Unless you actually wander through the bizarre social media world of Trump supporters, you will really have no idea just how out there and paranoid their perception of reality is. I was amazed to see that they are becoming increasingly convinced that the London mayor Sadiq Khan has ties to ISIS, the implication being that he was somehow behind the terror attacks. There’s no proof of this whatsoever, of course, but it was a story in Breitbart, which means it must be true. Furthermore, as Trump, like his core followers, gets most of his news from Breitbart, does he think that the mayor of London is affiliated with ISIS? Only tweets will tell.
Author Archives: Brick Wahl
Mad King Donald
Went offline for a few hours and come back and Twitter has gone berserk and Trump has fucked up more than anyone thought possible. Giving away classified information to the Russian foreign minister and Russian ambassador, in front of Russian reporters no less. Imagine being that stupid AND being president. And imagine there were enough people that stupid to vote for him. It’s not like no one knew just how stupid he was. He proved it every single day of the campaign. Most people realized how stupid he was, too, and there were millions more people not stupid enough to vote for him than there were people stupid enough to vote for him. But the dumbfuck gets elected anyway. That is some system we have. The brightest constitutional minds of their time somehow built a device that ensured that eventually the stupidest man ever to run for president would win even if most people didn’t vote for him precisely because they knew he was too stupid to be president. And to think they designed the system to avoid people as stupid as Donald Trump from ever being elected president. Because the brightest constitutional minds of their time knew damn well how disastrous a really stupid head of state could be. Europe was littered with the memories of countries ruined by unbelievably stupid kings. They were determined that would never happen to their new republic. It’s too bad they’ve been dead now for so many hundred years. I’d just love to see the look on their 18th century faces when they saw that the Enlightenment made possible the least enlightened president imaginable. To them it would be inconceivable that a free people could bring forth someone as loutish and thick and ill tempered as the most inbred simpleton ever to sit his fat decadent ass on a throne. Which is how bad a president Donald Trump is. We once rebelled against a king as obnoxiously incompetent as our president is now. Mad King George, they called him. We call ours Mr. President.
Ya know, the Roman Empire did not decline and fall. It did not rot away. It was not even close to rotting away. Indeed, in the fifth century it was doing pretty damn good, its economy thriving, and it was more stable socially and politically than it had been in quite a while. But then the people in charge of its western half made a whole series of really stupid impulsive decisions and suddenly, with little warning, the western Roman Empire was no more. The Eastern Roman Empire lived on another thousand years. They didn’t make the same stupid decisions. There’s a price to paid, sometimes, for putting incredibly stupid people in charge. They fuck shit up.
Mad King Donald is fucking shit up. Impeach him.
You can find fateful political implications even in something as dry as an actuarial table.
Black Americans living longer, but racial gap remains, CDC says. To quote the key line of the CNN piece:
“Although blacks are living longer, a racial disparity remains: The life expectancy of blacks is still four years less than that of whites.”
So you can find fateful political implications even in something as dry as an actuarial table. Because Trump’s margin of victory in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania was so narrow–about 80,000 votes between the three states–that the disparity in life expectancies between white males and black males might have been enough all by itself to give Trump the edge. Basically a white male will statistically vote in one more presidential election than a black male over a lifetime, meaning that of all the 75 year old men who voted in 2012, there was a higher percentage of white 79 year olds voting in 2016 than there were black 79 year olds. When you factor in the fact that older voters have by far the highest voting rate (upwards of 70% among those over 60), losing those departed voters is like losing about two or even three times that number of the youngest voters. They represented a significant loss to Hillary, compounded by the higher turnout that Trump was generating among his own rural white supporters. I’d have to do the math, but I suspect the numbers would show a far more than 80,000 vote spread. More than enough to tip the three states’ electoral votes to Trump. And though I’d have to work the numbers, lots and lots of numbers, I think it’s a distinct possibility that the Trump campaign benefitted from something so dry and obscure as data off an actuarial table. Not the most exciting bit of political analysis, sure, but by such absurdly arcane little demographic blips the course of civilization is changed. Sad.
Why do progressives consider late night television comedians to be great political thinkers?
Why do Progressives consider late night television comedians to be great political thinkers? I mean where the hell did that come from? What part of the concept of show biz do all these Progressives not understand? This celebrity political posturing isn’t real, this is like the Catskills. Just riffing on politics the way professional funny men used to go on about relationships. Do Progressives adore their pronouncements because it’s easier than reading? Less boring than the news? Do Progressives get the same sort of rush out of watching some ham fisted SNL skit that Trump supporters get chanting Lock Her Up? Has it really gotten this lowbrow? Hell, we used to think our parents were dumb but they weren’t watching Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts for political philosophy. They read the papers or watched the evening news. Sometimes it seems like everything is either Network or A Face In the Crowd anymore. Whatever the guy says on TV, we believe. Jimmy Kimmel crying like Al Jolson, give me a break. He’s just another celebrity millionaire pretending he’s one of us. He ain’t. He’s rich. Trump is rich too and he and Kimmel have vastly more in common than does Kimmel and you or I. Fuck the rich, they are the problem, and we sure as hell don’t need to have them to speak and think for us, no matter how funny they think they are.
Roger Stone, 420
Admittedly, mix tapes is way cooler than compilation tapes. Then again, pot wasn’t as strong then and we could say compilation without falling down. Four syllables, that is definitely a two hitter word. Though after the second drag off the Nixon bong (Nixon and tapes, it’s a natural) you’ll forget what the next two syllables were. Stuck at compil. French. Qu’est-ce que c’est? How do you tell a Parisian supermodel you got lost half way through the word compilation? So mix works. Mix tapes. Harsh, sure, without the mellow stoned sibilant halfway through the ashun in compilation, that whispered shhhhh, though you could go faux french and call mix tapes mees tapes. As in Ed Meese. Shhhhh I say again, and a supermodel thinks I mean her. She puts a long delicate finger to her lips and says shhhhh. Of course, back in the day cassette was too long to type if you were stoned so we used to type K7. Two key strokes. Just a one hitter, that. And French again. Ka sept, with a silent p. Ka set. Cassette. First time I saw that I thought it was kay seven. Luckily I didn’t say it out loud, and the Parisian supermodels I was hanging with never knew. They were too busy vogueing anyway. Just about then Lee Atwater showed up with a bag of blues 8 tracks, some Freedom Fries and a shitload of cocaine. What’s with all the Pink Floyd, he bitched. I hit on the Nixon bong again. You don’t like Floyd? It was my Pink Floyd meese tape. I exhaled a blue cloud and a single note repeated, over and over. That same single note. Ninety minutes of Echoes. I must have been high.
Roger Stone’s Happy 420 tweet
Kim and Trump and fire and brimstone
North Korean military doctrine is essentially that of the Soviets of World War 2. The Red Army in that war used artillery like no one else…they’d quietly mass batteries and mobile rocket launchers in numbers not seen anywhere else in WW2 and unleash sudden and astonishingly violent barrages that would stun those under them and pretty much annihilate anything left in the open. They could do this along fronts hundreds of miles wide. There was a German general named Heinrici who became brilliant at guessing just when one of the barrages was imminent and would withdraw his army to a secondary line so that all of the barrage’s violence would fall on empty trenches. But that is not an option the South Koreans have at the moment, since the North Koreans have all their artillery trained on Seoul.
It’s a lot of artillery, too, hundreds if not thousands of very large caliber guns, dug into deeply fortified batteries–a Japanese specialty in WW2, that one, and probably also studied by the North Koreans–and each fortified battery would probably require bunker busting bombs to destroy them. My concern is that if North Korea were to respond to any US attack by opening up on Seoul as they have been promising for decades–it’s their variety of Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.), you attack us, we destroy Seoul–that the bombardment will be massive and incredibly violent in a way that only those who have been subjected to one would appreciate. Which limits those who have subjected to one to Germans and their Eastern Front allies, or the Japanese in Manchuria in 1945, and all them are long dead and not being interviewed on the news.
Which means that the Mutually Assured Destruction value of having hundreds or very large cannon and rocket launchers trained on the city of Seoul doesn’t really hold if people in charge on the other side cannot fathom just how incredibly destructive an old fashioned WW2 style Red Army artillery bombardment could be. We don’t have those in war anymore. For one thing, armies are much smaller now, and battlefields ar smaller, and wars much smaller. Wars aren’t even as big as they were a generation ago. In fact what makes the Syria War so destructive despite the relatively small numbers of combatants involved (maybe half a million of all sorts from regulars to occasional militia; the Iran-Iraq War involved two million full time soldiers) is the combination of a Syrian military completely steeped in classic Soviet military doctrine–hence the destructive overkill–assisted by the Russians themselves, doing to Aleppo what they did to Grozny. Not that this should have been unexpected. Back in the 1980’s the Muslim Brotherhood in the Syrian city of Hama rebelled, and Assad’s dictator father Hafez Assad (imagine a meaner Bashar Assad) ringed the city with hundreds of the heavy artillery batteries the Soviets has given him to fight Israel and pounded it into submission for a solid month with a violence that surpassed even Aleppo, which, after all, took years to obtain the same result. (They also leveled buildings with tanks, and filled the sewers with diesel and set them aflame.) Even quashing a rebellion was sometimes done in much bigger ways a generation ago.
But we think smaller now. The US drops a non-nuclear bomb a zillionth the size of the bomb that flattened Hiroshima and social media is in hysterics thinking the end of the world is upon us. This was one big scary bomb, but not an atomic bomb. A hundred years ago they dug mines under the opposing trenches and filled them with TNT and blew enormous holes in the ground with vastly more explosive power than in Mother of All Bombs. And Britain’s giant Grand Slam bomb in WW2 might have been even heavier than the MOAB (they used it to punch holes in the twenty foot thick concrete ceilings of u-boat pens, and the explosions were so powerful it would disturb the ground underneath as well, weakening the foundations. And this was in 1945.) When we obsess and fantasize about a not exactly high tech bomb–it’s not a smart bomb, even, and the Russians have a bomb that is technologically simpler (using the air itself as explosive fuel, a technology invented by the Luftwaffe) and yet four times as powerful–we forget just how destructive an old fashioned massed artillery barrage can be. Just a bunch of big cannons that can fire a shell thirty or forty miles, and have it land within the city of Seoul, population ten million. Add in short range rocket launchers that can be fired from further distances. Admittedly Seoul’s distance from the DMZ is about the limit for heavy artillery and rocket launchers (so the north end of the city will take much more of a beating than the southern end) and we can assume that North Korea has to have their batteries closely packed together within range. So it’s not like they have all of their estimated 8,500 cannons and 5,000 mobile rocket launchers aimed on the South Korean capital. But they have a lot of them there. Yet even if the North Koreans have only 500 guns within range and they only manage twenty rounds each–an hour’s work–before being blown up themselves, that is ten thousand very large high explosive artillery shells landing on Seoul. Which is about the equivalent of a good sized bombing raid in WW2. Or a bombing raid on Pyongyang in the Korean War, for that matter, bombing raids we’ve forgotten about, but the North Koreans haven’t.
The most optimistic estimates, the ones who believe North Korea’s vaunted artillery potential is mostly bluff, say the number of shells landing on Seoul would only be in the high hundreds. Apparently that’s a good thing, only several hundred. The North Koreans themselves promise a rain of fire and brimstone (Kim Il Sung invented brimstone) and the most paranoid of disinterested estimations see hundreds of thousand of shells falling. We can safely say it will be somewhere between several hundred and several thousand shells falling on Seoul, possibly as early as this weekend if Trump is as mad as he likes to pretend he is. I say that given that the North Koreans learned the art of war, as they used to call it, from the military academy in Moscow (Kim Il Sung, like Ho Chi Minh and many of Mao’s generals, was trained there) I think it might be on the safe side to assume that the North Koreans could potentially lay down one hell of an old fashioned long distance heavy artillery barrage on Seoul, like the one the Russians unleashed on Berlin in 1945. And it’s also safe to say that there is nothing the South Koreans can do about it, if Trump really wants to nail Kim Jong-un. Because right now the fate of Seoul is in the hands of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. And you think you are having a bad day.
Spy stuff
Seems to me that if you had to pick one source for all that scary CIA hacking technology dumped on Wikileaks today, it would be the FSB. They had it, made use of it, and are now dumping it on the world through their useful idiot Assange. That is my guess. How they got it, who knows, but I imagine the vast reams of intelligence they got from Edward Snowden could have easily contained the keys (or at least a key) to it all. Snowden had no idea what he had in there. Or maybe he did. But I don’t think he did, for the most part. He’s always struck me as kind of an idiot, spy-wise. A low level functionary with sticky fingers and few scruples about where he stuck them. His real or feigned ignorance alone gives him an air of innocence in some circles, of martyrdom. Abraham, Martin and Ed. Many of us keep treating him and others in this biz like martyrs, like saints for the greater good. But they’re spies. And spies turn. Snowden did. Putin didn’t take him in out of the goodness of his stone cold heart. Snowden was one of the great intelligence assets of our time, the moral equivalent of one of those doofus hedge fund guys who wears a wire in return for immunity when the SEC comes knocking. But he’s no martyr. Martyrs don’t live in nice Moscow apartments with everything paid for by a foreign intelligence service. But that doesn’t mean he necessarily gave the Russians the means to get into this technology. He might have helped, perhaps unintentionally. Then again, it might not have been Snowden at all, but someone within our own vast intelligence community, perhaps not even American. Perhaps an ally. Or a well placed FSB agent. A well placed double agent. Or triple agent. Or agents, a whole network of them skulking about when no one is looking in the classic FSB/KGB/NKVD/Smersh/Cheka and all the way back to the Czarist Okhrana style. Russian intelligence methods go deep into the 19th century if not earlier, back when our own incompetent spymaster Pinkerton was telling Lincoln that Robert E Lee had a million confederate soldiers just across the Potomac. Unlike gullible Americans, Russians seem to have an instinct for this sort of work. They reel in the vulnerable, the contractors with a taste for cocaine and Russian blondes, the addled ideologue, the embittered fuck ups, or any combination thereof. How we can seem so startled by this I do not know, as if none of us ever heard of how Stalin got the plans for the atomic bomb, and then the hydrogen bomb. Stalin put Beria in charge of the whole operation. Beria wove an elaborate web of Russian agents and Americans and a seemingly unlimited number of upper class English communists who were utterly taken with the glory of Stalin. They used Canadians (there’s an interesting contemporaneous movie, the title of which escapes me, about that part of their operation). They used American scientists deep in debt. They thoroughly infiltrated our most confidential secrets and places and people and before you know it had themselves a nuclear arsenal. These are facts, Mr. Marlowe, historical facts. Not schoolboy history, not Mr. Stone’s history, but history nonetheless.
So I find it odd how in news analyses I heard today–one on the BBC, no less–the notion that maybe Russian intelligence sprung this was never even mentioned, as if it had never occurred to them that Russians have an incredibly effective intelligence service with a long history of doing just this sort of thing. I listened in disbelief as people rattled off all the possibilities without ever mentioning the fact that it was highly possible that this was another well played FSB operation, even as we are investigating the FSB’s well played infiltration of our own presidential election. Like we cannot connect the FSB’s capability to do both. There’s a Russian concept, maskirovka, which badly translates as military deception, though it goes far beyond that. It is basically the ability to carry out vast plans without the one being planned against having an inkling what is going on. The Russians inflicted devastating defeats on the German army that way in 1941, 1942, and 1944, defeats that put together essentially lost Hitler the war. Their military academies taught the idea to the Chinese who caught MacArthur flat footed on the Yalu in 1951 and nearly destroyed him. Their academies taught it to the North Vietnamese who launched huge offensives in 1968, 1972 and 1975 that caught the Americans and our South Viet Namese allies by surprise and had us, in the end, fleeing from embassy rooftops in helicopters. They even taught it to the Egyptians who nearly beat the Israelis in the Yom Kippur War using it. People talk about the lightning war concept of the Blitzkrieg, but you’d be hard pressed to find another more succesful strategem than maskirovka. And the odds that anyone reading this has ever even heard the term before are close to nil. I only stumbled upon it myself in a footnote.
It seems to me that the same principle is applied to Russian intelligence operations with just as devastating results. I have no idea if they call it maskirovka, but in practice the strategy is the same, and the results just as complete. They got the plans for our nuclear program, twice. More recently, they messed with our election and got Trump elected. They probably engineered the whole Snowden defection, perhaps the greatest intelligence coup of all time. And I would be flabbergasted if they were not behind this latest CIA humiliation, all our creepy secret monitoring techniques–using TVs, iPhones, cars, whatever–dumped onto the internet in front of God and China and ISIS and everybody. There was massive deception involved, it was probably the Russians, yet we seem clueless as to actually who was behind it. Even the BBC never mentioned the possibility it was the Russian’s hand, even though never has there been another county with a history of well bred treason like the fraffly wicked spies of Great Britain. Everything about this operation could have been the work of Russian intelligence. We stare right at them and don’t see it. Maskirovka. The Russians massed two million soldiers, six thousand tanks, thirty thousand cannon and eight thousand aircraft right in front of the Germans in 1944 at the height of summer and the Germans never noticed. The Germans never saw anything, or heard anything, or suspected anything till the day the Russian army came blasting though, unstoppable. Getting hold of our surveillance technology must have been a breeze, like stealing candy from a baby.
Maybe you have to be old enough to remember the Cold War to be so suspicious of Russian spies. Maybe you have to remember just who the bad guys were in those early James Bonds. Or remember Kim Philby or Julius Rosenberg, or the unparalleled Richard Sorge, the greatest Russian spy of them all. Sorge, indeed, was probably the greatest spy of all time, the one who, all by himself, might have changed the course of World War Two. There has never been a spy from any other country’s intelligence services that came anywhere near that level of effectiveness. But if reporters and pundits don’t know that history, some of it fairly recent, they’ll never understand what is happening now. They won’t find the answers scrolling their Twitter feeds. To quote Chicolini, this is spy stuff.
A mere piece of paper
My right to speak, worship and defend myself do not come from a piece of paper, as glorious as the Bill of Rights is.
They come from God.— Kurt Schlichter on Twitter (@KurtSchlichter) March 6, 2017
We’ve got ourselves a genuine constitutional crisis when Trump supporters begin thinking of the Bill of Rights as a mere piece of paper. “Natural rights”, as they call them, trumps the constitution every time, or at least the amendments to. Kirk Schlichter is a senior columnist at Townhall.com and a Trump true believer, every word as gospel. He doesn’t seem the least bit religious in his daily deluge of tweets. Instead it seems an excuse to dispense with constitutional niceties when they conflict with Donald Trump. He’d disagree, I’m sure, quite colorfully, but that must be the impression that all but the true believers get from him. And as the Trump administration descends into chaos, Schlichter’s tweets have taken on a ferocious, humorless intensity, very militant, often offensive, jibing with Breitbart and hinting at the increasingly crazed talk of civil war you see on InfoWars. He’s an impressive writer for what he’s doing, taut and angry, with nearly a hundred thousand followers, old friends of mine among them. He’s a masterful propagandist on Twitter, and Twitter is the social media battlefield now. Trump made it so, and battle lines surge back and forth angrier and angrier by the day, by the hour, in huge numbers. Schlichter is in the thick of it, hurling himself into the breach like John Bell Hood at Antietam, matching every thrust with a counter thrust, every insult with a sharper insult, every attack on Trump with an attack on Obama or Hillary or the press or Sweden or anybody. Just keep attacking. It’s impressive.
But look at the war of words over the long term. This political struggle is turning into a generational battle, Baby Boomers vs Millennials, with GenXers in between. The Boomers have another ten years of dominance in Red States and red counties before age and disease start thinning their ranks. You can do extraordinary damage in a decade. Schlichter and a zillion other Schlichters could be complete Bannon acolytes by then. All those old fashioned Tea Party principles gone the way of Barry Goldwater, replaced with this scary new economic nationalism. Imagine the battle lines then, long since hardened into trenches and barbed wire. A lot can happen in ten years. The country descended from peace into fanaticism and war in the ten year span from 1850 to 1860. You couldn’t have seen 1860 coming in 1850, and could scarcely have remembered 1850 in 1860. And all they had then was telegraphs. But telegraphy had shortened the news cycle from weeks to a couple days in that ten year span. The sheer velocity of news upped the intensity to crackling levels and the killing began. John Brown launched his raid because he knew that telegraphy gave him the possibility of starting a revolution overnight. He didn’t. But he certainly rushed the southern states headlong into secession.
So do I see a civil war happening again? No, I adamantly do not. It’s a comparison you hear more and more, however, and will hear even more so as the politics gets fiercer. But the differences in 1860 were much more stark, two civilizations existing under one constitution, each hating the other. We are nowhere near that now. We never will be. That was decided for us way back in 1865. Nor will we have revolution, that possibility ended with the election of FDR back in 1932. Besides, as Trump’s boomers fade from the scene everything will mellow out nicely. This is a scarily intense interregnum, the most conservative generation since the 1920’s–the baby boomers–wielding their maximum ballot box power just as their economic security plunges to an all time low. Thus the stark differences that have sundered the county now, these two huge camps of Americans who can’t agree on almost anything, even besmirching the Super Bowl with crazy political talk, and people talking idiotically of guns and revolution and civil war. All the time technology changes the news in minutes. Our never ending, never even slowing down news cycle, frantic as the electrons its made from, gushing with updates and breaking stories arriving by the second. The potential for vast and sudden change seems in there. It’s a perfect medium for extremism. I read David Duke’s vicious screes supporting Trump and hating Jews and realize that thirty three thousand people see those every time he pushes the enter button. For a second I get nearly metaphysical, wondering what all this means.
Well, it mean this is going to be a helluva fight, for one thing, and that 2018 is all important. So vote. If you love your Bill of Rights and constitution, you must vote. Resisting is all well and good, but voting wins.
Kurt Schlichter with what looks like a damn fine cigar.
Left and Right versus the press
It wasn’t so long ago that Bernie Sanders supporters hated the press, and Bernie held events that the press was barred from. Much of Bernie’s own stump speech railed against the media. He wanted reform. His first big event after conceding a discussion of how to change the nature of mass media in America. He said instead of a media like we have now–which he insisted was entirely corporate, all of it–we need to have a network run by the Democratic Party to promote a progressive agenda. He wanted a progressive Fox News. Trump wanted, and got, Breitbart. Both Bernie and Trump ran against the media. It’s just that Trump was elected. What you are seeing now is what happens when a campaign that ran on an anti-media platform wins the presidency. The antipathy toward the press in America is equally strong on both ends of the political spectrum. Most people prefer to read or hear only what they agree with, a tendency that has been reinforced by Facebook, where people do not like to see opinions they don’t agree with. Probably at least half the population of the U.S., perhaps a lot more, would support some sort of restrictions on the freedom of the press in this country. It’s just that since Trump is the one in the White House, progressives suddenly love the independent press again. But that creepy totalitarian streak when it comes to the news is not far beneath the American surface, and should another progressive candidate with so little regard for a free media come along like Bernie Sanders (left over from his hard left days, where Marxists cannot abide a free press), then you could have both Democrats and Republicans running against the media, and our tradition of a free press could be in serious jeopardy. Of course, that is a tradition that neither Trump and the alt-right nor most Progressives are particularly attached to.
I think when it comes to Donald Trump on the media, the progressives of America are looking at a hideous, distorted funhouse mirror reflection of their own attitudes toward the media and the First Amendment not too long ago.
What did the president know and when did he know it?
The reporting in the Washington Post makes clear that both Trump AND Pence have been aware that Flynn had been compromised by Russian intelligence, and have been aware for some time. We are not sure now how all the investigating into this will go. The press will be focusing on this with extraordinary intensity and with a White House that leaks like no other….and will now begin gushing like the Oroville Dam. Congressional investigations are inevitable. A special prosecutor seems at some point to be likely. And the FBI and CIA and several other agencies have been investigating as well, indeed, Flynn’s resignation seems to be the result of those investigations. And should both Trump and Pence be found to have been party to a conspiracy to hide the fact that Flynn had been potentially turned by Putin, then both Trump and Pence could be forced to resign. None of this is likely, but it is well within the realm of the possible without resorting to paranoid conspiracy thinking. In which case, unless Pence were to go first and a replacement chosen by Trump before Trump resigned, Paul Ryan, as Speaker of the House, will be president. People are no doubt talking to Ryan about this right now, telling him he has to be ready because there is an outside chance that he will constitutionally required to take the path of president. And that is how weird this is getting, and getting there so fast. Because we simply do not know. How much did the president know, I have heard asked several times on television tonight, and when did he know it. If you are old enough to remember the Watergate hearings, Senator Howard Baker’s double question to John Dean will send chills down your spine. It seems so impossibly unlikely that any of this could happen, but then Watergate began as an odd little burglary, and this seems to be so much more.
Brick's Politics 