brave E. Jean Carroll. He certainly didn’t walk back down Fifth Avenue to his eponymous tower all by himself after he committed that crime.

And knowing Trump, he definitely bragged about it, as I am sure he did after the dozens of other sexual assaults he is credibly accused of committing. The men who enabled Trump’s behavior should be viewed as accomplices and held accountable.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire: Trump is, and has always been, a one man inferno. The civil authorities and professional class of New York City went out of their way to protect Donald Trump over a long period of time.

This is not because they were unaware of his proclivities and objectionable behavior. It is because greed mattered more than justice to those who already had more than their fair share and wanted much more.

A few hundred girls, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, didn’t matter to them when it came to a billionaire willing to make introductions and park some money in their banks. JP Morgan profited from Epstein’s transgressions for years - and the banking industry at large kept Trump afloat when it was obvious all of his legitimate businesses had gone bankrupt or failed and money laundering for the Russian mob was all he had left.

Trump used his ice rink in Central Park to groom and recruit young girls into his world of abuse and exploitation. A friend of mine became one of his youngest victims when he started flirting with her at age twelve, as she took figure skating lessons at the rink, referring to Donald as her ‘Dirty Uncle’.

She later ended up in Epstein’s East 71st Street mansion and (as I have said many times before) confided to me in private conversation, ‘You would not believe what those men did to women and girls in that place’.

We should ALL believe her. The specific behavior she described to me matches perfectly with what many others have said they experienced over decades of abuse.

I repeat her words often not to belabor her truth but to elevate the resilience and strength of so many of the survivors.

The Epstein and Trump survivors have displayed real courage in a year that was dominated by cowardice and acquiescence. Where once mighty law firms and media corporations lined up to bend the knee and Ivy League universities complied with a regressive agenda rather than lose funding.

The metaphorically meek displayed real mettle whilst the powerful showed us what they were really made of: not much.

The abusers’ actions were unthinkable. It seems now the world may be finally ready to listen to the survivors - who never should have had to work this hard to be heard.

There are many lessons to learn in this ugly and unseemly chapter. The presumption of innocence that is afforded the powerful, while the folks they prey upon are met with adversity and institutional apathy, must be at the top of the list going forward.

Here’s the thing - folks with nothing to hide do not fear scrutiny, while those who commit evil acts spend their lives protecting themselves from truth.

This has been Trump’s modus operandi his entire life.

When he first ran for POTUS in 2016 he refused to show us his tax returns. We still have not seen them. Or his medical records, school grades - all of his marriages required NDAs for his ex-spouses. He purchased the silence of those closest to him. Only guilty men with something to hide require legal documentation to keep secrets.

His children know full well who their father is in terms of sexual predation but refuse to admit his wrongdoing.

Admittedly, they are all pretty vapid and heartless kids but they knew full well what their father and Epstein were up to. Vanky was certainly aware of how Trump treated the ‘Miss Teen USA’ contestants (most especially the girls her father favored that resembled her). They were also the ones that received the personal invites up to his private suite. There is no way she didn’t know what was in store for the girls when they got there.

I also highly doubt Marla Maples (most especially given the recent revelation that she warned the mother of a 14 year-old model attending a party at Mar-a-Lago in 1994 to keep her daughter away from the men at the party, including her then husband, Donald Trump) and later Melania Trump, were not aware of what their husband was up to. Marla (herself a former beauty pageant contestant) of course took a big check, signed an NDA and moved to California after her divorce from Donald - and kept her mouth shut. Trump’s behavior stretched into the next couple of decades.

Melania is from the same netherworld that Epstein and Trump inhabit, so I’m not even sure she has the moral bearing to understand what those men are doing is even wrong. To her, it’s all just transactional.

The recent documents dump from the DOJ is obviously another attempt at a cover-up; they are hoping much of the momentum of this story will dissipate over the extended holiday and the beginning of the new year.

Love is what we need to pursue in the coming days and months.

This past year has been unlike anything we have witnessed in this country before.

The shadow cast over this land will leave a lasting darkness that can only be countered with a remarkable and unwavering light.

With a renaissance of the human spirit, where creativity and diversity are celebrated, not punished and marginalized by MAGA’s clumsy attacks on ‘wokeness’ and anti-DEI efforts infecting the arts at the institutional level.

What happened at the Kennedy Center will reverberate well beyond Washington, DC.

Trump’s pitiful attempts to remake the arts into some greasy spectacle reinforcing the cultural ignorance and lack of intellectual appetite in those folks who would watch Fox News or find our current president a fitting host for this year’s Kennedy Center Honors fell flat. But the process by which Trump and his enablers have dismantled democracy, governing by executive order and mindless social media posts, has become firmly established in his followers - and his trolling is now deeply entrenched in the American psyche.

Trump’s need for constant attention is pathological - the best way to weaken him is to deny his narcissistic need to make himself the center of our universe. He is a demented man who needs to see his name on the side of buildings to feel important.

Give him less of the self-promotion he so desires. Cut him out of the conversation and you cut him off at the knees.

There are ways to report on the myriad misdeeds without contributing to the self-aggrandizing behavior. Trump has an instinctual way of using people’s own greed against them. We have to counter his corruption with moral clarity and media discipline.

The news cycle belongs to us and we need to reclaim it. This is a strategic imperative if we wish to snatch the momentum the Trump administration is seeking to carry over from their first year in office.

We need to make them hit a wall, hard.

They are attempting to export this ‘flood the zone’ democracy-destabilizing model to the rest of the western world with the help of Elon Musk, Steve Bannon and pro-Russian stooges like the laughably inept, imminently corrupt and unqualified Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

Witkoff’s appointment in the second Trump administration was personally requested by the Kremlin. The bumbling envoy in the Tom Ford sunglasses and Patek Philippe watch walked right into the thirst trap set for him by a cagey and much more savvy opponent, Vladimir Putin.

Like Trump, Witkoff is both dumb and greedy, the last thing you want in someone facing off against Russia.

At least ostensibly, he was representing the U.S.A. and the interests of freedom-loving people but it’s quite obvious over the last year his diplomatic efforts exist to further enrich himself and the Trump family along with its associated businesses.

WItkoff goes way back with Trump - and he shares the same dubious history of laundering money for the Russian mob with commercial real estate ventures, several of which are over-leveraged and facing bankruptcy.

A terrible dynamic for someone who is negotiating on behalf of a war-torn country like Ukraine, when his interests are clearly in appeasing Putin and helping himself and his private businesses out financially.

Which has always been Trump’s strategy as well - and it goes along way to explain why we have never seen his complete tax returns. He has been in business with Russia for decades.

Trump and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, are ready to burn all of our bridges in western Europe over what they deem social media censorship and restrictions on AI: what they are really doing is attempting to export the model they used, along with Putin’s help, to destabilize and partially dismantle our democracy.

We must stop them.

Here’s to peace and progress in the New Year.

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