Jawbreaker
I've been listening to bullshit on the news about how Trump will be making a grave error if he withdraws U.S. troops from Syria. He tweeted a short while back that we've defeated ISIS there. The reason he wanted U.S. forces to stay in Syria was because of the war with ISIS. That done, according to him, it's time to get out.
Setting aside his simplistic way of presenting details, he's right about getting out of Syria, unless one is of the opinion that seven years of fucking with a country that never attacked us is something we need to keep doing. Hillary Clinton, one of the country-fuckers of Syria in particular, scolded Trump via tweet, claiming that "Empowering ISIS is dangerous."
She should know. Large amounts of guns and money entered Syria from the United States while Clinton was Secretary of State and Barack Obama was President. These two helped arm "rebels" in the Syrian Civil War, favoring anyone, and I mean anyone, who sought to defeat Syrian government forces led by Bashar al-Assad. Al-Qaeda groups and ISIS received weapons in these transfers. ISIS, opposed to Assad, is an American ally, at least some of the time. America arms those in Syria that used to be regarded as the enemy, the ones who, according to the official version, struck the U.S. on 9/11.
By speaking out against ISIS and against Assad (who fights ISIS) we know that the official position of U.S. luminaries like Hillary Clinton is a contradictory one that only makes sense if Clinton and other power brokers like her want war in Syria for war's sake; plus, Russia's presence there adds to the enticement since Russia is allegedly our adversary. The belief, held by many liberals, that Hillary Clinton would've made a better president than Trump, never takes into account the vast numbers of Arabs she's willing to see shot and blown up in order to fulfill the unpublished agendas of the scum who rule the planet.
Ironically, Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton's friend and one of the above-mentioned scum, reportedly speaks on the phone a few times a month with Trump, acting as an unofficial advisor. I suspect he's done this with all presidents since he left office when Ford stepped down.
Cable news talkers speak out against Trump's Syria decision. He also wants to remove U.S. troops from Afghanistan. These could be savvy decisions on his part, relating to his reelection campaign. Our many wars are not popular. On the streets, demonstrations haven't started yet, which is amazing considering seventeen years of this counterproductive shit has been going on, with war profiteering flying high and the Grim Reaper always having work to do. Still, the glow of craving revenge felt by about ninety percent of Americans (for the record, not by me) in the aftermath of 9/11, resulting in the popularity of the pulverization of Afghanistan and majority-approval for the destruction of Iraq, has faded, replaced by preoccupation with domestic economic matters.
People are sick of this country sucking, economically. Cable news liars speak warmly of the stock market, how the economy is "booming." For a pundit on CNBC the economy is great, because that person has a lot of money. Michelle Obama is doing really well, and in spite of her reputation as a decent human being, I don't hear her talking about the plight of America's poor, or homeless veterans of twentieth-first century wars. She has talked about the candy handed to her by George W. Bush at his father's funeral, how the two of them have become friendly. She doesn't explain how she's able to stomach the company of a man who's killed about a million people, but her strength in that matter could be linked to her sharing a bed with a man who blew up little children with drone strikes. If she's fine with that, more power to her monstrousness, a sickness feeding the news media, their employees impressed and moved by the Bush candy scene, inspiring ignorant Americans to feel the same way Germans in the 1930s felt when they saw footage of Hitler petting his dog.
The Clintons, the Obamas, the Bushes, they're all so polite to each other, unlike that fucker Trump, who, whatever his motivations, wants to end America's participation in a war fought in a country occupied illegally by U.S. troops in support of the kinds of people we used to call terrorists.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, December 26, 2018
Tuesday, December 4, 2018
Let's Be Nice
We are a War State. The President of the United States is routinely referred to by his special title, Commander-in-Chief, as in Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Armed Forces, a man with Ares enveloping him in strong arms, directing his reason, convincing him to wipe out innocent people without consideration for their rights, which amount to nothing when compared to the rights of corporations and those who guide them.
So far, men have wielded this power. Women will have their turn and won't hesitate to kill. Chris Matthews of Hardball, a "tough-talking" news program airing five days a week on MSNBC, had as his guest Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat about whom 2020 presidential race scuttlebutt has moved like a vapor. Asked the usual question framed like, "Hey maybe you're going to run for president," Klobuchar smiled, resembling a high school English teacher, but one with excellent government-provided health insurance and a yearly salary at least three times that of a teacher.
She dodged the question. Matthews remarked that he likes her sense of humor. Shitty journalist that he is, he will snuggle up inside the rectums of almost any politician. He complimented her on her Minnesota accent. He often makes movie references. I suspect he's seen and enjoyed Fargo, with its woman sheriff speaking with a thick Minnesota inflection. Klobuchar, like the sheriff, must be, in Matthews' mind, down to earth, the kind of woman who makes her own coffee and scrambles her own eggs. She's changed lots of diapers. She knows how to drive stick. She has a no nonsense approach to judging matters of justice and law. A Democrat, she respects dead Republicans.
Klobuchar's exchange with Brett Kavanaugh about his drinking habits "went viral." She asked if he had blackouts when he drank in high school and college. He retorted, "Have you?!" She got him back by sharing with the world her still-living father's struggles with alcoholism, eliciting an apology from Kavanaugh, who probably felt he had to publicly apologize or maybe he wouldn't get the Supreme Court job.
Klobuchar remarked to Matthews that being president necessitates having a sense of humor. She talked about civility, obviously referring to Donald Trump, who, whether Klobuchar acknowledges it or not, does have a sense of humor; it's usually at the expense of others--and, sometimes, himself. He's impolite, lacks the filter that properly raised people have, the thing that prevents them from ejaculating whatever observation occurs to them. If Klobuchar runs for president in 2019-2020, she'll learn Trump's nickname for her. Matthews concluded his interview by suggesting she come up with a nickname for him.
Mushroom Dick is an obvious choice.
The main focus of the interview was the death of former President George H.W. Bush, who expired, finally, on November 30, 2018, ninety-four years young. The entire weekend and some of the following two days have been replete with Bush-related programming on cable news and in the rest of the mainstream news media. As when Ronald Reagan died fourteen years ago, and as when John McCain died last August, the news coverage lied by omission repeatedly for days and nights. Bush, in CNN's Chris Cillizza's view, was "the anti-Trump."
In my view, an anti-Trump is a poor woman who has to work shitty jobs all of her life, has no insurance, maybe is married, but only once, is humble, and thinks and feels for others. Cillizza, though, thinks in terms of power, for he, like Chris Matthews, is a kiss-ass to power. America, the great nation that it was, and in some ways still is, has achieved about the same level of self-inflicted slavery in its fourth estate as that of Nazi Germany's Ministry of Propaganda. To be a journalist in America today, to be well-paid and compensated in the mainstream, means to look away from what's actually happening. How else to explain the past few days of Bush 41 worship?
Amy Klobuchar, opposed to Trump, and part of the civility club running Washington and news organizations, had nothing but praise for the elder Bush president, finding eager agreement in Chris Matthews. She and numerous other politicians, pundits, and journalists spoke joyfully of Bush's gentility, his graciousness, his gentlemanly conduct, contrasting his cultivated behavior with the odious Trump.
Decorum is the concern of people who don't have real problems.
Not mentioned by any mainstream figure, at least in my samples of news broadcasts and in the written offerings of corporate news media, are Bush's crimes against humanity; his racism (the campaign '88 Willie Horton ad which Bush never apologized for, as well as his escalation of the War on Drugs, i.e. War on People of Color); his invasion of Panama to arrest his former CIA asset, with the resultant mass murder of around 3,000 civilians; his lies that got the U.S. into the Gulf War, resulting in the utter destruction of Iraq's infrastructure and the killings of, ultimately, over a million people; his participation in the illegal arming and funding of the Contras and his obstruction of justice in the official investigation; his pardoning of six prominent Iran-Contra Affair officials, enabling him to avoid testifying in one of their upcoming, but cancelled due to the pardon, trials.
You can look great on the surface and still be a nasty son of a bitch with an evil heart that beats on and on for ninety-four years, while hundreds of thousands of hearts have stopped beating because of your deeds, orders, manipulations, lies, and amoral thirst for power at any cost. That's George Herbert Walker Bush, and in his corrupted spiritual vileness of being willing to snuff out life on a vast scale, smash dreams, and ruin whole nations, he is just like Donald Trump.
Open your eyes, Amy Klobuchar.
Vic Neptune
We are a War State. The President of the United States is routinely referred to by his special title, Commander-in-Chief, as in Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Armed Forces, a man with Ares enveloping him in strong arms, directing his reason, convincing him to wipe out innocent people without consideration for their rights, which amount to nothing when compared to the rights of corporations and those who guide them.
So far, men have wielded this power. Women will have their turn and won't hesitate to kill. Chris Matthews of Hardball, a "tough-talking" news program airing five days a week on MSNBC, had as his guest Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat about whom 2020 presidential race scuttlebutt has moved like a vapor. Asked the usual question framed like, "Hey maybe you're going to run for president," Klobuchar smiled, resembling a high school English teacher, but one with excellent government-provided health insurance and a yearly salary at least three times that of a teacher.
She dodged the question. Matthews remarked that he likes her sense of humor. Shitty journalist that he is, he will snuggle up inside the rectums of almost any politician. He complimented her on her Minnesota accent. He often makes movie references. I suspect he's seen and enjoyed Fargo, with its woman sheriff speaking with a thick Minnesota inflection. Klobuchar, like the sheriff, must be, in Matthews' mind, down to earth, the kind of woman who makes her own coffee and scrambles her own eggs. She's changed lots of diapers. She knows how to drive stick. She has a no nonsense approach to judging matters of justice and law. A Democrat, she respects dead Republicans.
Klobuchar's exchange with Brett Kavanaugh about his drinking habits "went viral." She asked if he had blackouts when he drank in high school and college. He retorted, "Have you?!" She got him back by sharing with the world her still-living father's struggles with alcoholism, eliciting an apology from Kavanaugh, who probably felt he had to publicly apologize or maybe he wouldn't get the Supreme Court job.
Klobuchar remarked to Matthews that being president necessitates having a sense of humor. She talked about civility, obviously referring to Donald Trump, who, whether Klobuchar acknowledges it or not, does have a sense of humor; it's usually at the expense of others--and, sometimes, himself. He's impolite, lacks the filter that properly raised people have, the thing that prevents them from ejaculating whatever observation occurs to them. If Klobuchar runs for president in 2019-2020, she'll learn Trump's nickname for her. Matthews concluded his interview by suggesting she come up with a nickname for him.
Mushroom Dick is an obvious choice.
The main focus of the interview was the death of former President George H.W. Bush, who expired, finally, on November 30, 2018, ninety-four years young. The entire weekend and some of the following two days have been replete with Bush-related programming on cable news and in the rest of the mainstream news media. As when Ronald Reagan died fourteen years ago, and as when John McCain died last August, the news coverage lied by omission repeatedly for days and nights. Bush, in CNN's Chris Cillizza's view, was "the anti-Trump."
In my view, an anti-Trump is a poor woman who has to work shitty jobs all of her life, has no insurance, maybe is married, but only once, is humble, and thinks and feels for others. Cillizza, though, thinks in terms of power, for he, like Chris Matthews, is a kiss-ass to power. America, the great nation that it was, and in some ways still is, has achieved about the same level of self-inflicted slavery in its fourth estate as that of Nazi Germany's Ministry of Propaganda. To be a journalist in America today, to be well-paid and compensated in the mainstream, means to look away from what's actually happening. How else to explain the past few days of Bush 41 worship?
Amy Klobuchar, opposed to Trump, and part of the civility club running Washington and news organizations, had nothing but praise for the elder Bush president, finding eager agreement in Chris Matthews. She and numerous other politicians, pundits, and journalists spoke joyfully of Bush's gentility, his graciousness, his gentlemanly conduct, contrasting his cultivated behavior with the odious Trump.
Decorum is the concern of people who don't have real problems.
Not mentioned by any mainstream figure, at least in my samples of news broadcasts and in the written offerings of corporate news media, are Bush's crimes against humanity; his racism (the campaign '88 Willie Horton ad which Bush never apologized for, as well as his escalation of the War on Drugs, i.e. War on People of Color); his invasion of Panama to arrest his former CIA asset, with the resultant mass murder of around 3,000 civilians; his lies that got the U.S. into the Gulf War, resulting in the utter destruction of Iraq's infrastructure and the killings of, ultimately, over a million people; his participation in the illegal arming and funding of the Contras and his obstruction of justice in the official investigation; his pardoning of six prominent Iran-Contra Affair officials, enabling him to avoid testifying in one of their upcoming, but cancelled due to the pardon, trials.
You can look great on the surface and still be a nasty son of a bitch with an evil heart that beats on and on for ninety-four years, while hundreds of thousands of hearts have stopped beating because of your deeds, orders, manipulations, lies, and amoral thirst for power at any cost. That's George Herbert Walker Bush, and in his corrupted spiritual vileness of being willing to snuff out life on a vast scale, smash dreams, and ruin whole nations, he is just like Donald Trump.
Open your eyes, Amy Klobuchar.
Vic Neptune
Saturday, November 17, 2018
The Fossil
Fundraising maven Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) wants to be Speaker of the House--again. The Democratic Establishment supports her ambition. Her "experience" is the main thing touted as her prime qualification. She helped President Obama push through the Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as Obamacare, also as Romneycare, as in Mitt Romney, who adopted the plan many years ago as Republican Governor of Massachusetts. The plan, generated by the Heritage Foundation, a right wing think tank, is still the low rung on the health care ladder bragged about by corporate Democrats. It enriches the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries, those behemoths powering the campaigns of corporate Democratic politicians, the kinds of leaders propagandizing for Pelosi to be the next Speaker of the House.
Pro-Pelosi politicians, Donald Trump (who endorses her as Speaker) among them, are aided in corporate news media by pundits and insiders, all robotically mouthing the same praises for an unimpressive longtime politician who makes her comfortable multi-millionaire living appealing to "liberal" and Neo-Liberal donors for huge amounts of cash to keep the Democratic Party rolling on its way to change by gradualism--change that never comes, because the Democratic establishment, like its Republican sibling, is obsessed with money and cares not for those who don't have it.
Pelosi, on a Sunday morning show a while back, talked about her qualifications to be the next Speaker, bragging only about her fundraising abilities. The word millions attaches itself to her character like an ugly barnacle. There's no soul or breadth of ideas inside that woman. She epitomizes the sickness inside the Democratic Party, the so-called opposition, the hashtag Resistance, which includes Democratic luminaries like former Vice President Joe Biden presenting the Liberty Medal to George and Laura Bush on Veterans Day. Biden spoke of the noxious atmosphere in Washington, the loss of civility. He makes it seem as if ordinary Americans suffer from the fact that Republicans and Democrats don't always speak nicely to each other, not from lack of health care, clean water, and endless warfare sucking the American economy dry--the latter a condition hoped for by none other than Osama bin Laden.
"President Bush was my opponent, not my enemy," Biden said.
Biden voted for the Iraq War, the Afghan War, so as far as killing people goes it seems they agree with each other wholeheartedly. To get the Liberty Medal, I guess it helps to order the creation of a torture program, and then wait about fifteen years for someone so buffoonish to become president that the torturer/war criminal seems like the Good Old Days.
Pelosi, the night she won Congressional re-election in California, spoke of seeking unity with Republicans--with a party committed, evidently, to doing nothing to stop the ecocide that will kill everyone, leading to a time when being a millionaire will no longer be relevant, and greed-motivated shits like Pelosi, already old, will be long dead.
Vic Neptune
Fundraising maven Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) wants to be Speaker of the House--again. The Democratic Establishment supports her ambition. Her "experience" is the main thing touted as her prime qualification. She helped President Obama push through the Affordable Care Act, known colloquially as Obamacare, also as Romneycare, as in Mitt Romney, who adopted the plan many years ago as Republican Governor of Massachusetts. The plan, generated by the Heritage Foundation, a right wing think tank, is still the low rung on the health care ladder bragged about by corporate Democrats. It enriches the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries, those behemoths powering the campaigns of corporate Democratic politicians, the kinds of leaders propagandizing for Pelosi to be the next Speaker of the House.
Pro-Pelosi politicians, Donald Trump (who endorses her as Speaker) among them, are aided in corporate news media by pundits and insiders, all robotically mouthing the same praises for an unimpressive longtime politician who makes her comfortable multi-millionaire living appealing to "liberal" and Neo-Liberal donors for huge amounts of cash to keep the Democratic Party rolling on its way to change by gradualism--change that never comes, because the Democratic establishment, like its Republican sibling, is obsessed with money and cares not for those who don't have it.
Pelosi, on a Sunday morning show a while back, talked about her qualifications to be the next Speaker, bragging only about her fundraising abilities. The word millions attaches itself to her character like an ugly barnacle. There's no soul or breadth of ideas inside that woman. She epitomizes the sickness inside the Democratic Party, the so-called opposition, the hashtag Resistance, which includes Democratic luminaries like former Vice President Joe Biden presenting the Liberty Medal to George and Laura Bush on Veterans Day. Biden spoke of the noxious atmosphere in Washington, the loss of civility. He makes it seem as if ordinary Americans suffer from the fact that Republicans and Democrats don't always speak nicely to each other, not from lack of health care, clean water, and endless warfare sucking the American economy dry--the latter a condition hoped for by none other than Osama bin Laden.
"President Bush was my opponent, not my enemy," Biden said.
Biden voted for the Iraq War, the Afghan War, so as far as killing people goes it seems they agree with each other wholeheartedly. To get the Liberty Medal, I guess it helps to order the creation of a torture program, and then wait about fifteen years for someone so buffoonish to become president that the torturer/war criminal seems like the Good Old Days.
Pelosi, the night she won Congressional re-election in California, spoke of seeking unity with Republicans--with a party committed, evidently, to doing nothing to stop the ecocide that will kill everyone, leading to a time when being a millionaire will no longer be relevant, and greed-motivated shits like Pelosi, already old, will be long dead.
Vic Neptune
Friday, November 9, 2018
I Was a Religious Studies Major in College
Democrats will have a majority in the House of Representatives. What will they do with that power? From what I've heard, committees will form to investigate Donald Trump, because, apparently, that's what the American people need more than Medicare for all, a living wage, an end to our wars, a jobs program, a new emphasis on improving infrastructure, and free college.
An ex-Marine with PTSD massacred people in a California bar. Senator Marsha Blackburn (who looks like a past-middle-age Debbie Reynolds) reacted on Fox News by first insisting on the need to stand by the Second Amendment. She also mentioned mental health without elaborating on any of her ideas, if any, on the subject. The murderer, a war veteran, acquired his killing skills in another country. He came back to his own country, not taken care of properly by a government eager to send people overseas as tools of corporations, standing guard over Exxon Mobil's stake in the Arabic-speaking parts of the planet.
Marsha Blackburn, a longtime Washington politician in spite of her Tennessee accent and good Southern manners, cares more about the "right" to own automatic weapons than about the people they reduce to horizontal unmoving positions on reddening ground.
I wrote a previous post entitled Sick Fuck Jesus. It poses the question, What if Jesus was a sick fuck? Christian politicians, like Blackburn (a Presbyterian), often believe in and get legislation passed that is the opposite of Jesus' views as expressed in the Gospels. She supports the idea of Donald Trump receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Picture it: Trump, Man of Peace. It's like suggesting that John Bolton is a Flower Child.
If Jesus was a sick fuck, though, it would make sense--maybe the Gospel translations are faulty? Blessed are the poor? No, fuck the poor! Blessed are the Haves, those who receive the benefits from the tax cut for the 1%. Blessed is the Pentagon for being unable to account for the loss of 21 trillion dollars.
Marsha Blackburn is for traditional marriage. She sticks it to the Gays, the Lesbians. Somehow, that significant portion of the American population marrying each other affects her personal life. It's mystifying, like the moment Thomas put his hand (not his cock) into Jesus' resurrected side.
National Anthem kneeling protests get Marsha's goat, too, spoiling her Sundays. She wants a border wall between Mexico and the U.S. Her views are Trumpian; which is to say, Trump's views are Republican--he just offends some in his party because he's such a boor. Rich, "classy" folks don't like boors. Or the homeless. Or mentally ill veterans. Or sick people with no insurance. The lepers of our society, so to speak.
Marsha is against net neutrality, saying it's "socialistic." Think of anything beneficial to most Americans and Senator Blackburn is against it. As a Christian, perhaps, she fits that description. I suggest that it can be Christian to be a horrible person, believing heavily in a set of spiritually elevating beliefs (above others) that were pushed from an early age.
Jesus wasn't a Christian, he was a Jew. Arguably, a Jewish heretic. One can be Christlike and not be a Christian. The Jesus who wasn't a sick fuck said that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into Heaven. What does that mean? Exactly what it says!
I accept that Blackburn and Paul Ryan, Mike Huckabee, the Bush family, the Obamas, and many others among the powerful are all Christians; in varying degrees manifesting immorality and committing evil acts, including blowing people to smithereens, all in service to capitalistic and power consolidation goals having nothing to do with Freedom, Liberty, the American Way, the Shining City on a Hill; having nothing either to do with beliefs as demonstrated by the words of Jesus, who was tortured and murdered because he offended the assholes running the show in the Province of Judea, circa A.D. 33. Were Jesus to come back now with the same philosophy, people in power, like those mentioned above, would have him killed, making them literally Antichrist. I don't mean the Devil when I write Antichrist, but someone on the opposing side of Christ as represented by Jesus' words and compassionate acts in the Gospels. Did George W. Bush, Michelle Obama's fun new friend, kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis because he's Christlike?
Marsha Blackburn doesn't believe in climate change.
Marsha Blackburn is an idiot.
Democrats will have power in the House of Representatives so who wants to be the Speaker of the House? The same seventy-eight year old who shouldn't be, Nancy Pelosi, the champion fundraiser who cares most about money and maintaining the status quo in her party. A dinosaur.
Dinosaurs, remember, also witnessed climate change.
Vic Neptune
Democrats will have a majority in the House of Representatives. What will they do with that power? From what I've heard, committees will form to investigate Donald Trump, because, apparently, that's what the American people need more than Medicare for all, a living wage, an end to our wars, a jobs program, a new emphasis on improving infrastructure, and free college.
An ex-Marine with PTSD massacred people in a California bar. Senator Marsha Blackburn (who looks like a past-middle-age Debbie Reynolds) reacted on Fox News by first insisting on the need to stand by the Second Amendment. She also mentioned mental health without elaborating on any of her ideas, if any, on the subject. The murderer, a war veteran, acquired his killing skills in another country. He came back to his own country, not taken care of properly by a government eager to send people overseas as tools of corporations, standing guard over Exxon Mobil's stake in the Arabic-speaking parts of the planet.
Marsha Blackburn, a longtime Washington politician in spite of her Tennessee accent and good Southern manners, cares more about the "right" to own automatic weapons than about the people they reduce to horizontal unmoving positions on reddening ground.
I wrote a previous post entitled Sick Fuck Jesus. It poses the question, What if Jesus was a sick fuck? Christian politicians, like Blackburn (a Presbyterian), often believe in and get legislation passed that is the opposite of Jesus' views as expressed in the Gospels. She supports the idea of Donald Trump receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Picture it: Trump, Man of Peace. It's like suggesting that John Bolton is a Flower Child.
If Jesus was a sick fuck, though, it would make sense--maybe the Gospel translations are faulty? Blessed are the poor? No, fuck the poor! Blessed are the Haves, those who receive the benefits from the tax cut for the 1%. Blessed is the Pentagon for being unable to account for the loss of 21 trillion dollars.
Marsha Blackburn is for traditional marriage. She sticks it to the Gays, the Lesbians. Somehow, that significant portion of the American population marrying each other affects her personal life. It's mystifying, like the moment Thomas put his hand (not his cock) into Jesus' resurrected side.
National Anthem kneeling protests get Marsha's goat, too, spoiling her Sundays. She wants a border wall between Mexico and the U.S. Her views are Trumpian; which is to say, Trump's views are Republican--he just offends some in his party because he's such a boor. Rich, "classy" folks don't like boors. Or the homeless. Or mentally ill veterans. Or sick people with no insurance. The lepers of our society, so to speak.
Marsha is against net neutrality, saying it's "socialistic." Think of anything beneficial to most Americans and Senator Blackburn is against it. As a Christian, perhaps, she fits that description. I suggest that it can be Christian to be a horrible person, believing heavily in a set of spiritually elevating beliefs (above others) that were pushed from an early age.
Jesus wasn't a Christian, he was a Jew. Arguably, a Jewish heretic. One can be Christlike and not be a Christian. The Jesus who wasn't a sick fuck said that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into Heaven. What does that mean? Exactly what it says!
I accept that Blackburn and Paul Ryan, Mike Huckabee, the Bush family, the Obamas, and many others among the powerful are all Christians; in varying degrees manifesting immorality and committing evil acts, including blowing people to smithereens, all in service to capitalistic and power consolidation goals having nothing to do with Freedom, Liberty, the American Way, the Shining City on a Hill; having nothing either to do with beliefs as demonstrated by the words of Jesus, who was tortured and murdered because he offended the assholes running the show in the Province of Judea, circa A.D. 33. Were Jesus to come back now with the same philosophy, people in power, like those mentioned above, would have him killed, making them literally Antichrist. I don't mean the Devil when I write Antichrist, but someone on the opposing side of Christ as represented by Jesus' words and compassionate acts in the Gospels. Did George W. Bush, Michelle Obama's fun new friend, kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis because he's Christlike?
Marsha Blackburn doesn't believe in climate change.
Marsha Blackburn is an idiot.
Democrats will have power in the House of Representatives so who wants to be the Speaker of the House? The same seventy-eight year old who shouldn't be, Nancy Pelosi, the champion fundraiser who cares most about money and maintaining the status quo in her party. A dinosaur.
Dinosaurs, remember, also witnessed climate change.
Vic Neptune
Sunday, November 4, 2018
Snow Blind
One of my local TV news stations has a promo showing the weatherman flanked by the veteran anchorwoman and the young pretty reporter, all of them with jaw-straining smiles, announcing what'll be on tomorrow morning's show. Taking quick turns, each puts in a datum, an enticement to watch, concluding with "We're giving away a snowblower!"
The winner will receive a machine that will need fuel, maintenance, and housing. The new owner's prize means work. His city's ordinances include keeping his front publicly used sidewalk
"clean" after snowfalls.
Use of a snowblower beats a shovel, I admit. Still, the prizewinner will have a heavy piece of equipment to operate and store. It may last five years or eight, maybe two before needing repairs.
On Fox, an NFL game between the Detroit Lions and the Minnesota Vikings has, as decoration, a military theme. A baby-faced Navy enlisted man stands at attention, expressionless, a sentinel. If he's watching the game, he also looks like he might wave flags to signal "go" to a fighter jet pilot on his way to dismember human beings who don't speak English. One of the announcers reminds us that it's important to support our troops, that "this is the greatest country in the world." The small towels carried by the players are camouflage. Shiny olive drab jackets worn by coaching staffs of both teams have American flag patches sewn on the upper sleeves.
The other announcer expressed his eagerness to watch the Fox TV show 9-1-1. Judging from ads, the show combines the 1970s show about paramedics, Emergency!, with contemporary unrealistic cop drama (Angela Bassett, a Black actress, plays a police sergeant), and firefighters. Throw in Baywatch lifeguards and the L.A. porn industry and the show would be complete. I haven't seen the show, don't want to, but it's illustrative of what passes for serious network television in this post-9/11 mediascape.
9/11, the catastrophic event seventeen years ago, is now a TV series, 9-1-1. Starting in Season Two, Jennifer Love Hewitt has joined the cast as the best-looking 911 dispatcher ever. Hewitt was the Ghost Whisperer in 107 episodes, a woman who could communicate with the dead, acting as a conduit between the ghost's troubled loved ones, enabling all parties to reconcile and say farewell. What I saw of that series a decade ago was at times impressive as drama, even if not realistic (given the supernatural premise). Still, Ghost Whisperer was more human, more capable of demonstrating emotions and soulful concerns than most if not all of the cop shows or military themed programs on TV today.
SEAL Team, a CBS show in its second season, depicts its military men as troubled, intense, yes, but not the hard core killers they probably are by now, given that the SEALs have been operating covertly and murderously during the entire seventeen years since 9/11. On October 17 I saw part of one episode. The Wikipedia description follows:
"While holding a funeral for Alana, Jason is forced to step down as team leader to focus on his children, with fellow SEAL Adam Seaver taking his place. Ray joins the rest of the team at Jason's request and is deployed to Mumbai to rescue a foreign service officer, only to find out their hostage has been relocated."
Mumbai, India? Not Pakistan, or Yemen, or Somalia, or Syria?
Jason loves his children so much that he's "forced" to focus on them. The bit that I saw showed a daughter of around thirteen years trying to communicate with her monosyllabic and preoccupied father. He obviously would prefer to be aiming his gun at a Muslim.
It isn't big news that TV fails the human mind. Not always the case. David Attenborough's documentaries about life on Earth, with their crisp, spectacular cinematography showing places and animals you never imagined existed, edify the brain and heart, inducing awe, plus a sense of poignancy and impending loss, since so much of what he shows and narrates about is dying out and will be lost due to the follies of human neglect and ambition.
Eye candy showing a luscious 911 dispatcher, played by someone who used to address the ghosts of our painful new century, doesn't stimulate anything other than the parts of our minds given to sensationalism, and isn't that what most news is?
Enter a contest and you may win a snowblower, or witness a gorgeous actress taking desperate calls in a show obliquely named after the key event at the beginning of this century, the spark that's destroyed so many possibilities, growing conditions for lies, like the one that hooks militarism to sporting contests and gives us so many TV entertainment shows which make no sense in terms of human realities.
Vic Neptune
One of my local TV news stations has a promo showing the weatherman flanked by the veteran anchorwoman and the young pretty reporter, all of them with jaw-straining smiles, announcing what'll be on tomorrow morning's show. Taking quick turns, each puts in a datum, an enticement to watch, concluding with "We're giving away a snowblower!"
The winner will receive a machine that will need fuel, maintenance, and housing. The new owner's prize means work. His city's ordinances include keeping his front publicly used sidewalk
"clean" after snowfalls.
Use of a snowblower beats a shovel, I admit. Still, the prizewinner will have a heavy piece of equipment to operate and store. It may last five years or eight, maybe two before needing repairs.
On Fox, an NFL game between the Detroit Lions and the Minnesota Vikings has, as decoration, a military theme. A baby-faced Navy enlisted man stands at attention, expressionless, a sentinel. If he's watching the game, he also looks like he might wave flags to signal "go" to a fighter jet pilot on his way to dismember human beings who don't speak English. One of the announcers reminds us that it's important to support our troops, that "this is the greatest country in the world." The small towels carried by the players are camouflage. Shiny olive drab jackets worn by coaching staffs of both teams have American flag patches sewn on the upper sleeves.
The other announcer expressed his eagerness to watch the Fox TV show 9-1-1. Judging from ads, the show combines the 1970s show about paramedics, Emergency!, with contemporary unrealistic cop drama (Angela Bassett, a Black actress, plays a police sergeant), and firefighters. Throw in Baywatch lifeguards and the L.A. porn industry and the show would be complete. I haven't seen the show, don't want to, but it's illustrative of what passes for serious network television in this post-9/11 mediascape.
9/11, the catastrophic event seventeen years ago, is now a TV series, 9-1-1. Starting in Season Two, Jennifer Love Hewitt has joined the cast as the best-looking 911 dispatcher ever. Hewitt was the Ghost Whisperer in 107 episodes, a woman who could communicate with the dead, acting as a conduit between the ghost's troubled loved ones, enabling all parties to reconcile and say farewell. What I saw of that series a decade ago was at times impressive as drama, even if not realistic (given the supernatural premise). Still, Ghost Whisperer was more human, more capable of demonstrating emotions and soulful concerns than most if not all of the cop shows or military themed programs on TV today.
SEAL Team, a CBS show in its second season, depicts its military men as troubled, intense, yes, but not the hard core killers they probably are by now, given that the SEALs have been operating covertly and murderously during the entire seventeen years since 9/11. On October 17 I saw part of one episode. The Wikipedia description follows:
"While holding a funeral for Alana, Jason is forced to step down as team leader to focus on his children, with fellow SEAL Adam Seaver taking his place. Ray joins the rest of the team at Jason's request and is deployed to Mumbai to rescue a foreign service officer, only to find out their hostage has been relocated."
Mumbai, India? Not Pakistan, or Yemen, or Somalia, or Syria?
Jason loves his children so much that he's "forced" to focus on them. The bit that I saw showed a daughter of around thirteen years trying to communicate with her monosyllabic and preoccupied father. He obviously would prefer to be aiming his gun at a Muslim.
It isn't big news that TV fails the human mind. Not always the case. David Attenborough's documentaries about life on Earth, with their crisp, spectacular cinematography showing places and animals you never imagined existed, edify the brain and heart, inducing awe, plus a sense of poignancy and impending loss, since so much of what he shows and narrates about is dying out and will be lost due to the follies of human neglect and ambition.
Eye candy showing a luscious 911 dispatcher, played by someone who used to address the ghosts of our painful new century, doesn't stimulate anything other than the parts of our minds given to sensationalism, and isn't that what most news is?
Enter a contest and you may win a snowblower, or witness a gorgeous actress taking desperate calls in a show obliquely named after the key event at the beginning of this century, the spark that's destroyed so many possibilities, growing conditions for lies, like the one that hooks militarism to sporting contests and gives us so many TV entertainment shows which make no sense in terms of human realities.
Vic Neptune
Thursday, November 1, 2018
The Value of Self-Esteem and Having At Least Some Doubts
The man who murdered eleven people in a Pittsburgh synagogue last Saturday pleaded not guilty to those crimes. Robert Bowers, anti-Semite, owner of twenty-one guns, made no secret of his hatred of Jews. Referring to them in online posts as the "enemy of white people," he also called immigrants "invaders," a notion that should tie in with President Trump's hysterical overreaction (propagandized by Fox News Channel) to the thousands of Central Americans walking north, seeking asylum in the United States. In Bowers' view, however, Trump "is a globalist, not a nationalist. There is no #MAGA [Make America Great Again--Trump's 2016 campaign slogan] as long as there is a [Jewish] infestation."
"Jews are the children of Satan," Bowers wrote. He is clearly a man who, like too many people, believes his opinions are also facts, something he has in common with Donald Trump, who, as far as I can tell, doesn't hate or love Jews, but will use or not use them according to his own purposes, much like most American politicians.
Bowers' final message before committing the massacre reads, "I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in."
His use of the word optics in relation to the act of spraying bullets at unarmed peaceful worshippers minding their own business indicates Bowers' pushed-to-the-edge (by his own psyche?) feeling that it was finally time to make a statement, to be a White Hero, willing to sacrifice his life, or at least his freedom, for an overwhelmed and victimized population of Honkies. God knows, if you do some serious research, you'll find that White people, especially White men, are the most abused and victimized people in human history. Wealthy White men, like Donald Trump, are mistreated and scorned, just because they're rich and White.
It's weird how the dominant White race can't summon the power to overwhelm its darker-skinned enemies. You'd think that such a powerful mega-race would be able to control such weaker examples of humanity. Bowers, like all assholes with guns going against unarmed "opponents," believes in his own bravery. How many Israeli snipers killing and wounding thousands of Palestinian protestors last summer enjoyed doing that? If you believe you're snuffing out vermin (note Bowers' use of the word infestation), it might tickle sadistic impulses. I can't accept that the Israeli snipers shot all those Palestinians because they admire Palestinians.
Trump, like many Presidents of the past, kills people by remote control or through the giving of orders. Civilian casualties these days don't get tallied in any definitive way. For one thing, the U.S. military kills so many people, has been doing so for many decades, it's not possible to get accurate counts. Defense Department warlocks and generals don't care about the human damage they cause. Destructiveness of weapons and weapon systems is studied, improved upon for future uses. Anti-personnel sound weapons, tried out first in the 1989 invasion of Panama, are now employed against U.S. citizens, including at the 2016 Democratic Convention to drown out protestors while controversial warmongering speakers, like Leon Panetta, were at the podium.
Robert Bowers missed his time and place. In 1933 he would've made an effective Brownshirt in Nazi Germany, a low-ranking member, but capable at the task of abusing Jews, homosexuals, political opponents of the government, and doing property damage. A state-backed vandal.
According to reports from Pittsburgh, Bowers was a loner. He had more guns than any one person needs. His fantasies, apparently, dwelt on extermination of vast numbers of people. Survivors of his outrageous, stupid, and vicious act will remember him, but he'll be forgotten by the American people in a few weeks or less. The continuous pornography of the ratings driven news media cycle will pave over Bowers' extended middle finger at "optics," bringing new outrages, violent or at least troubling, as well as news corporations' constant obsession with mediocre men and women running this country, while innocent people die in the industrial killing machine drama of the War on Terror, which could be called the War of Terror States Hoodwinking People Into Believing They're Fighting Terrorism.
Vic Neptune
Sunday, October 28, 2018
The Wind and the Cryin' Lion
Donald Trump suffered the whimsy of an elemental force: wind-driven rain.
"...I was standing under the wing of Air Force One [important to mention his luxurious ride] doing a news conference early this morning, a very unfortunate news conference. And the wind was blowing and the rain, and I was soaking wet, and that's what I ended up with today [meaning his hair's appearance]..."
Saying this at a Future Farmers of America conference in Indianapolis, he continued, "I said, 'Maybe I should cancel this arrangement because I have a bad hair day, and the bad news, somebody said, 'Actually it looks better more than it usually does.'"
That morning, an anti-Semitic creep with guns murdered eleven people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Six were wounded, including four cops, who practice a profession that Trump likes to praise every chance he gets, but his near-cancellation of the Indianapolis event had more to do, apparently, with the condition of his hair.
I don't find it necessary to give examples of Trump's psychopathic personality, his inability to empathize (which should be disqualifying for his position, but is actually a common trait shared by many CEOs, politicians, corporate lawyers, and serial killers), but when he's trying to be funny in relation to a situation in which he stood in the rain answering questions from reporters wanting to know his thoughts about mass murder in Pittsburgh, as well as the would-be bomber Trump super-fan arrested in Florida who sent pipe bombs to Obama and the Clintons, plus several other prominent Democrats, his severe moral imbalance stands out.
Just a few weeks ago, Trump was prevaricating about the leader of Saudi Arabia, who has obviously had one of his journalist opponents tortured and murdered. Trump's talking points were identical to those of Mohammad Bin Salman al-Saud's, who not only probably ordered the hit, but condemned the killing after ordering an investigation. Yes, I remember when Charles Manson was allowed to investigate the Tate-LaBianca murders--no, that didn't happen, because that would've been insane.
Trump and MBS (as he's often referred to--I guess it means Muslim Bullshitter) both used the word "rogue" to describe the hit. The Saudi authorities produced a report concluding that the journalist died, accidentally, in a "fistfight" that concluded with a "chokehold" that must've been held a second or two too long. Manslaughter in the midst of some good old-fashioned fisticuffs.
When Trump talks about trivial matters, it may be a defense on his part, since he doesn't know how to express himself; human terms that aren't scripted for him don't come readily to his limited vocabulary. Even more limited--and let's recall that even the inarticulate Quasimodo, Victor Hugo's Hunchback, does have a heart--is Trump's ability to read situations, to say the right thing at the right time.
Newscasters on non-Fox cable news programs played montages of past presidents making speeches intended to unite the country after tragedies or national stressors. Obama's Newtown Elementary School shooting speech, George W. Bush's megaphone speech at the World Trade Center wreckage, Clinton talking about the Oklahoma City bombing, Reagan's Space Shuttle Challenger disaster speech. The journalists didn't mention that the above presidents didn't write those speeches--we have no one of Lincoln's caliber, the man who wrote the Gettysburg Address on the train on the way to the battlefield. But our modern presidents deliver the speeches well, usually. Trump, we must now realize, is weak when it comes to giving speeches. Since he has no inner core of morality, no ethical foundation except that of figuring out sleazy ways to make money, our president shouldn't be expected to act like he cares about one more mass shooting, one more organized terror attack (by a domestic terrorist would-be bomber who, not coincidentally, is an extreme Trump supporter).
Trump, asked by reporters if he called Hillary and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, or the other recipients of the bomb packages, to offer the solace, concern, and support a real leader would provide in such a situation--even to his political opponents--replied that no, he hadn't made any such calls.
"...if they wanted me to," Trump said, "but I think we'll probably pass."
Pass, as if if he's turning down an offer? From whom? He uses a business term but shows his mental and emotional deficiency by not making sense, a non sequitur applied to a reasonable question.
One advantage to be had when a politician speaks the English language well can be detected in our ability to think through and feel their intent, whether the well-spoken politician is benign or malign, or a mixture of both. Trump's use of language has been established by linguists and educators as being at the fourth grade level, but there are many nine and ten year olds who can articulate their thoughts and feelings and be readily understood.
Trump seems like a nine year old who never had the advantage of interacting with other children or adults who were sensibly interested in his progress as a human being. Instead, he grew up economically privileged, his father creative with financial manipulation. Trump, by the time he was eight, was a millionaire. Unfortunately, for his character, and the world, he wasn't abducted like someone in a romantic nineteenth century adventure novel, put to sea on a merchant ship as a cabin boy, suffering a great deal, but emerging as a strong person.
I don't advocate that this kind of thing be done to the children of the rich, but in Trump's case, he needed to get beaten up when he was young, to have his vanity pounded out of him. Trump likes MBS and Kim Jong-Un because all three of them are children of privilege who never suffered from need or want, ruling over millions of subjects whose daily concerns are of no concern to them, nor have they ever had such concerns for populations they can't relate to.
Trump, standing under the wing of his super-plane, getting wet and tempest-tossed, was only thinking of himself. He knew he had to say a few things about the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting; his son-in-law and daughter, after all, are Jewish. He knows that Israel runs much of American political thought and practice.
But damn, that rain! The hairdo is being assassinated!
Vic Neptune
Donald Trump suffered the whimsy of an elemental force: wind-driven rain.
"...I was standing under the wing of Air Force One [important to mention his luxurious ride] doing a news conference early this morning, a very unfortunate news conference. And the wind was blowing and the rain, and I was soaking wet, and that's what I ended up with today [meaning his hair's appearance]..."
Saying this at a Future Farmers of America conference in Indianapolis, he continued, "I said, 'Maybe I should cancel this arrangement because I have a bad hair day, and the bad news, somebody said, 'Actually it looks better more than it usually does.'"
That morning, an anti-Semitic creep with guns murdered eleven people in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Six were wounded, including four cops, who practice a profession that Trump likes to praise every chance he gets, but his near-cancellation of the Indianapolis event had more to do, apparently, with the condition of his hair.
I don't find it necessary to give examples of Trump's psychopathic personality, his inability to empathize (which should be disqualifying for his position, but is actually a common trait shared by many CEOs, politicians, corporate lawyers, and serial killers), but when he's trying to be funny in relation to a situation in which he stood in the rain answering questions from reporters wanting to know his thoughts about mass murder in Pittsburgh, as well as the would-be bomber Trump super-fan arrested in Florida who sent pipe bombs to Obama and the Clintons, plus several other prominent Democrats, his severe moral imbalance stands out.
Just a few weeks ago, Trump was prevaricating about the leader of Saudi Arabia, who has obviously had one of his journalist opponents tortured and murdered. Trump's talking points were identical to those of Mohammad Bin Salman al-Saud's, who not only probably ordered the hit, but condemned the killing after ordering an investigation. Yes, I remember when Charles Manson was allowed to investigate the Tate-LaBianca murders--no, that didn't happen, because that would've been insane.
Trump and MBS (as he's often referred to--I guess it means Muslim Bullshitter) both used the word "rogue" to describe the hit. The Saudi authorities produced a report concluding that the journalist died, accidentally, in a "fistfight" that concluded with a "chokehold" that must've been held a second or two too long. Manslaughter in the midst of some good old-fashioned fisticuffs.
When Trump talks about trivial matters, it may be a defense on his part, since he doesn't know how to express himself; human terms that aren't scripted for him don't come readily to his limited vocabulary. Even more limited--and let's recall that even the inarticulate Quasimodo, Victor Hugo's Hunchback, does have a heart--is Trump's ability to read situations, to say the right thing at the right time.
Newscasters on non-Fox cable news programs played montages of past presidents making speeches intended to unite the country after tragedies or national stressors. Obama's Newtown Elementary School shooting speech, George W. Bush's megaphone speech at the World Trade Center wreckage, Clinton talking about the Oklahoma City bombing, Reagan's Space Shuttle Challenger disaster speech. The journalists didn't mention that the above presidents didn't write those speeches--we have no one of Lincoln's caliber, the man who wrote the Gettysburg Address on the train on the way to the battlefield. But our modern presidents deliver the speeches well, usually. Trump, we must now realize, is weak when it comes to giving speeches. Since he has no inner core of morality, no ethical foundation except that of figuring out sleazy ways to make money, our president shouldn't be expected to act like he cares about one more mass shooting, one more organized terror attack (by a domestic terrorist would-be bomber who, not coincidentally, is an extreme Trump supporter).
Trump, asked by reporters if he called Hillary and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, or the other recipients of the bomb packages, to offer the solace, concern, and support a real leader would provide in such a situation--even to his political opponents--replied that no, he hadn't made any such calls.
"...if they wanted me to," Trump said, "but I think we'll probably pass."
Pass, as if if he's turning down an offer? From whom? He uses a business term but shows his mental and emotional deficiency by not making sense, a non sequitur applied to a reasonable question.
One advantage to be had when a politician speaks the English language well can be detected in our ability to think through and feel their intent, whether the well-spoken politician is benign or malign, or a mixture of both. Trump's use of language has been established by linguists and educators as being at the fourth grade level, but there are many nine and ten year olds who can articulate their thoughts and feelings and be readily understood.
Trump seems like a nine year old who never had the advantage of interacting with other children or adults who were sensibly interested in his progress as a human being. Instead, he grew up economically privileged, his father creative with financial manipulation. Trump, by the time he was eight, was a millionaire. Unfortunately, for his character, and the world, he wasn't abducted like someone in a romantic nineteenth century adventure novel, put to sea on a merchant ship as a cabin boy, suffering a great deal, but emerging as a strong person.
I don't advocate that this kind of thing be done to the children of the rich, but in Trump's case, he needed to get beaten up when he was young, to have his vanity pounded out of him. Trump likes MBS and Kim Jong-Un because all three of them are children of privilege who never suffered from need or want, ruling over millions of subjects whose daily concerns are of no concern to them, nor have they ever had such concerns for populations they can't relate to.
Trump, standing under the wing of his super-plane, getting wet and tempest-tossed, was only thinking of himself. He knew he had to say a few things about the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting; his son-in-law and daughter, after all, are Jewish. He knows that Israel runs much of American political thought and practice.
But damn, that rain! The hairdo is being assassinated!
Vic Neptune
Saturday, October 20, 2018
The Young War
From March 6, 2003, to March 6, 2005, I wrote an account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and related matters called The War File. Similar to this blog, it gave me the opportunity to express my thoughts and feelings about the rich and powerful, world events, domestic affairs from the trivial to the important. Mostly, it illustrates how my perspectives on U.S. foreign policy and the psychopathic personalities who wield it haven't changed; in fact, my views on these subjects, going back to the 1980s, have been consistent. My study of the John F. Kennedy assassination and later on President Reagan's on-camera lie denying U.S. support of the Contras triggered me, making me realize the extent to which governments and their allies in the news media use deception as a matter of regular practice.
Although there's much about the world right now I could write about, I'm using this post to display a random selection from The War File, the entry for June 28, 2004:
L. Paul Bremer jumped the gun. Iraq is now a sovereign state, run by Iraqis, for Iraqis. That's the officially approved idea. The handover was scheduled to occur this Wednesday [June 30] but was moved up two days to foil possible terror plots. Bremer gets to go home forty-eight hours sooner than expected and American politicians and pundits can feel proud of the epic accomplishments of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Thousands killed, wounded, left homeless. Guerrilla warfare, rising tensions between Shiites and Sunnis, a well-organized Kurdish army of 75,000 soldiers who might prove unwilling to obey the Iraqi governing council's edict for all militias to disband. The country still suffers from frequent electrical blackouts. Unemployment is very high. An American occupation force of 100,000 soldiers will remain. Will they be popular, now that Iraq is "free"?
Bush and Blair are optimistic. It's easy to feel upbeat when you don't have to smell the stink of Third World death. They've spent the last few days at a NATO summit in Istanbul. Bush has gladly given some of America's responsibility for "shouldering the burden" of the Iraq mess to other NATO members. After vigorous energy spent alienating NATO members prior to the war, Bush now seeks to buddy up to them. They cave in to his wishes because, truthfully, all nations fear the United States of America.
Donald Rumsfeld was at the NATO summit and said in an interview that we mustn't forget the Iraqis killed by terrorists. He refers to the many bombings that have occurred since the war "ended."
It's true that hundreds of Iraqis have died from terror attacks in 2003 and 2004, but Rumsfeld neglects to mention that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed by American forces and the U.N. embargo of 1990 to 2003.
Another big lie: Bush, during a press conference, made reference to Saddam Hussein; that the former Iraqi leader destroyed his country's infrastructure. No journalist in that room had the guts to call Bush on this reprehensible distortion of the facts. Saddam Hussein did not destroy Iraq's infrastructure. During the Gulf War of 1991 and the 2003 war, mostly American warplanes and
cruise missiles destroyed Iraq's electrical power stations, bridges, buildings and communication centers. From 1991 on the country has been wrecked, and during the 1990s the first Bush and then the Clinton administrations pressured the U.N. to maintain the strictest and most destructive embargo on any nation in recorded history. Hussein and his government were not permitted to repair the damaged and destroyed infrastructure caused by Operation Desert Storm. Parts needed to fix electrical power plants were often denied because they were regarded as "dual-use" items--objects with civilian but also potential military applications. With unreliable electrical power plants, Iraq's water treatment facilities bogged down, tainting the country's water supply. By 2000, raw sewage ran down some Baghdad streets. The effects of bad water and the recurrent lack of power had its most horrendous effects on Iraqi children and on the elderly. They died in droves.
Imagine: malnourished little kids with no medicine [due to the embargo] afflicted with diarrhea, shitting themselves to death so that George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush could punish Saddam Hussein into submission. Three fine Christian presidents have each remarked that our beef is not with the Iraqi people, but with Saddam Hussein. They've demonstrated this sentiment by killing over a million innocent Iraqis, before the 2003 war even began.
Rumsfeld and Bush do not want us to think about those victims.
Hussein, as we now know fourteen years since I wrote the above, got a noose around his neck. Rumsfeld, the two Bush presidents, Clinton, are all war criminals at large with more blood on their hands than hundreds of historical serial murderers combined. "No Drama" Obama continued the killings, even assassinating two American citizens, one of them a sixteen year old boy. Trump seems bent on bombing and shooting everyone that fits his narrow definition of enemies. He wants to unleash the military on thousands of refugees from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, seeking to cross Mexico to reach the U.S. They flee drug gangs, police corruption, terrorism, all of it generated by the U.S.-prosecuted drug war. Like an unredeemable alcoholic, the U.S. will not accept responsibility for the destructive conditions it creates and the lives it ruins.
American leaders continue to embrace triumphalism, brutality, and an arrogance rivaled only by the most chauvinistic Israelis. It's impossible to say for sure, but I can't accept the idea that the Fascist creeps running America and many other nations will be able to sustain their rule beyond the horizon of the mid-century. The world, dying as it is, most definitely transforming into a planet that will be increasingly an alien world to human life, won't help out the idiot tycoon class that chose to do nothing to save it. The needed revolution against the powers that be may simply come in the form of some really bad weather, combined with growing anarchy, humans forming into enclaves, nations growing quickly irrelevant, survival of the strongest and the luckiest. If luck includes negotiating the contours of Hell.
My country has visited Hell on other nations many times. Iraq, of course, still tells us something. I wrote the above account of human failure, hubris, lies and stupid cruelty fourteen years ago when I was forty years old. My father was dying of esophageal cancer at the time. He hated George W. Bush by 2004. A lifelong Democrat, the 9/11 attacks nevertheless bothered the shit out of him. He accepted Bush's invasion of Afghanistan and later supported Bush's rationale for invading Iraq. We argued once about Dick Cheney's Halliburton connection, how it enabled him to profiteer from the war. My father said, "We were attacked by people who want to kill us! If Cheney makes some money from the war that's fine with me."
A year later, though, with no WMD showing up, my father knew he'd been lied to by Bush and other administration officials. I knew Bush was lying from the start; I never trusted the son of a bitch and I still don't. I assumed from the very beginning of his phony stolen presidency that he would lie all the time; that, like his father, he would commit egregious acts of inhumanity against innocent people in other parts of the world. I was right about George W. Bush, who now, grossly, enjoys popularity among idiots on the Left because he seems so much better than Donald Trump.
They're both killers, they both violate human rights, they both deny global warming, they're both useless as leaders.
As my father lay dying during his final two weeks, the 2004 election yielded the result we now know. My father had stayed awake as long as he was able, watching the election reports but the winner was not yet known when he fell asleep. The next morning, he asked my mother, "Who won?" She had considered giving him the white lie that Kerry had won. My father, who was unconscious most of the time during those last days, would have then gone to his death believing that Bush and Cheney would've been out of the White House in two months. My mother decided she couldn't lie about it, though, and said, "Bush."
My father cried.
He and I finally agreed in our identification of human scum.
Vic Neptune
From March 6, 2003, to March 6, 2005, I wrote an account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and related matters called The War File. Similar to this blog, it gave me the opportunity to express my thoughts and feelings about the rich and powerful, world events, domestic affairs from the trivial to the important. Mostly, it illustrates how my perspectives on U.S. foreign policy and the psychopathic personalities who wield it haven't changed; in fact, my views on these subjects, going back to the 1980s, have been consistent. My study of the John F. Kennedy assassination and later on President Reagan's on-camera lie denying U.S. support of the Contras triggered me, making me realize the extent to which governments and their allies in the news media use deception as a matter of regular practice.
Although there's much about the world right now I could write about, I'm using this post to display a random selection from The War File, the entry for June 28, 2004:
L. Paul Bremer jumped the gun. Iraq is now a sovereign state, run by Iraqis, for Iraqis. That's the officially approved idea. The handover was scheduled to occur this Wednesday [June 30] but was moved up two days to foil possible terror plots. Bremer gets to go home forty-eight hours sooner than expected and American politicians and pundits can feel proud of the epic accomplishments of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Thousands killed, wounded, left homeless. Guerrilla warfare, rising tensions between Shiites and Sunnis, a well-organized Kurdish army of 75,000 soldiers who might prove unwilling to obey the Iraqi governing council's edict for all militias to disband. The country still suffers from frequent electrical blackouts. Unemployment is very high. An American occupation force of 100,000 soldiers will remain. Will they be popular, now that Iraq is "free"?
Bush and Blair are optimistic. It's easy to feel upbeat when you don't have to smell the stink of Third World death. They've spent the last few days at a NATO summit in Istanbul. Bush has gladly given some of America's responsibility for "shouldering the burden" of the Iraq mess to other NATO members. After vigorous energy spent alienating NATO members prior to the war, Bush now seeks to buddy up to them. They cave in to his wishes because, truthfully, all nations fear the United States of America.
Donald Rumsfeld was at the NATO summit and said in an interview that we mustn't forget the Iraqis killed by terrorists. He refers to the many bombings that have occurred since the war "ended."
It's true that hundreds of Iraqis have died from terror attacks in 2003 and 2004, but Rumsfeld neglects to mention that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed by American forces and the U.N. embargo of 1990 to 2003.
Another big lie: Bush, during a press conference, made reference to Saddam Hussein; that the former Iraqi leader destroyed his country's infrastructure. No journalist in that room had the guts to call Bush on this reprehensible distortion of the facts. Saddam Hussein did not destroy Iraq's infrastructure. During the Gulf War of 1991 and the 2003 war, mostly American warplanes and
cruise missiles destroyed Iraq's electrical power stations, bridges, buildings and communication centers. From 1991 on the country has been wrecked, and during the 1990s the first Bush and then the Clinton administrations pressured the U.N. to maintain the strictest and most destructive embargo on any nation in recorded history. Hussein and his government were not permitted to repair the damaged and destroyed infrastructure caused by Operation Desert Storm. Parts needed to fix electrical power plants were often denied because they were regarded as "dual-use" items--objects with civilian but also potential military applications. With unreliable electrical power plants, Iraq's water treatment facilities bogged down, tainting the country's water supply. By 2000, raw sewage ran down some Baghdad streets. The effects of bad water and the recurrent lack of power had its most horrendous effects on Iraqi children and on the elderly. They died in droves.
Imagine: malnourished little kids with no medicine [due to the embargo] afflicted with diarrhea, shitting themselves to death so that George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush could punish Saddam Hussein into submission. Three fine Christian presidents have each remarked that our beef is not with the Iraqi people, but with Saddam Hussein. They've demonstrated this sentiment by killing over a million innocent Iraqis, before the 2003 war even began.
Rumsfeld and Bush do not want us to think about those victims.
Hussein, as we now know fourteen years since I wrote the above, got a noose around his neck. Rumsfeld, the two Bush presidents, Clinton, are all war criminals at large with more blood on their hands than hundreds of historical serial murderers combined. "No Drama" Obama continued the killings, even assassinating two American citizens, one of them a sixteen year old boy. Trump seems bent on bombing and shooting everyone that fits his narrow definition of enemies. He wants to unleash the military on thousands of refugees from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, seeking to cross Mexico to reach the U.S. They flee drug gangs, police corruption, terrorism, all of it generated by the U.S.-prosecuted drug war. Like an unredeemable alcoholic, the U.S. will not accept responsibility for the destructive conditions it creates and the lives it ruins.
American leaders continue to embrace triumphalism, brutality, and an arrogance rivaled only by the most chauvinistic Israelis. It's impossible to say for sure, but I can't accept the idea that the Fascist creeps running America and many other nations will be able to sustain their rule beyond the horizon of the mid-century. The world, dying as it is, most definitely transforming into a planet that will be increasingly an alien world to human life, won't help out the idiot tycoon class that chose to do nothing to save it. The needed revolution against the powers that be may simply come in the form of some really bad weather, combined with growing anarchy, humans forming into enclaves, nations growing quickly irrelevant, survival of the strongest and the luckiest. If luck includes negotiating the contours of Hell.
My country has visited Hell on other nations many times. Iraq, of course, still tells us something. I wrote the above account of human failure, hubris, lies and stupid cruelty fourteen years ago when I was forty years old. My father was dying of esophageal cancer at the time. He hated George W. Bush by 2004. A lifelong Democrat, the 9/11 attacks nevertheless bothered the shit out of him. He accepted Bush's invasion of Afghanistan and later supported Bush's rationale for invading Iraq. We argued once about Dick Cheney's Halliburton connection, how it enabled him to profiteer from the war. My father said, "We were attacked by people who want to kill us! If Cheney makes some money from the war that's fine with me."
A year later, though, with no WMD showing up, my father knew he'd been lied to by Bush and other administration officials. I knew Bush was lying from the start; I never trusted the son of a bitch and I still don't. I assumed from the very beginning of his phony stolen presidency that he would lie all the time; that, like his father, he would commit egregious acts of inhumanity against innocent people in other parts of the world. I was right about George W. Bush, who now, grossly, enjoys popularity among idiots on the Left because he seems so much better than Donald Trump.
They're both killers, they both violate human rights, they both deny global warming, they're both useless as leaders.
As my father lay dying during his final two weeks, the 2004 election yielded the result we now know. My father had stayed awake as long as he was able, watching the election reports but the winner was not yet known when he fell asleep. The next morning, he asked my mother, "Who won?" She had considered giving him the white lie that Kerry had won. My father, who was unconscious most of the time during those last days, would have then gone to his death believing that Bush and Cheney would've been out of the White House in two months. My mother decided she couldn't lie about it, though, and said, "Bush."
My father cried.
He and I finally agreed in our identification of human scum.
Vic Neptune
Monday, October 8, 2018
Prop Wash
Before he goes somewhere, Donald Trump stands for a short while on the White House Lawn, answering reporters' shouted questions. They must raise their voices because of the nearby idling helicopter whining like a nuclear washing machine. The reporters participate in these absurd exchanges because Trump is news, no matter what hogwash gushes from his mouth. I've never heard any journalist remark upon the unacceptable noise of these lawn meetings, or why Trump likes to do them. He also takes questions in the Oval Office when a foreign dignitary sits beside him. Camera clicks and Trump's bullshit are the two instruments heard, with reporters supplying backing vocals. His responses in these situations are never useful as signposts of truth. He can't tell the truth, except inadvertently. The noisiness in the Oval Office question and answer periods, the helicopter and lawn interviews lack real information. They are static from an administration, indeed, a government more interested in hiding what's real and of concern to citizens than using straightforwardness as a matter of habit. They do this to protect themselves because they know that the masses of Americans would like to beat the shit out of them.
Ted Cruz, for instance. Cruz, a Senate Judiciary Committee member who all but begged Brett Kavanaugh to sexually assault him, so sniveling was his defense of the judge seeking a Supreme Court nomination, Cruz faces a strong possibility of defeat at the hands of a popular Democrat, Beto O'Rourke, in next month's election. If Cruz loses, he'll have more time on his hands to plan his next presidential run.
In the meantime, he's one of fifty senators who voted for Kavanaugh's confirmation, an explicit statement of support for a likely sexual assaulter and possible war criminal (from his previous work for Alberto Gonzalez in the Bush administration during its formulation of torture justifications).
One of the most reprehensible Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine, cast the deciding vote in favor of someone she says she believed to be truthful, while also believing that Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh's alleged victim, was telling the truth about her assault in 1982, but that Kavanaugh wasn't the perpetrator. How does Collins know this? We have no idea. She assumes that Ford, despite her vivid memory of the assault, got it wrong when identifying her attacker, in spite of the fact that Ford had known Kavanaugh for a while. I'm pretty sure that Collins herself doesn't believe her own rationale, because it's fucking ridiculous.
Trump expressed his concern about young men and boys getting falsely accused. Trump himself has been accused of sexual assault by, I think, fourteen women. He presents himself as having been victimized by his accusers. Brett Kavanaugh has done the same, buttressed by people like Cruz and Collins and forty-eight other creeps in the Senate willing to inflict a narrow-minded Republican with a frat boy background and mentality on the Supreme Court and thus into the legal bloodstream of the land--goodbye environmental protections, goodbye women's right to choose, congratulations misogyny and unchecked capitalism.
This does put the fight into people, though. A lot of women will run for office because of this. Kavanaugh's victim from 1982, though, can't return to her home. She receives death threats. Trump at a rally in Mississippi mocked her testimony after keeping his mouth shut for a few days. He received laughter and applause, because, I suppose, it's funny when a girl gets nearly raped by a drunken lout and years later gets a chance to tell her story to the world, only to see the drunken lout get a huge job opportunity provided to him by powerful people who, even if they believe her story, don't really give a shit, because Machiavelli beats Jesus at poker every time.
Now is it understandable that the U.S. government after World War Two smuggled Nazis like Klaus Barbie out of Europe? That Saddam Hussein was a U.S. ally during the Reagan administration? That the U.S. aids al-Qaeda in Syria? The people running the show don't have souls, caring only about the ends; furthermore, since they're also fallible and tend to be incompetent a lot of victims pile up.
Covering up that smell is why Trump likes to talk with a helicopter providing backing distortion. If people in general would realize the true degree of how loathsome these leaders inflicting damnation on us really are, how much they, Republicans and Democrats, don't give a fuck about anything except power and money, how long would we put up with this state of affairs? Brett Kavanaugh and the new five to four majority in the Supreme Court is poised to ruin millions of lives for the sake of enriching the richest of the one percent. And we just keep taking it, defending capitalism, apologizing for failed political parties, believing wrongly that if Trump is "gotten rid of" everything will be good again, like when Obama was using drones to blow up children in Yemen.
A new scientific study reveals that 2030 is the point of no return in regard to global warming. Drastic changes must occur until then to prevent the average temperature from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius, and even then, the world's in for a plethora of disasters. Our government demonstrates a persistent and willful lack of interest in preventing such horrors to befall the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Baby Boom generation that failed to act on global warming in a timely manner. Massive die-offs of animals are already occurring. Frogs, toads, bees, their populations drop. This harbinger means we will drop. The truth must be faced about these upcoming complexes of problems. The bullshit and lies must stop being regarded as anything but noise. Giving up your life to cling to some idiotic statement of belief by a man with no soul, Trump or otherwise, is a stupid thing to do.
Learn to read people. Apparently, Susan Collins and others of her kind lack that capacity.
Vic Neptune
Saturday, October 6, 2018
The Woman From Marie Antoinette's Fantasy Farm
Melania Trump visits four African countries in five days. Emphasis on meetings with children. If meeting with elephants in Kenya, they are calves. She feeds a calf with a milk bottle. When hugging children a smile shoves away the usual frozen expression of an isolated wealthy woman trapped in a loveless marriage to the world's most famous prick.
She visited a child welfare clinic in Ghana where she gazed at an infant in an incubator. She met with tribal chieftains in a place called Obama Hall. She was given a tour of a former fort used in the slave trade. In Malawi, resembling a giantess in four inch heels, she talked to a roomful of students sitting on the floor. She met with first ladies, hugged flower girls. The height of her heels was relentlessly stratospheric. The modest but attractive clothing of Kenya's first lady, Margaret Kenyatta, contrasts startlingly with Melania Trump's flamboyant couture. Out for a non-violent big game tour in Nairobi National Park, Melania Trump wears a white blouse, khaki pants tucked into brown leather boots, and a white pith helmet. On her way to get a glimpse of Tarzan?
At an elephant orphanage she pets the animals' rough heads and tips the milk bottle, smiling broadly because this reminds her of when she fed her son Barron.
Melania Trump loves the little ones, especially those without parents. There are many of these in Texas whose parents aren't dead, but their children have been separated from them according to a policy enforced by Mrs. Trump's husband, resulting in Central American minors forced to waste their lives inside for-profit American prisons. Does Melania Trump know that her husband inflicts pain and death on the world's children on a scale John Wayne Gacy would envy?
The Washington Post this morning put out a brief story entitled, "Melania Trump in Egypt to tour pyramids, Sphinx".
U.S. Agency for International Development has been working on a project to drop groundwater levels to prevent further damage to the pyramids and the Sphinx. Mrs. Trump will probably hear about this from an on-site scientist. Her own Sphinx-like face will nod up and down. She's supposed to meet, too, with Egypt's president, al-Sissi and of course the first lady, Entissar Mohameed Amer (cool name). Did President Trump tell his wife, "When you meet with Sissi, tell him he can have the F-35s, but he has to be prepared to use them against Iran."
She's in Egypt right now, or perhaps is on her way back already. Fast trip, lots of brown kids and elephants, she didn't go during the hottest time of the year. She can catch up on her sleep on board the plane. Did it occur to her that Donald Jr. and Eric, her stepsons, kill large African mammals? That her husband eliminated the slain African animal importation ban, probably to do his sons a favor? Does she know that the white pith helmet looks like something out of 1905 rather than 2018? That it visually brands her as an imperialist?
Is she even dumber than her husband?
Vic Neptune
Melania Trump visits four African countries in five days. Emphasis on meetings with children. If meeting with elephants in Kenya, they are calves. She feeds a calf with a milk bottle. When hugging children a smile shoves away the usual frozen expression of an isolated wealthy woman trapped in a loveless marriage to the world's most famous prick.
She visited a child welfare clinic in Ghana where she gazed at an infant in an incubator. She met with tribal chieftains in a place called Obama Hall. She was given a tour of a former fort used in the slave trade. In Malawi, resembling a giantess in four inch heels, she talked to a roomful of students sitting on the floor. She met with first ladies, hugged flower girls. The height of her heels was relentlessly stratospheric. The modest but attractive clothing of Kenya's first lady, Margaret Kenyatta, contrasts startlingly with Melania Trump's flamboyant couture. Out for a non-violent big game tour in Nairobi National Park, Melania Trump wears a white blouse, khaki pants tucked into brown leather boots, and a white pith helmet. On her way to get a glimpse of Tarzan?
At an elephant orphanage she pets the animals' rough heads and tips the milk bottle, smiling broadly because this reminds her of when she fed her son Barron.
Melania Trump loves the little ones, especially those without parents. There are many of these in Texas whose parents aren't dead, but their children have been separated from them according to a policy enforced by Mrs. Trump's husband, resulting in Central American minors forced to waste their lives inside for-profit American prisons. Does Melania Trump know that her husband inflicts pain and death on the world's children on a scale John Wayne Gacy would envy?
The Washington Post this morning put out a brief story entitled, "Melania Trump in Egypt to tour pyramids, Sphinx".
U.S. Agency for International Development has been working on a project to drop groundwater levels to prevent further damage to the pyramids and the Sphinx. Mrs. Trump will probably hear about this from an on-site scientist. Her own Sphinx-like face will nod up and down. She's supposed to meet, too, with Egypt's president, al-Sissi and of course the first lady, Entissar Mohameed Amer (cool name). Did President Trump tell his wife, "When you meet with Sissi, tell him he can have the F-35s, but he has to be prepared to use them against Iran."
She's in Egypt right now, or perhaps is on her way back already. Fast trip, lots of brown kids and elephants, she didn't go during the hottest time of the year. She can catch up on her sleep on board the plane. Did it occur to her that Donald Jr. and Eric, her stepsons, kill large African mammals? That her husband eliminated the slain African animal importation ban, probably to do his sons a favor? Does she know that the white pith helmet looks like something out of 1905 rather than 2018? That it visually brands her as an imperialist?
Is she even dumber than her husband?
Vic Neptune
Friday, September 28, 2018
The Boy Who Could Do No Wrong
Donald Trump, himself an accused rapist, picked for the Supreme Court an accused rapist, Judge Brett Kavanaugh. This symmetry suggests the President's boasts about picking "the right people, the best, the incredible, the fantastic," applies also to his many failures. Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn, Steve Bannon, Omarosa Manigault-Newman, all of them exuberantly described by Trump as "great, incredible people," have resigned or been fired by a lifelong businessman priding himself in his decision-making abilities, which include, presumably, the skill of selecting the best people for various jobs. Except that Trump, being Trump, is a terrible judge of character.
Brett Kavanaugh now faces a week-long FBI investigation into whether or not he, at seventeen, sexually assaulted a fifteen year old girl in 1982. The girl grew up to be Doctor of Psychology Christine Blasey Ford at Palo Alto University in California. At a party during the summer of 1982, she claims, convincingly, that an acquaintance of hers, drunken Brett Kavanaugh and his friend, Mark Judge, shoved her onto a bed. Kavanaugh then, according to Ford, got on top of her, groped her private parts, ground his crotch against her, tried to undress her, put his hand over her mouth to prevent her from screaming. Judge joined in, there was a tussle and Ford managed to escape from the inebriated pair. She hid in a bathroom until she heard her attackers go downstairs. She made her way outside and wasn't followed.
She confided this story after many years to a therapist and to her husband. She contacted her Senator, Dianne Feinstein, giving the latter a letter detailing the assault. This happened when Kavanaugh was on President Trump's short list for the next Supreme Court Justice. Ford, concerned that her attacker may serve on the Supreme Court, wished at first to remain anonymous, but investigative reporters, once the letter went national, found out her identity and confronted her with the information. Her life, turned upside down like Kavanaugh's, entered the bizarre alternate reality of politically based celebrity.
She received death threats from people lacking the ability to consider the possibility that someone Donald Trump might admire enough to nominate to the Supreme Court might be a criminal.
Ambitious Kavanaugh, seeking fame, became infamous, but also, to the Right Wing, a martyr. This became quite evident when the eleven Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the body that will decide the outcome of his appointment, used their time in "questioning" Kavanaugh mostly praising him and apologizing for all the inconveniences and spiritually crushing difficulties he's had to endure. He's a victim, the idea goes.
"Dr. Ford's a victim, you're a victim."
Satan's Sock Puppet Senator Ted Cruz stated, like many of his colleagues, that Dr. Ford's victimization had to do with "the last few weeks," during which she's become a household name, has received death threats, has had her life exposed for all to see, an excruciating and grueling process Judge Kavanaugh can, of course, relate to. Kavanaugh said in his opening remarks that "my life and that of my family have been ruined by this!" My inclusion of the exclamation point is accurate. Most of his opening remarks were characterized by vehemence, anger, self-pity, shrillness, aggressiveness, open contempt for the Committee's Democratic Senators. He blamed, among others, Bill and Hillary Clinton, suggesting a left-wing conspiracy (not his words but that's what he meant) was responsible for Dr. Ford's allegations.
As much as I loathe Mr. and Mrs. Clinton, it's preposterous that they or anyone within the Democratic establishment orchestrated this mess, especially when considering Dr. Ford's "compelling" (Trump's own word) testimony. The real conspiracy lies with the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, led by its Chairman Chuck Grassley, the man who in 2009 coined the term, "Death Panels" to speak out against the not yet passed Obamacare. Grassley, who, as he listened to Dr. Ford's emotional and terrifying testimony, resembled a lizard looking down its nose at something to eat.
It's obvious what was going on. Orrin Hatch, Grassley, John Cornyn, Lindsay Graham, fossils of the GOP establishment, against women's choices regarding their own bodies, the old boys' network, the lingering sickness of rich old creeps who won't surrender power, plus their younger allies, willing to overlook the credible accusations against their desired Supreme Court candidate just so they can see the Court swing decisively rightward--it's a disgrace and every woman who's been violated in America knows it. These proceedings triggered millions of women, causing a massive wave of personal stories and support for Dr. Ford. Something shifted in America yesterday. As Kavanaugh's belligerence betrayed his dry drunk personality, his tone, something so important to the Washington establishment, sounded unbefitting a Supreme Court Justice. I hold in disdain Justices like Samuel Alito but I've never heard him raise his voice and I'll go so far as to say that he wouldn't even get upset if you spilled a drink on his couch.
Kavanaugh, though, with his life and name getting "dragged through the mud," seemed like a man holding onto a cliffside by his fingernails. It's rumored that Trump wanted him belligerent, "fighting." Donald Trump, Jr., during the hearing, tweeted that "I like [Kavanaugh's] tone." Young Trump, who likes to kill large mammals in Africa and poses for victory shots with the carcasses of lifeless beautiful animals, is a Kavanaugh fan. He likes his Supreme Court Justices pissed. This one sentence in his tweet suggests Donald Trump, Jr.'s unfitness for society.
Leave it to a novelist, a student of human nature in other words, to make one of the best observations. Stephen King, alarmed especially by Dr. Ford's account of Brett Kavanaugh's and Mark Judge's laughter as they violated her, tweeted:
"Ask yourself who has more motivation for lying: the professor who's had her whole life turned upside down, or the judge who stands to land a lifetime job at a quarter-mill a year, plus [benefits] the ordinary Joe can only dream about?"
The Republican Eleven decided to allow their brains to not accept reality, to ignore the obvious. One of them even said that while he believes that Dr. Ford was a sexual assault victim, he didn't believe it was Kavanaugh who did it. He had to twist his mind into a plate of spaghetti to make his argument achieve mere speciousness, instead of commit himself to intellectual honesty.
Senator Jeff Flake, Republican from Arizona, finally, today at the last minute, stopped Kavanaugh from being a sure thing when he requested a one week FBI investigation into the matter, a process the Democrats have been asking for to no avail. Since one Senator can postpone the process, Grassley had to concede, so the FBI will interview and work on the case, tracking down witnesses, bringing in the elusive Mark Judge, we can hope, for questioning. Kavanaugh may yet be the next Justice. After all, America has become increasingly insane, but this process that looked like it was all wrapped up turns out to involve, of all people, a Republican Senator who may actually have a conscience; plus, he's not up for re-election.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
The First Fungus
Donald Trump should not have fucked Stormy Daniels. Apart from the trouble it's caused in his marriage to Melania Trump, who's living proof that marrying for money may be a dumb thing to do, the then game show host's one-nighter with the pornstar in 2006 returns to embarrass him at a time of numerous other pressures in his life.
There's the ongoing Mueller investigation; Paul Manafort has pled guilty to a string of crimes having nothing to do with Russiagate; Bob Woodward's book, Fear, has produced a desired result--making Trump reportedly distrust everyone around him, except for family members. His pick for Supreme Court Justice, Brett Kavanaugh, has been accused of attempted rape at a party when he was seventeen. Hurricane Florence, though it lessened to a storm later on, wreaked the usual watery havoc on the Carolinas. Trump went there today "to survey the damage." He assured survivors that "you're going to be all right," that "we're going to fix this."
Puerto Rico and Houston, meanwhile, are still dealing with the devastation caused by their Trump administration era hurricanes. A new study of Puerto Rico's death toll sets it at nearly 3,000 (approximately the same as 9/11). Trump disputes this, blames the estimate on Democrats wanting him to look bad.
"When I left the island," Trump tweeted, "AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths."
Is he ashamed to be this stupid? I have no idea. Does he not realize that the low death toll was an estimate relevant only to the very beginning of the reckoning of how many people died? Isn't this something that everybody who isn't a complete fucking moron would realize--that the death toll was bound to rise, especially given conditions on the island, with many communities cut off, meaning, no reports of casualties coming to news media right away?
Trump shaking hands and giving reassurances to people who've lost their homes in North Carolina doesn't inspire confidence in my government's ability to handle natural disasters. Trump's administration is a disaster. He gripes about his former attorney, Michael Cohen, now in deep shit with the law. He complains about Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from any investigation relating to Trump's presidential campaign. He's pissed at Gary Cohn for stealing papers off his desk. Kavanaugh might be a sexual assaulter. All of these men are people Trump has had the utmost confidence in, calling them "great, fantastic, incredible, wonderful people." His ability to hire good and trustworthy underlings is, evidently, suspect.
Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels' lawyer and cable news pundit, a darling of the Democratic establishment/anti-Trump #Resistance people who also push the Russiagate conspiracy theory, wants to run for president in 2020. He claims he's not interested in running if Trump and Pence aren't running in 2020. He thus sets himself firmly against Trump, a one-issue presidential candidate. This is so much the case that Avenatti also claims that the next president doesn't have to be the best candidate, but should be the one most capable of defeating Trump. Hmm.
That leaves a lot of room for some really shitty politicians and non-politicians being regarded by Avenatti as worthy of the presidency. Avenatti's convinced he can take on Trump. His experience as an attorney will make him such a battler in the arena that Trump will stagger from the bruises.
In my view, putting Avenatti against Trump would be no choice at all--I wouldn't vote for either of those egotists. A reality game show host became president in 2016. A man who became famous for being a pornstar's lawyer wants to run the country. Avenatti, like Trump, is a reality TV phenomenon with no political experience. He made a speaking trip to Iowa. He'll probably compete for the nomination with the likes of Joe Biden and John Kerry. Kerry, who, when interviewed in connection with his new book, can't speak like a normal person but sounds like the dry boring multi-millionaire lawyer that he is.
I skimmed a piece Hillary Clinton wrote in The Atlantic, something connected to the trade paperback reprint of her book What Happened. She outlined why Trump is so dangerous. She writes:
"On the day after [the election], in my concession speech, I said, 'We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.' I hoped that my fears for our future were overblown. They were not."
We owed the close-minded Donald Trump an open mind, for fuck's sake? Hillary Clinton actually thought it possible that Trump would be a good president? I never thought that for a second; consequently, Trump hasn't disappointed me, I knew he would suck. I knew well in advance of 2016 that Donald Trump is a degenerate; that becoming the most powerful man in the world wouldn't change him for the better, but would actually accelerate his descent into a moral sewer occupied also by lying power-hogs like Hillary Clinton.
What shall we do with a psychopathic megalomaniac billionaire? Give him power! What a great idea, America!
Our unlovable tendency to vote for utterly inappropriate candidates for high office may give us President Avenatti, and then we will see how this egomaniacal attorney who signs his correspondence with the pretentious, "Esquire," fulfills the Democratic establishment's continuing goal to enrich itself at the expense of ordinary Americans, the surveillance state intact and strengthened further with new technologies, the war continuing its debasement of everything good this country stands for.
Trump is not the worst we can do. Edward Snowden said a few years ago that the machinery for a totalitarian state in the U.S. is in place. It's a matter of the "right" group of people coming along to implement it. This future group, if it does manifest, may very well be Democrats offering the apparently benign solution of doing away with "threats to our democracy" like Trump, by overthrowing him from within a la Russiagate, or some other method. Whoever does this, if it happens, will not be doing it for the American people, certainly not for democracy. Being democratic by subverting democracy is an oxymoron. Intelligence agencies opposed to Trump are not our friends, either.
Hillary Clinton in her essay spoke out against Trump's "assault on the rule of law," made an endorsement of the idea that Russia "attacked" our electoral process, called Trump's corruption "breathtaking," forgetting her role in facilitating huge donations to the Clinton Global Initiative when she was Secretary of State. Trump "undermines national unity." Here, I guess, she's criticizing the fractious personality that for some reason didn't bother her when she and Bill were friends with him in the "old days" of the last decade.
A dark spot missing from her anti-Trump essay and thoughts is the war. She doesn't mention it even once. This means she has no problem with Trump's war-making. She also has no trouble with Trump's pick of the war criminal and torturer Gina Haspel for CIA Director. She doesn't give a shit that the U.S. is meddling in Venezuela and Nicaragua, seeking to overthrow two foreign governments put into place by vote of their peoples, i.e. democratically. Hillary Clinton doesn't give a shit about democracy except as it applies to her own career. She'll probably run for president in 2020. She just won't go away.
Another person who won't go away is Stormy Daniels. She has a book coming out in October. An excerpt receiving the most attention pertains, of course, to her night twelve years ago with Mr. Trump.
"I lay there, annoyed that I was getting fucked by a guy with Yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart...It may have been the least impressive sex I'd ever had, but clearly, he didn't share that opinion."
"He knows he has an unusual penis," Daniels continues. "It has a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool..."
We know that Thomas Jefferson fucked at least one of his slaves, but we don't know what his cock looked like, so this is a great advance in presidential history.
Vic Neptune
Donald Trump should not have fucked Stormy Daniels. Apart from the trouble it's caused in his marriage to Melania Trump, who's living proof that marrying for money may be a dumb thing to do, the then game show host's one-nighter with the pornstar in 2006 returns to embarrass him at a time of numerous other pressures in his life.
There's the ongoing Mueller investigation; Paul Manafort has pled guilty to a string of crimes having nothing to do with Russiagate; Bob Woodward's book, Fear, has produced a desired result--making Trump reportedly distrust everyone around him, except for family members. His pick for Supreme Court Justice, Brett Kavanaugh, has been accused of attempted rape at a party when he was seventeen. Hurricane Florence, though it lessened to a storm later on, wreaked the usual watery havoc on the Carolinas. Trump went there today "to survey the damage." He assured survivors that "you're going to be all right," that "we're going to fix this."
Puerto Rico and Houston, meanwhile, are still dealing with the devastation caused by their Trump administration era hurricanes. A new study of Puerto Rico's death toll sets it at nearly 3,000 (approximately the same as 9/11). Trump disputes this, blames the estimate on Democrats wanting him to look bad.
"When I left the island," Trump tweeted, "AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths."
Is he ashamed to be this stupid? I have no idea. Does he not realize that the low death toll was an estimate relevant only to the very beginning of the reckoning of how many people died? Isn't this something that everybody who isn't a complete fucking moron would realize--that the death toll was bound to rise, especially given conditions on the island, with many communities cut off, meaning, no reports of casualties coming to news media right away?
Trump shaking hands and giving reassurances to people who've lost their homes in North Carolina doesn't inspire confidence in my government's ability to handle natural disasters. Trump's administration is a disaster. He gripes about his former attorney, Michael Cohen, now in deep shit with the law. He complains about Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from any investigation relating to Trump's presidential campaign. He's pissed at Gary Cohn for stealing papers off his desk. Kavanaugh might be a sexual assaulter. All of these men are people Trump has had the utmost confidence in, calling them "great, fantastic, incredible, wonderful people." His ability to hire good and trustworthy underlings is, evidently, suspect.
Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels' lawyer and cable news pundit, a darling of the Democratic establishment/anti-Trump #Resistance people who also push the Russiagate conspiracy theory, wants to run for president in 2020. He claims he's not interested in running if Trump and Pence aren't running in 2020. He thus sets himself firmly against Trump, a one-issue presidential candidate. This is so much the case that Avenatti also claims that the next president doesn't have to be the best candidate, but should be the one most capable of defeating Trump. Hmm.
That leaves a lot of room for some really shitty politicians and non-politicians being regarded by Avenatti as worthy of the presidency. Avenatti's convinced he can take on Trump. His experience as an attorney will make him such a battler in the arena that Trump will stagger from the bruises.
In my view, putting Avenatti against Trump would be no choice at all--I wouldn't vote for either of those egotists. A reality game show host became president in 2016. A man who became famous for being a pornstar's lawyer wants to run the country. Avenatti, like Trump, is a reality TV phenomenon with no political experience. He made a speaking trip to Iowa. He'll probably compete for the nomination with the likes of Joe Biden and John Kerry. Kerry, who, when interviewed in connection with his new book, can't speak like a normal person but sounds like the dry boring multi-millionaire lawyer that he is.
I skimmed a piece Hillary Clinton wrote in The Atlantic, something connected to the trade paperback reprint of her book What Happened. She outlined why Trump is so dangerous. She writes:
"On the day after [the election], in my concession speech, I said, 'We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.' I hoped that my fears for our future were overblown. They were not."
We owed the close-minded Donald Trump an open mind, for fuck's sake? Hillary Clinton actually thought it possible that Trump would be a good president? I never thought that for a second; consequently, Trump hasn't disappointed me, I knew he would suck. I knew well in advance of 2016 that Donald Trump is a degenerate; that becoming the most powerful man in the world wouldn't change him for the better, but would actually accelerate his descent into a moral sewer occupied also by lying power-hogs like Hillary Clinton.
What shall we do with a psychopathic megalomaniac billionaire? Give him power! What a great idea, America!
Our unlovable tendency to vote for utterly inappropriate candidates for high office may give us President Avenatti, and then we will see how this egomaniacal attorney who signs his correspondence with the pretentious, "Esquire," fulfills the Democratic establishment's continuing goal to enrich itself at the expense of ordinary Americans, the surveillance state intact and strengthened further with new technologies, the war continuing its debasement of everything good this country stands for.
Trump is not the worst we can do. Edward Snowden said a few years ago that the machinery for a totalitarian state in the U.S. is in place. It's a matter of the "right" group of people coming along to implement it. This future group, if it does manifest, may very well be Democrats offering the apparently benign solution of doing away with "threats to our democracy" like Trump, by overthrowing him from within a la Russiagate, or some other method. Whoever does this, if it happens, will not be doing it for the American people, certainly not for democracy. Being democratic by subverting democracy is an oxymoron. Intelligence agencies opposed to Trump are not our friends, either.
Hillary Clinton in her essay spoke out against Trump's "assault on the rule of law," made an endorsement of the idea that Russia "attacked" our electoral process, called Trump's corruption "breathtaking," forgetting her role in facilitating huge donations to the Clinton Global Initiative when she was Secretary of State. Trump "undermines national unity." Here, I guess, she's criticizing the fractious personality that for some reason didn't bother her when she and Bill were friends with him in the "old days" of the last decade.
A dark spot missing from her anti-Trump essay and thoughts is the war. She doesn't mention it even once. This means she has no problem with Trump's war-making. She also has no trouble with Trump's pick of the war criminal and torturer Gina Haspel for CIA Director. She doesn't give a shit that the U.S. is meddling in Venezuela and Nicaragua, seeking to overthrow two foreign governments put into place by vote of their peoples, i.e. democratically. Hillary Clinton doesn't give a shit about democracy except as it applies to her own career. She'll probably run for president in 2020. She just won't go away.
Another person who won't go away is Stormy Daniels. She has a book coming out in October. An excerpt receiving the most attention pertains, of course, to her night twelve years ago with Mr. Trump.
"I lay there, annoyed that I was getting fucked by a guy with Yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart...It may have been the least impressive sex I'd ever had, but clearly, he didn't share that opinion."
"He knows he has an unusual penis," Daniels continues. "It has a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool..."
We know that Thomas Jefferson fucked at least one of his slaves, but we don't know what his cock looked like, so this is a great advance in presidential history.
Vic Neptune
Friday, September 7, 2018
Watch Out, He's a Dirty Fighter
Gary Cohn, former Director of the National Economic Council under President Trump, received a severance package of approximately $285 million from Goldman Sachs before joining the Executive Branch as an unelected government official. Bob Woodward, of Watergate scandal reporting fame, has a new book out, Fear, detailing life and work-hell inside the Trump White House. A much-reported story from that book has Cohn saving a South Korea-U.S. trade agreement by removing a paper from Trump's desk, preventing the President from signing an order ending the deal. Cohn claimed, too, that he could do the same thing if Trump would try to end the North American Free Trade Agreement.
On the POW comedy show, Hogan's Heroes, Colonel Hogan and his men often managed to hoodwink Camp Commandant Colonel Klink, making him sign papers without understanding their contents. In M*A*S*H, Corporal "Radar" O'Reilly did the same with his commanding officer.
Has the business of the White House become a sitcom?
Gary Cohn and other Executive Branch officials featured in Woodward's book appear to have a low opinion of President Trump. Chief of Staff John Kelly reportedly called his boss "an idiot." Secretary of Defense Mattis ignored Trump's tirade about assassinating Bashar al-Assad. In some respects, it's good that not all of Trump's whims are being heeded. The so-called "Resistance," which ironically consists of the Democratic establishment (hardly a Progressive group and a gang of Wall Street, Big Pharma, and Military Industrial Complex-connected individuals as well) and Intelligence Community rogues seeking Trump's removal from office, but also many Hollywood celebrities, celebrates news that Trump is being fucked with by his own people in the West Wing.
Trump, regarded by the "Left" as something close to a tyrant, is apparently being messed with by unelected officials, as evidenced by Cohn's behavior, in the name of keeping him in line; yet, their methods are hardly democratic. Trump, whether you're for him or not, is the legitimate President of the United States. To have a group of power players in the White House acting against the President is dangerous, for we are supposed to trust money-pigs like Gary Cohn to look out for our best interests. I don't trust Trump, but I also don't trust the Intelligence Community seeking to ruin him.
Uncritical and stupid commentary by mainstream news media journalists and pundits suggests that they, like the so-called "adults in the room" at the White House who've taken it upon themselves to run the Executive Branch (if it really has gone that far), are hellbent on the removal of Donald Trump and the installment of the sane and steady Mike Pence, who, in my view, is as bad or worse than Trump. Pence doesn't tweet, he's polite, but he's also a fundamentalist Christian loon. He's anti-abortion to the extreme. It's true that Trump's latest Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh, is also anti-abortion, suggesting that Trump feels the same way (although I think he doesn't really care one way or the other). Kavanaugh, however, is likely to be the next Supreme Court Justice, in spite of having worked for Bush's Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez at a time when lawyers in the Bush Adminstration conjured up the torture programs used by the U.S. military and CIA. If he had something to do with the "enhanced interrogation techniques" thing, Kavanaugh is set to become America's first Supreme Court Justice who's also a war criminal. Democrats, given their nature these past many years, will probably cave, Kavanaugh will wear a black robe.
This touches on how Donald Trump really does serve the interests of Wall Street, the Military Industrial Complex, the Oil Industry, Polluting industries, in short, Capitalism. For his service to these concerns, he won't lose his job before 2021. He may lose his next election, but every rich politician benefits from his tax bill. Gary Cohn, despite his theft of important government documents from the President's desk (is that a crime? If if it isn't, why not?) has done fine with Trump's view of taxes. Cohn is the same man who expressed his displeasure when Trump, right after the neo-Nazi riots in Charlottesville last year, said there was "blame on both sides," equating Nazis with protestors of fascism. Cohn later said he wanted to resign right then, but didn't, waiting evidently until the tax bill became law. Cohn is a Jew--he used his religion as a way of getting others to sympathize with his plight as an advisor to a racist President. I suggest that Gary Cohn doesn't give a fuck about Jews, Nazis, people killed in America's wars, the poor, but he does care about money.
Someone from inside the White House wrote an anonymous op-ed published in the New York Times. This person claims that Trump is being prevented from following his destructive impulses, that this is not an example of the Deep State, but of "the Steady State." The op-ed's author praised Trump's noteworthy accomplishments, such as the tax bill and his beefing up of the military budget. Whoever wrote this piece is as much of a pile of shit as Donald Trump. This person loves our wars, loves helping out millionaires and billionaires at the expense of the good of the country. This person also boasted of being part of the "Resistance," which now consists of White House insiders committing acts of duplicity against the President of the United States. Whoever this person is, journalist Glenn Greenwald called him or her a coward, and I agree.
All of this anti-Trump hysteria will help him get re-elected in 2020. If I'm wrong about that I'll admit my error in judgment.
Vic Neptune
Gary Cohn, former Director of the National Economic Council under President Trump, received a severance package of approximately $285 million from Goldman Sachs before joining the Executive Branch as an unelected government official. Bob Woodward, of Watergate scandal reporting fame, has a new book out, Fear, detailing life and work-hell inside the Trump White House. A much-reported story from that book has Cohn saving a South Korea-U.S. trade agreement by removing a paper from Trump's desk, preventing the President from signing an order ending the deal. Cohn claimed, too, that he could do the same thing if Trump would try to end the North American Free Trade Agreement.
On the POW comedy show, Hogan's Heroes, Colonel Hogan and his men often managed to hoodwink Camp Commandant Colonel Klink, making him sign papers without understanding their contents. In M*A*S*H, Corporal "Radar" O'Reilly did the same with his commanding officer.
Has the business of the White House become a sitcom?
Gary Cohn and other Executive Branch officials featured in Woodward's book appear to have a low opinion of President Trump. Chief of Staff John Kelly reportedly called his boss "an idiot." Secretary of Defense Mattis ignored Trump's tirade about assassinating Bashar al-Assad. In some respects, it's good that not all of Trump's whims are being heeded. The so-called "Resistance," which ironically consists of the Democratic establishment (hardly a Progressive group and a gang of Wall Street, Big Pharma, and Military Industrial Complex-connected individuals as well) and Intelligence Community rogues seeking Trump's removal from office, but also many Hollywood celebrities, celebrates news that Trump is being fucked with by his own people in the West Wing.
Trump, regarded by the "Left" as something close to a tyrant, is apparently being messed with by unelected officials, as evidenced by Cohn's behavior, in the name of keeping him in line; yet, their methods are hardly democratic. Trump, whether you're for him or not, is the legitimate President of the United States. To have a group of power players in the White House acting against the President is dangerous, for we are supposed to trust money-pigs like Gary Cohn to look out for our best interests. I don't trust Trump, but I also don't trust the Intelligence Community seeking to ruin him.
Uncritical and stupid commentary by mainstream news media journalists and pundits suggests that they, like the so-called "adults in the room" at the White House who've taken it upon themselves to run the Executive Branch (if it really has gone that far), are hellbent on the removal of Donald Trump and the installment of the sane and steady Mike Pence, who, in my view, is as bad or worse than Trump. Pence doesn't tweet, he's polite, but he's also a fundamentalist Christian loon. He's anti-abortion to the extreme. It's true that Trump's latest Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh, is also anti-abortion, suggesting that Trump feels the same way (although I think he doesn't really care one way or the other). Kavanaugh, however, is likely to be the next Supreme Court Justice, in spite of having worked for Bush's Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez at a time when lawyers in the Bush Adminstration conjured up the torture programs used by the U.S. military and CIA. If he had something to do with the "enhanced interrogation techniques" thing, Kavanaugh is set to become America's first Supreme Court Justice who's also a war criminal. Democrats, given their nature these past many years, will probably cave, Kavanaugh will wear a black robe.
This touches on how Donald Trump really does serve the interests of Wall Street, the Military Industrial Complex, the Oil Industry, Polluting industries, in short, Capitalism. For his service to these concerns, he won't lose his job before 2021. He may lose his next election, but every rich politician benefits from his tax bill. Gary Cohn, despite his theft of important government documents from the President's desk (is that a crime? If if it isn't, why not?) has done fine with Trump's view of taxes. Cohn is the same man who expressed his displeasure when Trump, right after the neo-Nazi riots in Charlottesville last year, said there was "blame on both sides," equating Nazis with protestors of fascism. Cohn later said he wanted to resign right then, but didn't, waiting evidently until the tax bill became law. Cohn is a Jew--he used his religion as a way of getting others to sympathize with his plight as an advisor to a racist President. I suggest that Gary Cohn doesn't give a fuck about Jews, Nazis, people killed in America's wars, the poor, but he does care about money.
Someone from inside the White House wrote an anonymous op-ed published in the New York Times. This person claims that Trump is being prevented from following his destructive impulses, that this is not an example of the Deep State, but of "the Steady State." The op-ed's author praised Trump's noteworthy accomplishments, such as the tax bill and his beefing up of the military budget. Whoever wrote this piece is as much of a pile of shit as Donald Trump. This person loves our wars, loves helping out millionaires and billionaires at the expense of the good of the country. This person also boasted of being part of the "Resistance," which now consists of White House insiders committing acts of duplicity against the President of the United States. Whoever this person is, journalist Glenn Greenwald called him or her a coward, and I agree.
All of this anti-Trump hysteria will help him get re-elected in 2020. If I'm wrong about that I'll admit my error in judgment.
Vic Neptune
Thursday, August 30, 2018
From the Depths
Boredom, seemingly a dead state of mind, also holds a potential in suspension, waiting for release into the next, more active mental patterns.
I wonder about famous philosophers as they found themselves listless and mentally inert. Socrates staring at a wall. Nietzsche getting irritated with a waiter. Camus on a beach fantasizing about touching some woman's ass. Are these unworthy thoughts of the great men of the past of any importance? Does it matter to the "Life of the Mind" that my back hurts on the right side, has been hurting and I should call my chiropractor's receptionist for an appointment?
I suggest that much of what philosophers have written was boiled inside their minds when they were subject to boredom, listlessness, feelings of uselessness, beset by trivialities, the ancient equivalent of what a human brain experiences when stuck in traffic.
Out of these moments of pointlessness came points of contention. This is just an idea based, in my case, on the great number of experiences wherein I've found answers and new interesting questions after periods of unproductive thinking. It's necessary, apparently, to let the brain go down into the valleys of mundane time filler so that later on it can open up to brightness.
The Death of Socrates makes for a dramatic painting. Socrates Jerking Off After a Long-Winded Question and Answer Session seems less important, yet, wouldn't that depict the opposite side of "up time"?
Up Time is when we're at work, interacting with family and friends, driving, getting interviewed for a job. I've found that even inside Up Time, I roll private thoughts about to the extent that I feel like I'm alone even when surrounded by people I like and/or love. Curse of the one who thinks too much.
Yesterday at the museum where I work a former coworker came in and took some time to look at the newly remodeled lower level. That level is devoted to art education and art activities for children. I'm satisfied now with how it turned out. For a while I didn't like some of the new chairs; they reminded me of decor in Dracula's Castle. Now that the place is finished, it looks better, with additional far more comfortable furniture counterbalancing the Dracula element, plus a stage with a curtain and art books to look at, but no coffee machine.
My former coworker came back upstairs and said to me, "IN-Credible!"
"Amazing," "Great," "UN-Believable," followed her first exaggeration. I'm not knocking this woman's personality. I like her. It was good seeing her after so many years. I merely point out that her adjectives describing the new lower level begged for precision and also overstated what she actually saw. Moses climbs Mount Sinai and God talks to him through the medium of a bush burning with a non-consuming fire. That's incredible and amazing. Granted, it's a Biblical story that may or may not have happened, but a words are for qualities or things that exist--or don't exist--in actuality or in theory.
A richer use of language can come about from more Down Time mental moments, I suspect. I'm concerned about the implications of this subject because of the debasement of language by today's criminally negligent Fourth Estate in this country. They ape the word gargle of President Trump, who says, far too often, words like "Amazing," "Tremendous," "Great," "Incredible," "Fantastic." With each utterance of these words, he never uses the adjectives correctly. He may as well describe Vice President Pence's job performance as "Apricot," or "Cheddar," or "Telephone."
Life isn't always interesting, but from the perspective gained from the dead moments of a day, when slight winds move fallen leaves in unnoticed seconds, a profounder approach to expressing thoughts can crystallize, pointing to new ways of thinking, and maybe also of being.
Vic Neptune
Boredom, seemingly a dead state of mind, also holds a potential in suspension, waiting for release into the next, more active mental patterns.
I wonder about famous philosophers as they found themselves listless and mentally inert. Socrates staring at a wall. Nietzsche getting irritated with a waiter. Camus on a beach fantasizing about touching some woman's ass. Are these unworthy thoughts of the great men of the past of any importance? Does it matter to the "Life of the Mind" that my back hurts on the right side, has been hurting and I should call my chiropractor's receptionist for an appointment?
I suggest that much of what philosophers have written was boiled inside their minds when they were subject to boredom, listlessness, feelings of uselessness, beset by trivialities, the ancient equivalent of what a human brain experiences when stuck in traffic.
Out of these moments of pointlessness came points of contention. This is just an idea based, in my case, on the great number of experiences wherein I've found answers and new interesting questions after periods of unproductive thinking. It's necessary, apparently, to let the brain go down into the valleys of mundane time filler so that later on it can open up to brightness.
The Death of Socrates makes for a dramatic painting. Socrates Jerking Off After a Long-Winded Question and Answer Session seems less important, yet, wouldn't that depict the opposite side of "up time"?
Up Time is when we're at work, interacting with family and friends, driving, getting interviewed for a job. I've found that even inside Up Time, I roll private thoughts about to the extent that I feel like I'm alone even when surrounded by people I like and/or love. Curse of the one who thinks too much.
Yesterday at the museum where I work a former coworker came in and took some time to look at the newly remodeled lower level. That level is devoted to art education and art activities for children. I'm satisfied now with how it turned out. For a while I didn't like some of the new chairs; they reminded me of decor in Dracula's Castle. Now that the place is finished, it looks better, with additional far more comfortable furniture counterbalancing the Dracula element, plus a stage with a curtain and art books to look at, but no coffee machine.
My former coworker came back upstairs and said to me, "IN-Credible!"
"Amazing," "Great," "UN-Believable," followed her first exaggeration. I'm not knocking this woman's personality. I like her. It was good seeing her after so many years. I merely point out that her adjectives describing the new lower level begged for precision and also overstated what she actually saw. Moses climbs Mount Sinai and God talks to him through the medium of a bush burning with a non-consuming fire. That's incredible and amazing. Granted, it's a Biblical story that may or may not have happened, but a words are for qualities or things that exist--or don't exist--in actuality or in theory.
A richer use of language can come about from more Down Time mental moments, I suspect. I'm concerned about the implications of this subject because of the debasement of language by today's criminally negligent Fourth Estate in this country. They ape the word gargle of President Trump, who says, far too often, words like "Amazing," "Tremendous," "Great," "Incredible," "Fantastic." With each utterance of these words, he never uses the adjectives correctly. He may as well describe Vice President Pence's job performance as "Apricot," or "Cheddar," or "Telephone."
Life isn't always interesting, but from the perspective gained from the dead moments of a day, when slight winds move fallen leaves in unnoticed seconds, a profounder approach to expressing thoughts can crystallize, pointing to new ways of thinking, and maybe also of being.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
America's Long Psychotic Episode
The day after Senator John McCain died, CNN commentator Ana Navarro tweeted:
"You know guys, the idea of Aretha Franklin and John McCain hanging out together in the Freshman section of heaven, kinda makes me smile."
Replying to Navarro, Shari Gable wrote:
"Hey Ana do u think she will ask him why he voted against MLK Day several times? That would make me smile."
McCain voted against Martin Luther King Day several times because he was a political opportunist. He had no integrity. In 2000, when George W. Bush's campaign manager Karl Rove devised a tactic involving robocalls in the South Carolina Primary that claimed McCain had fathered an illegitimate Black child, McCain lost that Primary, his chances at becoming president not realizable again until 2008. He probably hated Rove and Bush, yet, in 2004 he campaigned for Bush--because he was a political opportunist with no integrity.
He imposed Governor Sarah Palin on the American people, introducing into political discourse the most irrational politician until Donald Trump. McCain, like Trump, was a master self-promoter. He wrote (or had written for him) books about being a maverick, about living fearlessly in an age of terror and uncertainty. He made frequent appearances on popular TV shows like Saturday Night Live, demonstrating his sense of humor, making him lovable to audiences (Mike Huckabee did the same). The Daily Show With Jon Stewart was a favorite talk show destination for McCain. The show's young audience ate him up. For a while he seemed like the perfect politician, appealing to a wide variety of people, Republican and Democrat.
In 2008 he beat out Mitt Romney for the Republican Nomination. When in full battle mode with the presidency at stake, he revealed himself to be the opportunistic asshole he always was in actuality. He no longer appeared on Jon Stewart's show after the comedian criticized one of his policies. His sense of humor about himself began to look thin. He cancelled an appearance on David Letterman's show in October 2008 to supposedly return to Washington to deal with the newly unfolding worldwide financial crisis. Letterman, on air, discovered that McCain was in the same building on a different floor doing an interview with someone else. Was McCain afraid to talk with David Letterman? Granted, Letterman on occasion would ask a politician a difficult question, but politicians that can't take that heat should just stay home and never get known in the public eye.
Now, the alleged maverick is dead. A maverick is a person of independent mind. When it came to making war on other countries that never attacked the United States, John McCain's mind matched the psychopathic collective brain of both Houses of Congress. He was always in favor of making war, of helping out the military industrial complex. Lockheed Martin, a war profiteering arms manufacturer making a bundle off of Middle East turmoil caused by the United States, released a sugary thank you to the memory of Senator McCain, who always had Lockheed Martin's interests at heart.
Since McCain's murderous viewpoints are equal to those of the mainstream media, to the Washington establishment, his practice of voting in favor of killing strangers in other countries isn't regarded as abnormal or part of a psychopathic syndrome of the powerful people running this nation.
Earlier this year, McCain voted against ending support for Saudi Arabia's genocidal war against the Yemeni people. He was a political opportunist. Saudi Arabia is America's "valuable" ally. We can't leave them in the lurch by stopping support for their horrific atrocities committed daily for the sake of gaining control of Yemen's natural resources.
On his deathbed, did McCain find out about the school bus filled with forty children in northern Yemen? How it was blasted to smithereens by a 1,000 pound Lockheed Martin bomb fired by Saudis? If McCain heard this, was he disturbed by the news? I doubt it. If he had what normal people would regard as the least speck of humanity he wouldn't have voted to support Saudi Arabia's depredations against Yemen.
Still, his body lies in state under the Capitol dome. His daughter Meghan McCain (co-host of The View) was caught on camera weeping heavily before the coffin containing the Vietnam War torture victim who became a maniac for war and every other Republican Party value that strips the poor and middle class of their basic necessities. News personnel, pundits, politicians tweeted over the top praise, including the one I started this essay with, imagining McCain hanging out with Aretha Franklin, a woman of great artistry who spoke out for civil rights and women's rights. I doubt that McCain hangs out in the "Freshman section of heaven" with anyone--I suspect he's in Hell.
Actually, I don't believe that either, but if he did make it to Heaven, he may have already encountered the dead children who were on the bus blown up by a missile made by a corporation McCain supported.
Adios, motherfucker.
Vic Neptune
The day after Senator John McCain died, CNN commentator Ana Navarro tweeted:
"You know guys, the idea of Aretha Franklin and John McCain hanging out together in the Freshman section of heaven, kinda makes me smile."
Replying to Navarro, Shari Gable wrote:
"Hey Ana do u think she will ask him why he voted against MLK Day several times? That would make me smile."
McCain voted against Martin Luther King Day several times because he was a political opportunist. He had no integrity. In 2000, when George W. Bush's campaign manager Karl Rove devised a tactic involving robocalls in the South Carolina Primary that claimed McCain had fathered an illegitimate Black child, McCain lost that Primary, his chances at becoming president not realizable again until 2008. He probably hated Rove and Bush, yet, in 2004 he campaigned for Bush--because he was a political opportunist with no integrity.
He imposed Governor Sarah Palin on the American people, introducing into political discourse the most irrational politician until Donald Trump. McCain, like Trump, was a master self-promoter. He wrote (or had written for him) books about being a maverick, about living fearlessly in an age of terror and uncertainty. He made frequent appearances on popular TV shows like Saturday Night Live, demonstrating his sense of humor, making him lovable to audiences (Mike Huckabee did the same). The Daily Show With Jon Stewart was a favorite talk show destination for McCain. The show's young audience ate him up. For a while he seemed like the perfect politician, appealing to a wide variety of people, Republican and Democrat.
In 2008 he beat out Mitt Romney for the Republican Nomination. When in full battle mode with the presidency at stake, he revealed himself to be the opportunistic asshole he always was in actuality. He no longer appeared on Jon Stewart's show after the comedian criticized one of his policies. His sense of humor about himself began to look thin. He cancelled an appearance on David Letterman's show in October 2008 to supposedly return to Washington to deal with the newly unfolding worldwide financial crisis. Letterman, on air, discovered that McCain was in the same building on a different floor doing an interview with someone else. Was McCain afraid to talk with David Letterman? Granted, Letterman on occasion would ask a politician a difficult question, but politicians that can't take that heat should just stay home and never get known in the public eye.
Now, the alleged maverick is dead. A maverick is a person of independent mind. When it came to making war on other countries that never attacked the United States, John McCain's mind matched the psychopathic collective brain of both Houses of Congress. He was always in favor of making war, of helping out the military industrial complex. Lockheed Martin, a war profiteering arms manufacturer making a bundle off of Middle East turmoil caused by the United States, released a sugary thank you to the memory of Senator McCain, who always had Lockheed Martin's interests at heart.
Since McCain's murderous viewpoints are equal to those of the mainstream media, to the Washington establishment, his practice of voting in favor of killing strangers in other countries isn't regarded as abnormal or part of a psychopathic syndrome of the powerful people running this nation.
Earlier this year, McCain voted against ending support for Saudi Arabia's genocidal war against the Yemeni people. He was a political opportunist. Saudi Arabia is America's "valuable" ally. We can't leave them in the lurch by stopping support for their horrific atrocities committed daily for the sake of gaining control of Yemen's natural resources.
On his deathbed, did McCain find out about the school bus filled with forty children in northern Yemen? How it was blasted to smithereens by a 1,000 pound Lockheed Martin bomb fired by Saudis? If McCain heard this, was he disturbed by the news? I doubt it. If he had what normal people would regard as the least speck of humanity he wouldn't have voted to support Saudi Arabia's depredations against Yemen.
Still, his body lies in state under the Capitol dome. His daughter Meghan McCain (co-host of The View) was caught on camera weeping heavily before the coffin containing the Vietnam War torture victim who became a maniac for war and every other Republican Party value that strips the poor and middle class of their basic necessities. News personnel, pundits, politicians tweeted over the top praise, including the one I started this essay with, imagining McCain hanging out with Aretha Franklin, a woman of great artistry who spoke out for civil rights and women's rights. I doubt that McCain hangs out in the "Freshman section of heaven" with anyone--I suspect he's in Hell.
Actually, I don't believe that either, but if he did make it to Heaven, he may have already encountered the dead children who were on the bus blown up by a missile made by a corporation McCain supported.
Adios, motherfucker.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
In 2100, Whoever's Left Will Curse Us
Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's former lawyer, pleaded guilty to eight criminal counts, including "tax fraud, false statements to a bank and campaign finance violations tied to his work for Trump, including payments Cohen made or helped orchestrate that were designed to silence women who claimed affairs with the then-candidate," according to CNN.
"Cohen admitted," CNN continues, "that 'in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office' he acted to keep information that would have been harmful to the candidate from becoming public."
Trump, not named in the court filing, is referred to as "Individual-1."
Donald Trump tweeted about Cohen and this new development. One of them, from today, reads:
"If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don't retain the services of Michael Cohen!"
By far the funniest thing Trump has ever written or said, the joke deserves to be judged on its own merits. It provoked instead a mass of snide counter-tweets, like:
"Next Trump will say, 'If anyone is looking for a good campaign manager, I would strongly suggest that you don't retain the services of Paul Manafort'" [A laughing-crying emoji follows here]
"I hear Michael Avenatti is pretty good."
"Good thing I found this Yelp review before I hired this Cohen guy to handle MY Russian collusion!"
Tommy Vietor, replying to @realDonaldTrump, wrote:
"This was funny."
Moises Cohen tweet-scolded Vietor:
"The sitting president has been implicated in two federal crimes and his first national statement is an attempt at a joke? How is this funny? Mr. Trump is not a victim here. He directed his lawyer to commit felonies. He's angling for sympathy."
Angling for sympathy, Moises Cohen? Maybe so, but it's a fucking hilarious tweet, delivered deadpan and dry. It's one of Trump's only admirable accomplishments. It brightened my day. I laughed hard when I read it. I don't disagree with your points about Trump and Michael Cohen, that the President "directed his lawyer to commit felonies," that this is a serious situation. Trump's tweet is hilarious nevertheless. It also illuminates his ability to persist in the face of extreme opposition. Look at how the news media have been spreading Trump's weird fault-filled life all over the twenty-four hour news cycle for three years now without doing him any harm.
Just recently, former White House employee, Omarosa Manigault, who got into the habit of secretly recording conversations with Trump and others in the Executive Branch, as well as some in Trump's family circle, brought out a tell-it-all book about her time working for "the most powerful man in the world."
She hinted without subtlety that she possesses audio of Trump using the "N-word." Much speculation on what this would do to his presidency if the American people were to hear Trump say that word ensued on cable news. Some judged that the result would be "devastating." Don Lemon of CNN, a Black man, said, correctly in my view, that if we hear Trump say the N-word it will have no meaningful effect whatsoever.
One of the most interesting of the released audio selections is a phone call between Lara Trump (wife of the President's son, Eric) and Omarosa Manigault, dealing with a job opportunity for the latter after she was fired by Chief of Staff John Kelly.
In the recording, Manigault, who is Black, is offered by Lara Trump the opportunity to join the Trump reelection effort. Lara Trump says the job will involve making a few trips to New York, but mostly it won't be heavy in the work category--I'm paraphrasing. Lara Trump says, "In the White House you were making 179, right? Well, we can offer you, let's see--"
Here, she's clearly punching numbers on a calculator. "We can give you 180." She goes on to mention that this money will come from small dollar donations. In other words, Trump supporters of modest means (ordinary people) sending in their small and earnest donations, not realizing that some of their money will pay for a purely symbolic job, to the amount of a hundred and eighty grand, offered to a disgruntled former White House employee to keep her from saying anything embarrassing about Donald Trump.
What screamed at me as I listened to this exchange was the spectacle of a rich White woman trying to buy a Black woman.
Omarosa Manigault, to her credit, refused the "job."
What will happen next in Executive Branch Reality Drama is anyone's guess. I'm not enamored with the Trump shitshow. His policies on the environment, on deregulation of polluting industries, on war, are all horrible and match the viewpoints of the Republican Party, as well as many among the Democrats. His tweets and grotesque personality are the least important elements of his impact on the world, yet these insignificant insipidities continue to obsess pseudo-journalists who have become as stupid and irresponsible as the man they're covering in a sensationalistic way just to boost ratings, thus making money for their corporate masters who actually appreciate Trump and what he does financially for them, while America goes down the toilet.
The son of a bitch made a funny observation. I take that for what it's worth, a good joke that shows that he's poking fun at himself since he's the one who trusted Michael Cohen in the first place, just as he trusted Manigault.
Who else is recording him without his knowledge? Are we supposed to get upset that the rich and powerful get surveilled sometimes without their awareness? I care about the privacy rights of the fuckers in the White House getting caught on audio unawares as much as I care that John Brennan lost his security clearance.
As Trump's life gets more pressured with legal shit, many in the news media speak of impeachment; of, as Rob Reiner put it today, "the President not making it to the end of his first term."
My logical question for Rob Reiner is, "Are you a Mike Pence supporter?"
I sure as fuck don't support Individual-2.
Vic Neptune
Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's former lawyer, pleaded guilty to eight criminal counts, including "tax fraud, false statements to a bank and campaign finance violations tied to his work for Trump, including payments Cohen made or helped orchestrate that were designed to silence women who claimed affairs with the then-candidate," according to CNN.
"Cohen admitted," CNN continues, "that 'in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office' he acted to keep information that would have been harmful to the candidate from becoming public."
Trump, not named in the court filing, is referred to as "Individual-1."
Donald Trump tweeted about Cohen and this new development. One of them, from today, reads:
"If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don't retain the services of Michael Cohen!"
By far the funniest thing Trump has ever written or said, the joke deserves to be judged on its own merits. It provoked instead a mass of snide counter-tweets, like:
"Next Trump will say, 'If anyone is looking for a good campaign manager, I would strongly suggest that you don't retain the services of Paul Manafort'" [A laughing-crying emoji follows here]
"I hear Michael Avenatti is pretty good."
"Good thing I found this Yelp review before I hired this Cohen guy to handle MY Russian collusion!"
Tommy Vietor, replying to @realDonaldTrump, wrote:
"This was funny."
Moises Cohen tweet-scolded Vietor:
"The sitting president has been implicated in two federal crimes and his first national statement is an attempt at a joke? How is this funny? Mr. Trump is not a victim here. He directed his lawyer to commit felonies. He's angling for sympathy."
Angling for sympathy, Moises Cohen? Maybe so, but it's a fucking hilarious tweet, delivered deadpan and dry. It's one of Trump's only admirable accomplishments. It brightened my day. I laughed hard when I read it. I don't disagree with your points about Trump and Michael Cohen, that the President "directed his lawyer to commit felonies," that this is a serious situation. Trump's tweet is hilarious nevertheless. It also illuminates his ability to persist in the face of extreme opposition. Look at how the news media have been spreading Trump's weird fault-filled life all over the twenty-four hour news cycle for three years now without doing him any harm.
Just recently, former White House employee, Omarosa Manigault, who got into the habit of secretly recording conversations with Trump and others in the Executive Branch, as well as some in Trump's family circle, brought out a tell-it-all book about her time working for "the most powerful man in the world."
She hinted without subtlety that she possesses audio of Trump using the "N-word." Much speculation on what this would do to his presidency if the American people were to hear Trump say that word ensued on cable news. Some judged that the result would be "devastating." Don Lemon of CNN, a Black man, said, correctly in my view, that if we hear Trump say the N-word it will have no meaningful effect whatsoever.
One of the most interesting of the released audio selections is a phone call between Lara Trump (wife of the President's son, Eric) and Omarosa Manigault, dealing with a job opportunity for the latter after she was fired by Chief of Staff John Kelly.
In the recording, Manigault, who is Black, is offered by Lara Trump the opportunity to join the Trump reelection effort. Lara Trump says the job will involve making a few trips to New York, but mostly it won't be heavy in the work category--I'm paraphrasing. Lara Trump says, "In the White House you were making 179, right? Well, we can offer you, let's see--"
Here, she's clearly punching numbers on a calculator. "We can give you 180." She goes on to mention that this money will come from small dollar donations. In other words, Trump supporters of modest means (ordinary people) sending in their small and earnest donations, not realizing that some of their money will pay for a purely symbolic job, to the amount of a hundred and eighty grand, offered to a disgruntled former White House employee to keep her from saying anything embarrassing about Donald Trump.
What screamed at me as I listened to this exchange was the spectacle of a rich White woman trying to buy a Black woman.
Omarosa Manigault, to her credit, refused the "job."
What will happen next in Executive Branch Reality Drama is anyone's guess. I'm not enamored with the Trump shitshow. His policies on the environment, on deregulation of polluting industries, on war, are all horrible and match the viewpoints of the Republican Party, as well as many among the Democrats. His tweets and grotesque personality are the least important elements of his impact on the world, yet these insignificant insipidities continue to obsess pseudo-journalists who have become as stupid and irresponsible as the man they're covering in a sensationalistic way just to boost ratings, thus making money for their corporate masters who actually appreciate Trump and what he does financially for them, while America goes down the toilet.
The son of a bitch made a funny observation. I take that for what it's worth, a good joke that shows that he's poking fun at himself since he's the one who trusted Michael Cohen in the first place, just as he trusted Manigault.
Who else is recording him without his knowledge? Are we supposed to get upset that the rich and powerful get surveilled sometimes without their awareness? I care about the privacy rights of the fuckers in the White House getting caught on audio unawares as much as I care that John Brennan lost his security clearance.
As Trump's life gets more pressured with legal shit, many in the news media speak of impeachment; of, as Rob Reiner put it today, "the President not making it to the end of his first term."
My logical question for Rob Reiner is, "Are you a Mike Pence supporter?"
I sure as fuck don't support Individual-2.
Vic Neptune
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