It’s easy to be a good person when you’ve got money—so easy, in fact, that it’s a wonder more people with money don’t give it a try….
Belaboring the Obvious
Rum, Buggery, and the Lash
Judging by his extended prance before the nation’s grand assembly of military poobahs this past Tuesday, Secretary of Cosplay Hegseth seems to have decided that Britain’s 18th century royal navy had developed almost the perfect formula for military effectiveness.
He did, however, trim the original just enough to take all the fun out of it, which seemed weird for someone reputed to be both a drunk and a misogynist, but it was perfectly in tune with the Trump administration’s oft expressed infatuation with ignorant belligerence. Oorah! Semper Fi!
What If…
…Putin decides it’s time to drop a 10 megaton ICBM warhead on Quantico while Secretary of War Cosplay Hegseth is lecturing 800 generals and admirals on personal hygiene and lethality make-up essentials? What will the rolling MAGA clownshow have Ms. Leavitt say then?
The Kirk Circus
Everybody has a take. Everybody is deploring, threatening, scribbling cringeworthy hagiographies, lowering flags to half mast, offering up thoughts and prayers.
Charlie Kirk got what he deserved. He got what he’d already said he’d be willing to accept, if not endorse, as collateral damage in pursuit of what he considered to be a vigorous and necessary defense of the second amendment.
He never imagined that he’d be the one with a fatal bullet hole in him. Those would be reserved for Jews, immigrants, black and brown people, gay people, women who refused his benevolent instruction, empathetic people, people who’d read the wrong books, and above all, people who’d had a belly full of his trumpeted triumphs of the will to come, the triumphs that he and his equally deluded buddies were peddling to anyone stupid enough to take them at face value.
Civil society is in abeyance in the US. This was never our fault, but restoring it is nevertheless our duty. We can start by not shedding any tears for this sad, sick, puer aeternus, whose intelligence matured tragically earlier than his wisdom.
La fanciulla del West
Lethality Fashions
Trumpism’s Unspoken Antecedents
Joachim von Ribbentrop for foreign policy
The East India Company for economic policy
Joseph Stalin for scientific policy
The Taliban for social policy
The Spanish Inquisition for jurisprudence
Louis XIV of France for taxation
The Eastern Roman Empire for internal staffing and administration
Memento Mori
Dear Sir,
You’ll be dead soon. What’ll be the use of all that power and money then?
Will it establish and preserve a legacy? I doubt it—ambitious people will come from near and far to piss on a tyrant’s legacy as well as on his grave. Pigeons will shit on his statues, and the funding he leaves behind to have them cleaned will be reinvested in bitcoin by his heirs.
Will it found a dynasty? Carefully managed, it might, but your sons are morons, and despite what you say in public, we know you find them weak and contemptible—imperfect copies of a perfect original. The less said about your daughters the better. They’re old enough now to be as uninteresting and as greedy as your current and former wives, but not as submissive, at least not to you, now you’ve married them off to potential rivals. I mean, really, what point is there in funding the rise of someone else’s dynasty?
I know Janis Joplin once told us to get it while we can, but she was talking about love, not a commodity you’ve ever had much use for, then or now. Let that be your last thought on your way out of here: when the getting was good, you were busy getting the wrong things, and now you’re out of time.
Unbidden Bits—June 12, 2025
Checking my web links this morning, I find that J.D. Vance has also been demanding that Governor Newsom do his job. Unfortunately he thinks that a governor’s job is to lick President Trump’s boots, express contrition for not doing it earlier, and to look the other way while the President conducts a Nazi-style armed invasion of his state, sends the most vulnerable of his people to concentration camps outside the country, and gets his propaganda minister to brag about it on Fox News.
No, J.D., that’s not Governor Newsom’s job, that’s not any state governor’s job. As Trump’s Vice-President, that’s your job. You’re the Toady-In-Chief. My advice to you is to stick to your knitting, and let Governor Newsom get on with the job of defending his people against the sociopath you work for.
Governor Newsom, the Time Is Now
Defend your people. Do your fucking job. If you don’t know how, ask Володимир Зеленський.
Is It Genocide?
Yes.
To call it anything else is to deny the painfully, devastatingly obvious.
Have I, as a citizen of the United States, been complicit in this genocide?
Yes.
To deny it is to pretend that the obligations of citizenship do not apply to me.
Were there provocations? Were they inhumane?
Yes. As true in October, 2023 as in May, 1948.
Do we need to talk about European colonialism, Muslim atavism and xenophobia?
If we’re being honest, yes.
How can a child of the Enlightenment, a citizen of the United States, countenance even the idea of an ethnic state?
Intellectually, not at all. Diplomatically, the wisdom of the principle of live and let live is unavoidable. We should accommodate any religion or ideology which doesn’t demand that we bend the knee to its claims of supremacy. (This absolutely includes Christianity, which has a long history of lethal meddling in other people’s legitimate affairs.)
Can we understand why, 80 years after the Shoah, Israelis feel embattled, feel justified in committing any atrocity which they believe will keep their enemies at bay?
Yes, absolutely.
Can we understand why, 77 years after the Nakba, Palestinians feel abandoned by the rest of the world—as alone as the Jew who once wrote on a Matthausen concentration camp wall, “Wenn es einen Gott gibt, dann soll er mich um Verzeihung bitten!” (“If there is a God, then he ought to beg me for forgiveness!”)?
Yes, absolutely.
Is there any hope of forbearance, of reconciliation here?
None that I can see.
Is this because I’ve become morally and spiritually numb?
Probably. Does this speak well of me?
No.
Can I, will I do better?
Time will tell….