Today, the last day of 2015, the absurdest political year I've ever witnessed, Ben Carson, one of several ridiculous presidential candidates, lost two top aides, his campaign manager and communications director, to resignation.  I don't like to look at situations in a singular manner, but this development says one thing to me: Ben Carson will not win the Republican nomination.  Americans and the billions of the world don't have to fret about Carson becoming president.  The prominence of those two positions in a campaign shouldn't be underestimated.  They concern organization, and dissemination of a candidate's message.  Carson's men lacked confidence in the cause, so they stepped off a train rolling to a dead end.
     Last August, Donald Trump lost his campaign manager, Roger Stone, because the latter thought the former's "food fight" with Megyn Kelly blanketed important issues (another way of saying, "Trump is petty.")  Stone nevertheless insisted he felt no rancor for Trump.  Carson's fed-up men also wish the best of luck for the neurosurgeon they've invested so much time and patience in.  They don't have to deal with him anymore, so they wish him well (my cynical take).
     Just recently, Carson did well against Trump, poll-wise.  He released a book.  His unwavering ability to not respond negatively to Trump's typical nastiness, but to demonstrate turning "the other cheek," in imitation of Jesus's instructions on how to deal with aggression, should've been practiced more by other candidates vulnerable to the front-running shit-throwing orangutan billionaire, since bullies require reactions.  Carson seemed unflappable, even when he fucked up.  Video was dug up revealing Carson's belief that the Giza Pyramids were grain storage buildings, a statement that makes most people think, "You're fucking crazy," but he doubled down on the conviction when confronted about it by journalists.
     Carson, rivaling Trump in vagueness, told the Republican Jewish Coalition, "The world is complicated; the Middle East is even more complicated."
     Yes, the world needs leaders who think like this.  It's as if he said, "I like bread, but I don't like stale bread."
     Maybe I'm wrong, though.  Carson, perhaps, will find a miracle-working campaign manager and a solid pro communications director and overtake Trump and the others.  We'll forget about his lack of knowledge of foreign policy, his bizarre nearly prehistoric ideas about the past.  Americans have embraced mediocrity in past elections (Coolidge, Reagan--yes, I wrote it--George W. Bush) so why not embrace irrationality?  The choices before us on the Republican side talk like what used to be regarded as lunatic fringe political thinkers, all of whom had little or no chance of gaining power because of the extremity of their views.  Now, extremity is embraced in a world increasingly used to its attention-getting depredations.  Carson's "complicated" Middle East has Islamic fundamentalist extremists saying insane shit, while America has political high office seekers saying insane shit.  It's a poker game with two players refusing to say, "Call," and neither has a winning hand.

                                                                              Vic Neptune
   

     Donald Trump will reportedly start spending big money on his campaign in relation to the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary.  Popular news media wisdom settles on Senator Ted Cruz winning in Iowa, while Governor Chris Christie has the backing of New Hampshire conservatives, the kind of Republicans who don't want a flashy trash talking egomaniac winning anything.

     Trump's own narrative presents himself as a winner.  If he loses in Iowa, and then even in New Hampshire, how will he spin that?  We're used to his whining tweets, but how great will the torrent of petulance be if he loses in even one of those states, making him, by his own definition, a loser?

     He will, if it comes to his defeat in Iowa and/or New Hampshire, have no trouble assigning blame for his loser status.  Current targets of Trump's ire, like the news media (which strokes him generously with free coverage), the Republican and Democratic Parties, the Establishment, sane people, the Bushes, the Clintons, President Obama, people capable of logic, immigrants legal and illegal, Muslims, decent human beings, and women, would feel the withering Trump grump.  He would be able to feed off of his rejection for many years.  I think he's wanted to be president for a long time.  The August 2004 Esquire Trump cover story (in which he stated, unimpressively after the fact, his displeasure with the Iraq War) expresses his desire to lead the country, and that he would (of course) do it "better."  We only have his word on that, and his word is shit.

     Psychologically, how would a defeated Trump feel?  After Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte spent the last six years of his life imprisoned on the remote South Atlantic island, St. Helena, guarded distantly by British soldiers, living in a small house with a few servants in an environment of constant and maddening wind.  He spent some of his time going over that last battle of his, thinking of actions he should've taken that may have turned it the other way.  I mention Bonaparte because he's the only person I've ever read about with a colossal ego comparable to Trump's.  In the end, the great world leader and conquerer on his naked island surrounded by undrinkable nowhere, ended his life babbling manically, asking hundreds of questions without waiting for answers, the content of the queries quite mundane, concerning in one instance the price of apples in England compared to the price of apples in France.

     I don't think madness or exile lie in Trump's future, but I do hope, if he loses in Iowa, New Hampshire, and elsewhere, culminating in a denial of his presidential wish, that, like Napoleon, he experiences a deep depression, enough to shut him up for years, removing his grotesque blaring light from public consciousness so that his disgusting personality ceases to abuse the great country he falsely claims to care about.

                                                                            Vic Neptune

     

     The prospect of a Trump administration beginning in January 2017 generates nervous grimaces among the punditry.  Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, a man who doesn't shrink from bold statements pertaining to bombing and invading other countries, looks limp when he condemns the persistent Republican presidential frontrunner.  Kristol's permanent sneer, though apparently unaffected by the formerly unthinkable possibility of President Trump, looks more threatened now by the political success of a billionaire reality TV man who won't be polite, such as when he condemns George W. Bush and his neoconservative allies (including Kristol) for advocating and carrying out the bombing, invasion, and occupation of Iraq.
     Donald Trump, using what should now be a familiar tactic to anyone who understands English, likes to claim he was against the Iraq War from its beginning in March 2003.  "About a week after" the war began on March 19, according to a Washington Post reporter who "approached him at an Oscar after-party, [Trump]" said the war was "a mess."
     In July 2004, soon after Iraq's virtual viceroy L. Paul Bremer ended his year long mishandling of a country in civil war, Trump told an Esquire reporter that the war was a "mess."  By this time, a growing number of Americans had lost enthusiasm for the war.  Trump likes to cite this Esquire interview, supported by a cover photograph of himself looking like he's got someone's cock in his mouth.  On August 10, 2015, Trump phoned Morning Joe and said, "I didn't want to go into Iraq in 2004 and we went there.  So now we totally knocked out the balance.  What we've done in the Middle East is incredible."
     He's repeatedly cited 2004 as the year he's so proud of in regard to his ability to perceive national mistakes.  No evidence of Trump opposing U.S. military involvement in Iraq prior to March 19, 2003, exists.  I offer my own opposition to that war; what I wrote in an unpublished manuscript, The War File, on March 6, 2003, thirteen days before the first missiles flew:

     "I cannot support this upcoming war with Iraq.  Cloaked with lies, it is exploitation, degradation, humiliation, and a savage mismatch between a twenty-first century army against a twentieth century army.  It will go badly.  America's reputation for insensitivity towards the complexity of the world will increase.  More hatred will flare up.  Acts of terror will multiply worldwide.  Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and their corporate sector associates will profit.  America will be regarded as an ogre.  Babies will be bisected by chunks of shrapnel.  Wildlife will vanish.  The atmosphere will be poisoned.  The antichrist will come through and Bush may someday be surprised to discover that he, in a Jungian sense, is it...
     Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, and the other Project for the New American Century ideologues want war.  Getting a grip on the Middle East has been a dream in the ambitions of these arrogant cocksuckers for a long time.  Their desires are about to happen."

     Insisting on one's prophetic ability, as Trump does, isn't impressive when the remarks on the subject come sixteen months after the war began.  After the Iraq War got ugly, from an American perspective, pundits, politicians, Trump, started viewing the catastrophe as a fuck-up, though many of these people didn't look at it from the humanitarian viewpoint of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, wounded, missing, and displaced.  Iraqis jailed under false pretenses and mistreated in confinement translated in America to "some bad apples among Army guards in Abu Ghraib prison have disgraced their country and their uniforms."  Controlling the Iraqi populace amid civil chaos by making mass arrests and stamping down heavily on civil rights, enabled by the American virtual viceroy's orders, meant nothing to those in America, like Donald Trump, viewing human rights abuses carried out as policy as simply a failed war effort.
     Shame on Bush and Cheney for fucking up the Iraq War!
     Bill Kristol doesn't approve of Donald Trump.  The neocon co-editor of The Weekly Standard probably doesn't like Trump's loose cannon style.  Kristol likes well-aimed cannon, as long as he can agree on the targets.  On one of the Sunday morning talk shows he frequents, Kristol said of the so-called ISIS capital, Raqqa, that it would simply be a matter of sending in "fifty-thousand" troops to "clean it out."
     A 2012 census of that city puts the population at 220, 268 people.  ISIS members there probably don't account for more than a small minority, so "cleaning out" a city of around 200,000 people means homes and civilians getting in the way of Kristol's fantasized urban warfare.  Stalingrad, site of a five month battle between German and Russian troops in 1942-1943, showed in a 1939 census a population of approximately 445,000 people.  By the time the battle began the city's population had swelled by many thousands of evacuees fleeing German advancement.  Over the course of the battle, lost finally by the Germans, the city was virtually destroyed.  Since I assume Bill Kristol is smart enough to be a pundit and magazine editor, I must conclude that he just doesn't give a shit about what would happen to Raqqa's civilian population if it's ever the site of an urban campaign.  Nor, apparently, does he give a shit about U.S. troops involved in such a horrific battle.
     "Clean it out," he said, and Trump might add, based on what he actually proposed, "Kill the children and wives of ISIS fighters."  Since it would be hard to discern who's who in such a (overused phrase) "fog of war," many women and children in Raqqa unconnected to ISIS fighters would die.
     Kristol, appalled by the prospect of a Trump presidency, nevertheless has in common with the Republican frontrunner a heartfelt advocacy of mass murder.  Their voices (Trump's especially) are believed in by an alarming American minority I declare to be void of morality.  Trump and every other race-baiting, foreigner-hating, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, pro-war asshole in news media and politics do not speak for me, or millions of other Americans not enchanted by the desire to blame the unknown for their personal difficulties.

                                                                              Vic Neptune

   
     

     Jeb Bush's hapless campaign let it be known that their man is contemplating hitting Trump hard.  Bush apparently hasn't decided yet if it's a good idea to announce he's not going to endorse the asshole billionaire, who has his own growing cadre of stormtrooper followers.  He has to spend time wondering if he should endorse a nominated Trump?  It isn't clear to Bush by now that the piece of shit who ruined his chances of becoming president, browbeating him for months even unto the present day, shouldn't receive his endorsement?
     Republican politicians view Trump carefully, not speaking harshly of him.  Most of them condemned his insane idea to prevent Muslims from entering the United States, but they also didn't condemn the man who uttered the unethical proposal.  Finally, Congressman Reid Ribble of Wisconsin spoke out against Trump, saying he will not support him if he's the nominee.  Ribble is the only Republican politician in Congress I know of who's had the guts to say, in effect, "Fuck you" to Trump.
     I've heard often the phrase, "They're afraid to go after Trump," referring to Donald's opponents who struggle for second, third, fourth, fifth places in the polls.  Trump does slam whoever criticizes him.  His impulse control is like that of a hyperactive child.  He tweets compulsively, literally phones in interviews to cable news programs, the hosts of which listen to his narcissistic Napoleon complex fantasy talk as if they're hearing the golden sentences of a respected historian.
     Vladimir Putin, Russia's strongman, praised Trump, calling him "brilliant" and "colorful," and the "absolute leader" among Republicans running for president.  This has been interpreted in American news media as an endorsement by Putin.  I see nothing saying "endorsement" here.  Trump, calling in to Morning Joe on MSNBC, said he liked being called "brilliant" by Putin.  He praised Putin in turn, calling him a "strong leader."
     "Strong" in the Mussolini sense?
     Joe Scarborough, the show's eponymous co-host remarked to Trump that Putin has had journalists killed who disagreed with him.  He said it twice to Trump, who doesn't like to respond to issues involving the real human cost of violence.
     "America kills people, too."  He seemed blasé about the subject.  There may have been a time ten years ago when I would've disagreed with anyone stating that Trump would like to order the deaths of millions, but now I accept that idea readily.
     There may be another reason why Trump likes Putin: the latter's wealth.  Reportedly, Putin is the world's richest man, an achievement brought about by decades of calculated graft.  The figure I heard by one Putin expert puts the Russian leader at around a hundred billion dollars in net worth, compared to Trump's self-claimed eight plus billion.  Trump's praise of Putin fits with a relatively insignificant billionaire nestling inside the rectum of the world's wealthiest man.
     The last Republican debate showed the usual collective hard-on for war, the military, and killing "bad guys."  They say this crap because they think they have to.  None of them have any military experience.  None of them have been shot at.  Some of them want a no-fly zone over Syria, speaking about that as if Russia would go for it, and Governor Christie insisting he would order the shooting down of Russian planes violating the zone.  He and the others seem to have missed Aristotle's ideas about cause and effect.
     Living in America now, watching the money-corrupted political process unfold, feels like waiting for something uncomfortable to end.  Ten and a half months until the election.  Citizens United made this prolongation of capitalistic democracy possible, and its supposed benefactors, the candidates, show strain.  Bush looks like he's trapped in a cave.  Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Lindsay Graham, Rick Santorum for God's sake, none of them, and a few above them in the polls like Fiorina, have no  chance of gaining the nomination.  Why don't they stop?  Trump, meanwhile, doesn't have to surf the Citizens United wave, due to his own cash.  He gets free publicity every day on cable news.  He campaigns with Twitter.  He doesn't give a shit about the American people, or the people of the world.  He's a negative zone where those who don't want to hold their worst natures back anymore can enter and feel good about themselves because their leader is a nihilistic shit, like the man who runs ISIS.
     "Political correctness" is supposedly, in Trump's view, "destroying America."  Horseshit.  He uses the term in the same way some of his hate-monger predecessors like Joseph McCarthy used the word "Communism."  He's not the only one of his fellows on debate stages who condemns political correctness.  One of the candidates (I can't remember who) said we've been fighting "politically correct wars," a meaningless sentence, except that it contains the words "politically correct," sounds that stimulate the non-thinking reptile brain.  I suppose that Chris Christie's idea of a politically incorrect war would be one with Russia.
     I'm not unconvinced that some tenth graders would make smarter and more humane presidential candidates than most of the line-up we're faced with.
     As Devo put it, "Are we not men?"  
   

     Earlier tonight the Republican presidential candidates assembled on a stage in a Las Vegas casino owned by Sheldon Adelson, a man who in 2012 so believed wholeheartedly in the suitability of cynical fuck Newt Gingrich as president that he spent millions of dollars on that ridiculous lost cause, overwhelmed eventually by Mitt Romney's backers, another batch of money-wasting fools.
     The main debate was preceded by the "kids' table" debate, featuring four sad-looking candidates who will not be president: Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, and Rick Santorum.
     Rick Santorum?  He's running for president?  When I saw him talking about something it occurred to me that I didn't even know he was a contender.  I knew about Pataki and the other two, but hearing Santorum talk about terrorism and war made him seem like a caller phoning a right wing radio program.
     The main debate on CNN was presented as if we were watching a trailer for a Rocky film blended with hype for the Independence Day sequel.  These candidates, and their lunacy, increasingly blend our world's reality with the fictions of meddling minds subjectively projecting their contents into the public mind, conning many into believing in ideas with no basis in fact.  Donald Trump's power fantasies of mass deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, culturally-based surveillance of Muslims, of muscular and punishing warfare, advocacy of torture and the banning of all Muslims from entering the U.S., make him the loudest and most extreme voice among his colleagues seeking the Oval Office.  The others, though, in their stridency and enthusiasm for sometimes inhuman solutions (like eliminating the Affordable Care Act, thus sticking it to millions of formerly uninsured poor and lower middle class Americans saved by Obama's best accomplishment), sound like baby Trumps, willing to fuck over millions here and abroad for the sake of satisfying the powerful interests and individuals who seek to place their marionettes in the White House.
     The parts of the main debate I saw had Trump, when he did get to speak, often insulting the other candidates, ripping into Jeb Bush at one point after the latter criticized his proposals, making fairly reasonable comments about a dangerous piece of shit standing a few feet away.  As Trump predictably dismissed and denigrated Bush, I felt a little sorry for Florida's former governor, a rare emotion for me in the case of a Bush family member.  He's got lots of money behind him, but he doesn't have a chance against the upstart Trump, who bullies Bush even after having bullied him relentlessly in past months.  Trump does kick a man when he's down.
     He also reignites petty differences.  It should serve as an example of what kind of president he would be when we consider his resurgent enmity toward Megyn Kelly of Fox News.  Recall that Trump resented her question about his attitudes towards women at a debate last August.  He tweeted ridiculous, silly, and insulting things about Kelly, suggesting she was menstruating at the time of the debate.  Kelly held her tongue, proving herself capable of something Trump has none of: dignity.
     In the past few days, Kelly on her weeknight program misquoted Trump's latest poll number as fifteen, when it was actually twenty-seven.  Trump (I imagine him tweeting while sitting on his favorite toilet in Trump Tower) went after Kelly--"She said it's fifteen!"  An emotionally disturbed child might voice similar complaints.  He went on in his tweets, attacking Kelly and CNN, too, hoping that in the debate, "...they treat me fairly."  This kind of petulant tweet-speak appeals only, I suspect, to Trump's unthinking followers, who grow increasingly angry toward their Fuhrer's detractors.  Someone holding up a Black Lives Matter sign and shouting protests at a recent Trump rally was escorted out amid vicious cries and a shout of "Sieg heil" from someone.  The Brownshirt-like activity at these gatherings seems to be escalating, while in America at large, the fulfillment of Trump's hate rhetoric against Muslims can be seen in the fire bombing of a San Bernardino mosque, of vandalism against mosques and Islamic centers elsewhere in this country, and threats against individual Muslims.  Those who think this isn't serious and reminiscent of a northern European country in the early 1930s need to take their heads out of their asses.
     Trump, a voice fomenting this intolerance, blithely gets away with it--condemned by critics in the news media, yes, but still not treated as a growing threat to peace here and abroad.  He and his fellow Republicans running for president, all of them with varying degrees of hard-on for power at the expense of the disenfranchised, look like a row of dolts pointing guns at America's, and the world's, head, all believing they're doing good works.
     Not that I believe in the Devil, but the Devil is a clever son of a bitch.

                                                                           Vic Neptune  

     I will never write a book about the Trump presidential campaign, but if I were to do so, it would be called Logrolling With the Devil.
     Due partly to a need to disengage mentally from musings on American politics, if only for a few days, and partly to an energy-draining sinus infection, I didn't feel like writing, although I absorbed the latest domestic and foreign news.
     The massacre in San Bernardino, California, perpetrated by a husband and wife team; one, an American citizen, the other from Pakistan originally but later from Saudi Arabia, bore hallmarks of "Huh?" and "What the fuck?"  They met through an online match site.  He traveled to Saudi Arabia, they married in Mecca, returned to California.  The FBI investigation into the massacre and its creators revealed, to some surprise in the news media and in the vocal cords of some government authorities, that the couple, one of them dubbed by a terrorism "expert" on MSNBC as "the Black Widow,"--even though that term applied to the wife makes no sense--planned their attack for a year, building IEDs and modifying weaponry in their garage, sometimes late into the night with accompanying loud music.
     Syed Farook, the husband and all-American terrorist, worked as a food inspector, making a decent salary for a middle class family of three.  He and his wife were allegedly "radicalized" into close sympathy with anti-West/American groups, i.e. spawn of al-Qaeda, in 2013, a year before news broke in America of the existence of ISIS, itself a child of al-Qaeda in Iraq, itself inspired by al-Qaeda, itself originally Mujahideen fighters financed by the CIA and Osama bin Laden's construction family-based fortune with business ties to powerful groups and individuals worldwide, including members of the Bush family.
     The Farooks, committing themselves to fucking over at least a small part of America as early as two years ago (and Syed discussed with a friend the perpetrating of a massacre in 2012), before ISIS became known as a social network success, inspiring and recruiting through newer media that perhaps make irrelevant and pointless old methods of aerial bombardment and invasion, did not "fit the profile" of those in the West who might be disaffected targets of ISIS propaganda.  Young alienated Muslim men, rather, would more likely fit the profile.  The Farooks, however, got going with their violent plans in the midst of marriage, with pregnancy and baby thrown in.  The husband had what many would consider a good life: a good job, a faithful wife, a child, extended family support, American citizenship.  These elements do not add up, rationally, to people wanting to annihilate others and then themselves.
     Were the Farooks life-loving enough to provide their baby with a decent car seat?  Yes.  What is, as some young people used to say, "totally whack" about this couple, apart from their murderousness, is their act of leaving their six-month old baby with Farook's mother, and telling her they had a medical appointment.  True in a way, because what they did after that caused a lot of people in San Bernardino to require help from doctors.
     The example of a pregnant woman plotting with her husband a crime involving blasting the shit out of a lot of people with guns and bombs does not "fit the profile."  It makes no sense from what we think of as the nurturing archetype of the mother.  It does, perhaps, make sense in terms of what war, oppression, tyranny, terrorism by individuals and by states, does to some people and their descendants who often witness and feel the horrors.
     The Arab Spring happened in response to decades of U.S. and other western state-supported dictatorships pushing down on their peoples, until finally a time came of social media allowing the possibility of getting messages and images out to the world that made it difficult for U.S.-supported bastards like Hosni Mubarak to maintain power (bright flashlight beam on cockroach).  The same social media also became useful to malicious people with determination, guns, bombs, seized land from severely weakened states and the oil underneath (due ultimately to the acquisitive and inhumane decisions of Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, and others, all of whom were retroactively pardoned by President Obama to prevent them from ever facing war crimes charges in the Hague, making Obama an accessory after the fact as one aiding and comforting war criminals).
     The world seems to be trying to become one.  With the fulfillment of the Information Age, new technologies in communication are making everybody's business known to everybody.  It is a time of bloody birth struggle, but trying to fight the malign forces growing within it using nineteenth and twentieth century invasion methods and believing those tactics will "destroy ISIS," is ignoring San Bernardino, Paris on November 13, and the indefatigable sometimes evil spirit of humanity to adapt to new situations, inventing new tactics and strategies while hidebound minds in the Pentagon and equivalent mass-death-to-others mentalities in governments around the world believe, like the Farooks, the Paris and Bamako, Mali, attackers, that shooting and blowing up people will solve humanity's problems, and not, as Jesus knew, cause more violence, which will cause more violence.
     Donald Trump's recent proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States has been condemned even by Benjamin Netanyahu, a prolific killer of Muslims.  Trump's poll numbers orgasmed after he declared his anti-American, unconstitutional, and illegal proposal.  Within twenty-four hours of his cheered (by supporters) comments, a person in Philadelphia tossed from a moving car a pig's head at a mosque.  Trump stimulates hatred of Muslims, of Mexicans, of women, even of himself.  He also, from a national security standpoint, alienates Muslims generally around the world.  The frontrunner of the Republican party's struggle to regain the White House has proposed murdering families of ISIS members (a war crime, for deliberately targeting civilians is regarded thus by those who try to enforce international law, and it's also a practice of terrorists, making Trump a self-admitted advocate of terrorism).
     Trump now wants to close the borders to all Muslims, telling MSNBC's Willie Geist that everyone trying to enter the U.S. will be asked, "Are you a Muslim?"  Leaving it there, he didn't acknowledge that simply replying "No" to that unconstitutional question would defeat his method of filtering out all Muslims.  One need only lie to get into the country.  Trump knows about lying, but Geist didn't bother to press him on the epic stupidity of his proposed identification method.
     Trump's alienation of Muslims plays into the hands of ISIS recruitment.  Numerous politicians, security and intelligence experts, and retired military officers in America have acknowledged this.  Given this widely held view, why hasn't the Secret Service-protected Trump been visited by the FBI?  Aiding and abetting ISIS recruitment would get a normal American investigated, possibly arrested and prosecuted, resulting perhaps in prison.  Trump, with his bullhorn-style, has more influence than some schmuck operating at a low level in favor in ISIS.  Is Trump not helping ISIS?  Is ISIS America's declared enemy or not?
     If this dangerous new rhetorical bigotry won't dislodge Trump from his side of the log, we should acknowledge that even wealthy traitors, if their ratings are high enough, can walk freely, saying whatever they want, polluting their own countries with lies about innocent citizens, about faiths not their own, all for the glorification of the one true God, Donald J. Trump.

                                                                              Vic Neptune
   

     I heard that El Nino is causing the unseasonably warm weather where I live.  Today, high clear blue sky, temperatures in the forties Fahrenheit, less of a December, more like the second week of November.  Climate change deniers contemplate a blizzard in March and call it a refutation of humanity-caused climatic eventual doom.  It's cold, I slipped on the sidewalk and strained my back, therefore there's nothing to the idea of a Greenhouse Effect coming our way from air pollution.
     Venus, Earth's nearest planetary neighbor, seems to have had a runaway Greenhouse Effect going on for millions of years, making the temperature in its mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere hot enough to melt lead.  I've never heard or read why this happened, but I did read several years ago in Astronomy magazine about how Venus, Earth, and Mars, between three and a half to four billion years ago, all had planet-spanning water oceans with scattered land masses.  A traveler in a spacecraft visiting our inner Solar System in those years would've seen three planets with viable life potential, all starting out using the same deck of cards.  The traveler could've landed on all three worlds, collected soil, rock, and primitive bacteriological samples, then gone away to visit other star systems.          
     A descendent of that traveler, journeying in a far more sophisticated ship, visiting our Solar System now, would find Mars cold and dry (though underground water and evidence of water flows have been discovered), Earth abundant with life, still possessing its oceans, and Venus a hot cloud-covered hell with sulphuric acid rain and a day lasting longer than its year, so slow is its rotation.
     What happened to these worlds that were so similar at one point?  Time's passage causes divergences in a single human lifetime; one doesn't necessarily end up doing what one thought of doing early in life--at the age of ten I decided to become an astronomer, but didn't.  Divergences over millions and billions of years are more pronounced than we, in several decades, can achieve.  Mountains rise up and flatten over hundreds of millions of years, but to Earth's life perspective, these are like what to us would be periods of a few years, when, for instance, we spend some seasons with friends, but later on never see them again.  In other words, the Appalachian Mountains used to be very hard to climb.
     Venus and Mars had oceans, Earth still has a planet-wide ocean with several names, but there were times when atmospheric and local stellar conditions made Earth's water supply do strange things, like the period when the entire planet was covered with ice, a cosmic cue ball.
     Climate change deniers are right when they say that the planet's environmental conditions alter over time, having nothing to do with our actions.  They're wrong when they claim that curbing greenhouse gas emissions is futile and only hurts business.  In time, if their belief about this prevails, their descendants will find it impossible to sell their products to dead customers.
     Earth, fortunately, before its destruction by the growing red future Sun, will survive us.

                                                                             Vic Neptune

     Secretary of Defense Ashton (not Kutcher) Carter told the House Armed Services Committee that the war machine is giving birth to a "specialized expeditionary targeting force," to be sent to Iraq, the country President Obama promised we'd be done with militarily during his administration.
     This force will conduct raids, rescue hostages, and, judging by their wordy title, will not act as U.S. troops on the ground.  Still, they'll have guns and other weaponry, and will fight and kill ISIS fighters, as well as capture ISIS leaders, if they're successful.
     Carter is the latest in a series of meaty-looking war department leaders, always acting before the camera with their "this is serious" faces, and "we've got a tough road ahead of us, make no mistake" tones.  His predecessor, Leon Panetta, revealed in a recent documentary that one of his most difficult moments as defense secretary came when he was attending a funeral.  A phone call came at the cemetery.  The president wanted him to know about a terrorist currently in the sights of a killer drone in the sky.  The wrinkle?  Women and children in the potential blast zone.  The decision was left up to Panetta, causing me to wonder about Obama's mind, dismissing the killings of women and children by ordering his Defense Department tool to decide whether or not to "take the shot."
     As related by the documentarian, Panetta decided to kill the terrorist, and, "there was collateral damage."
     Hearing this story made me sick, not patriotic.  I guess there's something wrong with me for regarding President Obama as a cold-blooded man who tacitly accepts the dismemberment by missiles and bombs of women and children, and simultaneously condemns the up close and personal beheadings committed by ISIS killers.  Am I crazy for being against both methods of obliterating lives?
     I've written elsewhere about the use and misuse of language by those seeking and wielding power. "Specialized expeditionary targeting force" doesn't sound any less mechanical and inhuman than most Pentagon-derived word clusters, but coming now, in relation to the Paris attack of November 13, and the continuing (and continuous) war carrying on for Dick Cheney's pleasure since 2001, it just seems like another mistake doomed to succeed, as a mistake.  Senator McCain has long argued for American troops in their thousands on the ground in Syria and Iraq to combat ISIS.  He's right in that a ground war of major strength is needed to fully beat the motherfuckers.  He's wrong in that such an escalation of the war will give ISIS what it wants: lots of Americans to kill, capture, torture, and fuck with in ways we haven't yet seen.
     In France, Donald Trump-style, three mosques have been closed because "radical" ideas have been spoken there.  This is insane.  If mosques do better as recruitment centers for ISIS and other terror groups than the Internet, the world must be revolving in a pre-1990s reality.  Continuing war in the Middle East by the U.S. and its allies only ensures the continuing and future existence of ISIS and whatever comes after it to act as politicians' cause in fighting evil come the next campaign season.  Donald Trump and all the other candidates have no idea what to do, practically and humanely, when it comes to fixing the problems America helped create when its foreign policy makers decided to start fucking with the world after hearing about the sinking of the battleship Maine in 1898.
     A specialized expeditionary targeting force is really just Special Forces, the kind that Kathryn Bigelow makes movies about, the elite teams who see green when they stalk at night, the trained killers who get lauded almost to the point of sexual excitement by pundits and politicians.  Obama's war practice is one of specialization, maybe because he's such a cerebral SOB.  Robot aircraft firing missiles at little kids who get in the way of terror suspects, operated in a different hemisphere by a fellow with a joystick, impersonal long-distance obliteration; not getting the hands dirty, like John McCain wants to make others do.
     Send your specialized expeditionary targeting force, Mr. President.  You could call them repairmen if you wanted to, but really, they're soldiers entering a space you said we were done with.      Liar.

                                                                               Vic Neptune
   

   

     On Donald Trump's prime morning forum for airing his ideas to airhead TV personalities, Fox and Friends, the Republican frontrunner spoke in favor of mass murder:

     "We're fighting a very politically correct war.  And the other thing with the terrorists--you have to take out their families.  When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.  They care about their lives, don't kid yourselves.  They say they don't care about their lives.  But you have to take out their families."

     Co-host Steve Doocy, the male blonde sitting next to blonde Elizabeth Hasselbeck, then nodded as if approving of something he probably wouldn't ever want to witness firsthand.
     Trump uttered this abominable statement after the other host, Brian Kilmeade, brought up the concern over civilian casualties resulting from what Trump's "hitting em hard" throw-big-rocks-at- western-Asia strategy implies.  In true Trump contradictory fashion, he said he would do his "absolute best" to keep civilian casualties low, but then he used one of his favorite button-pressing expressions, "politically correct."  Obama, I guess, has killed Yemeni and Pakistani civilians in drone strikes in a politically correct way, which probably feels the same as when one is doing it rudely.  The fracture between Trump and the English language is the former's disrespect for the meanings of words.
     It's one thing to boast, and another thing to do.  There's no telling what Trump will do if he's ever the president.  Any non-believer of Trump's bullshit knows he will run into obstacles from the government's other two branches.  Howard Fineman of The Huffington Post, though, pointed out, convincingly I think, that Trump's self-centered personality may, if he's elected president, turn him into a Francisco Franco-like object of a leadership cult.  Then it will all be about Trump.  The fucker's in the habit of putting his name on everything he makes.  Not even Khufu, a massively more powerful person than Trump, put his name on the Great Pyramid.
     Trump's mouth lets out a barrage of words, and maybe he doesn't mean even half of what he says, but those who believe in him are chumps, fallen for a con man who's using them to glorify himself.  News media outlets are not free of his spell.  A man goes on television in America in 2015 and announces he wants to murder women and children in the Middle East.  The same man, instead of being watched by the police as a potentially dangerous person, is granted taxpayer-funded Secret Service protection.  He's given free advertising every time he opens his mouth in public, getting far more attention than even Hillary Clinton, whose poll numbers surpass his.  He's allowed by journalists to get away with egregious lies and distortions of the truth, with vagueness and self-contradictory statements that would cause Jeb Bush to lose poll points, and, most important, news coverage, and still he plows forward, manure spreader working efficiently, heading a campaign with its headquarters in a golden tower where he happens to live.  Like Adolf Hitler, the first political candidate to ever campaign by airplane, Trump flies from speech to speech, never having to actually stay in a mundane state like Iowa, like his competitors, who don't ride in helicopters and large passenger planes with their names written on the fuselages.
     Yes, he's a celebrity, he's "entertaining," if a man making fun of the involuntary movements of a journalist afflicted with motor control problems is entertaining.  He wants to kill women and children--how hilarious can he get?
     Trump supporters, microphones before their faces, defend him by saying his "untruths" don't matter to them, because "he's a good manager, and he'll get things done."  That could end up being the case, but I fear that Trump, if elected, will simply get the things done that he wants done.  Beholden to special interests, Trump will be the only special interest.  Like his tax proposal that just happens to benefit himself, we can apply any area of American life to the same idea: how will President Trump benefit?  How can he get the best deal?  How can he make the best killing (literal and figurative)?
     When words mean nothing, they can mean anything.  Donald Trump, voila, is the man who destroys meaning.

                                                                                 Vic Neptune
   
       

     Mitt Romney did well in a New Hampshire poll, showing up Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and the others--an impressive feat for a figuratively dead candidate.
     Why Mitt?  Could it be that his worst statements of 2012 weren't as bad as the current GOP office seekers' best?  Romney's "forty-seven percent" comments, dismissing nearly half of American voters as not worth cultivating, showed him to be a wealthy elitist; in that way he seemed a typical rich man beholden to one-tenth of one percent interests.  Mitt Romney lacked mystery.  His mind did not come off as the rotting cheese filling the braincase of Ben Carson, or the cluster bomb occupying Trump's skull.
     Trump's profile went underneath news media coverage of the Paris attack by ISIS.  He may have spent a few days wondering how to break back into the attention he needs to survive as a political candidate, entertainer, and megalomaniac.
     At a rally on Monday, three days after the Paris tragedy, Trump did two things that put him back where he's convinced he belongs.  A black activist entered the rally with a "Black Lives Matter" sign and shouted true invective at the great orange man.  Trump stopped talking and saw the source of the disturbance.  The activist, surrounded by angry (white) Trump supporters, was subdued, kicked, and taken from the room, while Trump encouraged the violence by saying repeatedly, "Get him outta here!  Get him outta here!"
     Cameras on the floor showed the activist on the ground receiving blows, reminiscent of Brownshirt activity against Jews in the 1930s.  Some surrounding Trump-supporter faces showed pure hate sculpted into anger, encouraged by their master at the podium, a man who, claiming to be worthy of the name leader, failed to even attempt what Mick Jagger attempted to do at Altamont when that singer urged Hell's Angels motorcyclists to stop fighting in an engagement that resulted in a death.  Mick Jagger, unlike Trump, is civilized.
     In Trump's world, dissent is unwelcome.  He is right, and everyone else is not as right as he is.  Would he like to be a dictator?
     At the same event, Trump claimed that on 9/11 he saw "thousands" of Muslims in Jersey City cheering as the Twin Towers fell.  There is no videotape of this occurring; the Jersey City Police Department issued a statement saying that it didn't happen.  News programs did show images of Palestinians celebrating the 9/11 attacks, but that's far from Jersey.  Trump has had two days to retract this lie, but hasn't.  His chief adviser appeared on CNN today, offering the argument, "Can you prove that it didn't happen?"
     Can you prove that I didn't see an elf stealing bread from my kitchen last night?
     Trump has entered dangerous territory and doesn't seem to care.  He's allowing his supporters to physically abuse people expressing their First Amendment rights.  He's a liar.  He commands the attention of American news networks even as he utters one falsehood after another, mixed with vague and unchallenged statements.  He's anti-intellectual.  He harkens back to a time when America was "great," and he'll make it "great again."  He uses the reactive mindsets of supporters, telling them what they want to hear.  He's turning into a fascist right before our eyes.  The separation between his rhetoric and good old fashioned American prejudices against minorities and Muslims is a very thin membrane dividing celebrity Donald from someone destined to kill people and visit wrath on innocents, all the while pretending to be "a nice guy."
     The GOP better figure out whether or not they want such a shepherd of humanity's basest instincts to represent them in a presidential run.  Even obtuse, boring old Mitt would be preferable as president.

                                                                             Vic Neptune

     For a few days after the killings in Paris, I heard and saw very little on cable news about Donald Trump.  Reports of mass brutality chase away, for a time, buffoons, but they return with, in Trump's case, stale nonsense masquerading as solutions.
     Appearing from Trump Tower, a waterfall behind him flowing over a stepped golden structure, he spoke to Sean Hannity, his slavish Fox News interviewer, about President Obama's obtuseness when it comes to recognizing the threat of radical Islamic extremism.  American right wingers are obsessed with the Obama administration's supposed inability to name the terror threat as being characterized by its Muslim component.  This criticism ignores the administration's tendency to parse language in Orwellian fashion.  They won't use the name ISIS, even though most Americans call it that (probably because that's the name that was used when we first found out about them only last year).  Obama and his people say ISIL, the L standing for Levant, an old and outdated name for the eastern Mediterranean islands and surrounding countries.  Daesh, an acronym using the name components of what ISIS actually calls itself, is also popular with politicians, especially after the Paris attacks, because ISIS doesn't want to be called that--they're against acronyms, apparently, and no, this is not a Monty Python sketch.
     Trump, Hannity, and others who vent exasperation and contempt at Obama for not saying "radical Islamic extremism," or words to that effect, piss and moan about a man and his administration that can't even figure out what to call the enemy when they do call them something.
     NSDAP is a German acronym that stood for, in English, National Socialist German Workers Party.  Nazi shortens the term quite a bit, retaining only part of National and part of Socialist.  Taken that way they almost sound like they may have been leftists.
     Trump's problem with Obama's use or non-use of words hardly matters in the bigger scheme.  What he said to Hannity about the massacre inside the Bataclan theater demonstrates his egregious lack of sensitivity, something he prides himself on, boasting often of his disdain for political correctness, and how he has no time for it (although he has lots of time to tweet).
     "Twenty-five people in that theater carrying guns could've taken care of the problem," he claimed, offering twenty-five, I assume, as a non-scientifically derived number that would have overwhelmed the firepower (automatic weapons, grenades, suicide vests, as well as the surprise element) of the terrorists.
     Alas, from Trump's viewpoint, France's laws lack our Second Amendment.  To Trump, though, it would have been a fait accompli: the terrorists would've opened fire, but twenty-five intrepid ready-for-anything citizens would've drawn their guns, assessed the situation rapidly amidst the environment of a loud heavy metal concert, with stage lights flashing, and deployed toward the gunfire, heroes with the uncanny ability to coordinate their tactics telepathically, honing in on the killers with, perhaps, a tenth of the casualties from the actual non-Secondment Amendment-blessed outcome.
     I recall Ben Carson's claim after a college shooting in Oregon not long ago that he would fight in such a situation.  Does he believe the people murdered in the Bataclan should've put up a fight?  American voters need to seriously consider the words of presidential candidates.  Anyone like Trump or Carson or anyone else trying to be president, none of whom know what it's like to be in such a horrifying series of unfolding situations as happened in Paris on November 13, are talking out of their asses whenever they try to sound intelligent about these situations, or what they "would do if..."
     Trump, with his golden shower behind him, provided no new ideas, no sane policy statements.  He merely exploited Paris 11/13 and those murdered and wounded.  He's a disgusting opportunist who shows how dark the Republican Party has become, in that he's their most popular boy.

                                                                            Vic Neptune

     Ben Carson, commenting on last night's atrocity in Paris, said we need to eliminate global jihadism.  He spoke as if killing all existing Muslim terrorists will permanently annihilate the threat.  Nothing he said wasn't believed by naive good versus evil philosophers like George W. Bush in 2001.
     Eyewitness reports from inside the Bataclan theater, where concertgoers were gunned down, with few places to hide except underneath corpses, indicate that the killers looked like young men, "under twenty-five."  That puts their birthdates in the early 1990s--they were under the age of ten when 9/11 happened, when Bush began bombing Afghanistan.
     "Killers who hate our freedoms," "terrorists," whatever you want to call them, cannot be wholly eliminated, as Ben Carson believes, as long as the War on Terror pot keeps getting stirred by the U.S. and other first world powers as they continue to support, following long-standing policies, repressive regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere.
     Last night's terrorists in Paris were young enough to have grown into their roles, backgrounded by endless warfare, political and economic destabilization, and manipulation by outside governments and corporations.
     A crime, any competent cop knows, should never be regarded as occurring in a history-free vacuum.  Unfortunately, the crime of 9/11 was regarded in the United States, by most of its people and also its leaders, as a bewildering "What the fuck did we ever do?" bolt from the blue.  The reaction was fairly swift, making sense only from the standpoint of helping war and security industries.  Killing and displacing thousands of Afghan citizens who knew nothing of the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, and in any case had nothing to do with him, but happened to live in the country run by the Taliban government which offered him sanctuary for a time, was as senseless as last night's God-obsessed young bastards slaughtering innocent civilians.
     The logic of "I have been wronged, therefore I shall kill someone who did not wrong me, instead of those who have," only makes sense to people willing to become professional death dealers, rationalizing their violence with holy books or the memory of a day when "the whole world changed," as 9/11 is regarded.  It certainly did change the world.  It could be that 11/13, Friday the 13th, will be a major turning point in the War on Terror, the war against ISIS, but more violence will beget more violence, and those stirring the pot making up the War on Terror, terrorists and politicians alike, will only succeed at extending what Dick Cheney called "the long war," a gift to arms dealers and political opportunists.

                                                                             Vic Neptune

     I've seen most James Bond movies.  When I was a kid, they appealed to me as action-adventure tales, with Sean Connery playing the part, I thought then, to perfection.  During the 1970s, Bond films were, like other theatrically released movies, shown on network television.  Most people didn't have VCRs, so one had to watch the movie, with commercial breaks, as it broadcasted.  This wasn't a bad circumstance--it planted the viewer's ass in front of the TV during specific periods.  When Roots, the super-popular mini-series aired, toilet flushing across the country was at a highly elevated rate at certain times corresponding to that show's commercial breaks.
     Decades after enjoying the Connery Bond films, I read some of Ian Fleming's Bond novels.  I was struck by how little Fleming's Bond resembles Connery's.  Eye color wrong, demeanor wrong, and Connery is a bit too warm at times, and glib.  Fleming's Bond is cold, very English, his eyes stony and gray.  This appearance fits with the most recent Bond, played by Daniel Craig.  I can't write much about the Craig contribution to the series, having seen only Casino Royale, which I liked, as much for the presence of the most beautiful actress in the world, Eva Green, as for anything else in the movie.
     Pierce Brosnan as Bond seemed wrong, his screen persona too Cary Grant-like to be convincing as a secret agent.  I think Brosnan's a pretty good actor, given the right part, as he showed in the TV series Remington Steele, but the necessary Bond coldness loses out to his cool smugness.
     Timothy Dalton did a better job as Bond, coming across as a man of action, if not portraying the role with much depth.  When he had the job in the 1980s, the Bond franchise was faced with the imminent end of the Cold War, the central background of the series in previous films and in the novels.  Dalton's two Bond films are straight adventure stories, one of them taking place in Afghanistan, with bad and dusty Russians providing targets for his bullets.
     Someone asked, "Who's your favorite Bond actor?"
     My answer surprised him: "Roger Moore."
     Did I reply this way because I tend to be quirky?  Moore had a long career in Hollywood and Britain before becoming Bond in 1973's Live and Let Die.  He was the star of the TV series, The Saint, a role similar to his Bond performances, in which he seems breezily unattached to life's dark depths, even while delving into them.
     He was most ready among the Bonds (though Connery did this, too) with clever quips and bad puns after killing someone or watching a henchman fall to his death.  After Moore had made several Bonds, his quips had become expected, but this overlooks an important aspect of his performances, the very reason why he's my favorite Bond: he has the Bond coldness described by Fleming.  His Bond's smoothness as a gentleman comes from the same source as his ability to cold-bloodedly kill his adversaries; the jokes he makes betraying the contempt he feels for human specimens who serve evil masters.
     A stony look comes over Roger Moore's face at times when he plays Bond; the chill of that mask--the death dealer--harkens best to Ian Fleming's creation, a man who kills for Queen and Country, and does so feeling nothing from it because it's a habit.  Moore's characterization of lightness--the bad puns, et cetera--covers the darkness propelling him, without which he has no purpose.

                                                                             Vic Neptune
     

     Ben Carson claims he was a violent boy.  He tried to stab a friend, but the blade broke on the friend's metal belt buckle.  After this incident, capping a boisterous career of rock throwing and trying to brain his mother with a hammer, Carson says he took the proverbial look in the mirror and changed course, resulting in the Christian helper of mankind he became--a Yale-educated neurosurgeon, the first doctor to successfully separate conjoined twins.
     He wrote about his childhood violence in a 1990 autobiography.  CNN researched his past, interviewing childhood friends and acquaintances, but none of them were able to substantiate Carson's tales of young teenage rage.  Carson now fights back, verbally, scolding journalists for wasting time when so many problems exist in our great nation.  Watching his falling eyelids and listening to his voice, which always sounds partially anesthetized, as he tries to own attacking his mother with a hammer and attempting to murder his friend with a knife, makes for a comical sketch in this most ridiculous presidential campaign season.
     I imagine a more vociferous Carson, angry and showing it as he defends his past:

     "I did try to kill my mother with a hammer!  I did try to do a West Side Story knife thrust into my buddy's abdomen!"

     The real anti-candidate Carson wants us to accept his violent past, while most politicians would try to conceal theirs.  He says he's not a politician, but given the likelihood that the CNN investigative journalists did a good job and were unable to corroborate his stories after interviewing those who knew the young Carson, he's taken on one key political practice: lying.

     Following up on the most recent post, Lieutenant Charles Gliniewicz, the "hero" cop who staged his death on September 1 of this year, tried to hire a motorcycle gang leader to kill a village administrator who was close to discovering evidence of his corruption.  Gliniewicz, it emerges, was a total shit with thirty years of practice as a cop, using his position to facilitate unlawful activities.
     Meanwhile, national news outlets that promoted his "tragic" martyrdom--before they knew the nature of the man--fail now to acknowledge their own past elevation of this base creep to the ranks of glory.  They report about his crimes without once admitting they fell under the spell of a made-up truth--one manufactured by the creep himself, an embezzler who managed to screw the people of Illinois out of a further 300,000 dollars simply by making authorities, and news outlets, believe in the existence of fictitious murderers.  Gliniewicz's last ploy, no doubt, was carried out so that he could, indeed, become a hero.  It worked for two months.  Now, a memorial photograph of the asshole displayed outside somewhere in Fox Lake, Illinois, has a black L drawn over his forehead.
     Loser.  But who won?

                                                                               Vic Neptune
   
   
   

     Quentin Tarantino attended a rally against police brutality and criminality.  Families of victims killed by cops were in attendance, the point being to show solidarity against police officers overstepping their legal limits.  Tarantino called cops who've killed unarmed black people "murderers," a word offensive, apparently, to those who prefer to imagine that cops these days, post-Ferguson with its killing of Michael Brown by a white cop, are beset by hostility from the masses and don't know how to behave anymore.
     The Fraternal Order of Police, with approximately 300,000 members, is supposedly planning "a surprise" for Tarantino prior to the release of his upcoming Western, The H8teful Eight.  They claim they'll hit him economically, "where it hurts."  The FOP executive director assured us that cops are dedicated to stopping violence, while Tarantino makes violent movies (but, I point out, so does Steven Spielberg).
     Yes, we know that cops are not supposed to hurt innocent people, yet, as Tarantino pointed out at that rally, they do sometimes ruin and take lives without sufficient rational cause.
     The cop in Fox Lake, Illinois, hailed for a time as "a hero," was supposedly shot and killed by two white men and one black man, right about the time a Texas policeman was murdered while pumping gas.  These killings prompted an abundance of Fox News fulminations against those disparaging law enforcement in America.  A thing called "the Ferguson Effect" was cited, the theory that, since the shooting of Michael Brown by a white police officer, cops nowadays fear to fully engage with their jobs, since they're under so much scrutiny from phone camera-holding citizens and under so much pressure to be far better than humanly possible.
     The Fox Lake cop's death caused a large manhunt for the perpetrators, who were never found.  A few days ago we heard the perps weren't found because they don't exist.  The manhunt cost about 300,000 dollars.  The dead hero cop staged his death, committing suicide.  Authorities were close to discovering his embezzling of thousands of dollars from a police youth fund.  He was a real asshole.
     Quentin Tarantino, it seems to be lost on some, wasn't criticizing the police, but was condemning police brutality.  The North Charleston cop who shot a fleeing black man in the back and planted evidence (captured on phone cam by a citizen) is a murderer.  Calling cops who murder people murderers is simply proper use of the English language.
     The Fraternal Order of Police plans to upset a movie director by using a tactic that rarely works: banning.  Banned books (Slaughterhouse Five, Catcher in the Rye) end up selling far more copies when the stupid malice of self-appointed censors is expressed.  These cops so offended by Tarantino's impassioned words against police injustice seem to believe they can economically hurt a director as popular as Quentin Tarantino.  Do they realize his film Pulp Fiction is a revered cinematic gem illuminating American pop culture like few other films of the 1990s?  Far more people, I'm guessing, give a shit about Tarantino's opinions than those of Joe Pasco, FOP's executive director, who displays his quality of intellect by announcing a "surprise" before the surprise pops.
     A final note: The Department of Homeland Security has approved Secret Service protection for Ben Carson and Donald Trump.  Among other things, this means that taxpayers will pay for the protection of a billionaire who can afford his own security.  This should've been put to a vote.

                                                                               Vic Neptune
   
     

     Yesterday in Manhattan, Donald J. Trump, author, announced the release of his new book, Crippled America: How To Make America Great Again.  The How To segment of the book's title has adorned his campaign baseball caps for several months, suggesting, to me at least, Trump campaign caps promoting Crippled America.
     Trump likes to claim he has no time for political correctness.  I think he just doesn't give a shit about it, like millions of other Americans.  Still, combining the no longer accepted term crippled with the sacred name America demonstrates Trump's mastery of (self- and finance-promoting) propaganda.  It was like 1977, when people formed lines extending far outside the venue to see Star Wars--Donald J. Trump and his new literary work, signings following a Trump Tower press conference preceded on cable news with the usual half-screen shot of an empty podium, and assurances of an imminent appearance by the man who makes the news media-entertainment complex gears move.
     Four weeks ago, a Business Insider preview of the book referred to it as a "slim volume," a term applied usually to a poet's humble first release, or, in this case, a windbag's effusion of already-heard-many-times talking points, some of which Trump repeated during yesterday's press conference.  I noticed that the first journalist Trump called on was MSNBC's Katy Tur, evolved apparently in Trump's estimation from semi-contemptible woman in his first interview with her to a favorite, working for an allegedly liberal cable news network.
     Today's episode of MSNBC's Morning Joe featured the usual Trump coverage (fuel feeding and sustaining the monster), accompanied by the typical amusement of those on camera, acting helpless as they react to Trump's psychopathic self-confidence; smiling, laughing, and even admitting sometimes that their attention keeps him going.  When news media workers analyze their own effect on the news, it's like the opening of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, when Alice, veteran of Wonderland, enters a flipped world through a mirror.  Trump, like the weirdnesses encountered in Carroll's fiction, rules freak zones.  In the world of today's real America, broken or not, it's important to distinguish the difference between the fantastic (that which stimulates the imagination, in political discourse, with flamboyant crazy talk) and the real world and its people affected by decisions that can put nutjobs into political office, or elect people who at least can do a fair job with the imperfect materials at hand.
   
     A side note: My friend Rhombus, a filmmaker and collage artist, has just uploaded his first video to YouTube, under the title Bag of Confusion.  It's a nineteen minute original film, with lots of music. Check it out if you're so inclined.

                                                                              Vic Neptune
   

     I didn't watch (endure) the Republican presidential candidates debate on CNBC last Wednesday.  I've seen excerpts, and learned that the participants who would be president, as well as the Republican National Committee Chairman, thought the moderators weren't fair in their questioning.

     Senator Marco Rubio claimed that "the ultimate Democratic SuperPac is the mainstream media," an absurd but popular statement, much applauded by the faith-based thinkers in the crowd.  The mainstream media includes Fox News Channel, Fox Business Channel, and CNBC, the last populated with more than its share of right wing capitalist pundits.  

     The candidates used the combative tone, effective when there's nothing substantial to back up their ideas about how to run America.  The moderators, including a woman with a Thackeray character-like name, Becky Quick, asked the candidates questions about their financial policies, the debate's focus, but were attacked venomously, as if "the mainstream media" were preventing brilliant economic minds like Ben Carson (who wants to impose a Biblical ten percent tithe on everyone) from presenting their ideas.

     Governor Chris Christie scolded moderator John Harwood, saying that his interruptions would be considered rude, "even in New Jersey."  This, from the Governor who's berated voters for asking him questions he didn't feel comfortable answering.  That's the key to understanding the candidates' antipathy for the moderators, who supposedly represent all of the mainstream media, when in fact they were simply three experienced journalists asking questions of people who have the temerity to present themselves as worthy of running the executive branch of the United States.
     The RNC Chairman, Reince Priebus, complained about the moderators and their prickling questions.  The candidates do not want to participate in an upcoming NBC debate.  Senator Ted Cruz said that it would be wonderful if the moderators for a debate could include Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.  Indeed, it would be like Ted Cruz's mother praising one of his speeches.  Hannity and Limbaugh willingly and eagerly suck Republican cock every chance they get, so Cruz doesn't want objective moderators, and he's smart enough to know that CNBC, covering Wall Street concerns, is not a liberal network.
     What Becky Quick and the others exposed is the egregious lack of intellect among Republican candidates running for president, brain power useful to the American people, who will be screwed if any of them win the Oval Office.
     Mike Huckabee, the most craven of them all, voluntarily looked to his left past other candidates at Donald Trump, and said, "Donald Trump on any day of the week and twice on Sundays would make a better president than Hillary Clinton."
     What's he doing stroking Trump?  He added, "I'm even wearing one of Trump's ties," referring to a garment of Trump's tie line, a product made in the People's Republic of China.
     Here we see Beta Dogs lining up to be considered as vice presidential material for Trump to someday bestow his billionaire's gratitude upon.  Cruz, in a similar vein, bitched in his power saw voice about the moderators' and "the media" concentrating on colorful aspects of the candidates rather than the strength of their ideas.  He managed in his carefully rehearsed tirade to link together several candidates as a united front against the evils of left wing repressions (like asking presidential candidates what they mean when they say they want to abolish the current health care system but don't offer a replacement solution).
     Finally, Donald Trump, who, with Ben Carson, complained to CNBC before the debate that it must last no more than two hours, including ads, did not receive the usual Trump-centric coverage while on stage.  Near the end he griped that the debate had gone over two hours and, I'm paraphrasing, "Let's wrap this thing up so we can get the hell out of here."
     Donald "Low Energy" Trump lost to the fiery Rubio and others on his periphery, all of whom shone and sparkled like greasy fires, proving that being loathsome, though using that unpleasant trait to misdirect attention towards alleged enemies (the mainstream media), while their real enemy, the voter, must perceive the truth or lies of those corrupted by their quest for power, is an essential component of leadership in a world run by degenerates.
   
                                                                                Vic Neptune

     For approximately eleven hours, Hillary Clinton sat before the Congressional Committee investigating, for what seemed the thirtieth time, the Benghazi affair of September 11, 2012.  Republicans nitpicked, whined, barked, while Committee Democrats griped about the pointlessness of the whole thing.  For the most part, I agree that the Benghazi investigations have nothing to do with the killings in Benghazi of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.  Focus from the political right has been on then Secretary of State Clinton supposedly lacking proper awareness of the dangers faced by the Ambassador and the others.  I don't accept this perspective.

     Overlooked, deliberately or not, is why the attack happened--its relationship to chaotic environmental factors in Libya since the Arab Spring, Muammar al-Gaddafi's assassination during the U.S. air war which supported Libyan anti-government rebels, but failed to follow through with stabilization measures, leading to civil strife involving numerous groups, many of them severely anti-American.

     President Obama's self-admitted failure to support Libya's development jibes with the uncaring attitudes of American and European oil corporation executives who had their nostrils inhaling Libya's oil for years before the dictator died.  Obama rejects nation-building.  He practices nation destabilization.  Libya, important enough to bomb, was left in its post-Gaddafi period with an understaffed American ambassador amid a U.S. strategy for the distressed nation utilizing a CIA presence belying Obama's (and Secretary Clinton's) proclaimed concerns for democratic development and peace.  

     The U.S. war against Libya, which Obama promised at the outset would take "weeks," implying just a few, took weeks extending to seven months.  Never believe predictions about the lengths of military campaigns.

     Their outcomes, too, look from the present like shifting shadows, and one shadow enveloped Hillary Clinton, whose political ambition, to be president, caused the progressively ridiculous Benghazi Committee hearings to happen.  Fighting the possibility of "another Clinton" becoming president, Republicans have directed their poison darts at the former Secretary of State and her alleged blasé incompetence regarding the deaths of four patriots--four Americans whose deaths have been exploited by scoundrels so desperate to dirty Clinton's reputation they don't seem to realize they've made her look better during the eleven hour bitch session.

     Clinton's conduct during the Benghazi affair of 2012 means nothing to me.  American CIA presence in Libya makes a far more interesting tale--part of my country's long tradition of participation in dirty wars with tragic outcomes for the people supposedly being helped.  American foreign policy minds don't give a shit about the Libyan people anymore than they care about Palestinians.  Hillary Clinton, now and when or if she's president, supports American dominance over third world peoples; she supports the government run by Benjamin Netanyahu and its execrable acts towards Palestinians.  She voted to go to war against Iraq.  As president, she would continue the war, adding her own modifications to Obama's remote control assassinations with attendant murders of civilians.  

     The Republicans questioning her during the eleven hour session are all, like Clinton, war-greedy American Exceptionalism fanatics sitting in comfortable chairs never questioning policies that blow off the arms of children in Yemen.  The Republican committee members made her look good, the fools.  They strengthened her support, giving her needed attention as she fights Senator Sanders for the Democratic nomination, with Vice President Biden conveniently announcing he won't run for president the day before Clinton faced the clowns.  

                                                                           Vic Neptune

     This is the third time I've tried to write a post today.  There's something fucked up with my arrow keys.  It has something to do with the undo redo.  When I press undo the redo also highlights.  When I proceed to write again the redo de-highlights, leaving undo highlighted by itself.  

     Is there something wrong with my trackpad?  Am I fucked?  Can a trackpad be replaced without me having to spend money I don't have?  As I seek answers in the internet, I ask the question various ways: the arrow keys, why don't they work?  I get lots of results showing computer users writing about their problems and other users trying to solve them.  Why doesn't somebody from Apple write a definitive answer?  Why doesn't that come up first in the Google search?  Instead, I hear about Jared's story with his arrow keys, and Maggie's. 

     It's not that they don't work entirely.  There seems to be a delay from my fingers pressing them to the execution of the task.  This thing should not behave like an electric guitar using a delay effect so that the musician has to finesse the timing of hitting strings with the sounds expected.  

     As long as I barrel forward I'm fine.  A rant works well that way.  As a serious thinker, though, I like to be more thoughtful as to how I phrase things, and I like the suppleness the arrows provide.  This computer is only three years old, a toddler.  It shouldn't have malfunctions going on yet, but we've lived in an age of planned obsolescence for many decades.  In Lord Love a Duck, a subversive film from 1965 that's the funniest anarchic comedy ever made, Roddy MacDowell talks about planned obsolescence: manufacturers of goods plan on the stuff they make failing before it should so that they can sell updated products a few years later, rather than making stuff that doesn't fail.  

     It's an idea now so obvious that consumers (the acolytes of capitalism) tend to find it worthy of a shrugging of the shoulders, rather than thinking of it as a manipulative con using people as marketing subjects guided slavishly by advertising and their own desires, which, as American wants, drive the economy forward at the wrong end of the tunnel where the light of true freedom isn't.

     My arrow keys still don't work.  Steve Jobs is still dead.  The new movie about him should have a scene or two about the topics of this post.

                                                                                   Vic Neptune

     CNBC, a financial news network characterized by moving stock symbols, Wall Street-centric arrogance, and commentators who've never missed a meal, will host the next Republican presidential candidates debate on October 28.
     Donald Trump and Ben Carson had threatened to not participate, co-writing a letter with an ultimatum to CNBC programmers: Allow opening and closing statements by the candidates, and limit the debate's time to no more than two hours, including commercials.  Considering the still large number of Republican candidates, their opening and closing statements would cut the debate's meaty portion by maybe fifteen minutes, leaving about ninety minutes of debate time, excluding the commercials that make the American political process possible.
     I do the vague math because it explains something important about Donald Trump.  He's a sound bite man, and so is the quieter Carson, who said in a recent interview that a Muslim should never be president.  A political sound bite works best when it seems thoughtless, a spontaneous burp in the direction of ears willing to hear what they want to hear.  Trump, we should realize by now, operates best when the liquid word shit spraying from his mouth isn't diapered by controlling factors, like ungovernable televised time slots.  Allowing a debate of three hours, as Trump learned from the recent CNN one, makes limp the strutting attitude he needs to maintain as prime cock of Republican aspirations in 2015, if not 2016.
     He complained of having to stand for three hours during the CNN debate.  I find it notable that the less in-shape Chris Christie didn't whine about having to do the same thing.  Any worker whose job requires standing for three hours or more should not vote for Donald Trump since he obviously can't comprehend how insensitive he is towards the working class.  During the Kennedy administration, it was unknown to the public that their president had severe chronic back pain stemming from his naval service in World War Two, when he, unlike Trump, put his life on the line.  Kennedy did not complain to journalists about his physical problems.  Neither did Franklin Roosevelt.  Do we want a president who can't handle standing for three hours?
     CNBC decision-makers received Trump and Carson's letter and a few days later they announced the debate would be two hours with commercials, the candidates each getting a thirty second closing statement and at the beginning the chance to answer a single question put to all.  Ratings concerns, of course, convinced the people at CNBC that a debate without the two Republican (poll-decided) frontrunners would garner several million less viewers.
     Trump is right when he boasts about viewers tuning in to see him debate (if debating means using methods like crowd-baiting).  CNBC will probably have a ratings orgasm on October 28.  NBC Universal, so righteous when denouncing Trump for his anti-Mexican slurs last summer, has no problem giving him a platform on one of their networks, a platform he gained while dictating the conditions of the upcoming debate.
     An honorable executive, if one were to exist at CNBC, would've said, "Fuck you, Mr. Trump.  Be in the debate, or not.  We know your threat involves giving up free publicity, something you're not known for.  It's unbelievable that you wouldn't show up."
     Trump runs the show, in the news media and politically, because the networks feed him to feed themselves.
     I remember when the final episode of M*A*S*H was the highest rated TV show ever.  I watched it, I liked it.  Do those ratings from 1983 matter now, compared to the quality of the show itself?  Ratings just mean people look at something on television.  Coverage of the 9/11 attacks must've been among the highest-rated ever (though not spoken about), dwarfing even Trump's performance at the Fox News debate when he bothered again to bring up his enmity towards Rosie O'Donnell, proof of his worthiness as president, if pettiness is one of a leader's traditional traits.
   
                                                                            Vic Neptune
         
       

     I didn't watch the first Democratic presidential candidates debate, but I heard later that Hillary Clinton was "strong."  If elected, she'll make a fine military leader, I suspect.  We should admire an American president's strength and toughness, because the world doesn't need more compassion, right?  The Republican Party's presidential candidates speak like they're ready to deal militarily with Russia.  Clinton, I think, would not be as stupid as Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio when it comes to dealing with Vladimir Putin, but my hopes aren't rosy when it comes to the 2016 election.
     Putin's military activities of the past few years point to a nation looking out for its interests, a practice long in play by U.S. leaders.  President Monroe in the 1820s decided that the United States should have sway over the Caribbean and Latin America.  Putin, like Stalin before him, wants control over "properties" adjacent to Russia.  He does pretty much the same thing American leaders do when they talk about protecting "American interests."  Interests are not the needs of poor people to live in peace.
     Looking out for American interests includes such ill-conceived projects as Obama's handling of the war in Syria.  He didn't and doesn't want to get involved, so he used the air option against ISIS (it worked so well in Libya), and now he's partnered, bizarrely, with Putin in the latter's entry into the Syrian war, with the Russians bombing Syrian rebels and making only a few raids against ISIS.
     It's difficult to understand Obama's decision-making process regarding Syria.  For a year he's conducted a half-assed military campaign against ISIS.  It won't succeed.  He speaks of a community of nations that will destroy the black-clad fanatics, but his approach has two faces.  Obama's against Bashar al-Assad, says he has "to go," but the Assad regime is also against ISIS, and is supported by Putin.  Obama and Putin had a meeting at the United Nations; soon after, Russian warplanes attacked U.S.-supported anti-Assad forces.
     "I'm shocked, Vladimir, what the fuck?"
     I'm not convinced Obama and his advisors knew nothing of Putin's intentions in Syria.  It's just a feeling based on my observations of the deviousness of political minds.  I do think we're looking at a Harvard-educated intellectual's mediocrity when it comes to conducting military campaigns.
     Syria and Yemen are both fucked.  What they need is not more military hardware and bombing campaigns.  The two former superpowers, now post-Cold War actors becoming adversaries again, find in militaristic tensions a new breath of life for their respective defense industries, with the backgrounding War on Terror sounding its ostinato, a musical term meaning a continually repeated rhythm.
     The growing power of information in the hands of most people on the planet means that more and more minds are aware of tactics and strategies of first world powers as they continue their tired practice of ruling the world by fucking over the overwhelming majority, a population getting bigger, and thus, increasingly feared by those in power.  War, then, is control.
     Hillary Clinton's "strength" as president will be the same as Obama's, meaning she will kill lots of people, and the Syrian people's agony will not end, and the weapons makers will continue to enjoy their paradise climate vacations, and none of them will ever go to prison.  Killing millions is the easiest crime to get away with.

                                                                               Vic Neptune
     

     While watching a Democracy Now segment on the suicide bombings in Ankara, Turkey, it occurred to me how I, like other observers, sit by and watch humanity fuck itself.  There are doers and commentators.  The field has players, the booth has those remarking upon the action, describing, analyzing it.  The people who blew themselves up at a peace rally in Turkey's capitol were probably inspired to do so by others who don't want peace with the Kurds.  The Turkish government's position on the Kurds has been horrendous for a very long time.  The Turks, a U.S. ally, make war on a U.S. ally, the PKK, Kurdish fighters formerly on the Americans' practitioners of terror list.
     Is it a coincidence that the Ankara bombings happened during a cease fire period with the Kurds?  Is it unreasonable to suggest that some Turkish authorities may have had something to do with the suicide bombings?  Was the 2004 assassination of Benazir Bhutto the act of a "lone nut" unaffiliated with Pakistani government officials who wanted her dead?
     I ask these questions not to seem like that dreaded American menace, the conspiracy theorist, but to point out how certain events sometimes fall into accord with the desires of certain political and military officials.  In the case of Turkey, a NATO member hosting a U.S. air base from where American warplanes attack ISIS targets and personnel, shall we not wonder what the American government's position is on suicide bombings so obviously meant to disrupt an attempt at a peace process between Turks and Kurds, both U.S. allies?
     The Obama administration seems to be trying to set a balance between enemies and allies for the sake of maintaining a usable and acceptable level of chaos in the Middle East.  Obama's support of the Saudi Arabian-led coalition wrecking Yemen and decimating its people is balanced somewhat by some of those coalition members helping the U.S. bomb ISIS targets.  The U.S. supports the Kurds' fight against ISIS, but lets the Turks bomb the Kurds.  Frankly, if I was president, in charge of these shenanigans, I would just admit, to myself at least, that I've embraced evil, because evil has its uses in geopolitics, and every president eventually realizes this.
     The suicide bombers in Ankara, like most if not all suicide bombers, believed in their mission.  They were doers, trying to make a difference, although their actions were familiar: murdering innocent people is older behavior than the historical record.  God protect us from believers.
     If Turkish government authorities were behind the bombings, the purpose, apart from disrupting the peace process with the Kurds, is probably to institute a police crackdown on dissent.  National emergency, increased security, and boost the defense budget.  It can happen in any country, and has, many times.

                                                                            Vic Neptune