Trump hands the world to China and Russia

 The greed and corruption of the Trump regime was already well on the way to knocking the United States to at least the third spot in the world order, before his adventure in Iran sealed the deal.

Trump and Hegseth treated our weapon stockpile like a Hollywood six-shooter that always has enough bullets to outgun the bad guy. Their orgy of violence in Iran burned through a couple of wars' worth of expensive munitions that they can't just order on Amazon with overnight shipping.

In addition to the military depletion, our country has been reduced diplomatically to the foot-stomping and whining of a spoiled rich kid. This regime was put in power by pissed-off simpletons. As such, it is perfectly representative of its constituents. The rest of us just got dragged along.

The pissed-off simpletons include the ones who voted directly for the vile, bigoted, lying grifter and the ones who sat it out in a snit in 2024 because the Democratic candidate wasn't perfect enough.

Whether Trump is formally a foreign asset or not, he has acted perfectly on their behalf, with the full approval of most of the office holders in the party he captured in 2016. We can neither fight nor bargain our way out of the shit swamp that the entire passel of clowns have dumped us into.

The failure of Soviet communism wasn't communism per se. It was the power-mad, sadistic liars in control of the government. The same right wing people who continue to bleat about communism have no problem with the Russian heirs to the same power-mad, sadistic liars exerting control to this day. And now we have our own power-mad, sadistic liars in control of what remains of our democratic government.

We have one needle's eye left that we can squeeze through to oust the power-mad, sadistic liars and resume our zigzag march toward the inclusive and imaginative powerhouse that this country could be. It happens in November, 2026, when one imperfect party stands against a party monolithically devoted to stamping all that out and settling grumpily into their rightful place below a former communist empire and a current one. Because that's how it will be. Tough talk. Threats of global holocaust. No real leverage. But we can stay home and dominate our women and pick on minorities and paint the walls with our own shit, for all that the rest of the world will care.

Massive war crimes in 5...4...3...2...

"A civilization dies tonight?" And the entire Republican Party is fine with that, or at least enough of them to present absolutely no check on the upcoming abomination?

Of course Trump does have the track record of blustering and then backing down, but he also authorized the already committed and ongoing war crimes of his elective bombing of Iran, so we know he likes to see things blow up and people suffer.

You'd think that the plutocrats who have kissed his ass for tax cuts would want to curtail his destruction of the global economy that makes them wealthy. Maybe their accountants have already figured out that they can absorb some losses now to cement their position at the tippy top of the economic pyramid after Trump has died and left the machinery they put in place to run more smoothly in the background.

The ultimate goal of progressives is a long-term prosperity in which everyone does modestly well indefinitely. The ultimate goal of uber-capitalist conservatives, white supremacists, and aspiring cyborgs in the tech sector is much crueler and more exclusionary, not to mention fragile and self-destructive.

No long-term goal of humanity is served by bombing anyone. Few productive short term goals are served by it, either. Good luck getting that across to the vindictive bastards who hug their emotional support munitions before raining them down on selected targets.

We're in the mess we're in because the entire Republican Party and significant factions on left and right have devoted themselves to various forms of ethnic cleansing and philosophical purification by fire. Right now, the Republican congress is complicit in war crimes and in the abuse of power domestically. They could stop the abuses of ICE and Border Patrol in this country and the mass murder of Iranians. They don't, because there's something in it for them, regardless of who gets hurt. When it blows back on them they will act surprised and try to rally the whole country the way they did after September 11th. Blame radical Islam! Blame anyone but them.

Millions of us should be in the streets right now, converging on DC and surrounding congressional representatives and senators wherever they are, to proclaim in a massed shout loud enough to be heard over bombs detonating that we do not endorse this murderous, lawless regime. We won't, of course. It's too hard to arrange. Americans are always leery of mass gatherings. For any congregation of true believers, whether at a Trump rally or No Kings, or Black Lives Matter, or Woodstock, there are many more regular folks who just wish people would simmer down. They're embarrassed by demonstrations and focused on their own day to day needs. Indeed, the need to demonstrate against authority's excesses is a gross imposition on the people that authority -- particularly the government -- is supposed to serve. 

The Secretary of Defense has already purged senior military leadership of the officers who would respectfully disagree and advise against committing atrocities in the name of Capitalism and Jesus and the god-king Trump, under the hijacked banner of the US flag. Don't expect the military to refuse to carry out the orders that will mark our nation forever as one of the worst in history.

Not exactly a paper tiger, but...

 The Trump regime's ill-advised foray in Iran is a massive strategic blunder on all levels. I know, I know. Captain Obvious speaks. But aside from the clear and present problems it has created, it demonstrates in painful detail how the United States can't actually lock down control of a situation just by walking into the room.

The shenanigans of Bush 43 did the same thing. His daddy just got lucky with the first Gulf War. Junior threw us into two quagmires with his administration's military responses to the crimes of 9-11-2001. But in both of those cases, the wrong thing to do at least had widespread popular support for the move into Afghanistan, and some degree of acceptance for the foolishness in Iraq. We enjoyed an illusion of progress in both cases, with casualty figures to US forces that fell far enough below Vietnam standards to quell widespread protest at home.

Never underestimate the soothing power of being safe from the danger that you support sending other people to face. If there had been a draft for either Afghanistan or Iraq, appropriate-age American citizens would have turned out in flash mobs.

In the current situation, with a regime run by 12-year-olds whose military experience mostly consists of war movies and fevered religious fantasies, the people in power lurched forward with all the restraint and forethought of an angry drunk who just heard something he didn't like. They happen to have one on staff.

The power of the United States from the 1950s onward depended on very careful image control. We faltered in Korea, and face-planted in Vietnam. Behind our adversaries in both cases stood powerful backers in the form of the USSR and communist China. The real powers in the world decided that it wasn't worth starting World War III over some turf battles in eastern Asia, but that it was okay to squander the lives of soldiers and luckless civilians in the vicinity just to feel each other out. Unlimited war would have destroyed the world. Limited war merely served to illuminate the limitations of the power of the United States. We saved face by remaining a fearsome engine of destruction on a global scale, for all that we couldn't defeat the military equivalent of swarms of gnats on the micro level.

So much of making the world a better place consists of holding off a devastating conflict while our species slowly matures and genuinely learns to play nicely with each other. Some people believe that we are so deeply flawed that it will never happen. Not with an attitude like that it won't. 

We face particular danger now because forces behind the current regime genuinely believe that World War III will bring Jesus Christ back to punish the wicked and reward the faithful. Nuclear holocaust isn't a deterrent. There's a strong suicidal element to religions based on the idea that things only get good after you're dead in this world and gloriously restored in the next one. "Gone on to a better place..." Get out the sack cloth and ashes. Start whipping yourself in penitence. Do any of them really believe that shit? Do any of the performatively pious disciples of prosperity gospel really want to plunge with us poors into the fiery hell of global war? I don't know. Highly insulated people who can fulfill their every material desire with a text or a phone call can get pretty crazy.

In summary: The power of the United States has depended in large part on flashy weapons and swagger. We do have some highly trained, deadly mofos on the payroll. However, once they're committed in one place, they aren't available to commit somewhere else. Our forces are designed to be able to fight conventional militaries on two fronts, but conventional warfare is on the way out. Threats are evolving rapidly in the form of numerous, low-cost weapons that can filter through defenses tailored to fewer, larger attackers. On one hand, you have to move with the times and update your defense capabilities. On the other, the constant pace of the arms race should make us question the idea of killing each other over control of our tiny little island in space. 

As a species, we're pissing away time and resources. How much petroleum has gone up in smoke in the past three weeks, when the regime came into office in part on the idea of increasing global supply? Set aside for the moment the fact that we should have been weaning off of petroleum for the past 50 years. We didn't, and we need it while we work on getting away from it now. But the boneheads in charge are blowing it up and simultaneously demolishing our stature worldwide in lasting ways. We will have far less say in global affairs going forward, because we have proven as a people that we lack the capacity for deep thought and mature action. We let these assholes have power.

Maybe we needed this to begin the many aspects of reckoning that we have been running away from since the 1860s. Hell, it's been longer than that. But the 1860s will do. Every issue remains valid. Progress has been rolled back. Illusory gains revealed as false. We're exposed from every angle. Bluster won't save us. We can't retreat to our former stances, because they have been undermined. We can only go forward, demonstrating through consistent action that we have learned better and will do better. So we're probably fucked. I don't want to believe that, but I have to throw it out there to see how it ages. I've wanted to be wrong about my view of the future for my entire adult life. I'm still waiting for an improvement substantial enough to make me regret not having kids. Things have definitely jumped in the wrong direction for that since 2015.

Trump and World War III

 Among the unhelpful, panic-mongering posts going around social media about how the regime will cancel the midterm elections, I caught one this morning about how Kristallnacht backfired on the Nazi regime because its public violence caught the citizens off guard. They didn't suddenly grow sympathetic to their Jewish fellow citizens. They just objected to the open brutality and widespread property damage. That is rather reminiscent of the right wing and "moderates" in this country, true. However, the post goes on to say that Hitler forced the "volk" to get back in line to support the regime when he launched World War II. Then it warns us that the current occupant of the Oval Office would not hesitate to start World War III to achieve the same kind of forced unity.

The dictator might fantasize that he could do something that Hitlerish, but several things conspire against him, or anyone similarly motivated.

As bad as the world is right now, it remains inoculated against true world war by the existence of doomsday weapons. It takes more than one country to play World War. In the 1930s, military hardware had advanced beyond what made World War I such a shocking slaughter and generational trauma, but you still had to go out in person to deliver your devastation. You had to drive there, march there, sail there, fly there. Germany eventually did develop early missile technology, but it remained pretty random right through the end of the conflict. At the start of the war, you just rolled out and faced whatever opposing forces rolled from their side to meet you.

The first world war was the result of unfortunate treaties and an outmoded sense of what warfare actually involved. Once it had started, it was hard to stop. Territory and resources were in play that would set the stage for the rest of the century.

The second world war was a result of the bungling of the aftermath of the first. But it might have happened anyway, because macho posturing was in vogue, and evolving weapon technology made global conquest look doable.

If the current dictator wanted to start a world war, it would be a nuclear war. I want to believe that our military would mutiny at that point rather than roll the dice on a limited nuclear exchange. Anyone who agreed to try that would have to be suicidal. It remains a possibility because of the number of miserable bastards who would commit murder-suicide. Look at the number of family annihilations in which a depressed individual, usually a man, takes out his domestic partner and their offspring before ending his own life. On a global political scale, look at the the kind of people who commit suicide attacks. Through history, they're not exclusively brown people from desert countries. All it would take is the perfect concentration of suicidal zealots who are willing to destroy humanity if they can't boss it around on their terms. Gather them, induct them into the military, and promote and assign them to get your cadre of murder-suicide soldiers at the controls of the nuclear arsenal. Fire one missile and see what happens. It makes a good movie plot, but is much harder to put together in the real world.

If you think that an attack by conventional forces, on Greenland, for instance, would do the trick, I call your attention to World War V -- the Vietnam War -- which was so divisive and unpopular that it set the stage for much of the strife that divides the nation today. By the 1990s we were ready to "give war a chance," as the gleeful militarists said at the time, but then the years of inconclusive bloodshed in Afghanistan and Iraq reminded us of why it wasn't so great after all.

The only people with any enthusiasm for war at this point are the chickenhawks who never put themselves in harm's way. This regime has a pretty high concentration of them, but the people who would have to execute the orders have been trained in more than just TV tough guy bullshit. The TV tough guy currently cosplaying as Secretary of Defense does have military experience, but not a service academy education. His on-again-off-again military career is not the same as the lifelong commitment of a truly senior military officer. He's well marinaded, but not seasoned.

And what if the dictator did start World War III? You and I can't do anything about that. The minority party in Congress can't do anything about that. Any move by military leaders to do anything about it would risk court martial and possibly execution. They might do it, because unswerving obedience isn't a good look when the survival of the human species is on the line. Keep hoping. Getting worried about it, even getting terrified about it, does you absolutely no good. Your "bug-out bag" and escape plans couldn't get you far enough to avoid the fallout -- literally -- of the conflagration. Think of Nevil Shute's On the Beach. So forget about it and focus on the boring, undramatic machinery of a functioning democracy. Continue opposing the regime through the non-routine actions of nonviolent resistance, and through community cohesiveness in the event that the goons come to your town and start throwing their weight around.

Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia

 Given that the Trump regime has been a joint venture with Russia since the first time around, and it's been even more obvious this time, any political figure or analysts asking whether he's concerned that the kidnapping of Venezuela's president, and stated plans to take over that country's oil fields will embolden Russia and China in their territory grabs is just framing a statement as a question.

Trump has an understanding with Putin. They've divvied up the world. Russia recently deployed intermediate range, nuclear capable missiles to Belarus, putting a gun to Europe's head. China's conducting military exercises off the coast of Taiwan. The deals have been made. Mind you, both China and Russia are assuming that the forces of ignorance and greed that have lifted Donald Trump to the status of most destructive president in American history will blunder so badly in their new playground that China and Russia will be able to close in from either side. The odds are in their favor.

At this point, China looks like the least worst as a global overlord. They're  repressive, sure. But Putin and Trump, and the powers aligned with them, are outright sadists. Trump and Putin and their devoted followers actively enjoy causing and watching pain and suffering. It's a major part of the strongman image. I don't welcome our Chinese overlords, I merely observe all the players and make a prediction. Domination by any or all of them will be much worse than bumbling toward some sort of global human understanding would have been. I just wanted to get a time and date stamp on my conjecture.

Trump has already threatened Cuba. Russia used to consider Cuba a tripwire, but I bet now they'd be willing to cut it loose to focus on getting more and more of the contiguous territory of the old USSR back together, and adding Western Europe as at least coerced allies.

Africa presents a problematic prize. South America gets mighty skinny as you go south. Neither Russia nor China would cross an ocean to fight you for it. But Africa is thick and broad and loaded with resources. It's difficult country to hold. A superpower could wield influence, but no outside force would be able to subdue any major percentage of it. China, Russia, and the country formerly known as the United States will continue to compete there, with the US off to the slowest start because of the stupidity, greed, and bigotry of the current regime, whether it's the part led by the senile 1980s real estate failure or the part led by Bible-thumping misogynists.

So: The Big Three have divided the world into general spheres of influence where each will let the other do pretty much anything. Global war will be threatened on a regular basis to keep ordinary citizens on edge expecting Armageddon. Small wars will bleed off young people who have no other job options. Or maybe conscription will return. If you survive your enlistment with all your body parts, and your mind intact, you might go on to finish out your career in the building trades, or trucking. If you're maimed in body and or spirit, die a beggar. No one asked you to be born. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country's wealthy leaders.

Even Hitler's power came from the bottom up

Back during the first Trump regime, he supposedly said that he wished he had generals like Hitler had. But what he has really needed, and lacked, is a populace like the German people in the 1930s.

The winners of the Great War were both righteously pissed off and more than a little opportunistic in their punitive attitude toward Germany after what was known at the time simply as The World War, because no one knew at that time that there would be a sequel. It was the most horrific conflict the world had known so far, taking machine guns, artillery, and aircraft to completely obliterate the last vestiges of the 19th Century style of military engagement. Once it started, no participating nation would dishonor itself by stepping back and saying, "Hold on a minute! This is complete bullshit! We need to figure out a better way to solve our problems."

The oversimplified version is that Germany started a fight it couldn't finish, despite doing a really good job for the first half or so. When they lost, the other combatants stuck them with the whole bill. This hobbled Germany's economy and battered their national pride. After the nastiest war in human history (to date), the opposing nations all said, "Good. You have no right to pride after the way you acted!" In that oversimplified version, the decision looks rash, but totally understandable after what Germany put everyone through.

In the book The Origins of the World War, published in 1928, Sidney Bradshaw Fay, professor of modern European history at Smith College, went into great detail about all the ways in which the other world powers of the era played games with each other and set up the calamity through more than the simple "entangling alliances" that supposedly tripped everyone at the last minute, more or less, into having to have this disastrous war. The book can be heavy going, because it backtracks a lot, covering colonialist rivalries, French resentment after the Franco-Prussian War, Balkan politics, and various movements swirling through Europe to try to create shared interests. Entangling alliances barely describes the uppermost surface of the deals and double crosses and shifty shafty shit that the French and British were pulling, in the European land grabs of late stage colonialism. So the Germans had more to resent than just a heavy handed treaty at the end of the war. They were in some sense set up beforehand.

You don't need to know that, but I found it fascinating. I was really bummed when I noticed that the book I had was only Volume I. How will I ever find out how it turned out?

Anyway, Germany was already ripe for a change, and the National Socialists already existed before Adolf dropped in. In many ways it was like Trump jumping to the front of the Republican Party's grievance wing and showing the rest of the party how to really exploit all the anger and paranoia that they had just been stringing along since the 1970s.

The thing is, Germany had a much higher grievance percentage than the United States had, regardless of how obnoxiously those bastards fill the airwaves today. Hitler could really pack a stadium. Trump on his best day couldn't match it.

The media have always helped Trump immensely. If he had not been a reality television star, he would have had no power in the political arena. Once he launched his campaign, the analysts dutifully analyzed him, rating his chances very low on the basis of experience, ability, character, and couth. None of those qualities mattered in the least to the voters who chose him. In many ways those were his best assets. And the cynical plutocrats and ideologues who briefly opposed him before going all in just saw him as a vehicle to their own ascendancy.

The Trump base is committed enough to be good German citizens of the 1930s. But they are a much smaller percentage of the overall population. And Trump lacks another critical element that Hitler had: a world where he could entertain a realistic fantasy of conquest. War was hell, but it was not yet capable of peeling the entire crust off of the earth in one glorious nuclear exchange. So while Hitler riled up his followers about the enemies within, he also fired them up to take revenge on the smug bastards in France and Britain who had done Germany dirt since way before the shooting started in 1914.

The combination of conventional warfare (more or less. Germany did innovate there, to its obvious advantage in the early stages of the war) and a Europe reluctant to get into it again helped him convince his people to throw their support behind the glorious campaign to claim what rightfully should have been theirs. Look outward to the foe! Those decadent people in other countries are soft! Now let's go get 'em!

Hitler's generals were actually good at generalling, unlike the current Secretary of Defense. And Trump and Major Hegseth's obsession with loyalty to the regime is further hollowing out the officer corps. Hitler's generals famously tried to off him more than once as they realized that he could fire up the people but he couldn't strategize worth a crap.

Regardless of whether the Republicans succeed in their decades-long campaign to gerrymander the country and suppress voting so that they always win, the general population is not behind them. It's statistically unlikely that the general population can be coerced into getting behind them, either.

They might be forced to try machine gunning a few public gatherings just to see how that goes. It's a risky gambit, though. The majority of the citizen militia types who stockpiled weapons so that they could fight in a glorious revolution against government tyranny only meant the tyranny of having to be nice to minorities and weirdos, and pay into a universal health care system that actually treats people without a lot of rigamarole. When it comes to actual masked, unidentified quasi-law-enforcement troops dragging people off to prisons without due process, a lot of them have already signed up. I've seen the bumper stickers. This is their dream job. Tyranny is great as long as they get to inflict it. But they're still spread too thin to subdue the entire country.

I said years ago that our enemies would finance our civil war. They may be chipping in a little right now, but the tensions that the right wing has stoked on behalf of the wealthy are so great that we can tear ourselves apart with very little input from outside. If the United States implodes, China and Russia will compete to take over the space and develop it for themselves. My money's on China, but I'd prefer that we didn't come to that at all. How about we reclaim our goal to be a shining example of how a nation can be run by its people, for its people? We need to set aside the politics of selfishness in order to achieve our full potential as a force for good.

There is no great era in our country's past to which we should aspire to return. Our wavering progress has always been linear and, until the last decade or so, generally upward. The only parts of the past that were good were the platforms from which we could build better. Not bigger. Not more posh. Actually, fundamentally better. We squandered our opportunities to correct course with relatively small adjustments, in favor of our experiment in unchained greed. The enemy within is not in slums and trailer parks and drag queen story hour. It's in boardrooms and brokerage houses.

As much fun as it sounds, storming the mansions and office towers of our overlords and putting them to the sword will not provide the lasting value that simply voting for higher taxes and other curbs on them will bring us. Our species needs to outgrow violence before it permanently stunts our growth.

Government is boring. Government should be boring. Pledge to dedicate yourself to plain old boring, effective administration. If your chief executive needs lapdog generals, military parades, a reign of terror over any portion of the country's inhabitants, and a giant ballroom appended to a very modest presidential mansion, that's a very bad sign for the health and well-being of ordinary citizens. I know each of us is extraordinary in our own way. We need to appreciate that about each other. Ya bunch of lovable weirdos.

The problem of political prisoners

 The crimes of the first Trump administration involved not only the occupant of the Oval Office himself, but many others inside the Executive Branch and scattered through Congress and across the country.

Before Trump even lost the 2020 election and began to lie about it, he was impeached for misdeeds in his first campaign and while in office. Some of the offenses in the Mueller Report could have led to criminal prosecution. Certainly his retention and mishandling of classified information would have led to charges. And let's not forget his 34 felony convictions for fraud, and the judgment against him for improperly reporting expenditures related to paying off Stormy Daniels.

Then there's the unresolved matter of the Epstein files. Who knows what's under that scab.

Some small fry were tried and convicted as a result of his crimes, including more than 1,500 people who had taken part in the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Only a handful remain in custody after the mob boss in chief issued blanket pardons to the rioters and individual pardons to favored minions he could spring from federal charges.

A majority of Americans seemed to be okay with the convictions of the January 6th rioters. The criminal behavior was plain to see on national television and all over the Internet. However, the acceptance that MAGA operatives had attacked the mechanisms of government at the strong suggestion of their leader was not enough to discourage voters from putting the criminal back into office in 2024.

As Americans we reject political prosecutions. The current criminal regime has taken advantage of this by generating doubt -- not reasonable doubt, just doubt -- among enough Americans to allow genuinely bad elements to take power and remain viable.

The Constitution describes how to get a bad official out of office, but the framers never imagined that Congress would be controlled by a corrupt president's allies, who would prevent any action to remove him. And one person's corruption is another person's ruthless politics. The First Amendment gives wide latitude to political opinion blending with religious freedom. Yes, there are election laws and supposedly guardrails around the proper roles and functions of government, but the infractions can be hard to explain to ordinary citizens. With a powerful propaganda machine pumping right wing messaging into every media channel like a toxic gas, the intellectual atmosphere is foggy and mind-numbing.

Voting out the Republicans at every level is only step one of the national detox from authoritarianism. The second, vital component is prosecution, conviction, and imprisonment of individuals who have been trying to replace representatives with rulers.

Prosecution of the people who have broken government will elicit howls from the people who relished the authoritarian crackdown on the elements of society that they hate. Many of them used to squawk at length about heavy handed government stepping on the little guy, when what they really hated was not being able to kick down themselves. Once the jackboots were aimed the right way, those brave rebels grew docile and smug.

While we are finding out what it was like to live in Germany during the 1930s, we are also finding out why Reconstruction failed after the Civil War. There were no extensive  trials of Confederates. The South did rise again. They bitched and grumbled about having to extend any measure of respect to their former slaves, but they got things mostly their way. It will be even worse this time, because we have the examples of repressive regimes from the early 20th Century onward demonstrating political retribution. Fascist and Communist/Socialist governments as well as independent dictators have shown over and over the dangers of political prosecution. 

In a country where government is "of the people, by the people," a politician has to be very obviously extremely criminally corrupt to avoid the accusation of political prosecution. We've had such figures. Right now we have a bunch of them. But the case has to be carefully made. That was one reason that the current occupant of the Oval Office is where he is instead of in prison: the case was being carefully and thoroughly made, and his lawyers threw enough speed bumps in to get him to the 2024 election. A rush to judgment would have failed. The careful walk failed anyway. And then the voters failed massively.

We don't know if we'll get out of the present mess in any kind of shape to seek legal action against the officials who have dragged us here. We don't know what form the MAGA movement will take after the inevitable demise of its god-king. Recovery, if it happens at all, will come in stages and could fail at any time, like recovery from addiction. For that matter, life is full of addictions. The challenge is to get hooked on beneficial things instead of destructive ones. I don't know if we can even control our predilections enough to choose which path we take. Psychology and physics both offer bleak prospects there. But there is dissent in both disciplines. I'm holding out for the things I like. I have slowly learned to be less of a dick to people, so it's apparently possible, but I guarantee that I have relapses, so maybe it's just chrome on a turd. I hope not. For any of you out there trying, keep at it. For any of you blessed to be be perfect by nature, congrats.

The US is no longer a great power

 Isolationists have succeeded in taking the United States from being a global power and a force for good and converting us into a global threat and an untrustworthy ally, possibly forever.

The politicians who cultivated a base of voters who live in anger and fear thought that those voters were stupid and apathetic enough to remain controllable. But somewhere along the line they started believing their own shit. We have a whole regime devoted to destroying our strengths both domestically and internationally.

We could have been great. Sure, we made mistakes, usually propelled by the same greedy impulses that have now led to this complete undoing of all progress. Countries don't have friends, they have interests. The same is true of corporations. But in the case of nations those interests can align with what's kind, moral, and just, as well. Everything does come down to philosophy eventually.

Kindness, morality, and justice, have gone in the shitter with this regime. It's all about the money and power.

It is much easier to impose a regime of cruelty than one of kindness. A free society always contains the seeds of its own destruction. The people who hate the freedom of anyone who is not like them will take advantage of the freedom to speak and assemble, to spread their anger and fear to anyone susceptible, and organize their militias and pressure groups. 

The fact that the regime's budget proposal rips away large sections of the social safety net for chronically underpaid "essential workers," the elderly poor, and children proves that they hate spending money on much more than foreign aid. They're demonstrating if not admitting that they consider anyone below a certain financial threshold to be a useful idiot at best and vermin at worst. And you could be in both categories.

The oligarchs believe that they do represent American values. They represent you, because you would certainly do what they are doing if you had the chance. This is depressingly true in a lot of cases. Now it's our nation's global posture. Turning inward has never worked out well for us in the past. We always get blown out of our complacency by world events and have to play catch up because we had let our global awareness and capability deteriorate.  This time around, our rivals will fill in behind us, and then sweep over us. The current regime is the most ignorant, inept, and corrupt in the history of the United States. Their lust for power will end up leaving them with none, and the rest of us with the ruins of what had been a promising young nation.

We could dust off the Constitution and start applying it in the more inclusive way that those soft-headed liberals had been suggesting before we decided to go ahead with the right wing's experiment in unbridled greed and cruelty. It will be too late for US standing as a global leader. We might even be a vassal state of China by then, in which case our Constitution is just a historical curiosity for underground scholars to remember wistfully. Same goes if the victor is Russia, but I don't think that Russian leadership is capable of global dominance the way the Chinese are.

The bullies are in charge of the playground now

 A minuscule majority of the voters who actually bothered to show up in November, 2024, put into office the worst executive branch in American history, and paper-thin majorities of GOP enablers in the House and Senate.

In "A Christmas Story" the narrator states that "in the kid world, you're either a bully, a toady, or a victim." In a momentary triumph, Ralphie beats the bully so badly that if it happened in a schoolyard today he would be charged with aggravated assault. Many of us smaller, nearsighted boys had similar experiences growing up, though perhaps without Ralphie's primal ferocity.

In the adult world, bullies organize. The fascist movements of the 1930s were just super organized bullies. The regime in the United States today formed a coalition of narrow-minded bullies, because narrow minds are easier to capture and control. The coalition will fracture, because the factions want different things, but it won't happen soon enough and completely enough to save American stature and power in the world.

The tech oligarchs want to use up the Earth to build their starships and leave behind the dead weight of people they consider inferior. It's a grand sci-fi fantasy. Thus they are strip-mining the government for resources that can be transferred to them in contracts and subsidies, making those inferior people subsidize their greatness through our taxes.

The ideological bullies include the Christian nationalists who want to cement the patriarchy and the libertarians who just don't want to pay taxes. There's some overlap between the libertarians and the religious dictatorship, in which male libertarians feel adequately  liberated as long as they can control their subservient women and shoot nearly anyone who pisses them off. But true libertarians want everyone to be able to shoot anyone who pisses them off, and to make bank on all of the toll roads and other privatized services that are going to be so wonderfully efficient and profitable.

The oligarchs consider nations to be tools to help control labor costs in the short-sighted grovel to control what's left of the planet's resources. The libertarians imagine exuberant anarchy in which they always manage to draw faster and shoot straighter in a world no longer encumbered by law enforcement.

To beat these bullies will take more than a single Ralphie to go berserk. It will take more than a handful of Ralphies to administer the beat-down. It will take the impossible dream of millions of ordinary voters getting together to defeat the voter suppression and gerrymandering, to ignore the oceans of money that the oligarchs will use to flood the election with advertising. It will take damn near all of the indoctrinated toadies defying the demographics that put them all in weird, sprawling voting districts and voting against the candidates that we all know were anointed for them.

The toadies think that they're bullies. Remember Scott Farkus's shrimpy little sidekick trying to exchange shoulder punches with him? "Scut" escalates until the little guy gives up. And when Farkus goes down, Grover the toady has no one. All he can do is run, and threaten to tell his dad.

The toadies of the current regime haven't been abandoned yet. The bullies are still in charge. Their little cheerleaders keep wearing the clothes and displaying flags and stickers. In the administration itself, politicians like Marco Rubio, who once considered himself a presidential contender, shames himself and his country as the Secretary of State. Republican senators and representatives abdicate their responsibility to stop the bully in chief because they support and expect to profit from the devastation.

The victims are starting to mount up. They're not the legions of illegal immigrants that the presidential campaign assured its followers would be marched onto cattle cars and made to disappear. It's thousands of federal employees, most of them far from DC, who, until yesterday, contributed vital funds to the local economies where they were working and living. It's workers at businesses who just had federal contracts canceled. It's veterans losing health care and mental health support. Thank you for your service! The silence of Republicans about the betrayal of veterans proves that Donald Trump was hardly the first person to consider them "suckers and losers." These are added to the casualties of Republican health care and reproductive rights policies who have been adding up since the midterm elections of 2022.

Victims include any of us who like to visit national parks and forests. Do you like good roads? Enjoy the state of the pavement now, because this is the best it's going to be for the foreseeable future, unless you happen to live near a rich neighborhood or along a route important to the burgeoning private space industry. The rest of it can crumble and rot in the name of tax cuts and deregulation.

Anyway, as long as the regime leaves the forms of democracy in place to set the stage for their sham elections we have the power to surprise the shit out of them by voting en masse for their opposition. That may lead to the sort of accidental deaths that plague opposition candidates in Russia. Then I don't know. 

I'm just glad that I never had kids. In the meantime, whether you have kids or not, it's time to step up and vote in favor of the younger generations. They deserve a planet that hasn't been hollowed out and burned over, presided over by bullies.

Final note: being asked or even required to accommodate people who diverge from an exclusively white, male, hetero stereotype is not bullying. It's the opposite.

War is expensive

 The current regime courted voters by claiming that they would bring down prices for ordinary citizens who felt overly burdened by price and availability problems with some items. They also characterized the party they ran against as warmongers likely to plunge us into World war III.

We've been on the verge of World War III for my entire life. The sense of doom hung over us before I was born and persists today. It takes its place beside the fear of Hell and the fear of public embarrassment as leverage that social leaders use on the masses. It's a good one, too.

The regime started a trade war immediately, billing it as a good economic move. It's not, of course. Tariff costs are passed directly to the consumers, whether the company they're dealing with is directly affected or not. Prices rising anywhere is an invitation to prices rising everywhere. Also, everything really is connected, so what seems unaffected can't really remain untouched. This is especially true with the new tariffs announced on aluminum and steel. These basic structural metals are in everything, more or less.

As costs rise here, civilians are paying the costs of leadership's insistence on hostilities. Meanwhile, civilians in targeted foreign countries are paying the costs of their leadership's retaliatory tariffs. It's always the common people who pay the highest price for any form of war. And if your politics are based in anger, you will have war.

Americans get nostalgic for World War II because all of the major destruction took place somewhere else. This country was the ultimate home front. Popular music continued to evolve and advance. Sure, there was rationing, and people lost loved ones, but the economy hummed along with war production. Everyone had a sense of shared purpose. They could ignore peripheral costs to the planet and the future, like the prodigious amounts of petroleum dumped into the oceans as warring forces sank ships full of oil, and chemical fires raged in bombed industrial and urban centers in Europe. Gotta get through this awful war. The citizens went without things. Their freedom of movement was restricted at least by fuel rationing, if not by little inconveniences like being thrown into an internment camp for the duration.

By the end of the war, the dawning Atomic Age pointed a charred, bony finger toward the threat of what a future conflict would bring. The Atomic Age melted into the Nuclear Age within a few years, raising the temperature of the fireball even higher. You want this? Do you? Bitch about the Boomers all you want, but that generation was raised with unprecedented levels of indulgence alongside the assurance that the grownups were going to start something any day to incinerate it.

Here we are today, in a trade war that shows no signs of slackening. Inflation is climbing when we were assured that it would snap off like a light switch. At the same time, the executive branch is yanking us out of alliances that were forged in that glorious shared struggle of World War II and its aftermath, and declaring its intention to destabilize the Middle East, annex the territory of allies, and do it all with a military force composed exclusively of white, straight men, apparently. 

It would take a lot to get nations chucking nukes at each other, but maybe not as much as you think. People with their finger on the trigger came close to making the mistake numerous times during the Cold War. Would the US have dropped its cute little atomic bombs on Japan if any belligerent country had the potential to retaliate? However, a hostile stance leads to skirmishes that can lead to battles that can lead to ground wars that can be used to pit Oceania against Eurasia or Eastasia in a perpetual struggle that might not even really exist except for the poor conscripted idiots sent off to provide the verification of their mutilated or dead bodies.

Cynics would say that we have had that for years. If true in any way, it has only been in its infant stages. The desire to control territory and expand regional influence is real. In the full 1984 version, the wars are more of an endless stalemate welcomed by the authorities controlling each entity. Maybe one day a single power might prevail, but in the meantime the stalemate served the top tier quite well.

If you finished the book, though, the spokesperson for the top tier of Oceania, O'Brien, admits that even the top tier has to live with less than the best that a person could have, for the sake of loyalty to The Party that keeps them on top. Orwell doesn't go into a lot about tax policy, but the diminished returns that the leaders of the party accept is a tax of sorts.

Anyway, here, today, we're closer to that than ever, but still not doomed. Unfortunately, the Republican Party has been so completely intoxicated by fringe legal theories and completely unconstitutional fantasies of a better government run by crazy rich people that their congressional delegation is doing absolutely nothing to exert their powers to check the executive branch. Between the ones who see benefit to themselves and the ones who never understood their constitutional responsibilities in the first place, power is in the hands of a slim but potent majority utterly unqualified to hold it.

That's the thing about representative democracy: if one party wanted to put up a sewer rat as a candidate and could convince enough voters to put that rat in office, we would have a sewer rat in office. The founders of this country anticipated incompetents and scoundrels, but never in such overwhelming force. So now we have to convince the party that grew its power by appealing to greed, lack of civic education, paranoia, and exclusionary religiosity to "do the right thing" and save the constitution from this onslaught.

The judicial branch is trying, only to provoke public statements from high ranking Republicans challenging their authority to do so. It's in that constitution that you people like to put on stickers in the back window of your enormous pickup trucks. The judicial branch can rule, but it can't enforce. Congress has to agree and refuse to cooperate further with the destruction.

Most Americans don't really understand what they could lose. American to them means white American, and white Americans have never lost anything. Sure, the South suffered a little reorganization in the Civil War, but they bounced back. Aggrieved citizens of a paler hue can claim that they were passed over for plum jobs because of various quotas, but in general we're used to having things our way. Almost none of us have put it together that the reason things aren't going as well as they might for us emanates from corporate boardrooms and the financial sector. The corruption of the government is just a byproduct of that abandonment of the middle class by the private sector. The top tier of wealth has reasoned -- rightly or wrongly -- that they don't need a thriving middle class and upward mobility in this country. They're sick of paying for it. They quit chipping in a while ago. They've had us fighting each other for decades.

There's a slim chance that the voters who put Republicans into congressional seats can bury them in phone calls, emails, letters, and social media posts to convince them that their political future lies not in cooperating with this regime but in asserting their power to stop it. There's a slimmer chance that mass public protests will do much more than cost their participants the money and time it took to participate. Those costs could be pretty steep in some cases. Remember the phrase "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" as you choose your side and take action. No one gives a shit about honor anymore, but lives and fortunes carry plenty of weight. It's our lives and piddly fortunes versus theirs. They have massively greater fortunes, but only a few lives.

Doesn't just voting seem a lot easier than plunging into the physical conflict or submission to dictatorship that will proceed unchecked? Support the government employees who are resisting DOGE. Pressure congress to support the judges who are supporting the Constitution. Refuse to comply.

"Daddy's home"

Trump's highest profile supporters are likening his return to "Daddy" coming home. The implication is that now butts that deserve it will be whipped soundly.

I already theorized that the majority of supporters of the current regime were from abusive family situations. There's corporal punishment and then there's ruling by fear. Corporal punishment is debatable because it reinforces the idea of the right answer for the wrong reason, but a family ruled by fear is just a bunch of hostages.

Abused people seem to react in one of two basic ways. Either they come out of it determined never to do it to anyone else or they accept it as the norm and perpetuate it. Among the latter, they develop a pride in their ability to withstand it. It made them stronger and better people who deserve now to hold the belt rather than receive its lashes. In their worldview you toe the line or take your lumps. If you want to be the one who makes the rules and enforces them, fight your way up. Stomp on whoever will fall before you.

Reveling in the idea that an angry, abusive father has returned to punish the disobedient is the opposite of freedom. Because the supporters of this regime are themselves pretty clearly veterans of abuse, they may squeal when it is turned on them, but they will revert t0 their old roles, cowering before their capricious overlord.

Republican nominee Trump

If Donald Drumpf ends up as the Republican nominee, America will have a referendum on hatred. So, if you are afraid of a Drumpf candidacy, you have already given up on America. He IS rallying angry, bigoted people. He's bringing them out, not creating them. They need to be repudiated at the polls. If they can't be, then this country was lost a long time ago. The truth may turn out to be sad and scary. That will make it no less true. At least then it will be out in the open and we can prepare for the rest of the world to decide whether to appease the real America or eradicate it.