In another sweeping, innovative move of MEGA-MAGA proportions, the Trump administration has announced the creation of yet another sovereign fund. The new Solar Fusion Navelgaze initiative, funded with hundreds of billions of Almighty Dollars, will run in tandem with his previously ballyhooed artificially intelligent Stargate naval-gazing initiative.

"This is going to be huger than huge," Mr. Trump told the press with his accustomed modesty and boosterish ahistoricity.

"It's going to be so much bigger than the Manhattan Project that led to the defeat of Communist China in World War I; a lot bigger and bolder than the Club Med resort we're gonna build in Gaza (once we ethnically cleanse all those Palestinian squatters and deport them to Haiti, of course); it will be more liberating than D-Day 1941 when American soldiers landed on the beaches of Switzerland and single-handedly liberated the Bolshevik death-camps run by the USSR; it will be more earth-shattering than Joe Biden's invasion of America by billions of illegal Japanese beetles; it will be incredibly more incredible than the American Anschluss of Greenland, Canada, Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938; and even more momentous than my executive order to ban paper soda straws!"

Because the future is plastic! Literally. We are drowning in plastic, plus a lot of other toxic "forevers," medical and biological detritus, and toxic chemicals. Not to mention political garbage!

According to a recent article in Nature, less than a quarter of the plastic products produced annually gets recycled. The vast majority of the stuff is simply trashed or incinerated. Even in environmentally friendly cities on the West Coast, recycling programs have stalled as traditional markets for waste paper and glass have dried up. In a move deemed unfriendly toward MAGA 'merica, even China has put a stop to accepting any more of America's garbage.

"In my opinion," said President Trump in a recent post at Truth Social, "failing to accept America's trash is as bad as refusing to use the American dollar for business. We're going to put a stop to it just like I ordered the Treasury to stop issuing pennies whose metal content alone is now worth more than the cost of minting them. Now, you might think that's an example of extreme inflation and the debasement of the currency, but it's really just a cost-saving measure [as well as an example of extreme inflation and debasement of the currency].

"But," Mr. Trump continued. "America is exceptional. We are exceptionally exceptional and we're going to force everyone around the globe to take our garbage and the U.S. dollar... or all Hell's gonna break lose!"

Pollution... including plastic, chemical, and ideological... is likely to get worse.

In just a few more decades, the world will produce much more - upwards of 1 billion tons of unrecycled plastic waste annually. Unfortunately, the current technology for recycling plastic is finicky at best, and energy-intensive at worst. In many ways, the western model of "recycling" is an optical illusion: much of the waste is simply externalized - just like the United States' national debt is externalized by selling Treasury bills and bonds to foreign and domestic creditors.

The physical garbage - as contrasted with the financial garbage that is transported digitally through the various computerized banking and transaction settlement systems - is transported in diesel-gulping container ships to be dumped elsewhere; then buried, burned and minimally picked over by impoverished folks living in Africa and Southeast Asia.

Mr. Trump has approved the process of shipping even more of our trash elsewhere because, in his opinion... except for the United States... the whole world is one big shit hole and they ought to just face that fact and get over it. "Drill, baby, drill!" the President proclaimed while signing off on another ten thousand Executive Orders that made America great again by turning the clock back to the gunboat diplomacy of 1898.

Bill Gates, a recent convert to Trumpism and a major proponent of large-scale philanthropy-capitalism, has suggested a blockbuster Big Science solution to the pollution problem: earth's garbage could simply be incinerated inside the Sun by launching large, one-way dumpster rockets - along with anyone who denies the benevolent intention of his (coincidentally) highly profitable bio-medical and global vaccine philanthropy-capitalism.

Sam Altman, the principal booster of the Stargate AI roadshow and stock market chautauqua, proposed that artificial intelligence, at a cost of only a Bazillion dollars, could also solve the World's pollution problems - in addition to curing cancer, male pattern baldness, the Chicago Cubs, and bad breadth - by simulating digital solutions to environmental problems. The solutions might be mere hallucinations, said Mr. Altman, but people would believe they were real even though they were not. Which is exactly why there are so many pot and liquor stores, psychedelic mushroom vendors, gambling casinos, the NASDAQ and New York stock exchanges, cosmetic and gender-affirming surgical clinics in America. Because where general intelligence is rare and magical thinking common, then, you know, whatever.

Boeing, too, got into the act suggesting that Starliner space shuttles (now available at discount prices on EBay) could be used to transport garbage to the Sun. "Boeing has a lot of experience sending junk into space," texted the company's CEO as he ducked to avoid being hit by a plummeting fuselage plug door that had popped out of a passing jet.

Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), simply observed that the environmental pollution of Earth is so bad that trying to clean it up would be a waste of time and money. Therefore, Mr. Musk said, we ought to just forget about it and colonize Mars.

According to Mr. Musk's plan, the hopelessly polluted Planet Earth should simply be nudged out of its orbit into a gentle spiral trajectory toward the center of the Sun. All of Earth's garbage, along with all of its inhabitants, would be compressed by the Sun's gravity resulting in a barely noticeable solar flare and fusion reaction. That, in turn, would emit clean hydrogen, helium, and a bonanza of carbon-free energy for recharging electric car batteries. Then, said Mr. Musk, Mars could be geo-engineered into the third planet rank where the Earth had previously orbited.

"Elon" (as the planet formerly known as Mars would henceforth be called) would be populated with the newly speciated Musk-quito people who Mr. Musk has already undertaken to breed with his own 14,398 children and millions of sperm-bank donations (the incognito Musk offspring of which are now being raised gratis by childless same-sex and multiply gendered freemartins all around the Neo-liberal West).

* * * * *

Well, I think I have flogged this joke for all it's worth. Still, we're only one year into the second Trump Administration, so there are a lot more jokes to flog.

A year?

Well, okay, it only seems like a year. It's really only been a couple of weeks since inauguration day. At the current pace of Executive Orders, however, it seems much longer.

Donald Trump is really just having a rollicking good time trolling certain "world leaders" and U.S. Democrats who, I agree, need to be trolled. Some Democratic Party honchos (and Republicans, as well) resorted to some of the most dishonest tricks and legal high jinx to derail his campaign. Rule Number One in politics (and in criminal syndicates!) is to reward your supporters and whack your enemies. No one should be surprised that Mr. Trump is paying back his political antagonists in kind. Moreover, he doesn't have to worry about getting reelected and he really doesn't care what happens to the Republican Party in consequence of his shenanigans. After all, most of the Republican donor class hates Mr. Trump as much as the Democratic donor class. And they are pretty much one and the same.

As Mr. Trump has likely concluded, après lui, le déluge!

Or is that après Luigi Mangione, le déluge?

Anyway, all that's happening right now is that Mr. Trump is throwing a bunch of turds up against the wall and waiting to see what sticks.

Mr. Trump's main problem, of course, is that he's rude and crude and brutally honest in saying what he thinks. He's the incarnation of "the Ugly American," a "businessman" who monetizes everything and has no interest in anything except cutting "a deal." As a political architect, Mr. Trump would design "brutalist" government - ugly structures of urban functionality that reflect pure utility and pure profit with zero concern for anyone or anything else.

As I think about it, Mr. Trump reminds me why I studied the humanities in college. I - and perhaps others of my generation - were fed up precisely with the Trump-personality of our mercantile 20th Century. We rejected all of that by getting into art, literature and music. And then we lost the thread. The Vietnam War ended, as did the draft, and we were swept up by waves of hedonism, consumerism, careerism, and consumption. Before we knew what happened, it was the 21st Century and we were right back where we started.

Mr. Trump is honestly boorish, and that's refreshing in a charmless sort of way. His persona certainly displays a Weltanschauung that has characterized the Western World for at least 500 years. He has a two-dimensionality that makes Mr. Trump just a little different from the usual slippery charlatans who hold the reins of power for the ruling class.

The best adjective to describe Donald Trump is the German adjective ungebildet. The word is not easily translated into English. A person is ungebildet who seriously lacks grace, education, subtlety, sensitivity, wisdom, Kultur, politesse, honor, and moderation. Ergo, so many Democrats and neoliberal World Leaders who profess to have these indefinable qualities (but who actually do not) have an intense, visceral dislike for someone like Mr. Trump... because he is such an abject parody of themselves.

Mr. Trump's mindset is quintessentially and repulsively reactionary. It's not that he tries to be that way: he's a natural. Some of his foreign and economic policies are as subtle as a blackjack to the head.

For example, Mr. Trump's partisan zeal for Israel's colonial policies and ethnic cleansing of Palestine is so nasty as to alienate all but the most rabid Zionist.

I mean, I can't think of two more disgustingly barbaric best buds than Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, arm in arm, chuckling about "the mess" in Gaza (that the U.S. and Israel have jointly created) or proposing to deport the surviving Palestinians so that a Club Med Resort can be constructed on their homeland. Ditto Mr. Trump’s "sanctions" on South Africa or the International Criminal Court as a demonstration of his pathological support for Israel and western imperialism. Are you two guys, perhaps, vying to win the top prize in the Reinhard Heydrich "Holocaust" competition?

Smash mouth locker room talk might be the sine qua non of 21st Century American culture, Mr. President, but it is mostly viewed, here and abroad, as imbecilic braggadocio.

In Ukraine, thank goodness Mr. Trump, you managed to end that bloody war in your first 24 hours, as promised.

Wait, you mean that war is still going on?

You know, Mr. President, trying to make "deals" that trade military support in return for the right to loot another country's resources is roughly on the same level as a mafioso don's protection racket. Which, I understand, is no coincidence. Of course, all "diplomats" throughout history have done the same, whether Bismarck, Bonaparte or Boris Johnson. But you, Mr. Trump have completely stripped away the thin velvet of the gloved hand and revealed the naked force of the American fist. Remarkably honest, of course, though I would have preferred a sincere handshake to a punch in the gut.

Likewise, sir, your bullying of Panama, Mexico and Greenland, not to mention your half-ass tariffs on every man, woman and child around the World, look less like diplomacy and more like what it is: thuggery.

Worse, every tariff you impose will, ultimately, be paid by Americans in the form of still higher inflation.

Don, surely you understand that the economic problems in the United States - and they are, indeed, very profound and serious problems - have absolutely nothing to do with China or India or Canada or Mexico or Europe. More than likely, we have been in a world-wide recession since 2008 and the Greater Depression is yet to come.

The U.S. and its oligarchs - completely on their own accord - totally de-industrialized and totally financialized the U.S. economy. This happened because capital wanted to be "free" to move wherever there were profits to be made and cheap labor to exploit. In a word, Don, you and your class let the evil Djinn of "global capital" out of its bottle and you won't ever be able to stuff it back in, with or without tariffs.

Mr. Trump apparently subscribes to the Vince Lombardi school of politics by which "Winning isn't everything; it's the Only Thing!"

Which is just another way of saying it's my way or the highway.

Which is also another way of saying every other nation and the peoples of the world need to organize themselves against the United States and seriously arm themselves with both a delivery system and nuclear weapons.

Thanks, Don. I don't think anyone else could have achieved that world-wide, unifying, eye-opening epiphany in less than 20 days!

But, on the other hand...

Some of Mr. Trump's other undertakings I actually endorse!

The cabinet of the current administration seems like a motley collection of corporate yes men, cowboys, carnival barkers and TV wrestlers. Some, like Ms. Kristi Noem, the new Secretary of Homeland Security and former governor of South Dakota, at least cuts an impressive figure on horseback with a lever rifle in her saddle holster. Others, hmm, not so impressive at all.

Two prospective members of the Trump Administration, however, are exceptional: Robert Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom - like me - are refugees from the Democratic Party.

I have read Mr. Kennedy's muckraking book The Real Anthony Fauci and I find his research and arguments compelling. I look forward to him trying to disentangle the highly vascular relationship between government and the bio-pharmaceutical corporate condominium. I also look forward to a more trust-worthy investigation into the dual use bio-warfare research (funded by our tax dollars) that unleashed Covid, experimental MRNA vaccines, and (probably soon) other genetically engineered pests from Pandora's clandestine laboratories.

As for Ms. Gabbard, as the Director of National Intelligence, she will have her work cut out for her. With a lot of effort and good luck, she might be able, at least minimally, to curry the tangled and matted hair of the various spooky intelligence agencies. Ever since the Eisenhower Administration, these murky entities have increasingly inveigled themselves into every organ of print and electronic communication; every financial entity; every facet of higher education; every aspect of entertainment, law and society - foreign and domestic.

For that reason, I do not criticize the Deep State excavations and bright lights shined on all the dark crevices of the federal government by Elon Musk as DOGE minister without portfolio. I went to law school at Georgetown and lived close by the Capitol Rotunda. In those law school days, when I turned on the lights in my studio apartment... swarms of cockroaches fled in panic. Which, I believe, Washington's corridors of real power also look like when illuminated.

It's not so much a matter of "wasting money" (as Mr. Trump likes to characterize things), but a matter of uprooting the suckers and runners of so much poison ivy. As for agencies like USAID - many of us have known for decades that it was a CIA cut-out, just like various so-called "news" organizations, and so many other "grass roots," NGO and nominally benign groups. One had to be wearing horse blinders not to have seen this. I am sure, however, that these hearty, invasive species will start to root again in the night soil of state government just as soon as the cultivating is done. Still, tending your garden is a never-ending task and one cannot skip the weeding just because you know that the weeds will come back.

Mr. Trump's pardon of the January 6, 2021 "insurrectionists" was, in my opinion, also appropriate and fair. The number of government infiltrators and strange happenings at that curious event suggested a deep entrapment scheme whose obvious target was not the picayune rowdies who were prosecuted, but the vainglorious... and soon to be unemployed... Mr. Trump. Ergo, yet another example of dirty pool played by those whose roles and identities have yet to be disclosed.

* * * * *

I know that Substack uses its algorithms to sort authors by tribal affinities - Democratic posters here, Republican posters there, and little boxes in-between for every other flavor of categorizable, conspiratorial lunacy. But I find all of our political-economic masters more or less conspiratorial, likable, unlikable, disgusting and amusing in equal measure.

Perhaps Mr. Musk is right - tip the Earth into the Sun and unleash the fusion that ends it all.

As for starting over on Mars, however... well, you first, Elon, and let me know how it goes. And, by the way Mr. Musk… I have a list of others to take with you on that first expedition to Mars.

Meanwhile, I think we're better off just staying put on this Planet Earth and making... or, at least, trying to make... all things in all ways at least a little better off.

* * * * *

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Dateline: January 21, 2025.

It was the day after Donald Trump's second inauguration as President of the United States. The leadership team of the World's Greatest Democracy met in secret discussion.

After buzzing around New Jersey's Turnpike and airports for several weeks, Dåscέzyügrъziy 4/5 landed his/her/its/their multicolor blinking space orb on the White House lawn, got out, oozed over and through the walls straight into the Oval Office.

"What the Fuck?" exclaimed Co-Presidents Elon Musk and Donald Trump in tandem as the green hued intelligent blob from the planet Inyagloűpstakt slid into an upholstered arm chair and introduced his/her/its/their self by waving its eye stalks and wriggling its multiple barbed tails.

"Grrrreetiъz Aresideъt Trr-umff and Hister Tsmuzzque," wheezed Dåscέzyügrъziy 4/5 through his frontal beak orifice. "I am Dåscέzyügrъziy 4/5, from the giant slime planet Inyagloűpstakt in the Alcyoneus Galaxy. I/we brigg you greetiggs from our world and wish to, ah... contribute, yes, contribute to, ah, mach Amerika a Crate again. Yes. And again! And again! Congratulations to MACHA, ah, hmm, yes. 'Brat' you say? Very very. Yes. So. Thank you. Brrrrrrr. Pop."

"That's amazing!" exclaimed Elon Musk. "A real space alien! The Alcyoneus Galaxy is 3.5 billion light years from Earth! How long did it take you to get here?"

"Whrrrrrrr. Nggggg. Uuum, so, like, very long time, Hister Tsmmmuzzque. Took, um-mm, eight hours Earth-thing time. Brat. Full autopilot. Use, ahh, solar power. But because batteries run down too low, hah hah. You know. No quick recharge station beyond your Neptune, eh, what, what? Tried to plug into your puny weak sun-star for power recharge, but not too quick. Need fast recharging plug-in for super giant sun. Super giant nova star. Puny earth-thing sun-star way too small for return trip to Inyagloűpstakt in the Alcyoneus Galaxy. You know, I recharge once and earth-thing sun-star gets fully drained, then go very darrrrk, verrrry coooold after single charge-up. Become instant brown dwarf star. You won't like when your own sun-star blinks out and cold to recharge intelligent slime blob spaceship. No sir. Also, take way too long to recharge. Several eons. Use hybrid electric-steam engine instead. Coal powered. Very very. Thank you. Brrrrr. Pop."

"You're an alien?" asked President Trump. "Maybe you haven't heard the news yet, but there's a new sheriff in town and all you aliens are going to be deported back to where you came from! You came here from some giant slimy planet in some kind of galaxy, you say? What kind of a shit-hole world is that? And did you vote for Camel Harris in the last election? Do you have any good golf courses out there? Just asking."

"I am an intelligent blob from the planet Inyagloűpstakt You have visited Inyagloűpstakt in the Alcyoneus Galaxy, Aresideъt Trr-umff?!?!" asked Dåscέzyügrъziy 4/5 incredulously. "My world is ah, ah, yes, one giant hot slime ball. Like you know, psssst, brrrr, mmmmmm, like you ert, ah, ertls, ahhh, ertles, ahhhh... Earth-things, yes, Earth-things... like you Earth-things trying to make on own planet Earth here. Shit-hole. Yes. Hmm. And no. Did not v-v-v-v-vote for Camel Harris, who that is? No, not. Did not. 'What can be unburdened by what has been a bean.' Has bin. Yes? Joy? Lotsa joy! Ah hah hah! Has been a bean! Thank you. Whrrrr. Pop."

"Well, if you're so intelligent, Mr. Blob," said President Trump, "then you damn well better learn to speak better American because from here on out, we're going to force everyone to use Dollars and speak good American and respect American culture and act like Americans. And it doesn't matter what country or planet you come from. Or else! You got that Mr. Alien Blob? And, uh... you blob guys don't happen to have any nuclear weapons, do you?"

"Whrrrrrrr. Nggggg. Uuum, so, like, very understood, Aresideъt Trr-umff. What what? We guyzzz? We are me/us/his/her/it. I am 4/5 of various gender types combined at once. That's why I am named Dåscέzyügrъziy 4/5. Four of Five all rolled into one. Verrrry efficient, yes. But we life-things from Planet Inyagloűpstakt do not have full speaking a-a-a-apparat t-t-t-appara.... ratusususes, like you earth-things. No mouth or larynxxxxx, hmm. Voice box. Not. Have beaks and pharynxxxx, some like you Earth-thing birds, yes, pharynxxx. Swwwwerrrrrreeeet. Like a whistle. Swwwerrrrreeeet. Have much problem with Anglisch, ummm, Engel-isch. Also, no lips. So. No p-p-p-p-p-plllosives like "P-p-p-p-p" as in Aresideъt Trr-umff. Also big big problems with labials like mmmmmmm, as in Hister Tsmmmuzzque. Brrrrr. Pop. And no, no nuclear weapons on Inyagloűpstakt, Aresideъt Trr-umff. That why we called "intelligent" life forms. Ha ha!" Earth-things maybe not so much. Too soon to tell, OK? Brat. Brrrrr. Pop.

The intelligent slime blob extended one of his/her/its/their tentacles and grabbed a dish of cookies off the President's desk. He/she/it/they tipped the cookies onto the floor and ate the plate. "Mmmmm, yes," said Dåscέzyügrъziy 4/5 the Inyagloűpstakt as it wiped porcelain crumbs from its beak. "Good. Wrrrrr. Uh, thank you. Pop."

"Well, why are you here? What do you want?" asked Elon Musk.

"Whrrrrrr. Naaaagggggh. Ooommph. I am intelligent blob. Businessman/woman/thing/corporation. Buy, sell, trade. You know. Ahhhh, bzzzzzz. Make lots of money. Brat. Make a deal. Yes? Whrrrrrr. POP."

Now President Trump's one and a half ears perked up! "A businessman? What kind of business are you in?"

"All kind of busy busy business, Aresideъt Trr-umff. Financial carry trade. Galactic crypto currencies. Develop real estate. Whole solar system and galaxy developments. Uhh, strrrrippp mall. Hah hah! Strrrrrippp mall where earth-planet get strippp-ed. Hah hah! Shopping Center. Housing development. With a-a-a-forrrdable homes. Like chicken coops, hah hah! Yes. Lots of buildings with all look alike a-a-a-forrrdable homes. Cram lots of Earth-things inside look-alike chicken coops. Lots of money make. Hah ha! Very big golf courses, of course, of course. Hmm. Whrrrrr. Brat. We can sell/trade you Greenyaland, Cccccanadaa, Pamamamma and, maybe, Planet Mmars and your Mmmmmooon? If price right. Of course. Of course. We on planet Inyagloűpstakt read in our news blobs that you wanna buy real estate. Yes? For national security, of course, of course. Aha ha ha! If price is right. You can have, uh, national security. Hah hah! Pfzzzzzz. Brrrrrr. Pop.

"Wait a minute," said Elon Musk. "You own Greenland, Canada and Panama? And Mars and the Moon? How is that possible? I thought Denmark owned Greenland."

"Not Denmark. What's a Denmark? I/we own. I/we own them all. All fair and square. Greenyaland is called "Green" land because it was first settled by giant intelligent slime blobs like me, long long time ago. That's why it's "Green" land, not "Whiteland" or "Purpleland," see? Inyagloűpstakt colonists stake out slimy claim to "Greenyaland" when it was truly green, long before Earth-things walk on two legs and drop out of trees. Also what you call Cccccanadaa and Pamamamma.

"Long long ago. I bought rights to Greenyaland, Cccccanadaa and Pamama at charity auction ball. There's more. Brrrrr. Zppppppp. I/we also won title to Mmars and 500,000 Earth-thing years ground lease for Mmmmmooon in Inyagloűpstakt high stakes poker game in galactic gambling casino: 356 card stud. Straight flush. Royal flush, all 356 cards. Quantum luck of the drawer, I/we think you say, yes? Verry lucky I am. Yessir, own 'em all. I have the IOU and deed right here to prove all. Swwwwerrrrrreeeet."

Dåscέzyügrъziy 4/5 from the giant slime planet Inyagloűpstakt in the Alcyoneus Galaxy drew out several rainbow colored shimmering digital documents from his leather attache case. The documents described themselves as deeds of trust and Uniform Commercial Code Article 3 Negotiable Intergalactic IOUs providing him with clear title to Canada, Greenland, Panama, Mars and a 500,000 year ground lease for the Moon. With his multiple slippery tentacles, he/she/it/they waved the deeds and the IOUs in front of President Trump's and Co-president Musk's eager eyes.

"Now," said Dåscέzyügrъziy 4/5, from the giant slime planet Inyagloűpstakt. "What you give mmmmeeee, for right to own, develop and mine Greenyaland, Cccccanadaa, Pamamamma, Mmars and Mmmmmooon." Dåscέzyügrъziy 4/5 paused momentarily and added ominously... "And if you don't want, I go next to China and make a deal, OK? Chinese much easier to speak and read, and much more logical than Angerlisch. Hmmm. Brrrrr. Pop."

Co-presidents Trump and Musk put their heads together and whispered to one another:

"Hey, this alien blob's loony," said President Trump. "And he's also pretty slimy - my kind of business man, you know what I mean? Why don't we offer him a zillion U.S. dollars. You know, between the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury they can print any number of digital dollars in a second! And then, right after we do the deal... we impound his bank accounts just like the EU did to Russia. Then we deport him to, I don't know, Venezuela or France or South Africa! We definitely want to buy the Moon. Think of the luxury hotels we can build up there! And the golf courses! That, plus we can put up on the Moon big neon flashing signs for cars, and beer and whatever. And every time there's a full Moon, you won't be able NOT to see the ads! This could be very very big, very huge, Elon!"

"Nooo," said Elon Musk, "Who cares about the Moon? It's Mars that we want! Let's offer him a zillion dollars worth of Dogecoin! And if he won't take that, maybe we can trade him even up for Denver and San Francisco?"

"Pssst, pssst, psst, psst, psst, psst, etc. etc. and etc, wink, nod, wink, wink, wink and etc......."

President Trump cleared his voice. "Ahem. Mr. Intelligent Blob from wherever. In return for you giving me, ahem, selling to the United States, that is... all rights to Canada, Panama, Greenland, Mars and the Moon, the United States Government will offer to pay you, in annual installment payments at 2% interest over the next 600 years, a half a zillion dollars U.S. - the greatest currency on Earth, mind you, backed by the (ahem) the FULL FAITH AND CREDIT OF THE UNITED STATES - plus 250,000 Dogecoin, all transferred to a completely safe and secure digital escrow wallet held in the Cloud of some computer company working hand-in-glove with the U.S. government - plus Denver, San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, San Francisco and TikTok...

"... and... we'll also throw in a fabulous new ocean view home on Topanga Canyon Boulevard in Pacific Palisades, California. Plus… Justin Trudeau; New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg; Germany's Olaf Scholz and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock; the European Union's Ursula von der Leyen; the Chicago White Sox baseball team; a lifetime supply of very safe and effective Covid19 MRNA vaccines (cough, cough); Mark Zuckerberg; Governor Gavin Newsom; plus... Benjamin Nettanyahu's soul. Of course, we have to discount the price some because, you know, we can't be sure that you really do have clean title to all these places you want to sell us. So, do we have a deal, Mr. Intelligent Blob?"

"No deal," said Dåscέzyügrъziy 4/5, from the giant slime planet Inyagloűpstakt.

"My title to Greenyaland, Cccccanadaa, Pamamamma, Mmars and Mmmmmooon just as good as your title to what you take from local Indians, yes? Way back in beginning. And you buy Alaska from Russian Tsar .... from Russian Tsar? Who'd he buy it from, hmm? No local Inuit owners asked no nothing, right? Or you buying New York from non-owners for a few glass beads. Or you buying Looooos... Looossss.... Louisiana Purchase; big chunk of real estate, you betcha. You buy Louisiana Purchase from N-n-n-Napoleon for pea-pea-peanuts. No local Indians asked no nothing, right? Or stealing Texas and California from Mexico. Stealing Hawaii from Hawaiians. Hah hah! Also, don't want no fake green German Annalena Baerbock. Aha ha! Too funny, yes? And no, don't want U.S. dollars. You make a good joke, Aresideъt Trr-umff! Full faith and credit of the United States! Aha ha ha! You Earth-things always, always, always act in bad faith, break all agreement and have only negative credit. Yes. Aha ha ha. Chicago White Sox base-a-ball team? Aha ha! And Benjamin Nattanyahu soul? You make joke? If you sell his soul, then sale price already discounted, yes?

"Yes, you one verrrry funny man, Aresideъt Trr-umff... I leave now to talk Chinese with Mr. Xi Jinping. Do direct galactic currency exchange through BRICS. No flaky dollalalahs necessary. Very good. Yes?"

"No wait!" shouted Mr. Musk grabbing the blob by two of his/her/its/their tentacles. "What if we also throw in... New York State, Ukraine, Anthony Blinken, Jeff Bezos, Emanuel Macron, Microsoft Corporation, Aaron Rogers and the New York Jets football team, the entire European Union including France and Germany and Lichtenstein, a free year long lease of a Tesla cybertruck... plus the British Parliament, along with the prime minister of Israel and his cabinet, the West Bank of the Jordan, Gaza, the Golan Hights, Beirut, the Pope and the Cathedral of Notre Dame? Whaddya say, Mr. Blob?"

"Hmmm," said Dåscέzyügrъziy 4/5, from the giant slime planet Inyagloűpstakt. "Definitely don't want Ukraine or Anthony Blinken. Not for sure! Not for sure! You also verrrry funny, Hister Tsmuzzque. You throw in, too, original Disneyland, super duper super spooky CIA and Mossad backdoor algorithm for hacking all phones and computers, 100 million cheeseburgers, patent rights for so-called "artificial intelligence " ... now funny idea that, verry funny! Artificial intelligence on ah Planet Earth-thing!... Also lifetime subscription to Hippomuse on Substack, no charge Costco membership, automatic first class upgrade on all airline tickets, vintage 1963 VW Microbus with sticka shift, entire U.S. Suprema Court, City of Las Vegas, winning Power Ball lotto ticket, and all of America south of Río Bravo del Norte or Rio Grande as gringos call it, yes?

"... oh, so I/we don't forget… plus Taylor Swift, Blake Lively and gymnast Olivia Dunne. Maybe then we think about it. Maybe...

"... and you keep Benjamin Nettanyahu and Israeli cabinet. Pfui. Unclean - treif! Also, not West Bank, Gaza, Golan and Beirut. Palestine already promised land to intelligent being of my world. All of Palestine from River to the Sea will be free. That not mean free like "free beer," yes? Long, long, long before this funny planet even cool off. Long before you Earth-things walk on two legs and drop down from trees. The Super Intelligent All Powerful Slime Ball in the Alcyoneus Galaxy promised it so. It is written in slime. From the River to the Sea, Palestine is free. And green. So. Holy book and all that. Our slimy holy book much much holier and slimier than yours. Not negotiable. Everythings else: you takes it or you leaves it. Ummhumm. Swwwwerrrrrreeeet. Brrrr. Brat. Pop.

In the end, after additional spirited negotiations, a lot of eye-rolling, knives in the back, fingers crossed and a clasp of tentacles all around, the parties inked their slimy signatures across the contract documents with proper notarization.

The United States bought the mining and development rights to Canada, Greenland, Panama, Mars and the Moon and gave to the intelligent business blob from the giant slime planet Inyagloűpstakt everything that he/she/it/they had demanded... plus the editorial boards of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Hillary and Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, 2 million tons of anthracite coal to fuel the intelligent blob's spaceship's hybrid electric-steam engine, the entire portfolio of music copyrights issued by the USPTO since 1950, the Royal Academy, Cambridge University, the Egyptian Pyramids, Hollywood, Harvard Business School, Jeffrey Epstein's Kompromat videotapes of the rich and powerful that were impounded years ago by the FBI, and half of the 150% tariff to be collected on the sale or purchase of goods from the West Coast after President Trump constructs his new wall (and moat) sealing off California, Oregon and Washington State from the rest of the USA.

As the new business partners went their own ways, President Trump whispered to Co-President Musk: "What a deal, eh, Elon? The deal of the century! Now, before that rube figures out what's happened, let's get our tech experts to spoof some Chinese spy agency, hack his account and drain it before he can spend a nickel! We'll blame the commies... and we'll get everything without spending anything! The deal of the century!

Dåscέzyügrъziy 4/5, meanwhile, from the giant slime planet Inyagloűpstakt in the Alcyoneus Galaxy, humming and chirping merrily to himself, zipped away in his multicolor blinking space orb. Twiddling his/her/its/their tentacles, the intelligent slime blob headed for the EU capital in Brussels, and thence the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland... where he/she/it/they would offer for sale or trade identical copies of the IOUs and deeds, the development and mining rights, for Greenland, Canada and Panama, Mars and the Moon that he/she/it/they had just sold to the United States.

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Honest.

I wanted to write something Currier & Ives-ish for the holidaze - you know, some mulled false memories with rummy egg nog, horse drawn sleighs, family gathered around the fire place, roasted turkey and all those other yesteryear things that I did not grow up with.

Instead of roast turkey, the big turkeys who rule our world keep bonking me over the head with their rubber pool noodles to remind me just how awful they are no matter the time of year.

I do not doubt that we (collectively) dodged a bullet when Ms. Harris's campaign train derailed on its way to the White House. I know that is a horribly mixed metaphor - mixing bullets and trains - but I like mixed metaphors much as I like bastard rhymes. For that matter, the first quarter of the 21st Century has been nothing but one mangled metaphor and bastard rhyme after another after another, so a few more won't hurt much.

More muddled 21st Century metaphors follow.

Like an AI large (muddled) language model computer program, Kamala Harris was an artificial construct that scraped various delusional memes from the past, transformed them incoherently and presented an assemblage of inanities. But even as we dodged that artificially intelligent bullet, the naturally unintelligent Mr. Trump was already firing off his own delusional cannonballs.

Mr. Biden was senile and Ms. Harris was empty-headed... but could Mr. Trump be insane? Conceivably, that assassin's bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania took out more than just a piece of his ear. Based simply on what he says, might the bullet also have nicked that part of Mr. Trump's brain that controls logic, humility and restraint? Or else, those parts of his mind were always lacking, who knows?

Hmm. Mr. Musk has proposed that politicians should take cognitive dementia tests. Perhaps voters should, too.

No, I am not nostalgic for Joe Biden's presidency nor for the administration of Kamala Harris that never was. Both these folks were controlled by shadowy operatives and profiteering interests pursuing their grubby agendas. For that matter - other than Mr. Lincoln - I have no warm feelings for any past U.S. president. I praise, instead, William Tecumseh Sherman who, refusing a presidential draft at the end of the Civil War, passed the cognition test when he resolutely stated:"If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve." Indeed. Anyone who wants to be president is, ipso facto, cognitively unqualified for the job.

Joe Biden, throughout his four year administration, was stuck in the year 1950. He was a captive of the Cold War and continued to fight it against imaginary Cold War adversaries. The West's "Cold War" adversary was Socialism a/k/a Communism a/k/a Marxism. The Collective West or, rather, its ruling class, has been fighting the specter of Socialism/Communism/Marxism non-stop since 1917. I call it a specter because that is how Karl Marx described it in the opening lines of his Communist Manifesto first published in 1848:

Does this sound familiar?

Substitute NATO or the EU or “the West” for “old Europe.” They are all haunted by this specter - which, by definition, is just an apparition, a ghost, a phantom - even into the 21st Century.

The Cold War, of course, was, in reality, a "hot war." It was only "cold" in nomenclature. It was only "cold" in that the fighting took place elsewhere than in the West. It was "cold" because the Soviet Union and the United States fought indirectly through proxies -- just like today -- and they did not directly engage with their nuclear arms. Just like today.

So far.

However, you would have had a hard time convincing the almost 60,000 American soldiers who died fighting for something-or-other, and the more than 3,000,000 Vietnamese soldiers and civilians who were killed, that the Vietnam War was “cold.” It would have been hard to convince those of my generation who were drafted at age 18, or those waiting for their birthday lottery numbers to be drawn for conscription into the Army (and possible death), that this war was “cold.”

Well, maybe it was cold as in stone cold dead?

The "cold" war in Vietnam was no less warm than the one in Korea where more than 36,000 American soldiers died along with 2,500,000 Koreans from the North and the South. Or the "civil war" in Indonesia that left nearly 500,000 dead. Or the thousands who disappeared in Argentina after the military junta took to tossing dissident students and activists - men and women - out of airplanes into the sea. Or the countless insurgencies, counter-insurgencies and coups in Africa, the Caribbean, Central and South America.

But if Mr. Biden was consumed by his never-ending "Cold War" psychosis, Mr. Trump has reverted even further backwards in time... all the way back to the Spanish-American war and Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders' charge up San Juan Hill.

Fancying himself the new capitalist colossus, Mr. Trump has resurrected the "gunboat diplomacy" of Commodore Matthew Perry who, at the barrel of his steamships' cannons, bluffed and bullied the feudal Shogunate of Japan into accepting "western values."1

Nevertheless, this is why mainstream Democrats and Republicans, neoliberals, neoconservatives and sundry elites of the American bourgeoisie all loathe Mr. Trump: he says in blunt and impolitic words... what they, too, think and they, too, would do... albeit with more finesse and more 'class.'

Class has two meanings, of course.

Mr. Trump belongs to the same socioeconomic ruling class as those who hate him. But he is déclassé, a boor in the sense that the man has no class.

It's the bourgeoisie versus the boorgeoisie!

The Trump-haters prefer the Bismarckian iron hand in the silk glove to Mr. Trump's bare knuckle berserker brawling.

Which is to say, most Democrats and Republicans, and nearly all American elites, disdain Mr. Trump's loutish lack of pretense. They prefer, instead, the polite white dinner gloves of proxy wars, 'color revolutions,' economic exploitation, and freedom from dissenting opinions. They will beat you to a pulp in the name (but just the name) of democracy, trivial pursuits, cultural homogeneity, and the primacy of capital.

To the conquered and cowed, however - Syrians, Libyans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Argentinians, Hawaiians, Inuit, Armenians, Ecuadorians, Haitians, Congolese, Somalians, Basque, Cherokee, or even the average American wage earner - it makes little difference whether your oppressor beats you up with gloved or ungloved fists.

Which is simply to say, judging from its slavish adherence to U.S. foreign and economic policy, that Canada is already America's 51st State and Greenland its 52nd. In deed if not as a matter of law. And if Panama believes it is truly sovereign, it has only to reflect on its own history.

Panama was originally part of Columbia until, in 1903 (during the uber-imperialist reign of President Teddy Roosevelt), the United States engineered Panama's "independence" to enable the United States' control over the Canal Zone. Thereafter, the U.S. casually assassinated one Panamanian president (Omar Torrijos), invaded the country in 1989, and forcibly captured/tried/imprisoned another president (Manuel Noriega) - all for presuming that Panama was other than an American possession. Such has been the historical pattern throughout Central and South America.

Which is simply to say that while Mr. Trump swaggers and blathers his bullying talk, his antagonists dispute not the reality of what he has said, but the fact that he has said it. Because it's all about style and appearances and the fictional narrative; and I really, really cannot stomach either the one or the other, the American bourgeoisie or the American boorgeoisie.

I am still sufficiently naive that I really do want something different and someplace better. If not here, then maybe Mars. Or another galaxy. Or maybe it is a parallel universe someplace.

So I publish these pieces at Substack - howling at the moon perhaps - for myself, for those few who read them and for the archives that save them. I do it, perhaps, only to make a record for those that monitor and record all these things that I - perhaps we? - perhaps just a small minority, perhaps more - do not concur, do not acquiesce, and are not fooled.

Which is why I did not, this holidazed season, write something Currier & Ives-ish with mulled false memories and rummy egg nog, horse drawn sleighs, family gathered around the fire place, roasted turkey and all those other yesteryear things that I did not grow up with. Because all the big turkeys who run this world keep bonking me over the head with their rubber pool noodles reminding me just how awful they are no matter the season.

Have a year. Make it new and better.

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The mourning after the morning after the elections.

It had been a really, really raucous party. Well, more like a wake, than a party.

The music was loud. People screamed. People shouted. People cried.

Confetti and crushed paper cups lie strewn across the floor. Red, white and blue bunting hangs limply from the rafters.

The air has that heavy, stale stink of cigar smoke. There are cigarette butts and buds everywhere.

Empty beer and wine bottles litter the floor. Potato chips and Doritos have been ground into the carpet. There are icky stains on the rug and the upholstery.

You woke up in the morning completely hung over. What a Katzenjammer! Your head was throbbing. Your mouth was dry and pasty.

Where on earth are you? How did you get here? What day of the week is this?

You can barely open your eyes. They are puffy with dark circles. You turn your head... but... What?... Who's that!?!? You woke up in the same bed with... with... Donald Trump!

# # # #

Who won and who lost the 2024 elections?

No one asked me and I didn't express a preference for either Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris. We vote by cohorts in the U.S., which translates into the Electoral College. Washington is, essentially, a one party state and a colonial outpost of California. My vote in national elections doesn't count for much.

However, if I had my druthers, and if they had been Americans running for America's top office, I would have cast my solitary vote for Russia's Mr. Putin, China's Xi Jinping, Mexico's Claudia Scheinbaum, Germany's Sahra Wagenknecht or Syria's Bashar al-Assad. Despite his czarist sensibilities, Mr. Putin is, at least, historically literate and well spoken. Xi Jinping is sincere and humanistic. As is Syria's Mr. Assad. Ms. Scheinbaum and Ms. Wagenknecht are both articulate and intelligent. All of which are qualities, I believe, that fatally disqualify such persons from holding public office in the United States.

So looking at the actual contestants, who really won and lost the US 2024 elections?

WINNER - Donald Trump.

Clearly, Mr. Trump is the big winner. However, the second coming of Donald Trump is not The Second Coming (or even the first, depending on the spiritual opiate to which you are or are not addicted). Nevertheless, the 2024 election was a significant event. Exactly why, I'm not yet sure, except for the strong affirmation of that great American tradition to "THROW DA BUMS OUT!"

And, duh, bring that bum back? Well, whatever.

Those traumatized by Mr. Trump's victory and who have been self-medicating with liquor and sedatives should just get a grip (on something other than their security blankets and teddy bears). Keep in mind that now the Republicans are the incumbent bums who, next time around, can also be thrown out.

Remember this as well: Democracy ≠ Voting.

Democracy means rule by the people (which we clearly do not and never will have), whereas "voting" (as in Western style 'democracies') just means choosing between cobwebbed & spooky "Door A" versus cobwebbed & spooky "Door B." You never really know what monster lurks behind either door until you turn the handle and open one and......

Aaaaaaarrrgggghhhhhhhhh!!!

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Leon Trotsky described "permanent revolution" as a stratagem for advancing the interests of the working class. The less dramatic practice of unelecting the incumbents might be the closest American analog to "permanent revolution." In France, the historical equivalent of "throw da bums out" was the guillotine. But that is another story for another day.

As for Mr. Trump himself, I have never figured out exactly what he stands for, other than his self-perception as a benevolent diamond-studded Daddy Warbucks tycoon looking out for us, the Little Orphan Annies of his comics world.

But, for that matter, neither did the Democratic Party stand for much other than its own comic book vision of the future. While staring reverently at their elitist belly-buttons, the Democrats simply patted themselves on the back for achievements strange and dubious and asserted that they lit the path toward a Hollywood type future.

Such were our choices in 2024! Oh woe is us!

As renegade Democrats Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy correctly observed, the current manifestation of the Party of Camelot is unrecognizable, if not downright nauseating, to anyone who recalls what it once was alleged to be. The same is true in Germany where the Orwellian Green Party, a member of the disintegrating ruling coalition, advocates War as Peace. Apparently, the German Greens support saving the environment through endless military conflict. Meanwhile, the mainstream German "conservative" and "social democrat" parties, the SPD and the CDU/CSU, immolate themselves in an economic auto-da-fé. In the U.K., since the ouster of its last worthwhile leader, Jeremy Corbin, the so-called "Labor Party" of Keir Starmer - just like the Democratic Party in the United States - has practically abandoned its blue collar roots and gotten into the sack with the bourgeoisie.

All of which demonstrates the complete bankruptcy of mainstream political parties in Europe and in the United States. All of which might also explain the allure of a U.S. presidential candidate who, himself, has so often filed for bankruptcy.

Not so very long ago, the Democrats in the U.S. at least pretended to represent the working class. Today, they no longer even pretend. Since the DNC machinations of President Bill Clinton (he who said he felt your pain as he inflicted more of it and cavorted with Jeffrey Epstein), the Democrats have followed the money. They became sycophants of the same pluts and oligarchs as the Republican Party. The Democrats' metamorphosis into a brain-eating party of well-educated zombies has been masked by a revolving kaleidoscope of freakish issues. That constantly revolving kaleidoscope, as intended, vented the accumulating steam of political discontent. It distracted the young, the impressionable and the historically illiterate from any movement that seriously challenged the status quo.

But the same may be true of Mr. Trump, too, who, as a billionaire real estate developer, failed as often as he succeeded. This is a truly odd person to champion the interests of the blue collar MAGA crowd.

Even though his "policies" might make some a little queasy, you have to appreciate Mr. Trump's pluck, his courage under fire (literally) and, his buoyancy. Despite means fair and foul (mostly foul, considering his opponents' assassination attempts and their abject abuse of the legal system), it seemed impossible to keep the Trump rubber ducky submerged in the bathtub. He just kept popping up over and over and over again. Love him or hate him, that kind of tenacity deserves respect. Moreover, the more his opponents tried to drown him, by means fair and foul, the greater Mr. Trump's aura became.

Mr. Trump's domestic enemies (of which he has many) tried to kill him at least twice in 2024 in addition to their countless efforts to discredit and imprison him. In a violent society like the United States, it is conceivable that the same class of powerful people who regularly coordinate the elimination of nonsubmissive and noncompliant people (foreign and domestic) will take another swipe (or two or three) at Mr. Trump.

As is customary in our times, if such a dirty deed happens, it would be immediately and falsely attributed to some hapless "lone wolf;" or to the terrorist flavor of the month; and/or to any one of the usual foreign state punching bags. You know the script, because you've already seen this movie so many times before. Most likely, however, is that Mr. Trump - now that he has been reelected - will forget all about his campaign rhetoric of "draining the swamp" (and probably many of his other campaign promises) and appoint the same old Beltway insiders to his retrograde cabinet. Thus will his next four years endure as the status quo ante until he exits the White House and is forgotten by history.

Here's an interesting note. If the Democrats and the Republican "Never-Trumpers" had not rigged the 2020 election -- which I believe they did; even though, truth be told, there has never been a free/fair/honest one in the United States, and there never will be -- but IF the 2020 election had not been finagled, then Mr. Trump would now be ENDING his second term and a Democrat would likely be sworn in as President in January 2025. Such are the practical jokes of Fate, I guess. Such also is decisive proof of the Democrats' hubris, their overbearing pride and arrogance. But to learn that lesson Democrats needed to have their heads handed to them on an election day platter.

Mr. Trump (version 2.0) is, effectively, a lame duck from the start because he is constitutionally prohibited from running again. That said, for at least the next two years (until the entire House of Representatives is, again, up for election), Mr. Trump will hold reign with majorities in both houses of Congress.

Unless… Mr. Trump repeats the amateur mistakes of his first administration when he filled his cabinet with lunatics, political climbers, incompetents, flatterers, back-stabbers and mad dogs.

LOSER - Ukraine.

Ukraine has been a loser since the western engineered Maidan Square "color revolution" (translation: coup d'etat) in 2014. Mr. Trump has promised to end the brutal NATO-Russia conflict within 24 hours. That was probably just campaign blather. Mr. Trump, in order to prove his personal cojones, may... or may not... lean on the Unbrainians in Kiev to dismount their warhorses and stop slaughtering their own people.

The business class in Europe and the United States, however, do not want to turn off the highly profitable war spigot. For them, Ukraine's resources are what's on the menu for lunch. The neoconservative war hawks here and in Europe still drool deliriously over their fantasy of militarily dismantling non-compliant Russia and China. Because that political-economic class remains Mr. Trump's primary constituent, it is as likely that he will prolong the NATO war in Ukraine as curtail it. Either way, the Ukrainian people lose, so long as they continue to treat "the West" as their savior.

WINNER - Elon Musk.

Mr. Trump and the Republicans won in the Electoral College. They won a majority in the Senate. They won a majority in the House of Representatives. They won the popular vote nationwide. But I doubt that either Mr. Trump or the Republicans would have fared nearly as well without the prominent support of Mr. Musk. Perhaps, without Elon Musk's prominence, the Republicans and Mr. Trump might not have prevailed at all.

I can't say that I like (or dislike) Elon Musk because I've never met him. I applaud many things he says and does. I criticize other things that he says and does.

Still, I respect someone who will jump into a fight wholeheartedly and put both his money AND his mouth on the line. Mr. Musk conspicuously tied his personal fortune (if not his personal safety!) to Mr. Trump's chariot before the race was won. Although the Republicans nailed the Electoral College and the popular vote nationwide, the data for the so-called "battleground states" show that the margins were really close. Really close! Undoubtedly, that margin of success was due, in large measure, to Mr. Musk's dramatic persona, his stunts, his unequivocal commitment, as well as the strategic investment of his campaign contributions.

Mr. Trump, however crappy his judgment has been in selecting subordinates, genuinely admires people wealthier than himself. He also genuinely admires the kind of all-or-nothing chutzpah that Elon Musk displays. Musk will have his reward. His investments in X and in Space-X will be protected. Whether inside or outside the Trump V.2 administration, Mr. Musk will have direct access to and, perhaps, a moderating influence on Mr. Trump.

LOSER - Kamala Harris.

According to the Peter Principle, Ms. Harris had already risen to her highest level of incompetence as Joe Biden's Vice President. It is just as well that she was not promoted to higher office. It would not have been a fun gig for her.

Precisely because Ms. Harris had no personal power base, she would have been at the mercy of a rather ruthless gang of investors and manipulators. They who mercilessly tossed mumbling old Joe Biden under the bus as soon as his "use by date" had expired would have had no compunction about similarly discarding Ms. Harris when she, too, may have become useless. This same pitiless gang sought to force "old and infirm" Justice Sonia Sotomayor to walk the plank because they want the "old and infirm" Joe Biden to appoint someone younger to replace her on the Supreme Court.

Pfui! These 21st Century Democratic Party power-brokers are all about imaging and they are all about power. They would have tossed Franklin Roosevelt overboard because of the "optics" of his paraplegia and his wheel-chair.

I commiserate with Ms. Harris. The Democrats have, after their wipe-out at the polls, now begun to scapegoat her. Paraphrasing Marc Anthony's eulogy of Julius Caesar, the Democrats have come to bury Kamala Harris, not to praise her. They are looking ahead to the next generation of comic book standard-bearers, by which time Ms. Harris will have been tossed by Democrats into the dustbin of broken dreams and promises.

WINNERS - Robert Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard.

Ms. Gabbard is a genuinely intelligent person with charisma. She should have been considered for the Defense Department or the State Department. Ms. Gabbard is both wiser and less obnoxious than many of the Deep State types who will be appointed. As a renegade Democrat who has joined the Republicans, Ms. Gabbard will be trusted by neither party's stalwarts. Notwithstanding his persona as an insightful employer, Mr. Trump has a penchant for hiring idiots, viz. his first administration. I expect him to do the same the second time around, which clearly means that Ms. Gabbard won't be a significant member of the team. I wish her well, however, even as I anticipate that she will be shunted to the sidelines

As for Mr. Kennedy, his quixotic campaign was absolutely sincere, which the Democratic and Republican standard-bearers were not. Significantly, Mr. Kennedy and other third party candidates like Jill Stein from the Greens, received just enough votes in key states to decide the issue for Mr. Trump. Undoubtedly, the Democrats will vilify Mr. Kennedy as another "spoiler," a saboteur a la Ralph Nader, as though certain demographics are OWNED by the Party, and how dare this vote rustler steal THEIR election!

But, in fact, Mr. Kennedy stole nothing from anyone. The dysphoria, the absolute indigestibility of the Democratic Party cuisine ultimately forced some key constituencies to head for the vomitorium. If many could not stomach voting for either mainstream candidate, then they could always cast a ballot for someone who spoke the truth, even if only about healthcare, Covid19 and Big Pharma's MRNA vaccines.

Mr. Kennedy, thus, proved a valuable asset for the Trump campaign and, I suppose, equally as valuable as the service rendered by Elon Musk. In addition to the obvious health-related cabinet possibilities, Mr. Kennedy would make for an interesting (but highly improbable) Attorney General or Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. As we remember, his uncle, John F. Kennedy, proposed to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds..." In response to which, as many have come to understand, the CIA conspired to splinter JFK into pieces and scatter him to the winds.

WINNER - Benjamin Netanyahu.

Mr. Trump definitely will not rein in the Zionist conquistadors in Israel... but neither would have President Harris. As the head of one of the most barbaric governments in modern times, Mr. Netanyahu has played - and blatantly interfered with - the American electoral system. Israeli interest groups have openly stomped all over the 1st Amendment Rights of Americans. They have bullied and slimed universities, their students, the news media, and the Congress. They sought to censor anyone who disagreed with them. In so doing, Mr. Netanyahu essentially saved himself while sacrificing everyone and everything else. And he doesn't give a shit.

Despite Mr. Netanyahu's arrogance and brutality, the new Trump Administration will likely further abet Israel by hammering even harder on the more independent Islamic states (Syria and Iran), by further cheer-leading (or, at least ignoring) Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people, and by additionally greasing the palms of the invertebrate western satraps of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, the PLO and Egypt.

LOSER - the State of Israel.

Mr. Netanyahu personally has won, but Israel has lost. Israel has become a psychologically and politically disassociated state. It has lost its mind as it lost its soul. It has also lost its raison d'etre.

Israel, from its inception, was a European colony. The German Nazis sought to expel and/or exterminate European Jews, just like the Turks sought to expel and exterminate the Armenians from the Ottoman Empire in 1914. Now Israel, like the Germans and the Turks, seeks to expel and exterminate the Palestinians.

Many Europeans enthusiastically collaborated in the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, including citizens of France, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Romania, Ukraine, and Bulgaria. Many of these countries' citizens actively fought on the side of the Nazis in World War II, including French and Italian fascists. Finland's German-allied army willfully collaborated in the deadly siege of Stalingrad from 1941 to 1944. And if neither the U.K. nor the U.S. were allies of Nazi Germany, neither did either of them do much of anything to interfere with the extermination camps that they undoubtedly knew about.

Thus, when the fighting in Europe stopped in 1945, Europe and the United States supported a Zionist solution to the displaced surviving Jews: settle them someplace else.

Zionism was but one of many Jewish ideologies that flew around in 19th Century Europe. Like the brood parasite cuckoo bird, Zionism sought to lay its eggs in another specie’s nest. Then, like the cuckoo, the newly hatched Zionist chick would boot out the native bird eggs. Ironically, Zionism's focus on getting out of Europe and founding a separate existence someplace else is what the Nazis initially sought to do to European Jews before, ultimately, deciding on a policy of genocide.

Where the war victors agreed to send the displaced European Jews was... Palestine. Tragically, the plan to resettle Europe's Jews in a Middle East quasi-European colony came at the expense of indigenous people who, equally ironic, bore no responsibility for the Holocaust.

Judaism is a religion, not an ethnicity, just like Islam, Christianity or Buddhism. The notion of a secular ethnic Jewish state is ridiculous. Israel cannot be the self-proclaimed "Jewish State" and then, by its words and deeds, disgrace the religion of Judaism.

Everybody everywhere is a mutt.

To a greater or lesser degree we are all related. The mitochondria in our cells, with its separate genome, non-sexually reproducing, therefore non-mixing, and closest to what we like to call “pure blood”, are ironically the surest proof of common ancestry via matrilineality. Genes are for mixing, which is precisely what sex is all about. Over the millennia, humans have co-evolved into a complete global mishmash of Denisovans, Neanderthals, Homo Sapiens of every culture and phenotype, and God knows what else. We are a still evolving species that may, or may not, survive into the future.

Israel lost the 2024 elections precisely because in the understanding of a lot of people - particularly younger people worldwide who count the most - Israel has lost its halo and became a pariah among nations. It is just another law-breaker now, a country no better, and often much worse than all the others. It has also shown itself to be weaker than it pretended to be. It cannot defeat a poorly armed popular resistance movement without the extraordinary military and financial support of the United States and without resort to assassination, duplicity and criminality.

The cynic says all the moralizing is irrelevant. Nothing matters, the cynic says, except, at the end of the day, who stands on the top of the hill. To which I respond: that is not true. Empires and kingdoms collapse and disappear. The ancient religious texts from which the Zionists draw their imaginary legitimacy report the same history: hubris leads to a fall. That was the Democratic Party's lesson from the election of 2024 and it is also a lesson for Israel.

Winner or Loser - Palestine?

Since October 2023, many thousands were killed and many thousands lost everything in Gaza. The genocidal pattern repeats itself now in the West Bank and in South Lebanon. The Palestinians clearly lost the 2024 American election because both parties, their coffers brimming with pro-Israel contributions, would offer them nothing, and feckless Islamic states sat on the sidelines. In the near future, however, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can take the Arab-American or the Muslim-American vote for granted. As the 2024 election proved, even small demographic shifts in political support can be decisive.

In the "best" scenario advocated by Kamala Harris, there would be a "cease fire" in Gaza and, possibly, somewhere, some time, some place, a Palestinian Homeland.

But a "cease fire" is a bad joke if it only occurs after Gaza has been bombed to the Stone Age and its people obliterated. Nor would a Palestinian Homeland be anything to shout about if it resembles the Indian Reservations of the American West or a polka-dot South Africa style Bantustan devoid of true sovereignty.

Palestine is a geographic whole that truly does reach from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, including Gaza, South Lebanon, the West Bank and Jordan; and it includes all of the assortment of peoples and religions residing there - Jews, Muslims, Druze, Arabs, Bedouins, Bahai, and Christians - who, undoubtedly, share a common ancestry as well as common cultural and religious roots.

Ultimately, the solution to the Middle East imbroglio is not grounded in 18th Century notions of "statehood" at all, especially not one based on religion or ethnicity. What the Middle East needs is what the whole world needs: not a one state solution, not a two state solution, but a no state solution based on Enlightenment principals that transcend the arbitrary lines of borders and ethnicity.

Winner or Loser - China?

Mr. Trump, like Joe Biden before him, has his head stuck in the Cold War 1950s. Both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are totally ahistorical if not also aliterate. Ms. Harris, in comparison, simply didn't know where her head was which left her at the mercy of her handlers.

Mr. Trump will likely escalate the ongoing assault on China. He professes to be a staunch supporter of capitalism and a virulent antagonist of socialism. Mr. Trump is given to silly anti-socialism burps and jeremiads, just like the current clown-president of Argentina, Javier Milei. Like so many in the western world, Mr. Trump understands neither one "ism" nor the other.

China is not, and never has been a military threat to the United States. It is the United States, and the Western World, that threaten China. People forget (or they never learned) that right up to the mid-20th Century, China was carved up, colonized, humiliated and bullied by every "Great Power" on Earth, including the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Portugal and Japan. But for the Maoists and the Communist Party wrenching China from western domination in 1949, China would still be a downtrodden colonial basket case.

The rhetoric notwithstanding, the American ruling class wants to take China down precisely because it wins as a socialist state playing capitalist poker with the West's own cards and chips.

I expect soon to read more lurid propaganda about fanciful "evidence" that Iran has targeted President Trump for assassination. Or, that China has "hacked" the otherwise "safe and reliable" digital records of American government, the American military and American businesses. In all likelihood, the propagandist accusations will simply project onto others our own agencies' penchant for misdeeds and malefactions. Thus will attention be deflected onto "others" for what "we" ourselves are and have been doing.

We know that throughout history, when times are tough... and we have entered some very, very tough times... political leaders gin up boogeymen and adversaries. A state in crisis needs ENEMIES to rouse the national spirit and patriotic flags to run up the pole and salute. In the Biden Administration, the "enemies" were Russia, Donald Trump... and China. In the Trump Administration, the enemies will be Iran, the Democrats... and China.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

China, not Russia, is the true target of Western machinations. The Russian Revolution ultimately failed because the Soviet Union derailed before the revolution could be fully metabolized. Russia today is not "communist," but an adumbrated federation of state-lets (rather like the early United States was after the War of Independence) ruled, in large part, by capitalist oligarchs, put in place by western financiers. To their chagrin, these oligarchs have not been admitted into the top tier clubs of the western ruling elite. The West covets Russian land and resources, and it is irritated by Russia's refusal to kowtow to the neoliberal cultural agenda. But Russia itself does not represent an existential threat.

China does. China is an existential threat precisely because it is a successful socialist state with its own cultural characteristics, one that embraces a flexible political-economic policy that can accommodate the aspirations of other peoples and cultures. China also demonstrates that it is possible to plan for and implement structural changes to adjust to a global climate that indubitably is in flux. All of which makes the Chinese alternative externally attractive... and a menace to the vestigial colonizing states of Europe and North America.

For that reason alone, China - in the short term - "lost" the American 2024 elections. In the long term, however, it is a contest between capitalism's hierarchical, totalitarian, class-based cupidity versus a more diffused brand of socialism with local characteristics.

Did China come out a "winner" in the 2024 elections? Not in the short run. In the long run, it's just too soon to tell.

Media Winners - Alternative News & Commentary

Legacy media - the major corporate networks, the national newspapers, and their high profile news analysts - all took a sharp kick to their soft corporate buttocks this election cycle. It's a good morning when non-traditional podcast venues such as those hosted by Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson carried greater influence than The New York Times editorial board. I am not always in sync with these podcasters' points of view, but I strongly endorse their right to share them. In any event, it was a matter of life or death for alternative media because, had the Democrats remained in power, it is almost certain that they would have burned the independents at the stake in a 21st Century Inquisition to enforce orthodox narratives suited to their agenda.

The losers, obviously, were the owners of the coordinated corporate media and the old standbys they employ as their mouthpieces: Rachel Maddow, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, the silly ladies of The View, Wolf Blitzer, Van Jones, Joy Reid, Jake Tapper, etc. Also losers were a host of Hollywood movie stars and show biz celebrities whose endorsements, so it seems, carried as little weight as that of The New York Times.

Sundry Winners and Losers.

There were many individual winners and losers in the 2024 elections. Most of them will soon disappear from the public stage: Bill and Hilary Clinton, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Michael Cohen, and others. Their fates shouldn't concern us.

The European Union and NATO are clear losers in the 2024 U.S. elections. I am no fan of either. NATO is simply a projection of the "threat" that it ascribes to others. It should be dissolved as a complete waste of resources. Europe has no one to fear except for the United States who blew up its natural gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea and who sabotages the European economies. The EU is undemocratic, autocratic, bureaucratic and problematic. Its governing counsel mostly fears "populism" of the type that EU wonks equate with Donald Trump. The EU sees Mr. Trump as a contemporary Robespierre carting them off to the political guillotine of popular elections. Hmm. Their nightmare might already be happening in Germany and in France!

The world economy was unaffected by the election of Mr. Trump. Either because of, or despite him, it's about to get worse. The giddy rise of the U.S. stock markets signifies nothing except as the harbinger of more inflation.

Stock markets are like cappuccinos: the cup is small and mostly filled with froth.

# # # # #

Was what happened on Election Day a conservative revolution?

Likely not. My interpretation is that it was more a matter of revulsion than revolution, an anguished cry by the majority of U.S. voters to "Throw da Bums out!" This time, the bums were Democrats. Next time, they will be Republicans.

It's the morning after. Or the mourning after the morning after the elections.

It's a new dawn.

It's the end of the universe.

It's time to hide under the bed.

We are in shock. We are ecstatic. We are despondent.

Relax everyone! Donald Trump represents less a political movement of American style capitalism than a bowel movement of capitalist indigestion. Mr. Trump is a personalty cult, a Party of One. He has no enduring dogma and no coherent theory to bequeath to the future.

The Democrats, too, have no dogma or theory other than the mystical catechism of intersectional gobbledygook. Thus, Democrats, too, turn to personality cults and identity politics that have no more coherent theoretical underpinnings than the Republicans. Thus enters... and exits... the stage: the two dimensional image and powerlessness of Kamala Harris.

When the 2024 elections cycle began in earnest, I tried to research what, in a legal sense, the American political parties actually are. Are the political parties corporations? Partnerships? Limited liability companies? 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations? What exactly are these entities that many of the American Founders inveighed against letting in the door of the newly minted Republic? I found no answer anywhere that made any sense, except for a loosey goosey tradition of people who band together to further their own power and wealth by exploiting the State.

Mr. Trump represents the flailing of western civilization that no more knows what it is than where it is going. The Democrats, for now, are equally clueless.

So am I. But, at least, I understand why I don't understand.

For the moment, however, we are entertained.

Bon voyage. It will be an interesting trip.

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Rather than debate in another choreographed televised debate, the two American political camps opted, instead, to send their champions to compete head-to-head at the Paris Summer Olympics.

Security was tight - tight because the Secret Service had been up all night drinking cognac, curacao, and absinthe electric iced teas. Still, their eyes were steady... almost glazed, in fact... and their aim was sure (although what - or at whom - they might be aiming at was not entirely clear).

The Republican's Team Trump - represented, or course, by Donald Trump - waved to an enthusiastic crowd of paid sycophants as they strode into the main sports pavilion. Mr. Trump wore his trademark dark blue suit and red necktie. He carried an American flag with fifty white dollar signs against a blue background. A contingent of the Basket of Deplorables cast rose petals and hundred dollar bills ahead of his path. Mr. Trump was accompanied by his trainers, his dietitians, his hair colorist, his golf caddie, his script writers, his pollsters, his sons and daughters, several dozen pro-Israel AIPAC lobbyists, Elon Musk, Jamie Dimon, and a horde of defense attorneys, all riding on large and very flatulent elephants. The Republican cavalcade of athletes was followed by enserfed middle and working class taxpayers who had to clean up the detritus and elephant doo.

The Democrats' Team Harris - represented by the ethnically rebranded Kamala Harris - waved to an enthusiastic crowd of her own paid sycophants as she marched into the main sports pavilion wearing her trademark light blue pants suit. A coterie of trans-gendered elementary school children preceded the Harris entourage casting marijuana buds, puberty blockers and shredded dollar bills in her path. Ms. Harris carried a rainbow colored American flag with 50 genders of multi-colored stars against a green background. She was accompanied by her corporate lawyer husband, her trainers, her ventriloquist, her script writers, several dozen pro-Israel AIPAC lobbyists, her pollsters, George Soros, Reid Hoffman, and a horde of trial lawyers all sitting on their very flatulent asses and donkeys. The Democratic cavalcade of athletes was followed by enserfed middle and working class taxpayers who had to sweep up the confetti and the donkey dung.

The two major parties also jointly chipped in to charter a special flight to Paris for third party candidate Robert F. Kennedy's entourage. The chartered jet was a Boeing 737-9 flown by crack pilots - or, rather, pilots on crack - with a special seat reserved for Mr. Kennedy right next to the rear fuselage plug door. When last heard from, the charter flight had made an emergency landing in Kabul, Afghanistan which, by all accounts, is rather distant from Paris. Various government agencies are said to be investigating how Mr. Kennedy's flight mysteriously ended up in the wrong part of the world and why the Boeing 737 rear fuselage plug door did not pop out. In the meanwhile, the State Department has revoked the passports of Mr. Kennedy and his campaign workers leaving all of them stranded in Kabul, at least until January 2025.

The Paris Olympic Games began in earnest. Republicans and Democrats immediately launched into their heavy-weight division mud wrestling competition. The judges quickly determined that it was a draw because once the mud-flinging had begun, neither team could easily be distinguished from the other.

The Republicans and Democrats then entered the gymnastics events, each parties' champions demonstrating their finest contortions, twists and distortions of reality. In the parallel propaganda bars, each parties' representatives tried to portray the other as being responsible for the rapid downward spiral of the American Empire. Ultimately, the audience couldn't figure out the two parties' gymnastics routines at all and simply changed channels to watch "Three Stooges" and "Gilligan's Island" reruns on TV. The gymnastics judges - New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Fox TV commentators and journalists - variously awarded 5.0 or zero (or negative) score cards for every athletic performance, depending on which party's team they were judging.

In track and field, the Republicans Lindsey Graham, John Bolton, William Barr and Nikki Haley set a new world record in Team Truth Vaulting. For some reason, all others participating in this event either disappeared or mysteriously died or conceded (their arms in slings or their faces badly bruised) without even trying. The coach of the Republican truth-vaulters, Mike Pompeo, told reporters that the secret to their success in the Truth Vault, as in all high credibility games, was simply that "we lied, we cheated, we stole."

The Democrats, however, swept all the medals in the synchronized lying competition. The Democrats winning team consisted of Rupert Murdoch (owner of "The Wall Street Journal," "Fox TV," the "NY Post," etc), Jeff Bezos (owner of "The Washington Post"), A.G. Sulzberger (co-owner "The New York Times"), Mark Zuckerberg (majority owner of Facebook), the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, National Public Radio and sundry Hollywood moguls.

By coordinating their political pitches in the press pool, the Democratic synchronized lying team successfully portrayed themselves as champions of the Middle and Working Classes, even though none of them had ever actually encountered someone from the Middle and Working Classes (except as limousine drivers, nannies, valets, cooks, security guards, housemaids and gardeners). The Democratic synchronized lying team also managed to completely sweep the field of contrary opinions and dissent, thereby creating the illusion that everyone, everywhere supports their platform.

In the 400 meter relay race, everyone encountered "technical difficulties." At the outset, Team Trump and Team Harris squabbled over the use of a starting gun. The Republicans demanded that the traditional blank-firing revolver be replaced with a semi-automatic NRA approved AR15 with a large capacity magazine loaded with FMJ 5.56x45 cartridges. The Democrats, on the other hand, demanded that all "guns" of any type and caliber be banned - especially the ones that go "bang" when you pull the trigger - except for those guns carried by security personnel protecting the Democrats' Olympic team.

The Republican relay team was anchored by Donald Trump, of course, but his team-mates Mitt Romney, Mike Pence and Liz Cheney absolutely refused to pass the baton to Mr. Trump. Instead, they ran around in circles and away from him doing their best NOT to let Mr. Trump finish the race. Or even begin it.

Meanwhile, the Democratic 400 meter relay team was equally disorganized as the third runner on the team - Joe Biden - in the next to last leg, started to look around for "his old Olympic team-mate Jesse Owens." Mr. Biden - reputed to have once been the President of the United States - adamantly refused to pass the baton to Kamala Harris. The Democrats previously tried to throw Joe Biden off the team altogether because he had exceeded his "use by" date. In the end, the judges declared both parties' teams "winners" just for showing up and participating, even though neither team finished the relay race in any fashion that could remotely be called free, fair or democratic.

In the Palestinian Child Toss event, both the Republicans and the Democrats fielded the same athlete: Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Republican and Democratic Party spokespersons brushed aside as antisemitic and unpatriotic any "silly questions" how a non-American politician from a foreign country could represent both parties of Team USA.

Mr. Netanyahu, competing simultaneously for Team Harris and Team Trump, then set a world record for tossing tens of thousands of Palestinian children out of their homes and into squalid refugee camps or cemeteries. In his post-awards press conference, Mr. Netanyahu vowed that he would remain the preeminent athlete in this sport until he eventually set a genocidal world record by tossing and ethnically cleansing every single Palestinian from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. The Republicans and Democrats wildly applauded Mr. Netanyahu's athletic prowess as they counted their sackfuls of campaign contributions. The Olympic world audience, however, responded by boycotting, sanctioning and divesting themselves of all other such events featuring the ineffable Mr. Netanyahu.

Another non-American,Volodymyr Zelensky, won a gold medal for the Democrats in the Ukrainian Fencing competition. Although Mr. Zelensky nominally participated as a Democrat, it was widely acknowledged that many Republican Senators also rooted for Mr. Zelensky and voted to give him billions and billions and billions of dollars for continued athletic training.

In Ukrainian Fencing, the players seek to obtain as much sporting equipment as possible and then fence it all on the black market at enormous profit. Fencers in this sport use a special foil called a "racket." In Ukrainian Fencing, everybody "wins" with large kick-backs, bribes and shady under the table payments (such as those paid by Burisima Energy Corporation to Hunter and Joe Biden and the profits earned by American weapons manufacturers) -- excepting, of course, middle and working class taxpayers who have to foot the bills without understanding the rules.

And... speaking of rules... the Olympic Rules Committee, consisting of Antony Blinken, Olaf Scholz, Emmanuel Macron, Ursula von der Leyen, NATO's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the head of the EU Central Bank Christine Lagarde, the United Kingdom's newly befuddled Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Canada's Justin Trudeau jointly proclaimed that the Paris Olympics would be run fairly, honestly and according to a rules-based order where only they knew what the rules were. Accordingly, all Chinese, Russian, Cuban, Palestinian, South African, Nigerian, Malian, Syrian, Libyan, Hungarian, Venezuelan, Iranian, and Yemeni athletes were summarily excluded from winning any prizes based on numerous secret rules, none of which were disclosed or explained.

As to the Chinese Olympics team, however, Mr. Blinken clarified that they had been sanctioned because they were deemed by the United States to be athletically "over-qualified" and "overly capable" as evidenced by the Chinese beating Americans at their own game. Thus, Mr. Blinken explained, China needed to be severely handicapped to render its athletes significantly less competitive than Americans.

"Because. Those are 'The Rules,'" Mr. Blinken said.

Mr. Blinken furthermore explained that the Chinese men should go back to wearing queues, Chinese women should have their feet bound, and Chinese workers should be forced to serve as coolie labor for American, German, French and British imperialists as in the 19th Century. Mr. Blinken additionally demanded that China resume importing and consuming opium, just as in "the good old days" before the Communist Party - in an unfair, anti-western and highly non-competitive act - lifted up the standard of living for all of the Chinese people and created an attractive alternative to the degenerate model of Western capitalist "civilization."

Team China responded to America's Olympic sanctions and trade barriers by winning all of the important sporting competitions in computer chip design, EV and solar power technology, mathematics, robotics, social justice, telecommunications, education, and space exploration.

In Women's Olympic Boxing, biological men who self-identify as women won all the medals after thrashing their female opponents in the ring. Canada's Justin Trudeau and France's Emmanuel Macron cheered the beat-down of women athletes as a victory for "gender equality" (somehow) and that anyone who dissented from this approved opinion was an anti-science homophobic troglodyte who should also be beaten.

Both the Republicans and the Democrats fielded trap and skeet shooting teams. Both parties' shooting teams had practiced earlier in the summer at a shooting range outside Butler, Pennsylvania where they honed their skills taking political target practice. Nevertheless, the coaches of the uni-party joint trap and skeet teams (the coaches' names remain unknown), ultimately decided not to send to the Paris Olympics any shooters who had, in fact, practiced on the Butler, PA firing range. They were struck from the shooting team due to their poor marksmanship and consistently missing the target.

The Paris Pentathlon was canceled after several athletes swimming in the highly polluted Seine River contracted e coli from capitalist fecal matter and scum floating in the water. Emmanuel Macron said that the river scum was just like froth on a cup of cappuccino and completely harmless. So he said.

However, U.S. athletic team doctor, Anthony Fauci, blamed the athletes themselves for failing in advance of their swimming events to get e coli mRNA injections and booster shots (manufactured by certain pharmaceutical companies that had paid royalties to Dr. Fauci). Although several athletes who had taken the mRNA shots suffered heart attacks or strokes, Dr. Fauci denied any causal effect. He said people had to "follow the science" (which he defined as himself). He furthermore pointed out that dead people do not contract diseases, thereby proving the efficacy of the (still experimental) mRNA technology.

The two parties fielded their best athletes in the free style economics competition. Team Trump promised a chicken in every pot, and the abolition of income and inheritance taxes for every billionaire in America... which, Team Trump assured its sporting fans, would trickle down to working serfs everywhere.

Sooner or later.

Some day.

Some how.

Mr. Trump also promised zero interest rates, a gravity-defying stock market and unbridled oil drilling and production notwithstanding global climate change.

Team Harris, on the other hand, promised everyone more pot than chicken along with Weimar style hyper-inflation such that everyone would earn more but could afford less. Team Harris also promised a guaranteed instant college degree for everyone regardless whether he/she/it/they actually attended college, but who could certifiably read at a 3rd grade level and count up to twenty on their toes and fingers (exceptions provided, however, for those with fewer, or more, than twenty toes and fingers).

Ms. Harris outdid Mr. Trump by promising not just zero interest rates, but negative rates that paid voters to borrow money. She also guaranteed a hyper-supercharged stock market that would defy gravity and never ever, ever, ever go down. Ms. Harris also promised to accelerate the electrification of America so that more fracked natural gas produced here could be liquefied and shipped to Europe in large diesel-burning tanker ships to substitute for Russian natural gas that couldn't be delivered because the United States had blown up the Nordstream Baltic Sea pipeline, thereby releasing billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, resulting in increased global warming and the further need to electrify America.

Demonstrating his next move in the free style economics competition, Mr. Trump then promised that in his next administration, every billionaire, no matter what his race, gender, or ethnicity, could afford to live in the waterfront mansion of his or her dreams, and that every billionaire would be able to afford nannies to raise his or her children in comfort and security and send them to the exclusive, private schools of their choice.

Ms. Harris retorted that in her administration, in order to alleviate the shortage of affordable housing, every working class man, woman and infinite variations thereof would have access to brand new 100 square foot shanties made of ticky-tacky that, at current rates of inflation, will still be unaffordable... except to the investor class who would buy them up en mass; and, in turn, would lease out the new ticky-tacky shanties to working class people at exorbitant rents; or simply lease them out as Airbnbs for tourists.

Ms. Harris also promised to import millions of "refugee children" from countries whose economies had been intentionally wrecked by Western economic and imperialist war policy so that these refugee children could be adopted - as pets or domestic servants - by the otherwise childless professional and working class people of America who have no time or money or energy or inclination in a self-destructive society like ours to start and raise their own families.

The Olympic 10 meter high diving competition was won by the Democrats on style points alone because the entire high diving team was already a mile high and cognitively dissociated on ketamine, magic mushrooms and designer hallucinogenics. The Republican high divers (consisting mainly of big-bellied beer-drinkers who imbibe suds other than Bud, of course) insisted that they should have won the event for having made the splashiest, audience soaking synchronized cannon-ball jump while emitting a deafening team burp from the event's high jump.

In the Olympic Marathon, Mr. Trump refused to start the 26 mile race without a golf cart. Ms. Harris (who had not even started the event) deftly jumped in from the sidelines only 100 feet from the finish line and claimed she had won fair and square.

In the final Olympic football match, Team Trump refused to participate unless the judges either changed the name of the game to "soccer" or changed the rules to those used by the National Football League. Mr. Trump said he believed in America First and he would not countenance a "foreign" game of "football" that did not allow players to wear pads and helmets, use their hands, throw passes, punt the ball and gang tackle opposing players. As for the Democrats, they also refused to play the final match unless, in the name of "equity," all of the "soccer" referees were replaced with DEI wheelchair bound blind people of indeterminate gender, and that each team would be awarded any number of goals that they aspired to kick, unencumbered by the matches that they had lost in the past. Or something like that.

The games culminated in the highly anticipated Olympic Vote Stealing competition in which both Republicans and Democrats vied, through fraud or foul play, to interfere with or outright disenfranchise each other's base of registered, unregistered, deceased, under-age, illegal, fictitious, and non-citizen voters. The gold medal competition in Olympic Vote Stealing was postponed to early November due to steadily increasing incidents of voting irregularities in the judging of the Olympic games themselves.

Recently reelected Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro offered to send election monitors to guarantee the integrity of the American Vote Stealing Competition in November, as did Syria's Bashar al-Assad and North Korea's Kim Jong Un. However, Team Trump and Team Harris emphatically rejected their offers on the basis that no one knows better than America what stolen and manipulated elections look like.

At the time of this report, the Democratic Olympic Team announced that it had already won all of the medals in every Olympic event, including those that had not concluded or had yet to begin. By their own count (verified by "experts" appearing on Mainstream Media, Social Media and National Public Radio), the Democratic Team tally included 76,347,398 gold medals, 798,309 silver medals and 2,809,000 bronze medals which, of course, vastly exceeds the total number of legitimate sporting events. In response, the Republican Party Olympic Team issued a press release declaring that the entire Olympics was rigged in favor of the Democrats and, as a result, they were nullifying the games altogether and staging an insurrection.

A rollicking good time was had by all - except for Robert Kennedy's campaign which the Republicans and Democrats jointly agreed should remain stranded and without passports in Afghanistan.

Both Team Trump and Team Harris then decamped Paris and returned to the U.S.A. to resume their respective unsportsmanlike conduct, bare knuckle fisticuffs, political sabotage and TV wrestling.

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"There's Something Happening Here; 
But What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear"

"For What It's Worth," 1967, lyrics by Stephen Stills, performed by the Buffalo Springfield

Nothing much happens during the dog days of summer, except that...

• ... last month, there was a non-debate between two not-yet nominated and remarkably unremarkable presidential candidates ( a "debate" most likely engineered by those who actually wanted to scuttle the campaigns of Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden);

• ... NATO expanded its military boundaries right to the outer limits of Russia and enlisted Asian allies in a similar armed alliance against China;

• ... Benjamin Netanyahu won the dubious prize of an eternal ringside seat in the innermost circle of Dante's Inferno while still trying to drag the U.S. into nuking Iran;

• ... continuing its propaganda war, America resurrected the Chinese scapegoat of the Yellow Peril, pumped up the Cold War and reanimated the McCarthyist Red Scare of the 1940s and 50s;

• ... computerized transnational business and financial systems were bricked by a klutzy cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike, forever after known as Dumbstruck;

• ... there was a palace coup by Party Insiders unhorsing and replacing the incoherent puppet-candidate Joe Biden with the equally incoherent puppet-candidate Kamala Harris;

• ... there was yet another American violent assassination attempt and pre-coup d'etat plotted by mysterious conspirators who, as usual, will never be known or implicated.

Ho Hum.

"There's Something Happening Here; 
But What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear"

It was simpler a few decades ago. You could, kinda, sorta, figure things out. In the pre-digital age, when a scandal or conspiracy was unearthed, the first thing you did was... follow the sound of the shredders.

Ah yes, shredders: back in the days of "paper" when plots were memorialized in "EYES ONLY" documents and hush-hush memorandums stamped SECRET and CONFIDENTIAL, it was no simple task to obliterate all of your fingerprints!

Do you remember the Iran-Contra Scandal during Ronald Reagan's second (senile) term as president? It was one of those convoluted conspiracy schemes by the freedom-loving U.S. in which it sought to a) perpetuate the bloody war between Iran and Iraq by selling American weapons to Tehran while providing poison gas to Baghdad; and b) using the proceeds of the sale of weapons to Iran to fund the AstroTurf counterrevolutionary Contras violently seeking to overthrow the duly elected socialist government in Nicaragua. Democracy, hurrah! Do you remember Fawn Hall - Lt. Col. Oliver North's comely confidential secretary with the Farrah Fawcett hair who testified before Congress that she smuggled out incriminating documents in her clothes? Ms. Hall stated under oath that she shredded so many documents so quickly that the shredding machine jammed!

Nowadays, of course, the conspiracies are as numerous as ever and their objectives are just as evil. Today, the digital tracks of dastardly deeds are easily erased, camouflaged by aliases, masked by "onion routers," spoofed, deep-faked, side-tracked by diversionary and bogus counter-narratives and artificially intelligized to obscure the truth and derail honest inquiry.

Speaking of which... will we ever know what really happened in Butler, Pennsylvania and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump?

Probably not.

It was, undoubtedly, an assassination attempt, notwithstanding the strange efforts of some airheads to deny the fact of the dead and injured. My guess is that if there was one failed effort to (literally) destroy Mr. Trump’s campaign, then there might well be others later on.

The attempted assassination of Trump was ascribed, of course, to yet another crazy "lone wolf." That sounds so much like Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray, n'est-ce pas? The "investigators" (Ha ha! The same organizations over whom a cloud of dark suspicion lies!) have released a slow dribble of anonymous "information" about the mysterious young shooter as though different stories are being vetted for 'credibility.' Thomas Matthew Crooks either had no social media track record and showed no signs of malevolence; or he was a porn-addicted misanthrope seeking fame in murder. Was he a crappy rifleman (like Lee Harvey Oswald, you remember?), or a highly skilled marksman who could hit a flea's chin whisker ten miles away? Was Mr. Crooks an incredibly careful planner? Maybe. But he was spotted, surveilled, targeted, photographed and documented for hours before he purportedly pulled the trigger... as though Mr. Crooks... or someone... wanted to leave no doubt in our minds whatsoever that the 20 year old villainous Mr. Crooks acted alone.

Uh huh.

Mr. Crooks, we were informed, was a newly minted member of the Republican Party who gave to progressive Democratic causes. What is that supposed to mean? He was a solitary, average sort of guy with no inclination toward violence. Or was he a criminal mastermind who stealthily outwitted America's nonpareil bodyguards?

I conjecture that eventually --- eventually --- an "updated" portrait of the young wannabe assassin will emerge as... a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign supporter who refused Covid19 vaccines, who had secretly converted to Islam, who supported Hamas and a free Palestine ("From the River to the Sea," of course!), who was a North Korean computer hacker, who was studying Mandarin Chinese, and who was one of Putin's deep moles planted in rural Western Pennsylvania to sow chaos in our otherwise peaceful, totally fair and impartial and completely democratic elections.

Ahem.

Clearly, the would-be assassin's diabolism was enabled by a circus of Secret Service stumble-bum incompetence. Sure it was. The Secret Service are just a bunch of goofy Keystone Cops who cannot shoot straight.1 Or... the Secret Service was collaborating with other nasty professionals in Butler, PA, all segregated, compartmentalized, isolated in their discrete roles unaware of the complete picture… and whose separate actions were coordinated and directed by the usual suspects.

Hmm. Perhaps we ought to check out the nearby grassy knolls.

In Dallas 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald protested that he was just a patsy and the fall guy for John F. Kennedy's assassination. But he didn't live long enough to explain what he meant and neither did Thomas Matthew Crooks. Dead men tell no tales; and, anyway, we'll never learn the complete story about what happened this month in Butler, Pennsylvania - so, HEY! Your guess is as good as mine and what's on TV tonight?

And speaking of coups d'etat, in July the Democratic Party backroom boys (and girls!) threw Grandpaw Joe under the bus and anointed the clueless marionette Kamala Harris as the Empress of the realm. In the declining years of the Western Roman Empire, emperors rose and fell rapidly. Who knows how long the next Caesar will last before the purple toga is, again, ripped away. In 69 A.D., Rome was wracked by the rapid succession of four Caesars - Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian - as Rome's Deep State equivalent and Power Elites jockeyed to grab the reins of power.

Mr. Biden's magnanimous written abdication and Kamala Harris endorsement letter (authored by persons unknown) was probably Veri-signed while Mr. Biden was being water-boarded and Jill was under house arrest.

"Friends, Romans, Americans," said Mark Antony, the ex officio spokesperson for the Democratic Power Brokers speaking on CNN. "We have come to praise good old Joe... and to bury him."

The ink was still damp on "his" signed renunciation as the Praetorian Guard and the coordinated western media cried "Hail Caesar, All Hail Harris" and deposited oodles of money into the election campaign coffers of the Empress. Away in the White House, the deposed Mr. Biden was heard to croak faintly, "Et tu Kamala? Et tu Barry? Et tu Hillary?"

Are we seeing shades of the Chicago Democratic Party Convention 1968?

1968 was a horrible year.

Martin Luther King was assassinated. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. The Vietnam War was raging on and on. Vietnamese were napalmed and carpet-bombed. American conscript soldiers fought and died for no good reason. They were defending “democracy,” they were told. Just like today.

In 1968, the immensely unpopular President Lyndon Johnson (Hey Hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?) decided not to run for another term of office. Johnson tried to pass the baton to his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey. It was Hubert Humphrey "they" pre-selected, not Robert F. Kennedy because RFK - the charismatic and surging challenger for the Democratic Party nomination - had that same summer just been gunned down by... yet another lone gunman, Sirhan Sirhan. Or so they say. There were riots in Chicago, in and outside of the Convention Center. All the "peace" candidates were, ultimately pushed aside. Like today, the winning "candidate" was chosen by the political-economic machine, the insiders, the wheeler-dealers. He was then duly marketed to the voting public.

"There's Something Happening Here; 
But What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear"

And speaking of elections... we just received our Washington State primary ballots!

Who are these candidates and where did they come from? In national politics, the major candidates are drawn from the ranks of party stalwarts and finger puppets of the ruling class.

Washington, however, is a one party state. The illusion of choice is sustained by a gnat cloud of candidates for every office from Governor to U.S. Senator to the state Supreme Court to local representatives in the state legislature. In several instances, there are gobs of individuals running from the same party. This leads, potentially, to a "general election" in November when the final choice might come down to a choice of plain vanilla ice cream or vanilla ice cream with sprinkles.

The candidates in Washington State fall, generally, into four categories:

First, there are the perennial loonies who run for a different public office every year. Their campaigns range from merely delusional to the certifiably insane. Some are exhibitionists who just like to strut around on the election stage; or they are put-up by others to divert attention to the clown show and away from legitimate issues. Lest you think that is just my imagination, I have actually conversed with one such (arguably normal) candidate whose sole purpose, he confessed, was (at the direction of a certain major political party) to siphon off votes from Candidate B such that the preferred Candidate A would be elected.

Second, there are the inarticulate and incoherent. The voters' pamphlet dutifully prints whatever is submitted without edits or redaction. Thus, many "candidate statements" read like fragmentary streams of consciousness. Or unconsciousness, as the case may be.

Third, there are candidates who (sob) feel compelled to tell their life stories as though the more misery they have personally experienced the better they can manipulate the levers of government. Well, maybe they're right. In any event, these are the folks who want you to know that: a) they are homeless and living on the street; b) that they are alcoholics and/or drug addicts; c) that they are former (or current) residents of the state penitentiary/psychiatric institute for the criminally insane; d) that they were abused as a child/adult/spouse/dog and require ongoing therapy (such as getting elected to public office); e) that they engage in the most twisted form of sexual deviance about which, for some unknown reason, they are 'proud' and demand constitutional rights; f) that they have experienced a mushroom induced vision of the Garden of Eden or some other atavism of religious epiphany; and g) that they fit into all or some variation of the foregoing.

Some of this third category of candidates include their weird, scary photographs in the voter pamphlet. If ever they came canvassing at my house, I would probably slam the door, bar it and pull out the can of bear spray.

A fourth category of candidates are the "legitimate" ones, the incumbents whose written statements are usually no more than a concatenation of party slogans, dog whistles and clichés. They like to portray themselves as "experts" whereas, in reality, they don't know any more than you do. Maybe less. Typically, these are the "elites," the folks who get all the campaign financing and who can pay for all the advertising. Consequently, theirs are the only recognizable names when voters grind through the mail-in ballot trying to figure out which bobble head's bubble to fill in.

I haven't watched TV in 25 years and do not participate in social media, so the advertising is wasted on me. Instead, I scrutinize the candidates' written statements, make informed choices based on the issues and completely strike out in every single election. I don't think I have voted for a winning electoral candidate since Jimmy Carter's first and only term! Nor should anyone running for office actually seek my vote because I appear to be an election Jonah whose endorsement would curse the endorsee with guaranteed failure.

And while we're cruising through the "boring" month of July, did I mention... CrowdStrike's own goal by which this supposed cybersecurity expert managed single-handedly to bring down some of the world's most sophisticated computer networks? Yes, it's that same "CrowdStrike" that played a shady role in "authenticating" the now debunked Russia-Gate filching of Democratic National Committee emails and sending them to WikiLeaks (supposedly to ensure Donald Trump's election victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016). Yes, that CrowdStrike; or ClownStrike; or DumbStruck.

CrowdStrike is a very politically connected company. As a result of "Russia sanctions" imposed by the United States and its cohorts, actual cybersecurity experts like Kapersky Lab have been "banned" in the West. This, in turn, caused many western states and global corporations to use CrowdStrike for their computer security needs, instead. Thus, while CrowdStrike's global customers were smitten with endless boot-loops and system paralysis last week... Russia's computer systems... too sanctioned to use any security but their own... continued to run, completely unaffected by the world-wide computer cataclysm. The history of the world is just full of such sweet ironies!

The CrowdStrike debacle, however, points out the precarity of our highly intertwined digital civilization.

Everything depends on everything else.

Few people actually know how anything works.

Complex (and essential) systems are amazingly fragile.

If the reason for the fall of the Roman Empire remains a subject of some academic debate, I do not doubt that our own 21st Century "civilization" will collapse one day in a Blue Screen of Death occasioned by some corporate mismanagement of its own digital monopoly.

"There's Something Happening Here; 
But What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear"

The German author Alfred Döblin wrote in 1929 near the end of his masterpiece novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, "Wach sein, wach sein, es geht was vor in der Welt. Die Welt is nicht aus Zucker gemacht." Roughly translated, this means "Look out! Pay attention! Something's happening here! The world is not made out of sugar."

No, the world is definitely not made out of sugar.

But, thank goodness, July is a slow and boring time of the year. As I look back on it, I'm not sure I would have wanted any more excitement.

Obviously, something -- a lot -- has been happening. But exactly what? It just ain't clear.

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I didn't listen to Mr. Biden's 2024 State of the Union Address. I haven't listened to any presidents' state of the union speech since the last century.

Instead of listening to or watching these performances, I read the transcripts the next day. When you read a speech, rather than listen to it, you can focus on the salient points and reflect on what was actually said as contrasted with what someone tells you was said the next morning.

I encountered this not infrequently as a 45 year veteran lawyer in civil jury trials. If not arguing an outright inversion of the truth, opposing counsel might engage in corny theatrical stunts or appeal to the lesser demons of prejudice, jingoism and irrationality that lurk in the dark recesses of many peoples' minds and hearts. We lawyers are actually taught this "skill" in the guise of zealous advocacy, truth be damned. I learned the tricks, too. It is a matter of survival.

For better or worse, the tactic frequently works. The 21st Century juror expects an entertaining theater production. Just like voters do. A well-played drama, in combination with repetitive and authoritative argument by a chorus of barking con artists, more often than not subverts reality.

There are probably too many lawyers in Washington DC writing too many hackneyed speeches. There are also too many guileless voters who don't have a clue how they are being played.

Mr. Biden's State of the Union Address was pretty awful stuff. But it was no worse than his predecessors' State of the Union Addresses going back for many decades.

The State of the Union Address today is rather like a publicly traded corporation's annual report - and equally as devoid of substance. Like a corporation's annual report, the purpose of the State of the Union Address is not to inform anyone, but to market a narrative, a narrative designed to pump up the "stock price," to create credibility and to promote "buy-in" for what the corporation is currently selling.

This was no different in the past. But, at least, some speeches years ago -albethey not state of the union addresses - had sincere gravitas, dramatic structure and a genuine appeal to deeper reflection, to wit: Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King's "Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence" (the speech at the Riverside Church that cost him his life).

There was no gravitas, no drama and no depth in Mr. Biden's 2024 State of the Union Address. In my opinion, having read the transcript carefully the following day, the speech was 45% dishonest, 15% disingenuous, 60% insipid, 38% obnoxious, 16% hyperbole and 72% delusional. That adds up to a lot more than 100%, but my math is no worse than what the President's speech-writers concocted.

I have selected just one of Mr. Biden's talking points as an example. In order to aide the starving Palestinians of Gaza whose homes Israel has razed and of whom more than 30,000 non-combatant men, women and children have been slaughtered, Mr. Biden proposes, as a "humanitarian gesture," to build a "temporary port" in Gaza to off-load Army surplus boxed K-rations.

This is theater of the absurd.

The privation of Gaza was deliberately created by America's ally, Israel, using American tax dollars, weapons and technical support to perpetrate the crime. This is among the reasons why, in an act of unbelievable courage, 25 year old U.S. Air Force Specialist Aaron Bushnell immolated himself in an act of protest this year in front of the Israeli embassy. If Mr. Biden really wants to relieve the suffering of the Gazans, then all he need do is cut off all aid to Israel - financial, political and military - immediately. But Mr. Biden - just like Mr. Trump and the entire U.S. Congress - lacks the cohones to do the right thing.

Mr. Biden assures us that the Gazan "port" he will construct is temporary and that no U.S. soldiers will step foot on Gazan soil. He is lying.

In the first place, excepting the fugacious military exit from Afghanistan in 2021, no U.S. constructed base is ever "temporary." We know that, like the 800+ acknowledged military bases that the U.S. operates around the world (a figure that does not include the many "secret" bases and bio-chemical warfare laboratories the U.S. operates), any U.S. port constructed in Gaza will be our pied-à-terre. Once built, it will have to be reinforced, defended from "terrorists" (who usually are our own creations) and, ultimately, made permanent in order to "help" the destitute people whose lives we have helped to destroy. Worse, according to Air Force Major General Patrick Ryder, a spokesperson for the Pentagon, security for the "temporary port" will be provided by none other than Israel, which is like asking the fox to protect the chicken coop. Ultimately, the installation of a U.S. "temporary port," secured by Israel, is precisely the objective sought by Mr. Netanyahu in the first place: tightening the noose around the necks of the Palestinians, enclosing them in a virtual prison camp secured by the Israeli military, leading to the ultimate "voluntary" exodus of the Palestinians from their homeland.

I repeat: Mr. Biden is lying. If he wants to help Palestinians (which he doesn't, and neither does Mr. Trump), then the way to do this is to rein in Israel, hard, fast and permanently.

But don't hold your breath waiting for this to happen.

Like crime syndicates, the two parties routinely reward their cronies and viciously punish their enemies. Mr. Julian Assange, for example, rots in prison for no good reason other that than he has, journalistically, trod on the toes of the Rich and Powerful. Sometimes, however, the crime syndicates also remove their erstwhile friends when they become burdensome. Mr. Jeffrey Epstein is Exhibit 1. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky might soon become Exhibit 2 should he become less a useful tool than an embarrassing obstacle to shifting objectives and story-lines.

Long ago in your American history classes, you learned about "Tammany Hall" and Mayor Daley's Chicago Machine and the Trusts and Corporate Syndicates that controlled the U.S. government in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Well, they are all back. Only the Trust and Syndicates are much bigger and more powerful than ever. The corruption now is also much worse and much deeper than before.

The parasites have learned. And they have organized. Everyone else...we... that is, the parasites' hosts... have neither learned nor organized.

Today, the corruption - in all of the many meanings of that word - is as incurable as a deep and malignant brain tumor.

I have read the bloggers writing about the threat of fascism if Candidate A or B is elected. This is partisan blather based on facile and ahistorical analysis.

Fascism is the merger of big business and the state. Fascism is not the same as Nazism (the merger of authoritarianism with "the basket of deplorables," as Hillary Clinton once put it), although fascism and Nazism are not necessarily antithetical. The "fasces" were the symbol of state power in the Roman Empire. In a fascist state, the oligarchic class owns the government and its government, just like the Roman Senate, represents the interests of the oligarchs. In a "democratic" fascist state, like in the U.S. and in most western industrialized countries today, you see the illusion of democracy and the reality of fascism.

The 2024 election will not decide whether the United States becomes fascist. That is because the United States is a fascist state and it has been one for quite a long time. The 20th Century comedian George Carlin quipped that "Germany lost the Second World War. Fascism won it." But it wasn't a joke. The 2024 election contest is not between "fascism" and "democracy;" rather, it is simply a turf war, a contest to determine which crime syndicate, on behalf of the oligarchs, will win the franchise for the ensuing four years to exploit the plebeians - that is, all the rest of us.

Come November, we will have, presumably, the "choice" between two presidential candidates each packaged differently but representing, more or less, the same class of patricians, i.e. oligarchs. One of the two candidates hallucinates. He talks like it's still the year 1948. The other candidate also hallucinates. He talks like we will return to an America that never was. Both of the two major candidates are mean-spirited, meretricious, unprincipled, venal, and conceited ignoramuses. If I vote at all in November, it will likely be for Robert Kennedy. Alas, Mr. Kennedy has his own quixotic delusion that the tumor can actually be excised without killing the patient. Or him.

There has been much discussion recently about whether the President of the United States should undergo cognitive testing as a prerequisite of holding office. I submit that the test need consist of just one inquiry: anyone who actually wants to be President of the United States fails the examination. Anyone who wants to be President in the current political-economic environment is, ipso facto, not intellectually, psychologically nor cognitively qualified.

Rather than test just the presidential candidates, I submit that we, the general population, should also submit to cognitive testing. Should we continue to complacently and complicitly acquiesce to the status quo, then we will have flunked our own citizenship exam.

* * * * *

January 18, 2024 - A Washington State Superior Court judge dismissed a lawsuit that challenged Donald Trump's right to appear on this state's presidential primary ballot. The lawsuit was based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, enacted in 1868 a few years after the end of the Civil War.

The presidential campaign of 1860 was contentious. There were literally two Democratic parties and two Democratic candidates. The northern Democrats, represented by Stephen Douglas, supported popular sovereignty, that is, the right of any new states to decide by local elections whether to be slave or free. The southern Democrats, let by John Breckinridge, promoted chattel slavery everywhere. Abraham Lincoln ran on the Republican platform of not allowing the extension of slavery westward as a matter of federal policy. A remnant of the Whig Party combined with the Constitutional Unionists and ran on the platform of holding the country together.

Across the Atlantic, factions within the British Empire expectantly watched and waited. The Empire's loss of its American colonies after the War of Independence still smarted. Since that war's end, Britain had supported various armed insurgencies against the United States. As part of the War of 1812, the British military sacked and burned Washington D.C. Like the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War (and like the current NATO proxy war against the Russian Federation), many in Europe saw great business opportunities in the anticipated disintegration of the United States. Although England had previously banned slavery within its own boundaries, it continued to trade manufactured products in exchange for cotton, agricultural and raw materials imported from the slave-holding Confederate States. Thus England in the early 19th Century continued to benefit from the southern states' continued use of slave labor even though slavery was no longer legal in England itself. At the onset of the American Civil War, European vultures circled over the anticipated cadaver of a ripped-apart United States, just as today, Western vultures circle around Russia and China.

The 1860 campaign rhetoric was nasty. Violence was wide-spread, particularly in the border states of Missouri and Kansas where "popular sovereignty" advocates, abolitionists and slave-holders fought pitched battles. Plantation owners from the South brought in armed partisans to intimidate local residents and to stuff the ballot boxes. Kansas and Missouri experienced years of bloody fighting preceding the "formal" Civil War. Though a minority at the time, abolitionists simultaneously pursued a vigorous religious and moral campaign against slavery. John Brown's attempted slave revolt at Harper's Ferry, Virginia in 1859 was a direct result of the pre-civil war. John Brown was consequently hanged for trying to incite an insurrection.

Ultimately, in the 1860 national election, Lincoln won a resounding victory in the Electoral College... but he took just 40% of the popular vote nationwide. Soon after the election of Abraham Lincoln as President, several prominent (but not all) southern military officers and politicians abjured their oaths of allegiance to the Union and defected to the Confederate States of America. Multiple states formally withdrew from the Union even before Lincoln was inaugurated.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was squarely aimed at disqualifying from public office those military officers who, before the Civil War, had sworn allegiance to the United States and subsequently violated their oaths (such as Robert E. Lee).1 It was also directed at various formerly powerful southern politicians in the U.S. House and Senate who, before the Civil War, had run legislative "interference" on behalf of the cause of slavery and who promoted its expansion. The point of Article 3 was to prevent those who had abjured their oaths of office from resuming their military or political careers as though they had never defected to the Confederacy. Perhaps, in part, it was also aimed at the likes of abolitionist revolutionaries like John Brown. Had the 14th Amendment existed one hundred years earlier, then all those who signed the Declaration of Independence, the first five presidents and nearly all of the nation's founders would also have been barred from holding public office, for they were insurrectionists all.

Lincoln won a second term as President. By this time, Lincoln had evolved into an abolitionist, more or less. In his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, Lincoln advocated "malice toward none with charity for all" as the formula to "achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Lincoln was assassinated just 41 days after he announced a policy of national healing. Lincoln's assassination put the kibosh on any notion of a post-war policy of reconciliation. And, indeed, there was no reconciliation, not as to the unreconstructed South nor as to slavery which continued de facto, if not de jure. As William Faulkner observed in his novel Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

Article 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used once before to block a candidate's run for office. Specifically, the Woodrow Wilson administration used it against Victor L. Berger of Wisconsin. Berger was a socialist member of Congress. His opposition to the U.S. entry into World War I led to his conviction under the Espionage Act and that, in turn, led to his political disqualification under Article 3 of the 14th Amendment. Victor Berger's 1918 conviction was eventually overturned three years later by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Wilson administration also prosecuted and imprisoned another prominent socialist, Eugene Debbs, under the same Espionage Act, thereby crippling his presidential campaign (as intended).

Mr. Trump is currently being sued or prosecuted in at least 90 cases. By November 2024, the number of lawsuits and prosecutions against him will have likely doubled. Whether you are a Trump supporter or hater, there is no doubt that every single one of these cases is politically motivated election interference. As the examples of Victor Berger and Eugene Debbs clearly demonstrate, however, prosecuting your political opponents and interfering with the electoral process is as American as apple pie.

Well, maybe rotten apple pie.

In fact, the United States shares august company with many other rotten apple pie baking "democracies" that routinely prosecute, imprison (or assassinate) unapproved political candidates. In Senegal, Ousman Sonko was imprisoned by the current government and disqualified from running for public office because of his support for "insurrectionary movements." In South Korea, the ruling party has sought to prosecute, disqualify and imprison its main political opponent, Lee Jae-myung, on corruption charges. In Ecuador, no sooner did President Rafael Correa (he who granted political asylum to Julian Assange) step down, then his "elected" successor immediately prosecuted Correa for corruption and sentenced him in absentia to prison (thus barring Mr. Correa from ever again running for public office). In Pakistan, former Prime Minister Imran Khan (who voiced strong opposition to American foreign policy) was removed from office in a constitutional coup. Mr. Khan was soon thereafter prosecuted and jailed by the pro-American Pakistani faction, thereby hamstringing Mr. Khan's election campaign. In Ukraine, that stalwart "democracy" championed by the U.S. and NATO, elections have been outright canceled. In Germany, new parties that might challenge the dominance of the mainstream Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats and the Green Party are routinely infiltrated, slandered and taken down.

As for the European Union - that latest attempt by Europe's ruling elites to re-create the Holy Roman Empire (it's likely the 5th such attempt, by my count) - its central ruling body, the European Commission, is not popularly elected at all.

The Washington State case dismissed this month seems to have been a copycat of the Colorado case in which, as you know, Mr. Trump was disqualified from the Colorado primary ballot.

Unlike the Colorado Supreme Court, the Washington State trial court judge determined that she had no power to grant the requested relief. Consequently, the Washington judge dismissed the case "without prejudice." This simply means that another lawsuit could be brought later to disqualify Donald Trump from the November general election ballot, depending on how the U.S. Supreme Court resolves the appeal from the State of Colorado.

It's noteworthy that in both Colorado and in Washington, the petitioners' pleading was specifically to remove Donald Trump from the Republican primary ballot, not the general election. The net effect, of course, would be the same - to disqualify a candidate from the primaries is tantamount to disqualifying that candidate from the general election, too.

Nevertheless, the fact that the petitioners in both Colorado and Washington targeted the Republican primary ballot makes one wonder who, exactly, was trying to get Mr. Trump out of the race, Democrats... or, sub silentio, the Republican donor class... or both.

My guess... and it is just a guess, albeit one well informed by reading the political tea leaves... is that, a lot of well-placed and affluent Republicans would shed crocodile tears over the ballot disqualification of Donald Trump. Privately, many apex Republicans - the Bush/Cheney/Koch/Nikki Haley war hawk faction, for example - would loudly cheer the removal of Donald Trump from the Republican primary.

Ultimately, these primary removal lawsuits are hyped to rile up the crowds sitting in the bleachers. The better question is: why does the State involve itself in any Party's primaries?

In some countries, like Italy and Germany, political parties come and go quite often. In some countries, political parties are actually state-subsidized as a matter of law. If a political party meets certain qualifying thresholds, and if it does not advocate the overthrow of the state, then it can receive taxpayer support. Whether that is or is not a good idea (I rather think it is a bad idea), the United States was mothered in insurrection and revolution. Thus, the American system is purely a free-market, non-state subsidized model of politics. Just like our economy.

Well, not really.

The reality is that we have neither a free market economy nor free market politics, just the facade of both.

In any event, the Republican and Democratic Parties are private organizations. They are NOT governmental bodies. At least, they are not supposed to be appendages of government. Nothing in the Constitution mandates a so-called "two party" system. In fact, "parties" are not even mentioned in the Constitution. Nor, for that matter, is "democracy."

Not long ago, Washington State had multi-layer caucuses, similar to those in Iowa.

I participated in several Washington State Democratic Party caucuses. These were raucous caucuses! And they were fun! Citizens came to the community meetings if they cared to. We verbally tussled, passionately argued and, ultimately, we voted in small neighborhood sessions who or what to support in the general elections, and who or what to oppose. Not everyone came to the caucuses, of course. But anyone who wanted to, could. The caucuses were shining examples of grass-roots politics (even though, as I recall, the precinct leaders sometimes had a hard time accurately tallying the votes if the natives, somehow, backed a candidate not favored by the party muckamucks).

Precisely because they were raucous and fun... the State of Washington eliminated caucusing and, instead, implemented (easier to control) vote-by-mail primaries. The grass was thus mowed down to its roots, democracy be damned.

The word "democracy" is a magic talisman in the Western World. It conjures an illusion of a mythical United States of America that simply isn't, wasn't and never will be.

Whenever people start to bellyache about protecting "our democracy," I ask myself, exactly whose democracy are they talking about, and from whom are they trying to protect it? Probably me. Possibly you.

Back in the beginning, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist debate over whether even to adopt the Constitution made one thing clear: a majority of the Founders were absolutely opposed to anything but the semblance of popular governance. The initial federal structure adopted in the new United States of America (well after the conclusion of the American Revolution) was anything but a "democracy." The right to vote was severely restricted and whole demographics - including women, those without property, slaves and Indians - were simply excluded. The President was not elected by popular vote, but by the House of Representatives. The Senators, in the beginning, were not popularly elected either. Senators were appointed by the various state legislatures. That didn't change until 1913.

Worldwide, there have only been a few, short-lived or uniquely structured democracies. Ancient Athens, as a mini city-state, was a "democracy," kind of, sort of, for a short while; but only the male, land-owning Aristocrats had the right to vote. Slaves, women, Helots, and poor folk were SOL in Athenian "democracy," just as they were in the beginning of the United States. In fact, "democratic" Athens looked a lot like an oligarchy, and it busied itself ostracizing, banishing or "suiciding" those people (like Socrates) who got sideways with the ruling cliques. Does this remind you of any post-modern state you know?

There is still a semblance of grass roots democracy in New England's old town hall meetings. As bracing as they are, town hall meetings are small and local affairs. Likewise, Switzerland's "direct democracy" allows many significant federal issues to be argued and decided directly by referendum. Practically speaking, however, a Swiss-like state with a total population smaller than many cities is probably the outer limit of a functioning direct democracy. Direct democracy requires that you actually know - and trust - your neighbors. Direct democracy requires that you know how to listen as well as yammer, that you have continuity in the community, that you have personal roots backwards in time and an expectation of local rooted-ness into the future. Few, if any, of these qualities exist in 21st Century western digital states where (by design) nomadism, fear and distrust are the rule and not the exception.

The technology absolutely exists to have direct democracy in America and anywhere else. We can vote on everything of importance - whether to fund endless wars in Ukraine, Palestine, Yemen, China, Serbia, Sudan, Libya, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, etc., etc., etc.; whether to ban natural gas stove tops or ICE automobiles; whether to increase or decrease immigration; whether to go to the Moon or to improve our public education. All of this could be decided by simply voting with the click of a button on your cell phone or computer, no Congressional representatives necessary. Likewise, all party members could similarly vote in a national primary (not paid for by taxpayers, of course) simply by pushing thumbs up or thumbs down buttons on almost any digital device.

But we know this is a pipe dream.

Direct digital democracy will inevitably (if not immediately) be corrupted, Trojan-horsed, hijacked, spoofed, spammed, compromised and outright falsified. The only difference between direct digital democracy and the weird system we currently have is that direct digital democracy will be manipulated faster and more efficiently; and those who engage in election interference will be even less accountable than today.2

Ultimately, how we select candidates for elected office begs the question, what are these political parties, anyway? One thing is certain: they are not what their names suggest. The Democratic Party is not democratic and the Republican Party is the party of the plutes, not the republic. The party names are more about a narrative, a brand and marketing shtick than anything real.

The French political-economist Thomas Piketty has (rather verbosely and statistically) described the phenomenon of the modern day party: they nowadays mostly represent the interests of the ownership elites (think World Economic Forum meeting at Davos, Switzerland), or they represent the young, educated and upwardly mobile strata of society that once was described as the bourgeoisie. This was how the Democratic Party, under Bill Clinton's leadership, abandoned the "working class" and embraced the same crowd of monied people as the Republican Party. The Labour Party in the U.K., too, under the tutelage of Tony Blair and now Keir Starmer, has done the same. No political party, says Mr. Piketty, represents the "working" or "middle" classes anymore. Mr. Piketty is correct.

The likely Republican Party nominee for President will be Mr. Trump. Top tier Republicans despise him as much as they disdain his blue collar supporters. But the proles’ votes are absolutely essential for Republicans to regain power, though the party big-wigs might hold their noses. Mr. Trump, for his part, is a multi-billionaire egoist whose campaign, in a mirror image of the Democrats' 2020 election strategy against Donald Trump, consists mostly of not being Joe Biden.

Mr. Biden, the likely Democratic Party nominee for President (for the moment), is running as the conservator of the Green Earth, the champion of reproductive rights, people of color, women, children and democracy. But, the Biden Administration, in its madly inflationary policies and its pursuit of War, War and More War has devastated the Earth, ruined the world economy, turned the U.S. into the No. 1 producer and exporter of fracked fossil fuels, undermined democracy at every turn, and, through its genocidal complicity with Israeli war crimes, killed tens of thousands of Gazan women and children. So much for the reproductive rights of Palestinians, I guess.

Political primaries are strange.

They are somewhat like Igor Stravinski's 1913 ballet the Rite of Spring: a tightly choreographed dance of pagan rituals combined with election-time pep rallies. Like Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, our primaries culminate in human sacrifice -- ours -- at the mock temple of democracy, while nationally dancing ourselves to death.

When the Rite of Spring premiered in Paris in 1913, the audience hated it. They started to scream and hoot and throw things. They rushed the exits to get away.

Watching today's American primaries unfold, I feel the same way.

There is a major crisis brewing in America's news rooms - there are too few forthright journalists, commentators and talk show hosts to satisfy the media ownerships' need to can them.

Julian Assange languishes in U.K.'s Belmarsh prison for having published the truth on Wikileaks.

Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox for rubbing the fur of various plutocrats, politicians and war-mongers the wrong way.

CNN anchor Don Lemon was canned for being, well, too lemony.

NBC fired news commentator Megyn Kelly for speaking her mind (or for having one).

Love 'em or loathe 'em, the ranks of the censored, marginalized, banned or canned spans the political spectrum left, right and center. It includes journalists and commentators like Glenn Greenwald, Seymour Hersh, Chris Cuomo, Charlie Rose and Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams.

The list of those abruptly discharged, purged, black-listed or cast into free speech purgatory is long and lengthening. What's a media mogul to do?

People -- especially little people -- need to know their place and they need to learn that speaking their minds - especially if they diverge from approved narratives - will get them in deep, DEEP, DEEP trouble. That means there must be high-profile examples of free-thinking, opinionated people tarred, feathered, roasted, ridiculed, smeared, decapitated, hanged, burned and debased. Just like all other animals in the animal kingdom, we learn by example, so examples there must be.

"Leaders" throughout history have understood the usefulness of such "teaching moments." Joan of Arc, Guy Fawkes, Spartacus, John Brown, Nat Turner, Giordano Bruno, the Salem "Witches," Hans and Sophie Scholl, Sacco and Vanzetti, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Giroloma Savonarola, Wat Tyler, Akiva ben Yosef, Shireen Abu Akleh, JFK, MLK, RFK - all were taken down for the sake of "order" (that is, maintaining the "rules based order" we hear about so much today)... and as conspicuous warnings to everyone else.

The lesson is that if such well-known personalities can have their livelihoods... and their heads... lopped off, imagine what can happen to you! But with so many high-profile journalists already having been ousted, de-platformed and dehumanized, and with the remaining broadcast bobble-heads keeping their ears low, their mouths zipped up and their tails between their legs, there simply are no more teachable moments possible.

Thus, in desperation, America's news rooms have turned to Hippomuse.

Fox News in particular (or someone spoofing him/her/itself as a representative of Fox News, perhaps?) has reached out to this very Substack subdomain to explore whether that media network can hire yours truly to replace Tucker Carlson... and then immediately get the boot.

Would we kid you about something like this? Of course not!

Indeed, we were offered fifteen minutes' minimum wage (which is about twice as long as a Hippomuse talk show would last!) for this Substack auto-da-fé. Hippomuse's hiring, followed by it's immediate public immolation, would all be for the sake of further demonstrating to all of us cowering masses the valuable lesson to stay in our lane, to stay in our Fox holes and to keep our mouths shut.

Unfortunately, beyond its world wide network of tens of subscribers, Hippomuse isn't necessarily well known to America's living room couch set, nor does it frequently appear on the usual social media platforms. Worse, although Hippomuse clearly does not hew to the approved social, political, and economic scripts, the views it expresses are so far from the mainstream catechism that, without GPS satellites and a map of the Zodiac, it's hard to know exactly where Hippomuse is coming from and where it is going. I mean, what good is a scapegoat if its politics and perspectives are, at best, undefinable and, at worst, incomprehensible? What good is a scapegoat if the scapegoat's scapegoating elicits a universal yawn? No more Hippomuse? Ho hum. I wonder what cute animal videos are on Twitter?

Are Hippomusers Russian propagandists? Chinese Communists? Zoroastrian Iranian apologists? Retro-Jacobin French pastry chefs? Marxist-Autarchic-Hammurabians? Levellers, Lychanthropes and artificially unintelligent Luddites? Leninist-Trumploditic-Crypto-Troglodytes? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Camelotian retro Democrats? Neo-nimby anti-colonial Ailurophiles? Trans-Ugaritic Analphabetics? Fractional Philatelist Lepidopterophobes? Poly-gendered Cephalopod Extraterrestrial Ephebiphobics? Monomythic Allotheists? All and none of the above? No matter - it's far better to sacrifice Freedom of Speech on the alter of social domesticity quickly before anyone - including the speaker - can figure out what on earth someone is saying! After all, in the post-Enlightenment West where the Bill of Rights intersects with plutocratic rentier capitalism, you can freely say whatever you like so long as no one can hear you.

The first step before signing the quarter-hour one-show, terminable at-will contract, the Fox Channel emissary assured us, was to complete the usual grueling, intrusive, humiliating background investigation to confirm that yours truly would be a worthy candidate for subsequent disappearance.

In that regard, news media lawyers have interrogated the innumerable friends, family and former class-mates of all Hippomuse Substack correspondents and writers to confirm, in highly confidential secretly recorded interviews administered under penalty of perjury and the bastinado, which statements were subsequently edited to misstate the facts, that:

1. to the best of their friends', relatives' and former class-mates' knowledge, said Substackers are persons of sufficiently low moral character to aspire to be a craven, high-income, groveling talk show host; that

2. said Substackers had (or had not) "inhaled" while living in college dormitories or while attending sundry rock concerts;

3. whether they were cisgender normies who knew, associated with or traveled in the company of oppositely sexed cisgender normies on one or more occasions without the presence of pronoun chaperones;

4. whether he/she/it/they currently or ever spoke, understood, studied or read any "foreign" languages other than "American;"

5. whether he/she/it/they espoused any officially proscribed wild conspiracy theories versus the officially condoned wild conspiracy theories;

6. whether he/she/it/they exclusively watched mainstream television, dutifully listened to and faithfully worshiped at the alters of NPR, PBS, ABC, MSNBC, BBC, CBC, CNN, Sinclair, and Fox, and trustingly read the gospel published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post;

7. whether he/she/it/they had ever opposed or criticized such crusades for Freedom and Democracy like the Vietnam War, the NATO demolition of Libya, the NATO evisceration of Yugoslavia and Serbia, the U.S. sponsored coup against Chile's Salvador Allende, the promotion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq invasion of Iran, the U.S. invasion of Panama, the occupation of the oil fields of Syria, Iraq Wars One and Two, the occupation of Afghanistan, the current US/UK/NATO proxy war against Russia, the subversion of numerous sovereign states in Central and South America, the destabilization of Northern, Southern, Eastern, Western and Central Africa, etc., etc., etc.;

8. whether any Hippomusers had ever grown a beard and mustache before it became fashionable for men and women to grow beards and mustaches; and

9. whether, while Home on the Range, where the deer and the antelope play, was there ever heard, a discouraging word, about the skies being cloudy all day?

Uh oh, wrong answers???

Well, then! Hippomuse was immediately fired even before it was hired, leading to the fastest a priori broadcast cancellation in television journalism history.

Meanwhile, the critical shortage of boot-ready talk-show hosts persists and the list grows shorter.

They might have to cancel television altogether. What then? We might have to learn to read again!

Horrors!

Notes:

1. Kurt Günther, Der Radionist (Kleinbürger am Radio), 1927,

   Tempera auf Holz, 55 x 49 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie

2. Self-portrait of Charles Keene reading some horrifying news in the paper.

   The Life and Letters of Charles Samuel Keene, 1892,

   Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

   Special Thanks to Old Book Illustrations

A bipartisan group of United States Senators quietly have begun to craft legislation that will simultaneously deal with long-term funding issues for Social Security and provide for increased deliveries of lethal weapons for Ukraine.

According to uninformed confidential sources, several Republican and Democratic Party lawmakers are deeply concerned that unless the federal government pulls even more money out of the otherwise fully funded Social Security account, millions of old and disabled Americans will actually feel secure in retirement. During one of their closed door meetings, Senators Angus King of Maine and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana reportedly expressed grave misgivings that despite the federal government having already "borrowed" more than $1 trillion from Social Security over past years to fund various pork barrel projects for select constituents, the retirement accounts of millions of senior citizens remain solvent.

Speaking confidentially to Hippomuse investigative reporters in a barely audible whisper, one unnamed Utah Senator and former private equity fund manager said: "Financial insecurity is what made this country great! If people believe that they have enough money socked away in secure government accounts to live adequately in their old age, then, well, everyone will just stop working! That road leads straight to the Hell of drug abuse, obesity, China, unmarried sex and Communism!"

The working group of senators has proposed to increase the threshold retirement age to 70 to qualify for social security benefits and to create a sovereign wealth fund that would invest Americans' Social Security money in the stock market.

Unnamed but extremely eminent experts employed by a consortium of banking and Wall Street interests advised the senators that by increasing the retirement age, more Americans will work themselves to death, thus saving the Social Security Administration billions of dollars in pay-outs that could then be used to bolster the stock market. This, in turn, would boost the gross domestic product, especially of the financial sector.

Furthermore, the unnamed eminent experts expertly said, that by borrowing Social Security money and using it to fund weapons research and manufacturing, the federal government could donate even more lethal weapons to Ukraine, thereby increasing patriotic investors' profits which, indirectly, could be used to pay the salaries of septuagenarians who will have to continue working to stay alive (although working at greatly reduced salaries to reflect their decrepitude and reduced productivity). "That, too," said the unnamed eminent Wall Street and banking experts speaking expertly, "would have the additional salutary effect of reducing wage pressures across the board while helping to control inflation."

Senator George Santos from New York's 3rd Congressional District, who is neither a senator nor a member of the working group (but said he was) applauded the idea which he claimed as his own.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also chimed in saying that the proposal to loot Social Security funds was a viable alternative to raising the national debt ceiling. "If we can repeatedly steal oil from Syria, if the EU can seize Russian assets, and if the U.S. can confiscate the gold reserves of Afghanistan's treasury, then I see no reason why working class Americans' Social Security funds cannot also be used to support America's ideals at home and abroad, as we see fit."

From his secure and secret offices deep in the basement of Victoria Nuland's home, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky issued a press release on U.S. State Department stationary supporting the idea of using Americans' Social Security money to fund Ukraine's military.

"Ukraine's security is America's security and that is surely secure," Mr. Zelensky said, adding as an aside: "Because if Russia wins this war, then, soon, all America's children will have to learn Russian and eat boiled cabbage and borsht; and street signs will be rewritten in Cyrillic, so you won't be able to read anything and everyone will get lost trying to get somewhere or other; and you will have to celebrate Karl Marx's birthday instead of Christmas; and your parents and grandparents, just like us in Ukraine, will have to fight Putin's barbarian horde of invaders landing on the beaches of Kansas and Oklahoma. So, yes, your Social Security is our Social Security, and so long as you have any money, we want it, and your kids, too, thank you."

No vote on the proposed legislation is currently scheduled, nor is one anticipated until some Friday at midnight during a major news event distraction as yet to be determined.