Megalomania

The tendency to use, misuse, and abuse power does not indicate a strong man but rather a weak one.

And the question is

Will the Trump Tabloid Presidency ever rise above the totally tawdry... is there nobody who can restore a little dignity to the office?

A walking-talking disease

Elon Musk is on the verge of becoming the world's first trillionaire. His personal wealth will amount to more than 1.1 trillion dollars. A trillion dollars is one million million dollars, one thousand billion dollars. There are less than ten thousand hours in a year. So one would have to dispose of one million dollars every hour for well over a century just to spend so much money. And yet this fellow - this clever capitalist - still has not realized or does not appreciate the fact that accumulation of so much money by a single person means that countless other persons will not have even their bare survival needs met.

Looking for a word

Odious does not cover it. Perhaps pernicious. Donald Trump lives as if virtue is a vice, and vice a virtue. He is a blight on Planet Earth.

Trump's military genius

Once again TACO Baby lets his cowardly and malevolent intellect shine. Instead of Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz, US warships will do the same thing. Why should Iran get the "glory" of driving global oil prices up (for the benefit of Russia?) when the USA can bear that responsibility... and maybe simultaneously starve some Iranian civilians?

Non compos mentis

With a POTUS (a President of the US) who is clearly no longer in control of his own mind... basically insane... the next three years should prove very interesting... unless Trump is somehow removed from office in an unprecedented fashion.

Talk about desperation at the White House!

First it was the Iran war to distract from Jeffrey Epstein. Now it is Jeffrey Epstein to distract from the Iran war.

Of course it's a victory for Iran

Iran has weathered a brutal attack by one of the world's biggest bullies and its proxy in the Middle East. How can that not be deemed a victory? Furthermore, the United States... or at least the U.S. Government has been exposed as having genocidal intent, framing both this war of aggression as fundamentally unprovoked and tending to justify anything that Iran now does (including the acquisition of nukes and retaining control over the Strait of Hormuz) as prudently defensive. Though an elderly, radical-religious government in Iran was deposed (brutally), a younger (but probably no less radical-religious) government has come in its place. And meanwhile, Iran retains a similar and proportionate military strength in the region, temporarily degraded but certainly not destroyed. So where is there any victory for Israel or the United States? Bibi and TACO Trump have only done the world and their own countries an obscene disservice.

Well duh!

Baby Trump writes: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will." Even a 5-year old can work out the ethics of such a proposition. If something you intend to do is likely to destroy an entire civilization, then you simply don't do it. It's a no-brainer. Hopefully, the American military will demonstrate a greater moral compass and more common sense than their Commander-In-Chief.

Talk about low energy and dementia!

And this Bozo has another 3 years in the cockpit.

Against my better judgement I watched Trump's speech on the state of his war. Boring! The scripted part and all the rest too. Scripted: This war lasted so many days, that war lasted so many days, and yada-yada. Unscripted: We've got more oil than anybody needs, and we'll be leaving Iran soon... but not before I commit this war crime and that war crime... all delivered in a tired, old voice.

But the greatest absurdity of that 20-minute, more-than-he-could-handle speech was: Donald failed "epically" to achieve the implicit  goal of his address. Clearly, he wanted to calm America's fears about rising prices and lost income; but instead (due to his demented rant), oil prices surged and the stock market tanked as soon as he dropped the mike. Somebody bring back Biden!

Long live Iran

In case anyone is wondering, in the current conflict my support is for Iran in a similar way as I have supported Ukraine (after the Russian invasion). There can be no doubt that the USA and Israel are the aggressors in the current war and that any threat to world peace lies primarily at the door of Israel and the USA. I give no credibility to the notion that Iran is an imminent existential threat to Israel, much less to the USA. Hence the attack on sovereign Iran and the assassination of its political leader and others (no matter how bad any of them were) cannot be justified. Neither Israel nor the USA was acting with the welfare of Iran's 92 million people in mind.

US Supreme Court rejects Trump tarriffs

Demonstrating a major shift in SC policy, by a 6-3 ruling the USSC has outlawed the Trump tarriffs. Given the fact that legal rulings are often more the product of naked self-interest than legal logic or reason - with the current Supreme Court possibly more flagrant than any predecessor - this ruling suggests that Trump's days of political dominance are now numbered. It may be that a significant majority of the SC justices have realized, at long last, that they've hitched their future to an aging and ailing donkey.

Sharks have begun feeding

 The price of flights out of Tel Aviv are now about 10 times higher than normal... and TACO Trump has already scheduled a trip to Oslo for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

An end to the 8-day war?

Make no mistake about this. The ceasefire between Iran and Israel announced today is the very same one that was on the horizon 4 days ago... before TACO Trump intervened out of bloodlust and a pathological need for attention. The main difference is only that the current ceasefire is somewhat more fragile due to Baby's megalomania. Let's not forget - and certainly Iran won't forget - that TACO Trump left the G7 meeting, allegedly going back to Washington to get an "unconditional surrender" from Iran. When asked about Macron's remark about a potential ceasefire, Baby insulted Emmanuel, claiming that the French President generally gets things wrong. So has TACO Trump himself now gotten things wrong by proudly trumpeting as a great achievement the very ceasefire that he actually delayed?

Underneath Bibi and Baby

And by "Baby" I mean Taco Trump. Here in Israel, despite Baby's aggressive intervention, after another torrent of Iranian rockets has just come down overhead, it still does not feel like peace.

To argue that there can be no peace between Israel and Iran is nonsensical. Less than 50 years ago the two countries had friendly relations. It was only aftrr the Shah was deposed by religious extremists that the situation deteriorated. So the problem with Iran is not the people of that country or its technological accomplishments but rather its regime. Of course, regime change is a very difficult task - obviously much harder than just eliminating some nuclear enrichment plants - but that is what is required. And, personally, I think there were far better ways - less destructive and more effective - to achieve that goal than warfare. Politicians will always seize any excuse to praise themselves and trash their opponents. But regime change could have been pursued in a far less costly fashion by friendly means... obviously not friendly to the current Iranian regime, but friendly to the Iranian people. It is said that when elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. Caught between Bibi, Baby, and Khamenei, we are all of us the "children of Gaza".

The Children of Gaza

For some days now I've been contemplating the good that might come from Israel's war with Iran. And though this result is a long way away, it occurs to me that one lesson to be learned would be the horrific consequences of war. I know it's been said many times before, but perhaps that's because humanity has still not heard the message. Maybe we should all take a minute to think about the children of Gaza (also the name of a fictional novel that I will never find the time to write). Those innocents have undergone two years without being able to go to school due to the terrifying recurrence of rockets exploding above their heads and on their friends. The sound alone over such an extended length of time must be devastating. Will Israelis learn this lesson, now experiencing the trauma of what they've been inflicting on Gaza? Somehow I doubt it. Rather, the prevalence of religious dogma tends to stimulate a hatred of the other faster than self-examination.

End the war, free the people

With internecine war a third party might make gains, but the main combatants are always losers. A military victory becomes a public relations defeat; and the public relations win, a military loss. This is what we see in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To talk of "war crimes" is almost meaningless when the real crime is war itself.

When governing becomes a private business

In every sense that matters, the would-be self-perpetuating political leaders of Israel have already lost the current war with Hamas. They have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by outdoing Hamas in every despicable fashion. And now their brazen and unfettered self-indulgence is naked for all the world to see. At a time when negotiations for a ceasefire and the return of any surviving hostages might be making some viable progress, in large part courtesy of Qatar's intermediation, the Israeli Government has closed the Qatari news agency in Israel, Al Jazeera, branding it as a mouthpiece for Hamas. This was a unanimous Cabinet decision, and it may well be "the first time Israel has ever shuttered a foreign news outlet". (CBS news report)

Police presence at Columbia University

Well, now that this has happened... and I think it was unavoidable and even appropriate... one of the first questions I'd like answered is whether any of the persons occupying Hamilton Hall are not registered Columbia students.

This should not be construed to mean I endorse Israel's brutal and largely unrestrained retaliation in Gaza. Indeed, I do not. But I also think that the protests sweeping American campuses today lack much of the legitimacy that drove the Anti-Vietnam War movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Again, I am not at all saying that the lives of Palestinians don't matter. Of course they do. And what is happening in Gaza is every bit as unconscionable as the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel that murdered, brutalized, and kidnapped Israeli civilians, including many women, children, and senior citizens. But US troops are not on the ground in Israel; and there is a valid argument to be made that what is happening in Gaza began as a defensive action, regardless of the fact that it is now clearly an offensive action and highly excessive.

A hot mess

Residing in Israel and observing what might well be a rapidly widening conflict... and watching the current political season in the USA, where a loathsome character like Trump is running a campaign that portrays him as an incarnation of Jesus Christ... I cannot help but wonder when the world will wake up and realize that religion is no panacea. And it is also not just an opiate, as Marx described it. Religion is, and has always been, a hot mess.