Apocalyptic Gossip
This morning on MSNBC anchorwoman Chris Jansing presented video of Vice President Pence in South Korea sitting one row in front of Kim Jong-Un's sister, Yo-jong, during the opening Olympic ceremonies.
I present an offering of headlines about this epic social non-exchange between two people connected closely to powerful motherfuckers armed with nuclear weapons:
New York Magazine: "Mike Pence Avoids Eye Contact with Kim Jong-Un's Sister..."
ABC News: "Kim Jong-Un's sister arrives to Olympics with much fanfare..."
CNN: "Pence, Kim Jong-Un's sister sat feet away from each other at Games..."
Yahoo!: "All swagger and smiles [accompanied by a photo of her not smiling], Kim Jong-Un's mysterious sister gets her star turn..."
USA Today: "Mike Pence doesn't speak with North Koreans, including Kim Jong-Un's sister..."
South China Morning Post: "Kim Jong-un's baby sister: the Ivanka Trump of North Korea."
The last one titillates with its implication that, in parallel fashion, Ivanka is Donald's daughter and sister, recalling Faye Dunaway in Chinatown proclaiming, "She's my daughter, she's my sister, she's my daughter, she's my sister..."
Chris Jansing on MSNBC claimed that Pence looked "uncomfortable." In fact, he looked like he always looks: serene, convinced he's going to Heaven, a bust made of human flesh. Unlike with his "protest" at an Indianapolis Colts game, when he and his Secret Service entourage left the stadium right after the National Anthem was performed, supposedly because he was offended by a few NFL players taking a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and Colin Kaepernick, Pence stuck this event out, his back to the menacing young woman sitting behind him.
Since Yo-jong for a time a few years ago ran North Korea when her brother was ill, she's Mike Pence's political equivalent, so it's appropriate they were seated near each other, and it would've been appropriate for Pence to shake her hand and (gasp!) have a conversation with her in order to try to find common ground. Why not? Reagan was willing to meet with Gorbachev. Kennedy met with Khrushchev.
Pence's "discomfort" was calculated, just as his phony protest of NFL players taking a knee during the National Anthem was figured out in advance. He and his boss, Trump, knew that some of the players would do it, but Pence, to prove a point, inconvenienced fans in the stadium with the usual overbearing security presence surrounding such "important" men, after having flown from California to Indiana to supposedly enjoy a football game he had no intention of watching in person, all of this costing taxpayers lots of money.
The degree to which government officials will waste citizens' money knows no bounds. If Pence truly was made uncomfortable by the nearby presence of Kim Jong-un's sister, then good. I hope he had a shitty time sitting there during the ceremonies, which always last quite a while. I saw footage of Pence at a U.S. airbase in Japan (didn't we beat them in a war 72 years ago? and we have military bases there still?) reassuring his well-hung military audience, flanked by warplanes, that "we'll honor our commitments and all options are on the table."
Why would nuclear annihilation be a problem in the mind of a righteous Christian like Pence?
Pence has a problem with women. His anti-abortion views are extreme even for a fundamentalist Christian fuck from Indiana. When Governor of Indiana he tried to make it a requirement that women pay for the cost of funerals for their aborted embryos and fetuses. A man who believes that is actually next in line to the Presidency, and there are many liberals, Democrats, and even some Republicans by now who would like to see Trump impeached and effectively kicked out of office so that "a competent leader" like Mike Pence can assume command. For the record, I am utterly opposed to a Pence Administration.
Pence, married once to the same woman since 1985, has an aversion to being alone with any woman other than his wife. From this, we can assume he's never had a one on one conversation with Melania Trump or Ivanka "the Yo-jong of America."
He wouldn't want to be in a room alone with Kim Jong-un's sister for political reasons, but also because she's a woman. Mike Pence apparently has the mentality, when it comes to women, of a thirteen year old. He evidently doesn't trust himself; he may, as Democratic Presidential Candidate Jimmy Carter in 1976 once controversially put it, "...[look] on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times."
What's gross about this story, from a truth telling perspective, is the interpretation by news people that Pence was "uncomfortable." It's an attempt to get us to sympathize with him, but how the fuck does anyone know what was in his mind? His bland sociopathic face looked exactly the same as it has every time I've seen it. If he shit in his underwear he'd have the same look as when he signed draconian anti-abortion legislation as Governor. He has the personality of a Soviet politician circa 1950, a functionary in high office doing the bidding of others behind the scenes. A steadier hand than Trump's for sure, which is why he must never become President.
Chris Jansing of MSNBC tried to humanize Pence, characterizing him as "uncomfortable" but in reality, I think it's more likely he regarded the experience of sitting just "feet" away from Kim Jong-un's sister as an exercise in patience, a showing to the world of American contempt for North Korea, a country run by insect people who will be smashed, eventually. Yo-jong is not only a high-ranking North Korean leader, she's a woman. By his policies, we should realize that Mike Pence hates women. The millions of women who will be killed in a potential war with North Korea mean nothing to Pence. It's irresponsible for a journalist to characterize, without evidence and using "body language"-based opinions, Pence's thought process. Maybe he was bored? The opening ceremonies of the Olympics comprise one long fucking parade.
Ironically, the South Korean leadership was willing to welcome and politely greet Yo-jong, just a few days after meeting with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, proving that the South Koreans are willing to do business and diplomacy with the two lunatic regimes most threatening to their own survival on Planet Earth.
The Vic Neptune Times: "Mike Pence's Nutsack Tingles In Presence of Kim Jong-un's Pretty Sister."
Vic Neptune
Friday, February 9, 2018
Thursday, February 1, 2018
The Wicked
Approximately half of Afghanistan and Iraq U.S. war veterans in need of mental health care aren't getting it due to Veterans Administration backlog and neglect by a government giving easy praise to military servicemen and -women while doing nothing to help them.
An average of twenty veterans kill themselves every day. An average of 7,300 veterans kill themselves each year. That tops by quite a margin the number of Americans killed in the 9/11 attacks and overwhelms the number of American military personnel killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in combat situations.
Is this an indication that the United States and its allies are winning the Global War on Terror? Is it rather glaring evidence that the United States leadership is killing its own military personnel?
I read an article two days ago in Consortium News about the Vietnam War-obsessed generals running the U.S. military now and advising Donald Trump. Most of them became officers after the end of the Vietnam War. Most of them believe it was possible to win in Southeast Asia. Some of them, like the sainted David Petraeus and Trump's national security adviser H.R. McMaster, have written books about what could have been done differently to win in Vietnam. It's like a man reevaluating his fucked up former marriage.
These generals are thrilled with a Trump whose willing to follow their advice. Dominating, killing, destroying buildings, strengthening an already cartoonish titanic military machine while claiming its in bad shape and needs more funding, the bigger the better way of thinking practiced by the current President, makes for high-ranking military men believing they can improve America's standing by "applying the lessons learned in Vietnam and other counterinsurgency theaters."
Remember when President Bush in 1989 launched Operation Just Cause? 23,000 American military personnel attacked Panama to arrest its leader, Manuel Noriega (a cocaine trafficker and important link in helping the Contras through purchase of military hardware with drug money, with Ronald Reagan's and George Bush's consent). It seems likely that Bush had an ulterior motive for attacking Panama. Noriega had to be silenced, he knew too much about the Latin American dirty wars funded and enabled by the CIA. Noriega himself had been a CIA asset--he knew George Bush, Director of the CIA in the mid-1970s. After killing about 4,000 Panamanian civilians and putting those made homeless in "temporary" but not so temporary camps in which large numbers of them were concentrated, making them concentration camps, Bush crowed, "Now we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!"
The humiliation of losing the unwinnable wars in Southeast Asia in which millions died, overwhelming greatly the number of Americans killed there, finally was, according to Bush, "kicked."
America felt hard and strong again. The Gulf War (also waged by Bush) further proved American strength and introduced embedding journalists with troops, a way to prevent them from writing critically about the military, since the journalists' lives depended on the soldiers and Marines around them.
In that war we got introduced to "smart" bombs and missiles, to supposedly clean kills involving multiple tons of explosives shot from A-10 Warthog killing machines. "Precision" bombs that "minimize collateral damage." These counterfactual ideas circulated into the American mindset, into journalists, politicians, and ordinary Americans not reminding themselves that bombs EXPLODE. People in the way of the explosions die and are wounded. Bombs and missiles destroy infrastructure required for a modern society to work properly, leading to disease, shortness of lifespans, no electricity, a broken land "saved" by construction contractors from the nation that did the destruction, hence, one major reason for bombing. The subsequent War on Terror has made the "collateral damage" apologists seem extremely stupid when they even bother to think about what bombs and missiles are. They say the same kind of thing when apologizing for criminal acts committed by a president, any president involved in prosecuting aggressive war (which the U.S. has been doing as readily as Nazi Germany and Napoleon did).
"Being President is a really hard job, they have to make tough choices."
Just think how stressful Hitler's job was. Stalin's. Mao's. Mussolini's. All of them eliminated people for specific reasons, and Trump, Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton, the other Bush, Reagan, also practice that. If killing children and women bothers them they don't reveal that emotion to us, even after they've retired. U.S. actions in the Middle East, the Iraq War for example, qualify as internationally recognized criminality. Making war on a nation (Iraq) that isn't a threat to the aggressor is against international law, it's in treaties signed by the United States. Everybody running every country in the world knows this. Everybody knows that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are war criminals with far greater body counts than some, like Slobodan Milosevic, who hanged himself in his cell before he met justice in the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
I want a President who doesn't believe that killing children is the best course of action. Someone who comes up with alternative solutions involving deescalation, true goodwill, compassionate assistance, atoning for the crimes committed by the United States since the end of World War Two. I know we don't have leaders or potential leaders with the wisdom to practice such a way. Instead, Trump says "Peace through strength," and news commentators don't even bother to point out the Orwellian nature of that slogan. Peace through strength means our version of peace in which other nations knuckle under to our might as we exploit controlled nations full of people fucked with by neo-Liberal policies as their countries' natural resources get exploited by foreign corporations.
Side note: Yesterday an Amtrak train carrying Republican lawmakers on their way to a "retreat" in West Virginia, to have policy meetings about how to further fuck the American people, collided with a garbage truck crossing the tracks at the exact wrong time. One in the truck was killed, two in the truck injured, injuries sustained on the train were minor, but one Congressman got wheeled away, conscious, on a stretcher. The ideal headline on this wasn't used on cable news, but I'll provide one:
GOP: Train Wreck
Vic Neptune
Approximately half of Afghanistan and Iraq U.S. war veterans in need of mental health care aren't getting it due to Veterans Administration backlog and neglect by a government giving easy praise to military servicemen and -women while doing nothing to help them.
An average of twenty veterans kill themselves every day. An average of 7,300 veterans kill themselves each year. That tops by quite a margin the number of Americans killed in the 9/11 attacks and overwhelms the number of American military personnel killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in combat situations.
Is this an indication that the United States and its allies are winning the Global War on Terror? Is it rather glaring evidence that the United States leadership is killing its own military personnel?
I read an article two days ago in Consortium News about the Vietnam War-obsessed generals running the U.S. military now and advising Donald Trump. Most of them became officers after the end of the Vietnam War. Most of them believe it was possible to win in Southeast Asia. Some of them, like the sainted David Petraeus and Trump's national security adviser H.R. McMaster, have written books about what could have been done differently to win in Vietnam. It's like a man reevaluating his fucked up former marriage.
These generals are thrilled with a Trump whose willing to follow their advice. Dominating, killing, destroying buildings, strengthening an already cartoonish titanic military machine while claiming its in bad shape and needs more funding, the bigger the better way of thinking practiced by the current President, makes for high-ranking military men believing they can improve America's standing by "applying the lessons learned in Vietnam and other counterinsurgency theaters."
Remember when President Bush in 1989 launched Operation Just Cause? 23,000 American military personnel attacked Panama to arrest its leader, Manuel Noriega (a cocaine trafficker and important link in helping the Contras through purchase of military hardware with drug money, with Ronald Reagan's and George Bush's consent). It seems likely that Bush had an ulterior motive for attacking Panama. Noriega had to be silenced, he knew too much about the Latin American dirty wars funded and enabled by the CIA. Noriega himself had been a CIA asset--he knew George Bush, Director of the CIA in the mid-1970s. After killing about 4,000 Panamanian civilians and putting those made homeless in "temporary" but not so temporary camps in which large numbers of them were concentrated, making them concentration camps, Bush crowed, "Now we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!"
The humiliation of losing the unwinnable wars in Southeast Asia in which millions died, overwhelming greatly the number of Americans killed there, finally was, according to Bush, "kicked."
America felt hard and strong again. The Gulf War (also waged by Bush) further proved American strength and introduced embedding journalists with troops, a way to prevent them from writing critically about the military, since the journalists' lives depended on the soldiers and Marines around them.
In that war we got introduced to "smart" bombs and missiles, to supposedly clean kills involving multiple tons of explosives shot from A-10 Warthog killing machines. "Precision" bombs that "minimize collateral damage." These counterfactual ideas circulated into the American mindset, into journalists, politicians, and ordinary Americans not reminding themselves that bombs EXPLODE. People in the way of the explosions die and are wounded. Bombs and missiles destroy infrastructure required for a modern society to work properly, leading to disease, shortness of lifespans, no electricity, a broken land "saved" by construction contractors from the nation that did the destruction, hence, one major reason for bombing. The subsequent War on Terror has made the "collateral damage" apologists seem extremely stupid when they even bother to think about what bombs and missiles are. They say the same kind of thing when apologizing for criminal acts committed by a president, any president involved in prosecuting aggressive war (which the U.S. has been doing as readily as Nazi Germany and Napoleon did).
"Being President is a really hard job, they have to make tough choices."
Just think how stressful Hitler's job was. Stalin's. Mao's. Mussolini's. All of them eliminated people for specific reasons, and Trump, Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton, the other Bush, Reagan, also practice that. If killing children and women bothers them they don't reveal that emotion to us, even after they've retired. U.S. actions in the Middle East, the Iraq War for example, qualify as internationally recognized criminality. Making war on a nation (Iraq) that isn't a threat to the aggressor is against international law, it's in treaties signed by the United States. Everybody running every country in the world knows this. Everybody knows that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are war criminals with far greater body counts than some, like Slobodan Milosevic, who hanged himself in his cell before he met justice in the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
I want a President who doesn't believe that killing children is the best course of action. Someone who comes up with alternative solutions involving deescalation, true goodwill, compassionate assistance, atoning for the crimes committed by the United States since the end of World War Two. I know we don't have leaders or potential leaders with the wisdom to practice such a way. Instead, Trump says "Peace through strength," and news commentators don't even bother to point out the Orwellian nature of that slogan. Peace through strength means our version of peace in which other nations knuckle under to our might as we exploit controlled nations full of people fucked with by neo-Liberal policies as their countries' natural resources get exploited by foreign corporations.
Side note: Yesterday an Amtrak train carrying Republican lawmakers on their way to a "retreat" in West Virginia, to have policy meetings about how to further fuck the American people, collided with a garbage truck crossing the tracks at the exact wrong time. One in the truck was killed, two in the truck injured, injuries sustained on the train were minor, but one Congressman got wheeled away, conscious, on a stretcher. The ideal headline on this wasn't used on cable news, but I'll provide one:
GOP: Train Wreck
Vic Neptune
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