Robot Jazz

  The ship was one of the navy’s pride, bearing the name of an esteemed statesman of its homeland. It served dutifully, carrying out its tasks with the professionalism and elan expected of its service’s long history. But morale had collapsed. The government had blundered into a war it assumed would be an easy victory over a weaker regional power — and it was not. Worse, conditions aboard the ship deteriorated under wartime stress so badly that even the food became unfit for consumption. Eventually the situation grew so dire that the crew mutinied. They seized the ship and fled while loyalist vessels scrambled to hunt them down. It played out like something straight from The Hunt for Red October — except this time the sailors weren’t defecting to a better world. They were escaping misery. That is the story of Potemkin, a pre-dreadnought battleship of the Russian Navy that mutinied during the disastrous Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. You can watch these events recreated in Russian...

  [The following is satire. Blame a rainy day, an irresponsible amount of gin, and a stack of WARNO screenshots begging to be misused. What follows is a chowderpot of farce, presented without a wink to realism. You’ve been warned.] Day 1 Today, the Trump administration announced a "1000% tariff" on all Soviet products sent to the US. At a press conference, President Trump said, "I love Yuri...I call him 'Yuri'. Not many people get to call him that. I love...uh, Yuri...but we can't have Russia taking advantage of Americans by dumping their vodka on our shores. We love their vodka, but we can’t let them cheat. Nobody cheats America except me — legally, legally."  The Soviet Ambassador, Ivan Ivanovich, released a terse statement that "The Soviet Union will not be abused by America, nor its NATO allies.  We will be forced to act." Andropov reportedly told aides, "I survived kidney failure, the KGB, and Brezhnev’s funeral circuit. I will surviv...

  As I think about this unmitigated disaster that is Donald Trump’s illegal war of choice with Iran, one thing above all others keeps stunning me: the administration’s complete unpreparedness for Iran’s obvious, long‑telegraphed strategy of shutting down a large portion of the world’s petroleum supply by closing the Strait of Hormuz. There have been many theories as to why this administration of self‑styled ubermensch failed to anticipate such a basic countermove — a failure that doomed Operation: Epic Fury from the start — but the most convincing explanation is what chess grandmaster Siegbert Tarrasch once termed amaurosis scacchistica , i.e., chess blindness. The administration was so supremely confident in its own strategy that it simply could not perceive the threat directly in front of it. In the June 2 New Zork Times  article entitled War Games and Warnings on Strait of Hormuz Went Unheeded by Trump , Michael Crowley wrote: One simple explanation is that Mr. Trump may ...

  Things are not going well for Trump 2.0. His “little excursion” into Iran has metastasized into a full‑blown war now staggering toward its fifth full‑month mark. Recall, Operation: Epstein Fury … er, Epic Fury was supposed to last a few days to a few weeks. Instead, we’re months deep with no resolution in sight. A “forever war,” to use the term du jour , is bad enough — but it becomes catastrophic when the commander‑in‑chief is a man who makes worse decisions the moment pressure touches him. The old adage, often misattributed to Einstein, about insanity being defined as doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result applies here. Trump is not, shall we say, an adroit thinker. He has a documented predilection for what Gen. Honore once called “getting stuck on stupid.” And that’s why there is growing concern that Trump, unable to stop the fighting that has choked off 25% of the world’s oil supply, now with both the Persian Gulf and Red Sea routes pinched of...

  It is an odd feeling to gaze up at the summer sky and not be greeted by a bright blue dome with a glowing golden orb cheerily laying claim to all that it surveys, but rather by a surreal smoky-red abomination with an orange-yellow splotch dominating its realm with tortured malevolence.  Yet, that is precisely what I witnessed this day, as smoke from massive wildfires poured down across the border as if Canada was exhaling after taking a long, deep drag on a tar-filled cigarette. Welcome to the century of global secondhand smoke.  We all tend to see the past through rose‑colored glasses, but I try to be objective about these things. And when I think back to my youth in the ’70s and ’80s, I can’t recall witnessing anything like this — not unless you count the day Washington state's Mount St. Helens blew with such force that its ash drifted all the way to New York, dusting cars and triggering a mini‑nuclear winter that made the following season measurably colder and snowie...