Tagged: Vladimir Putin

Random Reflections on the Fading Wish Formerly Known As The U.S.A.

President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” has passed the United States Senate, surviving the No votes of the only three Republican senators who are apparently still able to muster a bit of shame. For the GOP, in abject obedience to the MAGA mob and its cult leader, has just produced one of the biggest and most beautiful instantiations of everything that is wrong with...

Trump Bombs: A Few Questions

Donald Trump has decided to follow the lead of Benjamin Netanyahu in bombing Iran, with the purported aim of destroying or at least weakening Iran’s nuclear weapons program. A few questions spring to mind. Everyone knows that a military escapade is the strategic stanch of choice for every political leader bleeding popular support at home. Netanyahu himself has the most obvious vested interest...

Random Reflections On Current Nonsense

Donald Trump attended the G7 economic summit, as American presidents always do. And as Donald Trump always does at such summits — unlike all other American presidents — he used his opening public remarks at the conference to advocate yet again for the interests of Russian “President” Vladimir Putin and to berate America’s major democratic allies for not including and embracing the notably...

When the Slime at the Bottom of Any Old Barrel Is Your King

Donald Trump, proving himself yet again to be the softest of soft tacos, has answered his own recent weakly-uttered and moral-equivalency-diluted half-criticism of Vladimir Putin’s maniacal bloodlust by immediately, and in the most public way, returning to his knees before his master, in the process thereby returning his country, the former United States of America, to the status of unequivocal fellow traveller of,...

The Wrong Side of History

Ukraine has just carried out a stunningly clever military operation at multiple and far-flung locations throughout Russia, successfully destroying a remarkable proportion of Vladimir Putin’s military aircraft at their home bases, before they could be used to inflict more destruction upon Ukraine’s civilian population and infrastructure. This operation was apparently planned and prepared for over a year in secret. It continues in spectacular...

The Logic of Self-Obliteration

Donald Trump continues to insist that the stumbling block to a peace deal in Ukraine is President Zelensky. (Why do I refer to Trump as “Donald” while at the same time referring to the leader of Ukraine as “President Zelensky”? Because I am a Platonist who believes that truth consists primarily in proper definitions. Zelensky is the president of Ukraine. Trump has ceased...

Random Reflections In Vertigo

Sleep tight.– All this, so that seventy million frightened children may dream unto their graves, and finally unto their own private parcel of hell, in the warm cocoon of the most shameful mass delusion in world history. If their idol dies first, what will they do? I almost typed “frightened American children,” but decided not to sully the memory of a great country...

Passing Along A Word That Deaf Ears Will Never Hear

Since my website has essentially become a repository of judgments and reflections that almost no one currently alive on this planet will ever read, let alone care about, why not open it up today for the words of another man in a similar situation, though one whose voice speaks with considerably more practical urgency than mine? His pleas will fall on ears at...

Time Isn’t Money, and Other Facts

I see a headline informing me that Donald Trump is giving a speech to Congress this evening (U.S. time), which I am told I can watch “live.” I am not even remotely tempted. First of all, I have a habit of not listening to Vladimir Putin’s official spokesmen, regardless of which language they happen to be butchering. Second, if you have endlessly mounting...

More Notes From The Rubble

Answers to a few of the near-universal talking points apropos the deliberate Vance-Trump ambush of Volodymyr Zelensky: This was not, not for one second, “a shouting match.” A shouting match is an argument in which both sides are shouting. Zelensky never shouted, never lost his cool, but merely expressed his points with a certain amount of exasperation and animation which were clearly and...