Peter David's Blog, page 13

Freak Out Friday – July 13, 2018

I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: It is likely going to take an entire generation to undo the damage that Donald Trump is doing to this country.

And believe me, I wish I didn’t feel compelled to write about all his idiocies. I take no joy from it. I would have been thrilled if he had been able to, as many of his supporters or apologists claimed, set aside the demented narcissist that he had been during the campaign and actually grown into the presidency. Instead as time has passed, he has dragged the presidency down to his level. And Christ only knows what happens if he gets re-elected.

1) 90,000 Englishmen can’t be wrong. That is the expected number of protestors who will be assembling to protest him as he goes to London to–God help us all–have tea with the Queen. It is safe to say that he will be unlike anyone she has ever met, because everyone else in the world knows all the politics involved: what you should say, what you should not say. And Trump will naturally attend to none of that. Meanwhile a giant blimp will be floating near Parliament that is supposed to be representative of him. It really isn’t; it looks better than he does. But Trump is declaring that he is the most popular member of the GOP in history–more popular than Lincoln. He truly doesn’t understand that managing to accept a few thousand of braying crowds of die-hard supporters does not make you popular. He doesn’t get that losing the popular vote by three million doesn’t make you popular. Meanwhile he also took potshots at British Prime Minister Theresa May, claiming that her negotiations with Brexit could–according to NBC News–scuttle a trade agreement with the UK. That’s what top politicians want to hear when you visit their country: all out assault.

2) NATO to tangle. NATO members remain concerned that Trump was endeavoring to blow NATO sky high. His visit to England was preceded by a two day confab with NATO allies during which time he asserted that if NATO did not meet his demands, the US would consider “going it alone,” meaning that he would pull out of it. What followed was 48 hours of Trump acting like Trump: picking fights, making threats and insulting nations that have been our allies since the end of World War II, all the while prepping for his one on one confab with Putin, his boss. I would kill to be a fly on that wall. He also had a press conference where he trotted out a number of his usual falsehoods, exaggerations and outright lies, ranging from distortions and lies about NATO to claiming that he won Wisconsin whereas Ronald Reagan did not (a lie: Reagan won it in 1980 and 1984.)

There’s more I could go into, but screw it. There’s only so much I can take.

PAD

Freak Out Friday = July 6, 2018

Well, last week was certainly something of a f-ckfest as Justice Kennedy announced his retirement, which means that Trump will have the opportunity to put yet another judge on the SCOTUS. This is, of course, a disaster. Kennedy was conservative, but he was reasonable on some issues which made him a swing vote on some cases which resulted in liberals holding a favorable view of him. We can rest assured that Trump will not select any sort of reasonable individual, and that means that it’s going to take an entire generation to undo the damage he will cause. Roe v. Wade is the most immediate decision under fire, and a conservative dream court will now be sitting and ruling on any cases involving abortion. And you know that conservatives are going to fast track one even before the dust settles on the confirmation hearing.

Of course liberals are taking the tack of echoing Mitch McConnell’s words by declaring that it’s not right to put in a new judge in an election year. That makes sense; if the November election flips the Senate to Democratic, that would put an entirely new spin on the outcome. The problem is, of course, that McConnell didn’t really mean it. All he wanted was to prevent Obama from putting a new judge in place, and came up with his lame ass pronouncement to try and justify some sort of reason even though there was none. Now that we’re back in an election year and selecting a new justice, McConnell wants to make that happen as quickly as possible, his own words forgotten as rapidly as Trump forgets his own words.

So be prepared for abortion to be switched back to states’ rights, which means it’s going to become illegal in over half the states of the US. New York, California, you’ll be able to get them there, but if you’re a poor young woman in Bumblef*ck, Montana, you’re gonna be screwed.

Meanwhile Trump has been at more of his usual bull.

1). He never met a lie he didn’t like.. Speaking of Montana, Trump held another of his typical rallies because that’s what he likes: A mob of people showing up and cheering everything he says, including the falsehoods. Indeed, there are some that he adores so thoroughly that he brings them up at any public gathering. Claiming that the US pays up to 90 percent of NATO’s defense spending? Check. (It’s 72, actually). “Obama was very close to going to war with North Korea? Check. (No proof ever presented.). Claiming that Hillary earned 223 electoral votes? Yup. (She took 232.). Claimed 20,000 people were turned away at a recent rally? Yes. (Didn’t happen.). Stating that the $700 billion military budget he signed was “the biggest ever.” Check. (Obama signed a bigger version in 2011.). The wall is under construction in San Diego. Check. (It’s not.). Wages are rising for the first time in eighteen years. Sort-of check; previously he’d said nineteen and twenty-two years. Either way, it’s all false; wages have been rising since 2014. The trade deficit with China is over $500 billion. Check; he really likes saying that one. Too bad it’s $337 billion. And so on and so on. He has set records with the number of lies he has told during his term. Yet he has the nerve to keep complaining about the “fake media” when he is the biggest fake who has ever held the office. Indeed, pretty much any office.

2). Indian giver.. And yet he cannot stop obsessing about the alleged lie that Elizabeth Warren told decades ago. She believed the stories that her grandmother told her, mentioned that she had Native American blood in her, and pundits in general and Trump in specific have railed at her about that ever since a university where she taught mentioned it in their literature. The man who has literally told thousands of lies in his first year, wants her to get a DNA test and if it comes back positive, claims he’ll donate a million dollars to a charity of hers.

First of all, no, he won’t. She could come back one quarter Apache and Trump will still not pay out a million dollars to anybody. Second, sure she’ll do it, right after he releases his tax returns.

The bottom line is this: He’s targeting Warren because he’s afraid of her; he’s concerned she’ll run against him in 2020. Whenever he makes fun of her, it means he’s running scared over the prospect of having to face her. Trump has lost the right to call anyone else a liar, ever. Not with the thousands of lies that he has repeatedly stated to serve his base of non-discriminating chowderheads.

3). The China syndrome.. And for pretty much no reason at all, he’s launching a trade war against China this week which, when China lashes back, is going to wind up crippling–among others–farmers who were stupid enough to vote for Trump in the first place.

As I said: a generation to fix the damage he’s done. Maybe more.

PAD

ORDER OF THE CHAOS/THEY KEEP KILLING GLENN now on Kindle

Not easy to find for some reason, but these links will take you right there.

Find ORDER OF THE CHAOS here.

Find THEY KEEP KILLING GLENN here.

Happy reading.

PAD

Freak Out Friday – June 29, 2018

Screw it. I’m not in the mood. Talk amongst yourselves.

PAD

RIP Harlan

He died peacefully in his sleep.

Who the hell could have predicted that. I always thought he’d die while stopping a bank robbery. Or from an assassin’s bullet. Or flying off a twisty mountain road because some jackass in a Corvette thought he was a better driver.

Instead peacefully. In his sleep.

Son of a bitch.

The last several years he was mostly a prisoner of his stroke afflicted body. Most times recently when I tried to call, no one picked up.

He wasn’t happy. Not for a long time.

Now it’s our turn.

PAD

Freak Out Friday – June 22, 2018

In the early days of the Trump administration, people were worried that Trump would emulate Hitler. Others sought out rationality, claiming that while Trump was no prize, he certainly wasn’t Hitler and the USA of 2018 could not remotely become Berlin of the 1930’s/’40’s.

And then racist right wingers and the KKK endorsed Trump, and Trump talked about how there were a lot of good people in the array of Nazi protestors in Charlottesville, and suddenly the comparisons to Hitler seemed more spot on. In fact, even Godwin of the acclaimed Godwin’s law stated that his rule was suspended for the foreseeable future. And now the other shoe has dropped.

1). We have camps. Just as the Nazis had concentration camps that served as carrying out widespread execution and just as the United States had camps in which they incarcerated the Japanese, including many who were American citizens and had done absolutely nothing that was illegal (read George Takei’s column here to see insight from it by someone who was there) we now have a new generation of camps where children–ripped from their parents arms–are being held.

Meanwhile brand new holding facilities–jails, basically–are being constructed by Trump friends who donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaign because the executive order Trump signed this week stipulated that families had to be kept together. In prison. Sound familiar?

You remember the executive order, of course. The one that just a few days ago, Trump stated he couldn’t sign.

Even the Secretary of Homeland Security agreed. Kirstjen Nielsen (whose first name was even able to stump my Spellcheck) stated, “Congress and the courts created this problem, and Congress alone can fix it.” The day before she tweeted, “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.”

Except yes, they did. It’s been thoroughly documented. Trump’s right hand asshole, Stephen Miller, proposed it, and Trump embraced it. They did it to try and wrestle the Democrats into a hole where they would agree to give him enough money to build his goddamned wall in exchange for letting children return to their parents. Except Miller, Trump and Nielsen clearly had no idea what a spectacularly bad–not to mention illegal on an international level (could you imagine the three of them being summoned to The Hague to stand trial?) this undertaking would be. He managed to piss off Dems, GOPs, the Pope, not to mention Ivanka (the jury is still out on Melania who was seen heading for a surprise visit to kids in Texas wearing a jacket that said “I don’t really care. Do U?” Thank God she left it on the plane when she disembarked.). Trump clearly overreached just how far he could push people. Since he has no heart and no empathy, it didn’t occur to him that the enforced splitting up of families would freak out as many people as it had. His popularity began to sink, and his insistence that it was all the Democrats at fault was fooling nobody except his most devout, intransigent followers.

Even the news media is beginning to lose it, ranging from shouting matches between interviewers and Trump’s enablers to poor Rachel Maddow (when did we ever think we would combine those words?) losing her composure on the air while reading an AP report about camps targeted specifically for children. They’re building one camp two miles away from the camp where George Takes was imprisoned back in the 40s. Oh, and the document Trump signed? It doesn’t put forward any way of reuniting the families that have already been shattered.

Meanwhile the Charlottesville Nazis are planning a march in Washington D.C. demanding white civil rights. I swear to God, I’m hoping that two guys in black suits, sunglasses and hats and driving an old police car drive them into the Potomac.

It would be so easy to say that this entire fiasco is the absolute nadir of Trump’s presidency, but there’s no point in making that claim. Because if there is one thing that Trump has absolutely proven, it’s that no matter how low he goes, he will invariably find some new lower degree to which he can sink.

2). Spaaaaace Forrrce. Any reasonable and sane president, if he were interested in expanding the space program, would be solidly behind mounting an expedition to Mars. That’s the next logical step. Now to be fair, Trump did say that he endorsed exploring Mars. But most of his enthusiasm seemed to be powered by Elon Musk’s interest in launching a rocket. Back in the 1960s we were competing with Russia; now Trump is competing with a billionaire. Meanwhile NASA’s budget has been cut so far back that developing a serious endeavor to reach Mars is a non-starter. But what is Trump strongly endorsing? Basically he wants to create Starfleet. Something on par with the navy and marines. He wants to weaponize space, which is a concept specifically forbidden by the Outer Space treaty we signed with Russia over fifty years ago. Even Reagan couldn’t do it when he launched what he referred to as the Star Wars initiative, which Bill Clinton eventually pulled the plug on because nothing they were developing worked.

Trump also loves claiming that Hillary Clinton wasn’t the least bit interested in exploring Mars, which is of course yet another lie since she repeatedly did endorse it.

He never changes. His priorities boil down to three things: His own interests, competing with other rich people, and lying about Clinton.

At least he’s consistent.

Did he do anything right? No.

PAD

Order of the Chaos — The Hidden Earth, Book 3

I am pleased to announced that as of now, a mere eleven years after the release of the first book in the Hidden Earth trilogy, the concluding novel, ORDER OF THE CHAOS, is now available in paperback. The ebook will be available within a few weeks.

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You can find it right here.. And you can read more about it right here.

The final battle between humanity and the mythic creates who have taken over the planet called the Damned World finally unspools, and ideally there will be some surprises along the way.

So fans everywhere can stop asking me.

PAD

Freak Out Friday – June 15, 2018

I don’t think there’s a need to break down this week’s installment, because it’s been one long journey of diplomatic idiocy. And it’s very hard to determine how to think about it.

It was only a few months ago that all of us were terrified that Trump was steering us directly into nuclear war with North Korea. Trump loved hurling insults at Kim Jong un, needlessly provoking a known dictator who thought nothing of killing his own family members to secure his hold on power. There was much speculation that the two of them would become determined to display whose dick was bigger by beginning the lobbing of nuclear weapons in both directions. Every day of news would display more of Trump’s ludicrous treats like nicknaming Kim “Rocket Man” which is, let’s face it, actually a pretty good nickname. Trump even realized it and added “Little” to diminish him. Because that’s what you want to do to a demented asshole who kills routinely.

But then amazingly Kim saw that there was a possibility to achieve what he always wanted: recognition from the rest of the world as a respected leader. So to the shock of absolutely everyone he launched peace talks with South Korea and said he’d be willing to talk to Trump about nuclear deterrence.

And suddenly Trump managed to elevate HIMself by saying he’d be happy to meet with Kim. Fox News, who unilaterally screamed bloody murder when Obama merely said he’d be willing to meet with Kim or other dictators, naturally embraced the invitation and patted Trump on the back for making diplomatic advances that Obama never made and they would have excoriated if he had.

This development left many liberals confused. Was Trump actually doing something right? Was he really going to be able to utilize diplomacy to solve the nuclear threat that North Korea presents? The notion of having to pat him on the back and commend him for a job well done was certainly a daunting prospect. Was there a problem here we weren’t perceiving, or was Trump actually doing something indisputably praiseworthy?

The problem is this:

Putin wants to get rid of the Western alliance. This is a known fact. They threw him out of G8 when he annexed the Crimea and that still sticks in his craw. When you’re a dictator, it is your compulsion to want to be on top. You don’t want to be shunned by your peers; you want to be the leader, the one they answer to, the one who they listen to and ideally obey.

The US, Canada, England and the other members of the G7 served as something of a check against Putin’s power, and if there’s one thing dictators despise, it’s checks on their power.

Now we all know that Trump is in Putin’s pocket. He happily overlooks all of Putin’s horrific actions and murders because the fact is that Trump really wishes he could be a dictator. He hates the whole elections thing. He despises the fact that people don’t have to do what he orders them to do. He hates it when Democrats, lawyers and judges stand in his way. That’s why he “jokes” about being made President for life or having everyone compelled to do exactly what he tells them for fear of their lives.

So if Putin wants the Western alliance dissolved, you can bet he’ll tell Trump exactly what he wants him to do and Trump will do it. Because Trump has no respect for the other democratically elected leaders who try to stop him from doing whatever he wants.

Consequently Trump confronted the G7 crew, blew them off, and picked a fight with Canada. CANADA? How shite a diplomat do you have to be when you can’t get on with CANADA?!?! We have historically had the best relations with them of two border countries in the history of the world, and he’s picking fights with CANADA?!?!?!

And after he trashed our standing with G7, he went off to Singapore utterly unprepared to meet with Kim, who naturally steamrollered over him. Trump volunteered to cease military maneuvers with South Korea, which we knew going in that Kim hated. And for this concession what did we get in return? Nothing. Not a damned thing. A short document that swore they were going to talk about giving up their nukes without attaching any promises or deadlines. Meanwhile Trump actually went around praising Kim, talking about what a swell guy this murderous sack of shit was. He said that right after glossing over everything Putin had done and stating that he should be allowed to return to G7. Putin return? It wouldn’t surprise me if G7 realizes that G6 might not be a bad idea.

The simple truth is this: We are aligning with an Axis of evil. If World War III hit, we will be on the wrong side.

When you get down to it, in comparing the Trump and Obama presidencies, two pictures sum them up. With Obama, it’s the picture where he and the others are sitting in the War room, waiting to hear if bin Laden is dead. With Trump, it will be that picture where he’s sitting stubbornly with his arms folded, which is his body language tell that he isn’t listening to a thing that’s being said. That tells you all you really need to know.

PAD

“Order of the Chaos” review copies

If any legitimate reviewers are interested in obtaining a PDF proof of “Order of the Chaos,” the concluding novel in the Hidden Earth trilogy, please write to me at padguy@aol.com.

Thanks.

PAD

“They Keep Killing Glenn”

Is now available in Paperback on Amazon. The ebook will be up in a couple of days.

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You can order it here.

PAD