Bumbles
Bumbles's JournalFrom Russia(to Jeffrey), with Love
Perhaps this story has been out there and I just missed it. It further explains Epstein's connections, intersections and relationships.
From Craig Unger, posted on July 21, 2025.
"The Epstein saga is even more interesting when you look at the Russian women who helped run his operation. Here's a look at Svetlana Pozhidaeva."
https://craigunger.substack.com/p/from-russiato-jeffrey-with-love?r=d3y8v&triedRedirect=true
Beautifully written piece by Tracy Kidder about the hellscape already here for many
A New Era of Hunger Has Begun -
"Parts of Easthampton, an old mill town in western Massachusetts, look like relics of industrial New England — the old workers’ rowhouses, for instance. In other parts, it seems like a place in renaissance, with converted factory buildings spruced up and reinhabited by art galleries, restaurants, shops. Pedestrians fill the sidewalks on Friday and Saturday nights, especially during monthly art walk evenings. But on Monday mornings, when the downtown feels shuttered, another sort of crowd, one in search of food, not art and entertainment, gathers on a side street outside a 19th-century brick building. A sign out front identifies it as the Easthampton Community Center and Food Pantry.
The center distributes free groceries on Mondays and Wednesdays, but Monday is usually busier, because many people it serves have run out of food by then. By 9 a.m. on a Monday in June, a line of people with shopping bags extended from the sidewalk across the parking lot to the first of the food stations alongside the old building. There, clients are greeted by volunteers with friendly faces and helpful voices, offering milk and eggs, a selection of breads and pastries, frozen meat, fruit and vegetables. Inside, another team of volunteers assembles bags of canned and packaged food, some for adults, others for children.
The director of the well-organized commotion is Robin Bialecki, a white-haired woman of 71. Ms. Bialecki started as a volunteer 25 years ago and has managed the operation for the last 17. She’s the only paid employee; she works every day except Christmas and makes $32,400 a year. She had planned to retire, but has stayed on to help everyone through what now seems like the unraveling the country’s defenses against unnecessary illness and hunger . . . "
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/opinion/america-safety-net.html
This thoughtful and perceptive piece was on Facebook, a place I rarely go and am glad I did.
Oliver Kornetzke
May 1 at 9:08 PM ·
I come from a small, rural town in Wisconsin—the kind of place where the high school mascot is sacred, the churches outnumber the stoplights, and the local diner still offers political commentary with your scrambled eggs, all filtered through a Reagan-era lens of rugged individualism and bootstrap theology. It’s a town that raised me, yes—but also one I outgrew, not out of arrogance, but out of an insatiable curiosity that was simply not compatible with fences and familiar last names.
My childhood was an oddity in that place. While most of my peers stayed anchored in the gravitational pull of local norms and traditions, my parents handed me a passport and pointed outward. Road trips across the US turned into train rides through Eastern Europe. I was the kid who collected fossils and insects instead of baseball cards, who could name capitals but not quarterbacks. Later, I moved abroad. I pursued higher education. I immersed myself in history, science, philosophy, and the relentless pursuit of knowledge and understanding, trying to understand not just the world, but why people move through it the way they do.
And then, like some tragic protagonist in a novel about the perils of nostalgia, I came back.
If distance grants perspective, then returning to the town of my youth was less like coming home and more like stepping into a diorama. The streets hadn’t changed, but I had. What once seemed wholesome now felt performative. The patriotism wasn’t pride—it was ritual. The friendliness wasn’t openness—it was surveillance. And beneath it all ran a silent, suffocating current of fear: fear of change, fear of the other, fear of being left behind.
This divide isn’t just geographical. It’s evolutionary.
For 95% of our species’ existence, we lived in small, kin-based bands where survival was contingent on cohesion, predictability, and suspicion of outsiders. Tribalism wasn’t a flaw—it was a feature. It kept us alive. To be skeptical of the unfamiliar, to prioritize the known over the unknown, was adaptive. But we don’t live on the savannah anymore. The threats we face are no longer predators or rival clans, but climate collapse, income inequality, and information warfare. Still, the reptilian brain lingers. And it does not care about nuance. It cares about belonging.
Rural America, in many ways, remains a living museum of this tribal wiring. In places where diversity is minimal and ideas circulate slowly, identity calcifies. Community becomes echo chamber. It’s not that people don’t think critically—it’s that critical thinking is punished. Conformity is rewarded. Outsiders—literal or ideological—are threats to the fragile cohesion of a community whose worldview has not been tested by difference but merely reinforced by repetition.
This is the root of the urban-rural divide—not intelligence, not morality, but exposure. In cities, survival demands adaptation: to new cultures, new technologies, new ways of seeing. In rural communities, survival demands continuity. And so when the firehose of modernity blasts through cable news and social media, it’s not processed as information—it’s processed as attack.
And the right wing has weaponized this brilliantly.
They’ve learned that fear is easier to manufacture than hope, and far more profitable. That a brain wired for tribal survival will always choose the strong lie over the complicated truth. That it’s easier to sell paranoia than policy. In my town, like so many others, they claim to be patriots who love their country, but they’ll vote for the man who promises to burn it down. They don’t believe in climate change, but their crops are drowning and their wells are poisoned. They don’t want to be ruled, but they’re desperate to be led—by someone who speaks in absolutes, who confirms their suspicions, who reflects their anger back to them like a funhouse mirror.
And this is the part that stings the most: these are not all bad people. They are people trapped in a feedback loop that exploits the very instincts evolution gave them to survive. They have been trained to confuse subjugation with strength, cruelty with conviction. To them, surrendering their rights to a strongman is not cowardice—it is tribal loyalty. It is faith.
So when I walk those old streets of my youth now, it feels less like homecoming and more like fieldwork. I see not just neighbors but a case study in inherited fear. A once-hopeful people turned against themselves by a machine that knows them better than they know themselves. A culture that clings to its myths not out of ignorance, but out of necessity—because without them, the whole house of cards collapses.
And the tragedy is this: the world they’re fighting to preserve no longer exists. The 1950s never really happened—not the way they remember them. What they mourn is not the loss of a country, but the loss of an illusion. And in their desperation to reclaim it, they have become foot soldiers in a war against their own future.
But still, I hope. Because if evolution has taught us anything, it’s that adaptation is possible. That fear does not have to rule us. That our tribal instincts, while ancient, are not immutable. That exposure, education, and empathy—slow, hard, and human—can expand the circle of who we call us.
I don’t know if my hometown will ever change. But I know I have. I know that what we choose to do with our understanding—how we wield it, how we share it, how we live it—matters more now than ever.
Because history doesn’t just happen to us. We are it. In every conversation. Every vote. Every time we choose truth over comfort, connection over fear.
That’s the long arc. That’s the work. That’s the hope.
Trump blinks on tariffs in face of GOP resistance -- but he hasn't given up on his cult leader dreams
From Amanda Marcotte at Salon:
"History's most famous cults are known primarily for their final suicidal acts: the mass poisoning at Jonestown, the self-immolation of the Branch Davidians, the self-asphyxiations of Heaven's Gate. We know these things happen, but it's still a mystery to most of us how cult members get to this point. Why didn't they hit the eject button sooner, as their leader descended further into his incoherent megalomania? Why did they stick by him, even as it became increasingly clear he was putting the whole community on a pathway to self-destruction? Why didn't more people voice doubts or even confront the cult leader before things got this bad?
We're getting a compelling illustration on the national stage of how a cult leader can induce his followers to stick by him, even as he loses his mind and his behavior becomes too erratic and dangerous to defend. Almost every Republican on Capitol Hill knows that Donald Trump's tariff plan is political suicide, but few are willing to admit that Dear Leader fully intends to see this idiocy to the very end. Instead, most resemble the residents of Jonestown, many who hoped Jim Jones was testing their faith with all this poison-Kool-Aid talk, which allowed them to play along until it was too late to save themselves."
https://www.salon.com/2025/04/10/blinks-on-tariffs-in-face-of-resistance--but-he-hasnt-given-up-on-his-leader-dreams/
An unhappy Florida electorate finds few politicians willing to listen
"Floridians are big mad.
Not all 20-odd million of us, of course: We tend to be politically soporific, occasionally becoming passionate over potholes or maybe a too-short grouper fishing season, but preferring to keep reality at arm’s length.
Still, something is changing. People are angry, auto-calling their representatives, making signs, demonstrating and showing up at town halls.
- - - -
And I’ll bet a decent number, frightened and frustrated over President Musk’s scorched-earth attacks on the Department of Education, NOAA, USAID, etc. (it’s a terrifyingly long list), didn’t vote at all in 2024.
I overheard a couple of them talking about it during a recent town hall in Tallahassee. They both said they didn’t like either candidate: Harris was too pro-Israel, Trump was good at business (highly debatable) but a terrible person, and until now they never really thought it mattered who got elected."
SO, WHO'S SORRY NOW?
This is from Diane Roberts, Florida Phoenix by way of Rawstory
https://www.rawstory.com/an-unhappy-florida-electorate-finds-few-politicians-willing-to-listen/
Perhaps "the beginning of the end of the Trump era," if Democrats can seize the moment, according to Shadi Hamid.
"For a moment, it seemed like anything was possible. With Donald Trump’s popular-vote victory in November, the old order had been dealt a devastating blow. Democrats were mostly despondent. The resistance had petered out. Where to go from here? No one really knew.
- - - - - - - - - -
Trump was riding a wave of exhaustion with Democrats’ cultural overreach. After he won the presidency for the second time, centrist and even left-leaning friends would suggest on encrypted group chats that some good might come out of this after all. I’d meet people at parties, reading groups and “salons” who would whisper — or, when intoxicated, shout — that they could finally say what they really thought on issues such as gender identity and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives without fear of being ostracized.
- - - - - - - - - -
Some wear and tear is beginning to show up in surveys, with Trump’s approval ratings on a downward trend. For the first time in NBC News’s national polling, a majority disapproves of Trump’s handling of the economy, a striking reversal for a president who has traditionally received high marks on economic issues. The stock market has plummeted, inflation has ticked up, and Republicans increasingly face angry constituents at town hall events. Institutional opposition has grown as well, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a conservative, issuing a rare public rebuke after Trump called for a federal judge’s impeachment.
- - - - - - - - - -
Trump is squandering what might have been a once-in-a-generation realignment. Already, the moment has begun fragmenting into something else, something not yet defined but unmistakably different. This is the paradox of our political moment: Permanence announces itself only to dissolve almost immediately."
This is a gift article from The Washington Post. Yes, that Washington Post. - https://wapo.st/4iQC0M6
D Earl Stephens brings us College Level Cowards.
The University of Michigan is but the latest of our once-proud institutions surrendering to fascism ...
Despite all my bitching and moaning since a slim majority of Americans decided it was safer to carry on with their lives walking a tightrope without any safety nets, than it was to stay grounded, and together against the billionaires who have proved over and over again they want to eat us all, I have been mighty proud of the good and righteous people on the Left.
Too many Americans don’t deserve us, but the idea of America does, dammit. Despite being knocked down and staying down on that gray November day, we picked ourselves up and braved the fascist winds that are blowing at a gale off the Potomac right now.
This was no easy thing.
https://open.substack.com/pub/dearlstephens/p/college-level-cowards?r=2s28um&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Bernie Sanders Is Tapping Into a Deep Vein of Anger in America
In her commentary in the NYTimes Megan Stack shows how Bernie and AOC have tapped into the fears of many from very different backgrounds.
"They gathered early in North Las Vegas, waiting under the hot sun in a snaking line in the middle of a workday for their chance to see Bernie.
With stucco houses and apartment blocks interrupted by strip malls and trash-strewn vacant lots, this is not the Vegas you see in glamorous movies. It was, however, the setting for what Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont called the biggest crowd he had ever drawn here. Nevada was the first Southwestern stop for Mr. Sanders who, along with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had set out on what the pair dubbed the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.
Packing venues all over the country — in Nebraska, Iowa, Arizona and Colorado — Mr. Sanders appears more popular than ever. His core message hasn’t changed in decades, but it’s hitting harder now. In hours of interviews with all kinds of people at the Nevada rally on Thursday, two unbroken trends emerged: Everyone I met was having money problems. And all of them were frightened, some for the first time, that the country they’d always counted on was sliding away because of President Trump."
There should be no paywall as this is "gifted" from the NYTimes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/opinion/bernie-sanders-rallies-anger.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6U4.IiPb.scB4j9rMYIEN&smid=url-share
Bernie and Alexandria - two among the best of the best for this moment.
I hope they are well protected.
From The Guardian ;
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/23/bernie-sanders-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-democrats
"Bernie Sanders is not running for president. But he is drawing larger crowds now than he did when he was campaigning for the White House.
The message has hardly changed. Nor has the messenger, with his shock of white hair and booming delivery. What’s different now, the senator says, is that his fears – a government captured by billionaires who exploit working people – have become an undeniable reality and people are angry.
“For years, I’ve talked about the concept of oligarchy as an abstraction,” Sanders, an independent who votes with Democrats and twice sought the party’s presidential nomination, said in an interview after a joint rally in Tempe, Arizona, with the New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Vermont senator recalled Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the three wealthiest people on the planet – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – were seated in front of his cabinet nominees in what many viewed as a shocking display of power and influence.
“You gotta be kind of blind not to understand that you have a government of the billionaire class, for the billionaire class, by the billionaire class,” he said. “And then, on top of all that, you’ve got Trump moving very rapidly toward an authoritarian form of society.”
Feel like nothing you do matters? It may be "learned helplessness"
From Elizabeth Hlavinka at Salon comes this article which is so pertinent to what we are dealing with today and may help some of us to become "unfrozen", as in a spring thaw. I'm writing from Maine, so the analogy.
https://www.salon.com/2025/03/18/the-science-of-learned-helplessness-and-how-to-break-free-from-feelings-of-despair/
In the modern world, we can become overwhelmed with news of the collapse of our ecosystem, the chances of another pandemic, and global warfare, plus the latest political crisis — all within 15 minutes scrolling on our phones. As our brains struggle to process information related to major threats, it's natural to feel completely drowned in anxiety, frozen and unable to do anything except keep doomscrolling. Psychology can help us understand why our reaction to a stressful world isn't always fight or flight but paralysis — and it can help with breaking free from that feeling of helplessness.
In the 1960s, neuroscientists studying how animals reacted to stressors came across a surprising finding. Animals were put into an environment that delivered electric shocks no matter what the animal did to try and avoid them. Afterward, the animals were placed in a new setting where they could escape the stimuli. But, sadly, they stopped trying to escape — as if they had given up.
The authors concluded that the animals had learned they had no control over the situation and named the phenomenon “learned helplessness.”
While this science helped researchers better understand depression because it shares some similar characteristics, it has also helped them better understand how we can build resiliency in the face of stressors. And it turns out that a lot of what they learned has to do with exerting control over the situation — or, in other words, empowering ourselves.
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