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| J Robert Oppenheimer, Image Source: YouTube |
Topics: Einstein, Existentialism, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Oppenheimer, Politics
What I wouldn't give for "truthful hyperbole." The riff in "The Art of the Deal" that we now know was ghostwritten and probably like the life of the 45th president a blatant, pathological lie, it was at least a strategy towards an end: a clever tactic that bent the rules but did not break them or the administrative state. An armada is headed towards the Korean peninsula until its revealed it was actually in the Indian Ocean thousands of miles away. Two generals on his staff and his press secretary used the word "prudent," perhaps as a prayer that maybe in the long line of obfuscations, this was a legitimate act that wasn't born in indigestion, bad dreams and a tweeted warped imagination. What was alarming is the bluff or buffoonery could have ratcheted up tensions on the 38th parallel. 20+ million South Koreans, military bases and businesses like Hyundai and in the semiconductor industry were at the mercy of chance and blind luck if anything popped off. The closest military bases in South Korea or the pacific theater couldn't have responded in time to interdict catastrophe, only to help bury bodies in a conventional bombing aftermath. They're probably and rightly pissed with us.
His predecessor "wiretapped" him, and because he put his tweet in quotes it takes new meaning. Devin Nunes put himself squarely back on his dairy ranch and his political career in the golden crapper, getting the information from the White House to "reveal" it to the same and the media the next day. Correlate that to now the official log of visitors will in his bumbling aftermath not be revealed, so as to not know which staffer let the congressman in and the time stamp. Surprisingly, his midnight run has not been parodied by late night comedy as I've seen. It also explains 45's frequent trips to Mar-a-Lago: it is his country club, and as a guarantor of the privacy of members at $200,000.00 a year, no logs there are made, or will ever be published. A kingpin of the Mafia could visit or a Russian oligarch, and we would never know.
Andrea Mitchell, exasperated said this administration "flat out lies" as if beyond pathology, this chaos is a source of pleasure: a political pyromaniac that lights fires, denies responsibility while jerking off to the engulfing flames of a crumbling republic.
In geopolitics, it's dangerous. Being unpredictable, or thinking no one will ever challenge us because they think our president is insane is not a doctrine, not a strategy: it is pure insanity. This will embolden Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, ISIS/ISIL et al, not cow them. So far, the recent published opinions of ISIS that "the US is bankrupt and being run by an idiot" hasn't as yet resulted in a morning, mean-girl counter tweet storm.
Paul Mason, contributing to the Opinion Page of The Guardian (see Related links) summed it best:
"I don’t wish to alarm you, but right now the majority of the world’s nuclear warheads are in the hands of men for whom the idea of using them is becoming thinkable."
Those men are Vladimir Putin, Kim Jung Un and the 45th president, an "axis of grift, testosterone-driven, short-penis evil," thumping their chests like alpha apes, ignoring the ramifications of the effects of geopolitical gravity if we all plunge over this cliff. Nuclear war is thinkable to these men: megaton yield, radiation sickness, hunger, death, isotope half lives beyond human lifetimes for civilization to recover apparently is not. Trolls love to point out "science created the atomic bomb." Yes, it did. Werner Von Heisenberg was a scientist in the employ of the German Nazis working on the bomb. Father of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in Quantum Mechanics, he likely would have been promptly executed for any misgivings had he not. Albert Einstein was a theoretical physicist that almost single-handedly created the modern age during his "Annus Mirabilis," leading to this age of computers, solar panels, transistors, television, the Internet and GPS systems. He was also a Jewish immigrant fleeing Nazi Germany for his life, that wrote the US president on the danger of them getting the bomb first and what this posed, encouraging what became known as The Manhattan Project, a sin science has tried to atone for (since Oppenheimer famously quoted Hindu scripture) in publishing the report annually by the Union of Concerned Scientists about how close we are to extinction. The colloquial phrase is "if we didn't do it, we all might be speaking German." I say we - especially ethnic and social minorities - probably wouldn't be having this pleasant conversation if we hadn't. It doesn't excuse the carnage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that most historians now say the Empire of the Sun was literally on its last legs, and a few months more of empty stomachs could have changed the minds of the most recalcitrant regimes. This genie has been out of its bottle for quite some time now. We hope each election our heads of state are levelheaded responsible actors, not someone who tweets reflexively the last thing seen on Fox News without thought or context, or from a White Genocide twitter account. Apparently from the recent US elections and the rise of xenophobia in Europe, fascism - what we fought WWII for and established in its wake NATO and trade agreements - is making a comeback.
Another name for Beelzebub is "the father of lies." Who knew he would be personified in a septuagenarian that could do so in 140 characters or less?
Related linksFusion:The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift Is Blowing Up in the World's FaceAlex PareeneReuters:North Korea warns of 'super-mighty preemptive strike' as U.S. plans next moveJu-min Park, SeoulThe Guardian:Nuclear war has become thinkable again - we need a reminder of what it meansPaul MasonThe Intercept:Top Democrats Are Wrong: Trump Supporters Were More Motivated by Racism Than Economic IssuesMehdi HasanThe New Yorker:Donald Trump, North Korea and the Case of the Phantom ArmadaAmy Davidson
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