All posts by Joseph

Political Rants

Say what?

The more I watch TV talk shows, the more I realize that they live and die by a simple maxim: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That’s the principle that puts John Brennan, Norman Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and others of their ilk on centrist-liberal shows on MSNBC. I suppose it’s not all that surprising that the election of Donald Trump would result in the rise of a lowest common denominator resistance, such that open-throated advocates of the Iraq War and other disasters have spent the last three years nursing their reputations back to health, hour by hour, on Morning Joe and other platforms. I’m not the first, certainly, to point out that the left suffers under reactionary presidents as the broad opposition tends to focus all their energy on defense of existing policies under attack, at the expense of breaking new ground. That’s understandable … but do we really have to make common cause with Bill Kristol? Really?

This is the hashtag resistance on MSNBC.

Well, it’s worse than that. Because the corollary of this guiding principle is the notion that the friend of my enemy is also my enemy, and so, too, is the friend of that friend. We’re seeing that play out on the foreign policy front. This week, Rachel Maddow and others on MSNBC, in their desire to paint Vladimir Putin as this master manipulator, appear to have swallowed whole the ridiculous claim made by John Bolton and Mike Pompeo that Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro was set to flee his country, his plane idling on the runway, when Vladimir Putin told him to stay put. Maddow was chiding Trump for allowing himself to be duped by Putin; she almost sounded sympathetic to Bolton’s plight as yet another Trump administration principal who has been outflanked by his boss in public. I realize the whole bit is half played for laughs, but I fear irony is lost on today’s viewing public.

The same dynamic is playing out over North Korea. Bolton and Pompeo are obviously throwing a monkey wrench into the Korean peace process, while simultaneously trying to gin up conflicts and regime change in Iran, Venezuela, and ultimately Nicaragua and Cuba. Everyone on MSNBC, from commentators like Maddow down to newsreaders, are playing up claims that Kim Jong Un appears to be stepping away from any informal agreements regarding arms testing, suggesting that he’s taking Trump for a ride. So, in essence, they are advocating for returning to something like the confrontation of 2017, when we came within a whisker of war. That is insanity. Regardless of your opinion of Trump, we need to encourage a peaceful end to that confrontation and follow the lead of the South Korean president.

One can only hope that we can unseat Trump next year. If we fail, at the current rate, the hashtag opposition will likely go full-on neocon before 2022.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Light minutes.

Okay, so what if it doesn’t come back? What happens to your little experiment then, Einstein? What the … PUT THE STICK DOWN!

Oh, hi. Yes, things get a little contentious at times around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. I was just having a conversation with our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, who is doing some tests on a new propulsion system he’s developing. Suffice to say it’s the kind of propulsion system we would need to carry us to the far-flung interstellar venues that have been added to our upcoming tour in recent days. We haven’t secured transport yet, owing to our lack of resources, so Mitch has taken it upon himself to custom design a deep-space conveyance that will meet our needs … and then some.

Trouble is, he is … well …. a crazy-ass mofo, and because of that simple fact, he can’t just use existing technology to build his spacecraft. Oh, no … he has to innovate an entirely new form of propulsion. Don’t ask me the particulars – it has something to do with curved space-time. I don’t know much about that, except that I don’t have enough space-time in my life these days, curved or straight. Anyway … Mitch built a model of his rocket booster and has claimed that it will travel many, many times the speed of light. And to prove his thesis, he’s going to send the little gizmo several light minutes away and back, timing its journey on his old-school pocket watch. Of course, he gets all worked up when he does this sort of thing, so it’s best to avoid Mitch. Like, spend the day in another room. Or on another continent.

Well, all right, then.

So, yeah, we’ve added a couple of stops to the itinerary, which now looks like this:

  • May 12, Neptune
  • May 15, Proxima system
  • May 20, Barnard’s Star system
  • May 27, Procyon system
  • May 30, Epsilon Indi
  • June 2, Sirius
  • June 5, Jupiter, red spot
  • June 8, Small Magellanic Cloud

That last one is going to be a ball-buster. We may need cryogenic chambers to cover that ride, particularly if Mitch’s propulsion scheme doesn’t pan out. But, again … I will leave the science to the mad scientist and concentrate on what really matters: the Tuesday night garbage pick up. I mean, the music! May 12 is coming up fast, so …. better work up some numbers, am I right? Back to the studio!

Political Rants

Like old times.

I don’t know if it was at the start of this week or at the end of last week, but at some point recently I wondered aloud what became of the Trump administration’s coup plan in Venezuela. It seemed to have fizzled rather badly, despite their best efforts … but then this week it sprang back to life like Frankenstein’s monster. Washington’s hand-picked maximum leader of that unfortunate country, Juan Guaido, appeared in a cell-phone video surrounded by what appears to be a handful of soldiers, declaring himself president once again. This is, of course, not a coup, we’re told, because officials of the United States government have decided that Guaido is the legitimate president of Venezuela. Nothing screams freedom more than leaders selected by the regional hegemon.

Worse than neocons. Old-school imperialists.

Naturally, our execrable National Security Advisor John Bolton and our equally fragrant Secretary of State Michael Pompeo are behaving as if whatever they say randomly just has to be true. Pompeo claimed to CNN that Maduro had a plane ready to fly to Havana, but was talked out of it by the Russians. This doesn’t appear to be anything near the truth, it will surprise you to hear. Let’s just say these gentlemen have some serious credibility issues. As ham-fisted as they are, though, it’s hard to overstate the pressure that the United States can apply to a country like Venezuela. We basically control the international financial system, and Caracas has been cut off from the banking, loans, etc., since Trump applied sanctions in 2017. They are making the economy scream, as Nixon/Kissinger did with Chile in 1973, and this could bring the roof down eventually. (See the Center for Economic and Policy Research paper on these sanctions for more.)

We know from the Iraq debacle, and other comparable debacles before and since, that craven policy makers like Bolton, Pompeo, and Elliott Abrams can break a country in half, if we let them. What they’re not so good at is putting it back together (not that possessing that particular skill would make it in any way a worthy enterprise). There’s a better than fair chance that they will succeed in crushing the Maduro government, but very likely that will not be the end of it. Venezuela may be plunged into a bloody civil conflict that could last for years, perhaps decades. Not that such an outcome would be any skin off of Bolton’s ample nose, nor Abrams’. They’ve come through their previous disasters without a scratch. That’s more than I can say for their targets.

The only thing that can stop them is us. We need to raise our voices on this now, before it’s too late.

luv u,

jp