August 20, 2026: Wrong Thinking

 

War has changed. Massive, expensive, what former Defense official Dr. Jerry McGinn called ‘exquisite’ military hardware can be taken out by relatively cheap drones. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is demonstrating this new reality, because despite Russia’s military might Ukraine is not buckling under, and instead is taking the war to the Russians with their superior knowledge and use of drone technology. All the hardware the United States has been throwing against Iran has not crushed Iran’s will to survive. Instead, the Iranians have learned that the Strait of Hormuz is a weapon of blackmail, and they have learned how to use it. Now they are using their allies to expand the threat to other key commercial bottlenecks.

It makes me wonder, looking at the world situation, just how much Trump is actually enjoying the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. If you follow the money, Trump and Iran could be thought of as intentionally manipulating the oil market by controlling the Strait. If the price of oil per barrel goes up worldwide but American oil refiners don’t actually face increased costs, then they make more profit themselves. And so does Donald Trump. Just saying.

In fact, American oil companies reported their greatest profits ever during the second quarter of 2026, just after Trump’s war of choice began. According to The Guardian, the biggest companies in the world made about $700,000 profit per minute. But oil is a dirty and finite commodity. Human beings are moving away from fossil fuel dependence. Trump knows the inevitable. So do the oil tycoons. Trump has pushed back against alternative sources of energy against all logic. Why? Because there is a great opportunity to cash in big before the industry collapses. There’s money to be made, and Trump and those who control him don’t care about the consequences as long as they get theirs first. And if one of those consequences is bankrupting America by fighting a war nobody asked for with a dwindling supply of obsolete weapons, it will encourage the military-industrial complex to go into high gear. As is his wont, Trump is doubling down on wrong thinking.

It comes down to this. Trump wants a military budget of one and a half trillion dollars for the next fiscal year. He wants more high-end missiles and the delivery system to deploy them. He needs to replace all the ones his military has shot off over the past few months and will have to keep on shooting off for the foreseeable future. In today’s changing world, it’s a colossal waste of money. On 9-11, 2001, nineteen zealots and about $500,000 crippled the world for a time. The new reality is filled with people who know how to fly under the radar and strike hard, and no stockpile of Tomahawk or Patriot missiles can stop them. It’s wrong thinking to believe that money and munitions can solve our problems. We need intelligence, which today seems to be seriously lacking anywhere in our government.

Here Be Pirates!

 

July 13, 2026: Here Be Pirates!

No, I am not talking about the Pittsburgh Pirate baseball team. Once upon a time I was a huge fan, when I spent a great deal of time with John and Robert Pira, who were rabid Pirate fanatics. It was easy to like the Pirates because of Willie Stargell, arguably the nicest guy in baseball at the time, and the immortal Roberto Clemente, whom I thought was the most exciting player in the game, beyond even Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.

No, I am not talking about the Pirates of the Caribbean, who were my all-time favorite real-life characters when I was growing up. I collected every one of the 66 cards in the Fleer Pirate Bold set and read their tiny biographies, the size of an old tweet, every day. I am still fascinated. My favorite trio is Calico Jack Rackham, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. The original Skull and Crossbones motif on a pirate flag is said to have emerged from Calico Jack’s even better design, a skull, representing him, and crossed swords, representing his two female companions and soldiers-in-arms.

I am talking about real pirates on the High Seas today. Specifically, I am talking about the Strait of Hormuz and the United States Navy. More specifically, I am talking about the Navy’s Commander-in-Chief, Donald John Trump. Today Trump announced that our navy will be keeping the Strait open and that he expects passing ships to pay America a 20% surcharge to offset the cost of doing so. This means Trump plans to charge our allies to control, not fix, a problem he created when he declared war on Iran. It sounds like piracy to me. It sounds like extortion.

Maybe I am being unfair. To pirates. What Trump wants to do sounds like a protection racket. Old school: let me smash up your business, and if you don’t want it to happen again, pay me 20% of everything you make so I can protect you against myself. He’s not a pirate, he’s a gangster. He’s not Blackbeard, he’s Al Capone.

July 3, 2026: The Rule Golden

 

I have spent a great deal of time lately thinking about how humans should behave, and about how most human beings, I want to believe, strive to do good or at the very least, do no harm. We acknowledge that we are flawed. After all, perfection would be boring! Throughout history good souls have tried to lay down moral principles by which the rest of us should live. Our own country at its founding endeavored to codify, that is, human rights with a clear understanding that as We The People progressed, we would make the necessary modifications to expand those rights.

Yet it all can be boiled down to this: the Golden Rule distills what human beings ought to be, ought to strive for, in 11 words. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It seems brilliantly simple and probably naive. Georgia Senator and Baptist minister Raphael Warnock says there are versions of this rule in every faith, and that it is key to the small c christian moral code. It means, help others as you would want them to help you in similar circumstances. Do not enslave unless you want to be enslaved. Do not kill unless you want to be killed. Do not impoverish unless you want to be poor. Be kind. It should be self evident. But if it were, we wouldn’t need reminding.

And yet, I know atheists with a better moral code than Mike Johnson and other so-called christians.

Decades ago, Science Fiction writer Damon Knight wrote a novella called The Rule Golden. In it, if you kicked someone, you felt the pain. If you shot someone you died. I don’t know how to remind christians of their own moral code, but reading this book might be a good start, if you can find a copy.

MEDICARE FOR ALL: A HILL TO DIE ON

 A HILL TO DIE ON

Do not be surprised if the Republican leadership throws Donald Trump under the bus and enacts the 25^th Amendment, then blames Trump alone for the failure of the Iran War, subsequent rise in inflation, and the collapse of health care—all in the hope of salvaging their control of power. Trump is an easy target because he is guilty as charged. But We The People know the Republican leaders are complicit. This makes the midterm elections look very good for the Democrats. But Democrats are excellent at losing elections. They could use a positive campaign issue instead of always yelling about what the other side is doing wrong.

They need a hill to die on.

Health care is a major issue in this country. We have arguably the best health care in the world, if you can afford it. Even after the Affordable Care Act became law, insurance premiums with high co-pays and deductibles were the norm. If you are wealthy, cost doesn’t matter. But most Americans struggle to make their premiums and to pay their medical bills. The solution of taking out a loan to cover medical costs is no solution at all. By all global measurements, factoring in per person cost and healthcare outcomes, the United States ranks at or near the bottom among industrialized nations. I have seen an overall rank as low as 69^th in the world. Most surveys I have seen place us nearer to 37, which is still shameful for the richest country in the history of the world.

What’s different about all the other countries? They have universal healthcare. Everyone has access to equal treatment. There are problems, certainly, country by country, but the point is that healthcare is much more readily available, and democratic, elsewhere. We need Medicare for All.

But how? It should be simple. Consider. The average annual income for a family of four in the US is $106,000. I personally don’t know anyone in that bracket, but it takes a huge number of people making a whole lot less just to bring the average down from the billionaires and trillionaires. The average cost of insurance premiums for a family of four is between $18 and $27 grand. Even at the lower number, that’s 16% of that average income. Remember, there are a great many people making less than $106K who still have to pay that much in insurance premiums. I am not a math genius, but even I can see that killing private insurance and increasing the Medicare payroll tax from 3%, where it is now, to 8 or 9, or even 10% across the board, would save everybody money in the long run while at the same time providing better care for anyone who needs it.

It’s not like there are no models out there. Yes, the health insurance companies will balk, but how good are they at helping Americans? Maybe it’s time for them to go.

Remember, to whom much is given, much is expected. It also might be worth remembering that it takes a mighty work/consumer force to keep the wealthy afloat. But getting Congress to do anything close to this will take a long, long time and a great many down ballot changes. Still, for anyone who believes in helping our fellow citizens realize a better life, this is a hill worth dying on.

Liberty Rusting, and a New Slogan

LIBERTY RUSTING AND A NEW SLOGAN

Okay, I know what I said about changing focus. I failed. I was watching a documentary about Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, despite his human frailties, or perhaps because of them, came to understand that the role of government was not to promote the rich industrialists of America but to protect the American people from the greedy practices of those same industrialists. It reminded me of something I heard a few weeks ago, and I am paraphrasing, that Donald Trump's presidency is as consequential as FDR’s, but for the opposite reasons. Both men used the power of the executive to establish policy, but FDR did it to help the working class and to provide moral leadership, while Trump has done it to line his own pockets and dismantle as much of the past 95 years of progress on all fronts of human rights possible.

Commentators and pundits have voiced their impression that Trump wants to turn the clock back to 1950 or 1930, or perhaps 1890 at the height of the Gilded Age when robber barons made buckets of money at the expense of an unprotected workforce. I personally think he would like to push even farther back, to 1830, the era of his favorite president, Andrew Jackson. Jackson expanded cronyism with the “Spoils System,” giving jobs to personal favorites and supporters over-qualified applicants. Jackson pushed the Indian Removal Act through Congress, codifying American policy to shove all Native Americans out of the way of white Euro-American progress. Jackson owned 200 slaves.

Trump would whitewash our past, deny it existed. He does not want to learn from history, he wants to rewrite it in his own image, the same image he keeps plastering across the country. Through understanding our history, we learn from our mistakes and grow to do better. Donald Trump wants us stagnant and uneducated. An ignorant people are easier to control, to lie to, to fool, to rob. But ignorance is curable. Stupidity, which our current president exhibits in abundance, is not. This is not the America I know and love. It is not the America that says, “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” I was only two years old when my family sailed by those words on the way to Ellis Island. It is not the America for which Martin Luther King had a dream. It is not the country FDR envisioned when he said, “In our democracy officers of the government are the servants, and never the masters of the people.” But it could be.

We must not lose heart. We must push back against the threats facing our grand experiment. We cannot be complacent. We were always sputtering and trying and slipping, but we were always moving forward. That is the country I love, and it is up to all of us to reclaim her. So I wrote a poem, just four lines. I offer it, particularly the last line, as a new slogan for the American people. And pardon the language, please!

            Liberty Rusting

    We talk and talk and don’t do shit.

    Democrats, Republicans, I’m tired of it.

    You’re off the rails, you’re off the tracks.

    I love my country! I want her back! 

Trump's Real Game With Iran

 

All apologies. I had decided to steer away from bigger issues and focus on my own, more personal stuff, like poetry and the upcoming graduation of my first grandchild from high school. I even submitted three poems to a local writer’s club and won a prize! Validation feels good.

And yet, America remains under siege, deeply divided, and over-extended, and no one with any real power seems able or willing to do anything about it. Congress is ineffectual, the Supreme Court is questionable, and POTUS is downright shameful.

Since February 28, We The People have watched virtually helplessly as the United States of Trump launched a “pre-emptive strike” against Iran, in cooperation with Israel. The one immediate and ongoing consequence was and is the crippling of one-fifth the world economy because Iran discovered it could close the Strait of Hormuz and hold all ships transiting through the Strait hostage. I labored under the false impression that Trump did not realize this would happen. I have changed my mind.

In considering military actions, we employ scenario builders. Their job is to consider outcome. They look for probable responses, including those off the battlefield. Every President who considered military action against Iran was warned that Iran could close the Strait. Trump was no different. The closure was not a surprise. I now believe it was exactly what Trump wanted.

Reverse engineering, or following the money, I think Trump fully understood that attacking Iran would close the Strait, and that closure would drive up the price of crude around the world, this means American crude would sell at the same inflated price as the rest of the world. Oil companies and investors would see massive profits, even on a short timeline. Coupled with Trump’s concerted efforts to control Venezuela oil, and his attempts to cripple green energy alternatives, it seems like the President is doubling down on a dwindling energy source for short-term gain. If so, did he collude to create this war and crisis? Is he guilty of insider trading? Has he put American soldiers in harm’s way for profit? Is he guilty of murder? Of treason?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Trump's Legacy

I am sad and oh so tired.  I am embarrassed by my government, and by the people who still blindly support Donald Trump, the budget balancing, peace loving, God fearing, family values Republicans.  I am outraged by the obvious and blunt attempt by Trump to co-opt the world oil industry.  Money is being made by a few, hand over fist.  They have the power and Trump served them, not We The People.  It all wears me out.  

Trump is holding the world hostage.  Meanwhile, U.S. oil companies get to charge the world price, inflated by the closure of Hormuz.  Follow the money.  The super rich are only getting richer, at our expense.  Worldwide, particularly among our strongest allies, Trump is seen as a greater threat to world stability than Vladimir Putin.  

Others on bigger stages say much the same thing to much larger audiences.  All of us have the general problem of speaking to the choir, though that choir does seem to be growing slowly.  It doesn't change the power structure in America, nor does it change the minds of those in power who might be able to do anything to check Donald J. Trump.  So, I have been pretty quiet of late.  In fact, my voice in my golden years might just take up a more joyous banner.  So let this be both a transition and a parting shot.

Trump’s Legacy 

Great man,

Great and terrible,

Dreaming and believing

All your dreams,

History will spit

On your grave

And your dreams

Of gold and glory

And admiration

Will rot beside you,

Bones to dust

To hated bones.