The super PAC dedicated to the elevation of Jeb Bush to the presidency raised about 118 million dollars, wasted about eighty-seven million in mail flyers, TV ads, all of which turned into quickly processed mind candy for voters nonplused by the prospect of another Bush leading the free world.
Some of Bush's advisors and super PAC operators spoke to reporters within seventy-two hours of his announcement of campaign "suspension." They all spoke in hindsight, offering well-reasoned causes for their man's failure to generate more voter enthusiasm and his overwhelming defeat by the grandiloquence of Donald Trump. Bush's people have it figured out, because they've had, in my estimation, approximately six months to perform an intellectual autopsy on Jeb's doomed campaign, an endeavor they labored on diligently, hoping, as humans tend to do, that the obvious failure would never manifest itself--the kind of thinking prevalent in Hitler's bunker. This is why I don't put my faith in human institutions. What mankind creates and carries forth to term and beyond is prone to fuck-ups.
During a slow period at work a few days ago, my friend and coworker Dave and I discussed how every organization has a nitwit working there. The nitwit has been working for the organization long enough that there's no will in upper management to fire him or her. The nitwit sometimes works in upper management. The nitwit's incompetence and total unsuitability for his or her job never plays as a factor in the minds of upper management if or when they consider how the organization can improve efficiency. Sometimes it's a personality thing. The nitwit is a downer, perhaps, who has no vision, no ability to bring any freshness to the workplace, no open-mindedness.
The 118 million dollar fiasco which "suspended" itself last Saturday had a nitwit: Jeb Bush.
This enormous dumbshit campaign that could've significantly improved a large American city's public school district if the money had gone to actual needs instead of to the hopeless hyperextension of a failure obvious to any objective and intelligent observer since last August, was run by a group of educated idiots suffering from too much hope. In 2015-2016, they actually believed American voters would give a shit about Jeb Bush's record as Florida's past governor; would ignore his family ties to two past presidents, both of whom entangled America's fortunes, for the bad, with Iraq and the Middle East in general; would buy into Jeb Bush's relatively traditional Conservative views in a time when in the last ten years the Republican Party has produced nitwits like Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney as the best they could offer as executive possibilities.
The old long view of history gives us the idea that one can't know for sure what the true significance of some major event might be. The long-term effects of World War Two, for instance, have been the subject of numerous, thoughtful, and often brilliant books. Now, in Tweet World, we get instant examinations of events and people's actions that should take many years to figure out.
Jeb Bush's PAC operators and his advisors have given their quick analyses of why no one wanted what they were selling. Their smooth words reveal, on the surface, smart political operatives "telling it like it is." To me, their readiness to explain glibly their candidate's flameout shows craven and cynical assholes, none of whom had the guts to tell Jeb Bush, plainly, that he didn't have a chance to win the nomination. Instead, these worthies "stuck by" Bush, giving him strategic and keep-the-faith-type advice in the face of the besieged walls of the Jeb campaign crumbling, all the while, astonishingly, not bothering to get a handle on the workings of social media or to hire a young, hip Republican computer geek to take charge of their net-based outreach, which would've prevented such blunders as letting the Trump campaign, just a week ago, buy the domain name, JebBush.com and make it go to Trump's campaign website.
Jeb Bush himself had concern about his glasses: should he wear them, should he get contact lenses? Late in the campaign he sat in the eye doctor's examination chair and submitted to switching to contacts.
"Trying to attract the ladies, Jeb?"
"No, Doctor," he replies, chuckling. "I'm happily married."
"Just sick of wearing spectacles, huh?"
"Not exactly. It's actually an image thing. One of my advisors suggested I might look less like a CPA and more like the scion of a political dynasty destined to assume the highest office in the land."
"You might have something there, Jeb. I recall that Sarah Palin wore glasses the whole time she and McCain made their run way back in oh-eight. Last I checked, the vice president's last name is Biden, and he don't wear glasses."
Vic Neptune
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Truce means to stop fighting for a certain amount of time. Two righteous powers making war in the same country, Russia and the United States of America, have been trying to bring about in Syria something they're calling a "ceasefire." The idea, I guess, is to take a breather, give the tormented civilian population a chance to bury family members, have a drink or read a book without wondering if they're about to swallow or scan a written down sentence for the last time. It's part of the "peace process." Diplomats like Secretary of State John Kerry and the man always described in American news as his Russian "counterpart," Sergei Lavrov, talk on the phone, meet occasionally, along with Syrian representatives as well as Arab representatives from other nations, to figure out how to unravel the biggest Gordian Knot clusterfuck on the planet.
I offer my views on this horrible subject, recognizing my limitations: a) I'm not Syrian or an Arab or a Muslim; b) I've never traveled to the Middle East; c) I have no military experience, I've never been shot at, I've never witnessed a bomb explosion or an attack on civilians; d) I have relatives dead and living who fought in World War Two and in the Vietnam War, so I have loved ones who have been wounded physically and psychologically in the practice of warfare, which includes killing people, something I know these loved ones have done and did not relish.
Syria's Russian connection predates the rule of Bashar al-Assad. The Russians have a warm water naval base in Latakia. Their lack of warm water ports for their navies has been a problem for the projection of Russian might for centuries. The Russia-Syria connection isn't going away. Putin supports Assad because Assad holds the country together better than some rebel group, or ISIS, could. Assad's reaction to the Arab Spring was to fire bullets and shoot tear gas canisters at it, killing hundreds of protestors who were waking up, with the example of Egypt especially, to the possibility of ending the reign of a dynastic dictator. In the much smaller nation of Bahrain, the U.S.-supported dictator there also brutalized and killed protestors, but President Obama had no problem with that because Bahrain is home to the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and the U.S. Fifth Fleet. Short of raping Obama's dog, Bahrain's leader can do whatever he wants.
The truce proposal of February 2016, after at least 250,000 Syrians have been killed in a civil war both United States and Russian leaders have been looking at for years now without doing shit to stop it, sounds like a good idea. Ceasefire, stop fighting, come on, people! American, Russian, and Syrian government forces, however, directed by their leaders' wishes, want the ceasefire to have conditions; namely, that Assad's loyalists can still kill "terrorists," i.e. anyone against Assad, which includes rebel groups supported by the United States. The U.S. wants to continue bombing ISIS and al-Nusra Front targets, while Russia will also keep up its bombing, probably in support of Assad's wishes. This will not, as proposed, be a ceasefire, that is, if words mean anything.
Still, Vladimir Putin is optimistic, calling the ceasefire agreement "a real step that can stop the bloodshed."
As his military forces, along with Assad's and Obama's, kill people.
Why are these motherfuckers bothering to do this? Is it for show? The showy proposal of holding meetings in Munich, applying their surrogates' brainpower to an impossible situation, and trying to show they care about all the murdered Syrian civilians, while reserving the right to kill for peace, shows how diseased world leaders are when they mess around with countries doomed by manipulative first world policy making in regions of the planet treated as playthings for centuries. When killers claim they have the solution to the problem they caused in the first place, it's likely their motives are hostile. All three nations, Russia, Syria, and the United States, are using this ceasefire proposal to further their military efforts against rebels fighting Assad, al-Nusra Front (an al-Qaeda affiliate), and ISIS, all while Syrian Kurdish forces fight ISIS, opposed by perpetual Kurdish enemy Turkey, a NATO member supported by the U.S., which also supports and arms the Kurds who are also armed by the Russians. These three nations are simultaneously fighting friends of their friends, enemies of their enemies, and enemies of their friends. All three nations fight ISIS, which occupies one third of Syria, meaning that that geographical fact alone makes the words "ceasefire in Syria" a joke.
A man in Damascus, reacting to news of the ceasefire, told Elizabeth Palmer of CBS News, "We don't want a ceasefire until all the terrorists are out of our country."
Was he referring to all those terrorized by Russian bombing? By Assad's bombing? Terror against civilians caused by U.S. bombing? State terror is the blackened lung denied by those in power and those supporting them in the news media, when it comes to the health of any nation using force to get what it wants. We like to pretend our leaders never terrorize people, but they do. Obama wants to kill a suspected terrorist in Yemen; he sends an armed unmanned aerial vehicle over the target area, sometimes for many days and nights, the thing flying over a village, high up enough that it can't be seen but it can be heard, and the people down below know something's going to happen, and maybe, as in the past, many times, a "mistake" will be made, and dozens of innocent people will lose body parts, get their organs pasted to trees, lose friends and family if they survive, and maybe a few atypical Western journalists will investigate and give a shit, while the perpetrators boast proudly about protection of the homeland, their consciences long ago ruined by repeated involvement in underhanded murderous deeds, like reserving the right to kill during a ceasefire.
Stalin's suffering from signing all those execution notices came from writer's cramp.
Vic Neptune
I offer my views on this horrible subject, recognizing my limitations: a) I'm not Syrian or an Arab or a Muslim; b) I've never traveled to the Middle East; c) I have no military experience, I've never been shot at, I've never witnessed a bomb explosion or an attack on civilians; d) I have relatives dead and living who fought in World War Two and in the Vietnam War, so I have loved ones who have been wounded physically and psychologically in the practice of warfare, which includes killing people, something I know these loved ones have done and did not relish.
Syria's Russian connection predates the rule of Bashar al-Assad. The Russians have a warm water naval base in Latakia. Their lack of warm water ports for their navies has been a problem for the projection of Russian might for centuries. The Russia-Syria connection isn't going away. Putin supports Assad because Assad holds the country together better than some rebel group, or ISIS, could. Assad's reaction to the Arab Spring was to fire bullets and shoot tear gas canisters at it, killing hundreds of protestors who were waking up, with the example of Egypt especially, to the possibility of ending the reign of a dynastic dictator. In the much smaller nation of Bahrain, the U.S.-supported dictator there also brutalized and killed protestors, but President Obama had no problem with that because Bahrain is home to the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and the U.S. Fifth Fleet. Short of raping Obama's dog, Bahrain's leader can do whatever he wants.
The truce proposal of February 2016, after at least 250,000 Syrians have been killed in a civil war both United States and Russian leaders have been looking at for years now without doing shit to stop it, sounds like a good idea. Ceasefire, stop fighting, come on, people! American, Russian, and Syrian government forces, however, directed by their leaders' wishes, want the ceasefire to have conditions; namely, that Assad's loyalists can still kill "terrorists," i.e. anyone against Assad, which includes rebel groups supported by the United States. The U.S. wants to continue bombing ISIS and al-Nusra Front targets, while Russia will also keep up its bombing, probably in support of Assad's wishes. This will not, as proposed, be a ceasefire, that is, if words mean anything.
Still, Vladimir Putin is optimistic, calling the ceasefire agreement "a real step that can stop the bloodshed."
As his military forces, along with Assad's and Obama's, kill people.
Why are these motherfuckers bothering to do this? Is it for show? The showy proposal of holding meetings in Munich, applying their surrogates' brainpower to an impossible situation, and trying to show they care about all the murdered Syrian civilians, while reserving the right to kill for peace, shows how diseased world leaders are when they mess around with countries doomed by manipulative first world policy making in regions of the planet treated as playthings for centuries. When killers claim they have the solution to the problem they caused in the first place, it's likely their motives are hostile. All three nations, Russia, Syria, and the United States, are using this ceasefire proposal to further their military efforts against rebels fighting Assad, al-Nusra Front (an al-Qaeda affiliate), and ISIS, all while Syrian Kurdish forces fight ISIS, opposed by perpetual Kurdish enemy Turkey, a NATO member supported by the U.S., which also supports and arms the Kurds who are also armed by the Russians. These three nations are simultaneously fighting friends of their friends, enemies of their enemies, and enemies of their friends. All three nations fight ISIS, which occupies one third of Syria, meaning that that geographical fact alone makes the words "ceasefire in Syria" a joke.
A man in Damascus, reacting to news of the ceasefire, told Elizabeth Palmer of CBS News, "We don't want a ceasefire until all the terrorists are out of our country."
Was he referring to all those terrorized by Russian bombing? By Assad's bombing? Terror against civilians caused by U.S. bombing? State terror is the blackened lung denied by those in power and those supporting them in the news media, when it comes to the health of any nation using force to get what it wants. We like to pretend our leaders never terrorize people, but they do. Obama wants to kill a suspected terrorist in Yemen; he sends an armed unmanned aerial vehicle over the target area, sometimes for many days and nights, the thing flying over a village, high up enough that it can't be seen but it can be heard, and the people down below know something's going to happen, and maybe, as in the past, many times, a "mistake" will be made, and dozens of innocent people will lose body parts, get their organs pasted to trees, lose friends and family if they survive, and maybe a few atypical Western journalists will investigate and give a shit, while the perpetrators boast proudly about protection of the homeland, their consciences long ago ruined by repeated involvement in underhanded murderous deeds, like reserving the right to kill during a ceasefire.
Stalin's suffering from signing all those execution notices came from writer's cramp.
Vic Neptune
Monday, February 22, 2016
No more Jeb to kick around. Without waiting to find out whether he came in fourth or fifth place in the South Carolina Primary, the former president's brother, the former president's son, announced his withdrawal from the nomination quest. I knew his campaign was finished last Fall when he got testy with a group of reporters asking him questions. Trump can insult reporters to their faces; when Bush gets mad he seems like he's out of place, like William H. Macy's character in Fargo, trying to get away with the fake kidnapping of his wife. Macy's character doesn't have the criminal mindset, he's basically just a dork car salesman uncomfortable inside the lie he's trying to live. Bush, similarly, didn't have the go-for-the-throat skills of the natural sociopathic politician. Trump, we've known since last year, does.
A journalist on MSNBC this morning concluded that "Jeb is just too nice a guy."
Mild-mannered Bush--a contrast with the older brother, who was vicious enough to approve torture.
Speaking of torture, Kerry Sanders of MSNBC was in a Nevada restaurant this morning (preparatory to the Nevada Republican Caucus), talking with patrons, one of whom, a middle-aged woman, said that Trump's enthusiasm for the return of waterboarding of "terrorists" is a good idea. Anything that helps protect "our soldiers," she said, "is a good thing."
Sanders didn't ask the question I would've asked: "How does waterboarding protect American soldiers?"
I suspect the answer would've been something like, "The terrorists will spill information that will help uncover terror plots."
It's shaky ground, but Trump embraces the unsteadiness of the pro-torture argument, because, I think, it appeals to the sadistic, stupid, and disgusting instincts of his dumbest supporters--in other words, most of them. Trump's proposals, given usually at his mob mentality rallies, never take into account how much law will have to be abolished, how much of the U.S. Constitution, will have to be rewritten; how difficult and time-consuming these legal matters are to carry out, and in the end, how often the final results don't conform to the original proposals. Let's prevent every Muslim from coming to the United States. Let's make Mexico pay for a nearly 2,000 mile-long wall. Let's overturn the current laws against torturing people. From a practical standpoint, these three notions alone are not just bad ideas. They're megalomaniacal fantasies, bought into by about one out of three Republicans, enough of a minority to lead that party to the quashing of the influence of its more reasonable thinkers, and to the elevation of a strongman (in his own mind) who knows how to stir enthusiasm about himself, but doesn't know shit about the running of a powerful nation in a fast-changing world growing more confident in taking on first world countries.
Dull Jeb Bush was one of those reasonable thinkers, like his ideas or not, ruined politically by the king of a media machine. That king is going to win the nomination unless two much younger men, Cruz and Rubio, both horrible as presidential possibilities in their own ways, knock Trump down.
My money's on Trump. My head, and my heart, are appalled by the prospect of that motherfucker becoming president of the United States, but in these fear-driven times, characterized by random and purposeful violence, by economic mismanagement and environmental catastrophes manmade and otherwise, it seems likely my fellow Americans will, in November, make the stupidest mistake in this country's history.
Vic Neptune
A journalist on MSNBC this morning concluded that "Jeb is just too nice a guy."
Mild-mannered Bush--a contrast with the older brother, who was vicious enough to approve torture.
Speaking of torture, Kerry Sanders of MSNBC was in a Nevada restaurant this morning (preparatory to the Nevada Republican Caucus), talking with patrons, one of whom, a middle-aged woman, said that Trump's enthusiasm for the return of waterboarding of "terrorists" is a good idea. Anything that helps protect "our soldiers," she said, "is a good thing."
Sanders didn't ask the question I would've asked: "How does waterboarding protect American soldiers?"
I suspect the answer would've been something like, "The terrorists will spill information that will help uncover terror plots."
It's shaky ground, but Trump embraces the unsteadiness of the pro-torture argument, because, I think, it appeals to the sadistic, stupid, and disgusting instincts of his dumbest supporters--in other words, most of them. Trump's proposals, given usually at his mob mentality rallies, never take into account how much law will have to be abolished, how much of the U.S. Constitution, will have to be rewritten; how difficult and time-consuming these legal matters are to carry out, and in the end, how often the final results don't conform to the original proposals. Let's prevent every Muslim from coming to the United States. Let's make Mexico pay for a nearly 2,000 mile-long wall. Let's overturn the current laws against torturing people. From a practical standpoint, these three notions alone are not just bad ideas. They're megalomaniacal fantasies, bought into by about one out of three Republicans, enough of a minority to lead that party to the quashing of the influence of its more reasonable thinkers, and to the elevation of a strongman (in his own mind) who knows how to stir enthusiasm about himself, but doesn't know shit about the running of a powerful nation in a fast-changing world growing more confident in taking on first world countries.
Dull Jeb Bush was one of those reasonable thinkers, like his ideas or not, ruined politically by the king of a media machine. That king is going to win the nomination unless two much younger men, Cruz and Rubio, both horrible as presidential possibilities in their own ways, knock Trump down.
My money's on Trump. My head, and my heart, are appalled by the prospect of that motherfucker becoming president of the United States, but in these fear-driven times, characterized by random and purposeful violence, by economic mismanagement and environmental catastrophes manmade and otherwise, it seems likely my fellow Americans will, in November, make the stupidest mistake in this country's history.
Vic Neptune
Thursday, February 18, 2016
Impressions of the day:
I watched a few minutes of the 1944 film Kismet, starring Marlene Dietrich and Ronald Colman. It takes place when "Baghdad was new and shiny." In Technicolor, the beautiful costumes look like the contents of a psychedelic clothing store. Dietrich plays Jamilla, some kind of exotic love interest. Colman and the other obviously European American actors and actresses, including cute Ann Blyth (who famously played Mildred Pierce's horrible daughter) in brown Arab girl body makeup, inhabit an artificial past in a film made when Iraq was Nazi Germany's ally, and if we had met Saddam Hussein, then five or six years old, we would've sympathized with his small innocence. Kismet means fate, from the Arabic kismat, "division, portion, lot." To my mind, it implies that Allah divides up what happens to people--this is yours, this is yours, do with your lot what can be done with it. I don't know if that's what it means, but I guess, based on some education in religions.
My friend Brian let me know last night in an e-mail that if one types "JebBush.com" the first thing popping up is "Make America Great Again! Donald Trump for President."
Death by a thousand cuts.
Last night, Trump sat opposite Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough of MSNBC, comporting himself as a simulacrum of a civilized human being. Like with Kismet, I saw just a few minutes of the Town Hall, but Trump, often in suffocating close-ups, would listen patiently to his questioners, ordinary "folks," calling them by their Christian names. I've noticed lately Trump's tendency to refer to unnamed friends, as in, "I have a friend in the dump truck business and he said--" He does this so often I'm wondering how many friends he has. At the most recent debate, he spoke volubly of his "hundreds of friends" who died in the World Trade Center destruction. Hundreds? Would he be willing to name just one? I concede he probably knew some of the victims. He probably also, like George W. Bush, knows people who knew Osama bin Laden.
On C-Span, for more than a few minutes, I watched three women journalists on a panel, discussing their experiences covering the Guantanamo Bay detainee story. It's a frustrating beat, due to military restrictions and the fact that journalists can't interview the detainees. One of the journalists said that President Obama's desire to close Guantanamo Bay is really about relocation of prisoners to the United States. America wants to be a fucking bastard when it comes to the issue of long-term incarceration of prisoners never charged with committing crimes in a war that will never end.
Obama will travel to Cuba in March, the first U.S. president to go there since Calvin Coolidge made the trip in 1928. Senator Rubio, running for president, said at the Town Hall last night he wouldn't go to Cuba, not as long as it's not a free country. He calls it "an anti-American communist dictatorship." Arguably, considering the frequency of cybercrime against the U.S., so is the People's Republic of China, a far more powerful nation than Cuba. The Caribbean island also has opened itself up to America's overtures, a development long coming and predictable. These new relations will include lucrative business deals that forward-thinking American corporate officials wouldn't want to give up if a retrograde idiot like Marco Rubio were to ever become president.
I have mixed feelings about Cuba opening up to the United States, for it will get the bad with the good.
The unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia makes me wonder what his mind-controlled bitch, Justice Clarence Thomas, is going to do, now that he has to think for himself. Scalia was one of America's worst public figures. A right wing Constitutional originalist who wouldn't embrace the vital idea that the Constitution evolves. Obama's duty is to now nominate a replacement, but his opponents in Congress and on the campaign trail insist a new justice shouldn't be nominated until 2017. Fuck you, Obama, in other words. Their justification for this has no basis in legal history. Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy during his final year in office. Reagan, though, was an old white man.
The prospect of a Trump Supreme Court nomination is, as yet, unimaginable--like so much associated with the man, until he acts and speaks, proving again and again his loathsome anti-charm as he seduces voters and news corporations.
Vic Neptune
I watched a few minutes of the 1944 film Kismet, starring Marlene Dietrich and Ronald Colman. It takes place when "Baghdad was new and shiny." In Technicolor, the beautiful costumes look like the contents of a psychedelic clothing store. Dietrich plays Jamilla, some kind of exotic love interest. Colman and the other obviously European American actors and actresses, including cute Ann Blyth (who famously played Mildred Pierce's horrible daughter) in brown Arab girl body makeup, inhabit an artificial past in a film made when Iraq was Nazi Germany's ally, and if we had met Saddam Hussein, then five or six years old, we would've sympathized with his small innocence. Kismet means fate, from the Arabic kismat, "division, portion, lot." To my mind, it implies that Allah divides up what happens to people--this is yours, this is yours, do with your lot what can be done with it. I don't know if that's what it means, but I guess, based on some education in religions.
My friend Brian let me know last night in an e-mail that if one types "JebBush.com" the first thing popping up is "Make America Great Again! Donald Trump for President."
Death by a thousand cuts.
Last night, Trump sat opposite Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough of MSNBC, comporting himself as a simulacrum of a civilized human being. Like with Kismet, I saw just a few minutes of the Town Hall, but Trump, often in suffocating close-ups, would listen patiently to his questioners, ordinary "folks," calling them by their Christian names. I've noticed lately Trump's tendency to refer to unnamed friends, as in, "I have a friend in the dump truck business and he said--" He does this so often I'm wondering how many friends he has. At the most recent debate, he spoke volubly of his "hundreds of friends" who died in the World Trade Center destruction. Hundreds? Would he be willing to name just one? I concede he probably knew some of the victims. He probably also, like George W. Bush, knows people who knew Osama bin Laden.
On C-Span, for more than a few minutes, I watched three women journalists on a panel, discussing their experiences covering the Guantanamo Bay detainee story. It's a frustrating beat, due to military restrictions and the fact that journalists can't interview the detainees. One of the journalists said that President Obama's desire to close Guantanamo Bay is really about relocation of prisoners to the United States. America wants to be a fucking bastard when it comes to the issue of long-term incarceration of prisoners never charged with committing crimes in a war that will never end.
Obama will travel to Cuba in March, the first U.S. president to go there since Calvin Coolidge made the trip in 1928. Senator Rubio, running for president, said at the Town Hall last night he wouldn't go to Cuba, not as long as it's not a free country. He calls it "an anti-American communist dictatorship." Arguably, considering the frequency of cybercrime against the U.S., so is the People's Republic of China, a far more powerful nation than Cuba. The Caribbean island also has opened itself up to America's overtures, a development long coming and predictable. These new relations will include lucrative business deals that forward-thinking American corporate officials wouldn't want to give up if a retrograde idiot like Marco Rubio were to ever become president.
I have mixed feelings about Cuba opening up to the United States, for it will get the bad with the good.
The unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia makes me wonder what his mind-controlled bitch, Justice Clarence Thomas, is going to do, now that he has to think for himself. Scalia was one of America's worst public figures. A right wing Constitutional originalist who wouldn't embrace the vital idea that the Constitution evolves. Obama's duty is to now nominate a replacement, but his opponents in Congress and on the campaign trail insist a new justice shouldn't be nominated until 2017. Fuck you, Obama, in other words. Their justification for this has no basis in legal history. Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy during his final year in office. Reagan, though, was an old white man.
The prospect of a Trump Supreme Court nomination is, as yet, unimaginable--like so much associated with the man, until he acts and speaks, proving again and again his loathsome anti-charm as he seduces voters and news corporations.
Vic Neptune
Friday, February 12, 2016
The geocentric model, or Ptolemaic system, placed Earth at the center of the cosmos, with the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, outwards in that order, as planets ("wanderers") orbiting our world. Claudius Ptolemy, a second century A.D. scientist and writer from Alexandria in the Roman province of Aegyptus (modern Egypt), worked on and presented a model of the universe's structure which lasted as an accepted viewpoint among the educated until the Renaissance. That a brilliant man could be so wrong attests less to his greatness as a thinker, and more to the lack of proper equipment with which to observe the sky. In 1610, Galileo Galilei pointed his (by modern standards) low power telescope at Jupiter and saw points of light moving around the planet that had, even then, an oval spot. Concluding he was looking at four moons orbiting another world, he saw that Planet 6 (Jupiter, in the Ptolemaic system) had its own moon system, making the universe far more complicated than Catholic officials, for reasons of integrity, could admit, as they, according to the popular story, refused to look through Galileo's telescope at worlds we now call Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
"Nevertheless," Galileo reportedly remarked, "they are there."
Orthodox views often shut out the new. I'm amazed by how the vastness of the Christian universal viewpoint (God created everything) will at times refuse to learn or care about what the universe really is, how it's about 13.8 billion years old, how it expanded outwards in a cataclysmic explosion from a single point smaller than an atom. That there are neutron stars, gamma ray bursts, black holes, colliding galaxies, another possible planet in our Solar System not known about before this year. Ptolemy's model has been overruled, and even most Christians don't believe there are just seven planets in our system. Discovery of gravitational waves resulting from a collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away (1.3 billion years ago, in other words) have verified Einstein's equations on the matter. We're inhabiting an alive, moving system of universal proportions. Applying static theories to it makes for interesting-looking models, like the brass articulated sculptures of the Ptolemaic system--beautifully made, shiny, but hard, stuck in a past set of views no longer relevant.
If God created everything, surely that being could contain all current human knowledge and what will come of our development beyond now. God is what we haven't yet thought about.
Vic Neptune
"Nevertheless," Galileo reportedly remarked, "they are there."
Orthodox views often shut out the new. I'm amazed by how the vastness of the Christian universal viewpoint (God created everything) will at times refuse to learn or care about what the universe really is, how it's about 13.8 billion years old, how it expanded outwards in a cataclysmic explosion from a single point smaller than an atom. That there are neutron stars, gamma ray bursts, black holes, colliding galaxies, another possible planet in our Solar System not known about before this year. Ptolemy's model has been overruled, and even most Christians don't believe there are just seven planets in our system. Discovery of gravitational waves resulting from a collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away (1.3 billion years ago, in other words) have verified Einstein's equations on the matter. We're inhabiting an alive, moving system of universal proportions. Applying static theories to it makes for interesting-looking models, like the brass articulated sculptures of the Ptolemaic system--beautifully made, shiny, but hard, stuck in a past set of views no longer relevant.
If God created everything, surely that being could contain all current human knowledge and what will come of our development beyond now. God is what we haven't yet thought about.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
Now that the Solid Gold Man has won the New Hampshire Primary, it's worth considering his views on suffering children. Last weekend he told some of his supporters that he could look into the faces of Syrian War refugee children and say, "No, you can't come here [to America]."
In the past, he's characterized the Syrian refugees as predominantly "big strong men," and has wondered how they're able to pay for the cell phones he's seen in their hands in random news footage. These men, I guess, are all potential ISIS ringers seeking entry into Western Europe and the United States to carry out "Trojan Horse"-style attacks on welcoming nations too liberal for their own good. Apart from the argument's base stupidity, and assuming he's never had to look into the eyes of a child who has witnessed death and destruction on a vast scale, we can't know, anymore than does he, what Trump would actually feel if he met a real war refugee--and where, exactly, would this take place? On the road from Aleppo to Turkey?
Trump has expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin (brutes respect each other), whose air force bombs positions in and around Aleppo, aiding Bashar al-Assad's besieging ground forces, creating that city's human flow northwards to Turkey in the first place. An all out assault on Manhattan's Trump Tower would doubtless lead to its eponymous inhabitant's flight, but he can find some other place in America to set up his operation--south, by the Mexico-U.S. border, perhaps, where he can oversee the building of his dream wall. He estimates now it'll cost about eight billion dollars. He's said his administration will make the Mexican government pay for it. He has just as much chance of accomplishing that as the nations of Southeast Asia have of making the U.S. government pay to clean up the vast remaining death garden of unexploded munitions left from the Vietnam War era, including the wars waged against the peoples of Laos and Cambodia.
It's been asked, regarding past alarming historical trends, how a civilized and cultured nation can embrace intolerance, savage-mindedness, cruelty, and degenerate moral values offered by "strong" leader-types. The land that produced the great novelist Robert Musil also gave the world Hitler. Try mixing the delicate beauty of Viennese composer Franz Schubert's pieces with the image of destitute young Adolf Hitler, before World War One, walking the same great city's streets, generating ideas from a fertile zeitgeist of racialism to eventually change the world because people two decades later voted the son of a bitch into office.
In other words, good and bad people might live in the same neighborhood.
Brute culture in America has grown since 9/11. Callousness towards human rights has been encouraged by politicians and pundits who now speak openly of torturing people as a solution to supposedly uncovering the truth, when any responsible interrogator insists, based on experience, that torture doesn't work, unless the goal is to brutalize. Last Saturday's Republican presidential debate (which Trump, who used to disparage weekend "low-ratings" debates) featured as a low spot Ted Cruz speaking enthusiastically about waterboarding. Donald Trump topped, or bottomed, that by saying as president he would bring back waterboarding and go way beyond it, not specifying what techniques would engorge his sadistic patriotic prick.
Never assume that with the examples of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Rwanda in 1994, that authority figures from civilized nations won't speak and act as if they're willing and able to lead technologically driven mass slaughters and practice gross human rights abuses, all in the name of security, with right hand over heart, never mind the screams.
Donald Trump chooses to see beefy ISIS agents using the convenient pretext of Russian bombing and other long-standing chaotic situations to begin their treks to try to ruin our way of life. I see women and children, men too, dealing with a situation I've never had to go through, but I can imagine what it might be like to have to leave home because of massive explosions, the constant threat of violent death, the ever present possibility of losing loved ones, the lack of supplies, the sense that all this tumult goes on while diplomats talk and arms dealers profit.
To tell a child who is not responsible for any of the above-mentioned conditions he or she can't find sanctuary from wandering and death illustrates the slow-cooking evil of Donald Trump, his fellow like-minded office seekers, and those supporters of theirs who, unwittingly or not, embrace the annihilation of Syria by people like Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, and ISIS, with Obama and every nation militarily involved there doing their ill-defined parts in rearranging a mess out of a mess.
Vic Neptune
In the past, he's characterized the Syrian refugees as predominantly "big strong men," and has wondered how they're able to pay for the cell phones he's seen in their hands in random news footage. These men, I guess, are all potential ISIS ringers seeking entry into Western Europe and the United States to carry out "Trojan Horse"-style attacks on welcoming nations too liberal for their own good. Apart from the argument's base stupidity, and assuming he's never had to look into the eyes of a child who has witnessed death and destruction on a vast scale, we can't know, anymore than does he, what Trump would actually feel if he met a real war refugee--and where, exactly, would this take place? On the road from Aleppo to Turkey?
Trump has expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin (brutes respect each other), whose air force bombs positions in and around Aleppo, aiding Bashar al-Assad's besieging ground forces, creating that city's human flow northwards to Turkey in the first place. An all out assault on Manhattan's Trump Tower would doubtless lead to its eponymous inhabitant's flight, but he can find some other place in America to set up his operation--south, by the Mexico-U.S. border, perhaps, where he can oversee the building of his dream wall. He estimates now it'll cost about eight billion dollars. He's said his administration will make the Mexican government pay for it. He has just as much chance of accomplishing that as the nations of Southeast Asia have of making the U.S. government pay to clean up the vast remaining death garden of unexploded munitions left from the Vietnam War era, including the wars waged against the peoples of Laos and Cambodia.
It's been asked, regarding past alarming historical trends, how a civilized and cultured nation can embrace intolerance, savage-mindedness, cruelty, and degenerate moral values offered by "strong" leader-types. The land that produced the great novelist Robert Musil also gave the world Hitler. Try mixing the delicate beauty of Viennese composer Franz Schubert's pieces with the image of destitute young Adolf Hitler, before World War One, walking the same great city's streets, generating ideas from a fertile zeitgeist of racialism to eventually change the world because people two decades later voted the son of a bitch into office.
In other words, good and bad people might live in the same neighborhood.
Brute culture in America has grown since 9/11. Callousness towards human rights has been encouraged by politicians and pundits who now speak openly of torturing people as a solution to supposedly uncovering the truth, when any responsible interrogator insists, based on experience, that torture doesn't work, unless the goal is to brutalize. Last Saturday's Republican presidential debate (which Trump, who used to disparage weekend "low-ratings" debates) featured as a low spot Ted Cruz speaking enthusiastically about waterboarding. Donald Trump topped, or bottomed, that by saying as president he would bring back waterboarding and go way beyond it, not specifying what techniques would engorge his sadistic patriotic prick.
Never assume that with the examples of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Rwanda in 1994, that authority figures from civilized nations won't speak and act as if they're willing and able to lead technologically driven mass slaughters and practice gross human rights abuses, all in the name of security, with right hand over heart, never mind the screams.
Donald Trump chooses to see beefy ISIS agents using the convenient pretext of Russian bombing and other long-standing chaotic situations to begin their treks to try to ruin our way of life. I see women and children, men too, dealing with a situation I've never had to go through, but I can imagine what it might be like to have to leave home because of massive explosions, the constant threat of violent death, the ever present possibility of losing loved ones, the lack of supplies, the sense that all this tumult goes on while diplomats talk and arms dealers profit.
To tell a child who is not responsible for any of the above-mentioned conditions he or she can't find sanctuary from wandering and death illustrates the slow-cooking evil of Donald Trump, his fellow like-minded office seekers, and those supporters of theirs who, unwittingly or not, embrace the annihilation of Syria by people like Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, and ISIS, with Obama and every nation militarily involved there doing their ill-defined parts in rearranging a mess out of a mess.
Vic Neptune
Sunday, February 7, 2016
Today is Super Bowl Sunday. Peyton Manning of the Denver Broncos, possessor of one Super Bowl ring, has played for eighteen seasons and is thirty-nine years old. Cam Newton of the Carolina Panthers has played for five seasons and is twenty-six. The news media, sports and others, always want something attention-grabbing to focus on, even if they sound ridiculous dwelling on it. From what I've heard lately, the big story of this Super Bowl is Cam Newton's enthusiasm on the field. When he throws a touchdown pass, or runs into the end zone, he makes a big show of expressing his happiness. Little dances, stylized moves, the football always going to some child in the end zone cheap seats. Newton's celebratory behavior strikes some as excessive and others as flagrant. That NFL players have been celebrating their best plays within games for decades seems to have been forgotten by those condemning Cam Newton.
I remember watching games in the 1970s and nobody in those years spiked the football in the end zone after a score. That would garner a penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct. I began to get the impression that almost anything could be done in a touchdown celebration when I saw Dallas Cowboys linebacker Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson finish his interception run with a leap in the end zone and a toss of the football through the uprights. The act seemed to me to be the most disrespectful thing a player could do to an opposing team, but now, such behavior is common, even encouraged by a culture that celebrates its athletes in a sport providing the "blood" in the old blood and circuses concept of ancient Roman rule. Keep the people happy with entertainment of a vivid quality and offer goods to purchase. Voila, the Super Bowl, a perfect blend of sports entertainment and capitalism, overflown by military airpower right before the game along with a rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner."
Peyton Manning, off the field, shills for Papa John's Pizza, has donated thousands of dollars to Republican politicians, is a committed Christian, is white, and more than does his part to represent the NFL in combination with the money-making pizza I've never seen him eat.
Cam Newton, a black man, gets criticized for doing his own kind of on-field celebrations after scoring and making big plays; doing what hundreds of other NFL players have done, do, and will do. Manning presents a grim game face, while Newton expresses joy at playing the game he most loves. Those who find Newton's antics unsavory should reconsider the NFL run by Roger Goodell:
Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice slugged his girlfriend in the face on an elevator, and then dragged her unconscious body out into a lobby, both actions caught on surveillance cameras. Goodell and other higher-ups had access to police reports and could've requested the elevator video but didn't. Later, when the elevator video was released showing the star running back impacting his girlfriend's face, making her drop like a rock to the floor, Goodell had to increase Rice's game suspension from two to six. Assaulting a woman merits six missed games in Goodell's organization.
Greg Hardy of the Carolina Panthers, later of the Cowboys, assaulted his girlfriend, knocking her back onto a couch covered with assault weapons. He didn't go to jail, he just went to Dallas, which, considering the shittiness of the Cowboys for the past several years, was at least a small punishment, considering he had to leave the team favored to win today's Super Bowl.
Roger Goodell, on February 5, asked in a press conference about the dangers of playing football, said, "There's risk in everything. There's risk in sitting on the couch."
If it's covered with assault weapons.
Goodell, who, judging from his reluctance to punish Rice and Hardy by kicking them out of the NFL, doesn't care about women's well-being, has broken the overall football experience into two pieces: those who play the game and are endangered by it, and those who sit on their couches watching, also endangered, perhaps, by having to watch a happy black man express his enthusiasm when scoring, because that, not the hazards of the game, not the multi-million dollar commercial spots, not the game's weird association with nationalism, is what we should most fear: a member of an oppressed minority enjoying his success in a sport run by rich white men who ignored the danger of concussions even as some former players killed themselves. None of them died because they sat on couches.
Vic Neptune
I remember watching games in the 1970s and nobody in those years spiked the football in the end zone after a score. That would garner a penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct. I began to get the impression that almost anything could be done in a touchdown celebration when I saw Dallas Cowboys linebacker Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson finish his interception run with a leap in the end zone and a toss of the football through the uprights. The act seemed to me to be the most disrespectful thing a player could do to an opposing team, but now, such behavior is common, even encouraged by a culture that celebrates its athletes in a sport providing the "blood" in the old blood and circuses concept of ancient Roman rule. Keep the people happy with entertainment of a vivid quality and offer goods to purchase. Voila, the Super Bowl, a perfect blend of sports entertainment and capitalism, overflown by military airpower right before the game along with a rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner."
Peyton Manning, off the field, shills for Papa John's Pizza, has donated thousands of dollars to Republican politicians, is a committed Christian, is white, and more than does his part to represent the NFL in combination with the money-making pizza I've never seen him eat.
Cam Newton, a black man, gets criticized for doing his own kind of on-field celebrations after scoring and making big plays; doing what hundreds of other NFL players have done, do, and will do. Manning presents a grim game face, while Newton expresses joy at playing the game he most loves. Those who find Newton's antics unsavory should reconsider the NFL run by Roger Goodell:
Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice slugged his girlfriend in the face on an elevator, and then dragged her unconscious body out into a lobby, both actions caught on surveillance cameras. Goodell and other higher-ups had access to police reports and could've requested the elevator video but didn't. Later, when the elevator video was released showing the star running back impacting his girlfriend's face, making her drop like a rock to the floor, Goodell had to increase Rice's game suspension from two to six. Assaulting a woman merits six missed games in Goodell's organization.
Greg Hardy of the Carolina Panthers, later of the Cowboys, assaulted his girlfriend, knocking her back onto a couch covered with assault weapons. He didn't go to jail, he just went to Dallas, which, considering the shittiness of the Cowboys for the past several years, was at least a small punishment, considering he had to leave the team favored to win today's Super Bowl.
Roger Goodell, on February 5, asked in a press conference about the dangers of playing football, said, "There's risk in everything. There's risk in sitting on the couch."
If it's covered with assault weapons.
Goodell, who, judging from his reluctance to punish Rice and Hardy by kicking them out of the NFL, doesn't care about women's well-being, has broken the overall football experience into two pieces: those who play the game and are endangered by it, and those who sit on their couches watching, also endangered, perhaps, by having to watch a happy black man express his enthusiasm when scoring, because that, not the hazards of the game, not the multi-million dollar commercial spots, not the game's weird association with nationalism, is what we should most fear: a member of an oppressed minority enjoying his success in a sport run by rich white men who ignored the danger of concussions even as some former players killed themselves. None of them died because they sat on couches.
Vic Neptune
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
Since last summer I've felt an unease in my gut. Unlike many in the news media and in public life, I never dismissed Donald Trump's chances of winning the Republican nomination, and maybe the presidency, too. Newsmen and -women caught up with my view as the year passed. Polls elevated Trump to the title, "Republican frontrunner," held by him day after day, week after week. At debates he occupied the center spots behind lecterns, surrounded on either side by politicians for whom he felt contempt. Now, one of those political rivals, Senator Cruz, has beaten Trump in Iowa, earning Cruz the title, Republican frontrunner. Trump, meanwhile, and it gives me pleasure to write this, is a loser.
Coming in second place, Trump finished well, but when we compare this result with the bravado and self-assuredness shooting from this man's mouth from the first day of his campaign, his performance looks weak. Trump uses the word weak to put down opponents from Jeb Bush to Hillary Clinton, and again, it feels good to call him weak. After all, his Iowa loss can now clearly be seen as the result of spotty local campaigning in a state whose voters like to meet their candidates and get a good one-on-one sense of them. Ted Cruz won Iowa because of his organization, a strong voter-based effort with an Evangelical underpinning, while Trump landed (literally) on Iowa several times, held rallies filled with like-minded racist and bigoted idiots, and never bothered, except once, to stay overnight in the state, when he went to an Iowa motel and let us know the next day that the bed was "very comfortable." He found out that motels, by and large across the country, are adequate resting spots for those car-bound folks who don't have private jets that can send their owners back to private towers after a day of campaigning, whereas Cruz, by bus, bothered to make himself known to Iowans, and it paid off.
In New Hampshire, the second state in the long-distance race to gain nominations, we can expect a similar phenomenon: Trump, a fly-away-at-the-end-of-the-day campaigner, will have a hard time besting Cruz, or maybe Marco Rubio, while he refuses to behave unlike a billionaire asshole with his own escape plane.
Chris Christie came in tenth place in Iowa. He plans on campaigning the fuck out of New Hampshire, and indeed, has done plenty of it in past months. Still, tenth place! Ego, perhaps, holds him together in the face of what used to be regarded as disaster. Another low-ranking loser in Iowa, Mike Huckabee, can now count himself as a "friend" of Donald Trump, who was impressed, I guess, by Huckabee's showing up at Trump's cynical raise-money-for-veterans rally.
I seemed to say positive things about Ted Cruz in this post, but bear in mind I still think his ideas are batshit crazy. However, if Cruz is the weapon to disable and defeat Donald Trump this year, I approve of his Iowa victory, and whichever victories follow that prevent Trump from reaching the Oval Office.
Trump, after the news of his loss, congratulated Cruz, and went tweet-silent for fifteen hours. When he came back alive he bragged about his Iowa performance, saying how impressive it is that a non-politician, having never done this kind of thing before (Cruz, bear in mind, hadn't either), did so well. He failed to mention his calling Iowans "stupid" in past months, and also his off the cuff remark about running for president--that if he doesn't win, "all this," including campaigning in Iowa where he said this a month or so ago, "will have been a waste of time."
He blames the news media for his loss, as if their wall to wall coverage of him over the past seven months didn't demonstrate their dedication to ratings, which are like polls to the major news networks. In a previous post, I predicted that if Trump were to lose in Iowa, or New Hampshire, or wherever else, he would whine in his tweets and in interviews like we haven't heard him whine before. If we examine our memories, we can recall kids we knew in school who were like this: after the setting up of expectations to an unrealistic height, the excuses would follow, and you either wanted to walk away from them, or kick them in the balls.
The news networks now have an opportunity to kick the loser, Donald Trump, in the balls.
Vic Neptune
Coming in second place, Trump finished well, but when we compare this result with the bravado and self-assuredness shooting from this man's mouth from the first day of his campaign, his performance looks weak. Trump uses the word weak to put down opponents from Jeb Bush to Hillary Clinton, and again, it feels good to call him weak. After all, his Iowa loss can now clearly be seen as the result of spotty local campaigning in a state whose voters like to meet their candidates and get a good one-on-one sense of them. Ted Cruz won Iowa because of his organization, a strong voter-based effort with an Evangelical underpinning, while Trump landed (literally) on Iowa several times, held rallies filled with like-minded racist and bigoted idiots, and never bothered, except once, to stay overnight in the state, when he went to an Iowa motel and let us know the next day that the bed was "very comfortable." He found out that motels, by and large across the country, are adequate resting spots for those car-bound folks who don't have private jets that can send their owners back to private towers after a day of campaigning, whereas Cruz, by bus, bothered to make himself known to Iowans, and it paid off.
In New Hampshire, the second state in the long-distance race to gain nominations, we can expect a similar phenomenon: Trump, a fly-away-at-the-end-of-the-day campaigner, will have a hard time besting Cruz, or maybe Marco Rubio, while he refuses to behave unlike a billionaire asshole with his own escape plane.
Chris Christie came in tenth place in Iowa. He plans on campaigning the fuck out of New Hampshire, and indeed, has done plenty of it in past months. Still, tenth place! Ego, perhaps, holds him together in the face of what used to be regarded as disaster. Another low-ranking loser in Iowa, Mike Huckabee, can now count himself as a "friend" of Donald Trump, who was impressed, I guess, by Huckabee's showing up at Trump's cynical raise-money-for-veterans rally.
I seemed to say positive things about Ted Cruz in this post, but bear in mind I still think his ideas are batshit crazy. However, if Cruz is the weapon to disable and defeat Donald Trump this year, I approve of his Iowa victory, and whichever victories follow that prevent Trump from reaching the Oval Office.
Trump, after the news of his loss, congratulated Cruz, and went tweet-silent for fifteen hours. When he came back alive he bragged about his Iowa performance, saying how impressive it is that a non-politician, having never done this kind of thing before (Cruz, bear in mind, hadn't either), did so well. He failed to mention his calling Iowans "stupid" in past months, and also his off the cuff remark about running for president--that if he doesn't win, "all this," including campaigning in Iowa where he said this a month or so ago, "will have been a waste of time."
He blames the news media for his loss, as if their wall to wall coverage of him over the past seven months didn't demonstrate their dedication to ratings, which are like polls to the major news networks. In a previous post, I predicted that if Trump were to lose in Iowa, or New Hampshire, or wherever else, he would whine in his tweets and in interviews like we haven't heard him whine before. If we examine our memories, we can recall kids we knew in school who were like this: after the setting up of expectations to an unrealistic height, the excuses would follow, and you either wanted to walk away from them, or kick them in the balls.
The news networks now have an opportunity to kick the loser, Donald Trump, in the balls.
Vic Neptune
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