TRUMP'S MOST TERRIFYING WORDS

Donald Trump was on Fox last night explaining the process of declassifying government documents. Unfortunately, he found it necessary to use those terrifying words: "as I understand it."

And there's his problem in a nutshell: He doesn't understand how things work.

He thinks all he has to do is imagine that the documents are declassified for them to actually be declassified. According to him, he used this magical-thinking process on all the documents in question.

Which means, as he understands things, all is well and the government can just get the hell off his back.

Two problems with that: The documents have not actually been declassified. And even if they were, they still don't belong to him. They belong to the National Archives.

Now, maybe if a document is really, truly declassified, Trump would be free to make a copy of it. But in no way does the ownership of the original document shift from the government to him. He's still holding onto property legally owned by others.

But let's say for the moment he's right, and all the documents were magically declassified. Let's say they even had their ownership transferred from the Real World to Bizarro Trump World. Why on earth did he give up so many of those documents in January and June?

That doesn't make sense. Trump doesn't voluntarily give up anything.

Now the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has simplified the Special Master's job quite a bit. Classified material is back to being considered classified, and the Master won't have to look at it because by definition none of it belongs to Trump.

What about other stuff? As I understand it, when the FBI locates items listed on a search warrant in a particular drawer, the entire contents of that drawer are seized to show the context of how the listed item was found. All that stuff (minus the listed item) will, in due course, be returned. You don't even have to ask.

My guess is that if Donald Trump gets any of that stuff back, he will declare victory and claim all his incendiary statements have been vindicated.

But after that may follow the indictment, is there is one.

Sending Trump to prison is problematical. He may end up like Rudolf Hess, Hitler's formal deputy, who was the sole inmate of Spandau Prison for more than twenty years. Trump may serve his time in a prison built for one, run by the Secret Service.

It remains to be seen what will be left of the Trump Organization after the fraud suit filed in New York state is finally adjudicated.

And what if the IRS gets involved in a criminal prosecution?

Trump cronies all claim this is politically motivated. Will that reasoning also be applied to any jury findings?

The problem with MAGA-ridden Republicans is that they don't recognize an off-ramp when one shows up. But I suppose it's possible they're stuck way over on the wrong side of the freeway, and getting to that off-ramp would involve a great deal of dramatic carnage.

(Have I been watching too many dash-cam car-crash videos on YouTube?)
 

IMAGINARY THINKING

Trump sponsored Republicans are doing well in the primaries.

It's another sign of the Apocalypse, no doubt, along with epic floods, fires, droughts, pandemics, wars and rumors of war.

Glory be: Get on board the Heaven Train!

Q-Anon, Stop the Steal, global warming deniers, and so forth. I actually read about a guy who said he would stake his life there had been no moon landings.

Folks are willing to die for what they know to be true.

Trump tells his base the FBI laid siege to his home, occupied it, ransacked it, broke into his safe, all to obtain documents he would happily have handed over to them if they had just thought to ask.

Say the magic word! (The magic words are: Civil War 2.0.)

Now it's "Defund the FBI," and so forth. Or blast those evil bastards!

Folks are willing to kill for what they know to be true.

We live in glorious, heroic times! It's Game of Thrones, for real, and Donald Trump is the flying dragon. (Okay, more like a drifting blimp.)

If the Democrats are lucky, Trump will run in 2024—and lose again: Civil War 3.0!

He'll likely run because he thinks his legal problems will all be put on hold until the end of the election. And if he should (by some miracle) win, he could whip out his trusty Pardon Power.

(And ramrod a bill through Congress making that Magical Power work on state and local crimes, as well.)

But wait! Maybe there will be no miracle necessary, if Republican controlled state legislatures do what they think the Dems did in 2020 and steal the election, this time for Trump.

It's only fair, right? Tit for tat! They're doing God's Work!

Besides, it's the Christian thing to do: Fight the demons from hell!

MSNBC showed video of a minister haranguing his flock, reminding them they can't be Christian and vote Democratic. According to his loud and sweaty words, Dems were demons straight out of hell's butthole!

(Okay, I may have added the butthole part.)

And remember, if you can't suffer a witch to live (and why would you?), demons are way beyond the pale. (If you burn a demon, doesn't he just laugh at you? Fire is his wheelhouse. Maybe demons need to be drowned.)

It turns out, folks know what they know, and they can't be wrong (as far as they can tell).

Democracy is ultimately doomed because it relies on human beings, the most unreliable creatures on this or any other planet.

You can argue with humans, but you can't change their minds. How come? Because to a close approximation, humans don't have minds. We have imaginary minds where we do imaginary thinking.

And there's no solution for that. Not now, not ever. Idiocy is already baked in.

See, it was easier to evolve the delusion of intelligence than to evolve actual intelligence. And now we'll never have to be smart.

Seriously, how would it even help? We already know everything!


 

FOR THE CHILDREN

The bodies are piling up, and congressional critters are under pressure to do something about it. Again.

Here's why they won't do anything significant: They all have their careers to think about.

In a proper democracy, that would be impossible. In a working democracy, folks elected to sit in those special rooms in Washington have only one thing to worry about: correctly understanding the position of the majority of the people in their districts back home.

If you do exactly what they want you to, you're going to be fine!

But congressional folk are not, it turns out, there to do what the folks back home want. They're in that room to do what their party leaders want them to do.

Or, in some cases, they're there to do what some random ex-president wants them to do. Or face the consequences. (You get your butt primaried.)

The only reasonable (though unworkable) solution is term limits: One term and hit the bricks.

See, no reelections, ever. No reelection slush-fund money, no reelection pressure from lobbyists, no reelection garbage from previous presidents.

No reelections!

Perfect, but unworkable. Because who the hell would vote for something like that? Doesn't help to grandfather everybody in, the party leaders would never let you vote for it. Not even if it didn't take effect for 100 years.

So, we're screwed. Even if the entire country wanted something, folks in congress would be mostly unable to go along with it. Because of that thing that shouldn't even exist: a career path in congress.

And as long as we're screwed, let's go after something even more unlikely: Eliminate elections altogether. Just appoint folks to congress for short periods of time. Like jury duty.

These people need to have no opinion on any subject. Not their job, right? Just do what the folks back home want.

That's democracy, baby!

But here's the bottom-line problem with all that: Democracy relies on human beings, and human beings are the most unreliable creatures on this or any other planet.

So, yeah. We're doomed.

But let's forget all that. Let's fantasize about actual gun control.

Here's what you do: Comb through the states and eliminate every local Republican elected via the twin frauds of redistricting and voter suppression.

Then repeal the Second Amendment.

(You'll need two-thirds of state legislatures to go along with it, which is why you have to weed out NRA-addled Republican reps.)

Will that cause a squawk? I can already hear the gunfire.

But it's probably the only way to do it.

Remember, the Second Amendment was designed to spare the new country the expense of maintaining a standing army. Have the farmers of the nation hang onto their squirrel guns, see? Then in case of emergency, grab 'em up, march 'em around a little, and send 'em into battle to save the republic.

But we have a standing army now, plus the National Guard in the states. The Second Amendment is simply obsolete.

Figure a third of gun owners would comply with a weapons roundup. One third would go the Ruby Ridge route. And a third would take off for parts unknown, humping a crap-load of guns and ammo.

I guess they could start their own country somewhere...

DARK MATTER

CERN's Large Hadron Collider is working its way back to life, following several years of repairs and upgrades. There are thousands of tests to get through, but the machine is scheduled to be ready to begin science in early July of this year (if we're still around).

More powerful than ever, the device will look into finding out what Dark Matter might be. All we know now is that it's the mysterious stuff that comprises 95% of all gravitational matter in the universe.

(Dark Energy, the force accelerating the expansion of the universe will have to wait a bit to get our attention. High energy colliders tend to reveal new particles, not new forces.)

In other news, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is threatening nuclear war to punish the world for interfering with his perfectly reasonable blueprint for a new and improved Ukraine.

Dude, sounds like a plan!

Locally, Republicans are preparing to win/steal power in the 2022 mid-term elections. And looking forward to moving Donald Trump back into the White House in January, 2025. They know it's only right, what with the outrageous way the Democrats treated them in 2020.

In Florida, Governor Ron Desantis is suing Disney to get to the bottom of the age old question: Is Mickey a very big mouse, or is Pluto a very small dog?

Elsewhere, a woman is suing the manufacturer of an amusement park ride because her super-heavy son fell to his death. As I understand it, the kid was one hundred pounds above the ride's limit. The woman says she wants "justice" for her boy. Does she think the operators allowed him on the ride in order to kill him? Or were they just trying to be nice and accommodate a fellow who really, really shouldn't have been permitted on that machine?

Human beings know the answer to questions like these, and we can't be wrong.

Because it turns out everything is a trap. Everything is rigged. The world is not just hideously dangerous, it's been designed by villains to destroy us.

And even though a powerful and benevolent God is working overtime to protect us from evil-doers, it's not helping.

(But for god's sake, don't blame the guy for his failure to perform. He is one touchy SOB, and will eff you up plenty for complaining.)

The problem is, human beings praise the light, but look to the dark side for explanations.

QAnon, Stop the Steal, Covid Anti-vaxers, Climate Change Deniers, Flat-Earthers, Moon-Landing Deniers: We cry out for truth, and find it in the shadows.

Some of us may build astonishing machines to probe the universe for actual answers to questions posed by physics and cosmology.

Most of us, though, are content to scrutinize the darkness, seeking monsters to annihilate for making our lives impossible.

It is our deepest, most reliable nature.

CROSSING BORDERS

Putin's invasion of Ukraine continues apace.

It appears he wants three things: 1) a change in the Ukrainian constitution that prohibits the country from ever joining NATO or the EU; 2) recognition that Crimea belongs to Russia forever; and 3) acknowledgment of the independence of several provinces in eastern Ukraine that are home to ethnic Russians.

Not entirely outrageous demands, but was war the only way to make it happen?

Russia is clearly paranoid about the political makeup of countries on her border. In the past, invading armies have emerged from those countries and created havoc in Russia. In WW2, some 23 million people (soldiers and civilians) were killed when Nazi Germany came across the border.

Putin apparently thinks NATO or EU countries are chomping at the bit to invade Mother Russia. An understandable paranoia. Perhaps he could simply say, "Come across our border with your military and we will nuke your capital."

After all, nuclear weapons have almost no value except as a deterrence. The whole point of the Cold War strategy called MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) was: "Nuke us and we will nuke you back."

Admittedly, using the threat of nukes to deter a conventional military action is pushing the boundary a bit. It all depends on whether you can make the threat credible. And define the provoking action to be substantial.

But it's tricky. Nuclear bullies might stir up unpredictable responses.

As for Crimea, apparently it used to belong to Russia, but was handed over to Ukraine by the former Soviet Union. Maybe it can stay in Russian hands. Perhaps a sum of money paid to Ukraine would not be out of line here.

Or a partitioning of the region.

Partitioning might also work in the eastern provinces, with more money headed Ukraine's way.

Or, as I pointed out some time ago, maybe Putin should have invaded Ukraine with moving vans instead of tanks.

If ethnic Russians want to emigrate to Russia, who is standing in their way? It certainly sounds like a deal could be made here. Maybe some land changes hands, maybe not. People can be relocated according to their wishes. Money for housing could be allocated.

Folks should calm down and start boxing up their crap.

On the other hand, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has make all simple solutions vastly more complicated. So why did Putin do it this way?

Two likely reasons.

One, he expected a lightning fast war, leaving little time for opposition and outrage to build. Two, if he waited until Ukraine was actually admitted to NATO, coming across the border as he did would have been an act of war against the US. And that sounds way more dangerous.

Or have I got this completely wrong?

I am, after all, human.

The wankers who get most things wrong ...and never find out.
 

DIRECTIONS

According to the Real Clear Politics Web site, Joe Biden is sitting on a 42% approval rating, after one year in office. (And just so you know, Donald Trump has the same rating, currently.)

That sounds pretty bad, but you have to take into account the fact that a lot of folks polled are Republicans, some 68% of which don't even think Biden is the legitimate president of this country.

I got a feeling those guys are not very likely to endorse the man's performance.

Democrats, on the other hand, also have issues with the president: lack of voting rights legislation, failure to pass Build Back Better, and so forth. They may even still be smarting from the retreat from Afghanistan and how it was handled (though I doubt it could have gone much better).

Democrats are especially annoyed at Biden for not getting more done, despite having majorities in both houses of Congress.

But does he really have a majority in the Senate?

Two DINOs there seem to have as their mission in life to prevent Biden from getting much done—mainly by refusing to fiddle with the filibuster, that controversial Senate procedure that requires 60 votes to pass pretty much anything.

(By and large, Republican Senators line up the way Mitch McConnell tells them, which is designed to stop Biden at every point. In other words, pure partisan politics as its finest.)

One of those obstructionist Democratic Senators, Kyrsten Sinema, was recently censured by her state party leadership for failing to do everything in her power to ensure voting rights in this country.

For their part, Republicans are against any legislation that bolsters voting rights. Those guys need to be able to cheat in order to get elected. National voting rights are an existential threat to the GOP.

Quoting from the ABC news site: "H.R. 1 is an attempt to use the Democrats' slim majority to unlevel the playing field and take away the rights of roughly half of the voters in the country," said Mark Weaver, a GOP consultant based in Ohio and an election law attorney.

Losing an election just naturally destroys your life: The winners repossess your car, foreclose on your house, shoot your dog in the face, and slam you and your family into a concentration camp.

We've all been there, right?

Another Republican Tweeted that voting rights would turn America into a one-party country, like Venezuela or Russia. Mitch McConnell called the bill a "power grab." You just have to look at it from their point of view.

The other DINO, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, would seem to have an excuse to rob Biden of presidential victories. He represents a state that went for Trump in 2020. Manchin's constituents might covet some of the provisions in the Build Back Better bill, but perhaps they're willing to forgo those goodies in the near term to reach a higher goal: the eventual re-election of Donald Trump in 2024.

Sinema doesn't have that excuse. Arizona went for Biden, a result that has withstood multiple attempts to delegitimize.

The deeper question, should congressional representatives take their instructions from the people in their district or should they listen to national party leaders, who may have loftier prizes in mind?

(I wrote about this in my previous post.)

Another category of polling displayed on the Real Clear Politics site is the question of whether the country is headed in the right direction.

The latest poll (Reuters/Ipsos), taken just a few days ago, puts the break at 23/62, folks not at all happy with the way the country is going.

The thing is, I have a lot of trouble understanding a poll like this.

Suppose a large number of people think the country is headed for a Stop-the-Steal-induced civil war. Some of those guys might conclude civil war is the right direction. So, are they part of the 23% who are happy with the trend, because squabbling over 2020 takes them where they want to go?

Or would they be part of the 62%, folks who think matters are going so badly another civil war would be warranted? (And they're all for it.)

Could go either way, it seems to me.

On the other hand, the people who are fed up with Stop-the-Steal nonsense, think this is a bad trend. Is Biden supposed to take the hit for this, because he hasn't managed to stamp it out?

(Mitt Romney once said you have to tell those folks the truth. Unfortunately, they already know the truth: Trump won the election in a landslide. They know he did because he said so, repeatedly.)

In other news, people are sick and tired of the Covid pandemic. Is Biden to blame for this, too? And if they're also angry about vaccination mandates, which is worse? Biden's authoritarianism, or the continuing pandemic?

I guess you could blame the guy for each or for both.

Mounting inflation pisses people off, you bet. But if it leads to Biden being a one-termer, then inflation is a good thing, in the Trumpist book, at least.

If folks are looking for new stuff to lay on Biden, a lot of bad stuff could happen before the mid-term election: Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for instance. Or more rocket tests from Kim Jong-un. Or another, even deadlier variant of the Covid virus.

Or the president could get lucky: Maybe the Army's vaccine against both SARS viruses—and all their variants—could lead to a crushing defeat for Covid.

I'm thinking Joe Biden might slurp up a little credit for things like this.

Maybe it could offset the blame he gets for stuff he has no control over.

TELLING THE TRUTH

How do you know when someone is telling the truth?

If the statement in question concerns something you know nothing about, you may have to do some research. Which is tricky, because if you go to the wrong sites on the Internet, you might verify somebody's ridiculous position by listening to somebody else's effed-up lies.

And that could lead you down the proverbial garden path, which intersects neatly with the one paved with good intentions: Welcome to Hell, Bubba!

But maybe you won't have to do any research.

The easiest way to tell if someone is truthful is if they're saying something you already know to be true. You have now not only verified the statement, by extension you have gone a long way toward verifying the person making the statement. At the very least, the next thing the guy says will inspire a lot less skepticism.

You also may have unknowingly stepped off a cliff, and it's a long way down.

Here's the problem: You're a human being, which is almost never a good thing.

Because human beings are the stupidest, meanest, and craziest creatures in the Universe, as far as anybody knows.

It's What's Wrong With Us.

Humans are the ones who think they know things. Unfortunately, they're almost always wrong. Worse, they virtually never find out they're wrong. Everywhere they look, they see proof that everything in their head is true.

Or so it seems. Good enough for human work, at least.

See, it's easy to know when other people are full of crap. We just don't have nearly as good a track record when it comes to sussing out our own fragrant pile of faulty knowledge.

If somebody says something you already believe to be true, it's likely they're packed with the same brand of crap that resides in your own rotten melon. Consequently, you've learned nothing about the veracity of the speaker. Which means your new-found confidence in the guy is entirely misplaced.

Let's take Donald Trump, for instance.

I have often heard his loyal followers say they like him because he tells the truth. That's a statement on an almost infinite level of balderdash. The man is carved out of a single block of living crap.

Can his followers be that stupid?

Of course they can. In fact, we're born to it.

But I think what's really happening is that Donald Trump is spouting nonsense that matches—or at least rhymes with—the crap that already exists within the listener's rancid brain.

They're all full of the same damned crap!

Maybe politicians know this, and exploit it. Or maybe they just instinctively act this way. They stand in front of the cameras and spout their crap and see what happens. If their crap is popular, they move ahead and gain power.

And that is incredibly dangerous. It's how you end up with a siege at the Capitol. Stuff like that.

This whole problem began with a flaw in the democratic process engendered by eighteenth century communications.

The basic idea of representative government is that some guy will sit in a room in the Capitol and do what you tell him to do. He represents you in that room. It shouldn't matter what his opinion is on the subject at hand. He's supposed to do what the folks back home want him to do.

But what if he can't find out in time what you want him to do?

Bad roads, lack of telegraphs, etc., old-time technology, all of it disconnects the people from the people's representatives.

How do we solve this dilemma?

We hold elections and let potential representatives blab our their opinions on various issues. We pick the one most like us and let the guy do what he thinks best under whatever circumstances come up in that room, stuff we don't find out about until it's all over.

We can't tell him what to do, so we have to trust him to be the same guy we elected. We have to trust he isn't swayed by lobbyists, and so forth.

Up comes a refinement: political parties.

Vote for the party of your choice, and trust the party leaders will insure the stuff gets done right. They can literally use their Whip to make it happen.

Unfortunately, politics is a supremely blunt instrument.

And at base, it's still all about a match between the crap in your head and the crap in the representative's head (or his adherence to the party's crap agenda).

It's still just crap. Human crap, which is some of the most corrosive material there is.

And there's no guarantee this crap is lined up with the best interests of the country. Don't forget, Germans elected Hitler's party.

Two cheers for democracy!