Donald and Melania Trump Reference a Savior

     Days after the election, sentiment was, Biden's going to help us sleep at night.  We won't need to hear about angry presidential tweeting at three a.m.  That's so annoying to have to go through, especially so since it's our choice to go through it or not.

     Barack Obama weighed in, in conjunction with touring and interviewing to promote his non-mea culpa book, reflecting on how nice it will be to have "stability in the Oval Office."

     The stability, he means, of signing off on people's deaths, on his kill list.

     Trump represents one group of killers.  Biden represents another group of killers.  Our condition has not improved, it's deteriorating under the brain dead leadership of a wealthy class bent on destroying the country and the world, and us, while enriching itself beyond the daydreams of Kubla Khan.  They seem blinded by their power.

     I watched Donald and Melania, still America's First Couple, entitled to lead the dancers, give a Christmas message, about two minutes long.  Donald looked uncomfortable, like he wanted this little thing done, but he was willing to put up with it for her sake.

     "She's going to be the most beautiful First Lady this country's ever seen," remember Trump said in 2016.  

     Trump says he'll veto the 900 billion dollar Covid relief bill unless they raise the stimulus checks from 600 to 2,000 dollars.  Biden, it turns out, negotiated with Mitch McConnell and other Republicans to drop the initial offering of 1,200 dollars to 600.  Biden prefers Republicans to Democrats, his history shows that clearly.  

     Trump out-lefted Biden and the rest of the Democrats by suggesting 2,000 dollars.

     People think Biden will be a good president.  Let that sink in.  Think about how brainwashed and ignorant of Joe Biden's corporation-run career one must be to believe Biden will be a good president.

     "Give him the benefit of the doubt."

     My father said that at the beginning of George W. Bush's presidency.  At the end of his life he was crying that Bush won reelection.

     No, Dad, don't give this proven motherfucker of humanity from a disgusting white collar crime family, the Bushes, the benefit of the doubt, ever.

     Same for Biden.

     It must be obvious to lots of people now that Joe Biden and the Democrats want them to have 600 dollars while Trump wants them to have 2,000.

     "He's just buying our loyalty for his run in 2024 (a possibility, perhaps)," some may argue.

     Maybe so, but do I care about the motives of a man giving me 2,000 dollars?  Most people don't.  Money talks.

     I do care that the other guy, Joe "I'm the guy" Biden, wants us to have less than one-third of what Trump's proposing.  It hints at the coming Austerity Joe of the Early Twenties.  The political philosophy precisely the opposite of what we need to survive.  The economy will begin to thrive if people get money from the government.  Andrew Yang's Universal Basic Income (UBI) has never been more relevant than now, during a pandemic in a country where citizens do not have free health care.  Covid-19 death rate in the U.S. correspondingly and logically the highest in the world, making this nation, the "greatest in the world," a third or fourth world country when it comes to institutional neglect of its own citizens.

     As a matter of policy.

     Joe Biden as a sleeping aid may work for liberal, upper class work-from-home sorts, but most of us will have to deal with a leader growing more and more senile, more prone to angry outbursts, guiding the military while advised by psychopathic Pentagon warmongers with defense contracts and appointments after retirement.  

     Are we tired, yet, of militarism?  Does it do anything for you?  Does it really just steal money from the neediest?  Steal it so that bombs can dismember and vaporize children?

     Mark Esper looks like a college basketball coach.  He used to be a Raytheon man and while he was Trump's Secretary of Defense he probably still was a Raytheon man.  Esper makes money off of killing people.  He's a hit man, although hit men work on one target at a time.  Esper's hits blow up schoolchildren.  Raytheon and Lockheed Martin have killed more schoolchildren than the Newtown, Connecticut shooter.

     Top executives toast each other, weapons manufacturers, contracts with the United Arab Emirates, CIA accesses torture prisons in east Yemen run by UAE.

     The secret is, it's not a secret.  Lack of coverage on a "story," meaning, an event, an incident, an ongoing situation (like 9/11 or the Balloon Boy), dooms the story from being known generally.  News organizations like CBS or Fox don't do hour-long documentaries about what it's like to live in Gaza City.  What it's like to have phosphorus land on your neighbor's head during an Israeli attack.  How Covid-19 has spread through Gaza.  

     Presenting Biden's multi-racial and bi-gendered cabinet picks as "revolutionary" sugarcoats our expectations that we expect the next to be Hispanic, Black, a woman, an Asian, but they're all from Wall Street, the Military Industrial Complex, Silicon Valley; they're Neoliberals, they're Neoconservatives.  They're the kinds of people who sold the Iraq War to Americans.  They're corporate hogs, our exact enemy.  Trump, a visible face of evil, but now the evil's invisible, it's force field is called

C I V I L I T Y

     

     The great trick is, and let's hand it to the Boomer generation, they managed to make millions of people believe the ruling class of America isn't the enemy of America.

     Merry Christmas.

         Vic Neptune

     

     

     

Sham

      Professional wrestling, with its good guys and bad guys, struck me as illogical as a child.  I had a friend, Sam, who attended matches with his parents.  He showed me wrestling magazines, pointed out bloody faces, hair pulling, metal chairs bonking the heads of good guy wrestlers.  He believed in it; I was skeptical.

     How could one side always lose?  Why did referees allow flagrant rules violations?  Why did referees allow themselves sometimes to be hit, and then they didn't stop the contest?  

     I didn't realize it then, but pro wrestling is a show designed to be the way it is.  Like American politics.

     In the case of the 2020 election the "good guy" Biden has defeated the "bad guy" Trump.  Trump and Biden represent the same interests: Wall Street, Big Pharma, the health insurance industry, the military industrial complex, arms dealers, war profiteers, the wealthy and those even wealthier.  On these points there is no difference between the two candidates.

     I watched a nineteen minute long contentious debate on a Progressive YouTube channel. The subject was who to vote for: Biden or Trump, and who will be more damaging?  I came away from it thinking, "It's like they're trying to determine if a man who murders 100 people is better or worse than a man who murders 101 people."

     Except that, for both of these men, the numbers of those killed by them directly and indirectly is in the hundreds of thousands.

     Since the Biden presidency hasn't yet happened, we don't know if he'll be "better" than Trump or not.  Biden has already inflicted damage on millions of African American lives; he supported and vehemently argued in favor of the Iraq War (meaning he's the moral equivalent of Dick Cheney, a Republican whom Biden admits he likes).  Biden's evil acts are long established; expecting him to change into a good person, not a con man pretending sincerity, is shameful behavior in any rational human being.

     At what point do we say no to these choices?  The brutal and greedy Republican or the corrupt backstabbing Democrat committed to enriching the ruling class further while snuffing out hope?

     Right now, while I don't feel well (could be allergies), I know that if I get Covid-19 in America, my government will do nothing to help me.  A man from another country on Instagram posted a black and white handsome photo of Joe Biden, writing underneath, "Congratulations America! Welcome back to the world!"

     I took it to mean he's happy for us and the world that Trump has been defeated (in spite of what Trump claims).  I commented to him: "The triumph of neoliberalism."

     It doesn't take much time to find out about the character and deeds of a politician.  Since I practice that, I get exasperated with those who are ignorant of the diabolical nature of many of our leaders.  I've been told just in the last two weeks by family and friends they're enthusiastic about Kamala Harris.  They know nothing of Harris's corruption, her commitment to the practice of institutional racism, her persecution of African Americans, her hollow personality revealing a treacherous nature willing to accept donations for policies (Medicare for All for example) which she later disavowed, having taken advantage of citizens who believed in her.

     How can anyone support such noxious behavior?

     Trump, too, is noxious, but his opponents are just as bad.

     The wrestling ring contains only bad guys.

Vic Neptune

The Election Decision

     I've paid little attention to the U.S. election these past few days.  Liar One versus Liar Two.  Rich Man One versus Rich Man Two.  War Pig One versus War Pig Two.  In the One spot I place Joe Biden, because he's been in the business of screwing America for forty-three years while Donald Trump has been doing same for three.  Both men lack compassion, both pretend they care about "the little guy," both have cultivated public images detached from the real crimes against humanity they've both committed.

     We Americans are expected to vote for one or the other.  I voted for neither.  I chose to not vote.  I know this decision of mine will seem irresponsible to some, especially family and maybe a few friends.  How could I not participate in offering my voice to the great democratic tradition of voting for presidential candidates chosen by powerful and wealthy men and women having no concern for the needs of the masses during a pandemic, a looming eviction apocalypse, and Great Depression-style unemployment figures?

     How could I not offer my voice to support either the incumbent's incompetence, or the challenger's settled evil that's been growing since he sold his soul as an ambitious 1970s politician?

     Evil?  Yes, and Trump, too.

     How else should we explain both candidates' firm commitment to health insurance industry executives and stockholders over the will of hundreds of millions suffering through a global plague and all of its connected chaos--our will (supported by polls) to say "Yes!" to Medicare for All, necessary now more than ever before.  Biden and Trump, our two contestants, both reject that policy, meaning they lack interest in saving millions of lives over time; meaning, they're fucking evil.

     I had planned to write in Jesse Ventura, former Governor of Minnesota, former pro wrestler; in fact, a sensible man imbued with honesty and caring for his fellow human beings (he's for Medicare for All, for one thing).  The morning of the election I had to go to work.  I could've gotten up earlier and walked half a block to my polling place, waited in line, but I didn't.  At the time, I didn't know why.  I had planned to vote, but a calmness came over me.  I knew there were state and local races to also vote for, but I couldn't go to the polling place.  

     For the first time in many months of this uncertain, testing year, I felt peace in regard to the political process, in its spectacle, a show I don't believe in.  We are lied to every day.  No one in their right minds would want Joe Biden or Donald Trump to be President.  Neither of them offer anything to ordinary people.  Either of them will provide a gross bunch of unneeded aid to the wealthiest pricks in America. We need Trump and Biden like a lung cancer patient needs to smoke Marlboros.

     Still, the spectacle's entertaining.  I watched a YouTube video analyzing the election results.  As of this writing the outcome hasn't been determined.  I offer the following headline:

          ASSHOLE WINS PRESIDENCY

     Works either way.

     We need to stop admiring the white collar criminals who are killing us.

Vic Neptune

Lady and the Trump

    Barron Trump, fourteen year old son of Donald and Melania Trump, has Covid-19.  Donald, asked about it on the way to his helicopter, said breezily, "He's doing fine."  He switched topics in a hot second to the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Barrett.  "Amy's doing a great job," adding, "Barron's doing fine, Amy's doing fine."

     Son infected with a deadly disease, the father, naturally, flies to Iowa for a political rally, wouldn't you?  In such a circumstance I would stay near my son (safely, of course), but I'm not a father nor am I a responsible world leader with problems to deal with bigger than the health of one teenaged boy who happens to be the only person my wife cares about.

     Unlike the President's bold optimism about his own Covid-19 experience, First Lady Melania Trump wrote (or had written by someone) an essay relating her own rough time with the disease.  She said it hit her all at once; fever, chills, an overall slam bang level of crappiness we don't hear about, usually, from any politician or politician's spouse.  One gets the impression she actually thoughtfully endured this, that it made her reflect on human suffering.  I will not judge her unfavorably in this respect, especially since she made note of the high quality care she and her family have gotten, recognizing the privilege of receiving such medical assistance while most don't have it.  Her husband, by contrast, acts as if his medical treatment for Covid-19 just sort of happened, that apart from his numerous doctors doing "an excellent job," there's no difference between what he experienced and what any MAGA hat-wearing Covid patient might experience.  

     Melania Trump, too, is a mother dealing with her child who's afflicted with a disease.  Mothers understand this state of mind.  

     What's striking about the First Couple's different public responses to their individual bouts with the pandemic is how one person, the woman, the mother of a child now afflicted with the virus, offers the most human and candid confession, while her husband acts like he had a great time while he was sick.  

     Donald Trump's obvious breathing difficulties (visible on video during his Mussolini-like balcony appearance the night he returned to the White House from the hospital) belie the President's version of the truth: he no more enjoyed or easily got through not being able to breathe properly than anyone would.

     At a rally, he asked the audience if any of them had gotten Covid.  Some yelled out, indicating yes.  Trump smiled knowingly, adding they don't have to worry, they won't get it again (a debatable statement since it's not known for sure as of this writing if that's true or not).  

     Trump projects surface confidence about the virus but I suspect that the moment it was decided to transport him to the hospital he felt like shit, maybe even thought he was going to die.  Melania Trump, at least, is honest about how she felt, how it gave her some bad hours and days.  In her written account, she offers no sunny viewpoint about Coronavirus.  Now that her young son has it, she's terrified and anxious, I expect, and with an unsupportive husband in denial about the lethality and debilitating nature of Covid-19.

2020 has been a booming year for coffin sellers in the United States.

     Trump's companion in evil, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, has resisted making a stimulus deal with the President, thus denying an additional giving out of (probably) $1,200 checks to Americans hurting evermore in an economy wrecked by Washington's and Wall Street's crushingly destructive response to the pandemic.  

     Pelosi's rationale for not accepting Trump's and the Republicans' 1.8 trillion dollar proposal is she doesn't want to give the President a victory, even a minor one, before the election on November 3.  The idea is to get Biden in there so that a stimulus can supposedly happen after Inauguration Day, January 20, 2021, three months from now, with thousands more Coronavirus cases and deaths and evictions.  Homelessness in California, Pelosi's state, has risen to record highs, but her $25,000 refrigerator is stocked with expensive ice cream.  She's Marie Antoinette in the form of a harridan willing to let the country burn economically, even as her state has burned.

     Trump, Pelosi, McConnell, both Houses of Congress, have screwed the American people harder than the American people have ever been screwed.  Still, we're expected to vote for some of these fuckers.  It's a privilege to vote in this alleged democracy, or so we're often reminded.  In Saddam Hussein's Iraq voter participation was total.  The ballot was shown to the voter, the poll worker watched as the voter marked on the only possibility.

     "I'm a Saddam man!"

     Choice: you, the voter, can support Saddam Hussein, or you can go to a stifling prison and maybe never come out.

     Our system is still better than the former Iraq's (a country, I point out, supported wholeheartedly and materially--included with chemical and biological weapons--by the Reagan administration), but the corruption infecting both Democratic and Republican Parties in the U.S. consists of the same thing: too much money, too much influence by corporate interests.  

     These parties of Pelosi and Trump are helping plutocrats destroy us.  It is pointless and stupid to continue to support this system by voting for these parties, but we'll continue to do it, as we go down the drain, stomped on and mutilated by psychopaths like Trump, who can't even bring himself to say one word of concern about his sick child, and Joe Biden, who vows to veto Medicare For All if or when he's President, and during a pandemic.

     

Vic Neptune

      

     

       

     

Money Makes Bad Men Seem Good

      What if the news mediascape, so replete with falsities and failures to explore the depths of truth, is effectively fiction, a combination of facts, imperfect interpretations, and disinformation?  Fiction not in the form of novels, short stories, films, but a type twisted to serve oligarchs and paid lackeys seeking to deceive us into believing in enemies who are not our enemies, while they are the worst of our enemies?

     Early twentieth century masters of propaganda (advertising) passed on techniques developed by governments (fascist, democratic, communist), perfected over decades by intelligence agencies and military-industrial complexes of many nations, to the point of fiction dominating our news (i.e. "reality") intake.  

     I do not refer to Trump's "fake news."  To some, the current President sounds dependable as a truth-teller when he shouts down some report, accusation, poll, or editorial slant as "fake news," but, as with the ease of saying "fake news," anyone can receive a quick lesson on how to operate a fire extinguisher and then put out a fire set by a fireman training a group of novices, while firefighting skills require time, effort, and risk to acquire.  Saying "fake news" about a large portion (the political content) of the vast information universe generated by humanity, convinces millions of people to be skeptical, but Trump doesn't say that most of the news is based on imaginative interpretations driven often by motivations pushed forward by profit-making interests for the amassing of power--and the powerful are the greatest liars.

     Five years ago I first saw Michael Cohen, former Vice President of the Trump Organization and former personal counsel to Donald Trump, interviewed on MSNBC.  All I remember from that broadcast is Cohen's unwavering insistence on his boss's integrity, competence, and worthiness to be President.  He seemed like a well-paid but fanatical devotee of a billionaire businessman who, in my view, couldn't possibly really be such an exemplar of integrity and goodwill.  

     Since I didn't believe Cohen's verbal sketch of Donald Trump, I remained unconvinced but convinced I wouldn't vote for the Republican (who had been a Democrat) in November 2016.  I was, however, impressed by Michael Cohen's ability to make his case.  Any objection to Trump's words or actions coming from the MSNBC host were flattened by Cohen, a steamroller relentlessly undeterred from relating his case: that Donald Trump is a great man, he will defeat Hillary Clinton, he will be a great President.

     Only a few years later Michael Cohen, faced with a prison sentence for tax evasion among other offenses, told "the truth" about his former boss to Congress during the time of the Robert Mueller investigation into Trump's alleged collaboration with Russians to steal the 2016 election--a long fiction believed in by numerous Democrats and a huge complement of the news media.

     Cohen, among other things, predicted then that there wouldn't be a peaceful transition to power if Trump would lose the 2020 election.  He later wrote a book, out this year, called Disloyal: A Memoir The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump.

     After the book was published, Cohen's daughter, Samantha, age twenty-four, was interviewed by Vanity Fair.  CNN also took an interest in her story since she knew the Trump family.  The first time she met Donald Trump she was fifteen.  Seeing her from a distance, Trump said to Michael Cohen, "Look at that piece of ass!"  Cohen said, "That's my daughter."  

     A normal person would apologize, of course, but when he was introduced to Samantha he asked for a kiss on the cheek and said in a few years he'd be dating her friends.  Nonsensical talk, perhaps, nothing Trump actually intended to carry out, but why the fuck was he saying this to a fifteen year old girl?  Why the fuck, too, was he saying this in the presence of her father?  

     Samantha Cohen, who, in the CNN interview from last month, comes across as a sane and sympathetic figure, said her father would spend ten hours a day with Trump.  He would be browbeaten by him.  Her father reported feeling bad witnessing Donald Trump, Sr., often belittling Donald Trump, Jr.  Samantha says her father was a different person away from his job, treating his children and wife with care and compassion.  He was, however, run ragged by Trump, sometimes kept from family gatherings, on call at all times, even during vacations.  

     This account of hers didn't enlighten me on something I've long known: Donald Trump, past and present, is a piece of shit.

     Michael Cohen, though he participated in many questionable activities (as a party, for instance, to the Stormy Daniels hush money payment, which led him to lie about her husband's adultery to Melania Trump), also comes across, from his daughter's (granted, biased) words, as a sympathetic figure, due mainly to his public mea culpa.  From him we've gotten a Trump administration member who's actually admitted wrongdoing and regret for his bad professional choices.  Other former administration members, like the Defense Secretary, General Mattis, have revealed their own Trump stories in written accounts, but without admitting their own guilt (as a warmonger and war profiteer in his case).

     Samantha Cohen spoke of First Daughter Ivanka Trump, the President's favorite, as an "icy cold" woman who ignored her, looked past her when they'd be in the same space.  By contrast, Samantha's friendship with Tiffany Trump (they attended college together) was strong until Trump's presidency, when the younger of his two daughters made nice with her father after years of estrangement.  Samantha, convincingly, says that Tiffany's friends in college and in California, where she grew up, were Black, gay, Latino.  Samantha and Tiffany, both of them Millennials, interacted with a variety of people without judgment, but now, Samantha says, Tiffany just pretends to believe the Trump administration's rhetoric, going along to get along.

     Throughout the interview, Samantha Cohen comes across as a genuine person.  I can't say the same for Ivanka Trump.

     Points of view add up in spite of their individualities to what Philip K. Dick referred to as koinos kosmos, the shared reality, that which we agree upon, as in 2 + 2 = 4, an equation even Trump would find difficult to declare as fake math.

     Could it be a determination of the heart, of feeling and emotions, which leads us to recognize one story as truth, another as fake?  I believe Samantha Cohen, in that ten minute interview at least.  When she was a child her father worked strenuously for a rich businessman who now drops bombs on people in Asia.

     The news is packaged.  The truth isn't; it grows through the seams.  Not even skilled propaganda pushers like CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, The New York Times, Donald Trump, or the Joe Biden Campaign, can steamroll the minds of everyone, even though their jobs of distributing bullshit compensate them with the millions of dollars denied ordinary everyday truth tellers.  

Vic Neptune

     

           

     

     

     

Kamala!!! Mike!!! A Voting Housefly!!!

      I didn't intend to watch it but a friend texted me, spoke of her enthusiasm to check out the debate between Senator Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence.  My friend noted, "I DO find her entertaining."

     Since politicians aren't giving Americans anything after having screwed us all year, they might as well be a source of amusement.  The debate gave us that in the form of a six-legged animal landing on Mike Pence's white hair and staying there for a few minutes.  He talked without knowing there was a fly on his head; no one told him about it.  The fly may have been wondering why the strange snow white surface wasn't cold.  Pence himself is a cold man.  He shows most animation when he's lying.

     About the fly, my friend texted, "The fly was sitting on shit and is my hero."

     Still, Pence held himself together throughout the debate, while Harris shifted a lot, spoke much too expressively with her hands and arms, didn't have much to offer when talking about justice, an area of expertise on which she should have a good grasp.

     Not naming him but mentioning the specific amount of time to the number of seconds George Floyd was asphyxiated on camera by someone she backhandedly referred to as a "bad cop," Kamala Harris, former San Francisco D.A. who was in the habit of not prosecuting "bad" cops, called for the Minneapolis murdering cop, Derek Chauvin, to be prosecuted.  It's not likely she would have done so had the same thing happened in San Francisco a dozen years ago.  Like Amy Klobuchar, former D.A. of Hennepin County (where Floyd was murdered), Harris let cops get away with criminality; it's the way things are done in America--a Biden presidency isn't going to change it.

     She spoke of the Biden ticket's commitment to banning choke holds by police, but that won't take away the military gear granted to them by Biden and Obama; cops will still treat the citizenry in times of protest as adversaries rather than people with legitimate beefs against a system of governance that's screwing them in the ass while enriching tycoons.

     Kamala Harris's credibility problem runs deep.  She pretends to care about ordinary people, playing often on the "little girl from Oakland" story.  Her autobiography's book cover shows a picture of little Kamala with a pout on her face, looking at the camera.  A cute picture marred by the fact that this kid will grow up to persecute African-Americans, punish people for smoking pot, ally herself with Wall Street interests, support the decades-long occupation of Afghanistan with all of its killing and exploitation, support Israel's execrable activities against Palestinians, will rise in the ranks of a corrupt political party lacking any semblance to a well-functioning organization offering decent policies to ordinary people.

     She seeks Mike Pence's job.  She knows what Mike Pence is, a functionary of the state, someone who goes along to get along (like Kamala).  She knows Mike Pence compromised his soul decades ago, for she did the same.  

     I shouldn't be amazed, but I am amazed at how some people can look at Pence and Harris, Trump and Biden, and believe in them.  Pence with his white hair, resembling a bust of some general, perhaps, who ran the occupation of Nicaragua in the 1930s.  Expressionless, heart operating usually at thirty beats per minute.  Cracked ideas about religion, a lapsed Catholic but retaining the guilt and sense of Original Sin.  Trump, a Christian fraud lacking any real knowledge of the Bible or its teachings, especially the more humane ones.  Joe Biden, frail, not really all that religious as far as I can tell.  He doesn't, at least, make a noise about it.  He is, though, destined to lose his shit in office, if elected.  Like Ronald Reagan during his last year or two in office, Biden is soon headed for a land of mental fog guaranteed to be covered up by the news media as thoroughly as Franklin Roosevelt's time spent in a wheelchair.  

     A Washington Post article, "Joe Biden's campaign, summed up in one simple gesture," written by their fashion editor, Robin Givhan, exemplifies the willful blindness of mainstream news media journalists and pundits regarding the former Vice President.  On October 5, 2020, the same day Trump checked himself out of the hospital, having conquered Covid-19 (if you're one of those who believe that kind of shit), Joe Biden answered reporters' questions on the tarmac of the Wilmington, Delaware, airport before boarding his plane for Miami.

     I watched the video accompanying the article.  Biden stands about three or four feet from the front rank of reporters.  They're all masked.  Background jet engine noise makes everyone talk loudly.  I really think that politicians use machine noise to obscure language, to make the process of understanding painful.  Trump's press conferences usually happen with his helicopter's turboshaft engines idling in the background.  This creates a sense of tension as information is supposedly conveyed, but it just sounds like the Hieronymous Bosch factory Trump would secretly like to put everyone in.  Have you ever had a meaningful conversation with someone in an environment of machine noise?

     Anyway, the jet engine noise, according to Pulitzer Prize winner Robin Givhan (she did win the Pulitzer in 2006, but she won't win another for writing this shit article), caused Biden to get a bit too close (in this Covid-19 era) to the reporters.  In dashes Dr. Jill Biden, intrepid wife (and nurse?) of the Democratic nominee.  She performs "the gesture" of Givhan's article title by saying "Move back," and

pulling him back from the reporters to a more acceptable social distance.  

     Robin Givhan:

     "Biden apologized for his spatial indiscretion and then carried on with his thoughts about the importance of following the science in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

     'An entire campaign was summed up in that simple gesture--and by Biden's response to it."

     Givhan makes a big deal out of Biden saying "I'm sorry," noting that Trump is incapable of uttering these words.  I'll grant her that.  Trump's never saying sorry practice is a long-practiced philosophy of asshole pig capitalist businessmen who rise to the top by climbing over even their family members.  That most journalists have ever expected Trump to behave like a normal human being just goes to show they're often shitty at their jobs, not very perceptive, and maybe not bright, either.

     When Biden says, "I'm sorry," it's obvious he's addressing the apology to his wife, i.e. his handler, the one who keeps the closest eye on the fact that he's not all there.

     Biden didn't notice he wasn't socially distanced from the reporters.  For me, when I'm out in public, this is an awareness popping off in my head automatically.  For an old man losing his shit, it's a lapse we should also expect from someone who, in pre-Covid days, often got into women's and girls' spaces, sniffing or playing with their hair.  Biden's a touchy-feely guy.  

     Robin Givhan concedes that "Jill Biden proved she's a fierce guardian of her husband--able to keep a watchful eye on him while he conducts retail politics...she's doing her best to body-block a virus.  There was visceral emotion and power in her tugging on his arms."

     If you watch that minute-long video, I'd be surprised if you would interpret Dr. Jill Biden's actions in the same way.  "...doing her best to body-block a virus."  Take note, writers; this is how you write when you're going for a Pulitzer Prize.

     I'm done making predictions.  I don't know who's going to win, but it won't be the American people.  Just a week ago I predicted Trump would win, based on his cash cow status with the Democratic establishment and corporate news media.  Fundraising off of Trump and the consequent making of great ratings have made "the Donald" a golden egg-laying politician for people like Nancy Pelosi and CNN's top man Jeff Zucker.  Trump was selected President, by those who actually run the country, in 2016 for this purpose.  I can't prove it, but it's damned convenient for the wealthiest people in America to have an ugly and grotesque leader acting as a scapegoat distracting ordinary Americans away from the fact that Trump is just one of many rich scoundrels driving this country into a deep hole, on purpose, for the last forty years; a bipartisan screwing of the poor and middle class.

     That the fly in the room chose to land on Mike Pence's head instead of Kamala's doesn't mean she isn't also a spiritually empty, deceitful sack of shit.

Vic Neptune

     

     

     

     

In Defense of the Actress Tara Reid

      Tara Reid, the actress, has had a wild up and down life, over-covered in tabloids.  Her initial success in the popular teen sex comedy, American Pie (1999), later gave way to her being more famous for receiving reportedly "bad" plastic surgery on her belly and breasts.  She drank alcohol to excess, leading to a successful rehabilitation in 2008 at the age of thirty-three, but then she didn't work for three years.

     During her drinking days, she partied hard in the U.S. and overseas, had a relationship with MTV journalist Carson Daly.  She later got into the habit of making up relationships, generating wedding announcements that proved to be false.  A fucked-up kook, a has been, the kind that Hollywood personality gossips laugh at and dismiss over their salads during power lunches.  

     Tara Reid, though, made an unexpected career choice by embracing absurdity: she became the female lead in the six film Sharknado series (2013-2018) on the Syfy Network.  As the films progress, her character loses one body part after another to vicious sharks caught up in whirlwinds until she's essentially a robot, but one with enhanced technological powers, including the ability to fly.

     In this character, we see someone overcoming limitations to face challenges, extreme as they are.  Tara Reid isn't a robot but her earlier long struggle as a Hollywood star, including with addiction and dealing with harsh tabloid scrutiny focused excessively on her image, something actresses more than actors face as they must satisfy the industry's physical standards in order to achieve success, has found some vindication in a ridiculous film series collecting, thus far, four billion dollars in profits.

     Tara Reid, in these six films, is increasingly funny, her character performing ever more miraculous feats.  Making viewers laugh in a world so beset with tragedies and losing battles amounts to a valuable gift, something like what all artists have done throughout human history and prehistory: the making of art, in whatever medium, for the edification of others.  

     Tara Reid's fabulist constructions about having boyfriends and fiancés who denied having relationships with her could be regarded as mental meanderings, a sick mind crying for help.  Maybe so.  Imaginary boyfriends or girlfriends, though, can be found in many people as we fantasize in idle moments, but an actress in the spotlight could also amuse herself by fucking with entertainment reporters, the same people speculating earlier in her life about Tara Reid's "botched" boob job after someone photographed her breast inside a revealing dress at P Diddy's birthday party.

     This "nip slip" along with reports of her "party girl" behavior surrounded Tara Reid's life during the 2000s, a contrast to the more respectful way she was regarded as a promising newcomer at the time of American Pie.  

     For some prudish and, ironically, prurient reason, entertainment and mainstream news media reporters exhibit a fascination for the fact that young unattached women enjoy going to parties, they like to dance, they might just express interest in young men at these engagements.  Tara Reid, in her twenties, partied and drank, hung out with Paris Hilton, probably had some sex--like what a lot of college students and other young professionals and working class people do in their twenties.  Why is this news?

     Years later, Tara Reid made up stories about men to whom she was supposedly engaged.  Were these her attempts to get into the spotlight after a fallow period when Hollywood didn't want to hire her?  I don't know, but I see her playing games with the same entertainment news medium that published the "nip slip" pictures and writing about "the worst boob job ever," body shaming her, in other words, on the worldwide stage.  How would you, or anyone, handle that?

     Be who you are, Tara Reid.  I think you're all right.

Vic Neptune     

        

Catch Us Now We're Falling

      Some theorize that Trump is trying to lose the election in November.  Others suggest he, or rather his team, will steal the election.  Or, most ominously, civil unrest or a terror attack, or some other disaster, will cause Trump to suspend the election until order can be restored.  

     I don't necessarily believe in any of these scenarios.  I've heard people express a fear that Trump will go for a third term in 2024.  I've countered this with, "He'll have to get the Constitution changed to do that.  Do you know how hard it is to change the Constitution?"

     Trump wanting to shrug off the presidency makes some sense.  The job isn't what he expected, I suspect.  He's been thwarted by many of his own employees, such as when economic advisor Gary Cohn swiped an important document about North Korea from his desk.  One of Trump's National Security Advisors, John Bolton, tried strenuously to get his boss to attack Iran militarily.  Trump fired him, finally.  It's likely that Bolton acted as a spy for Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, although Trump often seems willing to be guided by war hawks.  With the cooperation of a Democrat-controlled Congress, Trump has been able to expand the military budget to the point where the United States could conquer a few extra planets, or, at least, destroy them.

     Both Democratic and Republican Conventions this summer were characterized by a Covid-19 caused social distancing virtuality, the speakers blasting their mostly horrific militaristic and super-patriotic views to cameras, without audiences of more than a few people.  Senator Kamala Harris, destined perhaps to be the country's first female leader, should a President Joe Biden get committed to a nursing home while in office, spoke to a large room with single delegates representing each state and a few territories.  A red, white, and blue motif decorated a stage most appropriate for the mass gaze of a very large crowd.  Instead, it looked like a rehearsal.  She gave it her all as the phoniness so characteristic of her personality tumbled from her mouth.  She's close to Hillary Clinton, so her genuineness as a human being with a soul is suspect.  Wall Street, at least, likes her, and the capitalist locusts running this country like Biden, too.

     A hacked election will be blamed on the wrong actors.  Israel has more to do, by far, with American politics than does Russia or China.  Saudi Arabia, too, has a great deal to do with the Trump administration.  Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, is close friends with Mohammad bin Sultan, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, mass murderer of the Yemeni people, sponsor of jihadis including ISIS.  His sponsorship of ISIS mirrors America's help of that outfit, and Qatar's, and Turkey's.  Americans I know don't care about this information, or it's just too unthinkable.  It's like finding out that the OSS smuggled Nazis out of Europe, that Nazis went to work for the CIA (which succeeded the OSS), for what became NASA, and leading right wing paramilitary groups in Latin America.  America likes Nazis.  America likes those Israelis, too, who act like Nazis.  

     George W. Bush, who acted like a Nazi by invading Afghanistan and Iraq and presiding over a torture program, is well-liked now in the mainstream news media.  Ellen Degeneres calls Bush her friend; so does Michelle Obama.  Ellen and Michelle like men who act like Nazis.  No condemnation, Ellen and Michelle, just admit it.  Truth and reconciliation, like what the South Africans did.  

     This sick fuck society admires mass murderers who make aggressive war against nations not our enemies.

     I'm not worried, yet, that Trump will suspend the election, but I expect the election will be tampered with, mostly by Americans, but also foreigners (Israelis especially).  The 2000 election was fucked with by Republicans.  The Iowa Caucus of 2020 was fucked with by Democrats.  The Democratic Primary of 2020 was fucked with by Barack Obama, demonstrating he will kill any Progressive possibilities in favor of the monied interests he sold his soul to before he even became president.  You don't have to be White to act like a Nazi.

     I saw a minute or two of Kamala Harris interviewing Barack Obama via Skype, or whichever remote communications medium.  She giggled as she talked about Joe Biden's love for ice cream.  Later, Obama mentioned how Joe loves his aviator sunglasses.  "He looks really good in those."

     I like ice cream, my great-grandniece likes ice cream, who the fuck doesn't like ice cream?  Is this what the former "leader of the free world" is really talking about with, potentially, the next Vice President?  Yes!  Joe Biden loves ice cream!  And he looks good in those aviator sunglasses!  It's his trademark, like Peter Fonda's stars and stripes helmet in Easy Rider.

     California's on fire you fucking millionaire assholes!  

     My assessment of Trump and Biden, including their injustice-loving running mates, leads me to feel concerned strongly that the winner will achieve that goal through cheating of some kind.  That's the age we live in.  Criminals run the government and the electoral process.  Both sides, representing Trump and Biden, are bereft of goodwill towards the American people and the world's peoples.  We don't matter to them.  

     You ever wonder what kind of ice cream Josef Stalin liked?

     Me neither.

Vic Neptune

     

The Stairway Just Leads Down

      The Second Amendment contains the term "a well-regulated militia."  In Kenosha, Wisconsin, August 25, a so-called militia of White dudes carrying semi-automatic rifles entered the city to "protect property" with the tacit as well as overt support of that community's police department.

     Multiple iPhone videos shot by citizens from different angles at different times reveal cooperation and coordination between cops and "militia" members.  Protests occurred in direct response to the outrageous shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black citizen who had just broken up a fight between family members.  As he tried to enter his car where his children waited he was tased, and then a cop shot him in the back seven times, paralyzing him below the waist in a country where Medicare For All is opposed by the current President and Joe Biden. 

     Someone, the would-be killer cop, perhaps, yelled, "He's got a knife!" before the shots came.  With his back to the cop, Jacob Blake was in no position, even if he had a knife, to represent an equal threat to a well-armed trigger happy policeman.

     If the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis wasn't bad enough for comfortable onlooking Americans, is Jacob Blake's devastating wounding by an irresponsible shithead cop lacking self-control an indication there's a serious race relations problem in America?

     Is it enough that Kenosha cops allowed and encouraged a "militia," hardly a "well-regulated one," to take on policing in a city where they don't even live?  The seventeen year old dumbass with a gun who did the murdering and maiming on August 25, Kyle Rittenhouse, drove from his home in Antioch, Illinois, to Kenosha, a trip of just over twenty miles.  He carried an "AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle" he's not allowed to possess, being a minor, so right there the Kenosha Police Department could've arrested him on that alone.

     Rittenhouse, though, was part of a group of armed men given free rein by a criminally irresponsible police department, criminal from the top down given the magnitude of its folding to vigilante justice.  Recall Charlottesville, Virginia, 2017, when protester Heather Heyer was run down in a vehicular homicide by a White supremacist.  Trump received appropriate criticism for saying, "There were good people on both sides," implying that the Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville were among the "good people."  A less examined part of the Charlottesville incidents that summer was the behavior of that city's police department.  They stood back behind barricades and allowed much of the violence to happen.  In Kenosha, according to a "militia" member disenchanted with Tuesday night's fiasco, cops enabled the pseudo-militia by telling them they would push protestors back towards the unofficial armed group, the very same group the cops are seen giving water to and thanking for their presence before the shit hit the fan.

     Rittenhouse, showing up several times in videos before and after his "heroic" act of "protecting property," did his killing and maiming in the street, shooting one man in the head, blowing another man's arm off, and shooting another in the chest (this man died later on).

     Amazingly, this isn't the worst part.

     After he finished his killing, Rittenhouse can be seen on a video talking on his phone.  He says, "I just killed somebody."

     Other videos then show him walking to a line of policemen, arms raised, gun barrel pointing downward, seemingly surrendering, but the cops yell at him not to approach.  It's as if they don't want to be associated with him now.  He vanishes behind a police line and it was found that he returned that night to his home in Antioch, Illinois.  As he approached the cops, bystanders yelled, "He just killed someone!"  This elicited no positive, as in lawful, police action.  Had a Black man armed with a semi-automatic rifle approached a line of cops would he have been met with a fusillade of bullets?

     We're supposed to believe the Kenosha cops on the scene were unaware that shots had been fired and that the man with the rifle walking towards them wasn't someone to at least question, but they didn't even do that.  They allowed a minor with a deadly weapon used to murder and maim three people to go free into the Wisconsin and Illinois nights.  I don't know what pressure may have been applied to this wretched police force to investigate these homicides, to locate the perpetrator, but I suspect, given the chumminess of the cops with the so-called militia, they knew Rittenhouse's name and whereabouts, for the coordination between Kenosha Police and the "militia" men seems to have been a move towards handling protestors in a punishing manner, much as the Charlottesville cops did in 2017 by allowing Neo-Nazis to bash in the heads of official enemies, i.e. Americans who want justice for all.

     This horrible shit happened during the Republican National Convention, an event I haven't watched due to my desire to not throw objects at my television set.  Like with the Democratic National Convention I did see some clips, including a one-eyed Congressman standing on the deck of a warship.  In my mind's eye I simultaneously saw a recently viewed photo of a Somali mother with her young son as they're forced to live in a refugee camp near Mogadishu, their lives uprooted by U.S. drone strikes.  

     Vice President Pence spoke, demonstrating how a devout Christian can be a dark sack of nothing while pretending to care about the unborn, even as he supports Israel's self-alleged right to defend itself against rock-throwing Palestinians by using U.S.-made fighter jets and their formidable weapons platforms.

     Our Republican and Democratic leaders have nothing for us.  They are like garbage stinking up your homes.  Don't vote.

Vic Neptune  

     

When Life Gets Overwhelming Even the "Great," Obsess Over Nonsense

      There were hints in the news media, from President Trump himself, too, that a significant presidential pardon of someone was coming soon.  In a news conference, Trump suggested the name Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower, forced into exile by an Obama administration enraged at the government employee for revealing the secret that American citizens are constitutionally violated by a government that's oath-bound to protect the Constitution.

     Trump, in his vague way, said Snowden has his defenders and detractors.  There's something significant to what the whistleblower did but also there are those who think he's a bad guy.  Trump appeared uncertain as to the truth but seemed willing to consider the veracity of either possibility.  If he were to read three or four good articles about this case he would perhaps have a better understanding, but, like George W. Bush, he doesn't know shit.

     Whatever the matter, he, like Obama, Bush, and Clinton before him in the era of telecommunications espionage by the NSA against the American people, is also guilty of violating his Constitutional oath and should resign on that basis alone.  Bill, George, and Barack, though, didn't resign either, so the ugly precedent is set.

     For a few days, speculation in news media revolved around the seemingly impossible idea that Donald Trump would actually pardon the mischievous Edward Snowden, living in exile in Moscow, in a country continuously vilified especially by Democrats and so-called Left news media.  The Russiagate cash cow continues to provide fuel for those power elites (including those in the news racket, like Rachel Maddow) on even this low information subject of "Who will Trump pardon?"

     Susan Rice, until very recently a top contender to be Biden's vice presidential running mate, tweeted her dismay about Trump maybe pardoning Snowden:

     "I.  Just.  Can't.  Congratulations GOP.  This is who you are now."

     To Susan Rice, Obama's National Security Advisor and later U.N. Ambassador, one of the architects of Libya's and Syria's destruction, supporter of terror groups in those nations, an all around terrific gal, the idea of Edward Snowden receiving a pardon makes her as sick as she makes me.  For Rice, the Republicans have become a party willing to consider forgiveness of a man, Snowden, who revealed the complete and utter shittiness of the federal government as it spies on its own citizens without probable cause, a violation of the Fourth Amendment.  I don't suggest the Republicans as a whole believe this, but Rice has no problem grouping them all together into one turd pile.  Because they so faithfully support Trump, the GOP must therefore be in favor of allowing Snowden the right to return home, unmolested.  Most of Trump's policies, though, are also supported by the majority of Democratic politicians in Washington, so they too, using Rice's logic, are Snowden-lovers, but of course they aren't, and neither is Trump, as he proved when he revealed the real subject of his pardon:

     Susan B. Anthony.  Yes, the lady on the hardly ever used dollar coin.  

     From ABC News: "Anthony was charged with voting illegally--as a woman--in the 1872 presidential election in her hometown of Rochester, New York.  She was ultimately tried by an all male jury--which the judge directed to find her guilty--and fined her $100, which she refused to pay...Anthony did not believe she had committed a crime by simply voting...

     "'This was brought up a week ago, and I was so surprised it was never done before,' Trump said of a pardon for Anthony Tuesday at a White House event commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment.  'What took so long?'"

     Could Neil Simon at the height of his comedic powers (let's say with The Odd Couple) have come up with a funnier moment?

     America spirals into a black hole, a pandemic kills citizens in the tens of thousands, changing habits, destroying businesses, a government unwilling to put its constituents above the craven interests of its financial masters, billionaires making tens of billions, Wall Street galloping proudly as the country dies, an election cycle narrowing to the most repulsive candidates imaginable--a repeat of 2016--lies and lies and lies abounding, a compromised news media, a war that never ends fueled by weapons manufacturers who literally make money from killing children, and amidst all of this we're supposed to give a shit about a "crime" committed by Susan B. Anthony in 1872?  

     Historians have said pardoning Anthony sends the wrong message because she rightly believed she had done nothing wrong by voting.  Arguably, she committed some form of voter fraud, an issue Republicans, including Trump, believe is worse, somehow, (bearing in mind its infrequency) than the real American practice of regularly disenfranchising Black and Latino voters, something done by both major parties for their own ends.

     "What took so long?"

     How come nobody noticed this injustice?  It took Donald Trump to right a wrong that's been gnawing away at our democracy since the Ulysses S. Grant administration!  

     Meanwhile, Democrats, and some Republicans, have been entertaining America with the worst TV show since 2011, the first year Jerry Lewis no longer hosted the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon.  I haven't watched the Democratic Convention, although I've seen excerpts of the virtual program.  Without audiences, the pre-taped addresses come across as stiff and pointless.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was given sixty seconds to make her case for Bernie Sanders, an utterly insignificant move given that Sanders is all in for Biden, the "friend" he betrayed his Progressive movement for.  John Kasich, an anti-abortion Republican whose virtue, I guess, is that he opposes Trump, was given more time than Ocasio-Cortez, a real indication that the Democratic National Committee would rather a right winger have a bigger platform than a Progressive, albeit one who's given in to Nancy Pelosi for the sake of her career.

     The second night was launched by Chuck Schumer standing at night with a background view of the Statue of Liberty.  Did he mention that famous monument?  Oh yes he did.  Had he stood in front of the New York Stock Exchange while he mouthed his platitudes I could at least respect his honesty as to where his power and influence comes from.  

     Michelle Obama, bestselling author, millionaire, wife of a man who murdered Yemeni children, scolded viewers when she said, "Now is not the time to play games with this election, to vote for a candidate who has no chance of winning."

     This is voter shaming before the fact and, well, fuck you Michelle Obama.

     By saying these words she didn't rule out the choice of voting for Trump and Pence, for they have an increasing chance of beating Biden and Harris.  In some polls, Trump has gained ten points on Biden in just one month.  This can only be due, not to Trump's criminally irresponsible handling of the pandemic, but to his brain dead opponent and his vile running mate, Kamala Harris.  The Biden team offer nothing to the American people: no Medicare for All, no forgiveness of student debt, no forgiveness of medical debt, no UBI, no legalization of marijuana, inadequate commitment to fighting climate change, no end to the endless war.  Biden's virtue of not being Trump seems like a childish reason to vote for him and for that matter, Trump isn't Biden.

     In the past few years I've sometimes thought, "Trump is President but at least Hillary Clinton isn't."  If Biden wins, I expect I'll think, "Biden is President but Trump at least isn't."  That will be no comfort, though, for Biden and Harris represent corruption, dirty dealing, dishonesty, a commitment to furthering injustice, war-making, and incompetence as real leaders during a time when a real leader could perhaps steer this country away from a possibly unstoppable doom.

     I may be wrong but Tulsi Gabbard might be that real leader.  Someday.

     Meanwhile, rejoice in the pardoning of a dead woman.  I'm sure your life will change because of it.

     Next, President Trump will pardon Jesus Christ.

Vic Neptune  

     

     

     

Do Black Lives Matter To Democrats? With the Harris Pick, Evidently Not

I'm dealing with Blogger's new format for the first time.  Already I've cursed a bunch of times.  I won't go into how I've been thwarted in trying to do simple things I used to be able to do in the previous version.  Suffice it to say the assholes who chose to mess up a good thing, albeit turning it into something usable once learned properly, have no problem wasting users' time by creating a new format to replace something that worked fine before.  This practice can only be the work of busybodies and their obnoxious masters, dedicated to making the simple more difficult, like when a cop says, "Vehicle," instead of "Car," or "Truck."  The second two words have one syllable each and furthermore describe accurately the "vehicles" involved.  A vehicle could be a tank, a semi, an MG sports car.  

     What all this has to do with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden is unknown to me.  I first became aware of then-Attorney General of California Harris when MSNBC's primetime host Lawrence O'Donnell touted her as a great pick for the U.S. Senate.  By that time, Harris had already locked up poor African American parents of truant children.  I guess Harris would've found it absurd to lock up the kids' grandparents too, so that means her judgment shouldn't be entirely suspect.  

     I saw a clip of Harris relating how she went after poor parents of truant children, terrorizing them with the prospect of jail time.  She laughs and smiles beautifully, MSNBC's and California's liberals idea of an enlightened well-educated person of color destined for great things.  On a radio show in February 2019 she boasted, while laughing, of having smoked pot in college.  As San Francisco's District Attorney she convicted over 1,900 people for marijuana possession.  Only after she left that job were their cases dropped by her more humane successor.

     Barack Obama smoked pot, Al Gore smoked pot, Bill Clinton smoked pot, George W. Bush smoked pot.  

     Biden-Harris 2020 thrills those who have it made, money-wise.  Hillary Clinton, close to Harris, sounded like Bernie Sanders in her congratulatory tweet.  Sanders offered the fiction that Kamala Harris has been good on the health care front.  The Vermont Senator's capitulation to Biden in the Democratic Primary proved him to be a creature of the Democratic Establishment, something independent journalist Chris Hedges wrote about in 2016, saying that Sanders' giving-in to Hillary Clinton that year and campaigning for someone mostly opposed to his views was a harbinger of what he would do in 2020.  His desire to avoid being ostracized like Ralph Nader, who supposedly cost Gore the 2000 election (he didn't) has stymied Bernie Sanders' presidential ambitions.  His crumpling under the pressure of a Democratic machine that's already proven it doesn't give a fuck about him or Progressives (and the Harris pick is a big fuck you to that movement) shows me, anyway, that Bernie Sanders would've made a terrible President, giving in on a regular basis to Republicans and Democrats.

     I saw an ad for Biden showing him outside his house, I guess, on a safe tree-lined lane with a green early 1960's Corvette, a beautiful "vehicle" for sure.  He claims at the end that Corvette is planning on an electric version by 2030 that will "go two-hundred miles an hour."  Corvette right away denied this.  Simple mistake, or maybe a fantasy on Biden's part as he believes the products of his fading mind more than he believes in the reality of his fading country.

     He zooms on the well-protected little road.  Secret Service standing near their cars watch him pass.  He sits in the convertible's driver's seat, saying, "I love how this is set-up," apparently letting us know it's convenient the makers of this car supplied it with a steering wheel, a shifter, a speedometer, and other devices one associates with a dashboard.  Biden doesn't smoke, but there's even a cigarette lighter.  

     The purpose of this ad, I guess, is to show a still vigorous leader, "in the driver's seat."  The common saying, "It's time to take Grandpa's car keys away," is not meant to apply here.  Ironically, if elected President, Biden will never drive again.  He doesn't drive now, in the sense of how most people drive--on streets, on freeways, on back roads where at least some traffic passes.  I recall reading a few years ago that Hillary Clinton last drove a car in 1991.  In other words, by now she's a terrible driver.  And old.

     Maybe it's time to have people who drive their own cars and trucks serving as politicians.

     The Democratic Convention is nigh, to be held in Milwaukee.  Face masks, social distancing, protests outside we can hope.  That ordinary Americans are okay with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden as alternatives to Trump-Pence is debatable.  Four repulsive human beings, all of whom have done their shares turning America into a "shithole country," to quote Trump's assessment of nations like El Salvador, do a repeat of 2016, when four repulsive human beings, Trump, Pence, Clinton, and Tim Kaine (a right wing Democrat who wasn't even pro-choice on abortion) offered their nation, as now, nothing to hope for.  

     The thing about a bottomless pit?  There's no end to it.  Not until people stop voting for politicians, Democratic and Republican alike, who are actively destroying our country.

                                                                                   Vic Neptune

         

      

     Works Fine Then They Change It

     Has the human meat brain caught up yet to the speed at which computers operate?  No, and never will, perhaps.  Nevertheless, Silicon Valley keyboard people and programmers periodically update methods on programs like iMovie, Pages, and now, Blogger.  All I can see is a different look.  White and black with two very thin red lines, symbols instead of words when conveying directions.  

     Irritating me, these programmers have substituted the clear statement, New Post, for an orange circle with a plus sign inside it occupying the lower right screen corner.  Being far down it's not noticeable.  New Post, inside a rectangle, was placed at the top, was immediately perceivable, unambiguous, a good example of an effective SIGN.  The new sign could represent crosshairs, Jesus, a place to put the business end of a Philips head screwdriver, or a big positive thumbs up from Tim Cook, successor to the equally weird but more human Steve Jobs.  Cook isn't from Google, but he's a rich man lacking a concept of ordinary reality, like the people running Google.

     Why change the New Post sign?  It worked, there was no point in changing it.  As someone says in one of my movies (to be seen on YouTube Channel John Berner), "There's always nerds messing with shit."

     This beef of mine now derives from spending ten minutes searching for the New Post sign in the unnecessarily redesigned Blogger.  When I wrote the post before this one, I had another ten minutes of New Post sign-searching until I asked Google how to find it.  This sent me to regular people asking questions of regular people on how to find the thing in question.  The answers helped, but again, I'm flummoxed by the modern age's desire to make things less clear, to trust the advice of non-experts.  I wasted twenty minutes and another twenty minutes writing about it, but it gave me something to write about--a peeve, though not the pet kind because every pet I've had I've loved.  I don't love Google and their practices, or Tim Cook and his lack of human relatability.  I don't love the practice of messing with things that work fine.

     With computer systems operating much of what happens in contemporary cars, imagine a motor company sending out flyers stating, "Introducing the NEW Ford Sideways Driving Feature."  They remotely program all Fords to drive sideways, some cars slip into lane-gobbling sideways-driving without the driver's doing anything to make that happen.  Glitches, 110 deaths, 5,327 accidents in a four day period, Congressional hearings with politicians on the receiving side of auto industry donations.  The Day the Cars Rotated, a nightmarish film, with video game following, makes a big splash when it eventually reaches freshly reopened movie theaters in 2026.  

     What's the point of being able to rotate your car so it's the width of a large truck's load?  What's the point of eliminating the words, New Post, which makes sense, in favor of a circle with a plus sign, which doesn't make sense, except as the command, "Add."  Add what?  Maybe I'm too dumb to operate a computer?  Maybe I shouldn't judge nerds messing with shit just because they're getting paid to screw up perfectly operating platforms that people enjoy using.  They always proclaim they're "simplifying" when they do this shit.  "Easy to use!"  The former Blogger was easy to use, you assholes!

     The new one's also easy, once I get used to it, before they change it again, but the doorkeeper requires a specific password: a plus sign inside an orange circle.  

     But Vic, your lack of education in semiotics prevents you from making the lightning-quick connection: plus sign means add post.  It's not your fault you concentrated on music and history in college, finished up with religious studies and English.  Not a single thing in there can be applied to modern practices, except music, and you studied bass trombone and piano!  You didn't even plan on joining a jazz combo!  Why those instruments?  You thought you'd someday be a classical pianist performing with symphony orchestras internationally?  Don't you remember how you stumbled through that Mendelssohn piece, lost your rhythmic counting on it, fingered wrong notes, while three piano teachers judged your abilities at the end of the semester?  An utter failure!  Horrible performance!  Epic!

     You didn't study computers, you nitwit, like Anonymous Google Employee Showing Up For Work Wearing Sandals.  Assigned to the team designing the new Blogger, Anonymous Google Employee Showing Up For Work Wearing Sandals might be a prankster, finding ways to obfuscate, getting a private chuckle out of people who have trouble finding his orange Easter egg hiding in plain sight.

     It's all a money-making operation.  Make things unnecessarily obsolete.  The spending of money comes from that.  Consumers of Big Macs are also consumers of technology.  We are the Borg.

     Do VCRs still work?  Yes, that medium has nothing wrong with it, although the picture doesn't match quality of Blu-ray.  When my simple DVD player malfunctions fatally I'll obtain a Blu-ray player, but will it last as long as the eleven years of excellent performance I got from a 1986 Zenith VCR?  

     The human mind, sucking in technological methods, force-fed them by the likes of Tim Cook among others, can slow down, use what's available for a while--how about two years on my laptop before it becomes one with the dinosaurs, can I have that, at least?

     It's partly about the selling of lithium ion batteries encased in technological wonders.  It's partly about why the United States Foreign Policy apparatus overthrew the Evo Morales government in Bolivia, a nation rich in lithium.

     Don't mess with Apple!

     Kamala Chameleon

     Senator Kamala Harris, after dropping out of the Democratic Primary, positioned herself to appear to be a criminal justice reformer.  Federal legalization of marijuana, holy shit!  This from someone opposed to that until recently, someone who smoked pot in the past but didn't have a moral problem with people behind bars for doing the same, meaning she's a fucking hypocrite.  

     Police reform, ending for-profit prisons, she sounds like a Lefty.  Joe Biden, teasing us until early August before making his running mate pick, may select Harris, whose background as Attorney General of California and as a District Attorney before then looks like the record of an ambitious Fury, willing to sacrifice the earned freedom of inmates so they could fight forest fires for minimal pay, among other terrible orders.

     A cold-hearted piece of shit, but with "rebranding," Kamala Harris emerges as a fighter for justice.  She and another failed candidate for President, Cory Booker, seek to come across to voters as balancers of the criminal justice equation.  Police officers committing egregious crimes are not dealt with properly and that needs to change.  Really, Kamala?  

     You mean that when you murder someone in broad daylight, with cops standing nearby watching you do it, and citizens videographing the incident, you'd think the murderer, a cop, would be stopped from killing, arrested, prosecuted, incarcerated if found guilty, but in Minneapolis it took a while for Derek Chauvin, the murderer, to be arrested and charged and even longer for the three cops with him to also be arrested for allowing the killing.  Sounds like the system is weighted in favor of cops, but you know that, Kamala, you've always overlooked their transgressions, until you began to smell the 

Vice Presidency.

     George Floyd's torture-murder by a cop is the kind of egregious violent act Kamala Harris objects to, I guess.  I can't get into her mind, don't want to, really (I don't like the smell of sulfur), but she's positioning herself as a woman with ideas, big ideas about criminal justice reform, of bringing healing to the nation, Hallelujah.

     President Biden, in his second year in office, will demonstrate so clearly his senility during a press conference turned viral, that calls for his resignation resound strongest among Democrats wishing to see a woman, a Black one at that, sitting in the big chair in the funny-shaped room, a former top cop of California in charge of a country so reeking of police state potential as seen in 2020.

     We're like Germans waiting for a strong authority figure, order must be restored; now, a Kamala, someone who fucked over the lives of Black people in California, thinking about her oppression of others only when Tulsi Gabbard recited some of her record during a debate.  

     Hey, it's your record, future Madame President.  Be proud of your accomplishments that led you to hold such a high position in a state with the world's fifth largest economy.

     Be proud that you wouldn't let people out who had done their time so they could risk their lives fighting forest fires in a state using prison labor instead of actual firefighters.  I'm sure someone who's never fought a forest fire is better at it than a professional.    

     Since the Democrats gave us Biden to put up against Trump, time for a competent woman, a Black woman, to emerge as an attractive vote magnet, someone who will restore decency and civility to the White House, to the job of President.  Will she continue Trump's Afghanistan bombing program?  Will she do business with Saudi Arabia, help them murder Yemenis?  Will she help Israel stomp on Palestinians?  Will she continue murderous economic sanctions against Venezuela?  Yes to all, I suspect.

     She'll be normal, in other words.  A typical American politician, someone whose actions and words get people killed.

     I first heard of her on The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, a Hollywood man with his own show on MSNBC, married to a Hollywood actress, one of the people behind the political Democratic fantasy TV show, The West Wing.  O'Donnell was excited about Harris's Senate campaign.  She's going places, doing things, Kamala Harris is a rising star.  The kind of person who eats dinners with people willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for salad and some kind of meat or tofu, no reporters allowed.         

     George Clooney, a Hillary Clinton supporter in the 2016 campaign, said that a candidate doesn't get influenced by the people at these fundraisers.  Yeah, George, you pay $50,000 to meet Hillary Clinton, you get to talk to her, you can pass along whatever info you want, whatever it is you're backing, whatever makes you rich, you know a billionaire who's looking for a candidate who will promote oil drilling off the coast of Virginia, and Hillary Clinton, or Kamala, or anybody, isn't swayed by that money.  Fuck off, George Clooney.

     Can an oppressor be rebranded as a caring individual?  Kamala Harris thinks so, and she's right.  In this climate of police violence, of so-called law and order enforcers violating citizens' civil rights every day, on camera and not giving a shit if they're seen destroying the Constitution, it could be seen as the solution to put in charge of the country, after Biden fades away, a woman who has the right look for identity politics, a background in justice, and injustice; someone in fact lacking the capacity to do right by others unless she can personally gain from that (a narcissist).  Given then a position of great power, corrupted further by that, a terrible great queen of horror and death.  

     Yes, with Kamala Harris I believe that's likely, if she reaches that position.  Joe Biden may pick someone else.  At the last debate, one on one with feckless Senator Sanders, the one where they did the elbow bump, smiling and looking hip for youth, Biden declared he'd pick a woman for his running mate.  Sanders wasn't so sure when asked the same stupid question, prompting #MeToo fraud and Biden supporter Alyssa Milano to tweet, "Huh?"

     Bernie said the wrong thing, should've answered, "A woman, yes, but who, and with what ideas?"

     Personality cults in American politics are inevitable given the long history in this country of fetishizing movie stars.  Americans have experienced emotions looking at screens for over a century.  Politicians, though most of them lack the beauty and handsomeness of film and TV celebrities, nevertheless command respect merely by being seen.

     "Oh, I saw him on television!"

     Thus, Trump's power, his immense visibility.  Kamala's, too, and she also happens to be one of the best-looking politicians.  That was one of Sarah Palin's advantages.  Those glasses, that pretty hair, the firecracker personality, her spotlighted brood with Addams Family-like names: Track, Trig, Bristol, Willow, Piper.  I felt sorry for those kids, not Track as much because he was an adult by 2008; but I feel sorry for all children whose privacy gets sacrificed by a parent willing to be financed by millionaires and billionaires, the last of the contender's soul lost in that process, bought by selfish destroyers with tons of money seeking to add another battery to their power walls.  

     Kamala, Joe, Donald, Michael Pence, all lost their souls a long time ago, not giving a shit about that because power, as a soulless person named Henry Kissinger said, "is the ultimate aphrodisiac."

Vic Neptune

     

   

          

     

    

     A Life Well Lived

     Today it occurred to me that my current age, fifty-six years and ten days, is the same as the lifespan of Adolf Hitler, who died ten days after his fifty-sixth birthday.  Given that Hitler was a prematurely aged man during his final years; that he was addicted to a smorgasbord of drugs; that Parkinson's disease increased his daily misery; that he suffered from wish fulfillment fantasies of some incredible reversal of Germany's hopeless military fortunes--I'm doing well by comparison.
     He'd married Eva Braun the day before their suicides, deaths from murder, or however it happened.  In any case, I'm in better shape physically, mentally, psychologically, I'm less likely doomed to go to Hell.
     I don't believe in Hell, the kind of thing seen in Bosch's paintings with the bird-headed Devil eating the damned, shitting them out through a hole in the seat of his throne.  I don't know if Hitler traveled, or travels, through the Devil's guts as punishment--I don't even know if he, or anyone else, deserves that as a forever recurring punishment for execrable and harmful earthly behavior.  One of my religious studies teachers said, "It could be that even Hitler has been forgiven [through divine grace, I guess]."
     As a peaceful person, I nevertheless feel enmity towards those who inflict tremendous damage on those who don't deserve such treatment.  War-makers and rapacious destroyers satisfying their own greedy lusts for dominance, power, and money sicken me, although had I been born into an upper class recruiting the impressionable young into politics and big business (and the CIA) I may have developed attitudes common to such groups.
     The poor, these upper echelons believe, are expendable.  Underpay them, let them fight the wars we create and profit from, let them believe the horseshit propaganda our controlled news media generates, get them worrying about made up stories, like Russiagate, that have nothing to do with the economic realities of their lives.  "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" is a line from a popular fantasy film but it nonetheless illustrates the reality that the Fourth Estate, when controlled by power and big money, doesn't want you to know what's going on.
     Hence, our political "heroes," like Bernie Sanders, who betrayed his own progressive movement by exiting the 2020 Democratic Primary in favor of the corrupt and odious war criminal Joe Biden, even plays along with the fantasy, urging his progressive supporters, and shaming those who don't, to support Biden, a man diametrically opposed to their interests and needs.
     Sanders, one of ninety-six senators voting for the CARES Act, the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history, but masquerading as a Coronavirus relief package with a single $1,200 payment to Americans urged to stay home while the economy dies, has revealed himself as more interested in Democratic "unity," than in saying "Fuck you" to the powers bent on destroying non-rich Americans.
     What would Hitler have done in the same circumstance?  Impossible to know, but would he have robbed his own people to such a vast extent?  Under the right circumstances, maybe so, but I don't think that fucking the German economy by screwing workers on a gargantuan scale was part of Hitler's plan.  Would I, were I part of the uppermost classes, have voted to rob the American people as did ninety-six senators and most of the House of Representatives, including the Progressive Caucus?
     Some people believe Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, eighty years old and opposed to Medicare For All (thus, in favor of killing tens of thousands of Americans every year), is a strong vocal and ideological opponent of President Trump.  They're wrong.  Pelosi, with Trump, allowed to pass the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history, on purpose.  Subsequent Coronavirus relief packages also lack Medicare For All, or even small concessions to the medical element of a global pandemic killing, to date, approximately 90,000 Americans, thirty times the number of people killed on 9/11.
     The milk of human kindness does not flow from the cold dead tits of Nancy Pelosi.
     As an independent thinker, I prefer to believe I wouldn't have voted for the Cares Act, that as a senator I would have put a stop on it and made the speech of my life, as Sanders didn't do.  He made a rousing speech, but it lacked force since he voted for the thing anyway.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also speechified against it, and then voted for it.  In my way of thinking, if you're against something, don't vote for it.
     But the twelve-hundred dollars!  We have to get those measly checks to out of work Americans!  Meanwhile, they voted to allow the richest Americans to receive bailouts.  Anybody thinking at this time that the government is on our side doesn't know anything, has been brainwashed by mainstream news media, or is dumb on purpose.
     Our worse problem isn't Coronavirus, or "murder" hornets: it's the murderers running this country.

                                                                              Vic Neptune
   
         
   
     

     Meryl Streep Is On My Shitlist

     In December 2017, Meryl Streep, grand dame of contemporary American cinema struggled to explain her business relationship with Harvey Weinstein after Rose McGowan, raped by the producer in 1997, inveighed against the announcement that Hollywood actresses would demonstrate solidarity for victims of sexual violence by wearing black at the 2018 Golden Globes ceremony.
     "Actresses, like Meryl Streep," McGowan tweeted, "who happily worked for The Pig Monster [Weinstein], are wearing black @GoldenGlobes in a silent protest.  YOUR SILENCE is THE problem.  You'll accept a fake award breathlessly & affect no real change.  I despise your hypocrisy.  Maybe you should all wear Marchesa [Weinstein's then-wife's fashion label]."
     Streep, stunned, wrote a long statement:
     "I wasn't deliberately silent.  I didn't know.  I don't tacitly approve of rape.  [Or murder?  Or arson?  Ridiculous of Streep to put that in there.]  I didn't know.  I don't like young women being assaulted [Really?  How about middle-aged women, or anyone?]  I didn't know this was happening.  I don't know where Harvey lives, nor has he ever been to my home.  [Where he lives has what to do with anything?]  I have never in my life been invited to his hotel room [a Weinstein modus operandi when luring and then assaulting his victims].  Through friends who know her [Rose McGowan], I got my home phone number [a landline, presumably] to her the minute I read the headlines [That's quick!].  I sat by the phone all day yesterday and this morning, hoping to express my deep respect for her and others' bravery in exposing the monsters among us, and my sympathy for the untold, ongoing pain she suffers."
     These excerpts, from a much longer statement printed in a Rolling Stone article reveal that Meryl Streep, even when she's not on camera, is an actress.  McGowan's language, refreshingly honest and direct, contrasts severely with Streep's overwrought bullshit as she answers questions no one asked of her:
     Are you in favor of rape, Meryl?
     Do you like it when a young woman, such as Rose McGowan, just twenty-three in 1997, gets raped?
     Can you supply Harvey Weinstein's address?
     Have you ever invited Weinstein to your house?
     Did he ever invite you to his hotel room?
     Hamlet's line, "Methinks the lady doth protest too much" comes to mind.  I don't suggest that Streep had anything more to do with Weinstein than she's related in her whining self-defense; however, her words stink of guilt generated by participating (successfully, with numerous awards and accolades) in a culture designed by men to manipulate and exploit women, the younger the better.  Streep, a literal drama queen, knows this.  Her reaching out to McGowan becomes a self-sacrifice ("I sat by the phone all day yesterday and this morning"), an excuse believed in, perhaps, by people who think movie scenes are more real than life.  The cynic in me, in anyone, says, "You don't have a cell phone?  You sat by your landline for a day and a half?  Even without a cell, you couldn't do things in your house, you had to be right by the phone?  Why?  Because, to you, some minor actress ripped into you and your silently protesting colleagues?
     Now that Weinstein, imprisoned and infected with Covid-19, has receded in Hollywood's letterbox-shaped rear view mirror, the community of filmmakers, performers, top producers, many of whom knew Harvey's vile secret, rests with the comfort of knowing that their SILENCE (as McGowan put it) will again be put to good use when the next wealthy predator among them gets exposed by courageous women like Rose McGowan, who has more guts than Meryl Streep, but no Oscars.

     The above news story from two years ago doesn't seem as relevant as the pandemic, but women getting violated by powerful men continues as Joe Biden, the walking corpse who's risen to the position of Democratic frontrunner to take on Donald Trump, is both an old and new story.
     Biden allegedly raped one of his staffers in 1993.  Her plausible story has been attacked or dismissed by pro-Biden surrogates, including, coincidentally, Alyssa Milano, from 2001 to 2006 Rose McGowan's costar on the TV series, Charmed.
     Milano, who did not initiate but popularized the #MeToo Movement, wrote in 2017, "If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote 'Me too' as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem."
     In 2018, Milano attended confirmation hearings for controversial right wing Judge Brett Kavanaugh, nominated by President Trump for ascension to the Supreme Court.  He had allegedly sexually assaulted Christine Ford in high school.  She came forward with her convincing story, testified before the senators, but nothing much came of it because power tends to stomp on justice and human rights.
     Being an actress with experience going back to her childhood in the 1980s, she found her spot in the chamber perfectly, seated over Kavanaugh's right shoulder, on camera much of the time.  She seemed to embody the #MeToo Movement, facing down a creep with the personality of a dry drunk.
     Not just Kavanaugh, but Trump, incurs Milano's disgust, so much so that by the end of 2019, she said to an MSNBC host that she supported Joe Biden, since he had "the best chance of defeating Donald Trump."  A typical view among Hollywood liberals.  Swallow the bitter pill and vote Blue No Matter Who.
     Now that Biden has been accused of rape, you'd think Alyssa Milano would follow the truth of her own words from 2017, would reject the former Vice President, especially after hearing his accuser's heart-wrenching account of Biden's alleged sexual violence.  I've heard audio of the accuser relating this story.  If you have no feelings, you could dismiss it easily.  If the account doesn't fit your political hopes, you can push it aside to a dark part of your brain, maybe the same space where Meryl Streep's guilt lives, tickled occasionally into expression whenever an inconvenient person, like Rose McGowan or Biden's alleged victim, speaks out to let the world know about our human failing of admiring evil men.
     Milano, though, remained SILENT for six days after Biden's accuser spoke out.  The mainstream news media barely covered the story.
     Interviewed by phone by entertainment journalist Andy Cohen, Milano's flabby comments on the Biden accusation made little sense.  She meandered, helped along by a celebrity-loving interviewer, and concluded with how there "needs to be due process" in the Biden case, although Biden's not on trial, so due process doesn't apply.
     Her public views on Kavanaugh in 2018 made no one wonder: she called him a "sexual predator."
     In Cohen's interview, Milano said, "We really have to sort of societally change that mindset to believing women, but that does not mean at the expense of giving men their due process and investigating situations, and it's got to be fair in both directions."
     Had she said that in 2018 during the Kavanaugh hearings she might've been a guest on a Fox News show.
     For many, integrity is valued until it gets heated by a challenging life problem.
     I leave the final word on integrity with Rose McGowan, who, regarding the Biden rape accusation, tweeted, in response to Alyssa Milano, "You are a fraud!"

Vic Neptune