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