The Books of Bokonon

My take is that the US has no business either starting or getting involved in another Middle-Eastern war. The ones from the "war on terror" era ended badly. This will end badly as well.

T om Sullivan has a post that looks at what might have been a silent protest by those military personnel tasked with marching in the parade old Donald Trump demanded take place last weekend. One measure of this regime's ability to end democracy once and for all is if Trump has the military on board. He might not after all.

I'd say this video about sums it up:   This video is from earlier in the week, but it will remain relevant for a long time to come.

This seems like a pretty good frame of reference for sorting out how at risk you are in the US as long as the Trump regime exists. I am probably more in the "keep your eyes peeled" category for now. Let's just say that when I go through airport security now, I make sure my phone is turned completely off. Otherwise due to my line of work, I am definitely not valued as a citizen. I would prefer not to expatriate at this time simply due to age. But if I had to, I am already preparing. Always good to have a backup plan just in case.

There are times when truth really is stranger than fiction. Want to know where Trump found the "intellectual" backing for his insanely awful tariff plan? Rachel Maddow spells it out. Turns out that Peter Navarro, Trump's crackpot trade hawk, cited an individual in his books named Ron Vara as his basis for promoting tariffs. Here's the thing: Ron Vara doesn't exist. He is a work of fiction by Navarro himself. Ron Vara is an anagram of Navarro. Yep. In the academic world, we would refer to this as fraud. We shun those who commit fraud in the academy with good reason. In the current White House, fraud is considered a positive. Crikey.

Johnathan Last of The Bulwark goes into just how self-destructive the current White House regime truly is - in the process declaring the American Age is over . When we keep in mind that Trump's big idea for decades has been to reimpose the sorts of tariffs only a Gilded Age president would love (McKinley, anyone?). We now are dealing with a tariff regime that makes no sense. Ask the penguins in isolated Antarctic islands that got caught up in this mess - well actually don't because penguins cannot talk or trade goods and services.  The tariff regime has led the current Canadian Prime Minister (and likely future Prime Minister following elections in the near future) to declare the era of American leadership to be effectively over. As a great power, the US is finished. We just don't quite know the scope of what has been done just yet. The way the tariffs were rolled out had no real coherence. The end result in addition to possible (or probably) plunging all involved into a gl...

I am going to post the last two videos in the series here. I have been meaning to for some time, but this has been a very busy calendar year for me so far. Timothy Snyder's book, On Tyranny is one I have said time and time again is a must-read. I read it the first time in a single sitting. It's factual, easy to read, and provides a basis for the resistance to an impending fascist regime that will be necessary as we go forward.    All we can do now is learn these lessons and be as courageous as possible. We have a long and difficult road ahead of us.

  This was the scene at one of my local stores (I know - a Walmart) just days after the WHO announced that Covid-19 was a global pandemic. To be blunt, this was starting to happen well ahead of then. This aisle was the one where you were supposed to find toilet paper, paper towels and the like. If I hadn't been so focused on just getting the last necessities my household needed to survive for a few weeks, I would have taken tons more photos of the other aisles. By that point, there was almost nothing left on most shelves, except perhaps for items that were not necessities. The behavior was about what I would have expected. People were panicked and the federal government was already AWOL. Trump did nothing to reassure the nation that the full power of our national emergency services, our public health agencies (CDC), etc. would be used to make sure we were as safe as possible. There was no clear display of empathy. There was nothing but bluster. Most state governments in my area wer...

If Lawrence is soon to be off the air (his contract ends in June), he is going to go down swinging. Here is his take on Trump and the GOP's cowardice:

Okay, since I am not well and can't really sleep, I will post a couple videos. I'll start off with Jon Stewart as he tries to cut through the crap old Trump and Vance pulled last Friday - an event that still has me muttering Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: The pro wrestling metaphor is fitting, actually. That's about as sophisticated as Trump and Vance can manage. And the Russian government and its state controlled media are jumping for joy. I'll finish with Jimmy Kimmel who had his own reaction to whatever old Trump's SOTU address was.

Rachel Maddow lays it out. Call it a thought experiment, or call it just asking questions. It doesn't really matter. Clearly someone is benefitting from actions at the White House now that Trump has been reinstalled.

Say what you will about James Carville, but he is correct in pointing out that Trump is more unhinged than ever. Just like the self-styled heterodox crowd, he deftly uses the tactic of stating that he is "just asking questions" regarding the state of Trump's mental health given the debacle that happened on Friday. Maybe it's just the accumulation of decades of a bad diet, bad sleep habits, and a generally bad attitude. Maybe Trump has an undiagnosed  personality disorder that leads him to think (along with Vance, who also ain't right) that ambushing the leader of an allied nation is a "good" idea. Or maybe the Kremlin has some kompromat on Trump that can explain what happened Friday. Personally, I don't give a fuck what the reason or reasons behind Friday's ambush of Zelenskyy who was gracious enough to appear at the White House and effectively surrender some of Ukraine's wealth to soothe mad King Trump's easily bruised ego. The point is ...

I already considered Trump's attempted shakedown of Ukrainian mineral rights to be thuggish and unhinged. What happened on Friday during what was around the start of my lunch break was at a completely different level of insanity. Don't believe me? See for yourself:   Chris Hayes' commentary strikes me as spot on. But even if you want to skip his commentary, watching the 7-minute meltdown that occurred at that particular event is a sight to behold, and I do not mean that in a good way. It was beyond embarrassing, and it was something many of us would have predicted as likely to happen - maybe I would not have predicted this clusterfuck from yesterday, but some other unhinged rant followed by a betrayal of our allies was to be expected. Many of us warned you. Many of you did not listen. After this debacle, old Trump let slip that the US government was turning its back on Ukraine. Again, this was predictable. If we interpret what old Trump and Vance did as an ambush on a leade...

Sometimes, all you can do is laugh at the absurdity of our present moment, and thankfully, Jon Stewart is there to lead the way:

  These are just a few memes floating around the internet tubes. It's going to be a long several years.

Just four years ago, the US almost experienced a successful coup. That is not hyperbole. It happened. Any of us who were anywhere near a cell phone, computer, or TV would have seen coverage on Donald Trump's self-coup throughout the day, starting at the Ellipse with speeches by Trump and his henchmen that ginned up the crowd to the attack on the Capitol Building grounds. There were injuries and deaths as a result. Congress members' lives were in danger for several hours. The whole thing was so well-documented and footage would continue to stream long after the coup was finally put down. There was no love there. These were not tourists. Even if the insurrectionists don't want to be seen in this light, the reality is that they were terrorists and traitors.  Trump had telegraphed his self-coup well in advance, laying the groundwork in the early fall prior to the election in 2020. The many lawsuits and schemes for fake electors in swing states that went to Biden were part of th...

Whenever I see a relatively optimistic take on what a second Trump presidency will bring our way, I like to bookmark it for further consideration at a later date. This blogger could be right on the money, or I may well be coming back to this one and saying "that aged well." We shall see. For the record, as dark as I may view this extension of the Trump era, I will root for the optimists to be right if only for the well-being of myself and those I am closest to.

According to the scripture found in the Books of Bokonon , a Pool-pah is defined as a "shit storm" or "the wrath of God." Either will do as far as I am concerned as we witness the latest round of House GOP incompetence (with a significant assist from Trump and shadow president Musk). As of now, we are staring down yet another government shutdown, and I will have to double check the calendar for the last day that the debt ceiling needs to be raised, but also the debt ceiling being breached, thus tanking the global economy. We have some real stable geniuses running this circus.  Here's the sitch: The US House of Representatives has a GOP majority this session that is wafer thin (currently 221 GOP - 214 Dem). It will be an even thinner majority come January when the new Congressional Session starts (220 GOP - 215 Dem, with some seats already vacated thus further narrowing the majority). Any House Speaker, regardless of who he or she is, will have to accept that mos...

The title comes from an opening line from Gil Scott-Heron's song B-Movie . Over the course of his spoken word performance, accompanied by a wonderful late-1970s/early 1980s funk groove, Gil Scott-Heron broke it down that there was no way that a guy who got maybe around a quarter of all potential eligible voters, and that it boiled down to half of the eligible American voters didn't vote in the first place, whether due to apathy, dislike for any candidate on the ballot for President that year, or any of a number of structural barriers to voting (persons with disabilities, or who work and have no early voting options, etc). Reagan managed to win over 25% of the eligible voters and the rest who bothered to cast a vote did so for Carter or Anderson in 1980. So the case that Ronald Reagan did not have a mandate for his first term is very defensible.  So why go back into some funk and R&B history? Because we have a bigger problem now, and that bigger problem also does not have a ...