boscohorowitz
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I don’t believe the things I’m seein’
I’ve been wonderin’ ’bout some things I’ve heard
Everybody’s crying mercy
When they don’t know the meaning of the word
A bad enough situation
Is sure enough getting worse
Everybody’s crying justice
Just as soon as there’s business first
Toe to toe, touch and go
Give a cheer and get your own souvenir
Well you know the people running round in circles
Don’t know what they’re headed for
Everybody’s crying peace on earth
Just as soon as we win this war
Straight ahead, gotta knock em dead
So pack your kit, choose your own hypocrite
You don’t have to go to off-Broadway
To see something plain absurd
Everybody’s crying mercy
When they don’t know the meaning of the word
Nobody knows the meaning of the word
Mose AllisonTurns out I miss you guys too much, especially Dr. D., who I joust with out of respect: I take his analyses very seriously, and poke at where I see holes… because I have confidence that he will not swat them aside if there’s any merit to them.
Here is the essence of what has been my position on Trump since, after the phenom first happened in 2015, I had, by mid-2016, done enough research and analysis to feel I’d reached a fundamentally nodal perspective on him. For the record, I’d’ve voted for some indy on either side of the spectrum had I not been homeless in the Colville National Forest at the time beginning in Sept. ’16.
Also for the record, I’d predicted the rise of someone like Trump back in 2013, although I’d put my marker on Cruz , Man of a 1000 Faces, so I could claim bragging rights.
Even I wasn’t crazy enough to appreciate how crazy America was, that Trump would be elected. Trumped again! (I am truly sorry for that. It’s like Tourette’s.)
That said, crazy of itself isn’t necessarily bad:
Being old and half-deaf, I tend to think that, like me, no one else can hear the lyrics without visual aids. Either way, the lyrics are worth a print-out:
Little Know It All
Iggy Pop, Sum 41
I’m the kid that no one knows
I live a life I never chose
But these thoughts in my mind
Are my own, my own
I’m face to face with the unknown
My scary movie will be shown
I’ve got one evil mind
Of my own, of my own
We take from one another
And never stop to wonder
How it feels from the other side
Well nothing lasts forever
When stupid turns to clever
Why are you surprised?
Little know it all
Ten bucks in my hand
Little know it all
Don’t cry I understand
I’m a target of the smart
They’ve got ambition I’ve got heart
Analysed and tagged
Before I start
So tell me
Who can I respect
I feel a leash around my neck
I find out there’s shame
In the game
We take from one another
And never stop to wonder
How it feels from the other side
Well nothing lasts forever
When stupid turns to clever
Why are you surprised?
And I feel like
I’m caught outside the box
And I feel like
I’m sleeping when I’m not
We take from one another
And never stop to wonder
How it feels from the other side
Well nothing lasts forever
When stupid turns to clever
Why are you surprised?
Little know it all
Ten bucks in my hand
Little know it all
Don’t cry I understand
Little know it all
Ten bucks in my hand
Don’t cry I understand
You’ll never know it all
( Iggy Pop)And now, someone else has posted as me, in which case, security is translucent in these parts… looks a bit further. It’s Raul, apparently caught in the now ubiquitous Mutiny of the Stupid Cyberbots, in which automatons too dumb to know they even exist are made even dumber by their programmers.
I didn’t really feel that Raul was censoring, but having a personality that too often is censored, I had to *think* so. As a friend told me not long ago, “Morrison, for a tread-worn cynic, you can be awful naive.”
That is good, for I had and have very high regard for Raul, especially in moral terms. Nonetheless, I will say farewell for personal reasons, being a) I have a novel to write that is now in full labor pangs and therefore it is time I went into labor, a grind from which indulgent posting on another fellow’s hard-earned website expends energy needed elsewhere, and b) the accumulated stupidity of morally autistical and functionally retarded digitech malfunctionality and privacy rape, now irritate me to a point where, as we saw in my earlier post, paranoia seems the only logical response even when one *knows* the accused is almost certainly innocent.
Why? Because when the entire technoculture and the “legacy software” (our basic economic/political culture) on which it runs, disrupt their own functions along with one’s own, both willfully and blindly at once like a robot sex slave that is programmed to rape its master over and over becausde master can’t figure out how to turn the damn thing off because appliances, yea, even mere can openers, scracely work anymore… wanders off into the desert, foaming and fasting like Jesus the Tasmanian Devil on a 40-day wilderness retreat….
Verbal Vortex
So, thanx for letting me vent, be excellent to each other, it’s been fun; and expect a check in the Brooklynn mail drop when our Xmas bonus comes in.I don’t know how to view a user’s history. Someone? Much obliged.
What I can see is the user profile, and boscohorowitz’s says Comments Off. I asked about that same thing last week for a lady who said she couldn’t comment. Don’t have that solved yet. How does that get switched off?
And if boscohorowitz is able to complain about earlier posts not showing up, that means the complaint DOES show. So perhaps not the same thing.
Raul: I can’t say for sure but it does seem as if you’re censoring comments. That is entirely your right, but I shan’t stick around for censorship. Thanx for the lovely news and analysis.
Didn’t think it would show. Hafta go here:
I have no party. I camped with the Dems for some years because all the cool kids told me it was where it’s at. The last vestiges of my illusory belief in the DNC and the concept of socially integrated democratic republican governance, left when Bernie got his ass handed to him by an offer he couldn’t refuse. Lord knows how many people they threatened to kidnap and do evil things to.
But even then, Bernie was mostly a symbolic candidate for me. His foreign policy was essentially no different that Hillary’s. He might have well have gotten us into the Mother of All Wars sooner, and more so, than the rest of them.
Liberalism/conservative labels in today’s partisan politics are about as meaningful as food labels touting natural this/organic that.
Oh, I have zero hope for either party reclaiming moral clarity or reliably focused power.
I would have some hope, some faith in the “gradualism” that both partisan camps worship, if it weren’t that the entire physical basis for the survival of 7+ billions humans has been used up and already discarded. People are willing to gradually, grudgingly learn to get along with one another when there’s more than enough to go around. Lacking that: don’t make me nervous; I’m holding a baseball bat. (Obscure Joe Turner tune I learned from the mis-named Hi-Yo Silver from Fleetwood Mac’s Kiln House album circa 1970. I still prefer the Fleetwood version.) The baseball bat refers not our enjoyable magical words-at-a-distance exchanges here, but the street reality I perceive to be more common than not ten years from now.
Democracy? Meet me in ten years around some campfire with the people of my tribe, if I’m still alive that long. Democracy works on a village tribal scale. Beyond that, nada. Democracy on a larger scale than that has always been between slave-owning oligarchs and their plutocratic running mates.
But I enjoy the fiddling, and don’t feel it is all frivolous. I learn things here, and knowledge is my favorite addiction after air, food, water, livable temperatures, and my wife.
Let’s see if I can get this image to appear:“If the US leaves the Kurds alone to be cannon fodder for Erdogan, it will deeply regret it. No-one counting on US support will ever trust it again.”
***
“Nonsense. The Anglos have betrayed and double-crossed everybody they ever met on every treaty they ever signed.”
***
But, until recently, USA could make offers other polities “couldn’t refuse”. It was a form of trust. Reliable blackmail, so to speak. LIke the relationship that used to exist between USA and Saudi Arabia.
Now, USA can’t even make offers that can’t be refused. In fact, it’s getting to the point where it can’t even make offers that are taken seriously.
“mental eunuchs”
An enviable phrase. I’ma steal it when no one’s looking.
At least they avoid this nightmare:
“If we step back from the histrionics of impeachment and indeed, the past four years of political circus, we have to wonder if America’s democracy is little more than an elaborate simulation”
We’ve tolerated the existence of Gitmo torture camps for 18 years, not holding accountable a single major politician (that I can recall) who promised to end the horror. If we’re a democracy, than we are a blatantly evil people.
Having known many Americans after living here for 63 years, I’d say that people are not evil but thoroughly overwhelmed by this tottering complex colossus called civilization, period. Democracy is a label. Chaos with ballot urns, as Carlyle said.
We do what we’re told, most of us.
Turfkiller: whether your comments are personally sincere or just passing half-hearted swipes from a paid troll (ooh! ad hominem speculations from bosco! bailiff, smack his peepee!), the result is the same: you steadily erode the liberal name-brand with every remark. I recommend you either become more entertaining or quit while you’re ahead.
boscohorowitz, lifelong liberal
It is my growing conviction that there is one and only one unifying ring to bind them all: everyone is terrified of going to jail if their chosen hero — President or Speaker of the House — fails in this ultimately judicial jousting contest. Corruption that thick not only stinks but sinks.
At some point they will no longer be able to fight the war on TV/twitternet (is 2 a woid! and it’s mine! mine!!!!!) and legally binding conclusions will have to be reached. Before that gets to happen, there will be a war. Not just a distracting war, but an in-your-face engaging war, with kids being conscripted, power grids being cyber-sabotaged, etc…
We’ve had our fun with our WWI Redux aka War on Terror (a war we basically waged on ourselves but with foreigners as the victims because we outsource everything anymore), and our deferred-at-all-costs Wiemar Republic inflationary period (self-inflicted rather than imposed by some schmucks in a place called Versailles). We’ve ramped up our campaign against our own civil liberties, and militarily blitzkrieged our way backwards into a position of virtually unconditional defeat.
We can’t win; we know it; therefore we must of course FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!
It’s what we *do*.
Hmmm… puts on his tinfoil conspiracy fedora… a false flag attributed to Saudi Arabia of sufficiently large and, shall we say, vulgar atrocity would “justify” a shock’n’awe against Saudi Arabia of enormous scale.
The one thing that USA military can still do is toss a zillion cruise missiles and such against adversaries not yet equipped with superior Russian defense weaponry.
The USA populace would probably buy it but the rest of the world, hardly. The atrocities involved would piss off the entire Middle East since most ME nations have significant numbers of their citizens working and living in Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t mean they’d retaliate, for while the USA military has become mostly a paper teddy bear, we are a nuclear armed-to-the-gills polity with a perilously corrupt tyrant class that smokes the Book of Revelations in a Jesus bong and seems to believe that Pyrrhic victory — or defeat — are what God wants to know when to come down and fix things.
Like they’re Roman centurions working the signal tower that let’s Caesar know the barbarians have breached the Wall.
So, crazy as it sounds, and oy, it sounds crazy, it’s par for the course with the likes of Pence and people who make Jeffrey Epstein seem like a nice enough chaperone for your daughter.
I don’t think they’ll kill Trump. He knows way too much. Much of what he knows about them would also incriminate himself, but dead men are difficult to prosecute.
I think Trump will win. The DNC is incapable of winning presidential elections anymore without a thorough changeover.
We’ll go to war. It’s what we *do*.
ABout the only card the USA has left is to attempt to occupy Saudi Arabia (at this point, I don’t know if our candy military can do even that much), which will at least lead, almost certainly, to a shutdown of Persian Gulf shipping, which in turn will increase demand for shitty USA shale oil, if only within the USA.
I suspect USA gas prices will be at least double a year from now.
As for the Picasso image: while it is an example of why I ignored Picasso when I was younger, having been exposed mostly to his ‘vivisectionist’ work to the near exclusions of his other work, I nonetheless look at it now and see Picasso struggling, among other things, to maintain that childish naivete he was known for.
As for Euros, cryptocurrency (rhymes with kleptocurrency), I think the following news is a much more fundamental alteration of the global economic landscape:
“(Consider a writhing mass of earthworms in a manure bucket, which we don’t really want to reach in and grab with both hands.)”
Quite the apposite analogy.
“The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. – African proverb”
Old tribal wisdom’s currency is on the rise.
“What justifies terrorising young kids like this? It is obviously mentally damaging.”
What justifies sticking our heads in the sand? Terror is a natural response to looming disaster. Parlor psych analysis coupled with political analysis doesn’t change this core existential reality.
If I were her age, I’d be terrified, and display the anger that terror inspires when it doesn’t inspire suicidal defeatism. So she’s being handled. So is pert near every leader and major spokesperson you see, hear, or read. Grown-ups, in fact.
A pox on all your houses. I hope y’all have nightmares about kids like Greta while you dismiss because of the existence of media spin doctors and the realities of media access.
“I wouldn’t have said he shames her. He simply understands that Greta IS her PR handlers. She should go home and be a child, not get dragged around the planet by spin doctors.”
Oh, I think that Putin, for all his decent qualities, is nonetheless Big Oil. Don’t attack Big Oil.
I suppose that if the UK still used the Law Lords concept that was in place before the Supreme Court was conceived in the 2005 Constitutional Reform Act, that would somehow be better? Not that I think it matters much to the steady demise of Great Britain via the usual factors that bury all empires, but still, the idea that it is somehow illegitimate to a) be relatively new, and b) independent of the snakepit known as Parliament, seems a matter of personal whimsy more than anything.
Of course the Queen won’t do anything. She rules the tabloids, not Britain. If she were to exert genuine power openly, we’d have a Monarch Yes!/Monarchy No! tussle on top of the existing mess.
I for one, would enjoy the spectacle but that hardly counts. As for now, no one gives a shit what the Queen thinks or wants, and everyone knows that BoJo was just using her as political cover. She proved her ineptitude in that act and is now toast as a comeback monarch.
I agree with Raul:
“The UK Supreme Court is in for the by far busiest time of its existence. And by the way, you can criticize the court, but only really by criticizing the way the judges on it are appointed, and then take action to change that way. If you try to question its credibility, however, you destroy the credibility of the entire judicial system, all of it.”
There’s really only one true problem in all of this: democracy. Democracy is so popular with the people that they can barely muster a 50% voter turnout in most elections, unless its forced like in Australia (amazing what a chintzy $20 fine will do, raising participation from 47% and 78% to 91% and 96%). If there were a referendum tomorrow on democracy, democracy would lose by default, since less than half the people would bother to vote yea or nay. (The one benefit of the Queen inspiring a monarchy resurgent concern is that they might get a decent voter turnout. Brexit got a 72% because it was a Big Important Issue, and because players like Bojo are adept at whipping up plebiscite foam. Queen Redux might get a 90%. After which, people would soon resume their usual half-hearted dalliance on and off with this thing called voting, most of them deciding on the basis of as little proactive research and inquiry as possible.)
Democratic nation-states have been the bane of humanity and the planet it lives on since Thomas Carlyle was in diapers. Democracy requires people give a shit beyond their private little horizons, and only sociopaths want such power.
We simply aren’t designed to function in groups larger than tribes of 100-200. There’s some wisdom in that old Tower of Babel myth.
Methinks that Brexit will end up a wet firecracker rather like Y2K. Come time, a zillion clerks will niggle the details and Parliament will sign because they have to sign something. It will be uncomfortable, maybe very uncomfortable, for awhile, but so it was after WWII.
The UK doesn’t have any oil left to speak of, and little else to offer. I doubt the EU gives a shit. Their problem is the USA/NATO ruining their ability to get affordable reliable energy from Russia. As for $currency issues: everyone’s fucked in that regard, although Russia seems to have taken enough action to survive the inevitable collapse reasonably well — if they can keep the USA from going nuclear nutso.
And after all, the EU was voted into existence by popular votes.
Let’s print up half a million and do a sticker-blitz on cars in the junkyard, Glennda.
Me, I wanna bumpersticker what says: Stuck Bumper
With Dali, my sentiments are rather the opposite of mine toward Gaugin: I prefer his earlier stuff to his signature style for which he is famous. Bather, 1924, does far more me than, say, The Persistence of Memory, which I perceive as Dali determining to make art that would sell. Not selling out, but trying to make ends meet while continuing to appease his muse and create original work.
This is not a criticism of Dali. It is my perception that Dali was deeply torn inside. He was, after all, exiled by his family and village. Ouch.
In his final years, his art regained some of the warmth and inner illumination I associate with his youthful work.
Well, you did ask for suggestions, but then, I’ll use any excuse to share free jusic while it last:
A society that measures economic health by the amount of excess consumption it sustains in ever-growing amounts would naturally equate growing debt with growing prosperity.
GDP as Garbage Dump Production
In the real world, one measures prosperity by how little one uses to sustain life. Waste not want not is the opposite of all prevailing economic theories.
By this measure , if we were on a spaceship, we’d measure prosperity by how fast we burned through our finite oxygen supply.
Gotta join in the Gaugin applause. Oh, as a painting, it doesn’t do much for me even though it’s wonderful, gorgeous, delicious. You can almost smell the air and feel the weight of its humidity, the shadows are like the inside of a giant camera, it all works so incredibly well… but, knowing what Gaugin’s crystallized genius would settle upon (growing up in Chicago, I even got to see a lot of his mature work in the flesh), I can’t enjoy it as it deserves, because I can see that, while Paul had about mastered in this painting all there was to master at that time — and then some, it’s just Paul learning how to put his deepest soul onto the canvas.
It’s perfect, vibrant, delicious — but it’s not Paul. Like very early Beethoven when he was just an overwrought Mozart.
***
I doubt that anyone was trying to foment Civil War in 1970. That is, anyone with any real money in the game. Civil wars are notoriously bad for destroying rich men’s properties, sometimes even rich men.
While I do agree there are wealthy persons willing to cut off any number of noses to spike their own self-interests, it seems to me that those creatures had so much rich and ample opportunities via fomenting civil war abroad, a means to steal poor people’s properties, commandeer local rich men’s properties, make another killing on defense industry stocks, and acquire a tidy labor pool of now landless peasants and so forth. Why shoot up the local scene? Isn’t that where they keep their stuff?
Doesn’t click for me.
***
“Hillary Clinton’s Big Comeback Begins Tuesday (WT)”
Perhaps they are going to re-run the ’16 election in more than name. More do-overs. Okay then, if that’s what you want to do, if that’s what it takes. One problem: an increasing number of Democrats dislike her and Biden even more than ever.
It intrigues me how we sometimes assume that one side of the perceived duopoly is more or less manufactured into place while the other side is *sincerely* just plain fucking up.
If we can believe that one candidate is installed, or at least majorly and competently aided by the shadow government entities (whose existence I certainly believe in), perhaps we can believe that the other side’s reasons for being stupid is not the one plainly declared by the media? In neat declarative sentences as FOX taught them all works so well? Maybe the DNC isn’t as stupid as we think it is, but more like just.plain.fucked.
Personally, I think they’re moving as insanely as they are because so many of them are wrapped in Hillary’s web (busy lady, Hillary) that they’re as terrified as she is, only more so: for while she’s merely terrified of her inevitable incarceration should she not be in office to nullify investigations (and, I’m pretty sure, roiling with murderous rage that she got axed in ’16 by that shithead Bernie and that unspeakable bloated toupee currently sitting in Her Throne), they — her cohorts, are terrified of her, period. Double jeopardy for some of them. Well, the women IS c-ra-zy.
But the fact that the media is chatting up Hillary Redux is, for now, only another bubble in the glittering facade:
Let’s see if that bubble machine is still pumping Hillary bubbles two weeks from now.
I suspect that they’re testing what she might still be for at this early stage of the election. I assume she has three potential benefits as a come-and-go candidatory prospect:
One is how her Wicked Witch aspect terrorizes various factions and how they seem to jump when startled by her face rising over the edge of the horizon like an enormous green zeppelin propelled by flying monkeys pulling on galley ropes.
Two is roughly the opposite. Who still likes her and buys into her bullshit.
Three is to distract from the truth about Biden that seems inevitably bound to emerge.
I doubt they’re so stupid, even terrified as they are, to think she’ll do any better than last time. BUt maybe they’ve been playing with those CIA “flashy things” a bit too much. Big hit at parties. No need to blackout drink.
The above refers to this link which I could swear I’d posted:
Trump tweets quote warning that impeachment will cause ‘Civil War-like fracture’ in US
Well, he’s right. Being crazy is so much more fun when you can be right. Man is certifiably deranged, but apparently it takes a deranged mind to prevail in deranged times.
It amazes me again and again how people cannot believe that Donald Trump simply *won* the election. (Looks to me like he did so merely by being the only comedian left standing at the podium.)
To oversimplify, it’s difficult for me to imagine Trump as milintel’s darling when he has consistently held back from actually getting serious with the ‘NATO good/Russia bad’ mantra that has been Milintel Policy 101 since Christ was a corporal.
There is a marked and decisive streak in Trump’s executive actions that has effectively stymied to date the military plan to Get Russia. It’s one of the very few things about which Trump has been consistent in foreign policy (or anything, I reckon).
Oh, he has talked the Deep State’s game for them sometimes, but just as often talked against it, cuz that’s Trump: erratic. And he’s always willing to give the Pentagon all the money it wants. But when it comes to actually pursuing the Color Revolution pattern that has marked recent decades, Trump holds back. (He backs the Venezuela onsanity because it’s oil close to home that we want to continue selling USA dollars if at all possible, imo.)
I wonder if anyone here thinks that we wouldn’t be gonads-deep in major military madness overseas, above and beyond the usual, if Hillary was in office? Yes, I know Trump has escalated our standard drone bombing nonsense, but the effect of his actions have time and again shown USA to be a paper tiger, and I’m hard-pressed to see how milintel wants that. To claim they need more money? That tune has been played to dust, and they don’t need help getting money: that’s what Congress is for, it seems.
I see two consistent themes in Trump’s geopolitics:
a) Trump doesn’t mess with Israel and Israel doesn’t mess with him;b) Trump likes Putin and Putin adroitly enjoy’s Trump’s easy manipulability. Those are the only consistent themes I’ve seen in Trump’s personal foreign policy stances.
Most of us have a pretty good idea why Trump doesn’t cross Israel too hard; Jeffrey Epstein is one good example, not that I believe there’s much dirt on Trump, actually. A guy who talks openly about manioulating movie starlets by their crotch doesn’t sound too scared about sexual dirt in his closet.
I’m not sure if I’ve heard anyone make any sense of Russia<>Trump relations. I’ve had to do that for myself, fwiw. Here goes:
obviously, Putin didn’t rig the USA election although he meddled a bit like all major nations meddle with each other’s elections. Not in the clumsy way the DNC claims with phony dats as backing, but a little money here, a good word there, blah blah. No one “hacked” the election. What was hacked was what’s left of the USA populace’s ability to think anything but what they’re told to, and our gubmint did that to us, not foreign powers.
But Trump was, it seems, seriously in hock to Kazakhstani oligarchs and some buddies from Putin’s preferred circle. After all, no Western bank would loan him any more money. iirc, Deutsche Bank was the only Euromerican bank willing to deal with Trump, which I assume is why the DNC is so rabid to get certain tax returns.
There’s no doubt Putin preferred Trump; he said so. And he surely backed that with some illicit campaign financing. Like every candidate does these days if they can.
Anyway, Trump being reliant during the 2016 election on Russian/quasi-Russian money during 2016 fits well with his solid working relationship with Putin and his curious resistance to the ever-popular themes of Liberate Ukraine! and Get Russia! He gave himself ample wiggle-room to deny this but his denials practically prove the point, for example here:
Trump said in an interview on ABC that he personally had nothing to do with the change, but did not give a clear answer to whether or not his campaign was involved.
George Stephanopoulos: “Then why did you soften the GOP platform on Ukraine?”
Trump: “I wasn’t involved in that. Honestly, I was not involved.”
Stephanopoulos: “Your people were.”
Trump: “Yeah. I was not involved in that. I’d like to — I’d have to take a look at it. But I was not involved in that.”
Stephanopoulos: “Do you know what they did?”
Trump: “They softened it, I heard, but I was not involved.”
As you can see, Trump says, “Yeah,” in response to a query that his campaign was involved. But it’s not clear if that’s the answer to a question or just Trump filling space.
After these questions, Trump hints at why the platform may have changed.
“The people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were,” Trump said.
That last remark surely made Putin smile. One can find more on this if one digs. Curiously, during all this ‘Putin got Trump elected’ spinning, the issue of Trump’s involvement with Kazakhstan money-laundering never got any lift from the media nor either major political party. Brief mentions, then vanished.
Meanwhile, Putin beats the living shit out of everything our military attempts…
…and the CIA has always been a lousy intel operation except for “sigint”. They’re certainly not getting any foreign advantages from Trump in office, and Trump regularly attacks the CIAided-media as “fake news”. Trump has in fact weakened the media’s grip overall, which is hardly what the CIA wants.
The CIA is mostly good at getting wars started where we want chaos to clear the way for greedy corporate assholes. It sucks at regime change also except for ham-fisted deals like Chile and Indonesia during the last century. If it wasn’t for social media amplifying the power of NGO-driven insurrections, the CIA would probably be reduced to flying drones into Muslim weddings as a hobby. It’s as inept and incompetent at espionage as the Pentagon is at spending defense budgets in a way that makes us stronger rather than weaker. (Which gives a dark perspective to Al Gore’s successful promotion of the internet, something I was rather close to back then when I sold telecom gear.)
It seems that the CIA is better at spying on us than foreign powers, just as the FBI seems better at covering up foreign crimes than prosecuting American crimes.
I really can’t find a decent cui bono for the notion of Trump being an intel pawn. This is the man who insisted on his private security over off-the-shelf Secret Service protection.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Best I can tell, USA elected a crazy man president because USA is a crazy people. Best I can tell, the only consistent theme in USA gubmint at this point is that of Rome during its final centuries: blind arrogant ignorance and incompetence whose only tool of choice is blunt force. In the end, Rome was so lost it had to sell its ancient pantheon of gods in for that new-fangled religion that Christ dude’s followers cobbled together in His name.
Trump seems able to outsmart the entire bunch, both DNC and GOP, by being just the right kind of crazy at the right point in time. He’s like Hitler in manipulating public opinion but barely pale shadow compared to Hitler’s success at shaping the nation to his will.
Or, as some wiseguy on the internet said so well: “We deserve the leaders we put up with.”
Moral: claiming military intel put Cheeto into office sounds as specious to me as the Dem baboon chorus that Putin Stole Our Election.
But I’m always willing to listen to sound reasoning based on reasonably legit data.
While I can do comprehensive detailed analysis pretty well, I tend more and more to feature my intuition, which is to say a broad perspective that shows a scene but fuzzes the details like Impressionist painting.
From that perspective, the thing that stands out to me from both the UK and USA political scenes (along with many other nations, I suppose) is how their legislative bodies, their parliaments and congresses, are busy writing new procedures to further their aims by side-stepping decades and centuries of tradition.
In Britain, it seems right now more to be the executive branch (I wanna say king’s throne) that is rewriting/ignoring the rules for ultimately private and obviously dishonest means; in USA, it’s the legislature rewriting/ignoring laws in order to hound the presidency.
Point being this: it’s reminiscent of how Nazi Germany came to be via such dishonest runarounds, including false flag atrocities and bumbling senile Hindenbergs* giving their approval to the radical prime minister or chancellor or whatever one calls the king’s seat these days.
*(imagining Lindsey Graham as a senile Prussian autocrat in Boy Scout lederhosen is kinda fun)
No, this is anything but Trump = Hitler. I’m not a kulturkampf kindergartner who believes that if we remove ‘dat bad bad man’ things will be okay. My focus is what fills the vacuum Trump is almost certainly to leave, probably from medical emergency if nothing else (and there are many elses poised and wanting to take him out).
Our Hitler, if anyone fit that comparison, was a little creep named Dubya, a sad sick little fuck who deserves a cellroom and a live-in 3-way with Hillary and Clenis, with Al Gore as a butler who likes to watch, and Cheney as a taxidermied sneer-in-the-corner. But such comparisons are odious: USA is very different from Germany, more ruthless, younger, foolish, and so strung out on faux victory fumes it resembles a giant opium den… inviting comparisons with late 19th century China under the Dowager Empress.
Hitler acted from a position of growing power. Trump from day one has had to act from a position of declining power. His saving grace in my eyes to date is that, while he preaches Make America Great Again to the throngs, in practice his entire life has been one strategic retreat after another, an act he’s awfully good at — and strategic retreat is the only sane course for the USA.
Trump’s shtick is proclaiming victory and overall uber alles (along with other tautologies, I’m sure), while looking for a quick exit out the backdoor with his skin intact and a luxury escape yacht waiting at the dock.
Bojo and Trump don’t worry me much. It’s what arises in their wake that I anxiously wonder about. The GOP already imploded, producing Trump. Now as the DNC implodes, I fear what will take its place… although it’s just possible that something good will arise. I, for one, would enjoy electing Charliehorse Two-Feathers as the first Native American president of our crumbling empire. I can see the campaign slogan now: We Told You So.
Oh well. From the horizon’s sunset edge, most failing empires look more or less the same:
“Corvids are my favorite birds; geniuses of the Aves family…”
Aye. I’ve been studying on them a bunch, and incorporating them into a novel I’m working on.
I see crows as one of the species most likely to fill the niche humans have filled until now, one soon likely to become a void.
Roaches, rats, crows, with crows being the evolve-as-much-by-culture-as-by-natural-selection successor to hominid cultural evolution. We’ve had our run. We’ve obviously blown it. Oh, humans will almost certainly survive, but civilization is toast.
Our great-grandchildren will probably wear animal skins and use dried fish as a barter medium.
“I cannot understand why people cannot see the truth about the USA. Why don’t they leave once they have experienced an unlivable condition.”
Goldfish in a fishbowl don’t know they’re in water until they attempt to escape their glass prison, whereupon they realize they don’t know how to live outside the bowl. Freedom, to a domesticated goldfish, generally happens via a horrendous exit via a flushed toilet bowl. If they survive that far, well, they just might make it. But they’ll tend to yearn for the Invisible Hand that, they were taught by too many Economy 101 pinheads, delivers the fish food manna from above on a regular schedule. (Not to mention the risk of choking on this over-taxed metaphor.)
Conditioned creatures tend to remain conditioned. It is only with great effort and often much suffering that people remove enough of their conditioning to understand how deeply conditioned they are in the first place.
USA citizens are as deeply conditioned as your average North Korean citizen — and on a less credible basis. As bad as things can be in NK, their self-obsession with defense has a solid historical basis, especially after the USA bombed them to jonesingtons in the early 50s.
Well, I’ve developed a deep personal relationship with some neighborhood crows (Gomez and Morticia). They were a critical part of me avoiding the worst effects of a major suicidal depression awhile back (now safely behind me as the issues driving it have mostly been resolved). So I had an uncommon perspective on that aspect of the sculpture, which I agree seems uncommonly fine.
Just the basic weight/mass/balance configuration, the, um, optical center of gravity, of the thing, amazes me. He doesn’t just look like he’s being pulled up; he *feels* like he’s being pulled up.
Love your analysis but with one caveat: I personally identify with the crow motif as an ambiguous deployment of the crow, symbol of death in most cultures, employed in this case as a force lifting a struggling/dying man up.
Maybe from mortal death or, to be momentarily metaphysical, *through* death as in on to the next plane of reality.
Like maybe an afterlife.
Regarding this (an article someone above provided):
Yemen’s Houthi rebels release Saudi attack video
guess who’s got their excuses to ‘protect’ Saudi Arabia by occupying it?
I wonder how they’ll dance the public into supporting renewed conscription into the armed forces?
