There has been a growing panic online for the last several days about the closure of the National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, by the FBI. On Thursday of last week the observatory was evacuated and the town’s post office shut down. A Blackhawk helicopter swooped in, FBI agents occupied the compound and began checking antennas. The local police force has not been informed what is going on and has been ordered to remain outside the perimeter.

The first I learned of it was on Reddit’s conspiracy sub, which I frequently read as it’s an incubator for Russian disinformation. A subscriber made a post claiming a “friend” at the observatory called him to warn that the sun had just burped out a large Coronal Mass Ejection headed for Earth, which would begin reaching us this week and likely burn us to death and boil the oceans.  The poster claimed the FBI swooped in to prevent the information from getting out and causing mass panic. As my last science class was high school physics, I did a bit of research and found his predicted outcome impossible. I did, however, check the space weather forecast and found there was a CME on September 7th that would begin impacting our atmosphere as a G2 solar storm beginning on September 11th. If you live in the Northern latitudes, you were lucky enough to have seen the Northern Lights as the CME impacted our ozone layer Monday and Tuesday night.

The FBI has not told local law enforcement the reason for the closure of the observatory and post office or when either would be reopened. The story migrated from the conspiracy subreddit to the front page of the news subreddit, where it is ranked as the number five story this morning. Adding to the story’s juiciness, the EU space weather sites, as well as those in China and Russia went down yesterday, which has a few people in a panic that the original poster might be onto something. My advice is don’t sweat it, we aren’t about to be burned off the Earth, at least not by a CME.

What I find interesting about the story is the other sites being temporarily knocked off the internet, which I believe was deliberate and related to hacking, not covering up an apocalyptic event. This is in line with Russian attempts to confuse and frighten the American public with disinformation. Some of you may recall a minor internet panic that the world was about to end last autumn as the stars supposedly aligned with some Bible verses from the Book of Revelations. Both incidents were of course dutifully reported by the British tabloids (Sun and Mirror) and faithfully linked by the Drudge report to scare the bejeezus out of the scientifically illiterate mass of Republican voters. You may also notice that both incidents came out as the Trump/Russia investigation heated up, probably as a means of distraction and to reinforce the narrative that Trump is somehow a god-like figure from the End Times, as some of the twisted religious figures around him proclaim.

Doomsday coverups are not part of the FBI mission; however, the FBI is in charge of domestic counter intelligence. You might have read that we have a problem with Chinese and Russian spies in the United States. The observatory in Sunspot literally overlooks Holloman Air Force Base and the White Sands Missile Range. Thus, the reports from El Paso’s KVIA-TV that the FBI inspected the antennae at the National Solar Observatory would seem to indicate that we are looking at an espionage investigation and not the end of the world. Why the secrecy? Because the FBI doesn’t comment on ongoing investigations. So chill, you aren’t going to die tomorrow, at least not from a Coronal Mass Ejection.

That said, the U.S. is woefully unprepared for a solar storm on par with the 1859 Carrington Event.  The 1859 solar storm was so powerful it knocked out power lines and burned the fingers of telegraph operators. If such an event were to happen today, it would knock out our grid, frying generators and plunging us into darkness, much like an EMP attack. Such an event would lead to mass casualties as our civilization is wholly reliant on electricity. The likelihood of such an event in our future is a near certainty but it is possible to defend against it by hardening our grid and generators with Faraday cages.  Such a defense would cost money but certainly much less than we gave away to the rich in the form of tax cuts this year.

If something like the Carrington Event or an EMP attack concerns you (and it should), write or call your Congressperson and demand they do something about it – their job is to allocate resources for our defense.  Our brain-dead Congress can be voted out of office but the sun is here to stay for the next 5 billion years.

Here Comes The Sun – The Beatles

While our civilization may have evolved from watching gladiators murder each other between Roman orgies to MMA pay-per-view and online porn, men haven’t changed. Sex and violence are still the big motivators. Priests, Kings and armies have been controlling sex to breed violence for centuries.  We’ve been a male-dominated civilization.

“Only two things a young man wants to do and that’s fuck or fight,” my First Sergeant used to say as if he were delivering wisdom from the Sermon On The Mount. He’d been sentenced to the Army and Vietnam as a teenager in lieu of jail after firing a shotgun at a guy while part of a Polish street gang in Chicago.

Sex and violence go together like Venus and Mars, ever present in the human condition. The United States, like the ancient Roman Republic our founders imitated by design,  heavily favors the cult of Mars over Venus.  It’s one of many reasons we’ve been such a violent country at home and abroad.

As Americans, we’re encouraged to worship at the altar of violence. Our entertainment idols stare at us from posters and billboards holding guns in their hands.  Our national sport, football, inures its players to the point of brain damage as they assault each other for our school, city and state pride and amusement. Our digital games reward us with upgraded weapons and powers for killing scores of virtual humans. Our most admired historical leaders won wars.  Our most trusted institution is the military.

I know a thing or two about what people nowadays call the patriarchy.  I grew up in a world where everyone’s dad was a soldier and then spent a significant portion of my twenties in the all-male world of an army combat arms unit.  We sang jody calls about our dicks in between going to the field to blow shit up and run shit over in our tanks for Uncle Sam.  Sergeants extolled the virtues of hardness.

While I was in the service, the Virginia Military Institute was being sued to admit women and I asked an L.T. I knew who graduated from V.M.I. what he thought: “They’re afraid she’ll have sex with someone, I don’t even know why men would want to go there,” was his response.

We can tell how dysfunctional and violent a society is measured by how much they shame women and sex.  Islamists fly planes into buildings and cut people’s heads off because they’re terrified of women controlling their own sexuality. Fundamentalist Christians are able to deny centuries of science, support war and self-flagellating economic policies toward the goal of controlling women’s sexuality.  Donald Trump can threaten to burn millions of people alive with nuclear war on Twitter but can’t admit he had sex with a porn star.

Growing up in the 80s, the most shameful things you could be called as a young man were a pussy or a faggot.  It meant you were weak, a coward.  The name-calling, like all name-calling, simply pointed out the social hierarchy.  During my four decades on this planet I’ve found it’s quite the opposite. The bravest people I’ve known have been women, gay or both.

The consequences for sex and violence have radically changed thanks to modern technology.  Sex between consenting adults no longer must result in a baby and/or venereal disease but violence perpetrated by an individual can kill scores with a store-bought gun. Nonetheless, it is women’s control over their own bodies that the Republican party seeks to control. The right wing wants to restrict family planing and abortion to punish women for sex, as if it were somehow a bad thing.

The cult of man used its raw muscle to hack nature into submission, dig into the bowels of the earth, pound steel into swords, conquer our neighbors and enslave the weak.  It has resulted in a dying planet rigged to explode with thousands of nuclear weapons.

My fellow dudes, there is a better way.

Might I suggest we move the needle away from masculine and toward the feminine.  Life is simply better the more women are involved.  Women are generally kinder. Women tend to talk things out.  Women care more about the future as their children are usually more important than their ego.  Women nurse us back to health. Women create life.

Human civilization is on the precipice. If we continue business as usual, we’ve got maybe a generation or two left before the climate annihilates us. We need to change and that change means taking the power away from the destroyers who have lead our societies for thousands of years and putting it in the hands of creators. It means empowering more women to fix the awful mess we’ve made. It means women must have, at a minimum, full equality and control over their own bodies.

As studies have shown that we men are more impulsive and mature at a slower rate than women, I’ll boil it down for my bros: what would you rather do, fuck or fight?

Solar Sister – The Posies

A large number of people think we are repeating the history of 1930s Germany. While that may be Trump’s goal, it is not the goal of the moneyed interests behind the Republican party. We are repeating our own history, the end of Civil War Reconstruction, by the same groups that did it just over 150 years ago, using many of the same methods.

Reconstruction radically changed the post Civil War South.  African Americans finally had the right to vote, could enter interracial marriages, could open their own businesses, and run for office. Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce were even elected to the U.S. Senate.

This enraged the rich Southern planter class that owned  land and slaves. They now had to pay their workers and property taxes for the first time, which enraged them. They called themselves Conservatives and set about “redeeming” the South. They believed the federal government was a tyranny for its imposition of taxes, public schooling, and anti-racial discrimination measures – sound familiar?

These plantation owners ran the southern Democratic Party, notable for its hatred of Lincoln, President Grant, the Union and black people. They used propaganda (they owned the newspapers) terror (the KKK, Red Shirts and White League), voter suppression (poll taxes and literacy tests) and election theft (stuffing ballot boxes) to rig the system. The Conservative Democrats gained control and used it to pass Jim Crow laws throughout the South, ending reconstruction and relegating African Americans to second class citizenship for almost a hundred years.  As an added bonus, it allowed Dixie’s elite to split black and white workers apart, crushing the nascent labor movement in the former Confederacy.  Federal courts did nothing to restrain the cabal, who used the letter of the law to destroy the spirit of the law.

This system remained in place until the 1960s, when the Democratic Party under JFK and Johnson supported civil rights for African Americans. Once again, the southern elite grew enraged at the temerity of the federal government to support basic rights for citizens. When Nixon appealed to these racists in 1968, it began the wholesale migration of southern racists from the Democratic to the Republican Party.  The federal courts stymied their movement and prevented them from turning back the clock.

We see the same neo-Confederate inherited wealth at work today as the Republican party tries to turn back the clock and deny citizens their civil rights. Propaganda outlets like Sinclair, Fox News and Clear Channel feed the public with misinformation in pursuit of conservative goals. Intimidation comes in the form of online harassment, militia groups and hate rallies (many organized by the President).  Voter suppression is achieved through gerrymandering, voter purges and elimination of voting centers in minority districts. Election theft has been achieved through court decisions (Bush vs Gore) and electronically hacked voting systems (Georgia elections and possibly the 2016 elections).

The only thing holding back a further erosion of civil rights in the United States has been our federal court system.  That block on power is about to be removed if the neo-Confederates get their wish and confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Know that we’ve been here before. We must not let history repeat itself.  The only solution is to vote in such overwhelming numbers against the G.O.P. that the vote cannot be hacked.  Your rights depend on it.

Here We Go Again – The Hives

We make a grave mistake with the security of our nation when we put it in the hands of private business instead of military or civil servants. We’ve outsourced much of the nation’s physical and electronic defense to private companies since America hit the panic button after 9/11. We didn’t use mercenaries to fight World War Two and we shouldn’t be using them now. This has made us less safe as a nation and will bear poison fruit for decades to come.

When I learned American mercenaries were killed in Fallujah back in 2004, I thought, ‘Why are we using mercenaries in Iraq?’ When I heard Edward Snowden had defected in 2013, I thought, ‘why is Booze Allen doing that kind of work?’ When I read in 2017 that federal agencies had been using Russia’s Kaspersky Labs for electronic security I thought,’you’ve got to kidding me’.

The primary mission of U.S. armed forces and intelligence agencies is to protect the nation. Their leaders’ duty is to the constitution. The  primary mission of any business is to make a profit.  A C.E.O.’s  duty is to shareholders, not the people of the United States.  Notice how the goals don’t align?

Contractors offer a significant cost savings as there are no pesky retirements or medical plans to budget.  The government uses them for things it can’t, won’t or shouldn’t do.

Military contractors allowed the U.S. to claim it had less combatants in the field, to provide convoy support the military hadn’t anticipated, to supply logistical support to units in garrison. Intelligence contractors allowed the U.S. to run black sites and do dirty work around the world for the war on terror. Electronic security contractors allowed the U.S. to use skills it hadn’t developed.

Contractors are generally paid more than their military or civil service equivalents for doing the same job. This begins to rot the core institutions themselves as they start to attract people who want to check a box before going on to make the real money as a civilian contractor.

Businesses must grow to survive. With a drawdown in some Global War On Terror operations under Obama, mercenary outfits sought other clients. Erik Prince pitched his services to China and Gulf sheikdoms.  Military contractors found work protecting hydrocarbon companies, using the same GWOT playbook on domestic environmental activists and indigenous tribes. Israel’s ex-spies execute direct measures for Black Cube against politicians, rape accusers and former civil servants within the United States.

Corruption sinks in as money, threats and deceit intertwine. On a micro level, I knew a guy who’d been in the Mossad. He said when men left the service they’d call in  threats to Jewish centers in Europe to get hired as security.  On a macro level, guys like Erik Prince try to use fear to get Trump to create a private intelligence agency answerable only to the President. Can you imagine if that disaster had gone through?

Reliance on the profit motive has failed to protect us in the digital realm as well. American weapons’ research was stolen throughout the 2000s, using something as obvious as peer-to-peer networks which lead to Russian and Chinese “breakthroughs” in the headlines with hypersonic missiles. Government agencies used anti-virus software made by Kremlin-controlled Kaspersky Labs. United States’ cyberweapons “leaked” to Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, which then immediately used them to hack Sony Studios.  Data miners and social media networks, frequently used to gather intelligence, conspired with foreign powers to influence the 2016 election, because, hey, a paycheck is a paycheck. Lest anyone think civilian companies have a better handle on internet security, one need only mention the Equifax breach, the Facebook hack or the hundreds of millions of dollars stolen electronically from the U.S. banking system each year.

The real danger for society comes when greed fully infects the source institution. Officers and agents see their peers richly rewarded for using their same skills on the outside. Why should they have to wait until they get out? This is what happened in Russia, where the Soviet Union’s old KGB merged with the mafia, and in Mexico, where Special Forces turned on their government and became the Zetas cartel.  If you dig farther back in history, the Indian subcontinent was subjugated by  a mercenary army raised by the British East India Company.  We aren’t there yet but why wait for it to get to that point?

We should reform our systems so that people working within the national security envelope do not have dual loyalties. If we need to expand the personnel rosters at the DoD or CIA, then let’s do that.  It would  eliminate the post-service market for trigger-pullers, hackers and spooks, saving us from a host of future problems as each group tries to expand their business. Some arenas are best left to the government, like waging war and spy games.  If folks want to do that, they should stay in the service and when they get out, make a genuine transition to the civilian world.

We need to build real cyber defense capabilities. The piecemeal patchwork of private companies hasn’t worked. Everything from our voting systems to our electrical grid has been hacked by hostile powers recently.  If personnel can’t be recruited because of drug tests, stop drug testing. If they can’t be recruited because of pay, increase it or train a new generation in the necessary fields using scholarships that come with government service attached. This field is critical to our defense and we haven’t taken it seriously.

Privatization of our defense and intelligence since 2001 hasn’t worked well.  The men and women who protect our nation should be government/military employees.  Who would you prefer protecting you? Somebody who answers the call of duty, honor, country or somebody who answers the call of the highest bidder?

Dogs of War – Pink Floyd

Dogs are people in that they have names, personalities and feelings. They’re members of our families, serve in the military and even beat us into space. Dogs are friendly, honest, empathetic and want to be helpful.  Some of the best people I know are dogs.  We don’t deserve them.

Dogs evolved with us for tens of thousands of years. They did stuff for us, like guard duty and assisting the hunt, and we did stuff for them. like provide food and protection. If your culture is from a cold climate, they also kept us warm in the freezing darkness, hence the expression and band Three Dog Night. They get their cues from reading us and believe loyalty is a two way street because that’s the way it’s been for thousands of years.

Like many Americans, I love dogs.  I grew up with a dog and then had my own in my 20s. I thought I knew all about dogs until I was 40, when I met my current wife, who is into dog rescue.  When you have a significant other into dog rescue it means that you will be into dog rescue.  It means dogs will become a much bigger deal in your life.

The first big event that happens when you date somebody involved in dog rescue is that you find yourself the guardian of a dog. I adopted a six-month old Boxer with a broken leg that had been sold to a couple that couldn’t care for her by a breeder. She’s a wonderful dog and I couldn’t believe somebody abandoned her.

People give up their dogs because they’re moving to a place that won’t allow pets or can’t handle taking care of the dog. That’s understandable but they shouldn’t have taken on the animal in the first place. It’s a living being that loves us. The least they could do is find another responsible person to adopt the dog. Unfortunately, many simply drop the dog off at a shelter. The dog will be killed in some shelters after ten days if no one adopts him/her.  The human has already moved on with his or her life, often guilt free. That’s how much some people value love.

My wife mainly adopts senior dogs – they are most in danger of not being adopted and therefore sentenced to death. We had seven dogs when we married.  That sounds crazy but old dogs don’t do much more than lay around the couch all day. If you want a dog that’s already house-trained, doesn’t rip apart the furniture and longs for kindness, shelters are full of elder dogs.

Animal shelters are full of elder dogs because many humans suck. They don’t want their dog now that it’s old so they dump it at the shelter, then go out and buy a puppy. Think about that. These humans take a member of their own family that loves them, then sentence them to days of emotional agony wondering why they’re alone in a cage before being (likely) put to death on a cold, metal table.  That’s what a lot of dogs get for their loyalty.

Humans also inflict a lot of needless suffering on their dogs. My wife rescued a mutt whose hind leg had been cut off by a human with a knife and left to wander the streets of L.A. for a week. Humans punch them, kick them, burn them and force them to fight each other. Those humans lack what the dogs and all “good” people have: empathy.

A dog is bound for rescue  when it winds up with a  human being that doesn’t value  love, shows no loyalty or lacks empathy.  The only thing that can save it is somebody who cares.  I’ll leave the America/Trump analogy there.

Show you care. Spay and neuter your pets. If you can handle the responsibility and value the love and friendship a dog can bring, please consider adopting from your local shelter or a dog rescue.  It will be the best decision you can ever make.

Our country’s constitution was thought of as a social contract by the founders.  The enlightenment idea of a social contract had been around for about three centuries. It was an implicit agreement among members of society to cooperate for social benefits (like law and order, public health, defense etc.) by giving up some individual freedoms to the state. Only a small percentage of North Americans had a say in our social contract – white, property-owning, males.

A lot has changed in 230 years.  Slavery was outlawed after a civil war. The native nations were subjugated and annihilated. The country expanded to the Pacific ocean. Women and people of color got the vote. Technology radically changed the way we live.  At our founding, 1 in 20 Americans lived in cities, today 16 in 20 Americans live in urban areas.

We are raised to believe that each of us has an equal say in how things are run based on our vote. That couldn’t be more wrong and this warping of the poplar will is a large reason why the country is so bent out of shape politically.

A voter in Wyoming’s vote is worth 68 times more than my vote in California when it comes to the U.S. Senate but only 3.6 times more when it comes to voting for the President thanks to the Electoral College.  A third of our country’s population controls two thirds of the Senate. It’s not fair.

It’s not fair because rural states don’t look demographically like the rest of the country – they are older and whiter.   They don’t deal with the myriad problems of large cities or multitude of interests that come with them.  They are typically controlled by a small number of powerful families whose interest is in keeping things exactly as they are: when you’re at the top, why would you want anything to change?

In our money-influenced electoral process, states like Wyoming, Kansas and Arkansas are cheaper to buy.  Their local newspapers and television channels were purchased decades ago by the right wing, shutting off opposing points of view.  Smaller populations require less advertising dollars per Senate vote.

Smaller states like Alabama and Kentucky are more easily captured by moneyed interests. The result is that our tax dollars flow to subsidize the social safety net in these states as their corporate-owned politicians compete to see who can dismantle public education, social safety nets, labor and environmental regulations the fastest.

The majority of Americans have been in favor of national health insurance, better public education and environmental protections for decades yet we can’t put a President in office or sway the Senate. The founders wanted the Senate and Electoral College to ‘slow things down,’ but let’s not bullshit ourselves: it was meant to slow things down to keep the institution of slavery intact.  This denial of the popular will weakens us with cynicism in our institutions because they aren’t functioning properly. Political pressure will continue building the more out of step our elected government gets from the people.

There is no moral justification for a person in a state like Vermont or North Dakota to have so much more political power than a voter in California, Texas or Florida. A couple ways to fix this would be admitting Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia as states.  It would give voice to a broader and more urban representation in the Senate more in line with our national reality. Washington D.C. has a larger population than Wyoming or Vermont.  Puerto Rico has more people in it Alaska, South Dakota and Montana combined.

How about equal representation? Or is that just something we carve onto buildings and preach from textbooks?

Let ‘Em In – Wings

Standing in line with groceries at the checkout took about fifteen minutes in the 70s, ten minutes in the 90s and five minutes today. The one constant to the experience is tabloid newspapers in your face as wait. Most Americans see the cover of the National Enquirer once a week. Ever since they published the John Edwards lovechild story, they were taken more seriously than the other garbage on the rack. That prime piece of supermarket eyeball real estate has been used by the National Enquirer to promote a Donald Trump presidency since since 2010, according to a report on Thursday by the Wall Street Journal:

“In 2010, at Cohen’s urging, the National Enquirer began promoting a potential Trump presidential candidacy, referring readers to a pro-Trump website Cohen helped create. With Cohen’s involvement, the publication began questioning President Barack Obama’s birthplace and American citizenship in print, an effort that Trump promoted for several years, former staffers said.”

Think about that paragraph. The tabloid gave six years of free advertising to candidate Trump before he was elected.  It also deliberately pushed the phony birther narrative to make Trump’s ‘big lie’ against President Obama more palatable to the rubes.  Wouldn’t “promoting” the candidacy be a violation of campaign finance laws?  Why would the aptly named David Pecker agree to demonize Obama by spreading the lie that he wasn’t a real American?

The National Enquirer did all this on Cohen’s urging? Cohen? The lawyer with two-and-a-half clients? The guy who pays off the pussy?

I’m not buying it.  Trump and Pecker have been friends for decades. Now that Pecker has realized Trump’s friendship is less important than staying out of jail, I expect we’ll learn a lot in the coming months about how those two rigged the system with fake news.

I’m curious to know how much commission Pecker made in the catch and kill scandal  business. ‘There’s a nasty story about you going around that we won’t put on the front page if you buy it,” stinks of blackmail.  Surely the National Enquirer gained some kind of reward for these transactions. Hopefully we’ll find out because we’re about to get distracted by the contents of Pecker’s supposedly epic Donald Trump scandal stash.

It’s poetic that thirty years of truth is about to be released from the vaults of an organization that publishes lies.  The non-disclosure agreements are melting away. The level of scandalous truth about to be unleashed on Trump will be historic. It will make past covers of the weekly tabloids tame by comparison.

Trump and Pecker conspired to brainwash the American people with known  lies while we stood in line at the checkout counter.  Some are upset that Pecker won’t face any criminal penalties for his actions but I think it’s more important that he be exposed and spill the beans on Trump.  As voters, we need to learn what really happened and how we were manipulated so we don’t get lost in the supermarket again.

Lost In The Supermarket – The Clash

Perhaps you’re one of the 308 million Americans who know Donald Trump’s favorite word. As I write this, he’s tweeted it four times in the last three hours, once to describe Vince McMahon as one of the “greats”, his “great” dinner in Ohio, how “great” he feels watching the Senate work and how no one is “greater” friends than Australia and the United States.  Trump’s constantly stated goal is to make America great.

Great is shitty word.

Great is a word that gets people to stop talking instantly. How do you feel? Great. How was the meal? Great. How was the movie? Great. This answer translates as “I am satisfied, don’t feel like registering a complaint with you, or haven’t given any thought whatsoever to the particulars of the question you’ve asked therefore I will give you this one syllable word and we can move on.”

Great also denotes something big or powerful, like Great Britain, the Great Barrier Reef or Alexander the Great.  Geopolitical problems arise for countries when great isn’t good enough; like greater Germany, greater Serbia and greater Israel.

Great is the go to word when you want to spare somebody’s feelings.  “How do I look?” “Great.” “How was my band?” “Great” “What do you think of my soap-carving?” “I think it’s great.” Great is reassurance.  Great covers up the truth.

Which brings us back to the President, who sprinkles the word “great” like Velveeta cheese over all the broken, rotten things and people he touches.  White supremacists can be “great people”.  ICE does a “great job” protecting the country by separating children from their parents.  The economy is “doing great” as wages fall and trade wars begin. The tax cuts were “great” even though they will add crushing debt to ourselves and our children. His cabinet is “great” as they mismanage every department.  His energy policies are “great” as they hasten the death of our children.

So much greatness it’s pathetic.  How about instead of being great, we be decent?

Decent people care about their neighbors. Decent people are kind. Decent people don’t cheat and steal. Decent people share. Decent people want their children to have a healthy planet.

Forget making America great.  Let’s make America decent.

The President’s lawyer and campaign manager are now felons. None of this is surprising to people who have been watching the investigations post election, only the timing of both going down on the same day. It’s probably a safe bet to say that most of the present cabinet will be indicted for one thing or another in the next few years and that won’t be surprising either, they’ve been violating conflicts of interests and lighting money on fire in the form of private jet fuel right in front of our faces since day one.

I’ve got no idea what Trump will say or do to weasel his way out of this one but it really doesn’t matter because we know he’s guilty of a lot more than being a co-conspirator with Michael Cohen to break campaign finance law by paying off sex partners. Trump either abruptly retires, succeeds going full authoritarian or spends the rest of his life in jail or some combination of the three.  He won’t succeed at going full authoritarian and so his Presidency is fatally wounded from here on out for one simple reason.

Trump got busted.

Now that Manafort and Cohen are officially guilty, Trump might as well have “busted” stamped on his forehead.  The verdicts rendered virtually everything he’d said or tweeted about the investigation, Manafort and Cohen a lie.  His every tweet conjures up the mental image of Mueller wearing an accountant’s shade as he adds up obstruction of justice charges, “there’s another one, there’s another one, there’s another one…”

Trump and everyone around him  knows the jig is up. His friends are now in jail, guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  The only guessing that remains is how many years each of them will serve (I’ll take Cohen for 3 and Manafort for 10). Trump now realizes it’s only a matter of time before justice hammers him.  He’ll turn to his friends for help but it’s too late, he’s been busted.

Nobody wants to face a criminal investigation and it appears to this casual observer that anyone the  President comes into extended contact with is facing at least one.  The opportunists surrounding him surely recognize this and are probably making a beeline to Mueller’s office this week. I’d expect a thinner crowd of sycophants around him in the Mar Lago clubhouse after golf.  They may be ass-kissers but they aren’t stupid.

The Republican party won’t be able to rescue him, neither will Putin, the mob or the alt-right. The Nazis will not march, at least not in any numbers to make a difference. The climate of fear and intimidation Trump’s built around himself  like a wall will crumble and evaporate, revealing a quivering and delicate center.

The President will soon be alone, on stage, naked under a blaring spotlight.   It’s not a pretty picture but there we are. I’m sure Trump wishes for the first time in his life he could turn off that spotlight. He can’t.  He’s been busted.

Busted – Johnny Cash

Sometimes conversations stick in your head for decades.  When I was a sixth grader in 1982, HBO had become a thing in our Colorado Springs’ subdivision.  My friend Drew and I would spend Saturday nights watching R-rated comedy movies in between building plastic 1/72 scale models of WWII tanks and aircraft. One night, we’d just finished watching Bill Murray in Stripes and were painting a winter camouflage pattern onto an ME-109.

“People copy what they see,” Drew said, “and we like watching assholes. What if everyone becomes an asshole?”

It was true. All our friends enjoyed watching Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield et al, act like assholes. Transgression at other people’s expense had its rewards as our leading men always got the girl and sometimes the money.  The dearth of cheap home entertainment options meant these movies were ingrained into our heads through multiple views. Grown men still quoted lines from Fletch into the 1990s.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote that Americans, “ridicule themselves and glorify their betters.” Comedy lead roles in our culture generally represent the average person (clerks, mall cops, waiters and starving artists) while dramatic lead roles represent the elite (ex-special forces, district attorneys, rags-to-riches musicians and mafia dons).

Our parents watched assholes having a good time in their movies too: Al Pacino in Scarface, Michael Douglas in Wall Street. Micky Rourke in Nine And A Half Weeks, Jack Nicholson in anything. The leading men in these films got their good times at other’s expense during the film instead of at the end.  I won’t even go into 80s action movies, which all boil down to: asshole with a gun, beautiful woman and explosions.

We absorb this behavior into our minds each time we sit down in front of a screen. It seeps deep into our social subconscious, taking a few years for the influence to surface. My Bradley gunner used to laugh as he recalled the men of his platoon competing to see who could hit an Iraqi refugee the hardest with an MRE thrown from a moving armored vehicle during the first Gulf War. “We were assholes,” he admitted. Of course they were, it’s how they’ve been trained to behave.

Our comedy leads changed post Gulf War.  They became kind-hearted but so stupid they didn’t realize they were behaving like assholes: Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler and Mike Myers.  A new idea, unbelievable to our rational minds, grew in the dark recesses of our lizard brain because we’d seen it – you could be a stupid asshole and still wind up with the girl and the money.

Hollywood’s post-Schwarzkopf programming added a new layer to our dramatic leads: criminal assholes.  We were given John Travolta in Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty, Robert DeNiro in Casino, Heat and Analyze This and Ed Norton in American History X and Fight Club.  Tinsel town closed out the century with a character that dropped like a bomb on the American subconscious, Tony Soprano.  The fictional mob boss was a selfish asshole who lived off other peoples’ misery  and dominated American TV and Awards for 6 seasons.

9-11 detonated in the American zeitgeist, addicting Americans to media updates from the towers’ collapse through the well-executed, strategically-disastrous Iraq invasion. American studios didn’t know how to react, they used the writer’s strike to get rid of old inventory and turned to union-free reality TV as both an income and asshole generator.

When Hollywood finally found its War on Terror box office footing, the final pieces of our present reality were put into place. Comedy leads, we the people, dealt with a world of assholes by getting high (Harold and Kumar, Knocked Up, Superbad and Pineapple Express)  and dramatic leads, the elite, are asshole billionaires willing to level entire city blocks to keep the ‘system’ in place (There Will Be Blood, The Dark Knight and Iron Man).

All those Republicans out there who heap scorn on Hollywood should be praising it instead. It took forty years of programming but it finally paid off with the election of Donald Trump, a ‘billionaire’ criminal asshole, as our President.

Asshole – Denis Leary