Some Thoughts in the Eye of the Iranian Storm

On this day:

1820
The Venus de Milo is discovered on the Aegean island of Melos.
1832
Black Hawk War: Around three hundred United States 6th Infantry troops leave St. Louis, Missouri to fight the Sauk Native Americans.
1904
British mystic Aleister Crowley transcribes the first chapter of The Book of the Law.

1942
World War II: The Japanese take Bataan in the Philippines.
1952
U.S. President Harry Truman calls for the seizure of all domestic steel mills to prevent a nationwide strike.

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Long-run political policies are almost a contradiction in terms in societies where politicians are elected in the short run.--sowell

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Is the AI detecting software, AI?

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With birthright citizenship, will a two-tier system of citizenship develop?

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The attack on Markwayne Mullin is a fascinating and unashamed revelation of his critics. He left school to take over his father's business after his sudden death. Mullin built that business into the larhest of it kind in the state. But his critics were not ideological; they objected to the business being a plumbing business. Their objection was social. It was, in their minds, class.

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Aleister Crowley was a British mystic and goofball whose philosophy was “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” The French author François Rabelais had expressed this more than 300 years earlier in Gargantua and Pantagruel—but Crowley made it the basis of a new religion he called Thelema, thelēma being the Greek word for “will.” He went through a large inheritance with travel and excess. He was a great chess player and mountaineer. He attracted a lot of interesting young people early in their lives, including J.F.C. Fuller, later a well-known military strategist and historian. He was an opponent of the poet William Butler Yeats within the London Golden Dawn occultist group. The Beatles put his picture on the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.

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Some Thoughts in the Eye of the Iranian Storm

Trump is fascinated with himself as the center of attention. One wonders if this obsession will influence policy.

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Trump's understandable anger with those opponents who seemed to have publicly and secretively lied and manipulated in efforts to undermine him is total. One wonders if this obsession will influence policy.

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One wonders if changing monikers like Operation Epic Fury to something like Operation Mad as Hell or Operation Pretty Damn Angry would lead to different results.

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Trump's support of Orbán in Hungary is peculiar, especially since the only other leader who has supported him is Putin.

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The atmosphere of Europe is despair. Things are simply beyond them: economic decline, immigration, loss of identity, public bullying by people and events, and, especially, the understanding that it is all self-imposed.

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The great problems of the West are the direct result of inaction in the face of obvious threats. The National Debt and the Iranian Holy War are 

predictable problems rising and flowering exponentially in our lives that will eventually dissolve into a chaotic resolution or be solved in the U.S. by desperate, unconstitutional acts. That action will not be chosen but imposed upon a wide-eyed leader, like the final moments of musical chairs.

It could be horrible. But the real question is, what does it say about representative democracy?