Trump: 4+ Years That Shook the World
by John Kendall Hawkins
It blows the mind when you think about it. The disruption to our precious and pure democracy. If you're a lefty refugee like me, maybe you wonder if you should have gone to that drive-in double bill all those years ago showing The Life of Brian and Altered States, having dropped psilocybin and washed it down with a jug of cheap red wine. Years earlier, I'd had my young mind blown living in West Hollywood, an "extra" vet (Raid on Entebbe), when I sat through the double-bind of Executive Action, which posited that the JFK thing was a military gig, and, after a refreshing of the popcorn, watched a hoaxing Jesus I had come to know and love behave like an a**hole in The Passover Plot, spitting in faces, setting up the grift, seemingly pre-luding the revenge to come in the kick-ass Revelations, nine-eyed goats and sh*t. It all spells doom; it's a crazy town cocktail of postmodern excess. Like the late great poet and singer Jim Carroll would sing with his band ("People Who Died") later in my life, Nothing is true / It's all permitted. Nietzsche on heroin, talking to horses.
I did a lot of reading between such consciousness-splitting films. A lot of reading. Such wonderful in-your-control education, paced as you like, performed on the page according to your whimsy or woe on any given day, was mostly helpful, assuaging and ameliorating an otherwise gloomy outlook without end. John Updike's Rabbit series was especially helpful along the way. Although, Philip Roth brought me back to Earth in a hurry. But more recently, i my dotage, I've been reviewing books and discovering interesting but disquieting revelations that make me think I don't know jack about Jill.
For instance, I read a book about how the anopheles mosquito and its disease-bearing mischief has accounted for the most deaths in human history, and influenced Napoleon's withdrawal from Haiti and the sale of Louisiana to the Yanks. I read a book that said Robnson Crusoe, long held ut as the model of rugged individualism, was a notorious f*cking slaver. I read a Trump biography that claimed the marshmallow fascist pushed his brother to suicide and wrote not word one of The Art of the Deal. I read a book that claimed that Columbus might have been sailing the seas high on drugs and everywhere he went looked like India to him. I read another book that suggested Englishman Paul Revere was an a**hole and that Crispus Attucks, the Black man killed first in the Boston Massacre, had just been made a freeman ("mothafukka," he may have intoned as he fell). Know what I mean?
Four years of Trump made us goofy. And the MSM continues to stroke the cash cow Trump is. We don't know how much he actually makes, because he still fights to keep his tax returns private, but the real question we should be looking at is how much milk the MSM has pulled down since 2016 just scourging the f*cker -- Chris Hayes alone has become a household brand name, up there with Lysol, since Trump took being invited to host Saturday Night Live (2004) too seriously and began suggesting he'd run for prez. Sweet Cheeses!
This fat f*ck Richie Rich, all growed up, took us by storm, and under the table, which is preferred workplace for exchanges. When he became president, SNL continued the infatuation with the Toon Goon by having William Baldwin parody him for years, but Trump got him back much later by replacing that toy gun on that set with a real one. Now Bill's gun-stunned. Trump knows people. Probably it was Roger Stone. The guy who openly pressed Trump to stage a coup.
Lots of crazy going on.
Take QAnon and the Proud Boys. And the MAGA crowd. WTF? How could the MSM have seen them as would-be Founding Fathers of a new republic that was the old republic but with just one amendment -- everybody keeps their guns. You wanna express your freedom, you'll just have to risk being shot, or else move to Australia, where there is no Bill of Rights -- just everyone connected by mateship contracts and contract killers. But seriously, consider how the MSM, for their own selfish monetary reasons, has framed these clodhoppers. We who pass for normal, are told by the MSM that, for instance, QAnon has a "conspiracy theory" that there are pizza shops out there somewhere tha have trap doors that lead to cubby hold filled with the missing children we've seen on milk cartons getting sexually abused under the fires of the woodfired stove.
Similarly, the Proud Boys sing an anthem about making mommy proud-- literally -- that was a song dropped from the Disney film, Aladdin, presumably because the mother's demands of her child had her coming across as Cruella, and it rubbed some studio genie-s the wrong way. The loud Proud Boys are led by a swarthy white FBI informant. QAnon and the Proud Boys and MAGA are all tossed off by the likes of Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow as "conspiracy theorists." But the problem is that such an attribution normalizes their shtick.
In actuality, they are crazy.Somewhere in the DSM is an entry on their ailments. Really. Instead of calling in the National Guard or Capitol Cops to stop them on Jan 6, we should have rounded up a SEAL Team 6 version of psychiatrists and had them rappel into the jungle of their collective unconsciousness. Think: Inception. If you make a buck off madness, expect a future of duckrabbit people speaking fast auction English gibberish. The new norm. Hello Quantum, goodbye heart.
Lots of crazy to go around.
US/NATO/EU
Probably NATO should have ended when the Warsaw Pact ended and the Iron Curtain stood down and McDonald's was dancing in the streets of Moscow and Yeltsin was Monica. NATO was never to move east under agreements with multiple Russian presidents. And there have been no real indications that NATO would be granting Ukraine that status anytime soon, if ever.
In recent years, the NATO alliance has weakened somewhat. Nation-states were not paying the 2% GDP for defense they pledged. Trump probably further disincentivized Europeans from caring about the alliance by having called it "obsolete" on the campaign trail, and then following the bluster up with pushy posturing on his first trip to Europe in 2017 following his inauguration, during which he was seen shoving a NATO fellow in a photo op and remarking on French president Macron's wife's allure "for her age." Fox News, Trump's favorite media outlet at the time, framed his position this way:
Featured in the segment is European Council President Donald Tusk reminding Scrooge McDuck: "Dear America, appreciate your allies. You don't have that many." Touche'.
There have been signs that Germany was tiring of the alliance, partially set up to deter any future ambitions (we don't need any more Reichs for crikesakes). The German Left is especially ennui-ed about NATO, calling for withdrawal from the mateship obligations. A Deutsch Welt piece last June, "Germany's Left party plans to scrap NATO, end troop deployments," begins:
The socialist Left party has adopted its policy platform for Germany's September general election. Internationally, it is calling for NATO to be replaced and an end to troop deployments.
Olaf Scholz, before becoming the new German Chancellor (elected last December) from the Social Democratic Party, had voiced serious criticism of the Trump administration's economic sanctions regime, which was echoed by Angela Merkel. For more than a decade America has sought to be the prime provider of energy to Europe. To do that, it has to stop Russian gas from coming in. Trump's sanctions penalized companies working to finish off the Baltc undersea Nord Stream 2 pipeline that skirts Poland and Ukraine, depriving them of billions of dollars in transit fees. Scholz said, "Such sanctions are a serious interference in the internal affairs of Germany and Europe and their sovereignty. We firmly reject this." Joe Biden has ratcheted up these sanctions further and forced the closure of the finished Nord Stream 2spigot. It would be like a pushy Coke threatening a nation's families if the government didn't turn off the cheaper Pepsi supply. More recently, Scholtz, falling in step and promising to supply Ukraine with weapons has dragged his feet on the delivery of tanks.
Some people wonder why, given the American Intelligence Community's "assessment" of DJ's link to Putin, why the Russians didn't invade when he was in office. Given the ancient history of Ukraine's entanglement with Russia, it's hard to say what the war is really about and who is right. The academics will tell us ten years after all the smoke is cleared. But in a recent interview I had with investigative reporter Greg Palast, who revealed that he had roots in Ukraine, he opined that the war was about religion (of all things!) and oil. He said in March:
All right. So Putin, with justification, said Crimea is part of Russia. It is. The second is that the Donbas is Russia and part of Russia, and it is"Two weeks ago, Putin won the war. He got the Donbas. He got Crimea. And yeah, I mean, it's true that Ukraine didn't sign off, but big frickin deal. Yeah, they own it now. So he won the war. So what is he doing next? Why this invasion of the non-Russian parts of Ukraine?
Dramatic Pause.
This current war didn't just start. It started eight years ago in 2014, when there was bombing from both sides of the of the Donbas to Ukraine side. Fourteen thousand people have died. Three thousand Russian ethnic civilians, mostly children.
So what's going on? Then we get to number two: oil. The price of oil collapsed with COVID in 2020. Forty three percent of Russia's state budget, which means their pensions, whatever, comes from oil and oil revenues. The price of oil collapsed, in fact, if you remember, there was even one day when the spot price of oil was negative, you had to literally pay people to take oil. This was devastating to Russia.
So what do you do if the price of oil is down? You raise the price of oil. What's the best way to raise the price of oil? War. Blow things up, threaten the world. Well, just raise the price of oil. Russia is the world's number one exporter of oil and gas products. Today, oil hit $130 a barrel. It was $50 a barrel this time last year. I'm looking at nearly a $1 billion a day war windfall for Putin. So there you are. It's religion and oil.
Indeed, Russia colluded with our longtime "special friend" Saudi Arabia to drive oil prices up, to the point where today Americans are paying more than $6 a gallon at the pump. Etc. Ouch.
Crazy starting a war over oil.
But also crazy is Brown University's final tally on the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the American taxpayer after the attacks of 9/11: $20T. For nothing. Nothing. Republicans jumped all over Biden for the way the hasty withdrawal from Russia's "Nam" went down. He-hee, we let the Soviets soften up the Taliban, then they Empire-collapsed and we tee-heed all the way into Moscow with our Golden Arches. $20T. For Nothing. You would think, exhausted, we'd have reflected for a while; thought about how it might have gone better.
Cofer Black, previously castigated for his poor communication about events leading up to 9/11, went on to open our gloves-off aptly named "Black Sites," and, more important to the point I'm making, went on to, by his own words, "He conceived, planned, and led CIA's role in Afghanistan" (note the image's Fight Club ending atmosphere). Let me see, since it was mostly a CIA-led war (drones, coordinates), and he was in charge, by his own admission" Cofer went on to become an exec at Blackwater and at Total Information Awareness (now OODA). And one wonders what mistakes he can get up to with mercenaries a phone call away at his desk on the board of Ukraine's reading gas provider, Burisma. Joe Biden's kid, Hunter, in his curiously ghost-written memoir, pointed out that "To put it more bluntly: having a Biden on Burisma's board was a loud and unmistakable f*ck-you to Putin." Imagine the f*ck You effect of a guy, like Black, on the board, who likes collect terrorist heads on sticks.
Biden's poll numbers plummeted after the Afghan debacle, and then he gaffed and seemed in the press to be okay with a 'minor incursion' by Putin into Ukraine just a little bit, presumably meaning that if he just took Crimea and the Donbas everything would be copacetic. When the incursion occurred, suddenly, and predictably, Biden' poll numbers went up. He began mobilizing NATO and the US military and arranging for all manner of weapons to be sent to Ukraine to help in the resistance to Russia's war. Suddenly, cash-strapped, impoverished America, still gobsmacked by the $20T throwaway, were watching the House and Senate climb over each other to throw money at Ukraine. The Daily Caller reports:
The Senate passed a bill Thursday approving $40 billion in aid to Ukraine, nearly $7 billion more than Biden had requested Congress to pass. Congress also approved a $14 billion package in March and the Biden administration sent $350 million in the first days of the war and $1 billion more in March.
So, it looks like Ukraine will be the new Afghanistan, aka, Nam II for Russia. So, surely, for something so silly and wasteful, Cofer Black must be there to give the coordinates for the coming pallet drops of US dollars, which the Ukrainian oligarchs so much love, including Ihor Kolomoisky, President Zelensky's campaign backer and owner of the TV network where Z was a comic hit as a brash anti-corruption school teacher elected to the presidency in the show, Servant of the People -- also the name of his political party. Funny stuff. Ihor's under investigation by the Justice Department in the US for money laundering. And the loveable Capt Z. has offshore accounts he ain't talking about. Tears of laughter roll down mine cheeks. Maybe the incursion will see Cofer Black's mercenary connections, code-named "Nietzsche," go up against the Russian mercenary group we've been hearing about, "Wagner," and we can call their battle Nietzsche Versus Wagner, Amatis up against tubas and tiny violins,and hope for a nice settle-in HBO series. The Will to Power versus Tristan's love for his sister. Welcome to the 21st century.
In a recent interview with Heidi Peltier, a researcher from the previously cited Brown University Cost of War project, who provided the $20T for nothing figure, said of the burgeoning participation of the US in Ukraine's resistance to Russia, that it could be protracted due to military contractor pressure. She said:
I think some of what's happening there that relates to recent work of ours is, number one, how much US contractors are benefiting from this. And you can see that in their stock prices. There's a quote from the CEO of Raytheon who's saying this is going to be good for us. And so I think that's one thing to watch is that contractors and some contractors are benefiting from this and we'll have no incentive for the US to minimize its intervention. That's one fear...
You know, one thing I just read yesterday was that some of the some of the equipment and weapon systems that are being sent to Ukraine right now are not coming out of US stockpiles, which they could be, but rather that they are being manufactured newly, which is, you know, not only a waste, but also another way that the contractors are kind of increasing demand for their own products. And U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill for that. So that's another concern....
Putin is said to be collecting a windfall of $1 billion per day (see Palast above) and the US military contractors may see similar results. Who was it long ago who said that War Is A Racket? So, since there's nothing to lose but taxpayer money, and everything to gain by taxpayer money to military contractors, don't look for a quick end. Maybe we can have back-to-back $20T waste wars.
Perhaps, more importantly, presidents are supported in times of war. And polls indicate that Democrats will lose control of the House in the midterms coming in November. Presidents are supported in times of war, so expect purple prose applied to Europe's and America's existential condition. But Putin ain't Corn Pop and nukes in the parking lot ain't mere straight razors you can stare down with a length of hegemony chain. If Biden loses the House, he may well be revenge-impeached, as some Republicans promised after the silly charade of 2020 that saw the nation's attention diverted from the arrival in the States of Covid-19.
And arguably this all began when Trump pushed and shoved NATO members and sized up Mrs. Macron and complemented her on the preservation. of her jam N ow Sleepy Joe is out there with his chain gang. Too funny.
Covid-19
But nothing in Trump's four years in office spelled crazy like the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in America. Forget the impeachment trials. Forget that Florida governor Ron DeSantis admitted that the US was aware that Covid was in the US at the time of the Super Bowl, an event for which people flew into Miami from all over, and may have made it a Super Spreader of the virus. But money doesn't talk, it swears, the Bard from Duluth tells us (and he should know). Forget the nonsense about masks (still relevant) and safe distancing and home remedies and the fostering of militant resistance to vaxxing.
We'll never know how Hillary might have handled the outbreak of Covid-19, but it's conceivable that the pandemic might never have happened. Barack Obama's administration had cut off funding for gain-of-function research into viruses in 2014. Such research was seen as too dangerous to pursue in the US, leading to it being subcontracted, as it were, to China (and, many say, Ukraine).
But the funding and research were restored in 2017 under the Trump administration. The controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology lab, not the market pangolin outbreak theory, is still the leading contender for the causal outbreak -- accident or mischief -- and the public knows that Dr. Fausti had granted funding for g-o-f research at WIV, and the lab not only doesn't deny working with coronavirus-bearing bats, but crows about it at their website. Trump single-handedly undermined a scientific review of the origin of the virus by claiming that China was responsible, and, what's more, through the mouth of his friend and lawyer Rudy Giuliani, that China had intentionally spread the virus around the world. It took world class documentarian Sacha Cohen (Borat) to reveal this incredible utterance from a White House insider to a girl "from Kazakhstan" interviewing him and to which he seemed to be making a sexual pass. This scene could sum up, in miniature, the Trump damage to our self-esteem -- or, more likely, the depth of our corruption. "China did it," Rudy says to the faux naif.
Curiously, no MSM segment ever followed up on this damaging "interview" whose postulation still makes it difficult to get Chinese cooperation for the origin of Covid solved. Trump and his lot made science political. Think Galileo and Copernicus, back when religion was political. Some scientists still argue for a market outbreak for the virus, others, including Jeffery Sachs and Neil Harrison argue for the lab outbreak theory. In an Intercept article a few days ago, "JEFFREY SACHS PRESENTS EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLE LAB ORIGIN OF COVID-19," the pair point to further evidence for the lab theory they provide in a science journal:
The journal article offers a scientific road map for how this unusual sequence of amino acids could have made its way into the furin cleavage site, or FCS, of the virus. Sachs and Harrison acknowledge that the sequence could have arisen naturally. But they also lay out another possibility: that scientists might have purposefully inserted this particular string of amino acids into a bat coronavirus in the course of their work. They focus particularly on scientists who submitted an unfunded grant proposal to a division of the Defense Department called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, laying out plans to insert a furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus.
DARPA? This is ouch and a worry, and follows the kind of planning from a framework for intentionally creating novel viruses described in the government book, Biodefense In The Age Of Synthetic Biology, which I reviewed back in 2020. The government owned that they intended to f*ck with Mother Nature for the well-being of mankind (you've seen the Twilight Zone episode).
But it is just another theory. And Sachs and Harrison, in "A call for an independent inquiry into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus" in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the pair do draw attention to the damage that the Trump administration skepticism of science has created. They specifically point to the shortcomings of the Intelligence Community (IC):
This lack of an independent and transparent US-based scientific investigation has had four highly adverse consequences. First, public trust in the ability of US scientific institutions to govern the activities of US science in a responsible manner has been shaken. Second, the investigation of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 has become politicized within the US Congress (5); as a result, the inception of an independent and transparent investigation has been obstructed and delayed. Third, US researchers with deep knowledge of the possibilities of a laboratory-associated incident have not been enabled to share their expertise effectively. Fourth, the failure of NIH, one of the main funders of the US-China collaborative work, to facilitate the investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2 (4) has fostered distrust regarding US biodefense research activities.
So, two years later, we don't know the origin of Covid-19. We don't know why WIV was trusted with lab research the UD regarded as too dangerous to pursue at home or why NIH would contract with WIV to execute gain-of-function research in a nation that is closed and, we often say, inimical to our national world view. And with the DARPA input revealed, we don't know if we will ever get an answer for the origin and aftermath -- even when an answer is seen as crucial to preventing the next outbreak. In addition, the DARPA influence sheds a new light on another program that started up during the Trump administration -- the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3), which started up immediately after Trump's inauguration, in February 2017. DARPA's stated mission for P3:
DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, announced Feb. 6 that it has launched the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program in order to facilitate a system capable of halting the spread of any viral disease outbreak before it can escalate to pandemic status. "Such a capability would offer a stark contrast to the state of the art for developing and deploying traditional vaccines-a process that does not deliver treatments to patients until months, years, or even decades after a viral threat emerges," according to the agency.
Miraculous technologies are at work then. And what a god-on-our-side coincidence that P3 was all set up and running -- two years in -- when Covid-19 hit us all. Also odd that the program, according to the DARPA media representative I exchanged emails with, is scheduled to terminate this year, 2022. You know, given that it's been so successful in its mission, getting a medical solution to market within 90 days.
I wrote about the P3 program previously, noting how one Canadian lab, Abcellera, had been given by US officials the first Covid survivor antibodies to process on February 25, 2020, and that they had, using sophisticated AI-assisted technology, they had come up with a monoclonal solution by August 2020. DARPA told me that such a solution could be a viable fill-in (as it was repeatable) until a safe vaccine was developed, which could take years (no vaccine for a virus had ever taken less than four years-- and no vaccine had ever emerged for coronavirus). The NYT, Trump's greatest detractor for four years, was all over the impossibility of the Warp Speed miracle vaccine that Trump was touting. But they lied or were misinformed. Unless you keep in mind that the current array of miracle vaccines are under-tested and are out there under Emergency protocols that limit Big Pharma liability for harm done, which could take years to emerge fully.
The disgraceful coverage of the miracle apparatus by the MSM under the Trump regime will come back to haunt us, I predict.
One could go on about what the Trump administration -- and the knee-jerk reaction to it -- have done to public interest information distribution in America. One could laugh hysterically, clutching oneself in straitjacket full moon glee, thinking about what passes as treason since January 6th....
But enough. I need to fart, guffaw and fade.
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