Robot Jazz

  Generated with Opera's Aria AI Credit where credit is due: It appears that President Trump's Iranian gamble paid off with a win.  A few hours ago, Iran did retaliate against American bases in the region, but the attacks were minor and telegraphed in advance. As the New Zork Times reports: Even as it attacked, there were signs that Iran was been looking for an off-ramp from a confrontation with the United States. Three Iranian officials said their government had given advance notice that the missile strike was coming, to minimize potential casualties, and President Trump responded with an olive branch online. “Perhaps Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the Region, and I will enthusiastically encourage Israel to do the same,” he wrote in one of a series of posts on Truth Social. That's the game right there. Score one for Team Trump. I am not nonplussed by these developments. As I wrote yesterday, Iran has its back against the wall. Its proxies smashed by Israel, ...

  While the above AI-generated image (via NightCafe ) might not be the best representation, there is a great deal of truth in the idea that Trump is slowly becoming Woodrow Wilson's understudy.  Not only did Wilson implement racist policies as Trump has done (MAGA isn't Make America Great Again as much as it is Make America White Again ), but Wilson also campaigned on an isolationist platform, only to engineer America's entry into World War One at a politically advantageous moment for the ambitious president. As this  New Zork Times  headline suggests, Trump's "America First" isolationism is becoming creeping Middle Eastern adventurism: Is this the start of Wilson 2.0?  🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽 Let's be clear: Iran is a bad actor on the world stage, and has been for a great many decades. This is why no one is rushing to their aid. Sure, Russia, China, et al. might speak fondly of the nation, but their lack of assistance exposes how it is just talk, an alliance of conve...

  Consider this a bookend to my previous post  to my previous post on the eve of the "No Kings Protest".  Happily, my earlier post that pointed out that as many Americans, if not more, oppose Trumpist fascism was proven correct by the fantastic turnout across the country. Well done, America! The Founding Fathers are no doubt proud!  While quantifying the precise turnout is difficult, it is clear that at least five million Americans turned out to reject MAGA and its fascist agenda. As Arie Melber pointed out tonight on MSNBC , that is roughly twenty times  the number of people who protested at the height of the Tea Party  movement.  Fantastic!   Sadly, while America did choose Trump, America is now rejecting him. Better late than never, right? Like an alcoholic, sometimes a country has to wake up in the gutter before it realizes it has a problem.  🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽  By contrast, the Dumbkopf Fuhrer's masturbatory birthday celebr...

  I remember when, in one of my early poli-sci classes, we covered the rise of Hitlerian fascism in Germany. At the end of the lecture, the most common emotion was one of bewilderment. Why didn't the German people stop Hitler before he led them into the abyss? Why didn't they take Hitler's expressed ideas, as he recorded in detail in  Mein Kampf, seriously and end his political career before it started? My professor's answer was brutal in its directness: because the German people wanted what he was selling. To be sure, some did oppose Hitler and even lost their lives due to their opposition, but the majority of the German people reveled in Hitler's vision for a Third Reich . They were on board for the madness, hence why there was never a popular uprising, even after the war turned against Germany.  How does a once-rational nation fall into madness? The answer varies depending on the specific situation, of course, but one general principle, as espoused by Plato in Th...

  One of the things that I have pointed out previously in this blog is that one of MAGA's guiding principles is that "we don't need no fancy book learnin'" as a 21st-century nation. From a profoundly stupid man as president to a profoundly brain-addled anti-science figure as head of Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and the rest in between (such as FEMA head David Richardson being unfamiliar with hurricane season ), the entirety of Team Trump is built upon the idea that politics is merely a matter of uninformed opinion. As someone who has formerly studied politics, this attitude offends me in its, well, stupidity.  As any political scientist will confess, political science  is less a science than it is a form of meta-science. Whenever one has to deal with something human , the rules aren't made of steel but of plastic because oft irrational human emotion can be as powerful a motive force as hard data. Hence, why we shouldn't call it...