The Frankish Reich

Now you know what I mean

Starring Jim Caviezel, who previously starred in a Mel Gibson film about an unmarried 30-something cult leader who spent a lot of time around children and prostitutes. Groomer!

You beat me to it. The headline gave it away: “despite a treaty signed by many allies …” Q. what relevant treaty the Russia is a party to? A. The Geneva Conventions

Agreed. I was an aging holdout, unfurling my newspaper at coffee shops for years while everyone else was asking “what’s the Wifi code.” I finally gave in. Print is dead.

Agreed. Special tax favored investment zones were favored by Republicans of the Reagan type. They are not nearly as problematic as the commitment of public funds for private purposes. Stadium deals are the same corrupt mess. I mean, I want them to keep my teams in town, but that’s just me being selfish, not good policy.

I am so triggered by this B movie I never would have heard of until people started saying I should be triggered by it.

Yeah. 8 long years … …. Deek, are you sure you don’t need a mental competency exam? Or maybe the sun and the umm, Bud Lights got to you.

Two things I cannot understand. 1. What's in it for Putin? Even if he had "conquered" Ukraine, how does that make life any better for Russia? For Russians? For Ukrainians? Perhaps some small percentage of Russian speaking Ukrainians in the far eastern region would be happy, but that's it. Was it all for the ego of Putin, to be known as the man who reconstructed Peter the Great's Empire? We may dismiss the idea that Russia was somehow frightened that Ukraine would invade. That they'd join NATO and exert soft economic influence to make Russia more democratic? More ... gay? (the ultimate irony: the gay West kicking his country's manly ass). What possible motivation? There is no rational one. 2. What inspires these Putin apologists in the West? I get the pacifist tendency. But these are selective pacifists. Do these people really think that Putin has a point 'in attempting - in the most aggressive manner possible - to keep the former Russian Empire culturally conservative/orthodox Christian? What is "Christian" about Putin and his regime? What is worth preserving in that sick culture? It's not like westernized attitudes will wash away all their Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky and the Bolshoi Ballet. What is the defense of Putin's actions? I'm not seeing any defense at all, which is different than saying the United States shouldn't get involved. Clearly some comments cross the line into an implicit (or even explicit) defense of Russia and its actions. This assumes that there is some scenario in which NATO would attack Russia. Which is preposterous Putin nonsense.

Deek would've brought us peace in our time! But here we are stuck with demented fool Biden.

The June gloom. Must be San Diego or Orange County?

Haha. But really ... if all other developed world economies are trailing the USA (including those with conservative governments like the UK), how likely is it that Biden is dragging the USA down?

You win!

Agreed. I guess I am kind of an old cold warrior. I agreed with Reagan that the Soviet Union was an evil empire. And to be honest, I don't see any difference between the end-stage Soviet Empire and the current Russian Empire.

Again, another disturbing area of agreement ... Trumpism is in a lot of ways a kind of modern-day Trumanism. You have the idea that the government can protect old industry (steel, automobiles, etc.) through a combination of protectionism/tariffs and industrial policy/subsidies. Grafted onto that is a kind of ill-considered Kissinger like realpolitik - the rejection of the focus on international human rights that was in ascendancy from Nixon through Bush in favor of, well, America First. This was the turf occupied by many Democrats like Sen Scoop Jackson when I was a kid. I find it interesting that the pacifism of the left - let's get out of Vietnam! let's keep out of Iraq! - is now the province of the Trumpist right. Obviously we stayed in Vietnam too long, and obviously Iraq was a mistake from the start. But that doesn't mean JFK's response to the Cuban Missile Crisis was a mistake, or that our support for Ukraine is a mistake. I rejected the wholesale pacifism of the left back in those days just as I reject the "who cares about Ukraine" pacifism of the right today. I care because it's a just cause, AND because it's in America's interest to rein in Russia's ambitions. REMINDER: Mitt Romney was right; Barack Obama was wrong. Where are all these "mRNA vaccine-injured individuals?" And why would I care what Mark Zuckerberg - not some kind of immunologist - privately thought about it?

If "amazing" means "the strongest economy in the world today," well, I guess I do win.

We are working alongside Ukraine and our NATO allies to stop the expansion/reformation of the Russian Empire. Don't listen to me; listen to Putin himself. It's very easy to throw out the counterfactual: "so what if Ukraine had fallen in 2 weeks like Putin and his military advisors thought it would." Where would that leave the rest of the former Soviet sphere? Putin didn't stop at taking Crimea. He didn't stop at taking the majority Russian-speaking eastern provinces. What about all those Russian-speaking Latvians who need protection?

But there's this too: Foxconn will almost certainly not be able to make good on its promise to cover $300 million in bonds issued by Wisconsin. https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/25/foxconn_wisconsin_factory/ It is not an epic fail I guess, but it's still a fail. I don't think you'll see Trump visiting the site on his campaign swing through Wisconsin ....

So what was the alternative? Surrender Ukraine to Putin? He made it clear he was going to annex the eastern part of the country and install a Belarus-style puppet regime in Kiev. Where would that leave the Baltic states? Poland? That would have put us on the precipice of a NATO-obligated full-on war vs. expansionist Russia. The death and destruction (not to mention money spent) is a tragedy. But from a purely geopolitical/U.S.-centric standpoint, we are in a much stronger position today than we were before the Putin invasion. The whole world understands that Russia is unable to actually occupy territory outside of its borders in Europe. The laggards in Europe like Finland and Sweden are coming completely into the NATO fold. The Baltics are more secure today than they were at the start of 2022. Russia has been revealed as a paper tiger. It's still dangerous - an unstable dictator with nukes will always be - but it's imperialist ambitions have been effectively killed, and the rest of eastern Europe outside of puppet state Belarus is now more firmly western oriented than ever before. A colossal error on the part of Putin, but only an error because the West - yes, under Biden's leadership - proved the more united, effective, and committed force.

Yes. You are a Democrat. Nothing wrong with being a JFK Democrat! It's really not that different from being an old-fashioned, post-1988/pre-2016 Republican. (I guess Vietnam doesn't count now??)

Oh, come one. This is not your father's Kennedy. Read the NYT article. It's short. And honestly, the five things they point to are pretty unhinged. And they kind of underplay the level of crazy when it comes to the assassination of his father, stating that RFK Jr. has suggested there was a CIA conspiracy to kill him. In reality, RFK Jr. has expressed doubts that Sirhan Sirhan was actually the assassin, or the sole assassin. Everyone saw it on TV, but he tells us not to believe our lyin' eyes. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/robert-f-kennedy-jr-says-hes-not-convinced-sirhan-sirhan-killed-his-dad This guy is a nutcase.

I know some of us prefer to rely on heroin addict English has-been comics, or stay-at-home-mom legal pundits without a law degree, of the guy who thought child torture was going on in the basementless basement of a DC pizza shop. I prefer the Council on Foreign Relations. Again, what I mean when I say today's TrumpRight is often indistinguishable from the anti Military-Industrial Complex left of the 1960s-80s. You know, the people Nixon and Reagan called commies back then.

OK, explain this: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/business/energy-environment/opec-russia-saudi-arabia-oil-coronavirus.html HOUSTON — Oil-producing nations on Sunday agreed to the largest production cut ever negotiated, in an unprecedented coordinated effort by Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United States to stabilize oil prices and, indirectly, global financial markets. Saudi Arabia and Russia typically take the lead in setting global production goals. But President Trump, facing a re-election campaign, a plunging economy and American oil companies struggling with collapsing prices, took the unusual step of getting involved after the two countries entered a price war a month ago. Mr. Trump had made an agreement a key priority. Get that? The TRUMP ADMINISTRATION urged OPEC to cut production. In April 2020. In other words, the Trump Administration policy after COVID broke was to stabilize or RAISE CRUDE OIL PRICES. It's hard to argue with someone with a fixed/wrong idea about how the way the world works.

And the example is ... the suppression of Ivermectin! A drug that the vast majority of infectious disease specialists thought wouldn't work against COVID, yet a drug that was the subject of multiple COVID studies, all of which showed, conclusively, that it does not work against COVID. Nothing was "suppressed." It. Didn't. Work. You need to be a more critical reader. Look at the structure of the "argument" here: 1. Some doctors though Ivermectin may be a cheap/readily available/effective COVID therapy. 2. Big pharma would not profit from that. It would profit from having its own newly-developed/patent-protected vaccines and therapeutics adopted as the standard. 3. Other big industries (tobacco, energy, chemicals) have lied about various things over the years. 4. Ergo, Big Pharma suppressed an effective cure in order to foist their ineffective/profitable "solutions" on the public. Think about that logic. What's missing? A. Anything suggesting that Ivermectin is actually effective! He saves that for the last sentence, speculating on "how many lives could have been saved" if the Ivermectin cure hadn't been suppressed. Except that it WAS studied, and WAS (unfortunately for all of us) found to be ineffective. Also missing: any indication that there was any conspiracy to suppress evidence that Ivermectin is an effective COVID therapeutic. What happened is that the vast majority of experts said, "there's no evidence that this Ivermectin thing works." And that was true then. And now? There is strong evidence that it doesn't work. Only someone predisposed to find a conspiracy would find anything persuasive about this profoundly stupid article.

My point is this: "industrial policy" is usually the opposite of free market policy. And in a lot of these cases - Tesla in Buffalo, Foxconn in Wisconsin - we see nothing more than the socialization of losses. The government that "invests" (providing state money and incentives) is often left holding the bag. I thought socialism was a bad thing.

I'm sorry, this makes zero sense. Our relations with Saudi Arabia are fine. We sell them lots of military hardware, they sell oil to the world, they largely control OPEC and reduce production when crude prices are low and raise production when crude prices are high. And they are not functioning any differently in the market now than they were under Trump or under Obama or under Bush 43 or under Clinton. Where are you getting this notion of our "lack of relations" with the Saudis? You don't remember the famous Biden fist bump with the Saudi dictator? And the Saudis know which side their bread is buttered on. With rival Iran taking provocative acts again, guess who they'll be cozying up to again. I think you just made this up. It's a weird agglomeration of righty echo chamber memes: Biden energy policy bad. Trump managed Saudi relations better. Inflation is up. Somehow - you don't explain how, since there is no explanation - that means that Biden's perceived lack of Saudi ass kissing is hurting America. O.K.