All posts by Joseph

Political Rants

Week that was (5.0).

It has been another one of those weeks, packed to the gills with news, mostly bad. Of course, this is not a bug but merely a feature of the times we live in, so I will make my usual lame effort at grappling with a small subset of what has been assailing us over the past few days in the final full week of the third year of Our Lord Trump, king of the chimps.

Debate #7. Not at all sure I see the point of these corporate exercises in superficial political sparring. The CNN questioners were clearly excited to dig in to their “breaking news” story about what Bernie said to Elizabeth a couple of years ago in a private conversation. The moderator who queried Sanders on this when straight to Warren with a question that assumed he was lying in his response. I am disappointed in Warren, frankly, for perpetuating this line of attack. It plays on the odious claim the Sanders and his followers were misogynistic in their race against Clinton in 2016 – something Clinton alumni cling to as one of the rationales for their loss. This is toxic, and I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to suggest that it could ultimately blow the election. WTF, people … time to put the movement above your personal fortunes. Knock. it. off.

When a billionaire has to intervene, you know there's a problem.

Impeachment. A historic week in terms of the delivery of articles of impeachment to the Senate for only the third time in American history, with respect to presidents, at least. It seems like a forgone conclusion that Trump will walk away from this, but not unscathed – impeachment without removal is a kind of accountability. If there is history after this presidency, this action will be indelibly recorded next to his grisly name. As for the trial, well … I expect a relative circus as compared to the already ridiculous Clinton impeachment. The G.O.P. has decayed considerably over the past 20 years, such that there’s some question as to whether all of them will keep their pants on for the entire proceeding. We shall see.

War lies. Bernie had it right Tuesday night: our two biggest foreign policy disasters in recent decades were spawned by lies – Vietnam and Iraq. Though with Vietnam, I’m pretty sure he’s talking about the Gulf of Tonkin incident that never happened, with the U.S.S. Maddox and Turner Joy. (There were a lot of lies that preceded that with regard to Indochina.) Of course Trump is lying about Iran … that’s the same as saying he’s speaking about Iran. We are in a similar boat with Iran as we were with Iraq back in 2001-03; elements within the the administration want to have a war for whatever reason, perhaps ideological, perhaps mercantile, likely some mixture of both. It appears that the general population is more against the idea than it was in the case of Iraq 2003, and that that opposition is broad-based enough to make Trump somewhat cautious. Ironic that this heightened tension is taking place in the immediate wake of the release of the Afghan papers, the DOD internal history of the Iraq conflict, and the big Intercept / NY Times scoop on the activities of Iran’s intelligence services in Iraq. (Of course, these were all one or two-day stories at best.)

Natural Disasters. Heartbreaking climate-fueled fires in Australia, earthquakes in Puerto Rico, volcanic eruptions in the Philippines. Jesus H. Christ, what next?

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Robo-mill.

2000 Years to Christmas

Yes, I know the clothes washer is running. I was trying not to speak too loudly, but it appears to have overheard what I was saying earlier. This is a fine kettle of soup. Wait … what’s happening in the kitchen?

Arrgh. Hi, out there in web land. Hope all is well with you. Over here in Big Green – land (not to be confused with big Greenland, the island), the year is getting off to a rocky start. Nothing too surprising in our world. It gets a bit annoying having to tip toe around this place, but we have to be more careful than usual, now that Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, has finally delivered the big-ass Christmas present he warned us about late last year. We all thought he was just winding us up, but there actually was a rabbit in the hat, as it turns out, and well …. now it’s out.

Now, I know what you’re all thinking: “Joe, Joe! What did Mitch get you? What’s the present? Tell us NOW!” Just calm down children, and I’ll tell you. You’ve heard of the Internet of Things (IoT)? How about smart home technology? Well, if you haven’t, good for you … that means you’ve managed to avoid listening to National Public Radio for the last five years. Interactive houses are all around us these days, and while they are the product of other people’s inventive imaginations, that fact doesn’t preclude the possibility that someone else might re-invent that stuff for his or her own nefarious purposes. What I’m trying to tell you is, Mitch gave us a Smart Mill for Christmas this year. Yes … he wired up the Abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill so that it responds to our every command. Isn’t that something?

Well, yes, it is something. But nothing good, I assure you. For one thing, Mitch has everything set so that it hears every word you say and takes each one as some kind of command. It kind of works like this: Instead of saying some corporate-determined name like “Alexa!” or “Gladys!”, you trigger the “Smart Mill” by saying, “Cheney Hammer Mill!” And just saying “Cheney” won’t work – that will get you a hologram of the former Vice President. And trust me … nobody wants that.

Actually, we’ve had to curtail our euphemisms to a ridiculous degree … one time this week, Anti-Lincoln misplaced his keys and shouted, “Give me a break!” in frustration. Suddenly, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) came wheeling in like an automaton possessed and attempted to break the antimatter emancipator’s right arm. Fortunately Marvin lacks the strength to do such a thing, but still … he could just as easily been a competent robot, compelled to violence via wi-fi by a malevolent electronic brain hidden in the bowels of the Hammer Mill. And then there’s the song lyrics. Damn!

Suffice to say that we are not enjoying the mad science version of IoT, It’s a lot like the mad science version of everything else, frankly. The only upside I can see is that it can do mundane stuff like this: “Cheney Hammer Mill: Publish this blog post!” Zing!

Political Rants

Dodging bullets.

Fuck all, what a week this has been. The Suleimani assassination has turned Trump’s disastrous approach to foreign policy up past eleven, and that is a positive danger to organized society. Domestic president Bam-Bam is dangerous enough, but give him a war that he has started himself and god only knows where the hell we’ll end up. It’s like someone let a chimp loose in the oval office, and after months on the job he’s going stir crazy, pulling levers, pressing buttons, and randomly throwing feces at his political enemies. Does this kind of governance really work for anyone? It’s like living on a very active volcano. We may have temporarily dodged a bullet this time, but nothing has fundamentally changed.

Times like these I am grateful for podcasters, bloggers, and independent journalists. The mainstream press have been of very little use through this recent crisis. There is this insistence, for instance, on calling Suleimani a terrorist or a bad guy, over and over like a mantra. Usually tagged on to that is the claim that he was directly responsible for the killing of hundreds of Americans – I’ve heard talking heads put the number around 700 – during a certain phase of the Iraq war. This is total shit. I remember those days pretty well, as does the Progressive’s Stephen Zunes, who wrote a good treatment of this claim this past week. It is well to remember that the Bush administration, even in the face of their disastrous invasion of Iraq, still had Iran in the cross hairs and were working to build a public case for yet another regime change enterprise. They didn’t succeed, but what they did manage was to plant this notion in the heads of journalists and commentators that Iran was responsible for every EFP roadside bomb planted in southern Iraq, a vacuous claim that assumes every Shi’ite resistance fighter is subject to mind control by the Ayatollah.

Once again, let’s be clear – the people responsible for the deaths of the more than 4,500 U.S. service members killed in Iraq are named Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. We can try to blame the people we invade for resisting our armed forces, but doing so doesn’t hold a lot of water. We should never have been in Iraq in the first place; anything that proceeded from that criminal decision is the responsibility of our own decision-makers. It took virtually no time for the same crop of insane leaders to exploit the deaths of the people they sent over there and attempt to utilize them as a means of starting yet another needless war. And now the current incarnation of the Republican regime change machine is working overtime to make war with Iran inevitable. That includes most prominently that overstuffed geiser of pig shit – a veritable Old Faithful of rancid manure – Mike Pompeo, who is in many ways worse than Trump.

Arrgh. I could go on, but my main point is, agitate for peace. Make your voice heard. Don’t think someone else will do it. This is like the election – you need to participate and encourage others to do the same. That’s the only way out of this shithole.

luv u,

jp