10/26/25: One day, in my medical office building, I saw a man in his sixties bent over like a pretzel. That was his condition, to spend the rest of his life as if he were an upside-down "U." His wife saw me and engaged me in conversation. She related that her husband has prostate cancer and the MD treated him with surgical removal of the major source of male hormone feeding the cancer-his testicles. His bizarre body configuration was the result of severe osteoporosis that followed his surgical castration. Due to his bent body, he was continually short of breath. His life was living hell. The Holy Grail of medicine: Primum Non Nocere or First (above all) Do No Harm had been violated. What I was witness to was horrendous collateral damage.
Every day we hear more of Trump's outbursts, his rage exploded into impulse action, without oversight by Congress. All are characterized by significant degrees of uncertainty. Were only the bad guys killed or was there collateral damage an innocent lives lost or maimed? Could these strikes against "evil" been conducted with more precision, deliberation, and consensus by Congress? Could the issue of crime in our cities or illegal immigration be conducted with more accuracy, with a focus on immigration policies, budget expenditures for vetting of those wish to enter the US, and fast-tracking those seeking legitimate asylum? Of course. And, I bet that anyone of us could have done a far, far better job than those appointed by both Democratic and Republican Parties. So much of our government has been run by those of mediocre work ethic and lack of doing the job right.
What we are seeing every day, and now in the Caribbean, is Trump's modus operandi. Don't be surprised when he does the same in Greenland. Trump mimics Putin in just about every way.
He does whatever he wants, without the oversight that has never before been so flagrantly violated in over 236 years. Trump's tirades are that of a spoiled brat, but his toys are real guns, real planes and bombs. We have a madman in charge. What he has done is off-the-rails. It is the razing of the White House East Wing, the helter-skelter of ICE raids, the invasion by the National Guard and/or Marines into America's cities and force used against peaceful protesters, and his petty but vindictive lawsuits against anyone that has criticized him. Now he has manifested escalation of his psychopathy with raids on boats sailing the Caribbean. Trump has defiled due process, spent hundreds of millions if not billions of taxpayer dollars, murdered or severely damaged the lives of innocents, and has the balls to nominate himself for the Peace prize. This is the grand tosser we have as POTUS. This is the man, and his gang, that is castrating America- all will suffer. A nation divided cannot stand. He, Trump, is fulfilling DOGE's mandate: DOGE (Destroy Our Great Experiment). Destroy America. Trump is not for Americans or America; he is Putin's comrade.
These are the Constitutional precepts openly violated, with a complicit Republican Party and an enabling SCOTUS. Shame on them, ALL. Imagine, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rand Paul are now speaking out against Trump.
✱ The rights of the people are openly declared (not granted but affirmed) in the founding documents of our nation. These rights were not understood as given, and therefore retractable, by the government at its discretion; they were understood, rather, as entitlements originating in “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”
✱ A government’s wish to rule in secret on its own initiative and authority is perfectly understandable; this is a merely human weakness. Of course, government officials would like to keep some information secret for reasons of national security, as well as for many other reasons that may readily be imagined. It is nevertheless true that a government’s wish to govern in secret is the same as the wish to govern tyrannically
✱ Perhaps it is always the tendency of those in power to wish to rule autocratically, and this is what our founders feared and provided against. Aside from any issue of faith or theory, there is a practical reason for ascribing human rights to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Rights that originate beyond and above governmental power cannot justly be abridged or revoked by a government.
✱ Governments, the Declaration says, derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” If the governed accept or allow a government that is arbitrary, self-authorized, and self-justified, then, whatever may be the fate of national security, mere citizens will no longer be secure in their rights.
✱ We may say then that national security has been our concern from the beginning, and that from the beginning the designated purpose of the nation was to secure the rights to which its citizens individually were entitled by the laws of nature and of nature’s God.
✱ The two kinds of security were understood as one. If the security of the nation ceases to imply the security of all its inhabitants in their God-given rights, then, according to the Declaration of Independence, that nation’s government will have delegitimized itself and should be replaced.
That is not the wild idea of somebody in the current crop of left-wingers or right-wingers, but merely what the Declaration says, and we have been living with it unobjectingly for going on 236 years.
Trump, his Cabinet, and the Republican Congress should be replaced. What we have is a bastard King, a being that is far from a hero or peacemaker.
If you Google "lyrics to Marat by Judy Collins" you will see the similarity to our current ship of state. There is no doubt, no hesitation, that our Ship is sailing in a Shit Storm. All Americans that care about their homeland, their children, the legacy they are leaving, must
WAKE UP.
✱
All of the text preceded by the asterisk, is of the prophetic writing from my now favorite person on the planet, Wendell Berry. The text is excerpted from A Way of Ignorance, published in 2005–20 years ago. Berry, age 91, lives in Port Royal, Kentucky. He is a present-day Socrates. I suggest start with a Berry work published in 1972 called "A Continuous Harmony." It is a gem. Find it here: https://tinyurl.com/4mv69mw4 on Amazon, or here: https://tinyurl.com/cdk7e2z7 at Thrift Books (cheaper than Amazon).
This is the Monroe doctrine writ large. The US has a very long history of interfering (with extreme prejudice) against South American countries they decide the don’t like dating back to Teddy Roosevelt, Bay of Pigs, Allende overthrow et al.
This will end badly. What happens, for example, when cartels start reprisals against Americans?
There's no standard Western hemisphere equivalent to "never engage in a land war in Asia", but the record of US interventions suggests that there should be.
This was my case against the Peace Prize award. The award isn't for freedom fighters (in the literal sense), it's for making and sustaining peace. Machado was a dubious choice from the start and her dedication of the prize to Trump, as an inducement for a war of liberation, proved it to be wrong.
I’m going to push back on the Maduro being evil thing. The U.S. wants cheap oil. Countries south of the U.S. have a right to govern themselves without American interference. Down with the Monroe doctrine. This woman is a right-wing puppet who would give her country’s assets to the U.S. I hope Venezuela can resist the U.S.
Maduro being evil should not be a controversial take. You can oppose US interventionism in domestic South American politics without backing a dictator who ended the remnants of his country’s democratic system years ago and thus has infringed on his countrymen’s right to govern themselves far more than any foreign power right now. Likewise, your concern should Machado or some other opposition get in power is that they would be some puppet who would hand national assets over to the U.S., as opposed to the current situation, where Maduro has created a kleptocracy with a rule oligarchy of regime loyalists and family members who impose control over all the country’s institutions and levers of power and enrich themselves through the corrupt exploitation of Venezuela’s assets and government power. I will never understand the far leftwing insistence on glazing a guy whose position of power and abuse carried out in his own country is not all that materially different than Trump.
Re: Liberation from Imperial Adventure: Venezuela's sad century history is a tragedy of corporate predation backed by a pseudo-Monroe Doctrine -- various administrations owing fealty to corporate prerogatives. Machado will have difficulty navigating this territory, however patriotic she is. She could not have picked a worse time to bet on U.S. "help". No doubt she needs it, but we don't yet have an independent citizenry to supply democratic means in defiance of rentier lords.
Thank you, Mike, for this post. Right on point. I was extremely disturbed by Machado's dedication of her prize to Trump. Her words say something about who she really is - someone who will do the wrong thing to get what she wants. The end never justifies the means.
10/26/25: One day, in my medical office building, I saw a man in his sixties bent over like a pretzel. That was his condition, to spend the rest of his life as if he were an upside-down "U." His wife saw me and engaged me in conversation. She related that her husband has prostate cancer and the MD treated him with surgical removal of the major source of male hormone feeding the cancer-his testicles. His bizarre body configuration was the result of severe osteoporosis that followed his surgical castration. Due to his bent body, he was continually short of breath. His life was living hell. The Holy Grail of medicine: Primum Non Nocere or First (above all) Do No Harm had been violated. What I was witness to was horrendous collateral damage.
Every day we hear more of Trump's outbursts, his rage exploded into impulse action, without oversight by Congress. All are characterized by significant degrees of uncertainty. Were only the bad guys killed or was there collateral damage an innocent lives lost or maimed? Could these strikes against "evil" been conducted with more precision, deliberation, and consensus by Congress? Could the issue of crime in our cities or illegal immigration be conducted with more accuracy, with a focus on immigration policies, budget expenditures for vetting of those wish to enter the US, and fast-tracking those seeking legitimate asylum? Of course. And, I bet that anyone of us could have done a far, far better job than those appointed by both Democratic and Republican Parties. So much of our government has been run by those of mediocre work ethic and lack of doing the job right.
What we are seeing every day, and now in the Caribbean, is Trump's modus operandi. Don't be surprised when he does the same in Greenland. Trump mimics Putin in just about every way.
He does whatever he wants, without the oversight that has never before been so flagrantly violated in over 236 years. Trump's tirades are that of a spoiled brat, but his toys are real guns, real planes and bombs. We have a madman in charge. What he has done is off-the-rails. It is the razing of the White House East Wing, the helter-skelter of ICE raids, the invasion by the National Guard and/or Marines into America's cities and force used against peaceful protesters, and his petty but vindictive lawsuits against anyone that has criticized him. Now he has manifested escalation of his psychopathy with raids on boats sailing the Caribbean. Trump has defiled due process, spent hundreds of millions if not billions of taxpayer dollars, murdered or severely damaged the lives of innocents, and has the balls to nominate himself for the Peace prize. This is the grand tosser we have as POTUS. This is the man, and his gang, that is castrating America- all will suffer. A nation divided cannot stand. He, Trump, is fulfilling DOGE's mandate: DOGE (Destroy Our Great Experiment). Destroy America. Trump is not for Americans or America; he is Putin's comrade.
These are the Constitutional precepts openly violated, with a complicit Republican Party and an enabling SCOTUS. Shame on them, ALL. Imagine, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rand Paul are now speaking out against Trump.
✱ The rights of the people are openly declared (not granted but affirmed) in the founding documents of our nation. These rights were not understood as given, and therefore retractable, by the government at its discretion; they were understood, rather, as entitlements originating in “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”
✱ A government’s wish to rule in secret on its own initiative and authority is perfectly understandable; this is a merely human weakness. Of course, government officials would like to keep some information secret for reasons of national security, as well as for many other reasons that may readily be imagined. It is nevertheless true that a government’s wish to govern in secret is the same as the wish to govern tyrannically
✱ Perhaps it is always the tendency of those in power to wish to rule autocratically, and this is what our founders feared and provided against. Aside from any issue of faith or theory, there is a practical reason for ascribing human rights to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Rights that originate beyond and above governmental power cannot justly be abridged or revoked by a government.
✱ Governments, the Declaration says, derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” If the governed accept or allow a government that is arbitrary, self-authorized, and self-justified, then, whatever may be the fate of national security, mere citizens will no longer be secure in their rights.
✱ We may say then that national security has been our concern from the beginning, and that from the beginning the designated purpose of the nation was to secure the rights to which its citizens individually were entitled by the laws of nature and of nature’s God.
✱ The two kinds of security were understood as one. If the security of the nation ceases to imply the security of all its inhabitants in their God-given rights, then, according to the Declaration of Independence, that nation’s government will have delegitimized itself and should be replaced.
That is not the wild idea of somebody in the current crop of left-wingers or right-wingers, but merely what the Declaration says, and we have been living with it unobjectingly for going on 236 years.
Trump, his Cabinet, and the Republican Congress should be replaced. What we have is a bastard King, a being that is far from a hero or peacemaker.
If you Google "lyrics to Marat by Judy Collins" you will see the similarity to our current ship of state. There is no doubt, no hesitation, that our Ship is sailing in a Shit Storm. All Americans that care about their homeland, their children, the legacy they are leaving, must
WAKE UP.
✱
All of the text preceded by the asterisk, is of the prophetic writing from my now favorite person on the planet, Wendell Berry. The text is excerpted from A Way of Ignorance, published in 2005–20 years ago. Berry, age 91, lives in Port Royal, Kentucky. He is a present-day Socrates. I suggest start with a Berry work published in 1972 called "A Continuous Harmony." It is a gem. Find it here: https://tinyurl.com/4mv69mw4 on Amazon, or here: https://tinyurl.com/cdk7e2z7 at Thrift Books (cheaper than Amazon).
This is the Monroe doctrine writ large. The US has a very long history of interfering (with extreme prejudice) against South American countries they decide the don’t like dating back to Teddy Roosevelt, Bay of Pigs, Allende overthrow et al.
This will end badly. What happens, for example, when cartels start reprisals against Americans?
There's no standard Western hemisphere equivalent to "never engage in a land war in Asia", but the record of US interventions suggests that there should be.
This was my case against the Peace Prize award. The award isn't for freedom fighters (in the literal sense), it's for making and sustaining peace. Machado was a dubious choice from the start and her dedication of the prize to Trump, as an inducement for a war of liberation, proved it to be wrong.
I’m going to push back on the Maduro being evil thing. The U.S. wants cheap oil. Countries south of the U.S. have a right to govern themselves without American interference. Down with the Monroe doctrine. This woman is a right-wing puppet who would give her country’s assets to the U.S. I hope Venezuela can resist the U.S.
Maduro being evil should not be a controversial take. You can oppose US interventionism in domestic South American politics without backing a dictator who ended the remnants of his country’s democratic system years ago and thus has infringed on his countrymen’s right to govern themselves far more than any foreign power right now. Likewise, your concern should Machado or some other opposition get in power is that they would be some puppet who would hand national assets over to the U.S., as opposed to the current situation, where Maduro has created a kleptocracy with a rule oligarchy of regime loyalists and family members who impose control over all the country’s institutions and levers of power and enrich themselves through the corrupt exploitation of Venezuela’s assets and government power. I will never understand the far leftwing insistence on glazing a guy whose position of power and abuse carried out in his own country is not all that materially different than Trump.
Re: Liberation from Imperial Adventure: Venezuela's sad century history is a tragedy of corporate predation backed by a pseudo-Monroe Doctrine -- various administrations owing fealty to corporate prerogatives. Machado will have difficulty navigating this territory, however patriotic she is. She could not have picked a worse time to bet on U.S. "help". No doubt she needs it, but we don't yet have an independent citizenry to supply democratic means in defiance of rentier lords.
Thank you, Mike, for this post. Right on point. I was extremely disturbed by Machado's dedication of her prize to Trump. Her words say something about who she really is - someone who will do the wrong thing to get what she wants. The end never justifies the means.
Sort of seems like Venezuela is the Greenland we can bully. How long until we pillage the oil and minerals there?