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
   
     

     A few impressions from a day of thinking too much...

     Some lions in Africa are bred and raised to be hunted.  Rod Serling might've written a Twilight Zone script using the premise, but he would've had a lion hunter, played maybe by Jack Warden, shifted into an alternate reality in which humans are bred and raised to be hunted.

     The Republican Party is controlled by right-wing fanatics who couldn't accept the very conservative Kevin McCarthy as the next Speaker of the House.  Paul Ryan, who doesn't want the job because it'll hurt his future presidential ambitions (considering his performance as vice-presidential candidate in 2012, there will be many jokes to be heard if he aims for the Oval Office), may have to take it, since he seems the only one who can gain enough votes.
     Meanwhile, John Boehner, who hoped to retire this month to become a lobbyist, will have to hang on to the job he evidently hates.  Rod Serling might've written a Twilight Zone script using the premise of a man who achieves his dream job, Speaker of the House, has a huge new gavel carved for him, but finds himself unable to achieve anything due to the crazies in his party.  He then finds himself stuck in the job with the uncooperative nuts.  The camera moves up and up to show him inside a chamber filled with gibbering and fighting politicians, all surrounded by blackness, and the impotent sound of the huge gavel.

     It's fun to watch squirrels eat.

     The Pentagon program, costing half a billion dollars, which was to have trained Syrian rebels to battle ISIS, has failed utterly.  Only a few recruits were trained, and I mean a few.  Weapons ended up in enemy hands.  Taxpayer money was wasted on a program applauded vigorously when Obama announced it during a State of the Union address.
     Sometimes things that seem brilliant, like they can't go wrong, are fucking insane.  As soon as he spoke of the plan in the address, I thought of the Contras and how well that went.  Rod Serling might've written a Twilight Zone script in which a nation at war is so seriously fucked up, with no solutions possible, a race of deities removes the country from Earth and places it under a dome on Mars.  The combatants don't realize they're no longer on Earth.  Even the gravity is that of Earth.  The protagonist, maybe played by William Shatner, realizes something's up when his sergeant gets blasted by machine gun fire, and the man's blood runs down an invisible barrier.  Then what happens?  I don't know, I haven't seen the episode.

     One nice thing about really cold weather is that drunken college students don't walk around town then, shouting and kicking things.

     Looking at news items on the Internet today, I saw a teaser about a Picasso painting discovered recently.  I didn't read the article or take a close look at the painting.  I don't really care about Picasso's art.  If a newly discovered Max Ernst painting, or one by Mark Rothko, among others, were discovered, I'd read the article and examine the painting.
     This reminds me of John Grisham, the lawyer/bestselling novelist.  The ready availability of his work, I mean.  Picasso is so famous, even though his stuff is radically weird, but it's a weirdness gone mainstream.  Grisham isn't weird, but his books have been assembled from several forests, so numerous are their copies.  One of these copies, of the novel The Client, was in my ex-girlfriend's bathroom for a while.  I sat on the toilet one night and read the first few pages.  I decided to read the book whenever I took a shit at my girlfriend's apartment.  I didn't get beyond about twenty pages, having lost interest in the project and the book, but I still associate John Grisham's writing with literature to shit by.

     I saw a teaser for some entertainment news program: the Kardashian women sitting for interviews and smiling, along with the narrator saying, "The Kardashians.  Do you know them as well as you think you do?"
     Is there more to know?  Have they reserved a trace of dignity in the past decade and now they're going to give it away?  Did they decide to hold back their opinions on some subjects when doing their various shows?  Are they more intelligent than they seem?
     The constantly regarded Kardashians constitute something like a religion.  A devout Christian can picture Christ on the Cross, Jesus baptized by John, Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, Mary Magdalene washing and anointing Jesus's feet and the Apostles giving her a hard time about it.  These stories never needed television to make images in worshippers' minds.  They had cathedral windows.  The Kardashians are a modern religion, in high definition imagery, for those looking at what it might be like to live mundane lives in mansions and luxury hotels--Heaven to the materialistic mind.
     Self-obsessed Armenian-American idiots whining about their interpersonal relationships make another version, perhaps, of faux Serling's battle torn nation transferred to Mars.  The Kardashians are stuck in a prison they volunteered to inhabit, and their options, apart from working in the fashion industry or living from the cushion of their money, are few.  Go to YouTube and listen to Kim Kardashian singing if you want to realize the lack of talent we're dealing with here.  Should she have the flair and voice of Beyonce Knowles?  No.  But she isn't even as good as Kei$ha.
     The Kardashian talent is performing "reality" in lives under surveillance.  They're rich, they represent an aspect of the American Dream, but not all dreams are interesting.
     I didn't tune in to find out what I may not know about the Kardashians.  Rod Serling might've written a Twilight Zone script in which the Kardashians prove to be paid actors, moving on now to other acting gigs after a long successful run with their show.  The actress who played Kim was excellent, the perfect dingbat looking for love and fulfillment in marriage to self-obsessed men.  The actress who played the mother, Chris Jenner, managed to come across as wise at times, but also pathetically driven to be a pal to her progeny.  The actor who played Bruce Jenner turned in a stunning performance as the low key, chilled out man with a secret desire to become a woman.
     The Serling twist?  We're all acting.  Watched by cameras, under automatic suspicion by the NSA, stuck in reality--just don't get typecast.

                                                                               Vic Neptune

   
   

     In 2010, President Obama sent his counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, to Yemen to meet with then President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
     In a Gulf News article from September 20, 2010, we read that Brennan "discussed...bilateral cooperation against the continuing threat of Al Qaeda in Yemen."
     Brennan delivered to Saleh a letter written by Obama, a friendly communication reading like a travel brochure composed by a former hippy:
   
     "We are also committed to helping Yemen achieve a future that builds upon the extraordinary talents of its people and the richness of its history.  Yemen possesses a deeply rooted culture, and is widely admired around the world for its ancient traditions, beautiful countryside, and hospitable people.  I am convinced that the people of Yemen can do more than overcome the threats that they face--they can build a future of greater peace and opportunity for their children."
     Five years later, 2,355 Yemeni civilians (Obama's "hospitable" and extraordinarily talented people) have been killed in a war led by Saudi Arabia, supported by the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Qatar, Senegal, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, and the United States.  The last country named, led by its current president, supported Ali Abdullah Saleh, who lost power in 2012 and now supports the Houthi rebels warring against the righteous coalition led by oil billionaires, using military hardware purchased mainly from the United States to slaughter Yemeni civilians and belligerents.
     When Saleh, a man in his seventies, left Yemen initially in January 2012, he went to New York for medical treatment, then on to Ethiopia for a day, then to Yemen.  Yemenis protested his return.  Like other democracy-seeking citizens during the Arab Spring, many of them were murdered by Saleh's government forces at the same time the Assad regime was murdering Syrian protestors.
     In 2013, according to the Wikipedia article on him, Saleh "opened a museum documenting his 33 years in power...One of the museum's central display cases exhibits a pair of burnt trousers that Saleh was wearing at the time of his assassination attempt in June 2011."
     In the Wikipedia article, the reader can see pictures of Saleh meeting with George W. Bush and also shaking hands with Dick Cheney.  The War on Terror makes familiar bedfellows.
     Saleh, like the United States during the Carter-Reagan-first Bush years, was an ally of Saddam Hussein, and also supported the latter's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
     Are politicians whores?  Will they fuck anyone as long as the money's right?  Is Obama, in his dealings with Saleh, one of these whores?
     "I am convinced," Obama wrote in his letter handed to Saleh in 2010 by John Brennan, current Director of the CIA, "that the people of Yemen can do more than overcome the threats that they face--they can build a future of greater peace and opportunity for their children."
     Hard to do, when a coalition of oil rich nations supported by the United States, led by the same man who wrote the above letter, is bombing those "hospitable" people, with his tacit approval.
   
                                                                             Vic Neptune

     Ben Carson thinks he knows what he would do if he found himself face to face with a mass murderer pointing a gun at him.  He would try, he said, to rally those with him and rush the gunman.  He assumes he would behave like a character played by Bruce Willis in an action film.  He's wrong.
     Donald Trump supported Carson's comments in a tweet.  The two men, both running for president,  a position implying gravitas, seem to think they know how they'd react if a maniac with a gun, bent on killing as many people as possible, were to point the weapon at them with obvious deadly intent.
     Macho statements are easy to make from the comfort of the couch on the set of Fox and Friends.  Carson will likely never be in the position the students menaced and killed in Oregon were last week. He's a gun rights advocate.  Better than chastising Congress and gun lobbies for allowing the chronic misinterpretation of the Second Amendment to continue, Carson prefers to say the shooting victims in Oregon should've handled things differently.  He may as well have said they should've contracted flu and not gone to school that day.
     The Second Amendment speaks of the necessity of not preventing citizens from owning firearms due to the possibility, far more real then than now, of invasion from without, as happened in the War of 1812.  With their own guns, citizens could be formed into militias to help fight off enemies.  I wonder about Second Amendment enthusiasts of our time, defending even irresponsible gun-related laws.  That anyone can buy an assault rifle is, in my opinion, an egregiously bad idea.  That NRA mentalities won't budge even in the face of children being slaughtered, as in Newtown, and preach a pro-gun dogma, as does Carson, is insane.
     I'd like to ask Second Amendment lovers if they'd really like to do what the language of the Amendment calls for citizens to do: join a militia in case of invasion.  Would Carson or Trump really be willing to join a militia and actually fight for their country?  Trump, old enough to have been drafted during the Vietnam War, received deferments then, like that other non-combatant patriot, Dick Cheney.  Like Newt Gingrich.  In the past, these men proved they weren't willing to fight for their country.  Why would they fight now?
     Carson finds it easy to make a few remarks on what he would do.  Anybody can say, "I would do this..."  What isn't easy is feeling the nerve-twitching intensity of a real deadly situation and then acting in a heroic manner, as a young student, also a military veteran, did in Oregon, rushing the gunman and getting shot multiple times.  Carson didn't know about this until Norah O'Donnell on CBS told him.  He said that just proved his point, but what I saw was a presidential candidate with more feeling for bullets than for the people whose relatives and friends were murdered.  We can't ask them what went on in their minds before they were shot to death, but with imagination we can do a better job than Carson and Trump, wondering about what can be done in a narrow field of choices amid the sounds of gunfire, screaming, and the shaking hell of panic.

                                                                               Vic Neptune

     U.S. warplanes destroyed a Doctors Without Borders clinic in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on October 3, 2015, four days before the fourteenth anniversary of the U.S. attack on that country.  It always takes Pentagon officials a while, two days in this case, to acknowledge their negligent homicides.  Reports usually come from the place attacked, Pentagon spokespersons won't confirm or deny the veracity, and finally, it turns out that when civilians are slaughtered by U.S. ordinance, survivors and investigators arriving on site soon after don't invent stories about corpses of women and children.
     In Kunduz, a city recently attacked by Taliban forces and fought over by the U.S.-backed Afghan Army, the Doctors Without Borders clinic was a refuge for war weary injured people.  The organization's policy that no weapons are allowed in their facilities suggests that the Afghan forces who requested the U.S. airstrike were lying or mistaken when they said Taliban fire was coming from or near the clinic.  Doctors Without Borders lost ten personnel in the attack.  Twelve others died, women and children mostly; six civilians, according to one witness, were burned in their hospital beds.
     It's a war crime, Doctors Without Borders declares, and they're right, but then, first world powers commit war crimes and get away with them year after year.
     Pentagon officials always shuffle their papers when U.S. forces commit atrocities.  Today, a general assured us they will conduct a thorough investigation.  I always feel comforted at the thought of someone committing manslaughter and being allowed to investigate himself.
     If I sound pissed off, I'm not sorry.  I decided years ago I'm utterly opposed to the glibly used term collateral damage.  The same things get said every time: "We regret that..."  "The Taliban [or Hamas, or insert whatever enemy] conducts their operations in urban areas, near civilians, and unfortunately, accidents happen."
     I know the U.S. has come a long way from Curtis LeMay and Robert McNamara, indiscriminately blowing up thousands upon thousands of civilians, deliberately and mathematically.  Still, trying to solve war issues with air power, the Obama Remote Push Button Doctrine, leads to the same LeMay-like callousness, if on a smaller scale.  On that small scale, though, imagine being injured in a war-torn city in a raped country, lying on your hospital bed, and then getting shot at by an AC-130 gunship making regular passes for about an hour, targeting specifically the building you're stuck in, unable to rise, due to previous wounds, from the bed that will consume you in flames.  It astonishes me that there are people in our government, in our society, in our world at large, who never think about this kind of thing, who never question generals and politicians conducting this diseased and endless war most popular with those selling weapons, like Pentagon arms dealers.
     In another war, the Obama administration has sold ninety billion dollars' worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, providing also logistical support for the latter country's devastating war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, a country on the verge of mass famine and every bit as screwed up as Syria.           Obama expressed his frustration with mass shootings in America in the aftermath of the Oregon community college killings.  How does he feel about forces under his command killing children and women with far bigger guns than those used by the Oregon shooter?  At what point will he say, "Enough!"
     When will any of the motherfuckers who lead us, fourteen years away from 9/11 and the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan, have the guts to speak out against the inhumanity embraced by this country as it blindly seeks to avenge the inhumanity of 9/11?  It takes a hive mind of shit-for-brains Pentagon fools and their supporters in Washington to believe in a strategy more effective at creating enemies than stopping them.

                                                                             Vic Neptune
   
   

     Would you like to yell at a politician?
     I've seen it done on TV when politicians speak at gatherings--town hall meetings or venues with "backdrops" composed of human beings symbolically representing the politician's publicly stated views.  A protestor in such settings doesn't have much of a chance remaining in the room, so he or she must shout the point of disagreement, the words brief as if they're written on a sign.  Since the protestor just sounds angry, and is, the politician need only remain silent, waiting for the muscle to shove the citizen expressing free speech out of hearing of those present, and the microphones.
     Savvy politicians, once yelled at, may make a witty comment, or a quip not so funny, as when Sarah Palin used the opportunity of being yelled at to praise the police and first responders, while ridiculing the Black Lives Matter movement--a clever, but malicious jab, illustrating her genuine pettiness combined with the contemporary Republican willingness to embrace divisiveness.
     After a protestor gets taken away by Secret Service men or private bodyguards, I wonder what happens to them outside the event.  If they remain argumentative, a ride in a police car may take them away from the object of their displeasure.  The politician, meanwhile, works his or her mouth, saying the usual things:
   
     America is the greatest nation in the world, the greatest in history, and our greatest days are ahead.
     There may be many reasons for pessimism, but hope will take us far.
     America has nothing to apologize for.
     Our great democracy finds itself challenged by an ever-changing world.
     Beans make us fart, but cheese makes us irregular.
   
     News cameras follow the politician, but I want to see the arrested protestor on the back seat of the police car, handcuffed, thinking about the televised encounter, hoping it made a difference.  The protestor may already realize his or her outburst means nothing in the big scheme, but it must be exhilarating to break with decorum at a gathering where the only focus should be a politician running things already, or wanting to run things.
     The Iraqi man who threw his shoes at President Bush during a press conference did so for good reasons: Bush made the decision to invade Iraq based on fabricated evidence of Hussein's WMD programs; he appointed L. Paul Bremer as virtual viceroy--Bremer's mismanagement fueled the Iraq Civil War--and the President and his advisors, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld especially, destabilized the Middle East, making decisions leading to the wrecking of Iraq's infrastructure, to the maiming, torturing, displacing, and killing of hundreds of thousands of people, making them mass murderers and doom bringers on a scale the next school massacre perpetrator can only dream about.
     None of these horrible realities meant much to news reporters when showing and talking about the shoe throwing incident.  They talked about Bush's quick reflexes, the fact, too, that shoes, for God's sake, were thrown.  In Iraq, shoes, associated with dirt, thrown at a world leader, mean, "You are shit, you are contemptible."
     Bush, oblivious to the meaning of the man's malice, joked about it.  The shoe thrower got beaten up and went to prison.  Bush returned to Washington, or Crawford, Texas, to take another vacation.
     The problem with yelling at politicians is similar to the problem of trying to talk to them.  Even reasonable, polite questioners won't necessarily get answers relevant to what they've asked.
Politicians' minds calculate angles as they talk:
     What shall I say to not offend that particular group which supports me with enough campaign cash to buy a portion of the next election?
     Jeb Bush asked himself this while trying to sound compassionate discussing the latest mass shooting at a community college in Oregon.  Not wanting to offend the National Rifle Association's sociopathic leadership, Bush took a typical Republican tack on the subject, simultaneously sounding prim by not using the expression as it's usually spoken:
     "Stuff happens."
     He meant "Shit happens," but if he'd said that, I guess he would've sounded insensitive.
     Yes, former Governor Bush, the young students shot to death by a white man with a collection of automatic weapons so numerous they were hardly needed for defensive purposes, had families and friends who can now comfort themselves with your words, "Stuff happens," when they vote in the Oregon primary, fuck you.
     Do I want to yell at a politician?  No.  I don't even want to be near them.

                                                                         Vic Neptune

     "How do you know where to put the slide?"
     I played bass trombone in high school and college.  Many people, musicians even, asked me the question above.  There are no visibly marked delineations along the slide.  It's a matter of feeling and hearing where the seven positions are.  With practice, the forward part of concentration doesn't pay attention to the positions' locations.  It's like typing, eating cereal, driving, putting Chinese crap in a box on an assembly line: the body learns motions, does all the work eventually without letting the meddling mind intrude.
     When another student musician would ask me the slide-placement question, I'd say, "You just learn it."  I'd also think, if the questioner were a trumpeter, why he or she didn't think about the basic look of the controls of their own instrument--three keys to press down like pistons in various combinations, offering a multi-octave range.
     While driving yesterday, I steered the car around numerous blocked off streets.  Summer road construction and repair will go on until it gets too cold.  Making what seemed to be my twentieth left turn, I noticed my left hand's position on the turn signal, its downward push to activate the left side lights on the car's hull.  Until my attention went there, the action, as usual, had been unconscious.  The term autopilot is often used to describe people "going through the motions," implying a need to get done with a task, in spite of mental and physical exhaustion.  It's a state of mind, in other words, regarded as something unpleasant, the result of circumstances pushing us into strain, and deadness to outer realities.
     Playing trombone, moving the slide where it should go, though mechanical, like driving and typing, has the virtue of eventually allowing musical expression and individual artistry to overtop the necessary foundation of learning early on where it is one puts the slide to sound an F, an E flat, a B.  When the positions are learned and practiced, one doesn't have to think about knowing "where to put the slide."
     Knowing, strangely enough, requires no active thought at all.

                                                                             Vic Neptune

     Pentagon minds looking at Syria, and filtering their word trash into the news media via Defense Department sources, have imposed a word on civilian Americans that ranks in my mind as one of the most inelegant words I've heard: deconflict.

     Obama and Putin met in New York during the United Nations mega-gathering.  Emphasis on their handshake and "shortest photo op in history" dominated cable news talk on their meeting.  Frosty.  Brrr.  Cold War Two?  

     Fox News Channel hosts and hostesses enthused, as usual, about Putin's toughness, comparing him to the do-nothing Obama.  This simple, craven tactic aims to further uselessly scrape barnacles from a ship that's already sailed.  Obama's tenure ends in fifteen months.  Putin will last longer.

     Russian expansionism is real.  Crimea, Ukraine, and northern Kazakhstan, not yet attacked, but ethnic Russians there feel increasingly nationalistic, matching Kazakhstan's own patriotic surge as ethnic Russians have been imprisoned for fighting in Ukraine.

     Russian air bases have been built in Syria, the government of Bashar al-Assad long-supported by Putin.  The meeting between Obama and Putin (they even sat at the same table for lunch) left us guessing, but many of us assumed Putin would direct his air force in Syria to attack ISIS targets.  The first Russian foray by air attacked rebels instead, reportedly killing a lot of civilians.  This looks like a double cross on Obama.  Is it?  I don't know, because the administration's policy and actions taken toward ISIS have made no sense, militarily.  

     Last year, when Obama said ISIS was going to feel the pain, "be degraded and destroyed," he sounded serious.  There've been airstrikes.  Syrian civilians have been killed by U.S. might from above, and ISIS fighters and leaders dropped dead in pieces.  Obama didn't commit U.S. troops to the endeavor, preferring proxy forces; a promised Contra-like U.S.-trained Syrian force with Saudi Arabian soil in the role played in the 1980s by Argentina, Costa Rica, and Honduras in Reagan's own Dirty War drama.

     One significant problem in trying to defeat ISIS is in dealing with their mobility.  Their reach has extended from northern Syria to the middle of Iraq, with satellite influence in Yemen, Libya, and the occasional maniac with a gun in Second Amendmentstan.  Without sending in ground troops, Obama relies on an ineffective Iraqi Army.  The pace of training the Syrian "freedom fighters" has been slow, perhaps careful.  Rebel groups fighting Bashar al-Assad's forces vary according to tribe, religious sect, but many of them hate American policies as much as does ISIS.  

     It doesn't surprise me that Putin directed his air force to attack al-Assad's non-ISIS enemies.  He's helping his ally, but then, whenever U.S. forces attack ISIS, Obama helps al-Assad, who doesn't want ISIS on his territory.  Syria may have taken over from Iraq as the world's biggest clusterfuck, a word known, I presume, to the same Pentagon minds using the far less clear word, deconflict.

     According to my Mac-supplied dictionary, that word means, "reduce the risk of collision between (aircraft, airborne weaponry, etc.) in an area by coordinating their movements."

     Not in an area, actually, but in a volume, since area deals with two dimensions, but okay, the Secretary of the Air Force on CNN this morning spoke of the necessity of deconfliction in Syrian airspace.  She didn't say that coordinating fast-moving warplanes, helicopters, and unmanned aerial vehicles in cooperation with another major power should be thought out well in advance of the actual campaign.  

     Did Obama and Putin in their meeting not discuss deconfliction?  Should we accept the suggestion that Putin sent his warplanes to bomb rebel targets without knowing concurrent U.S. air activities in Syrian airspace?  

     I propose that both Putin and Obama aren't telling us everything they know about their plans to further alter the Syrian landscape, and its people good and bad, with explosions and shrapnel.

     Russian strikes against Syria have been played up in American news.  It gets John McCain's goat that Obama hasn't tried to overthrow al-Assad.  The Russians look in our news like aggressive duplicitous assholes.  Our news people don't mention the uncounted thousands of obliterated human beings in the Middle East, who breathed their last breaths right before American bombs slammed shut the light in their eyes.  

     Deconflict: another way of saying, We don't know what the fuck is going on.

                                                                             Vic Neptune