Organized Crime

     The approaching end of a year encourages a psychological phenomenon characterized by a person's growing need to accomplish deeds.  The New Year brings an optimistic belief that new habits can be acquired and practiced regularly.  The efficiency of these goals, enacted or not, depends upon the determination and discipline of the individual, plus some luck.
     In President Trump it's obvious he wanted to get something "big" done before year's end.  His accomplishments as Chief Executive have thus far consisted of selecting a nominee (Gorsuch) to the Supreme Court, an act of choice probably consisting of some consultations with advisors, the coming up of a short list, and a pick by the "decision-maker," hardly a demonstration requiring much intelligence.
     Trump, it's been revealed in the last few days, had doubts early this year about Gorsuch.  Trump can never be absolutely certain of another's loyalty, someone outside his family.  The family depends upon Dad to deliver cash-wise (as in the new Tax Bill's repeal of the Estate Tax, which will benefit Trump's children enormously).  As long as the money's coming, Trump's children and current wife will never speak badly of him.
     Other Trump accomplishments include mass slaughter of human beings in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Syria; the alienation by militaristic threats and tightening of embargoes towards North Korea and Iran; demonstration of a willingness to support a child-molesting Senate candidate over a man who successfully prosecuted one of the white supremacists who bombed a Birmingham church in 1963.  The latter candidate, Doug Jones, winner of the Senate race, was claimed by Trump to be "weak on crime."
     I have to wonder about the cognitive abilities of some of my fellow Americans, those who don't seem able to realize that a man who prosecuted a murderer of children is not "weak on crime," but Trump's man, Roy Moore, who doesn't respect separation of Church and State, is anti-Constitutional in so many other ways as well (rejects all Amendments past the Bill of Rights, including the one that freed the slaves) is somehow "strong on crime."  Moore, if his adult accusers aren't slandering him, molested and sexually assaulted teenaged girls in the 1970s and 1980s; in the words of the illogical, he's not weak on crime.  Although, in reality, he is likely a violent criminal--what's more, a violent criminal supported by Trump and Trump's former propagandist Steve Bannon.
     Violent criminality, though, is a longtime practice of the American government.  Trump's announcement to move the capital of Israel to Jerusalem, with an accompanying relocation/building of a new U.S. embassy has set that region on fire; Palestinians have protested, been killed, shot at by Israeli security with non-lethal ammo.  Some crap comes out of Trump's mouth, people die.  That's quite an ability to be proud of.
     The U.N. voted overwhelmingly to condemn this idea of a move to Jerusalem, prompting U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley to act like the asshole she probably is by saying that the Trump Administration may cut off aid to all the countries who voted for this resolution to condemn the U.S. for proposing the insane idea of using Jerusalem as Israel's capital (a move supported strenuously by Democrat Chuck Schumer, so it's bipartisan antagonism towards Palestinians, nothing new).
     Since only nine nations voted against condemning the U.S., this means the U.S. wants to punish most of the world to get its way in satisfying the sadism of people like Benjamin Netanyahu, who wants Jerusalem to be the capital, and who always loves to antagonize Palestinians.
     I found a dead cat on my property recently, a car-hit victim apparently.  I took the cat to the Animal Shelter; a very nice young woman dealt with me.  It was upsetting to find the cat (I love cats) and to feel how stiff it was, its beauty when living in the patterns of the black and white fur.  The young woman at the Shelter was very kind and respectful towards the body of this dead unknown cat with no identification.  Our moment with this unfortunate animal happened in twenty-first century America, a country run by violent and greedy lunatics.  Most Americans, like most Iraqis or Israelis or Palestinians, are decent people.  Our national identity, and those of others worldwide, is maybe the least important thing about being human, but it's the most important thing when those in power in whatever country group us into lumpy categories called American, or Korean, or Russian, et al.
     The overall philosophy of power and government in America can be seen with the Tax Bill, which looks to be a success, soon, for the Republican majority.  This out in the open mass theft of billions of dollars from the American poor and middle class by the rich will break this country, causing perhaps the ultimate gutting of Social Security and Medicaid to make up for the one and a half trillion dollars the Bill will add to the deficit.  On the plus side, for millionaires and billionaires, the Bill eliminates the Estate Tax, will save Donald Trump about a billion dollars (he claims it will cost him money--but, he's a liar), and will further the cause of making wealthy people in America even wealthier, while the rest of the country becomes more Third World.
     People will lose their insurance but the corporate tax rate will drop about fifteen percentage points, so while a poor person dies from want of decent insurance, he or she can marvel that telecommunication companies and war industry corporations are making shitloads of money with net neutrality rules quashed and the war going as strong as ever, killing more poor children in the Middle East and Africa.  As Trump put it in a celebratory moment with his Republican political supporters arranged around him at the White House, "We're making America great again!"
     Making America great again apparently consists of giving the President of the United States a billion dollars instead of arresting him and every other evildoer who made this Tax Bill happen and then putting them in prison for the rest of their lives.
     Who's more dangerous to ordinary Americans?  ISIS, or these homegrown motherfuckers?  Osama bin Laden's dream to initiate the 9/11 attack and then sit back and watch America economically fuck itself is succeeding beautifully.

                                                                              Vic Neptune
       

     America's Most Dangerous Enemy: Those Who Manage It

     I heard Israel's Ambassador to the United States praising President Trump's announcement recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, a decision unpopular with a majority of human beings.  Trump says it's a move towards peace in the Middle East.  He also once said Trump Steaks "are the world's greatest steaks and I mean that in every sense of the word."
     Along with recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital goes the future building of a U.S. embassy there, a move as popular among Muslims as Caligula's decision in A.D. 40 to have his statue erected within the Second Temple, a project met by vast protests and only quashed by Caligula's assassination the following year.
     Trump hasn't yet referred to the possible future U.S. embassy as "beautiful," as he's referred to his so far theoretical border wall, but it makes sense that in agitating so many millions of people with this decision, his main interest is the construction of an American building, a piece of fantasy national embassy U.S. soil plopped onto the holy city like a pile of hog turds.
     Let truck bombs attack it!  Let the thing be protested!  Let Arab demonstrators get mowed down and tear gassed!
     Trump and those who regard Israel as the second most important nation don't give a fuck.
     I've heard journalists and pundits ask, "Why now?"  Why is Trump pushing this?  To distract attention away from the Mueller investigation?  Mueller is said to be investigating Trump's own finances, something the President referred to as a "red line" Mueller better not cross.  Well here it is, and Trump isn't firing Mueller, so it turns out his threats don't mean much, like when he promised without coming through with it, to sue every woman who came out against him last year with sexual abuse allegations.
     One of these women is suing him for defamation of character.  Trump's attorneys are trying to get this irritant put off until after he's no longer in office.  We can hope he'll have to testify under oath while still President.
     This Friday he travels to Pensacola, Florida, so near the Alabama border it makes it obvious he's campaigning for accused child molester and rapist Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate who stands a very good chance of winning the December 12 special election.  Moore's Bible-thumping cowboy persona, his Second Amendment swagger, his total denial of any wrongdoing when it comes to his behavior with teenaged girls, his insistence on his penis's innocence when it comes to the female half of humanity, appears to have convinced enough Alabamians that he's the right man for the job.
     Trump himself is convinced.  He's essentially said it would be worse for a liberal Democrat like Moore's opponent, Doug Jones, to be in the Senate than Moore, though Trump hasn't mentioned child molestation, thinking back, perhaps, to when he, Trump, allegedly sexually violated a thirteen year old girl.  Rich and powerful men, I've found, are hypersensitive when their own crimes and embarrassments are mentioned.  I once saw right wing pundit and neoconservative warmonger Bill Kristol twist his mouth into a look of disdain and contempt on his sour face when a questioner at some forum asked about how his avoidance of military service doesn't jibe with his promotion of the Iraq War.
     "I'm not going to dignify such a question with a response," Kristol said.
     Roy Moore has been absent from news media direct attention.  He spent two weeks just recently not appearing before the press or at rallies, or even in the shopping malls where teenaged girls might be found.
     Closer and closer to December 12, Mitch McConnell, who seemed so forthright in his offhanded condemnation of Moore a few weeks ago ("I believe the women"), said on Sunday, "Let the people of Alabama decide."  Another way of saying, "I have no opinion of a man accused by eight women of sexual misconduct committed against them when they were teenagers.  A man who made a fourteen year old girl put her hand on his cock should be in the U.S. Senate, if that's what Alabamians choose. Forget what I said a few weeks ago.  Don't you realize by now that Mitch McConnell has no integrity?"
     Should we be surprised that the Republican Party is prepared to seat a child molester within its hallowed chamber?  With their gross tax bill, a giveaway to the richest motherfuckers in the land at the expense of the poor and the middle class, they've decided that giving sick children health insurance is far less important than making sure that Donald Trump, Jr. isn't burdened with the Estate Tax.  McConnell and others in the Senate don't care about children anymore than they care about that fourteen year old girl in 1979 who was forced by thirty-two year old Roy Moore to gratify his lust.
     The Republicans have been this bad, at least in their desires, for a long time.  Fucking the poor was Reagan's hobby, too.
     To expect the Democrats to mount opposition to Republican excess is problematic, unless the Left stops benefiting from a rigged system with Wall Street putting cash into two disgusting and corrupt parties.  These two parties are failures as philosophical systems, for they elevate the cretinous and the stupid above the worthy, holding off evolution for the sake of power and gain.  They're just killers.  It's time to not vote for them.

                                                                             Vic Neptune
   
       

     Thou Shalt

      The Republicans' record on putting forth candidates for high office doesn't always conform to common standards of morality.  Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, the second George Bush, Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney, Paul Ryan, and now Roy Moore of Alabama, called "a great guy" by fellow Republican Donald Trump, all lacked or lack, for various reasons, the human thing that prevents most people from committing horrible acts against other human beings.
     I don't believe one has to be a degenerate to be a politician, but an inability to do right on behalf of the less powerful characterizes the above-mentioned men, as it also characterizes many Democrats, like Barack Obama, who slaughtered civilians in the Middle East and Africa, made the big banks bigger, deported more illegal immigrants than any other president, prided himself as an assassin, and strengthened government secrecy even as he claimed transparency.
     Obama's example represents, for some, the dubious maxim that as president, one's job is very difficult, the most difficult in the world; therefore, some unintended consequences, like blowing up the wrong people, is just part of the job.  I stopped buying into this idea many years ago when I realized that I never heard a president, Democratic or Republican, demonstrate remorse for committing what would normally be regarded in our civil society as mass manslaughter.  If someone accidentally kills dozens of people, including children, there's a legal investigation, at least.  Obama and every other president will never be investigated for their epic number of acts of "collateral damage."  Powerful people in our country and elsewhere get away with casual killing so often and so predictably that it's become something most citizens shrug their shoulders at.
     Not me.
     An Alabama politician, Roy Moore, runs for the U.S. Senate.  His background as a district attorney, judge, and during the Vietnam War, as a military policeman, qualifies him as a law and order candidate who happens to love God, the Ten Commandments, and guns.  In recent weeks it's also been revealed that he loves having sex with teenaged girls.  In the 1970s he (allegedly) molested a fourteen year old girl.  He was assistant district attorney at the time, an authority figure with power, especially over a kid.  In his thirties then, according to numerous reports, he regularly "dated" girls aged sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.  Age of consent in Alabama is sixteen, but one sixteen year old girl was violated by him in his car, then pushed out onto the pavement by a dumpster before he drove away.  About half a dozen women have shared their painful Moore stories, but the Republicans in both houses of Congress have been slow to condemn him without sounding like uncomfortable cowards.
     Mitch McConnell, Jeff Sessions (now the Attorney General and formerly the holder of the Senate seat in Alabama sought by Moore), Jeff Flake, John McCain, and several other Republicans have stated their belief in the women's stories about Roy Moore.  Even Paul Ryan, one of the most prominent Republican sociopaths, has expressed, in his usual insipid way, condemnation of the child molester.  It could be, and I believe this is the case, that some of these condemnations from the Right are politically motivated.  Republicans, generally, care so much about women's rights that they want to defund Planned Parenthood, thus denying millions of women healthcare.  Moore is an embarrassment to them on a moral ground, and also his association with them as their fellow Senator would taint their own images as defenders of family values, Christian style.
     Moore says he's a Christian, but his behavior is antichrist.  I imagine him as a military cop in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.  Did he violate Vietnamese girls?  He wouldn't be the only sexual predator in the U.S. military back then, or now.  Are we to believe that his predatory behavior began in Alabama after he returned from the war zone?  I suggest, based on human psychology, that Roy Moore has been a criminal most of his life.
     Or, as Trump put it in a tweet, "a great guy."
     Trump hasn't commented publicly about the Moore issue.  The President is most definitely preoccupied with the Mueller investigation (Donald Trump, Jr. is in the news again, having spoken with Wikileaks last year regarding Clinton) and also with his just completed Asia trip.  By the time this is read by anyone, it could be that we'll know what Trump has to say about his "great" Alabama guy.
     While all this goes on, seven million people in Yemen are on the verge of starvation due to the Saudi-enforced blockade and the now two and a half year old war supported logistically by the United States and by many of the same politicians here who find Moore so offensive.  Yemen's infrastructure is broken by the relentless bombing enabled by in-flight fueling by American airplanes, by cluster bombs supplied by the U.S., by fighter bombers the sale of which was enabled by former Secretary of State Clinton.  A cholera epidemic in Yemen resulted from the infrastructure destruction, potable water increasingly rare.  It's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse time in the world's poorest Arab country and seven million possibly impending deaths will top the six million Jews killed by Hitler, so can we just say it?  The United States of America may soon be a party to genocide, and the major news networks aren't even talking about it.
     Is that because we're so used to our leaders being killers, liars, suppressors of basic human rights, and, even on occasion, child molesters?  In other words, it's not even a story that the United States government will gladly aid and abet genocide committed by the Saudi government, but Donald Trump, Jr. making contact with Wikileaks to find damning information on his father's chief political opponent somehow merits anyone's surprise?
   
                                                                                 Vic Neptune
     

     The Light At the End of the Gun Barrel

     In this essay, I will quote from an Associated Press article published November 3, 2017, by McClatchy DC Bureau.  The piece is headlined, "Assembly eliminates Wisconsin's minimum hunting age"
     The word "eliminates" can mean remove or get rid of, but it can also mean to murder someone.  An atmosphere of eventual probable human deaths suffuses the bill passed by the Republican majority Wisconsin state Assembly.
     "Residents of any age, no matter how young, could legally hunt in Wisconsin..."  As if to pound the idea into our heads with a hammer, the article's author wrote, redundantly, "...of any age, no matter how young..." as if to write, "Do you understand what this means?  Do you perceive the lunacy of this bill?"
     The current law allows twelve year olds to purchase hunting licenses "or hunt with a gun unless they're participating in a mentored hunt.  Children as young as 10 can hunt under that program."
     Ten.  Is that not irresponsible enough?  Apparently not.
     "The Republican-authored bill would allow people of any age to participate in a mentored hunt, effectively letting anyone hunt.  The measure also would eliminate [that word again] the requirement that a hunter and mentor have only one weapon between them."
     More guns, of course, will mean less chances of bloody accidents.
     Here's something I didn't know: "Thirty-four other states already have no minimum hunting age, according to the Wisconsin Hunters' Rights Coalition."
     In a country politically warped by the NRA, it's fitting that there are hunters who felt the need to put together an organization called the Wisconsin Hunters' Rights Coalition.  Didn't they realize that American gun owners are already untouched by moral justice?  It's similar to how White men feel like their rights as American citizens are constantly threatened by Affirmative Action, illegal immigration, feminism, the Black Lives Matter movement, and political correctness.
     The bill passed 57-32, with three Republicans voting against it, while four dipshit Democrats voted in favor.
     Sensible arguments against the bill included the idea that little kids armed with guns would put other hunters at risk of being shot.
     Democratic Representative Katrina Shankland "warned Republicans that younger children can't pay attention to their mentors.  'To allow...a toddler, a two-year-old (to carry a gun), and I'm not being hyperbolic because someone will allow it, is dangerous...Other hunters in the woods are not going to choose to get hurt by a child with a rifle.'"
     Her statement, strange as it is--the idea of someone not choosing to be shot is a weird way of putting it--reflects the reasonable idea that letting a small child have a gun is akin to letting a small child drive a car, or vote, or join the Army.  The last case, actually, is practiced in many parts of the world, with its hundreds of thousands of child soldiers, all armed with various weapons, so far along in violent experience, beyond Representative Shankland's hand-wringing about little Wisconsin kids using adult killing tools.
     Who is the bill's author?
     "[Republican] Rep. Rob Stafsholt of New Richmond, told reporters...that not every hunter uses high-powered rifles and he believed he was capable of handling a .22 caliber rifle when he was eight years old."
     Therefore, logically, every eight year old can handle a .22!  What's the problem?
     During the Assembly floor debate, Stafsholt said "...that his daughter killed a bear at age 11 but [he] held her back from bear hunting when she was 10 because she wasn't ready...We're returning the choice to the parent."
     The bill goes to the state Senate, it will probably be voted on next Tuesday, and if it passes, Governor Scott Walker must sign the bill to make it law.  I wonder what the Governor, a man well-known for his idiotic, destructive, bone-headed choices will do if the Baby Face Killers bill comes to his desk?
     That thirty-four states already have no minimum hunting age means that a majority of Americans probably don't even think this kind of legislation is batshit crazy.
     Representative Rob Stafsholt argues disingenuously that "not every hunter uses high-powered rifles," making it seem as if every "responsible" parent, or mentor, will have their child or charge use small caliber weapons (which also kill and maim).  He apparently assumes that Wisconsin parents who love the shit out of their guns and who endlessly defend their misunderstanding of the Second Amendment will never supply their children under the age of ten with high-powered weaponry.  I recall footage of a young Texas girl receiving instructions at a shooting range.  Her teacher was (note the past tense) a former soldier with a typical crewcut and camo outfit, showing the girl how to fire a machine gun.  Being a kid lacking the proper strength to use such a weapon, the gun's kick aimed it upwards at the man's head, killing him instantly.  Lesson over.
     I realize I'm spoiling the fun of imagining children under the age of ten stalking around in the Wisconsin woods, armed with weapons legally bestowed upon them by Assemblymen and -women who work on behalf of the National Rifle Association, an organization that corrupts our willfully greedy leaders in state capitals and in Washington, D.C.  The lesson of the dead children in Newtown, Connecticut, the gun massacre that so moved President Obama that he insisted a moral turning point had been reached and then proceeded to do nothing about it, is that politicians in America, generally, don't really give a shit about all the children killed by guns every year.  They don't care about children in the Middle East killed in American drone strikes, either.  President Trump doesn't care about all the children drinking unsafe water in Puerto Rico as I write this.
     This bill heading to the state Senate on Tuesday and possibly to Governor Walker's desk, offers further proof, to me at least, that Republicans are stupid.

                                                                               Vic Neptune
   

     This Isn't Even the Bottom Point Yet, But It's Pretty Bad

     American news voices and political establishment workers love high-ranking military men.  The spectacle of General Petraeus (who "literally wrote the book on counter-terrorism") facing a Congressional Committee to explain his leaking of military secrets to his mistress nevertheless presented a typical proud lion of Democracy's defense in barbarian lands.  Put these men in their heavily decorated uniforms, speaking in their clipped monotones about "necessities," "the battle space," or "the few who serve in an all volunteer military force,"--the greatest thing since the legions of Marcus Aurelius--and news commentators lose their rationality.
     Petraeus, a married man, was the subject of journalistic inquiries by a good-looking woman who also got herself intimately involved with the twenty-first century Patton and later wrote a book about her personal experiences as she viewed the hero in a way Petraeus worshippers in the news media and in Congress may have envied.
     All of this begs the question: Why wasn't Petraeus prosecuted for giving top secret information to his mistress?
     It comes down to what I wrote above: high-ranking military men can commit egregious violations and get away with it, while a mere Private, like Bradley (later Chelsea) Manning, who revealed explicit evidence of U.S. war crimes, was put into a cell with the lights on for two years, a form of sleep torture practiced under the aegis of Barack Obama, not Donald Trump, in case we're under the impression that Trump is the only evil President.
     That dress uniform works really well when it has lots of ribbons and metal stars on it.  In 1987, Oliver North, a mere Lieutenant Colonel, became a folk hero because of the way he looked in his Marine uniform.  He had well-acted gravitas even as he confessed before Congress, speaking with blunt, unashamed pride about how he and his gorgeous secretary, Fawn Hall, shredded shitloads of government documents to cover up the Reagan Administration's illegal funding and involvement in the Contra War in Nicaragua, a U.S.-directed atrocity that also involved the selling of missiles to the Ayatollah Khomeini; but that was all done by Reagan, a great man even Obama admires.
     Extending my sarcasm to the present day, we have another General, John Kelly, Trump's first head of the Department of Homeland Security and, after the firing of Reince Priebus, Trump's second Chief of Staff.  A tough-looking taciturn man, Kelly has a sense of humor that seems self-deprecating.  He pretends like he doesn't know how politics work and the press corps giggles.  This idea gets reinforced by news media commentary.  Kelly "comes from a military sphere and as such he will bring discipline to the Oval Office, limiting access to the President, and, we can hope, reducing the amount of tweets."
     In Trump time, that was ages ago, but really it was just recently that John Kelly took on the position with the chief purpose of "stopping the leaks."
     They haven't stopped.  I've wondered sometimes if Kelly himself leaks to the press.  He's said to hate his job, according to leaked information, and is planning an exit that may also involve a simultaneous jumping of the ship by Secretary of State Tillerson.  Trump, for all his self-claimed accomplishments as a great businessman, is unable to keep people working for him.  This, in any business, small or large, indicates shitty management, not competence.
     Kelly couldn't stop Trump from saying horrible things about yet another Gold Star family.  Last year, Candidate Trump took a shit on the Khans, Muslim parents of a dead Army officer who was killed saving the lives of his men, qualifying him as a hero.  Just recently, Trump took another shit on a Gold Star family who lost a husband and son in Niger in a still mysterious military action against an ISIS offshoot.  Kelly took credit for telling the President what to say during his condolence call to the widow.  When Kelly later explained what he had instructed Trump to say, it sounded reasonable.  Kelly's a combat veteran, he's made such calls himself, but Trump must've sounded like the tactless, shallow brute that he is.  The widow had put the call on speaker, a Democratic Congresswoman and friend of the soldier's family heard it too, as well as the soldier's mother.  All three women, all Black, a race Trump has demonstrated his documented prejudice against, agreed that the President was insensitive, didn't mention the soldier's name, La David Johnson, even once.  He said also that "He [Johnson] knew what he signed up for."
     The widow was in tears from Trump's call, from the President's attempt to "help."
     Kelly appeared at a press conference and explained the background of the call.  He also spent a lot of time attacking Congresswoman Wilson "for listening in on that call."  Kelly didn't know, even though the information was available, that Wilson has known the Johnson family for a long time and also that the widow chose to let her mother-in-law and the Congresswoman listen to the President.  Trump later tweeted petulantly that Wilson listened to a "SECRET" call, even as he revealed that other unnamed people besides Kelly had been in the Oval Office during the call.  Thus, it was not a secret call, even if one were to capitalize every letter of that word to somehow make it so.  Trump also tweeted several times about how Wilson's account was "fake news," even though it was corroborated by Mrs. Johnson and her mother-in-law, the latter saying, "The President did disrespect my son."
     We can expect Trump to indirectly accuse a Green Beret's widow and mother of being liars, but what did John Kelly do?
     Kelly's account of his own soldier son's death in 2010 resonated with the news media, but once he attacked Wilson, calling her "an empty barrel, the kind that makes the most noise,"--unaware apparently that this accurately describes his own boss, Trump--he smeared her further by condemning her dedication of an FBI building in 2015, mischaracterizing her speech, calling it "grandstanding,"--again, unaware apparently that Trump is the biggest grandstander of all.  Journalists quickly produced the speech in question, proving that Wilson's comments were anything but grandstanding.  Kelly thus showed himself willing to smear an earnest Congresswoman on behalf of supporting his boss's lies which include the condemnation of a Gold Star family.
     How ironic that a General would countenance such loathsome behavior toward a dead Green Beret's family.  We Americans are supposed to respect the military, the flag, the National Anthem, but here we have a four star General and the Commander in Chief both dishonoring a dead soldier, his pregnant wife, their two other children, and his parents.  What is that?  Could it be that Trump's attacks against NFL players supposedly disrespecting the flag and the Anthem, and by extension the military, have nothing to do with Trump's own self-alleged love for the U.S. Armed Forces?  When it comes to the real thing, actual combat death in a war theater (West Africa) most Americans and many politicians didn't even know existed, Trump and General Kelly have now shown in their treatment of the Gold Star Johnson family that soldiers under their command are just objects to throw down the garbage disposal of the Global War on Terror.  
     The narrative in the news media shifted to the idea that everyone, even tough General Kelly, gets brought low by exposure to the hazardous waste dump of a human being that is Donald Trump.  This same corporate news media gave Trump unlimited airtime last year and the year before, allowed him endless minutes of spreading the lie about Obama's citizenship, not realizing, I guess, that close contact with this reality TV star might also pollute them; that is, if they hadn't already been corrupted by such egregious violations of decency as letting the Bush administration convince the American people of the necessity of war with Iraq.
     John Kelly is so noble that he works for Donald Trump.
     Out of this whole disgusting story, the truth is, Donald Trump is an asshole, we knew that; John Kelly is also an asshole.

                                                                          Vic Neptune
     
     

     The Gold Dragon

     I heard on the news this morning that Donald Trump wants the United States to have ten times as many nuclear weapons as it has now.  Our current stockpile of such weapons (Go U.S.A.!) is 4,480.  Trump wants us to have 44,800 nuclear weapons.
     When I was a teenager playing the fantasy role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, my character and my friends' characters would gradually accumulate wealth, weaponry, personal defenses, property.  Our ambitions would grow, ultimately leading us towards the game designation, Chaotic Evil, Lawful Good's opposite.
     Our characters, starting out with good intentions, ended up living and thriving in an atmosphere of acquisitiveness, treachery, and casual violence.
     Yesterday, Trump sat in the Oval Office with a familiar gnome, former Secretary of State and current war criminal, Henry Kissinger.  The unspoken rule in corporate news media persists: show Kissinger but do not mention his vital role in killing millions of people.  Instead, the story focused on Trump's tiff with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, that the latter "allegedly" called the President a "moron."
     Trump, though he's pretended to be unruffled by this, bothered to tell a Forbes interviewer that if the moron comment is true, he'll "have to compare I.Q. tests with Tillerson," adding that we "know who would win."  In saying it that way, Trump implied, to me anyway, that Tillerson might be a moron.
     Verbal exchanges like this point to the adolescent nature of the Trump Administration.  The Executive Branch eats itself.  Paranoia, leaks to the press, "strong" new officials brought in to restore order (like Chief of Staff John Kelly) who themselves find it likely they might have to resign.  How does one work for a lunatic indefinitely?
     Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (the second person to hold that position and it's only eight months into this administration) seems to be holding tightly to her job without fear of dismissal. Her father, former Governor Mike Huckabee, who ran in primaries against Trump in 2016, interviewed his former adversary, giving the President an easy-going chance to sound off about how great he is.  Not even Sean Hannity is as sycophantic toward Trump.  He drew a compliment out of his daughter's boss by asking about Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her ability as a press secretary.  Trump used one of his few adjectives, "great," to describe her job performance.  I have no doubt that Trump thinks this of her, because Sanders lies for him every time she faces the press.
     On November 4, 2016, four days before the election, Mike Huckabee tweeted, "Trump may be a car wreck, but at least his car is pointed in right direction.  Hillary is a drunk driver going the wrong way on the freeway."
     When I see a wrecked car on a freeway or on a street, I don't think, "Good thing that car's pointed in the direction it was traveling."  Huckabee last November couldn't bring himself to speak plainly, resorting instead to nonsensical car metaphors, when he could've just said, "Both of these candidates suck, but one of them, the Democrat, sucks worse."  That would be an honest statement from Huckabee, at least.
     I think, though, that Huckabee was hoping for a cabinet appointment or some other role in Trump World.  In the interim period between election and inauguration, Huckabee met with Trump to discuss the possibility of being appointed U.S. Ambassador to Israel.  Yes, a Bible-thumper with the standard set of End Times beliefs, which include the ultimate damnation of all Jews, as the top American diplomat in Israel.
     Huckabee instead got his own show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, an organization I know nothing about, except that they, as Christians, are willing to have as a guest on one of their shows a man who admitted to Billy Bush on audiotape that he sexually assaults women, an activity enabled by his big money and power, the pattern seen in Trump's friends Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, and in the recently discovered sexual predator, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.
     Go Christian values!  Go capitalism!
     Corporate news networks keep reporting the Tillerson insult as "moron," but in fact he called Trump a "fucking moron."  He said this last June in relation to Afghanistan policy; it took three months to filter through, to the point where anti-Trump networks, CNN and MSNBC, mention it over and over, omitting the "fucking" part, which of course gives the insult its bite.
     What this has to do with Dungeons and Dragons, I don't know, except that my friends and I, playing that game, knew we were Chaotic Evil

                                                                              Vic Neptune
   

     Ad Nauseam

     The first thing I thought when I heard about the mass shooting in Las Vegas, information that included the name and age of the perpetrator, a sixty-four year old retired white man, was that he wasn't committing his crime on behalf of ISIS and that he wasn't a Muslim.  He didn't fit the profile of what quick-judging Americans think of as a terrorist; yet, he terrorized thousands of concertgoers, killed fifty-nine people and wounded 525.  I heard later that the automatic rifle fire went on for about twelve minutes, or half the length of a sitcom.
     He managed to sneak twenty-three automatic rifles into his hotel room.  From a high vantage point he had a good view of the large flat space where the country music festival was taking place.  Nobody  knows why he did it.  His brother said, "He was just a guy."
     President Trump pronounced the massacre "an act of pure evil."  Trump, like all Republicans and some Democrats, supports the NRA, gun rights, is against gun control.  Trump admitted more than once last year that he has a pistol strapped to his ankle.  Imagine that slob who never exercises trying to bend at the waist to get access to a pistol he wouldn't be able to use effectively because he has no experience in combat situations, a choice he made when he complained to the Vietnam-era draft board about his hurting foot, and years later he couldn't remember which foot it was--in other words, there was nothing wrong with his foot.
     Trump's lack of fighting experience mirrors all tough-talking Second Amendment propagandists, like gun enthusiast Ted Nugent, who, during the Vietnam War years, avoided military service by making himself so repulsive (not bathing, shitting on himself, becoming a derelict) that he was rejected automatically as physically and mentally unfit for duty.  He's clean now, but inside he's still a cowardly shit.
     Bill O'Reilly, another tough talker with no combat experience, claims that the Las Vegas massacre is "the price of freedom."  In some of the on-site footage I saw two young women running along, and then dropping to the pavement at the sound of another volley of gunfire before they got up again, moving in a herky-jerky way, clearly freaked out of their minds.  If O'Reilly or Ted Nugent or Donald Trump were to ever undergo such an experience, would the words out of their mouths regarding the Second Amendment (which says nothing of lone gun maniacs with automatic weapons and endless ammunition, but mentions a "well-regulated militia," a body that would not accept a solitary creep with a penchant for mass murder) be modified?  Would they denounce the NRA's knee-jerk reactions to such events?
     Over and over, robotically, because it's a talking point, the NRA-infected political class (including Sarah Huckabee Sanders--the snake who speaks to the press for Trump) says that "this is not the time to be politicizing this tragedy.  The bodies haven't even been buried."
     They said the same thing after the murders of twenty children in Newtown, Connecticut, the mass murder (committed by a mentally ill young man) that moved President Obama to declare how fed up he was, not realizing, apparently, that he's ordered missile strikes in the Middle East that have killed far more children than twenty.  Oh well, he tried, and failed, to get America behind the idea that gun control needs to happen.  That it shouldn't be easy to obtain unlimited amounts of ammunition, that it's crazy to allow semi-automatic and automatic weapons to be bought legally in the first place.
     Every time a gun massacre happens, this dispute goes on: don't politicize this because the victims must be honored, the families prayed for, thoughts sent their way.  On the other hand (the one not holding the gun) it's exactly the right time to bring up gun control, to fight the NRA.  The NRA, ironically, benefits from mass casualty situations brought about by people with guns.  Gun sales go up.  Guns, like metal and plastic flowers, rose from the graves of the children of Newtown.  Guns will be sold massively after Las Vegas, in Las Vegas, because that's the site of so many gun shows that it's practically a daily thing.
     Trump will visit Las Vegas on Wednesday, Puerto Rico on Tuesday.  He's sent many a corrosive and vile tweet criticizing the heroic Mayor of San Juan for her strident and honest assessments of the slow and incompetent U.S. government response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria.  In true Trump fashion, he doesn't like it when someone doesn't pay tribute to him.  The poor and downtrodden are supposed to thank the masters for the scraps thrown their way, not comment on the paucity of offerings.
   
                                                                           Vic Neptune
   

     Damage Report

     I just read a funny article published today, September 27, 2017, on CNN's website.  It was written by five authors: Jim Acosta, Jeff Zeleny, Elizabeth Landers, Kaitlan Collins, and Kevin Liptak.  That a short article requires five authors is a question in itself, but I figure that one of them, Acosta perhaps since his name appears first, wrote the article (which needed proofreading before publication), while the other four gathered the information--and what information it is, since it deals with President Trump's psychology as well as the groupthink mentality in his administration, even as White House personnel continue to leak, a no-no that led to the replacement of Chief of Staff Reince Priebus with dour retired General John Kelly, who made it clear that leaking would not be tolerated.  He apparently doesn't realize that corrupt systems contain their own downfalls.
     The article, titled "Trump infuriated after backing Alabama loser," starts out with the President returning to Washington on Air Force One.  He had just been attending "a high-dollar fundraiser in Manhattan."  A fundraiser for desperate Puerto Ricans whose island at night now looks like North Korea from space?  A fundraiser for the Texan and Floridian victims of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma?
     The fundraiser, actually, was for the 2020 Trump reelection campaign committee.  75% of money raised would go to that, while 25% would be sent to the Republican National Committee.  In other words, money for scum.  Make America Great Again by ignoring everyone in need.
     An "infuriated" Trump watched Fox News Channel on the plane taxpayers pay to operate.  The Alabama senatorial election was called by a wide margin for Roy Moore over the President's endorsed candidate, Luther Strange.
     Trump, according to "officials and informal advisers," i.e. leakers, vented "at his political team and...Mitch McConnell, who had consolidated establishment GOP support behind Strange."
     McConnell had pushed for Strange, getting Trump to endorse and campaign for him.  As the election neared, Trump wobbled, saying at a rally in Alabama that "if Roy Moore wins, I'll fight for him."  He vacillated about Strange, saying, "Maybe he'll win, maybe he won't."
     According to officials and informal advisers (Ivanka Trump among them?) around the President, he "fretted the endorsement made him appear weak, cowed by an establishment that he's openly rebuffed during his own campaign."
     If you've gotten this far without laughing at our President, you may be a Trump supporter.
     Recently departed from the White House, right wing fascist pro-Nazi Breitbart leader Steve Bannon pissed on Trump's convictions by holding his own rally for Strange's opponent, Roy Moore.
     Strange has supported Trump's agenda.  Trump loves loyalty (if it flows his way).
     Trump was willing to make the "Strange" mistake, due to the man's loyalty, but still felt, Trump-wise, that "his team had largely failed him."
     "He [Trump] went to bed 'embarrassed and pissed' following the election loss, according to a person familiar with his mindset." (Did Melania Trump leak this tidbit?)
     McConnell is on Trump's shit list, apparently, and he feels "outdone" by Bannon.  Fingers in the White House are pointing at people to blame, though none apparently are willing to put a spotlight on the brains of the whole operation, the man whose "brand" gets hurt, according to the article, by "losing."
     Late last night, Trump erased recent history, deleting favorable tweets about Luther Strange, replacing them with this one about the victor, Moore:
     "Spoke to Roy Moore of Alabama last night for the first time.  Sounds like a really great guy who ran a fantastic race.  He will help to #MAGA! [meaning Make America Great Again!]"
     Of Strange he wrote, "...started way back & ran a good race."
     Enter Orwellian White House mouthpiece, Kellyanne Conway, who said of Moore's upsetting victory, "The result was not unexpected, and even though the polls are often wrong, the result was not unexpected."  In other words, the result was expected.  Nonetheless, she added that the race "validated" Trump's strategy.  In other words, whatever the fuck happens, let's call it Trump's strategy, whether it's nuclear war with North Korea, letting Puerto Rico go to Hell, or Trump's having to watch NFL owners disagree with him by supporting their players in their protests during pre-game performances of the National Anthem.  Chaos works that way; Trump's spokespersons, like Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, push the idea that Donald Trump actually has a command of the difficulties of his job, when he's actually making it up as he goes along.
     Conway added further that "other Republican senators who have supported Trump's agenda can expect similar shows of support from the President."  She went on to say that the Moore-Strange race echoed last year's atmosphere of anti-establisment support for Trump.  Thus, she conflates Trump's and Strange's failure with the victorious 2016 Trump, attempting to make it seem as if this new screw up in Alabama is part of some plan carried out by competent strategists.  Her promise, too, for the pro-Trump agenda senators getting the opportunity to have Trump's backing, as did Luther Strange, sounds more like a prediction of future election day losses for those Trump-supported senators.
     Trump, as he often does, gave his own inferiority complex and self-hatred away when he wrote in the above two tweets his characterizations of the the two campaigns.  Moore's he called "fantastic."  Strange's was merely "good."
     Two influential men campaigned for Strange and Moore near the end: Donald Trump for the former, Steve Bannon for the latter.  Trump had to concede that Bannon's man had done a "fantastic" job, while his own man had been "good."
     Compared to Bannon when it comes to political campaigning and propaganda, Trump is weaker, and he knows it.  His angry outbursts (such as when, according to sworn testimony in first wife Ivana Trump's divorce deposition, he beat and raped her after getting a bad haircut) tend to come when things aren't going his way.  The White House still leaks--John Kelly, therefore, isn't doing what he was brought in to do regarding that matter.  The place is dysfunctional, the most loyal servants are also the most craven.  Hitler in the Berlin bunker was also surrounded by such people, many of whom had a diminishing sense of reality.
     "Embarrassed and pissed," Trump went to bed last night.  At least he has a comfortable place to sleep, unlike three and a half million American citizens in Puerto Rico.

                                                                             Vic Neptune

                                                                                           
   

     The Gibbering Mouthers

     I haven't written in this blog for a short while, but I've written in the other blog: Screen Screed: Thoughts on Movies From a Lifelong Eater of Cinema.  Check it out.  The same writer wrote it, so if you like this political/current events blog it makes sense that you'll like the movie blog.
     This morning before going to work I endured, out of curiosity, twenty minutes of Joy Reid's softball interview on MSNBC with Hillary Clinton.  Turns out that Clinton is convinced she lost, teleologically speaking, because of the James Comey letter.  I guess American voters didn't find her repulsive--they weren't sick of her after a quarter of a century.
     It's interesting that even after the Access Hollywood audio recording from 2005 was released in early October 2016, Hillary Clinton still couldn't beat a man who bragged about his aggressive creepy prowess with unwilling women.  The man who said of one of his alleged conquests, "I moved on her like a bitch!"
     Joy Reid pointed out that Clinton was harassed in social media, called the "C Word," the "B Word."  Cunt, bitch, were the two words Reid was referring to.  Harassment on social media is a common thing for people in show business, on YouTube, in politics.  What getting harassed in that manner has to do with not bothering to campaign in Wisconsin (a delicate victory for Trump that seriously helped him win the election) is anybody's guess.  Only a shitty candidate with boneheaded advisors would ignore a vital state like Wisconsin and instead concentrate on trying to win over Republican voters dissatisfied with Trump, a strategy confirmed after the election by Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer.
     Clinton, stuck on this failed method, spoke hopefully of the Democrats' need to win over Republican congressmen and -women and Republican senators who might be persuadable in the health care issue, which burns brightly again as yet another attempt is made by the GOP to deprive over twenty million people of health care. She offered her view of Bernie Sanders' recent announcement of going for Medicare for all, a measure that, if it ever passes, will bring the United States into the First World.
     "We shouldn't be concentrating on anything but defeating this latest attempt by the Republicans to repeal and replace Obamacare," said Clinton.  Sanders and his politician supporters on this measure (including many who regard themselves as 2020 presidential candidates and probably don't want to seem like the shits they really are when it comes to this vital issue) can surely make a commitment to Medicare for all while also condemning and fighting the sociopathic Republicans who want to viciously destroy the lives of millions of Americans, something they apparently have in common with Kim Jong-un.
     The truth is, Hillary Clinton is against Medicare for all, i.e. Single Payer.  I won't call her a cunt or a bitch, but she is a wealthy out of touch piece of shit, schlepping her new book full of excuses as to why she lost while Bernie Sanders (who, unlike her, is popular) tries to help the poor and beaten down people of this country.  This is the same Bernie Sanders who, during the campaign season last year, said proudly that he doesn't count Henry Kissinger among his friends.  Hillary and the war criminal Kissinger are friends.
     Hillary Clinton, like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, do not represent the interests of the younger generations whose voting habits will favor people more like Sanders and other Progressives.  The old guard of Baby Boomers running things in this country is "cracking at the seams," as it's put in King Crimson's song, "Epitaph."
     Trump's braying voice, meanwhile, reveals his sick fuck brutality every day.  He declared at the United Nations that if the U.S. or its allies are threatened by North Korea, "we will totally destroy North Korea."  By displaying a willingness to murder 25 million people, he revealed that surpassing Adolf Hitler's killing record may be one of his goals in life.
     From the macro to the micro, Trump has gone after Black athletes, attacking in Twitter Stephen Curry, the champion basketball player (and one of the most popular athletes in the country) after Curry said he had no intention of visiting the White House for the traditional NBA champion team meet and greet with the President.  Lebron James, NBA mega-superstar of these times, backed up Curry, calling the President a "bum."
     Trump has also made football his target, taking on Colin Kaepernick, formerly of the San Francisco 49ers, the quarterback who kneeled during the National Anthem to protest the institutionalized mistreatment of people of color in America.  It's his First Amendment right to do so, but Trump at a rally two nights ago jabbed his stubby finger at the air, called Kaepernick a "son of a bitch," and opined to the jackals in his audience what a great thing it would be if the NFL owners (thirty-one of whom are White multi-millionaires or billionaires out of thirty-two) were to fire anyone who refuses "to honor our flag and National Anthem."
     Trump proves his patriotic spirit (the thing that shows love of country) by backing a bill that would deprive many millions of people of health care, making it unaffordable, making many thousands (at least) die.
     Jemele Hill of ESPN tweeted that Trump is a white supremacist.  The White House demanded an apology from ESPN.  That corporate body replied they were handling the matter in-house.  Even Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the soulless Trump worshipper and Press Secretary, said that what Hill wrote was "horrible" and that she should be fired.  I thought that Republicans are against government interference in the business of corporations?
     A little story came out about Trump's Administration, finding that it's the most male-dominated Administration in recent history, with four-fifths of the positions held by men.  Trump is not sexist, though.  We know this because on the Access Hollywood recording Trump says that when you're famous, you can "do whatever you want [to women]...Grab em by the pussy."
     That's the gross puddle of America's bad karma that Hillary Clinton lost the election to.

                                                                             Vic Neptune
   
     

     Donald Trump's Penis: The Sunset Years

     I make connections.  I see one thing and it reminds me of something else, so I wonder about the combination, even if the two things might not be related.  I think some more about the combination and sometimes see similarities to ponder, maybe even some cause and effect.
     In this way today, I began thinking of a subject that led me to contemplating something most people wouldn't want to think about: Donald Trump's penis.
     First, considering the President's overwhelming ego, how could he, a power-mongering Alpha Male (a blowhard obsessed with his own masculinity), not be obsessed with his own penis?  Most men, including me, are at least fond of their own penises.  Trump has spoken proudly, during a Republican debate (!) of his penis.  "There's no problem there, believe me," he announced to millions of viewers.  That he made this claim indicates to me there's a good chance there is a problem, and I'm not talking about the size issues people like to joke about.
     My first connecting thought, as explained above, wasn't about Trump's penis, but something he said in a sound bite where he used the same phrase three times in answering a question about whether or not the United States will go to war with North Korea (i.e. do something that will lead to the kinds of scenarios seen in popular apocalyptic television shows), leading me to wonder if he takes drugs.  Could it be that his behaviors (impulsivity, pressure to speak, short attention span, inability to hold back from blurting rude comments) have something to do with drug addiction?  If so, he's masked this aspect of his personal life well, even as his outward persona so obviously shows anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear a demented man with severe mental problems that have never been dealt with, by him or by health care professionals.
     Celebrities who are supposed to be "with it," aren't often allowed by those around them the space and time to collapse and be real, to go nuts if they need to.  I think it took Britney Spears so long to be properly diagnosed and medicated because many of the people around her (some of them vampires just using her) couldn't continue living off of her largesse and fame if she went bonkers.  Eventually, she did display psychotic behavior in public, bringing a horrible amount of mocking attention from news media people who, like society at large, have no sympathy for the mentally ill, although it's a common enough malady that it's likely most news people know family members and friends who have such problems.
     It's just not talked about.  Unlike with someone missing a leg from a tour of duty in Iraq, a mentally ill person looks normal physically, so it doesn't seem there's anything wrong, but all it takes, in Trump's case, is an application of the imagination to wonder about what might be going on in the head of a man so insecure about himself, his body, his sexuality and masculinity and potency, that he can't help announcing to the world that his cock works and it's a big one.
     Trump's golden helmet, his hairdo, is made possible by the drug Propecia (also known as Finasteride).  It prevents hair loss, grows hair and helps men who aren't comfortable with their own personalities deal with going out in public.  We know from first wife Ivana Trump's divorce deposition that her husband, after getting a bad haircut, beat and raped her during their marriage.  Trump's hair and his sub-normally sized hands, subjects he often brings up, are of enormous importance to his sense of self-worth.
     Propecia's side effects can include loss of interest in sex, impotence, ejaculatory delay, dizziness, feeling like one might pass out, swelling of hands and feet, and other possibilities.  It's the sexual mention above that I'm interested in for the purpose of this post, although it's interesting to note the President's exhaustion during his first foreign trip from Saudi Arabia to Sicily.
     Many years of taking Propecia, of losing sexual potency and effectiveness, of experiencing reduced sex drive, has, if this applies to Trump, led him to either seek alternatives with testosterone-based sex drive boosting drugs, or not.  Shall we assume that Donald Trump, a lifetime womanizer by his own admission, has never tried to recover his sexual potency, the hard-ons and orgasms quashed by Propecia?
     Being a man myself, I assume that getting a boner and being able to ejaculate is also important to Donald Trump, but what if he can't?  He's put his focus on improving the visible, the fleshy bone thing above the neckline of his crappy suits--his head with its puffy skin and dyed blonde Propecia hairdo that looks like something a dying Roman emperor would wear to the Coliseum during the Roman Empire's final century.
     Note: I don't make fun of homely people because they're homely.  I only do it when they're also rich sociopathic scumbags.
     Donald Trump is a proven chronic liar.  If he boasts of his penis, "There's nothing wrong there, believe me," he means there's something wrong.  Given that we know he's a Propecia user, it's likely his cock doesn't work, a different angle of approach from the usual "Donald Trump has a small penis" put-down.
     If it doesn't work and maybe hasn't worked in years, the joy of having a normally functional penis is not something Trump experiences anymore, making Melania Trump even more of a trophy wife, a display item elevating her husband's ego even as he doesn't really give a shit about her.
     For many years we heard comedians remark that Trump's hair is mostly toupee.  Turns out that with Propecia, it's actually just an abnormal growth that gets funnier and weirder looking the closer one gets to it.  Say what you want about Kim Jong-Un, at least his hair is tight on his head and neatly ordered.
   
                                                                             Vic Neptune
     
   
   
     
     

     Catastrophe

     President Trump and his wife have visited flood-stricken southeast Texas twice and Louisiana once.  Hurricane and then Tropical Storm Harvey was, to use Trump's tweeted word, "Historic."  He also used the word, "Wow!"
     In Corpus Christi, Texas, during the first visit, he spoke into a megaphone (a la George W. Bush on the ruins of the World Trade Center) to a crowd of cheering supporters, making "a show of compassion"--the trip's purpose--into a ragged rally.  I figure that the people who showed up to see him bray his message about the people of the Great State of Texas, their courage and altruism (traits found worldwide actually, whenever disasters occur, including in the aftermaths of U.S. airstrikes), were either taking a needed break from sorting through their possessions in their rain-damaged houses, or were among the Trump faithful who can't regard the man critically, even when he ignores the excesses of the KKK.
     The Corpus Christi crowd chanted "U-S-A!  U-S-A!"  This is the go-to slogan that seems to hearten Americans in their simple-minded moments, as when a crowd chanted the same thing outside the White House the night we found out that Obama had assassinated Osama bin Laden.
     Such enthusiasm directed at Trump greases his interior wheels.  He loved the crowd size.  I saw on weather charts this past week that some parts of Texas received forty-three inches of rain in a single twenty-four hour period.  Trump on his second visit, to Houston this time (this from the September 4, 2017 L.A. Times), remarked to journalists that, "We saw a lot of happiness.  It's been really nice.  It's been a wonderful thing.  As tough as this was, it's been a wonderful thing.  I think even for the country to watch it, for the world to watch.  It's been beautiful."
     There's more, which illuminates the sick fuck nature of the nation's forty-fifth President:
     "Asked what people had said to him, Trump replied, 'They're really happy with what's going on.  It's been something that's very well received [the hurricane? the emergency response? Melania's ass in those tight expensive pants?]."
     An actual human being in touch with reality, Devon Harris, a construction worker, remarked, "Is he going to help?  Can he help?  I lost my home.  My job is gone.  My tools are gone.  My car is gone.  My life is gone.  What is Trump going to do?"
     "Later, the Trumps put on plastic gloves and helped hand out lunch boxes--hot dogs, potato chips, applesauce."
     "The Trumps later stopped at...a large suburban church doubling as a relief center.  [Trump] handed out plastic buckets and cardboard boxes of supplies to motorists..."
     "[After the church visit], the Trumps loaded about a half dozen cars and trucks. 'Hey can you handle this?' Trump said to the first recipient...'There's a lot of stuff in here.  You're all set.'"
     "'It's good exercise,'"Trump said as the man drove off."
     I'd like to note here that this is the only time that Donald Trump has ever worked.
     Vice President Pence, before Trump went there the first time, "rolled up his sleeves" and cleared some branches, said all the right things, came across as a functioning and psychologically balanced person.  What wasn't mentioned in mainstream news media was how in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, then Congressman Pence argued on the floor of the House for cutting Medicare and Social Security to pay for Katrina's devastation.  Pence visiting southeast Texas after Harvey may have seemed laudable but don't forget, he's a son of a bitch with a cold heart.  A Christian, too, but a bad one.
     When Devon Harris, quoted above, asked, "What is Trump going to do?" he asked that question, I suspect, because Trump's own words about the hurricane, the "Historic" rainfall, the recovery and rebuilding, are so vague, which is typical of the man's personality and his deficient use of the English language.
     Trump saw happiness in the shelter housing people driven there by absolute necessity.  He, a rich fuck who will never want for anything, except proper crowd sizes, bigger hands, and a time machine to go back in time to prevent Robert Mueller's birth, saw a roomful of desperate people being polite because the President of the United States and his glamorous wife were suddenly among them.
     The biggest rainfall in the history of the United States, the enormous damage it's caused to heavily populated zones and to the energy industry located there, alligators and wood debris covered with fire ants in the water, people getting electrocuted from current passing through water, thousands of pets separated from their owners, jobs and lives lost, homes destroyed, water becoming stagnant and not draining fast enough, all this and more leads our leader to proclaim it to be "a wonderful thing for the world to watch."
     Yes, Trump, maybe so, if you hate your own country.

                                                                               Vic Neptune

                                                   
       

     Counter-Clockwise, Like a Hurricane

     I want to plug a new blog I started, one about movies, called Screen Screed: Thoughts On Movies From a Lifelong Eater of Cinema by Vic Neptune.  It's a nice alternative for me, giving me a chance to write about a subject I'm very interested in that doesn't have to do with current events or politics, which still get dealt with in One Damned Thing After Another, this particular blog that's existed since November 2014.
     2014, the year before the presidential campaigns for 2016 started.  2018 will be its equivalent, in terms of not hearing about politicians being moved around the country to say shit to people who need to see such power-mongers in person.  One can, like with football games, watch and hear such shit on TV, not having to be around crowds of people willing to be frisked and electronically checked for weapons before entering a venue to see their preferred man or, sometimes, woman.
     Remember Carly Fiorina?  I remember that she seemed pretty hostile to abortion.  As a Republican candidate who, like many others, lost to Donald Trump and was insulted by him, Fiorina also loved the American war machine.  She ended up doing badly enough with the voters that her declining self-esteem led her to accept Senator Ted Cruz's offer to be his running mate, after a presumed win of the nomination.  Cruz was Trump's last opponent before the self-described billionaire won the nomination and then the election.  Fiorina dropped out of sight for a while, but was seen at Trump Tower interviewing with the President-Elect for the job of Director of National Intelligence (DNI).
     Why would Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard, be qualified to head the nation's intelligence community?  For the same reason, perhaps, that Trump's son-in-law acts as a peace envoy to the Middle East.  That the jobs don't match the characters and abilities of those in the Trump administration starts with the President himself.  He has no government experience, and what he's done with that experience since January reveals an incompetent who prevents any real work getting done in the Executive Branch because his politics are based on personalities with all the whining bitchiness accompanying that; a key feature of American culture in a time of growing social media and "reality" shows on TV as well as this nation's own self-regard as a great and perfect country that cannot do wrong.
     Trump, in an attention-grabbing interview last year, said that Carly Fiorina's face disqualified her for the presidency.  "Look at her!"  She wasn't good-looking enough, I guess.  She should look like Cindy Crawford.  Had he declared, "I'm a misogynist!" would that have made any difference? Trump's own ugly face didn't prevent him from winning over enough voters to give him a job he can't handle, proving that there is a double standard and voters' judgments of character are generally inaccurate.
     In 2019 the shit show will start again, and Trump, maybe, won't even be President then.  Talk of his supposedly soon-to-happen resignation "in disgrace" is increasingly heard in news media, independent and mainstream.  I'm not convinced of this, yet.  Consider how Trump has managed to survive a multitude of supposedly "this is the end for him" scandals, all of which tend to clash with each other.  He's proved that dishonorably insulting a war hero can be done by a presidential candidate.  He's proved that attacking the mother of a war hero and insulting her religion at the same time can be done.  He's proved that proposing a ban on all Muslims from entering the United States won't get him dismissed from American public life forever.  He's proved that siding with neo-Nazis and the KKK won't reduce significantly his popularity among the America First right wing.  The problem with Trump is that his ideas about the United States having the right to dominate and murder and exploit other peoples and nations is not out of the mainstream of American political thought, i.e., American exceptionalism, believed in by nearly every politician and corporate news media representative.
     Trump's mistake for many in politics isn't that he's pro-war and pro-national security state, it's that he talks about these subjects in such a vulgar way.  He talked last year about "taking" Iraq's oil.  This caused a furor in the mainstream press, even though that was the main point of Bush's 2003 invasion and everybody knows this.  He's spoken recently about exploiting Afghanistan's undeveloped mineral wealth, something that could yield trillions of dollars in precious metals.  Colonel Jack Jacobs, an MSNBC contributor on military affairs, used the word "removing" that wealth, a "nice" way to talk about it, even though what he really meant is theft of a sovereign nation's natural resources, making America, if this is ever accomplished, a robber of epic proportions, with accompanying bloodshed.  But that's what this and other powerful nations have always done--stolen and killed and devastated less powerful nations.
     Trump's "tone" offends his establishment critics, as when he told Bill O'Reilly that "We [America] kill people."  It's true, but he got skewered by pundits and politicians for saying that.  The U.S. Army in 1945 forced German citizens to see piles of dead bodies, victims of Hitler's reign.  The political and news establishments of America have, in just one example, the Iraq War and around a million dead people to serve as a reminder of the truth of Trump's statement about how the U.S. kills people.  Still, they deny it, in an age of mass communications.  Josef Goebbels and Hitler may have envied the smooth workings of America's current propaganda machine--one that succeeds mostly at not allowing American citizens from being concerned about how their government, using taxpayer money, commits mass murder as a daily habit.  Trump's blunt statement offended the shit out of establishment journalists, pundits, and politicians, the same elite people in the business of concealing the magnitude of the truth about the dark side of American glory.
     Trump is the proverbial "crazy uncle" at the dinner table, talking about subjects no one in polite society mentions.  Trump and I differ in how we view the morality of these concerns.  I'm against the U.S. military operations that fuck with other countries.  Trump has no problem with dropping a 22,000 pound bomb on Afghanistan--I think it's reckless and evil.
     Donald Trump's "Russia connections" mean far less to me than the general establishment viewpoint that what America does in the world, to the world, is good for the world, especially the most vulnerable caught in zones of first world mismanagement and warfare.  That kind of shit doesn't get criticized on the news in the mainstream media.  I don't hear politicians on the floors of House and Senate crying out against American exceptionalism and the damage that does to peace and security in our own country, a nation that can't get its shit together to the extent that the poisoned poor people of Flint, Michigan still deal with state government criminality; that the minimum wage is still an insult, that health care hasn't been improved to the level of decency enjoyed by first world countries, and no one in government or corporate news media seem to care that climate change will, a century from now, make Earth into an alien planet.

                                                                            Vic Neptune
   
   


   
   

     The Good Old Days

     The removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, provoked a rush upon that city of KKK, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and other racist men filled up to their eyeballs with angry cum.  They marched the night of August 11 and 12, after sunset Friday--the Sabbath--carrying tiki torches that looked ridiculous but also proved to be effective weapons used on counter-demonstrators.  Jews in the synagogue observing the Sabbath were made to feel the skin-crawling presentiment of Nazi persecution while the Charlottesville Police Department and Virginia National Guard did nothing to curb the excesses of hundreds of white men chanting anti-Semitic and Nazi slogans.  Their torchlit parade was right out of Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda films of the 1930s.
     The following day, while police continued to do nothing, the Nazis and Klansmen battled with counter-protestors, the former armed in some cases with automatic rifles, also carrying shields and some dressed as cops in riot gear.  The kinds of kicks Brownshirts aimed at Jews in the 1930s were shot on video, shown on the news all weekend and all this week, accompanied by overwhelming condemnation in the mainstream press, although Fox News Channel's Jesse Watters (a Bill O'Reilly protege) pretended to be denser than he actually is when acting as if President Trump said everything he needed to say on August 12.
     To cap the event off, a neo-Nazi, twenty years old, drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors, injuring many and killing a thirty-two year old woman, Heather Heyer.  This ISIS-style method of mayhem didn't inspire Trump to condemn the obvious sources of the violence in Charlottesville.  That Saturday, he read a tepid statement condemning the violence that came "from many sides."  This implied equivocality between the Nazis/KKK and those on the other side, the anti-racist counter-protestors--those who suffered casualties.
     How can Trump do this?  That was the question uttered by many pundits and news anchors.  On Monday, August 14, Trump read another statement that condemned neo-Nazis, KKK, and white nationalists, as well as the violence committed in Charlottesville.  The next day, in Trump Tower, he descended from his penthouse to give a press conference on infrastructure rebuilding plans (one of his presidential campaign talking points).  Instead, he went on at length about Charlottesville, reversing what he had said on Monday, reverting to his initial Saturday statement about the violence coming "from many sides."
     It's obvious that he sees the violence and protests in Virginia on August 11 and 12 as something the far right nationalist/racist wing of his supporters needed to do.  Trump said of the Lee statue, "What's next?  Are they gonna pull down statues of Washington and Jefferson?"
     No, Trump; unlike Robert E. Lee, Washington and Jefferson weren't traitors against the United States of America.  General Lee fought to preserve the institution of slavery.  The states' rights issue of the American Civil War had to do with southern states retaining the right to maintain slavery.
     Trump, though no intellectual, manages to catch my attention whenever he attempts to speak about history or any other subject he knows nothing about.
     Two of his business councils (consisting of high-powered CEOs) have disbanded, revealing once again that Trump is a lousy businessman.  The mayor of Phoenix has expressed his disapproval that Trump will soon hold a rally in that city.  Statues have been vandalized, in Baltimore a few came down by order of the mayor.  It's not politically correct to honor the Confederate States of America at this time.
     The "Alt-Right," i.e., the neo-Nazis and KKK, as well as other white people who want their "country back," finds great encouragement from Trump's words during his "off the rails" (as CNN put it) press conference last Tuesday.  Trump has even been criticized by Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Mitch McConnell, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.  Throughout this past week, I have not heard even one mainstream news commentator or politician state the simple fact that Donald Trump is a racist.  In 1973 he ran into legal trouble when he refused to rent to Black tenants.  His racism goes back, publicly, that far.  It didn't just start in 1973.  He has in all likelihood been a racist most of his life.  Why would he, a racist, give the racists who raised chaos in Charlottesville a hard time?  At the ball, you dance with the one who brought you.
     Meanwhile, the same journalists going nuts over the Trump/Charlottesville story, ignore the daily slaughter of Afghan civilians by the United States military.  Trump, according to his tweet from about an hour ago, is in Camp David meeting with generals, talking about Afghanistan.  Rather than disengaging from that wretched country, Trump continues the horror, increases it further.  In Afghanistan is a "treasure trove" of rare earth metals.  The place is literally a gold mine, but the chaos and the ineptitude of the government there has prevented Afghans from developing that wealth.  The potential dollar value on all this is in the trillions of dollars.  Another nation with trillions' worth of undeveloped metal richness is North Korea.
     It's not a mystery.  The U.S. wants Afghanistan's and North Korea's mineral wealth, and Trump is a racist.  According to his first wife he's also a rapist and wife beater.  It tends to be the most low grade type of human being that gets into the political racket.  Once a person understands that, an illusion is necessarily dissipated.

                                                                               Vic Neptune

     Witless Gamblers

     Do I have time to buy the materials to construct a bomb shelter?  Are we in the 1950s again?
     This morning on MSNBC I heard commentary on the "North Korea crisis."  The U.S. Defense Department has a plan, which, unbelievably, they've shared with the public, to "conduct a preemptive strike against North Korean nuclear missile sites."  A map of the Korean peninsula showed red circles, like open sores, where these sites allegedly are.  Satellites have undoubtedly identified the targets.  We need only wait for President Trump, currently vacationing in New Jersey at one of his golf resorts, to order a swift and short air campaign to end the crisis; or to begin World War Three.
     The news hostess stood before a board displaying the capabilities of the B-1 bomber, emphasizing the aircraft's high speed and capacity to carry massive amounts of explosives.  Primitive computer animation showed the numerous support airplanes that would accompany the B-1s.  North Korea has nothing like this--their missiles, though, are poised, they say, to strike the U.S. territory of Guam in the Pacific Ocean.  From Guam, ironically, the B-1s will fly, although it is and has been a major U.S. military installation for a long time and as such makes sense as a target.
     North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-Un, or high-ranking officials in his government, have declared for all to hear that by mid-August, days away, their plan to attack Guam will be ready.
     Can a diplomatic solution be found?  We've been assured, just two days ago, by Secretary of State/former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson that we have nothing to worry about in this matter.  He's a very reassuring and trustworthy person; I had a good night's sleep after I heard him say that.  He's been on a trip to eastern Asia; he seems calmer than the excitable Donald Trump.
     During a presidential meeting on America's opioid epidemic (which kills more Americans than terrorism), President Trump, in his usual off the subject fashion, declared that if North Korea gets out of hand with its nukes, America will bring "fire and fury the likes of which the world has never seen."  Senator Lindsay Graham has spoken glibly of obliterating North Korea.  These mad positions, fever dreams of power-hungry vicious sadists who don't seem to realize that a cooling of aggressive rhetoric would probably help Kim Jong-Un relax, could be viewed in their insanity by Donald Trump's body language when he made the "fire and fury" remark.  While he was supposed to be talking about alleviating opioid addiction (helping people) he boasted instead about annihilation, around the time of the anniversaries of Hiroshima's and Nagasaki's atomic destruction.
     He gripped his upper arms tightly in the exact position of someone bound in a straitjacket.
     Someone gets put into a straitjacket because they're having a psychotic episode.  There's concern by a medical staff that the patient may harm him- or herself, but may also harm staff members.
     The rhetoric of U.S. versus North Korea agitates the skin of insanity.  Trump, with all of his other problems--the Russia investigation led by Robert Mueller, the FBI raid with search warrant on Paul Manafort's house, his low popularity ratings, the setting up of a PAC for a Mike Pence presidential run in 2020, the slow diminishment of his voting base, scrutiny of his family by government investigators--is faced with one of the most difficult issues of the last six decades, the Korean Question.
     The Korean War of 1950 to 1953 did not resolve itself.  A leftover of the Cold War (by contrast, Vietnam united into one country after 1975), North and South Korea remain separated by political decisions and the militarism in service to those decisions.  Koreans are one people.  South Koreans want unification with the North--they don't want their separated fellows to be obliterated by the might of American sky dominance.  During the Korean War, American bombers blew up North Korea every day for three years, death toll unknown but probably in the millions.  North Koreans think of this when they think of America.  America, to them, is a major mass murderer.  Many Iraqis, I suspect, think the same based on experience.
     We Americans like to believe that we do good in the world.  There are some government policies carried out that really help people in other countries, but the left-hand side of that equation carries a gun with no limit to its ammunition.  We Americans act as if our military isn't strong enough, even though its muscularity makes it into a Goliath, one that doesn't seem to realize its own enormity.  That hugeness is not only unnecessary, but counterproductive when it comes to good relations with the world, and the overall economic health of this country.  War and war machines produce only the need for more war and war machines.  Trump's straitjacket posture, perhaps, shows our country's mindlessness and self-tormented idiocy resulting from constantly being hard for aggression; a testosterone-addled cage fighter that just needs to fuck with people.
     MSNBC's segment on the capacities of the B-1 bomber ended with a tease for the next segment, accompanied by repeating images of North Korea missile launches.  Remember August and September 2002, when Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and George W. Bush warned of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons capabilities, that he might destroy a major U.S. city.  More people realize now that this was bullshit; too bad for all those dead Iraqis.  I say it's time again to look at August as not only the month when politicians go on vacation, but as the time when they plan to fuck up the lives of foreigners.  One major reason for going to war is to get the public distracted.  Trump has some uncomfortable legal issues getting close to his way of life.  If Mueller is digging into the nature of Trump's finances--and why wouldn't he be?--the President of the United States may find himself getting booted out of office, a failure, even as he may eventually come under the cloud of embarrassing financial investigations.
     He's a sociopathic predatory capitalist criminal, most of us already know this--for Mueller to prove it would be something beyond the day by day show of "What did the President tweet?"
     Once again, my country is following war as a solution, starting with war talk, threats, maneuvers of ships and airplanes.  Do these strategies ultimately work?  Are we better off for having attacked Afghanistan in October 2001?  Iraq?  Is the Syria campaign helping anyone?  Did overthrowing Gaddafi make Libya more peaceful?  Is the American Empire getting stupider by the year?  Whatever its level of intelligence, I want it to fail.

                                                                                Vic Neptune
   
   

     Murderers

     One can write a novel set during a famous historical period, like the Great Depression or the French Revolution, have well-known people of those times as characters.  Franklin Roosevelt or Maximilien Robespierre would make good characters; Adolf Hitler, too, and J. Edgar Hoover, Marie Antoinette and Georges Danton.  I've seen films featuring all of these as characters.  It's tempting to think of history as the story of great and wealthy people.  By "great" I don't mean "good."  Great, among other definitions, means "above the average."  People who "make their marks on history" are standouts.  Pens, bottles of ink, typewriters, cameras, microphones, served as media to immortalize Robespierre and Roosevelt, yet millions of no longer known historical players have been forgotten because history doesn't examine the lives of ordinary people unless they impact "the great."
     We know a lot about Lee Harvey Oswald because he was accused, without being tried in a court of law, of assassinating President John Kennedy.  Had he not become mixed up in that mess, it's likely Oswald would've remained unknown.  A popular postmodern American novelist, Don DeLillo, wrote a good novel about Oswald called Libra.  DeLillo took on as subject matter a controversial American, offered his own take--admittedly a difficult task getting into the mind and life of Oswald, a man regarded in so many different ways by so many different theorists, official and otherwise.  Many people have opinions about Oswald; the assassination and its investigations created a jumble of possibilities, leaving behind a broken trail of evidence making it impossible to find out the truth.  That's a practice of the CIA and other intelligence agencies worldwide: disseminate disinformation, "muddy the waters."  (Note that the government's official 9/11 theory is not airtight and suggests plausible alternatives).
     I do not accuse the CIA of killing Kennedy, but I do accuse that agency in 1963 of behaving exactly like itself: of creating discord, screwing with governments, planning and carrying out coups, participating in covert activities here and abroad.
     Dan Rather, then of CBS News, once asked, in a televised interview, former CIA Director Richard Helms if the agency was in any way involved in the Kennedy assassination.  Helms, of course, said "No."
     As far as the dumb minds in the CBS building were concerned, Helms's answer put the question to rest.  Still, even and especially today, former CIA officials and operatives are regularly asked for their viewpoints on MSNBC, the alleged liberal cable news network.  If not the CIA, former Bush administration officials are frequent guests, their Bush/Cheney era views normalized.  David Frum, a speechwriter for Bush who coined the phrase "Axis of Evil" to group together Iran, Iraq, and North Korea--three countries not linked together--appears often on Lawrence O'Donnell's MSNBC show.  Frum, a Republican, finds Donald Trump unsatisfactory, a position shared by MSNBC's new pundit, George Will, and by Fox News pundit, Charles Krauthammer.  Neoconservative and warmonger Bill Kristol also doesn't like Trump.  This makes them seem like the kinds of men a regular old Democrat could have a conversation with, joke around about the nutty piece of shit who runs the Oval Office.
     Anti-Trump views, like those of Conservative Hugh Hewitt, will get you a show on MSNBC, even if you also believe Planned Parenthood should be defunded and millions of women and girls should be left without health care options.  It seems to be more important to Phil Griffin, who runs MSNBC, to bash Trump and spend inordinate amounts of airtime on the current president's apparent buddy-buddy relationship with Russia, wasting wind on discussions about Trump's weird personality, than on focusing on issues of actual concern to most Americans, like health care.
     The Republican machine continues to relentlessly attempt to repeal Obamacare, offering no sensible and humane replacement.  Each bill they try to pass represents the depth of their evil, for they are willing and eager to deprive millions of people of health insurance.  Trump, too, wants this.  Supposedly, the American people want it, in spite of polls revealing that only about twelve percent actually want millions of people to be fucked over and condemned by their own government.
     Senator John McCain, who ran for president unsuccessfully in 2008, has brain cancer.  Nevertheless, he got up from his recovery bed (after a risky surgery) to fly to Washington where he cast his vote in favor of depriving 22 million people of health insurance.  Entering the Senate chamber, every politician applauded him.  His "courage" was remarked upon, made into a "story" on the news.  Barack Obama praised the Senator in a tweet.  Obama didn't comment on McCain favoring the deprivation of health insurance for millions of Americans.
     The bill didn't pass, and neither did the one following it.  They've had seven years to figure out how to get rid of Obamacare, to come up with a plan that would succeed it, and they can't do it, so far.  It reflects badly on Trump, who criticized McCain, though not by name, for joining with Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski (both of them Republicans who might actually be worth a damn) in a "No" vote on last night's Obamacare killing bill.  McCain may have voted in the negative this time because the weakened thing didn't have a chance to pass, earning it the silly nickname, "Skinny Repeal."
     The anxiety caused by these motherfuckers trying to destroy health care, doing only that instead of the many other things they should be trying to do, like fixing the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, withdrawing from Afghanistan, has kept me awake for sure.  Millions of others, whose health and monetary concerns are being irritated by this loathsome crew of degenerate politicians, are the people of history not mentioned by name and eventually forgotten.  It could be that the majority of people mentioned in history books were horrible, at least some of the time.
     McCain's appearance in Washington to vote after brain surgery wasn't courageous.  Applauding him wasn't, either.  Newspeople who celebrate McCain (they are the majority) may in the end, in history, get their man regarded as a hero, overlooking his viciousness.  Yet, his "greatness" is the same as that of Bill and Hillary Clinton, of Obama, of Bush and Cheney and other bloodletters of history, while the people they make bleed have no names.

                                                                              Vic Neptune