Month: February 2022

Do not make me pledge allegiance

To happiness,

Or its pursuit.

Do not make me pluck my

Sadness, from a chest which long

Has carried such weight;

Nor from my shoulders,

which have borne more.

Let it rest where it belongs, its rightful home.

The Man in Black made a bold

choice.

Me, I am not so certain.

White and black contain so much,

and I feel them mixing, in an endless frothy whirl.

And my white HAS hot pink, lime green, lavender and blue;

And my black their inverse.

Today I release a gray balloon

Into a gray sky, and speak (oh interminable contradiction!) the beauty of silence.

One can rest in confusion and indecision, and perhaps nowhere else.

I offer this poems to the winds,

And feel words disappearing,

As I write them.

May you never be blessed with comfort,

until you have forgotten

what you never knew.

Hunter Biden certainly took bribes for himself and his dad from Burisma.

Rumor has it John Kerry’s son, one of Mitt Romney’s, and one of Nancy Pelosi’s son were involved too.

Now, my search engine pops up “fact checks” immediately on all that.

Here is Pelosi’s son saying he is in the Ukraine to discuss soccer: https://www.theamericanmirror.com/blog/2017/07/25/nancy-pelosis-son-appears-ukraine-talk-soccer/

Me, I’ve assuming the bribes to Biden were to get the prosecutor off the Burisma case, which was done (using the method they impeached Trump of using, which he didn’t).

But what if there is substance to all these rumors, and some other form of corruption is going on, that goes much higher than energy companies and relatively low level greed?

Something like that makes sense.  Remember, Putin is not saying he wants to occupy the Ukraine, but rather to in effect conduct hits on specific people, then leave.

Details are obviously impossible to know, but something in that neighborhood feels right to me.  And the stakes must be high or he would not be taking this level of risk.  He is likely chain smoking right now, even though  he gave it up.

I just read Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.  I will reread it a few times, but what I got from it was timidity.  Conformity.

And to my surprise I found myself not judging him.  I understand cowardice.

And it hit that as I grow braver, which I believe is happening, inevitably the cowardice or fearfulness of others will frustrate me less.  I have in the past often been annoyed by people I viewed as overly timid.  Why?  Because I WAS AFRAID.

All reactions you have to other people tell you something useful about yourself, if you pay attention.

Here is my proposed Bon Mot of the day: Courage understands cowardice, but cowardice does not understand courage.

I’m not sure if that is true, but it does have the virtue of concision.  Many bad ideas are pithy.

You figure it out for you.

Biden IS weak, but even if Trump had been President, my sole expectation of him would have been to keep us out of a war with potential calamitous consequences over something which was not strategically important to us.  There is no need to risk nuclear war over the Ukraine.

Taiwan, yes, we should fight for Taiwan.  All in.  But not Ukraine.

And I will say this: the only thing I am sure about in all this is that something is going on that I don’t understand.  Putin’s Russia depends on European trade, and even if he can bully his way out of sanctions it will be natural for the Europeans to start finding ways out of their deals with Russia.  This whole thing will create opportunities for somebody.

So what does he gain with all this?  I don’t know.  Taking two small parts of the Ukraine made sense to me.  Taking the whole thing doesn’t.

It feels like an act of desperation, not rational  calculation.  And I will wonder aloud if all these past years of the Deep State using Putin as a bad guy and punching bag, for things, in general, that he didn’t do, has created the situation in which invading Ukraine made sense to Putin.

I have to wonder if he sees the Deep State winning over here, and a monolithic threat evolving against which he has few good options.

Or maybe it is one of the bizarre conspiracy theories–and in this case I think that phrase is apt– I am seeing.  If you are into that sort of thing, then you are seeing them too.

And it’s interesting seeing today’s kids get a taste of what growing up during the Cold War felt like.  And we never had any threats this direct in my lifetime, so it would be fair to say this is worse.  It’s scary.  We are helpless.

It would be nice to have a President who didn’t need ice cream to speak even incoherent sentences.  Who makes the decisions in a situation like this?  There’s no one there.  Joe is probably literally wearing adult diapers that come in useful sometimes.  Is it delegated to the Secretary of Defense?  Campaign donors?  Bill Gates?  A Ouiji Board?

It’s impossible to know, isn’t it?

 

China and Russia have entered a partnership and Putins current role is to test American will and capability. If all goes well, Putin proves all our military assets mean nothing, and that an invasion of Taiwan is likely to go largely unopposed, particularly since Biden has been taking Chinese bribes for some time and likely owes his election to them.

 

I sure don’t seem to have called that right.  I will simply speculate that, in the end, Putin’s utter and complete contempt for Biden–and to be sure, the Europeans and the Ukrainian military– won out.  He is also a gambler, and gambler’s take calculated risks.  Perhaps he is secretly desperate, for reasons I don’t know.

Ultimately, why this is worth it to him at this moment, I have no idea.  I have not studied the history, other than to recollect things like the Holodomor, and that the Ukraine suffered badly under both the Soviets and the Nazis.

Maybe the Ukraine is filled with the spirits of the people who made the word Slave out of Slav.  Maybe Cuba is filled with reincarnated cannibals.  I do wonder sometimes if nations suffer because of the sins of their past, and if it is not the spirits of those people themselves, enduring karmic consequences.

I don’t know this universe works, or if anyone can be said to “deserve” anything.  I don’t even know how good or bad the government of the Ukraine is at this moment.

I just talk, and seem to be mostly forgiven for it, and sometimes even encouraged.

2020 should be remembered, in any honest history, as the year the governments of the world attacked their  citizens.

The disease was nothing.  Left alone, it would have done its mischief, killed a few more people than flu normally does, have killed no one in humid nations like Vietnam and the Congo, and been forgotten like a bad winter or every other bad flu season.

What is remarkable is how our governments attacked and CONTINUE to attack us.  As a very good meme put it, “two weeks to slow the spread devolved into your bank account is closed and you are under arrest.”  Only the most paranoid among us anticipated that.  As I said over and over, I did not understand then and do not really understand now how the citizens of the world could be so fucking supine and STUPID.  None of this was REALLY that complicated.  You simply had to make a smart choice between common sense and blatant propaganda.  It was more a choice between courage and cowardice.

And this inflation is CLEARLY, obviously, the outcome of policies chosen to curry sufficient political favor to initiate and continue the idiotic and absolutely destructive and pointless lockdowns.

The mental health of our children has been permanently, in many cases, been compromised.

And for what?  To create a global superstate that can prevent a global warming that doesn’t exist?  To stop an overpopulation crisis that doesn’t exist?  To pursue sustainable growth that could easily be sold to a populace opened to it by the same propaganda means used to sell lunacy?  Even if you think humanity is on a collision course with extinction, none of this makes sense.

This is the problem with schemes hatched in the dark: no one with wisdom and decency sees them, and is thus not able to point out the obvious problems.  This is also why vain idiots do not like having their schemes  questioned.  And criminals, of course, also prefer the dark, for obvious reasons.

And it occurred to me to comment that inflation will hit our elderly and poor the worst and first.  This is the normal outcome for all Left wing ideas pushed by frothy mouthed lunatics designed to help people.  They would be more open if they simply declared themselves as the means by which the weak and vulnerable were cured of discomfort by being cured of life itself.

I used to work with a guy who liked to say “you can’t bullshit a man with a turd in each back pocket”.  It’s, well, the sort of thing male salespeople say when surrounded by male salespeople.

But I would suggest you can definitely bullshit bullshitters.  But you can’t do it without them wondering if something is up.  We–and I include myself here, since I may vary the truth on occasion for mild and unimportant reasons that happen to be convenient–understand how, why, and when people say things that are not true.  And when those conditions are met, we pay extra attention.

But the EVIDENCE is not always there.  And for myself, I have learned that I very certainly tend to be more distrustful than most situations warrant.  As I told someone today, though, sometimes my paranoia pays off.

The naive, though, don’t even look.

If I might continue the shit metaphor, and perhaps give Freudians some hope their bad ideas are not fully empty and pointless, SEAL founder Roy Boehm commented in his biography that he wanted sinners for his Teams, since people who are not sinners can “rationalize a turd in a drinking fountain”.  For whatever reason that line has always stuck with me, as has his story about having a friend snatched from his arms by a shark.

All of us need a little sinner in us.  It’s not useful or good to be so compulsive that the idea of breaking rules triggers panic attacks.  You can terrorize anyone into consistent behavior.  That does not make them good people, and it certainly does not make them reliable people, in any sense outside rote conformity.

Me, I’m definitely also a bit of a fuckup.  That means I get along great with average people from all walks of life.  I can walk into nearly any bar in this country and feel at home.  The only places I don’t like are overpriced rich people bars.  I know where they are.  I just don’t go to them.  The conversations bore me.  Trust me, it’s a lot more fun in places where people are meeting  life at its basic level.

My money is made in the business world, so I understand it well.

We are all reading about inflation.  Prices are going up.  This is what ALWAYS happens, sooner or later, when money is stolen from the mass of people–either directly, or from our children–through money creation.  Inflation is theft.  I have said this often and justified it often.

Here is the thing: there is a strong, strong incentive, given all this, to profiteer.  Even if the costs of a given business have not gone up, there is a strong temptation on the part of many if not most if not all business owners and managers to raise prices just because you CAN.

What I am going to suggest is that this temptation should be resisted, in the public interest.  If  your costs have genuinely gone up, by all means maintain the margin that allows your business to make sense and remain viable.

But in my view it is unethical to use this situation opportunistically.  Now, I get that the best run businesses tend to profiteer anywhere and everything they can, every chance they get.  That is not my model.

I would put it this way: greed is not bad, but greed unchecked by basic humanitarian and community-concerned impulses tends to be bad.  Make a living.  Don’t try to make a killing.

Putin and Trump have pretty similar personalities.  They are both men of action, who are able to make decisions quickly and stick with them.  Neither are even remotely academic, as far as I can tell.  Neither can give you a long off the cuff disquisition on anything.

But both are cunning.  They have a natural understanding of strategy, long experience using it, and an acute awareness of human psychology, and particularly human weakness.

I think Putin just wants those two parcels of land in the Ukraine.  He has no intention of invading the whole nation of Ukraine.  But by saber rattling and scaring people, he is likely calculating that he can make invading two relatively small parts of the Ukraine look like a victory for the West.  He will go in there, where his support is strong and they don’t want to be part of the Ukraine anyway (I will note, this may be the result of long term cross border subversion; I won’t claim to know much about the history), and then mass his troops again on the Ukrainian border.  He will talk about how the whole of Ukraine belongs to him, how he has a right to it and West has no right to interfere.  He will talk again about his nuclear missiles, and Russian history.

Diplomats around the world will be engaged.  Biden will send Blinken, which Putin will vastly prefer to the laughable idea of meeting with a senile criminal who was not overly smart BEFORE he got Alzheimers.  How awkward and BORING that would be, for a man of above average intelligence.  It’s borderline insulting.  A week or two will pass.  Missives back and forth.  Maybe a few minor artillery events on both sides.

Tension.  Then, finally, Putin finally pulls all troops back, allows Biden and the West to declare victory in their diplomacy, and HE WILL STILL BE IN THOSE TWO REGIONS.  We are not going to go to war to “rescue” parts of Ukraine that don’t seem to want to be Ukrainian anyway.

And he can stop there if he likes.  It’s a solid win.

How ludicrous and risible must it be, looking at the US from ANY direction, with a senile imbecile for President and a corrupt, inarticulate, ignorant whore a heartbeat away as our leaders.

And Putin, like Trump, probably loves spinning people’s wheels, getting them going.  He is probably laughing his ass off.  As far as I can tell, Biden and his handlers may REALLY be worried.  This wasn’t part of the script.  And they are all amateurs.  They know how to take bribes, tell party lies, and mouth the pieties of the day, but they don’t know jack shit about real world policy, not if the goal is effectiveness rather than rhetoric.

What a strange time.  What a strange world, although I really don’t have any others to compare it to.  I suppose when we say strange, what we really mean is how wide the gap is between what we would suppose should be happening, and what actually is.  “Strange” usually means people are doing stupid or rotten things.

But, as I say, what Putin is doing makes perfect sense from his perspective.  It is rational, at least if I am reading it right.