Cats Working Welcomes “The New Kid”

By Max and Roc

Roc: Since we lost Adele on September 12, I’ve made Max’s life hell. I didn’t realize how much I depended on Adele for company, even though I annoyed the shit out of her most of the time. Max was taking the brunt of my frustration and loneliness.

Max: Karen was devastated to lose Adele, who’d been here over a decade before I ever showed up, which was the very day after Adele lost her BFF Yul to kidney failure. I think she wrongly connected dots on those two events and always blamed me for Yul’s departure.

It was hard to live as Adele’s prey. Once she was gone, I finally felt free and loved it. Then Roc started hounding me constantly to wrestle, which we haven’t done since he was tiny and couldn’t beat me.

Roc: Karen put up with our scrapping for about six weeks before she found me a new friend going by the name Kappa, but whom we’ll call “The Kid” for now…

Max: The Kid and one brother were six weeks old and half dead when they were brought from Northern Virginia to the Richmond Animal League. There was no info on what happened to their mother. The Kid was malnourished, dehydrated, underweight, had ear mites, an upper respiratory infection and a heart murmur. The works.

RAL got him better and neutered him before placing him in a couple of foster homes. Then blood started coming out of his butt for no reason they could find.

Karen had hoped for a younger kitten; this one was nearly five months old now and on the verge of becoming a hard-to-place teen. But he was extroverted like Roc, so Karen decided he deserved a shot at a better life.

Karen had the Man Cave upstairs equipped for the slow introduction new cats are supposed to get. But once in the front door, The Kid shot out of his carrier and explored every inch of the house while Roc and I sat there going “WTF?” The Kid even ventured out on the beams!

To impress on you how dangerous this is, here’s our living room. For us big cats, it’s routine to leap from the beams to the kitty perch or the bookcases. It’s an Evil Knievel move for a kitten. (The Kid did fall off the middle beam soon after, but miraculously missed the furniture on the way down and didn’t miss a beat.)

Roc: The Kid and I were hanging out and playing within an hour of his arrival…

Max: With the heat off me, I could watch those two knuckleheads roughhouse from my comfy chair…

Roc: The Kid did spend his first night in the Man Cave just to calm him down. I spent the night camped outside his door to make sure he was OK. Who could resist this face?

Max: The next day, he wasted no time checking out Karen’s desk, where he learned how fascinating a cursor can be…

Roc: He jumped right in helping us keep tabs on the neighborhood from the big kitchen window…

Max: I even let him help me with squirrel patrol on the deck…

Roc: It was nice to have company at meals again…

We were getting along great, but I’ll admit I was surprised when The Kid followed me into the “locker room” to watch me do my “business!”

Max: Halloween night, Karen let him try a little ‘nip. I think he liked it…

Then we all joined him on the kitchen table to get in on the action…

Roc: The Kid soon revealed an intense interest in all things culinary. Karen can’t keep him off the counter. He has no fear whatsoever of the stove, on or off…

The Kid’s first Sunday, Karen made a big pot of chili, which he had to inspect…

He was also desperate to try her homemade beer bread. That’s right. Beer…

Max: The Kid can devour a 5.5 oz. can of Friskies Shreds in about two minutes (which means stealing Roc’s half). Karen hasn’t had a plate of food he hasn’t attacked since he got here. This morning he went after her breakfast…

I know it looks like a puke on a plate, but Karen said it was Potatoes O’Brien with a couple of eggs thrown in and it was delicious.

Roc: After breakfast, The Kid stole Max’s food (Max eccentrically eats in a mine field of Karen’s junk, the coffee table)…

Max: Karen bought The Kid “Da Bee,” a stick toy which was his favorite in his second foster home. He’s already on his second bee after demolishing the first one. This is Karen’s attempt to capture him playing cute with it…

She also tried for a nice portrait of him, but he preferred to look like he’s in Witness Protection…

Roc: He’s claimed the late Cole’s favorite teddy bear. The teddy seems happy to have a kitty again…

Max: The Kid’s got salt-and-pepper fur, a long, lanky physique, a daring and adventurous spirit, and a love of the kitchen, booze and cuisines feline and human, so we’ve named him…

Tony Bourdain

Democrats Need to Talk Straight About Health Care

By Karen

Though I no longer have a dog in this fight because this month I finally got to enroll in Medicare, my hair still ignites when I hear the Democratic presidential candidates misleading us — whether in ignorance or intentionally, I don’t know — about how to reform health care.

If you’re confused about Medicare for All (a.k.a. “universal coverage”), let me explain the jargon…

Insurance – The crux of the problem. Candidates say “insurance” and “health care” interchangeably, but they’re totally different. Insurance is a piece of paper. Health care is visiting a doctor. The company who sold you the paper may not pay for your doctor’s visit.

Private Insurance – Candidates say this to mean insurance individuals buy for themselves AND insurance that employers provide for workers. Again, two completely different things. When dissing Medicare for All, candidates say, “People don’t want to lose private insurance they love.”

NOBODY loves true private (individual) insurance. It’s expensive because insurers cherry-pick and jack premiums based on age and health. It often has a high deductible, it can be canceled without warning when you get sick, and it can pay little to nothing on claims.

Employer-provided insurance is controlled solely by employers, who can change it, cancel it, or shift its cost onto workers. If you quit or get laid off or fired, you lose that insurance.

To control costs, both types of private insurance may lock you into “provider networks.” You see the doctors the insurer wants you to see, or go elsewhere and pay most or all of those medical bills yourself.

Affordable Care Act (ACA) a.k.a. Obamacare –Obama and Biden managed to pass this in 2010 over Republicans’ dead bodies for people who can’t get employer-provided insurance. It has an online marketplace a.k.a. “the exchange,” where you can buy insurance. Because the ACA didn’t go live until 2014, insurers spent four years royally screwing people (like me) who already had individual insurance by raising premiums astronomically.

ACA insurers on the exchange offer no discounts (see “Subsidies” below). Policies available on the exchange depend on which insurers do business in your area. It’s totally up to the insurers. There may several, one, or none.

Subsidies – Insurance premiums under the ACA are cheaper for people with low incomes because the federal government shovels billions of dollars in subsidies to insurers to make up the difference and keep them profitable.

Public option – Today, the ACA offers insurance only through insurance companies. The proposed “public option” is insurance provided by the government. The easiest way to have that option is to let people under age 65 enroll in Medicare.

Single-payer system – This would create a central federal billing and payment hub (think Medicare) that doctors would bill for providing health care for all Americans (universal coverage). There would be no paperwork for patients and it would have no co-pays, no deductibles, and no surprise bills. England, France, Canada, all of Scandinavia, and many other countries do health care this way because it’s more efficient and cheaper.

Medicare for All – The universal, single-payer system that eliminates insurance and pays for all Americans to receive health care from birth to death.

—

Here’s where some of the Democratic candidates stood in last night’s debate…

Joe Biden wants to keep the ACA and add the public option. Problem: insurance companies continue getting billions in federal subsidies that could otherwise pay for actual health care.

Pete Buttigieg wants “Medicare for All Who Want It.” He says people should keep private insurance if they like, which is bullshit if it’s employer-provided. He wants to keep subsidies to control costs, still shoveling taxpayer money to insurers to keep their profits up instead of paying for actual health care.

Amy Klobuchar wants to reduce premiums. She thinks punishing Big Pharma will do that. Insurance and drugs are separate industries; they have nothing to do with each other. The only overlap is when your insurance doesn’t cover your drugs and you have to pay full price.

This morning on Morning Joe, Klobuchar complained about Medicare for All kicking “149 million people off of their private insurance.” She’s another one confused about employer-provided insurance that workers have no control over.

Elizabeth Warren wants Medicare for All, but must be unsure of the numbers because she won’t say how she’d pay for it.

The ONLY candidate who fully understands the problem and how to fix it — because he “wrote the damn bill” — is Bernie Sanders. Under his plan…

No American will need health insurance. Instead, we’ll channel what we now spend on premiums, co-pays, deductibles AND surprise health care bills into one system.

A single, centralized billing and payment system will drastically cut administrative overhead and expense for the entire health care industry. This federal system will also have clout to negotiate lower rates for health care services.

You can go to any doctor. Networks won’t exist.

Not a penny from taxpayers will be wasted on subsidies to boost insurance company profits.

I believe, with Bernie, that not only will we all come out ahead financially, but no one will have to go bankrupt from disease or illness.

Check out this publication from the White House from March 2018 called The Profitability of Health Insurance Companies. It says insurance companies have done just dandy since the ACA took effect (emphasis mine)…

“As government policy amplified eligibility and per-enrollee spending, the stock prices of health insurance companies rose by 172 percent from January 2014 to 2018 resulting in improved profitability and outperforming the S&P 500 by 106 percentage points.”

And its conclusion says…

“Despite an initial rough patch in the ACA marketplaces, the ACA Medicaid coverage expansion and subsidies to insurers have resulted in a large increase in health insurer profits. Health insurers’ stock prices more than doubled the impressive gain in the S&P 500 since the law’s main provisions took effect on January 1, 2014. Much of insurers’ increased profitability has resulted from increased Medicaid enrollment and increased payments per enrollee in Medicaid expansion states where the federal government pays nearly all the costs. While insurers initially incurred losses in the ACA marketplaces as they adjusted to new regulations and a relatively unhealthy risk pool, insurers are now profiting on the individual market as well, with higher premiums that are largely covered by federal premium subsidies.

Bottom line: Any candidate, Democratic or Republican, who talks about subsidies, or even insurance, is for squandering our taxes to keep the biggest obstacle to health care — insurance companies — profitable.

Anthony Bourdain Auction: More Information

By Karen

OCTOBER 3 UPDATE: You can now preview photos of everything up for auction and see opening bids at iGavelAuctions.

Two hundred-fifteen items from Anthony Bourdain’s estate will be auctioned online October 9-30 by Lark Mason Associates on their website, iGavelAuctions. Items may be previewed beginning October 2.

People.com reproduced many of the photos The New York Times (subscription only) ran of some items believed to be most grabby for Bourdain’s fans, including his writing desk, a jacket he was given by the Navy when he was rescued from Beirut in 2006, and a chef’s knife made especially for him in South America in 2016.

During the auction period, Lark Mason will have some of the items on exhibit in the firm’s offices in New York; New Braunfels, Texas; and Savannah, Georgia.

It’s being widely reported that 40% of the proceeds will fund the Anthony Bourdain Legacy Scholarship at his alma mater, the Culinary Institute of America. Barron’s added that this honor was established “in partnership with chefs Eric Ripert and José Andrés in June.”

The remainder of the proceeds will go to Bourdain’s estate.

Lark Mason estimates the market value of the items to be between $200,000 and $400,000. I personally think we’re looking at a sale that will easily fetch seven figures.

I’ve learned from a trusted source that many of the items were selected because Bourdain acquired them after he separated from his wife Ottavia in 2016. They have little sentimental value for his family nor associations with his life as a husband and father.

The item that stands out to me is the creepy painting Tony bought a week before he died titled, The sky is falling. I am learning to live with it, by John Lurie.

Tony visited the artist at his home for the Lower East Side New York episode, which was the last aired Parts Unknown. Lurie made Tony two hard-boiled eggs. Tony’s assistant Laurie Woolever revealed to the NYT that Tony paid $19,000 for that painting.

Here’s the brief list of items with estimated values the iGavel site provides…

• Brad Phillips (Canadian), Cristine and Me as Still-Life, oil on canvas, 2016 ($2,000-$4,000)
• John Lurie (American, b. 1952), This Party Sucks, watercolor on paper ($1,000-$2,000)
• Peter Lovig Nielsen teak flip-top desk, Denmark, 20th century ($800-$1,200)
• Custom Bob Kramer steel and meteorite chef’s knife ($4,000-$6,000)
• Chrome duck press from the Paris episode of The Layover ($200-$300)
• Vietnamese blue-and-white ceramic tall bottle form vase, with cover ($250-$450)
• Original typed manuscript or early draft for A Bone in the Throat ($700-$1,000)
• Simpsons script for Bourdain episode, “The Food Wife,” with signed inscriptions to Bourdain ($800-$1200)

I have been able to obtain another partial, but more extensive, list. Here are some small items Cats Working readers might be interested in bidding on…

• White chef jacket
• Zippo lighter engraved, “No Reputations. Desert Special 2011”
• Art pottery ceramic green umbrella stand
• Framed photo and note from Billy Joel to Bourdain, dated 2005
• Molded glass ceiling light fixture
• Two dark blue ceramic lamps

Art will figure prominently. The titles of works Bourdain collected say a lot. Here are more…

• Phillips, Eat, Pray, Get the Fuck Out, watercolor on paper
  • Tan Lines in March, watercolor on paper, 2013
  • Just Jumping, oil on canvas
• Lurie, The Judge was hypnotized by alcohol, jet print on rag paper
• Ralph Steadman (British, b. 1936), Rats in the Kitchen, artist’s proof inscribed to Bourdain, 2009
  • Hunter S. Thompson, Twisted Meat Artist, artist’s proof
  • The Brain of Hunter Thompson, silkscreen, artist’s proof
• Etching, Street View from Saigon, and a print of Angkor Wat Ruin
• Les Ruines d’Angkor, Indochine, modern
• African carved wood and metal ritual figure, Congo
• Nepalese carved and lacquered wood mask, and a Tibetan silver decorated animal skull

There’s also some furniture, ostensibly from his last apartment in the Time Warner Center because the pieces are all dated 2016, including…

• Shell Lake Woodcrafters Sap soft maple black shelf or media center
• Stickley Mission Style one drawer nightstand
• Stickley tall bookcase

And a wood vanity with drawers and mirror, a tall mahogany dresser, a walnut credenza, and a small red and black low table.

My list also has seven sets of cuff links and three watches, including a Rolex and a pocket watch.

I’m told this is by no means the entirety of Anthony Bourdain’s possessions, regardless of media reports about how sparingly he collected things. The bulk of his belongings are still in his estate’s custody.

However, what the family is parting with will allow future culinary students to travel and study abroad and give Bourdain’s fans who wish to do so an opportunity to purchase material things that he touched and which touched his life.

Cats Working Says Good-Bye to Adele

By Karen

I’m deeply saddened to report that Adele passed away on Thursday, September 12. She was 19 years and 5 months old, the last of the original Cats Working team who inspired my book, How to Work Like a CAT.

Without missing a beat in her routine until the very end, Adele became yet another victim of chronic renal failure, which she lived with for over two years. In her lifetime, she watched four “brothers” who were her world also succumb to CRF — Rex, Fred, Yul, and Cole.

Adele and Yul

This past spring, Adele also began developing a tumor on her neck. It didn’t hurt or bother her and seemed comparatively the least of her ailments, so she didn’t undergo any aggressive diagnosis or treatment for it.

Cole and Adele

Adele drove the daily agenda around here until her days slowly became more bad than good. When most foods lost their appeal (and we tried them ALL) and her meds weren’t helping, and even sleep didn’t bring much relief, we knew it was time to let her go while she still had her dignity. Her death was very peaceful.

Max and Roc are adjusting like a couple of rebels without causes to the newly quiet house and Adele’s empty favorite spots. They’re facing life for the first time since kittenhood without their etiquette coach and disciplinarian. They are better cats thanks to Adele’s tough love.

Max and Adele shared a bed

I’m missing my Delly so much, feeling the weight of accumulated grief from losing another decades-long companion to a scourge of epidemic proportions that veterinary medicine inexplicably seems to NEVER make any headway against. It’s taken me days to bring myself to write this and I’m in tears as I type.

Roc and Adele

Book Review – Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview

By Karen

I read The Last Interview, a 109-page trade paperback, in two sittings over the weekend. I believe it’s the 23^rd installment in a series about deceased writers, musicians and celebrities.

It begins with an introduction by food writer Helen Rosner about how she discovered Bourdain and eventually got to know him personally. They were in touch right up to his death, and she never got to respond to his last note.

It’s unclear if she selected the seven interviews in the book, arranged chronologically from 2003, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2016, January 2018, and finally June 3, 2018, the last Sunday he was alive.

Quick digression on production quality. This book isn’t going to age well in your Bourdain collection. It’s printed on that coarse, cheap paper that yellows. And I wonder about the editing. Some chapters are transcripts of live appearances, and I was surprised to find typos like “Namimbia” and “Columbia” (the latter misspelled four times).

During a 2011 appearance in Sydney, Tony said about his daughter Ariane, “I don’t want her reading terrible shit about me on the internet, behaving badly toward women, for instance. I’m not going to do that.”

I just shook my head, thinking, “No, Tony, you did something much, much worse.”

As a Bourdain watcher since 2007, I didn’t really learn anything new about him here. The most notable bit for me was when Tony mentioned in his 2013 interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson the Roman condiment garam. He described it as “essentially rotten fish guts and rotten fish sauce,” and said it was as ubiquitous a seasoning in Europe as salt is to us. If he’s ever mentioned garam on TV, I missed it, and it was another example of his encyclopedic mind.

January 2018 is a transcript of Bourdain on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. That might have been the last time I saw Tony alive in real time. He seemed in good spirits, saying, “I’m an enthusiastic son of a bitch.”

In hindsight, we know he was then embroiled in trying to extricate his girlfriend Asia Argento from charges of allegedly raping a 17-year-old boy. You may refresh on the timeline of that in this archived post.

The last chapter is an interview with IndieWire, which was published on June 3, a Sunday. Parts Unknown Hong Kong first aired on CNN that night. It was also the weekend Argento cavorted around Rome for the paparazzi with Hugo Clement.

Obviously unaware he was being betrayed as he spoke, Tony raved about working with Argento on Hong Kong, which she supposedly directed. “My god, I’d love nothing more than to repeat the experience. She made it incredible.”

In other interviews, he’d called that shoot some of his best work. It’s become one of CNN’s “lost” episodes because they no longer rerun any Parts Unknown Argento was involved with.

Bourdain went on about Argento: “She listens to my advice and frequently if not most of the time, rejects it. That is something Asia cannot help but do. She is brutally honest about herself and anything, and it’s a great quality.”

I just about gagged on that paragraph. And when I turned the page and realized that was the last line in the book, my jaw dropped. It felt like the editor deliberately left readers to wonder, was Bourdain really that deluded or just lying? We still don’t know.

You can read that particular interview at IndieWire.

On Tuesday, June 5, Bourdain, while filming in France, would see the photos of Argento with Hugo. We’ve heard only unverified stories about arguments, and Eric Ripert told Tony’s mother Tony had been in a “dark mood,”

On Friday, June 8, Ripert found Tony dead in his hotel room of apparent suicide.

Personally, for the foreseeable future I’ll buy any book about or by Bourdain. Fingers crossed he left something more to publish. But I’d say go ahead if you want to give The Last Interview a miss. Reams of more illuminating interviews are available online.

For example, I was surprised that “Bourdain Confidential” in Popula from February 2018 with Maria Bustillos wasn’t included.

Or even better, you can just reread the books Bourdain wrote before his life took that last fatal turn.

Gordon Ramsay Couldn’t Shake Bourdain’s Shadow

By Karen

Gordon Ramsay’s first season of Uncharted recently wrapped on National Geographic. On the NatGeo site you can watch his travels to Peru, New Zealand, Morocco, Laos, Hawaii and Alaska. The reviews were not positive, usually comparing Ramsay unfavorably to Anthony Bourdain.

Ramsay has been my guilty pleasure for years, though I admit he’s not for everybody.

He shows (I hope) his nice side on MasterChef Junior with adorably precocious kids. On adult MasterChef, the withering insults flow, but he leaves the heaviest dickishness to fellow judge Joe Bastianich.

I love Hell’s Kitchen when Ramsay, in bleep-filled fury, strips culinary bozos of their delusions of competence. He’s similar on 24 Hours to Hell and Back, trying to save failing restaurants by berating and humiliating the owners in front of their customers. I was also a fan of Kitchen Nightmares and Hotel Hell. Not so much The F Word.

Bottom line: I’ve seen a lot of Gordon Ramsay. Uncharted was something else.

Ramsay denies ripping off the Bourdain formula, saying he got the idea in Cambodia during a 2004 visit. But comparison was inevitable because both men’s series focused on travel and food. Ramsay’s big twist was his trademark move: turning the food into a competition with a tight deadline.

Ramsay’s mission was to learn as much as he could about the place’s cuisine in a week, then to prepare a feast against a local chef, with invited guests blindly choosing which dishes they preferred.

To make it a “fair fight,” Ramsay gave himself the disadvantage of cooking outdoors with unfamiliar ingredients. He always managed to create something edible, but his dishes weren’t always the favorites. His willingness to come in second showed, at least, an attempt to be humble.

To develop his menu, Ramsay roamed around and had people show him where ingredients such as eels, ants, beetles, grubs, plants growing on cliff sides, fish and game were sourced. Gathering them was often physically grueling, showcasing that 52-year-old Ramsay works out a lot.

What Uncharted never showed was Ramsay strolling through city or village markets, looking effortlessly chic and cool in a rumpled shirt and jeans.

Also missing was the stunning cinematography that Bourdain’s Zero Point Zero film crew had honed to Emmy quality. Uncharted captured what it needed of Ramsay, but any tourist could have shot the uninspired B-roll.

Another glaring omission for Bourdain-spoiled viewers was compelling narrative. Ramsay’s voiceover was often nicely self-deprecating, but light on wit and insight.

Ramsay did break new ground by introducing the Ugly American’s cousin — the Ugly Scot. He mocked locals for going to extremes to snag ingredients. He spit out what he was served a lot. Apparently not a drinker, he missed those opportunities to bond with his hosts, settling instead for a quick sip of the local brew, then insulting it with a puckered face.

Most irritating to me were Ramsay’s ever-present deadlines, which he enlisted everyone into helping him meet.

“I want to hear all about your history, your culture and your cooking techniques, but I’ve got this feast to prepare in the morning, so chop-chop!”

Bourdain had a production schedule, but I can’t recall ANY meal in ANY of his series where he ever made his hosts feel like he didn’t have all day or night to spend with them, eating, drinking, just shooting the shit and enjoying himself.

If Gordon Ramsay accomplished anything with Uncharted, it was to unwittingly remind us of the extraordinary soul we lost with Bourdain’s passing.

Trump Sees Himself in Mass Murderers

By Karen

“Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul.”

These words came out of Donald Trump’s mouth yesterday. Reading from a teleprompter without comprehending what he was saying, he unwittingly gave the truest description of his own behavior and its consequences that we’ll ever hear from him.

I say “without comprehending” because when he erroneously said the mass shooting in Dayton happened in Toledo, it didn’t register with him at all.

Trump’s enablers felt obliged to prop him up behind a podium to condemn the latest back-to-back massacres, in El Paso and Dayton, in an attempt to absolve him from national outrage over the government’s ongoing failure to address gun violence.

Side note: Have you noticed they prop Trump up now almost exclusively? If he doesn’t have a podium for balance, he squats in a chair in potty position. His ambulatory ability seems to be deteriorating along with his increasingly slurred speech. The goal, with our own media’s complicity, seems to be to keep us from seeing Trump’s advancing loss of coordination.

But no matter what words they put in Trump’s mouth, they know Trump doesn’t condemn the shooters. He’s called racist domestic terrorists “very fine people” when he wasn’t reading a speech.

That’s because Trump sees himself in them. Or, more accurately, he sees the self he WISHES he were if he hadn’t grown up a sniveling loser, stunted by his domineering father. His courage never developed beyond childish name-calling and passive-aggression.

If you view our rogues’ gallery of mass murderers, it’s almost all white boys who grew up hating some group of people. They compensated for their own lack of education or moral compass by telling themselves they were superior to and needed to exterminate whomever they hated.

Trump’s main difference from that bunch was that he had a wealthy father who kept him in school, shoveled money at him, and brought him into the family’s criminal enterprise business. Young Donnie may have fantasized about sneaking off to buy a gun and killing everyone he imagined had ever wronged him, but he never had the guts to do it.

When his opportunity to have a free gun in the military came along, Donnie faked bone spurs because he couldn’t face being a man and defending the country. A country he now should be leading instead of destroying with his irrational hate.

Trump LOVES young mass killers because in them he sees Trump 2.0, the next, improved generation of himself. At every rally, he carefully fills their heads with racism and hatred of this country’s people.

The 57-year-old homeless loser in Florida who lived in a van splattered with Trump stickers and sent inept DIY pipe bombs to many leading Democrats and CNN just got sentenced to 20 years in prison. He explained his crimes by writing that he was never political until the name Donald J. Trump “popped up” on his cellphone. He described attending Trump rallies as getting “wrapped up in this new found fun drug.”

That’s from a man old enough to know better. Just imagine the impression Trump is making on aimless young punks whose minds are pretty much blank slates and who have ready access to as many assault weapons as their little hearts desire.

Conservative writer George Will in his latest column, “Trump doesn’t just pollute the social environment. He is the environment,” wrote that Trump has a “fascination with what he utterly lacks and unconvincingly emulates: strength. Hence his admiration for foreign despots, and his infantile delight in his own bad manners.”

Every time there’s a mass shooting, Trump the chicken-shit imagines himself the triumphant commander of an army of Mini-Me’s — disaffected, brainwashed white kids armed with assault rifles, fearlessly willing to murder innocent men, women and children on Trump’s signal. They carry out his delusion that this country needs to be “cleansed” of its “infestation” by immigrants.

Yes, guns are a huge problem and must be taken off the streets. But Trump being allowed to prey on and gleefully goad the ignorant and weak-minded among us to murder en masse and glorify his vision of a pure white U.S. is the real and immediate crisis.

Trump is bathing in human blood and loving it. It fulfills his dream of being the most brutal despot in history. But we know it will satisfy him only temporarily. We can’t wait to see how he takes it to the next level. We can’t wait for the 2020 election to put an end to his reign of mayhem. Trump needs to go NOW.

Note: I haven’t used the names of any of the mass murderers because scum doesn’t deserve an identity.