2016 already looks like a year crafted by a psychopathic personality.
     Barack Obama and his family flew to Cuba.  He attended a baseball game featuring the Tampa Bay Rays playing a Cuban team.  I didn't follow that story from a sports angle, so I don't know or care which team won, but I heard invective against the president for watching baseball during the Brussels crisis.  If Republicans were to acknowledge history's significance as it pertains to what happens in the present, instead of saying things like, "That was in 2003!  We're not here to litigate the Iraq War!" then they might admit to President Bush's reading of My Pet Goat to elementary schoolchildren while the Twin Towers burned.  Great men, even non-entities holding high office, find themselves in the present, when, sometimes, confusing events occur.
     The non-great man, Governor Chris Christie, should be able to relate to Obama's watching baseball during the aftermath of the latest ISIS bombing in Europe.  Christie, during his presidential run and even before that, spent very little time in New Jersey.  Recently, while acting as Donald Trump's support-weight (the governor endorsed Trump after "suspending" his own campaign), Christie had to endure, in public, a cruel joke told about him by his new master.  Complaining about Senator Rubio's absences from his regular Washington job, Trump said Christie had done the same, which is true.  There's no way of knowing what went on in Christie's mind when Trump insulted him thus.  I've heard him say in the past that he keeps in touch with what's going on in New Jersey every day; I'm sure he does.  There are phones and computers, after all.  Obama, too, we can assume, is also well-informed even when he seems to just be enjoying an afternoon of baseball with Raul Castro.
     While writing this I decided to link to YouTube and listen to an album by the great Belgian band Front 242, called No Comment.  I've loved this band's music since I first heard them in the 1980s.  The power of the artistic impulse, contrasted with the utter stupidity and black-heartedness of murdering people, as happened yesterday in Brussels, is a vast gulf illustrating two poles of human existence: greatness and sublimity, as against pettiness and cruelty.
     My own views on ISIS are these: I hate the motherfuckers.  I have no sympathy for their cause.  The Caliphate is an impractical joke a thousand years and more too late.  The Middle Ages are over.  They pollute Islam, a great religion, with utterly insane apocalyptic beliefs that leave no room for life to exist and flourish.  In my view, they are anti-Islam, anti-life; if Heaven exists, I hope it rejects ISIS martyrs, catapulting them in the other direction.  They are not only anti-life, they are anti-culture.  Their destruction of ancient ruins, such as their devastation project at Palmyra, earns them a place among the most reprehensible criminals of all time.  May they all be annihilated.
     With these views, I may sound like Cruz or Trump, or the Le Pens.  The difference, though, is that I regard the problem quite differently than does Trump, whose minuscule logic identifies Islam itself as an enemy.  Cruz, too, contributes to the hate project against Muslims.  Their views and policies (if actually implemented) would isolate American Muslims, a practice more common in Europe, where radicalization is thus more potentially widespread, a ghettoization that helps ISIS recruitment.
     Trump and Cruz want to institute repression because they, like ISIS leaders and nation-snatching brutes throughout history, are authoritarian in their viewpoints, filled to capacity with propagandistic horseshit pouring from their mouths, U.S. news cameras, microphones, and Twitter, bubbling their poisonous fumes into the ears of gullible and fearful citizens who don't recognize the violence inside their favorite politicians--violence that can inspire movements, Horst Wessel-style.
     The next president should realize that ISIS derived, albeit indirectly, from bad decisions made in Washington, D.C., and in the Pentagon.  America is Frankenstein.  If you read Mary Shelley's novel, you'll find that Doctor Frankenstein embarks on his project with good intentions.

                                                                             Vic Neptune