The Talking Dog

August 31, 2017, Musings

Next month will mark the sixteenth anniversary of this blog, not to mention the sixteenth anniversary of America's Own Reichstag Fire[TM], September 11th (and now, as then, I still work a city block or so from the WTC complex).

Still trying to reconcile the fact that the winning combination of the minority of American voters managed to install an actual circus clown as President, at a moment when the American Empire is coming apart at the seams anyway, largely as a result of the decisions made as a result of... the aftermath of September 11th. Specifically, the endless expenditure on blood and treasure in Western and Central Asia has resulted in military adventures that literally sucked the life blood out of the American spirit (and economy). They have been also been used as pretexts to justify universal surveillance on virtually every communication on Earth that technology will permit to be monitored, torture, even more cruel and arbitrary treatment of prisoners (both military and civilian, Joe Arpaio), and evidently as cover for financial institutions to rig the financial world to explode (which it did in 2007 and 2008, and might be ready to again).

And at a moment when the leader of the nation (such as he is and it is) might consider appropriate for genuine introspection, we have, instead, a man who thinks that his own P.T. Barnum-like impression of a poor person's idea of a rich person is more important than the Presidency that he has somehow stumbled into (thanks again, Hillary), and so, instead of even asking the irritating Ed Koch-ish "how am I doing?" insists on touting his non-existent accomplishments, with "I'm doing great, right? What a turnout for me!" When, instead, he should be expressing sympathy and compassion for victims of a horror.

The disconnect between the clown show that now passes for national discourse and, ahem, reality is nothing short of exhausting.

I'd suggest that fewer and fewer of you were following along with whatever it is I'm trying to do, but even Sitemeter has gone ahead and given up! So... hopefully, I'm not just yelling into the void. In any event, GTMO is still an abomination, and Andy and Candace are on the beat; I hope to have some more interviews one of these days, and I do keep playing with a "more substantial written product" in this area... stay tuned.

A bittersweet time (aside from the shitshow of state)... August coming to an end, summer to follow shortly thereafter; the Loquacious Pup has gone off to college; Donald J. Putin is up to over 400 followers... such is life-- a cyclical thing, which we forget at our peril (even as too many of our countrymen insist on telling us that they are stupid and racist and that they resent being called stupid and racist.) Pshaw.

Alrightie. Hey, keep the faith, fight the power, etc. Never have people of goodwill been needed more; your efforts may not appear to be immediately rewarded, but... karma... just saying.

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August 12, 2017, It never f***ing ends

In Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists (including the Ku Klux Klan) were protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, a vehicle plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing at least one and injuring at least nineteen.

The Governor of Virginia had declared a state of emergency, and even Il Douché the President tweeted something on the subject, without, of course, mentioning his base those actually responsible for the violence, i.e. the White supremacists themselves, or the specific incident.
It took please God our next President Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah (#PresidentHatch) to actually condemn the violence.

It is not without irony that I have just returned from a week long visit to Hungary, a fascinating and beautiful country, but one with its own troubled history of fascism (and whose hard-right anti-immigrant leader Viktor Orban was actually among the first-- and the first EU leader- to congratulate Il Douché the President on his electoral victory.) I understand Big Boss Vladimir Russian leader Vladimir Putin will actually be visiting Hungary for the second time this year later in August.

Alrightie then. If we couldn't do so before, we can now officially say that there is now a body-count to the President's overt racism (which, after all, got him "elected" in the first place, assuming you accept the sadly bipartisan, but ever more unlikely narrative that actual voting machines and tallies weren't hacked). We can only say that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's work now takes on a new urgency (even assuming that the President's amateurish and ill-advised tit for tat posturing with nuclear armed North Korea doesn't get us all killed).

We have completed what has probably been the longest six-months in American history (even as shockingly little apparently happened, while what we have come to believe was a functioning government is quietly being dismantled affirmatively or otherwise suffering rather malign neglect in front of us, and our nation's standing in the world deteriorates perhaps more rapidly.)

Is this the start of the race-war that Mr. Trump and his supporters have been trying to bait now since long before the election? We can only hope that calmer heads prevail (and strangely, we have to hope that one of those calmer heads belongs to Kim Jong Un.)

The old Chinese curse has clearly come true for us: we live in interesting times.

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