Robot Jazz

  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‑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 off by ...

  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...

  Yesterday, news broke that Trump had scheduled a prime‑time address to the nation. What this address will be about is officially unknown, but a rumor in the press suggested that it would concern America’s election security in general — and specifically the claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, along with the allegation that Georgia’s two Democratic senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, were fraudulently elected.  What are we to make of this address? I, for one, see three possibilities: 1. The Empty‑Calorie Performance First, this is going to be yet another empty‑calorie performance from an entertainer long past his prime and completely out of fresh material. If you recall, it was just this past April that Trump felt compelled to give an address where, in his typical incoherent fashion, he tried to justify the Iran war a full month after it began — and only after it was already progressing poorly. That performance came after a similarly deranged affair the ...

  Back on April 10th, when word of the cessation of hostilities with Iran first broke, I reminded people that any agreement with Trump is worthless. The man is, by nature, treacherous. As I wrote at the time:  This is typical Trump: a man with a long history of violating contractual obligations (3,500 breach-of-contract lawsuits over the past three decades, according to the Journal Sentinel).  Having done what he needed to do to extricate himself from this fantastic mess that he created with his co-conspirator and war criminal, Benji Netanyahu, Trump is now attempting to change the terms of the deal to suit himself.  Can I call it or what?  I don't deserve any credit, though, as Trump, being the simplest of simple-minded individuals, is fantastically easy to read and predict.  Which is why he lost the war against a mid-tier regional power like Iran, and will lose this next round as well. Speaking of, here is the headline from today's New Zork Times : If thi...

  It was a surreal spectacle. After a blistering‑hot day, a line of strong thunderstorms with “destructive winds” — as the NWS so helpfully phrased it — blew into my area. Before I could even call for Auntie Em, gusts topping 80 miles per hour ripped through the neighborhood, blowing through the house like a poltergeist as curtains snapped and light décor scattered. Worse, the winds caught my large deck umbrella like a sail and took it — along with the glass‑topped table it was attached to — flinging the whole thing onto its side and into the still‑smoldering charcoal grill, risking a fire. In a matter of seconds, my calm Fourth of July evening had become Bedlam. After I closed my slack jaw, I immediately ran onto the deck to save the table and avert a possible fire. As I stepped outside, I was buffeted by impossibly strong gusts of wind that made the tall oaks on my property dance like tortured spirits in the night. Adding to the end‑of‑the‑world vibe were loud cracks of thunder, ...

And I am back! I wasn’t gone that long, but somewhere along the line I got addicted to these late‑afternoon blogging sessions, and any absence longer than a week feels like a small eternity. Part of the break was my seasonal affective disorder acting up — the garish summer sun loves to inflict cluster headaches on me. (Long‑time readers know my feelings about summer. Don’t worry, that rant is coming.) But I was also waiting for my new laptop. Believe it or not, I’ve been doing all my blogging on a seven-year-old  Chromebook . A pre‑COVID Chromebook , mind you, back when they had the processing power of a determined potato and a three‑year expiration date before Google cut off updates. The fact that I coaxed it into lasting more than twice its intended lifespan is a minor miracle — one that required creativity, alternative apps, and the patience of a monk as I waited for my keystrokes to appear a full second or two after I typed them. What can I say? I’m loyal to my tech and aller...