Trump's Solar Stargate Initiative Will Fix Climate Change, Pollution, Paper Soda Straws, Illegal Immigration and Create Gaza Resort Hotels Using Solar Fusion

Why Kill Two Birds With One Stone When You Can Kill Them All?

The Sun, 1909 by Edvard Munch, Oslo University Assembly Hall

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).

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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.

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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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