Greenland.

 Let's not be fooled, all this talk about the United States annexing Greenland has nothing to do with the natural resources of greenland, has everything to do with normalizing Putin's behavior in ukraine. Trump, who is Putin's toady has to tow the line that what he's doing in Ukraine is a completely normal thing for superpower to do, namely that be taking over one of its neighbors, by us threatening to take over Greenland it goes Putin cover to wave his hands and say see, see, see what the United States is doing so what I'm doing isn't so bad!

Putin's IRBM and why I think it's a sign of weakness.

A couple days ago Putin launched an IRBM (Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile). People collectively freaked out.. I shrugged.

With Putin throwing NK troops into the meat grinder and Ukrainian long range missiles hitting strategic military assets, I see this as a vain act of strength that's actually weakness.

He can't fly planes over Ukraine..

He can't get ships near the Ukrainian coast..

Russian tanks quickly become smoking wrecks..

This is why he's had to resort to these mass drone attacks and now using IRBM weapons.

Frankly, I think Russia is finished. It's still going to take a couple of years, but I think even if with the possible easing of sanctions, the mortal wound has been dealt.

I'm Shocked, shocked, well not that shocked.

In 2016, people voted for Trump because they wanted something? For many of us those 8 years had been good, for them it had been rough, Trump offered up some unknown "fuck it, let's try something crazy!"

It doesn't help that Hillary was about likable as a hat on a broom.

Then we watched Trump well.. Trump out loud. It's nearly four years later and the full extent of his crimes are still coming to light. Likely he'll ensure many of them never see the light of day now.

He's was the "new coke" candidate..

Everybody gave him a try and then the dog shit taste hit the back of our throats.

Don't get me wrong.. some people liked that taste. Really liked it. So much so they built a cult around it. The rest of us were repulsed by it.

Then 2020 came and we'd had enough of that! With nearly a million dead from a pandemic that was made far worse by a ham handed at best and malicious at worst response, our economy going off the rails, we ran to the polls and voted for not Trump.

The chaos came to a close and people said, "well that was a hell of a thing!" Biden isn't perfect by any measure, and he inherited a complete disaster and put sensible people in the right places to fix things as best as possible.

But if Republicans are masters of anything, it's throwing the vase on the floor and as Democrats are busy gluing the vase back together start yelling "Look at all the cracks in this vase!"

As we watch his put the most unhinged, bat shit crazy and/or obvious grift appointments in place, we shouldn't be shocked by any of this.

However, we must and continue to repeat to everybody: "None of this is normal!"

Keep repeating it. As the chaos ensues, keep repeating it.

I don't know if it makes any sense to try to argue with these people. I'll leave that up to you. There are definitely going to be leopards eating people's faces in the coming years.

honesty

Walking the dog this morning, I got ruminating on the four tenants of stoicism; Wisdom, Temperance, Justice and Courage, and I got thinking about honestly. It seems to be some bit of justice and courage.

Without honesty, we are nothing. Honesty with ourselves, honestly with others and honesty through our deeds and actions.

An element of honesty is acknowledging when you've make a mistake and working to resolve what's happened.

Honesty also takes so little mental load. It appears to me that habitual liars have a carry a pretty substantial mental load keeping all their stories straight. If you just keep to the facts, the story is just the story.

I feel personally with everything going on in your life, having to add the load of making sure when your talking to a particular person you make sure you give them one version of a story and when talking to another person you give them yet a different version of events.. I'm getting tired just writing this run on sentence!

I can see the allure in some sense. You're running late leaving work and when your wife calls you blame it on traffic. It takes the fault off you and displaces it onto something that's out of your control. But you just lied to your wife. So when you do get home, she asks, "where was the traffic jam?" now you're in it for another lie.. Now you need to remember all the details of that set of lies and whatever ripples out from there. vs.. "I'm sorry, I got caught up at work chatting with a co-worker. I'm late and it's my fault."

Sure, your wife might be disappointed, but the story ends there. Moreover, if she starts asking questions, you're merely recounting actual events.

I have to also imagine that habitual liars live with a sense of dread. Keep telling enough lies and stacking those lies high enough and eventually the jenga tower of bullshit comes crashing down. While that tower is teetering.. egads.

Being honest, everybody here has lied, myself included. Thankfully many years ago I got to stand on the sidelines and watch someone lie themselves into a corner and then it all went to shit. It was an instructive moment for me. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, they'd started with a small lie, but then had to buttress it with more and more lies until the bill came due.

Watching that debacle was enough for me to resolve I'd never put myself in such a wildly stupid spot.

Of course, simply googling for "Stoicism and Honesty" brought up some great articles including this quote from Marcus Aurelius.

“How rotten and fraudulent when people say they intend to ‘give it to you straight.’ What are you up to, dear friend? It shouldn’t need your announcement, but be readily seen, as if written on your forehead, heard in the ring of your voice, a flash in your eyes — just as the beloved sees it all in the lover’s glance. In short, the straightforward and good person should be like a smelly goat — you know when they are in the room with you.”

— MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 11.15

Be the smelly goat!

It's been a while. Looks like Trump might actually be in trouble.

 Wow.. Sept of 2022.

I'm slightly maybe optiomistic that Trump maybe just might face some consequences. I have this weird feeling he might weasel out in the end, but who knows.

Honestly, he did so much damage to the justice system by his cramming through of crazy federalist judges.

But here's the long and short of it.

The now former president had a whole trove of top secret documents in Mar-a-lago.. essentially unguarded. Documents that should be housed in a vault, three stories underground in vault.

He's tried to claim they're now not secret because he waved his arms and yelled "declassified." but that's so vacuously bullshit as to be silly.

He's tried to claim executive privilege, but that's also bullshit.

Honestly, I think he's proper fucked.

What needs to happen now is for a foreign operative to come forward with copies of these secret documents to make the circle complete.

The Muller Report

I've managed to sit down and try to read the Muller report. Mind you, I'm a guy who builds datacenters and will gleefully digest multiple 100 page PDF's on the inner workings of the latest mainframe...

It's not that I find it that actually hard to read, it's that I find it that actually hard to read.

NONE OF THIS IS NORMAL. I had to get that off my chest.

What we learned was that Russia did in fact meddle in our elections... That unto itself should be enough for me to just stop typing... But it gets oh, so worse.

Apparently through shear incompetence Trump and his associates were unable to work directly with Russia despite trying. Go watch the John Oliver special about it... holy fuck.

As for the obstruction question, well let's say, if any of us acted the way he acted... we'd have been charged with obstruction.

Apparently if you're the president, you can't commit crimes.

Excuse me if that sounds like a fucking emperor.

But now what?

I'm of two minds when it comes to impeachment.

On principle, we impeached a president for lying about a blowjob.

You'd think this would rise to that level... However, I'm fearful if we try to impeach him and it fails it'll be used as ammunition.

What I really want to see is his taxes. I think that might be the one thing that'll likely cause some of his diehard supports to go "the fuck?"

Imagine if it comes out that he's straight up cheated on his taxes?

Why Trumps National Emergency Is A Mistake

Now that Trump has issued a "NED" (National Emergency Directive) for a thing that's clearly not an emergency, we're officially in completely uncharted terrirtory.

Go check out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_emergencies_in_the_United_States

As you can see an overwhelming number of these are sanctions.

What Trump is doing is engineering an attempted end run around the legislative branch and I believe it will fail.

Why?

1. If he manages to scrape up the 5.X billion dollars, congress still has to sign off on it. It's not like he can simply demand 5.XB dollars and just get it.

2. This is a stunning and unheard of case of executive overreach. Moreover, it sets a very dangerous president. Why wouldn't a Democratic president just use the same tactics?

3. This money will need to come from somewhere. I'm sure the list of things to defund is already drawn up, and quite likely it falls squarely on party lines. In a nutshell you can expect states with Democrats senators are likely to get fucked extra hard as programs / institutions in their states get suddenly defunded. So as much as the idiots will be gleeful about the defunding of climate science, etc. They also know this cannon can just as easily be turned on them. Revenge is a dish served very cold.

4. This is going to trigger an unyielding and massive number of lawsuits. Trump will paint this as a stalling tactic from the Democrats, but I can imagine there's quite a few ranchers on the southern border who voted for Trump now going "Wait... you're going to take my land by emanate domain? Let me call my lawyers" and Indian Reservations and conservation land.

Granted at this point the SCOTUS is 5/9's filled with judges who have demonstrated they're Republican shills and when the facts don't work, simply throw out the facts and craft legal opinions that'll go down in history as galling hackery, but I'm not so sure about this. I'm suspecting they're going to be looking at #2 and #3 and asking the question "Do we want to open this pandora's box?"

At this point I've lost all hope they'll do the right thing, but who knows...

In any rate, I don't see the president getting his wall built. I see his lawyers frantically trying to defend a position that'll go something like this.

TL (Trump Lawyer): "This is clearly a national emergency"
OP (Opposing Lawyer): "So the last two years this wasn't? When you controlled both houses it wasn't?"
TL: "Umm... It's an EMERGENCY!!!"
OP: "By your own accounting the number of illegal immigrants is dropping"
TL: "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!"

You get the drift...