Author Archives: Hue White

I was not aware that there were such things as college micro-influencers:

If any school can claim the title of America’s “college of influencers,” it’s the University of Miami, with its palm-lined walkways, pool in the center of campus and long list of ultra-viral alumni. It’s where Alix Earle became one of the biggest influencers in the world, posting TikToks from her Coral Gables dorm room about acne, outfits and her breakup with a professional baseball player when she was a marketing major in the early 2020s. …

Higher education has by and large embraced influencer culture, which already dominates beauty, travel, health and so much of everyday society. Plenty of schools, like Miami, funnel marketing dollars toward student creators as a recruiting tool or have embraced the RushTok phenomenon of viral sorority selections. [WaPo]

It used to be that one of the priorities of college, for many new students, was finding the appropriate church to attend. Not only did it serve spiritual needs, but it was the start of the social network that most students needed, for both in-college support and post-college career building.

As religion’s dominance over society has faded, fraternities and sororities stepped in to fill the void to some rough extent, but now they seem to be fading as the hyper-individualism of the age has taken over. But that doesn’t obviate the new student’s need for a social directory, knowing how to behave, etc, and, while yes, blogs and AIs can provide such services, a micro-influencer is more entertaining and even uptodate on current events. Unlike other services, a micro-influencer’s pushed by the lure of revenue to be uptodate.

So I’m not so sure about this statement:

[Nikki Pindor’s] followers may love her for her candor, but Pindor’s under no illusion about her impact. “We’re just entertainment,” she said. “We’re not doctors or politicians. Unless you’re raising awareness for something real, your contribution isn’t that deep.”

They may be more important than Pindor thinks.

Over the last few days I know I read a short post from someone concerning the Department of Justice being understaffed, but I can’t find it. Here’s an earlier post on The Hill alluding to this situation:

Welcome to the dumbing down of the Department of Justice, where the smartest and most experienced prosecutors are resigning or being dismissed; partisan, substandard lawyers are replacing them; and the department’s mission is reshaped to serve the president’s political and vengeance agenda — and to investigate bizarre conspiracy theories.

Ten experienced, high-quality federal prosecutors left the department over its decision to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in an apparent quid quo pro for his support for Trump’s immigration crackdown. Over two-thirds of the attorneys in the department’s Civil Rights Division have left because its mission has been twisted from enforcing civil rights to enforcing Trump’s executive orders. Trump aides forced out most of the lawyers in the Public Integrity Section because prosecuting corrupt Washington officials evidently is less important than deporting undocumented immigrants who work hard, pay taxes and have committed no crimes.

Who is filling the vacuum? Start with Ed Martin Jr., a Missouri lawyer and conservative activist with no prosecutorial experience, who is the subject of pending disciplinary proceedings and who had once been found in contempt for failing to obey a court order. Trump nominated him to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, but he proved too extreme even for Republican senators. Trump had to withdraw his nomination, but Martin was then installed in multiple high-ranking Justice Department roles that bypass Senate confirmation.

Since then, several Trump-nominated U. S. Attorneys have been rejected by the courts as not being properly nominated; Jeanine Pirro of Fox News fame and now US Attorney for Washington, DC, keeps failing to secure grand jury indictments, suggesting incompetence or a tin ear; and, in general, AG Pam Bondi’s minions continually fail in court.

All of this has made me wonder how other Departments of the government are doing, manpower-wise. We all remember DOGE demanding many personnel should be dismissed, and then begging them to return. So … how’s Treasury doing? Defense? Agriculture? Commerce?

Is our deflating government approaching the flap about stage, unable to function, leaving the President even more incompetent to the demands of leadership, such as his planned invasion of Greenland?

And, finally, I wonder if Mayor Frey of Minneapolis, or Governor Walz of Minnesota, currently occupied with ICE agents who are harassing citizens, have offered those agents asylum, although that’d be logistically difficult to guarantee; however, Canada might be capable of making such an offer to ICE agents worried about simply resigning.

Hmmmmmmm.

It’s films like these that challenge the inveterate quipper.

Zero Theorem (2013) is a movie by Terry Gilliam, which is enough for some folks. But for those who wish to soldier on, this story is an imaginative attempt to prove the universe in which we live is a swirling black hole of unintelligible nonsense.

Qohen Leth is a worker-bee mathematician working for an oligarch. He’s been assigned the task of proving 1 = 0. Minutely managed, Leth has long ago mostly lost his mind, but whether this is due to the irrational society in which he lives or the vortex of irrationality that is, metaphorically, next door is entirely unclear.

As he approaches success, his life becomes more irrational and insane, and, in the end, we’re not even sure he lives in a universe, or a computer simulation.

It’s all a madcap attempt to entertain philosophy in a fictional story, and it helps to be in a mood when watching this. I’ll just finish by observing that I have no idea what might be that mood.

I hustled outside to flutter the shutter a few times this morning. Here are my favorites:

CNN has a summary report that I thought iconic of the clumsy ways of President Trump:

• Oil plans: President Donald Trump said he will personally decide which US companies can enter Venezuela and rebuild its oil industry. Oil executives largely declined to commit to such a deal during a White House meeting today, with ExxonMobil’s CEO warning the country is “uninvestible” in its current state.

Does uninvestible mean the technical challenges render the project of stealing Venezuela’s oil too expensive given the current market price of oil? That’s congruent with the Epstein “we need a distraction!” Files hypothesis, and with Trump’s tendency to do things with little forethought.

Or does it mean the Venezuelan’s attitude makes the project too dangerous? Again, a forethought problem, but correctable if enough of them are bribed/moved/or even killed.

If you think, well, he wouldn’t do that last one, you’re still not taking this seriously enough. Go back and study this pathological narcissist and his immense, yet frail, personality. Think about this hypothesized drive to acquire wealth so that, when he dies, he can buy himself a favored position in heaven.

It ain’t morality that’ll stop him.

And maybe not his family, either. They’ve really dropped out of sight, haven’t they?

The Creator (2023) takes a different tack when it comes to the Artificial Intelligence / Robot trope.

Rather than menacing killers or benevolent overlords, it makes the arguably more likely assumption that AI robots will suffer the same travails as do we humans, from the various physical ills and injuries that afflict tangible creatures, to the delicate problems of intelligence and emotion, to, on the other end of the spectrum, those philosophical questions that plague intelligent creatures, including Why am I hear? What should I be doing? Why is this happening?

Los Angeles has been substantially destroyed by a nuclear bomb, planted and triggered by the artificial intelligence community. The response of the Americans is to begin hunting down the robots, who live in mixed communities large and small in the Far East.

We meet infiltration agent Sergeant Joshua Taylor in New Asia. He has met and married a local named Maya, who is pregnant; an extraction team, detecting the possible presence of Nirmata, the leader of the AI robots, forcibly removes Taylor before U. S. S. NOMAD hits the area with a missile. Taylor survives.

But with his wife gone, he is broken, and that makes him easy prey for a fake wife – or so his team believes. When he disappears into New Asia, they pursue, almost frantically.

But Taylor finds Nirmata, who is a five year old boy robot, and the real chase is on. Full of action sequences, this is a rare movie in which philosophy is successfully mixed in with action.

I shan’t spoil this any more, but it’s worth the time to watch if you want your mind and emotions stretched. I don’t know how I missed this when it first came out, but it’s well done, both as a story and a production. It may have a trifle of commercial slickness, but Strongly Recommended.

Speaker Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leader Thune (R-SD) seem to be having a bit of a disagreement:

The Senate unanimously approved a measure Thursday to display an existing plaque honoring the officers who protected the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot.

Congress passed a law in March 2022 mandating the plaque, but years later it has yet to be installed. Speaker Mike Johnson has argued the project is “not implementable,” and the Justice Department has maintained in litigation that an existing plaque does not comply with the law because it lists the departments who responded, not the individual officers.

The measure on Thursday, led by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), sought to address the long-running political squabble.

“Squabble”? No, this is Trump waging war on the police who stopped his insurrectionists from illegally interfering with the vote-counting process, and this is Speaker Johnson, one of the weakest Speakers in the history of the House, and probably weakest members of the House ever, zealously doing the bidding of the man who handed him the honor of the Speakership. It’s been reported that the government website devoted to the insurrection has been whitewashed to make it appear the police instigated the incident, and the plaque would be discordant with this fanciful version of reality.

But, with this measure passed, Thune and the balance of the Senate has refused to erase reality.

This is emblematic of the choice that has been coming slowly into focus for every right-winger since the insurrection: did President Trump actually win the 2020 election, as he claims, or does he simply lie about it every time he opens his mouth – and, by implication, about just about everything else?

AND … whether each Republican sees the massive mendacity of many lead GOP officials, including the Mendacity Machine himself, as reason to leave the right, or is their faux-grasp^[1] on power so important to their egos that truth and honesty is disregarded by them, as we’ve already seen with the current Cabinet members?

That is, the Republicans are now, individually, faced with a choice: Erase the historical perceptions of reality in their insane dash for absolute power that will, I think, result in a Republican Party-level internecine war between people with surnames such as Vance (R), Johnson (R-LA), Johnson (Ron, R-WI), Fuentes, Paxton (R-TX), Emmer (R-MN), Vought (Dir of CFPB), two dozen pastors, three dozen “prophets,” and so many others as soon as Trump disappears from the scene. Folks, I have a bad feeling that the far-right, jealous fourth-raters all, are about to literally tear themselves apart in a spate of automatic weapons and blood, and I’m not speaking metaphorically. As observed by historians and structural demographers such as Turchin, countries lacking a generally recognized external existential threat can fall victim to internal conflict; I would add … when the arrogance of the rivals is well out of alignment with reality.^[2] Generally, this continues until the bulgy-eyed types are all dead and everyone else is so horrified that compromise becomes a good word, again. Let’s hope the speedy demon of technology enables us to figure this out in weeks and not decades.

Keep your heads down, folks, and keep an eye on the far-left as well; they have a history of trying to sail in as an ally of the center when the right collapses. To paraphrase Franklin, we only get to be a democracy so long as we work to keep it that way.

Wild prediction of the day: Once Trump realizes he’s not in control, he’ll commit suicide. Within six months, I’d say.

¹ Faux-grasp is the phrase I use because, like any tin-pot dictator, Trump doesn’t share power.

² In our case, to one side I’d state that No, God doesn’t take sides, the Divine may not even exist, and to the other, No, your favored latest academic fad in governance does not entitle you to act the part of autocrats.

Steve Benen hasn’t descended far enough into the far-away land of … farce:

As policy priorities go, [America buying Greenland] seems plainly ridiculous. And yet it also raises a host of new and related questions: Where exactly does Trump intend to get the money to buy a massive arctic island that isn’t for sale? Is he going to ask Congress to appropriate the funds? Would GOP lawmakers be willing to write an enormous check?

And how embarrassed is the House speaker right now after his “took it as a joke” line has been publicly discredited by his ostensible allies?

The entire endeavor is descending quickly into farce.

I think the Danes should tot up the estimated value of the various precious metals Greenland contains, multiply by ten to cover the value brought by the Danes who’d become Americans and accompanying infrastructure, and then notify the United States that they can open the bidding with that number, with paperwork certifying they have that much money in cash.

And then wait for other bids.

I wonder how Alaskans will feel about Trump offering to sell Alaska back to Russia in order to buy Greenland. You just know Trump would jump at the opportunity if that’d bring in enough money to make the Greenland, excuse me, Trump-land buy. Russian bloggers have, I hear, been speculating that Russia may reacquire Alaska in the near future, in all seriousness.

Farce is in the eye of the beholder.

This is hot? Are you a lunatic?!

Undertaking Betty (2002; Brit. Plots with a View (UK)) is a pleasant British farce in which a British undertaker, faced with a chance to steal away the woman who he lost to a slicker competitor, must make his move while facing down an American competitor, his objet’ desire dies, and then her husband dies.

The bag of tricks of the latter is appalling.

This is one where the specifics may escape your predictive capabilities, but each twist is unsurprising, yet fun. I don’t recommend it as I’ve already forgotten most of it three weeks later, but there’s nothing awful about this, excepting a haircut or two, but neither is there anything exceptional.

While I remain convinced that Paramount Skydance, helmed by David Ellison and backed by father Larry Ellison, will acquire Warner Bros and associated properties due to the Ellison’s association with President Trump, and stifling Netflix’s acquisition attempt, Warner Bros themselves continues to play the game by the rules, or at least what I expect are the rules:

Warner Bros. on Wednesday unanimously rejected Paramount’s revised offer to acquire the production studio, saying the hostile bid is still too risky for shareholders to accept, despite the guaranteed financial backing Paramount pegged to its $108.4 billion offer in December.

Netflix and Paramount Skydance have been locked in a race to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which announced late last year that it had entered into an $83 billion deal with Netflix for its studios and the HBO Max streaming platform. That prompted Paramount CEO David Ellison to mount a hostile takeover bid. Paramount has since made eight offers to Warner Bros., all of which have been rejected by the board out of concern over the risk presented by debt, financial backing and large fees if the deal were to collapse.

In a letter to shareholders, the Warner Bros. Discovery board said that Paramount’s revised $30-per-share offer is still too risky because it relies on an “extraordinary amount of debt financing,” adding that the leveraged buyout threatens shareholders with “considerable value destruction.” [MS NOW]

If the Netflix deal is nixed by, well, Trump, will Warner Bros bravely refuse the Paramount Skydance offering and continue to be independent?

We replaced our dolomite back porch last spring with pavers, but retained and used the best of the old dolomite for designs. Here it’s January, and the pavers drained well during the January thaw, the dolomite … not so much.

The death by ICE agent of Renee Good in Minneapolis is a tragedy – and, for the good of the nation, must be dealt with rigorously in the context of the accusations and rebuttals flung about by Governor Walz, Mayor Frey, and Secretary Noem.

We are a nation of Law and Truth, so the Mendacity Machine^[1] should be, for the good of the Nation’s soul, ignored.

In a sober court of law, attended by a duly appointed jury, the truth can, hopefully, be ascertained. If the jury observes an attempt to kill the ICE agent who will stand accused, then little more need be done.

If the ICE agent is observed to have broken the law in the discharge of his weapon, off to prison for manslaughter or whatever the district attorney determines is appropriate.

Seems shorn of excitement, doesn’t it? Where’s the protests and excitement? Well, I understand we (I live in a suburb of St Paul, MN, across the river from Minneapolis) had a lovely moving memorial for the victim, Mz Good. Peaceful protests convey to the nation the importance of considering whether the ICE agents are truly operating in an honest manner, which is to say arresting violent criminals, or if they’re a sloppy ad hoc army spreading terror.

I can’t tell from here. We really require good investigation and a cessation of the arrogance found on both sides of the aisle. Sadly, we won’t get either.

I expect a rocky ride.

¹ For newcomers and the forgetful, I refer, of course, to Donald J. Trump.

When it comes to targets, cartoonist Mike Smith has a different take.

Prediction: if the United States does take possession of Greenland, the name will change. It won’t be a native name, if such even exists.

It’ll be Trump-land, or something close to that. He can’t resist putting his name on everything.

This post is for completeness, really. Long-term readers may recall the dam on the Klamath River in Oregon had been taken down, and a chinook salmon run took place a short while later. Dan Bacher on Daily Kos now reports on more progress on the human side of things:

As salmon return to the headwaters of the Klamath River for the first time in over 100 years after the removal of four dams, the newly formed Klamath Indigenous Land Trust (KILT) and PacifiCorp announced the landmark purchase of 10,000 acres in and around the former reservoir reach of the river, according to a press statement.

Representatives of the trust say the transaction represents “one of the largest private land purchases by an Indigenous-led land trust in U.S. history.”

“Dam removal allowed the salmon to return home. Returning these lands to Indigenous care ensures that home will be a place where they can flourish and recover,” said Molli Myers (Karuk), President of the Klamath Indigenous Land Trust Board of Directors. “Our communities spent generations fighting for this moment and we honor our ancestors who carried this vision forward. The healing that’s underway is real, and this acquisition reflects the future we’re building together as people of the Klamath Basin.”

Hopefully the Klamath Indigenous Land Trust Board is up to the job.

In the context of the Greenland issue, White House aide Stephen Miller was caught making an intellectual error:

“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” [White House aide Stephen Miller] said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” [Deccan Herald]

How very Mencken of Miller. H. L. Mencken once said, or perhaps wrote,

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Here, the question is How does the world work? Miller hasn’t thought this through, no doubt because it sounds so right to him.

But does he want to hire 24 hour bodyguards for himself and his family? Deal with kidnapped children?

The best societies agree to rules of law so that everyone can feel mildly safe. Defending all one values 24 hours a day means little or nothing else is accomplished. And many, many people die, leading to heartbreak and travail.

Someone needs to clout Miller upside the head, but I doubt it’d help.

Cryptic pregnancy:

Former Rep Greene (R-GA) impertinently asks some pertinent questions:

Mexican cartels are primarily and overwhelmingly responsible for killing Americans with deadly drugs.

If U.S. military action and regime change in Venezuela was really about saving American lives from deadly drugs then why hasn’t the Trump admin taken action against Mexican cartels?

And if prosecuting narco terrorists is a high priority then why did President Trump pardon the former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez who was convicted and sentenced for 45 years for trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine into America? Ironically cocaine is the same drug that Venezuela primarily traffics into the U.S.

The next obvious observation is that by removing Maduro this is a clear move for control over Venezuelan oil supplies that will ensure stability for the next obvious regime change war in Iran.

And of course why is it ok for America to militarily invade, bomb, and arrest a foreign leader but Russia is evil for invading Ukraine and China is bad for aggression against Taiwan? Is it only ok if we do it? (I’m not endorsing Russia or China) [X]

There’s more, but it’s enough to to remove most doubts that Greene is behind this push. It also explains Erick Erickson’s post earlier today in which he excoriates certain members of the far right for not getting behind the President:

Tucker Carlson is opposed to what Donald Trump just did.

Steve Bannon, who worked to rehabilitate Jeffrey Epstein’s image, is opposed to what Donald Trump just did.

Candace Owens is opposed to what Donald Trump just did.

Marjorie Taylor Green is opposed to what Donald Trump just did.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping — they are all on the side of the Woke Reich in opposition to what Donald Trump did.

If we could ignore all of them, we should. But they do have large followings and shape a lot of online conversations. I say that because I know few people offline who really pay attention to them. But a lot of online conversations drift offline.

The problem for the right these days is that the fringe of the right online is loud and assertive and risks placing much of the right in a bubble in the way the loud online left got Democrats in a bubble, such that they still believe boys can magically become girls.

I think some of these right-wingers are earnest in their reactions, such as Greene, while others, like Bannon, are trying to take influence away from the President and his minions through strategic positions that they believe will appeal to the MAGA base. In this case, the Trump campaign promise not to get involved in foreign wars.

Meanwhile, Erickson carefully lumps Greene, et al, with the progressives he repeatedly claims are nuts.

This’ll be interesting. I wouldn’t put money on anything, but some members of Congress may be in more trouble than they know if they back the President – and if they don’t.

Governor Walz (D-MN) just announced he’s not running for re-election, which would be his third term, so once again Minnesota will not have a three-peat governor.

I’ve been wondering if Walz was going to be stubborn and drag down the Minnesota Democrats, as while I doubt there was an intent to permit the crimes, it has become big enough to suggest a failure to manage effectively. By exiting the race, voters can vote for whoever wins the primary. Lt Governor Flanagan (D-MN), currently running for Senator Smith’s (D-MN) seat, might consider running for the governor’s seat, which may be more attainable.

We shall see.

Long-term readers will remember the prediction that the Republicans would accelerate right as they fight to move up the social prestige ladder of the conservatives. Because the right has been successfully trained to consider purity golden and compromise loathesome, the ambitious, arrogant gits on the right would have de facto contests to show who is most pure and, thus, claim for themselves a golden calf to sit upon.

Yes, I did write golden calf, and that’s to emphasize the role the clerics have played in relentlessly telling their base that the Divine is on their side, even though he doesn’t speak to them, and, of course, Neither the clerics nor the base can be wrong. As Senator Goldwater (R-AZ) said back when I was a kid (the 1960s):

Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.

Back on point, here’s the latest subject of a right-winger trying to move up the right-wing social ladder through a demonstration of purity:

In case this X post disappears:

BREAKING – Streamer Asmongold says the Somalian fraud is far larger than just arresting a few Somalians, that entire families must be denaturalized and deported, and that the officials who allowed it to happen must face treason and capital punishment charges or he is done voting.

Followed by a stream from ‘Asmongold,’ aka Zack Hoyt. I didn’t actually listen to the stream, as the summary seems enough for me. Ja’han Jones of MS NOW contributes this:

“If JD Vance does not push for treason with capital punishment against Tim Walz, do not vote for him,” [Hoyt] said. “If Trump does not deliver that, do not vote for him. Unless the most extreme, dramatic, brutal, aggressive option is on the table, I’m staying home.”

Elon Musk joined in, as did others, according to Jones.

Where does this go now? Well, it’s up to the conservative base. If they desert Hoyt, rejecting him as the power-hungry fool he appears to be, then we may be on our way back to sanity. That base is already suffering shocks from President Trump’s tariffs, foreign wars, deeply embarrassing Cabinet, and the symptoms of dementia he puts on display every day. Calls for capital punishment for failing to prevent fraud is so utterly ridiculous that they should reject it, and those who call for it.

But they may cling to their allegiances, because falling down the social prestige ladder is a real blow to the ego. What I see as a truly shattering blow to the plausibility of Trump and MAGA may not be enough drive them away just yet. If so, I fear we’ll be seeing more wild-eyed propositions from idiots.

Sheesh.

… it is known, for example, that hurricanes tend to kill more people if they have feminine names, because they are perceived as less dangerous, meaning people are less likely to take adequate precautions. [“Why do we feel the need to humanise everything, from dogs to cars?“, Elle Hunt in a book review, NewScientist (27 December 2025, paywall)]

I suppose if we labeled them with numbers some folks would think that’s a severity rating; animal names, danger ratings; etc. Our tendency to look for hierarchies here in the West is either inborn or a product of society.

And does it really need a re-think?

When it comes to the United States kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Maduro, which I look at as simply one bad guy knocking off another bad guy, I’m starting to see flags that my thought that this is a distraction from the Epstein Files is true.

The lack of details about what comes next led some U.S. officials to question why there was no detailed plan in place well before deposing Maduro. [Wall Street Journal/MSN]

While extremists on the right apparently do not plan much, this report is also congruent with a panicky attempt to distract from the Epstein Files. And I see Senator Murphy agrees:

This is about satisfying Trump’s vanity, making good on the long-standing neoconservative grudge against Maduro, enriching Trump’s oil industry backers, and distracting voters from Epstein and rising costs.

Assuming the email is authentic, of course.

In case you’ve run across one or more articles claiming fascism can’t be stopped once it’s underway, Daily Kos‘ GoodNewsRoundup has a diary entry purporting to refute the claim. I’d seen, but not read, one or two such claims on DK of late, but the author struck me as new, so I hadn’t paid much attention; GoodNewsRoundup’s article I skimmed. If you’re alarmed or depressed, this might serve to lift you out of a hole. Money quote:

Someone reposted an old post on here arguing that no one has ever stopped fascism.

Good lord. How is that helpful?

Or at all true?

It is useless and inaccurate doomerism.

I am dismayed and disappointed to see, this morning, that we’ve invaded Venezuela overnight. A lot can be said about this, from both news and opinion perspectives, but here I’ll address the three issues that came immediately to mind on hearing that the United States and its government is making a horse’s ass of itself.

1. The putative problem for which this action is promulgated is not effectively addressed in my mind. We’re talking supply and demand, the supply of drugs, allegedly, by Venezuela in order to satisfy demand, the demand of American consumers, who continue to self-administer recreational drugs which consume their time, their minds, their families, and their wealth. Stipulating to Venezuelan drugs, destroying Venezuelan drugs does not destroy American demand; they’ll just switch to, say, Honduran drugs, or Chilean drugs. American demand is not caused by the presence of drugs, foreign or domestic. At this juncture, the common continuation might be A defect in American society causes American demand, but that suggests it’s a fixable problem, and I am unconvinced of the possibility. I think it’s a byproduct of how we run our society, an inevitable byproduct, and fixing it might cause a different problem involving excess timidity. Or perhaps not, it’s a difficult question.
2. Venezuelan President Maduro simply did not properly manage President Trump. Readers should remember Juan Orlando Hernández, former President of Honduras, who, being convicted in an American court of drug smuggling, was pardoned by President Trump in November of last year. GovFacts suggests this was a reward for supporting Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2021, and for signing an Asylum Cooperative Agreement. GovFacts also suggests Trump’s fear of leftist governments motivated this action, in combination with a recent Honduras Presidential election and a dismayed National Party (conservative); I should not doubt that some dollars from Hernández were also involved. Maduro should have arranged to support Trump, making it difficult for Trump to use the justification of drug smuggling, an unproven accusation, for attacking Venezuela, even if the Venezuelan nationalization of the oil  industry (1976) is of overwhelming importance to the Republicans, who are still outraged at the Cuban nationalization of various American properties in Cuba.
3. How long will Trump hide behind Venezuela in order to avoid the Epstein Files issue? Historians must be licking their lips.

Whatever else I think, this’ll have knock-on effects for years to come, and that those may be unmanageable is what President Trump and his minions don’t get, an inevitable conclusion in light of issue #1, above. Confusing supply and demand is a simple mistake that should not have been made, and that they did….

Well, the future should be fascinating, but dreadful if you’re Venezuelan.