Cranky Old Man

It’s really amazing. Vladimir Putin must be some smart bastard to have conceived of placing Donald Trump in our presidency.  He’s destroying the country without firing a single shot.  Who would have thought that was even possible?  Every time I turn around, it seems he has totally destroyed yet another of our government agencies.  What a record—EPA, Education, FCC, Treasury . . . and the list goes on and on. Sometimes, he destroys them by placing in charge someone who fundamentally disagrees with the basic mission—like Betsy DeVos, or Mnuchin,  or Pompeo/Bolton, or Scott Pruitt. But almost as often he has these amazingly dumb people who are within his stable, folks like Ben Carson (who belies his brain surgeon background). I figure Ben got his brain surgeon degree at WalMart.

And now, he is acting out the role of a fascist dictator. Almost everything he has been doing over the past six months is straight out of the fascist dictator playbook:

·                     Denigrating the news media, to a point that he seems to want to destroy them;
·         Insulting his opponents, and then threatening to jail them;
·         Defying Congress, to the point that he seems to make believe they actually do not even                  exist;
·         Placing his relatives in high positions.

And the list goes on and on. He would make Hitler proud.  Oh, and although he has not yet placed any of his hated immigrants in a gas chamber, his policies continue to see folks, often little folks, die in his custody.

And his supporters just continue to back him to the hilt.  They are almost as amazing as Vlad’s move to place him in the job. I guess the MAGAHeads also approve of selling the country to the Russians. They never say anything to that end of course, but I assume they are fine with the whole idea.  It does make me wonder what they get out of the deal, though. Maybe Vlad intends to provide them all with free vacations to Siberia. I understand it is great this time of year.

But then I look at Britain, and the demise of Therese May and the consequent rise of those idiots Boris Johnson, and Nigel Farage. And India—they re-elected Modi, despite his complete lack of success in bringing anything of real value to the country. I guess the Congress party is off vacationing in Scotland.  Australia seem to have swung over to the extreme right, although, happily, New Zealand seems to be resisting. Italy is flirting with its fascists, and even Germany has a rising core of fascists.

What the hell is going on?

I think the common thread seems to be immigration.  Lots and lots of migrants are fighting free of their national boundaries and are heading to what they perceive as more civil, or just less murderous grounds.  In the Middle East, the warring continues. It has never really stopped since the so-called Arab Spring. I assume that Shrub, who launched his war in Iraq armed with fake facts, contributed substantially to the ongoing warfare, but they really do seem to get off on killing one another.  Organized religion is so consistent regarding the killing thing.  The religion thing is, of course, just an umbrella that covers all the bloodshed—Religion: it’s a killer.

In our neck of the woods, the migration seems to be caused by either organized crime, big throughout Latin America, or by just murderous regimes, like Venezuela.  Latin America apparently has no interest in this democracy thing—it’s bad for business I guess.  I’m not sure I understand the mess in India with Modi and his right wing thugs. Maybe it is nothing more than 70+ years of tolerating Pakistan, which is not materially different from the Middle East. India and Pakistan seem to get off on killing one another over either territory, or each other’s religions.

In the meantime, Russia and China seem to be figuring out new ways to mess with the world.  And having someone as terminally stupid as Trump at the head of our increasingly useless government does not help to inspire anyone but his bankers.  The bankers never seem to lose, do they?

But all this ongoing mess makes me wonder why nobody ever wants to deal with the basic underlying problems. If the single dominant problem that leads to migration is fear of being murdered, why cannot the theoretically civilized world help to ameliorate the murder?

In the Middle East, the murderous ISIS-Taliban cohorts seem to be being defeated, but the region is not even close to resolving anything that might lead to stability.  In Latin America, the organized crime gangs continue unchecked, and the regimes continue to pour gasoline on the fires of rebellion and murder.  It all makes me wonder about the potential for the United Nations to begin to weigh in.  Why did we create that creature—the United Nations? Let’s look at its purposes.

1.     To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;

2.     To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;

3.     To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and

4.     To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.

So, if that is why the UN was created, why do we now abandon it when it is needed perhaps more than at any time since WW II (remember WW II??)? It would seem that the “civilized world” has forgotten why they created the UN.  We were all just emerging from four years of mass murder. Surely then, if not now, the world was getting really tired of bloodshed. Relatively civilized leaders decided that some other form of dispute resolution might be preferable to machine guns and bombs.  I think even then it was never believe seriously that one could talk one’s way out of any problem. They understood that force was often going to be necessary, but if the civilized world could act in concert, then emerging murderous regimes might be contained.

Now the problem with this UN approach is that currently the murderous regimes seem to outnumber the “civilized world nations”.  Somehow, “democratic” approaches to governance, however preferable in the long run, seem not to appeal to folks like Donald Trump, Vlad the Impaler, and the thugs of ISIS/Taliban/Qaida. Organized crime, by definition, prefers other than democracy.  In the short run, the civilized world seem to be falling apart, as people like Trump, Boris Johnson/Nigel Farage, and Modi have taken control. These folks seem not to believe in democracy either.

Now, Modi aside, I have to believe that sooner rather than later, the peoples of the civilized world nations will begin to awaken and begin again to take voting seriously.  Our thugs won’t like it of course, but voting is our literal last chance.  If voting here and in other places like Britain fails, then the world really will all sink into bedlam and murder—can actual wars be far behind with them in charge?

So, I am hoping that we can hang on until real people get to vote, assuming that voting is still legal.

Remember folks, VOTE. Your lives literally depend on it.