NO! to your bald-faced lies about the tragic murder of innocent Nicole Good by vicious I.C.E. agent Jonathan Ross! He wasn’t injured, but he put at least 3 bullets in a mother and wife without provocation! If Ross was traumatized by an earlier incident, why wasn’t he at a desk job until he healed? Innocent blood is ON YOUR HANDS, murderer!
NO! to your fake investigations of Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey! You have sent an invading army of anonymous, violent, even murderous GOONS and THUGS into their state, because you yourself are so weak, and your ego is so withered, you cannot tolerate ANY differences! NO to your lies about them, both honorable men, inciting disobedience! They are doing what they were elected by the people of Minnesota and Minneapolis to do — defend them from criminals like YOU!
NO! to your insane plan to invade Greenland! We have a treaty with Denmark from 1951 (my birth year, BTW) that allows us to build and operate military bases there! We used to have 17, but the U.S. government closed them down! Greenlanders are happy to let us use their island, and your fears that Russia and China are “closing in” demonstrate only your own swelling paranoia! The best way to push Greenland into enemy hands is to do EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE DOING, destroying N.A.T.O., the organization that has kept American and its European allies safe and secure for 80 years!
NO! to your wet dream of building the world’s most expensive floating target, a $20 billion “Gold Fleet” of battleships! Do you know what proved them useless in WW I? Submarines firing torpedos! Do you know what proved them archaic in WW II? Aircraft carriers! One dive bomber with a brave pilot and a 500-pound armor-piercing bomb could sink a battleship! All they ever did was blow each other up, like Bismark vs. Hood, and make holes on beaches for landings, which can be done by lesser destroyers or cruisers. One nuclear torpedo, one powerful mine, or even a clever dolphin delivering a magnetic limpet mine (which the Russian Navy knows how to do), will blow your battleship to hell, where it belongs, along with the rest of your insane military ideas! You know who else thought he knew more than his generals and admirals? HINT: His first name was Adolph, and his last name began with H and ended with -itler!
NO! to your cruel deprivation of A.C.A. health insurance to 20 million low-income Americans who need it desperately, because they have nowhere else to turn! You raised their premiums to impossible heights, and you deprived the hungry, and expectant mothers, of their S.N.A.P. benefits! Are you a sullen little twat because the A.C.A. got named Obamacare by the grateful American people, and your name will be scrubbed from every building and street sign in America, once you are gone from office? You petty little child! +
NO! to your lawless plan to cancel the 2026 MIDTERM ELECTIONS! You are a mad bull in china shop, crushing everything blindly, but I guarantee you, you are no longer friends with Elon Musk, and he may not do your bidding, as he did in 2024! Every-body knows he rigged the voting machines in swing states for you, donated a quarter-billion dollars to your war chest, and took a chain saw to a budget that required a scalpel. NO! to martial law in Democratic cities and states, your plans are totally transparent!
I could go on, but are you listening? I long for the administrations of Barack HUSSEIN Obama and Joe Biden, because know what?
WHAT THOSE MEN LEAVE IN THE TOILET EVERY MORNING has more CLASS AND INTEGRITY than you and anyone in your whole stinking, corrupt, fetid administration!
YOU DEFILE AMERICA AND WIPE YOUR ASS WITH THE CONSTITUTION, BUT YOU ARE, THANKFULLY, NOT IMMORTAL! And when you are gone, regardless of whether you walk out of the White House you ruined on your feet, or are carried out feet-first, the righteous people of America and their leaders will purge your name from EVERYTHING!And Donald J. Trump will be obliterated from history. You will become a B.L.O.A.T. — BIGGEST LOSER OF ALL TIME!
Have a nice day, LOSER! — Malcolm J. Brenner, B.A. woke joker
Author displaying a bottle of formerly Russian alcoholic beverage, and a Russian translation of his non-fiction novel, Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover.Crap, can you imagine what kompromat Vlad the Invader has on Donald the Village Idiot? Putin plays chess, and wins. Donald plays dominoes, and loses. End of story!
AmericanPresident Donald J. Trump, 34-count convicted felon and sexual offender, glares angrily from his mug shot. Photographer: Some Fulton County, Georgia, cop!
The one certain thing you can say about President Donald Trump is that he changes his mind more often than he changes his diaper!
The Prez thinks it’s fun to have his $$-multi-billion Navy, built to battle Soviet submarines, blow up Venezuelan fishing boats on the high seas! Gee, what WAS in those white bags aboard the first boat, the one Trump said was loaded with fentanyl and Tren De Aragua drug dealers, headed for our shores? We’ll never know, but it doesn’t matter, because YOU’RE A MADE MAN NOW, Presidente El T.A.C.O!
In preparation for the 2026 mid-term elections, Trump thoughtfully sends National Guard troops into predominantly Black-run cities to maintain law and order, preserve the peace and MOST IMPORTANTLY, to keep the minorities from exercising their voting rights, STUPIDLY assured them by a damn fool WOKE Congress in 1964!
Secretary of Health RFK Jr. thinks he feels the tapeworm moving… again.
Having bravely faced down the COVID-19 virus with Operation Warp Speed in 2019, Trump appoints RFK Jr., a man with a dead pork tape worm rotting in his brain, which he got from carelessly dining in an East Indian slop house, to be Secretary of Health! RFK Jr., in turn, reports that he has finally determined the mysterious cause of autism! Trump announces it — “aceto… asseto… ackeeto… how do you pronounce that? TYLENOL!” (Note: widely disproved by actual science.)
California Gov. Newsome congratulates Steven Miller on being cast as Voldemort! He’s a dead ringer… no pun intended!
Angry gangs of masked, heavily armed thugs, fearing no retribution, roam the streets of major American cities, grabbing people, some of them innocent American citizens who happen to be slightly darker than me, some foreign nationals with protected visa status but funny-sounding last names, and force them at gunpoint into unmarked vans, then imprison them in places like Alligator Alcatraz for days without communication, only to fly them to impossibly hostile foreign countries where they don’t speak the language and are held for ransom… oh, EXCUSE ME! That’s just Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) agents acting on orders of Steve Miller, Voldemort look-alike and new White House Chief of Policy, trying scrape up his MANDATORY DAILY QUOTA of 3,000 “illegal criminal aliens,” the so-called “WORST OF THE WORST” (or anybody who’s not, you know, sort of white-ish) to prosecute and deport, because we all know that the Democrats just let ILLEGALS come here in droves because they always vote Lunatic Lefty!
Vitriolic Charlie Kirk got his dumb ass shot dead, so now Trump wants to canonize him as the Patron Saint of Irrational Race Hatred, Misogyny and Indifference to the Suffering of Others. MAGA endorses it! The Pope, however, doesn’t. Shame!
MEANWHILE…
CBS Comic Stephen Colbert got his show cancelled for not being nice enough to Herr Drumpf, and for calling him bad, bad — they were, really, the WORST EVER — BAD names, and now Cinderella’s fairy godmother ABC has sprinkled Disney dust on Jimmy Kimmel, and made him go bye-bye, just like El T.A.C.O. Presidenté SAID HE WOULD! Wow… self-fulfilling prophecy, or what? Meanwhile, millions of previously faithful Disney viewers have cancelled their channel subscriptions, upset that the most powerful entertainment complex in the whole world is puckering up to KISS TRUMP’S ASS, costing Disney $$ millions! Unexpected consequences, Walt?
Pam Bondi, a fake blonde with fake brains but a huge loyalty to Herr Drumpf, receives an email from Da Prez, exhorting her to speed up the imprisonment of LIBERALS, ANY LIBERALS, she can dream up charges against! Especially the ones that really hurt him bad a decade ago, that he’s NEVER gotten over, like Hillary! Hunter! Schumer! Comey! Barr! Biden! Bolton! And the millions of deluded American voters who still believe the Demon-Rats Big Lie that TRUMP LOST THE 2020 ELECTION, so he just HAD to sic his mob of vicious, cop-beating deplorables on the Capitol, making every Republican in Congress who had previously supported him run like a scared chicken to the basement bomb shelter, after which they all denounced him… THEN, two weeks later, KISSED HIS ASS!
THIS JUST IN: Israeli bombs continue to fall on innocent Palestinians in Gaza, 65,000, mostly women and children, now dead. America announces $6 billion arms deal with the IDF! Keep the ordnance coming, Prez, and the Military-Industrial Complex will continue to support you! Precise but indiscriminate Russian cruise missiles kill children, soldiers and the elderly alike in Ukraine, while Trump diddles with Putin, granting him extensions during which he will murder more Ukrainians, and maybe some Poles or Moldovans, too, just for the heck of it!
…AND NOW PASSING THE ORBIT OF JUPITER, A HUGE… NOT COMET, NOT ASTEROID OR METEOR, NOT A BIRD, NOT A PLANE, NOT EVEN SUPERMAN, BUT SOMETHING…WEIRD, ANCIENT, POSSIBLY ARTIFICIAL AND GLOWING LIKE AN H.I.D. HEADLIGHT IS HEADED TOWARD THE INNER SOLAR SYSTEM, WHERE IT WILL SURVEY MARS, VENUS AND JUPITER! BUT EARTH WILL NOT BE IGNORED… FOR THIS IS THE ONE THING PRESIDENT BONE SPURS FEARS MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE!
Coming soon to a drive-in near you:
THE RETURN OF COMET EPSTEIN!
It keeps coming back, over and over again! Why won’t it go away and leave poor Donald alone? Why can’t he make anyone look away at the many distractions he offers us, his loyal legions of MAGA followers?Are there any astrologers left over from the Reagan Administration around the White House?Surely this is a bad omen!
“I’M NOT DEAD YET!” — Mary, Queen of Scots, according to Monty Python. Godz bless you all, my brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles (except weird Uncle Albert whom we don’t talk about any more), and may Fortuna turn her bright and provident face upon you… and not let you see her break out laughing! Until next time, VIVE LA REVOLUTION!
After watching the utterly humiliating spectacle of the first and second elected officials of the U.S.A. — Dumpty-Trumpty and Shady Jay-Dee, if you weren’t clear — acting like mid-level Mafia bosses putting the squeeze on some two-bit hood named Zelenskyy, the commentator Keith Olberman, who hosts the podcast Countdown, was really angry! He cursed the Deplorable Duo up one side and down the other for the pettiness, their meanness, and their fondness for mass murdering autocrats who enslave their people. And in all 28 minutes of this, toward the end, Olberman made a comment that reached out of the flat screen display and SLAPPED ME UPSIDE THE HEAD! This is it:
“Burn in Hell, Trump! I’d say the same to J.D. Vance, but I suspect he’s realized he’s already burning in Hell. HE WORKS FOR TRUMP!”
(CULINARY NOTE: Were you as puzzled as I was by the huge, obnoxious grease stain on the yellow Oval Office couch, next to Secretary of Defense Peter “Cottontail” Heggseth, in Trump’s shameful meeting with Zelenskyy on Friday? Well, scientists who analyzed the stain say that’s all that’s left of former U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (RRR-FL)! Once the least-voting resident of the Senate Chamber, who delighted in taking overseas junkets almost as much as Texas Sen. Teddy “Bare Bear” Cruz, Rubio somehow — rolling dice? Rock, paper, scissors? A tarot card reading? — got elected chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is kind of funny if you think about it. Because he’s got about the intelligence of a castrated bull. Sort of an ox-y moron! When HE was running for president, Rubio, a child of Cuban boat immigrants who put their dry feet in Miami, rightly lambasted Trump on a variety of issues, among them being close to Vlad the Impaler — excuse me, same guy, wrong century! But when Herr Drumpf won the primary, Rubio was at the head of the line to kiss His Royal Heinieness’s Ass, and got the coveted Secretary of State position! But, unlike J.D Vance, Rubio had a lower melting point, and it was apparently exceeded by the heat in the Oval Office while the two Elected Bullies were trying to turn up the heat on Zelenskyy, who, WARNED IN ADVCANCE by other European leaders, had apparently donned asbestos underwear as a precautionary measure. Smart move, Volodomyr!) SLAVA UKRAINE!
AI generated image to my specs, third try. Vance looks a little too Old Testament, but aside from that I think this captures Shady’s current career ladder rather well! Problem is, on that particular ladder he’s NOT ASCENDING… and funny thing, the further down he goes, the hotter the rungs get!
Today, inspired by current events, I sat down and wrote a slightly — OK, somewhat — sarcastic letter to our 47th president, who could use a little advice about how to handle all the difficult, complex problems swirling around him, at home and abroad. Here it is! Go forth, Donny, and sin no more! Oh, BTW — your diaper needs changing! I can smell it from here.
Unloved King Shitzfurbranez,
Ye gods, you are an unholy fuckup! Even a little schmuck like me can still give you advice, so here’s a bulleted list:
Get rid of Elon! You need him, but does he need you? NO! His net income is bigger than some countries’ GDPs! He’s bought you, but how long will it be before he runs out of Special K and gets bored? My advice: Do him on a bridge, like Teddy Kennedy did it with that little bitch Mary Jo Kopechne! You can say you dove into the frigid, swirling water dozens of times trying to rescue Musky, and emerge for the news cameras a sopping wet HERO! Once again, you, Donnybrook, WIN!
Social Security, which I depend on for a meager $1,005 a month — pardon me, I had a checkered career — is headed for insolvency, and Medicare, which keeps me from dying of treatable illness and pays for my hospital stays and doctor care, appears to be on the chopping block. Oh, the government spent too much, we can’t afford to help the POOR any more! Besides, they must’ve somehow earned their poorness, because that’s where they are, right? POOR! BUT, I have come up with an amazing solution, completely unthought-of by anyone in your cabinet, Musk Ox or extended advisory council! Want to hear it? OK, and I won’t even charge you! HERE IT IS: TAX THE MOTHERFUCKING RICH! TAX THE MOTHERFUCKING RICH! TAX THE MOTHERFUCKING RICH! TAX THE MOTHERFUCKING RICH! There! Did you get that? And let me tell you why that’s GOOD economics, GOOD for America and GOOD for YOU: because if you tax the RICH, there aren’t enough of them to form a big mob, like you did on Jan. 6, 2021, pick up pitchforks and light torches, block the exits of the White House so you can’t get out, and burn it down AROUND YOU! That’s what happens, even to kings and queens, when they try to shift the tax burden from the nobles to the peasants. The peasants BURN you ALIVE!NOTE: This is not a threat, so don’t call whatever crook you have running the Secret Service. It’s merely a historical observation. But take my advice & AGAIN, YOU WIN!
Gazans have had at least 46,000 people, 2/3 of them (30,360) women and children, killed in the recent Israeli-committed genocide. I know you don’t give shit about them, but that was state-sponsored payback for the horrifying Oct. 7, 2023 HAMAS attacks where about 1,200 Israelis were killed. Now, you say you, or we, or somebody, is going to OWN GAZA and develop it into beautiful beachfront property, like Siesta Key, Sarasota, FL, where I used to live. But NOBODY ASKED THE PALESTINIANS! Because they’re poor, and poor people don’t vote, not for you, unless they’re white and dumb! I know the Navajo (Nation) pretty well, and they were relocated by the 7th Cavalry around 1862. They tried to scrape a living out of the sorry piece of sand they were forced to live on for 3 years, then gave up and WALKED 300 MILES back to their FORMER home! So I don’t think the Gazans, who have been living in PALESTINE for centuries, if not millennia, are going to leave that easily. My solution? Most Israelis are ASHKENAZI JEWS, which means their ancestry is European! WOULDN’T IT BE EASIER TO SEND THEM BACK TO EUROPE, GIVE GAZA BACK TO THE PALESTINIANS, and shake your buddy Netanyahu’s hand as he gets on the last train out of Jerusalem? Problem solved, and again, YOU WIN, DONNY! And don’t say I’m anti-Semitic, my dad was a Jew, served with the U.S. Army Signal Corps in WW2, and was a fine man. I loved him dearly. (My mother also served, as a nurse in the Royal Air Force, but with her, not so much.) Don’t worry, I’m approaching the end! •What I said about the Navajo loving their land also applies to Ukrainians. They like their own land just fine. And if that Jewish Fascist Zelenskyy started the war, did the Russian tank commanders have compasses? I ask, because all the Russian tanks I saw (you can tell, they had Russian flags on them) WERE HEADING WEST! I know that Putin is a fellow oligarch-cum-dictator, but just drop a small nuclear weapon, say 1 KT, on the Kremlin while he’s in it! Never mind the fallout, it’s just collateral damage, after all, you will have the heartfelt thanks and prayers of every Russian (I have friends there)! And the Ukrainians can go back to what they enjoy, being servile slaves of that horrible despot Zelenskyy! AGAIN YOU WIN!
The economy still sucks, worse than under Biden! That egg for your McMuffin cost $1! FORGET IT, YOU LOSE, KING SHITZFURBRANEZ! LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, you know who will inherit your throne? Not your children, but a man named ELON! LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOERLOSERLOSERLOSER!
Most sincerely yours, Malcolm J. Brenner
P.S. — Just one question, Donald (you never did like that name, did you? What a shit your father was, to name you that!): I had to fill out a long and rather complex form to be able to send this email to the White House, and answer some personal questions to do so. BUT WHY DO YOU NEED TO KNOW MY BLOOD TYPE? It is, for the record, B negative, which I am. Only towards you!
But what, Donnie, can I do? IT’S IN MY BLOOD! — MJB
(Image generated by AI. All you graphic artists out there, from the bottom of my flinty, cheap little heart, I apologize! This time, AI did what I asked, and I don’t have any money to pay you, anyway. And if I offered you my daughter’s hand in marriage, her husband might object, although that’s not a sure thing, they live in San Francisco, after all. So there!)
Yeah, you’ve seen this photo before! And you’ll probably see it again, before I get done with it, and #45!
Unless you read Russian, and are familiar with the current generation of samizdat — underground home publishing by officially unacknowledged writers — you probably aren’t aware that my novel of non-human intelligence, WET GODDESS: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover, is published in Russian! Here I am, celebrating the official publication in 2015, with my good friend Stoli Ch’naya, who used to be Russian but wisely moved his operations to Lithuania several years before Putin thought to put the bite on him:
This publication — little noted in the Russian press, by design — was actually initiated by the translator himself, who contacted me in 2014 to let me know that he had spent a year painstakingly translating Wet Goddess so his close friends and family could enjoy it as much as he had, and oh, by the way, did I mind?
Yes, he was asking my permission for a deed he’d already done!
Of course, being an ardent capitalist (at least when I have no money), my mind immediately turned to how I, and maybe even he, could turn a profit on the book, and, by the way, spread my radical ideas about dolphin personhood to a new continent and the largest country in the world (as of this writing)!
You may notice that I am not including a photo of my Russian translator here, or mentioning him by name, nor identifying the Russian city or oblast (state) where he lives. The reason for this is the meat-grinder of Putin’s insane war with Ukraine, which is currently turning Russian youth into sausages, with body-bag casings. Although my translator was working as a salesman in a failing retail store when he contacted me, he has, by dint of thrift (and Soviet-style subsidized rental housing, which costs about 1/10th of what it would here), slowly improved his photo and video gear to the point where he’s been operating for a couple of years and as independent cameraman/director/editor for his own and others’ productions! This guy is a typical Republican “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” self-made man, but he managed to do it in the Middle of Bumfok, Nowhere, Russia, without any help from what now passes for the GOP!
Not only that, the dude’s insanely handsome, like a Bolshevik version of Brad Pitt, but with that crazy madness in his eyes that we’ve come to expect from every Russian villain, from Dr. Zarkov in Flash Gordon to Viggo Tarasov in John Wick! When I pointed this out to him, he just replied “Yes, that’s what my mother says, too, but I thought she might be biased.”
This guy is utterly clueless!
I think I’ve said all I have to say, while keeping him safe from the clutches of the FSB! Here, without further ado, is my letter describing the confusing political events of July, 2024, the month and year when A NEW HOPE SHONE FORTH…
July 28-29, 2024 Dear XXXXX,
I know I haven’t given you enough time to respond since my last email, but current events have overtaken me, and the U.S.A. in general! Since I don’t know what or how RU TV covers U.S. news, I suspect you may have heard some rumors, or half-truths, or convenient untruths, about what is actually going on over here.
Because things are a bit topsy-turvy right now, let me try to summarize for your benefit, and that of all your fellow Russians, petit-bourgeois commoners, surfs, kulaks and nobles alike, the often confusing, sometimes confounding U.S. political events of the past month in chronological order, presented on a handy, bulleted (no pun intended) list for clarity, and because everybody else does it:
June 27, one month + one day ago: Ex-President Trump mops the studio floor with President Joe Biden in their first, and it turns out last, debate. Never mind that Trump lied hundreds of times during that 2 hours — the “firehose of falsehoods” you’ve referred to previously — Biden looked weak, and frail, and old. Not good optics! And of course no fact-checking by the moderators, which Trump wouldn’t tolerate. Worst thing Biden got out was “I’ve never heard such malarky in my life (Irish roots showing)!” I saw Biden debate Trump 4 years ago, and he was great. It’s sad to see what’s happened to him, but Grandfather Time catches up with everyone, even us Boomers!
End of June/Beginning of July: The Left falls into general slump, realizes Biden hasn’t got what it takes any more. Influential Democrats like George Clooney, the famous American actor (he was in a bad remake of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris in 2002, but I like Andrei Tarkovsky’s twisted vision better, he didn’t try to film a love story, but he left in those endless cheap special effects shots driving around Tokyo’s Ginza District on wet streets at night) start asking Biden to step down and let someone else lead the anti-Trump charge. Gee, who could it be? I wonder… the U.S.A.’s first Black/Asian female VP, Kamala Harris, former California senator, former federal prosecutor for the district of San Francisco?… NAH! What are you smoking, comrade? July 13, Saturday: Trump’s dog-and-pony show sets up its tents in the Rust Belt town of Butler, PA, about 40 miles north of Pittsburgh, which used to be the thriving center of the U.S. steel industry in the 20th Century. It’s solid-red Trump Country! Unbeknownst to the Trump security team, the local police or county sheriff, or even the Secret Service or his own family, a mentally disturbed white, Republican 20-year-old named Thomas Matthew Crooks, whose gun-nut father is a rabid Trump supporter, asks borrow his dad’s AR-15 style people-hunting rifle, so he can get some time in at the local gun range. Crooks’ dad jokes that his son needs the practice! (NOTE: Crooks’ high school gun club threw him out because he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, and was a danger on the firing range to himself and others! This kid was no Lee Harvey Oswald, a trained USMC sniper, by any means!) Later That Same Day: Crooks buys 50 rounds of ammo at a local gun shop, picks up a digital laser rangefinder and a short step ladder at Home Depot, and drives 40 miles to the Butler Farm Show, a seasonal event at which Trump is blathering. While Trump recalls his boyhood friendship with fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter, Crooks wanders around, measuring, sighting, and planning his shots. Supposedly the Secret Service knew about the danger he posed 18 minutes before the attempted assassination, as people saw Crooks up on the roof of the building that law enforcement was using as a headquarters! Crooks has plenty of time to crawl over the roof. A local sheriff’s deputy follows him up the ladder, but when Crooks points his long gun at the deputy, he falls off! Moments later, and while being intently observed by not 1 but 2 Secret Service sharpshooters, Crooks opens fire. 6:11 p.m.: Making a point, Donald Trump turns his head slightly and a .223 high velocity round flies through his right ear, missing a cranial shot by about 2 cm. Crooks gets off several more rounds, blasting a Teleprompter to fragments, seriously injuring two bystanders and killing a third. The SS sharpshooters put five .50 caliber rounds into young Master Crooks, ending his brief reign of terror, the Secret Service agents mob Trump, who instructs them on a hot mic to put his shoes back on (???) and doesn’t forget to pump his fist in the air, a dramatic salute to his followers, as he’s hustled out of the arena, blood trickling down his face. Immediately Afterward: The Republican Echo Chamber begins turning out nonsense about the shooting, and there’s no official word from either Trump’s campaign staff or the hospital where he was treated, other than to say he’s “doing well.” Rumors don’t just fly, they teleport! And when it’s finally realized that Crooks WAS a Trump supporter, and his family donated to Trump’s campaign, the Right is utterly gobsmacked! They were all prepared to blame President Biden, for threatening Trump by making him sound like a mean old Nazi, which Biden did by the simple expedient of quoting some of Trump’s statements recorded at his private, unscripted events! Here, Trump praises Fearless Leader, Little Rocket Man, Adolf Hitler, Stalin, and Nikolay Denkov, among other despots, for their firm grip on power. His fans eat it up. July 15-18: Republican Convention in Milwaukee, WI, a city which Trump has previously declared he hates, and is the capital of American beer-brewing. Trump is apotheosized and given burnt offerings and songs of glad adulation, along with people beseeching him to rescue them and their semiautomatic weapons from the Horrible Socialist Left, as only he can! July 18: On the last day of convention, Trump announces his eagerly-anticipated choice for VP! It’s J. D. Vance, a freshman senator from Ohio who was famous 10 years ago for writing a briefly bestselling book about how lousy his youth was titled Hillbilly Elegy. Almost immediately, videos of Vance making anti-Trump statements a few years ago start circulating. If you want to know what Pretzel Logic is, it’s politics! July 21, Sunday: Former Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, finally convinces President Joe Biden to depart the campaign, for the good of the country and the preservation of our democratic republic! Reluctantly, Biden agrees and appoints Kamala Harris to replace him on the ticket! She eagerly accepts, and starts fundraising immediately! 24 Hours Later: Harris has raised over $100,000,000, and set a new one-day record for U.S. political fundraising! July 22, Monday, A Slow News Day: When the news about Harris’s campaign gets out, Republicans suffer coronary arrest! Trump demands somebody repay him for all the money he’s invested in planning Sleepy Joe’s defeat, because Harris leaves him with no arguments except that she’s Black, she’s Asian and she’s got a vagina! (Which I think everybody was willing to accept on expert opinion.)
LATE MONDAY, 7-29: I put in 4 hours researching and writing this compilation, intending to complete it earlier, but I really felt like crap all day. Current events confound everything; for instance, where’s the supposed bullet hole in Trump’s right ear? And where are his medical records from the hospital ER, where he was treated? The FBI, among others, would like to hear it from Trump’s lips, and he’s finally acceded to their request. Also, the local sheriff’s office SWAT team was never briefed, never contacted, by the Secret Service until after the assignation attempt! Stay tuned to National Public Radio (NPR) for the best reporting originating in the USA. It reflects pretty well not only the news, but how it’s affecting ordinary people over here. Be well, stay low, wear camo and carry spare ammo! That’s the best advice I can give you right now, XXXXX, the rest is up to Lady Luck! — Malcolm
I woke from a nap last Saturday, just in time to witness on live TV the attempted assassination of ex-President Trump. It was quite a surreal situation, I assure you; I’d laid my head on a pillow on the couch for just a moment, and it seemed like no time had passed. I sort of lap-dissolved from the national evening news into coverage of The Donald’s election rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and became, as they say, another witness to the latest chapter in America’s dark, violent and bloody modern politics, the politics of hate, of polarization, the politics of the AR-15 and the bump stock.
Do you know what the wonderful thing about hate is? It is utterly indiscriminate! As an emotion, a state of self-perpetuating rage and battle-response stress, hate doesn’t care about any reasons who or what is hated, it’s much too primal for such refined cogitation. Any reasons it could come up with would only be thin masks, barely concealing the need to inflict hurt on others. Because hate only acknowledges its own existence, its own pain, its own wounds, and uses them to justify lashing out at the perceived person or object hated, or, as psychologists call it, the other.
Hence, we get news stories of rednecks attacking Sikhs, not because Sikhs are evil or have done the rednecks any harm, but since adult male Sikhs all wear turbans, grow full, luxurious beards and appear prosperous (the ones I’ve seen, anyhow), they fit the rednecks’ preconceived image of “your stereotypical A-rab oil sheik” and as such become the target for discrimination, harassment, assault and worse. Mind you, the rednecks wouldn’t know a real sheik if they tripped over him; many sheiks wear Western business suits when visiting our side of the world. Besides, I hear relations between the Muslims and Sikhs aren’t exactly what one would call amorous, and haven’t been much that way for the past, oh, I don’t know, 525 years?
Would-be Trump assassin Thomas Mattew Crooks, it now turns out, had images of both Trump and Biden on his cell phone, along with schedules of the Republican and Democratic Conventions. Crooks targeted both, but Trump’s convention came first, and was thus the earliest opportunity to do something totally random, totally chaotic, and thoroughly evil. It’s obvious Crooks didn’t care who he killed, finding one victim as good as another! He therefore had no impetus, no narrative, and no motive, except the brooding rage of one incessantly bullied, access to his father’s semiautomatic people-hunting rifle, enough cash to buy 50 rounds of ammo, and the immanent, irresistible presence in his world of an important, accessible target, like the smell of bacon attracting a hungry dog.
The FBI and other law enforcement agencies are having a hard time assigning a motive to Crooks’ murderous actions, and no wonder! His only motive was the opportunity to kill someone famous, it didn’t matter who! This kind of randomness, where the flip of a coin may decide whether you live or die, doesn’t care which side you’re on, what uniform you’re wearing, what color your skin is or what language you speak. Like the Xenomorph in the Alien movie franchise, Crooks killed because he could. His attempt to murder Trump made about as much sense as nobody John Hinkley trying to kill President Ronald Reagan to impress actress Jodie Foster: NONE WHATSOEVER!
Is this assassination attempt, such a meaningless gesture, a signal that the era of extremism in politics is over? If it no longer makes any difference to a would-be assassin what you as a victim believe, or do, or plan, why bother holding extremist viewpoints? Now, both sides of the Congressional aisle can feel equally threatened!
When it no longer matters who you kill, liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, you have truly become a psychopath.
***
NO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (A.I.) WAS USED IN THE COMPOSITION OF THIS ESSAY. AS A WRITER, I REJECT A.I. IT’S MORE PRONE TO HALLUCINATIONS THAN I AM! I MUCH PREFER THE APP NATURAL STUPIDITY. YOU CAN DOWNLOAD IT AT… OH HELL, JUST GO FIND IT YOURSELF!
All photos taken with an iPhone 7, most in the parking lot of a local Winn-Dixie supermarket. Wherever possible, identifying details of the license plates have been obscured; otherwise, these are the digital equivalents of box-camera negatives, and should be treated as such: nothing fancy! Enjoy, and ponder what it all means when we roll the bones!
“If I wanted to hear from an asshole, I’d fart.” Or you just might stay where you are and await the scream of tortured metal…
This would be on a Jeep… obviously, the owner has a problem with the flood of refugees the U.S.A. is accepting from South Stickistan!
There are those of us who want to live in the past, and then there those those of us who just want to live.
Hey, anyone for a heaping helping of cognitive dissonance, original Leon Festinger family recipe? #45 could have served in the military, but he didn’t want anything to happen to his precious bone spurs. When they’ll come in handy, you never know!
Conflicting opinions… What would John do?
And if you don’t know who Bob Dylan is, or what he was, or represented to Baby Boomers, don’t ask your folks, ask your grandparents… but only if they are, like, cool! You know, they do yoga, smoke weed, spout poems that don’t rhyme and there’s a gleam in their eye when they reminisce about ‘shroom hunting in the cow pastures just outside Sarasota in the early 1970’s?
Yeah, them. Ask them who Bob Dylan was, and why his anthem “Like a Rolling Stone” (sorry, stoners, this has nothing to do with the Stones) is quite possibly the greatest rock song ever written: because it embodies the sense of loss my generation suffers from, not only the loss of our brothers in the meat grinder of Vietnam, but the sense of loss of control over our own lives.
I don’t follow any professional sports, but I probably know more about the Steelers than I do about women… they’re from Pittsburg, right? The football team, I mean!But… why be merely annoying, when, with just a little more effort, you could be a truly Evil Genius?…And she’s better behaved than that slutty, potty-mouthed daughter of yours, beee-atch!
Again, different parents, different parenting styles! Where is Dr. Spock when you need him?
(CLARIFICATION: “Spock” here refers to the influential 20th Century American pediatrician Benjamin Spock, not the half-Vulcan bastard with the pointy ears and the sarcastic sense of humor on Star Trek: The Original Series! Am I understood?)
The flying lights sighted by both Allied and Axis air crews during WW2 were called, for some reason, “foo fighters” by our side and “fiendish Red Fascist weapons of aerial assault, built by the damn Jews of America, to thwart our beautiful plans for founding the Third Reich” by the Nazis.
(JK, of course, I don’t know what the Nazis called them but I’ll be fucked if I’m going to try to look up the German for “flying saucer”! I already know what it is in Italian, disco volante. That comes from reading my older sister’s Ian Fleming novels about a spy named… Bond. James Bond…it was 1961, and somewhere history was being made. But it wasn’t near me!)
Here I am, at the Charlotte County Arts & Cultural Center, which is just a few blocks from my house, getting my first vaccination shot on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day! That date is also the birthday of my father, Millard Maxwell Brenner, born in 1915 while the “War to End All Wars” was being waged. If you’re hesitant about the vaccination, don’t be! I feel really healthy for a change with Bill Gates’ nanobots, running Windows 13, in my veins and arteries! They are keeping me perfectly fine! perfectly fine! perfectly fine! perfectly…
I may have been mostly sitting on my butt lately (it’s the vertigo), but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been mentally active (I hate double negatives, don’t you?)! I’ve been reading books and watching movies, and here are my brief opinions of a bunch two of them.
The Current War
This larger-than-life story pits two 19th Century titans of industry against each other AND the forces of nature! It has the added feature of being mostly true.
On the one hand, all-American inventor Thomas Edison, whose sweatshop-cum-laboratory has given the world the wonders of the victrola and many other inventions, with direct current (DC), which usually won’t kill you but can’t be transmitted very far. Edison’s solution: what do people living in the country need electricity for, anyway?
George Westinghouse, having invented the air brake for railroads and thus made his million, sees the potential in this mysterious stuff, electricity. When his senior researcher is killed in a predictably avoidable accident, Westinghouse recruits the weird Serbian Nikola Tesla, who has been digging ditches since being fired by Edison’s lab for advocating an alternative to DC, the vastly more transmittable but also more dangerous alternating current (AC). There’s also the little matter of the $50,000 bonus Edison promised Tesla and then welched on, saying “You don’t understand the American sense of humor.”
Thus is engaged the The Current War,which lasted from about 1890-1904. Edison demonstrates the dangers of AC by electrocuting an incredible number of stray and unwanted animals, only the first of which is shown, fortunately, and off-screen. Tesla responds by letting millions of volts of AC cacade over his body at the 1893 Chicago Exposition with no ill results.
Overall, the film is gorgeously filmed and very, very believably acted by all those involved. Female characters, mostly in the form of the two inventors’ wives, are represented. It was reportedly a troubled production, with portions re-shot after a test screening at a film festival, but if so, the result doesn’t show on the screen. (Thanks, Martin Scorsese, who as a co-producer insisted on the right of the final cut!)
We take electricity and the light, warmth and power it gives us for granted. This film reminds us that we shouldn’t, that it was the work of hard-nosed businessmen that brought those wonders to us. I wish all historical films were this good!
Peter Fisher’s Odyssey: Marine Mammal Warfare
a novel by Michael Greenwood
In 1978, when I briefly worked for newspaper heiress Margaret Scripps Buzzelli, she flew me to Moorhead, Minnesota, where I interviewed a very withdrawn and forlorn Michael Greenwood. He was a civilian scientist who’d just served as a source for the influential 1977 PENTHOUSE article “The Pentagon’s Deadly Pets,”which pretty much blew the whistle on the U.S. Navy’s use of dolphins at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam. (Note: I can’t find the original article on the Web. It should be. I think I have a copy in my files, I’ll OCR it and put it up here.)
Of course Greenwood, who shows remorse for his dolphin deeds similar to Flipper trainer Ric O’Barry, says the dolphins at Cam Ranh were weaponized with syringes that injected enemy swimmers trying to mine the U.S. warships with compressed air, causing an instant and fatal embolism. The U.S. Navy has said it never weaponized dolphins, finding them to be to unreliable in targeting as a weapons platform, and anyway a live enemy swimmer is more valuable than a dead one, because he can give you intelligence.
I spent a couple of days interviewing Greenwood, smoking dope to control the weirdness of what I was hearing while he consumed an inhuman amount of cheap beer. He talked about dolphins and more, about distant communication with submerged submarines using ultra-low frequencies and about being able to send them a self-destruct signal should they fall into enemy hands. And about a tell-all book he hoped to write on the subject, then tentatively titled The Dolphin Machine.
It was a very heavy interview. I still have the tapes, and I have tried to listen to them to edit them into something I can put on line. But Greenwood’s elliptical, looping, self-reflexive way of speaking defeats me every time. He is incomprehensible and hypnotic, and that’s a bad combination. I went home feeling depressed.
So now we have the promised novel, only it’s titled Peter Fisher’s Odyssey: Marine Mammal Warfare.I think it may take the cake for longest gestation time for a literary work, even beating my own Wet Goddess, which took 37 years to finish, or 24, if you don’t count the 13 years I put it aside because I was emotionally too close to the story. For the record, I think the earlier title, and probably the earlier draft, were better.
Greenwood has written a novel just like he talks — elliptical, looping, self-referential — and very confusing to read. I have gotten 81 pages into it, and I can’t bring myself to pick it up again. It’s sad, because THIS IS THE ONLY NOVEL, AND PROBABLY THE ONLY WORK OF ANY KIND, ON THE OBSCURE SUBJECT OF MARINE MAMMAL WARFARE!
But here’s what I’ve been able to glean so far: The title character is leader of a Navy S.E.A.L. team, The Hounds of Hell, doing a dirty mission in Vietnam. Then he comes home, goes to college, and asks his professor a bunch of obvious, didactic questions like “What is a scientist, Max?” Cut to Peter, now a novice professor of psychology, lecturing his first class… and he flashes back to the time years ago when he, several human collaborators, a bunch of dolphins and a couple of pilot whales, infiltrated a Chinese harbor and fucked-up a bunch of Chinese whales.
At least, that’s what I think is going to happen. Peter Fisher finishes teaching the class before he finishes the flashback, and then… he dies. This is revealed on page 84. I’m sure that his story continues somehow, because the book goes on for a total of 666 pages. All of them as self-referential as an actor speaking to the camera.
There’s an old dictum in writing fiction, or non-fiction for that matter: Don’t tell the reader what you want them to know, show them. Greenwood never seems to get this, and thus we are subjected to a novel that reads somewhat like a corporate board meeting: Greenwood clues us in on what he’s going to tell us; then he tells us; the he explains what he just told us. It’s insane and boring as shit to read, but I really want to finish the book because I know Greenwood personally (albeit superficially), I can tell he went through something traumatic with dolphins, and I admire what he was able to do and learn about them. He’s also responsible for the release of one, a female Tursiops named Dolly Phynne, from the Navy’s Key West facility, without orders to do so. For which, I gather, he got in trouble. But Dolly Phynne is a another story.
(Greenwood also tells an incredibly funny and poignant story about a dolphin’s blunt response to open-ocean work, but that too is another story.)
Well, this book has a bunch of 5 star ratings on Amazon, so I guess somebody must like it. But now that I’ve put it down, I can’t pick it up again. You try.
About six weeks ago I was contacted by someone with the unlikely name of SunShine McWane, an associate producer for the Dr. Susan Block Show, to ask if I wanted to do a live interview. The podcast has been on the air since 1996 (!), and Dr. Suzy, as she is known, has quite a few listeners in the Los Angeles area.
Of course, ever hopeful to evangelize a greater audience (which, I hasten to add, is hardly a scientific way to do my work, but an effective one given I don’t have the numbers) I said yes.
Thus began the odyssey of SunShine (no, I never did ask why) McWane, who was determined to get a marine biologist on the show to discuss dolphin sex. I warned her.
“The producers of ‘Dolphin Lover’ tried, without success,” I recalled. “They couldn’t get the one they wanted, so my dialogue about that ended up on the cutting room floor.”
SunShine assured me that she was hopeful. Two weeks later, she didn’t sound so positive.
“They’re all so hoity-toity,” she complained. “I never imagined it would be this hard to find someone to go on a podcast and discuss the normal way dolphins have sex!”
I told her that, for what it was worth, with bottlenose dolphins there didn’t seem to be a normal way of having sex. It was made up all the time, with whatever props, objects or beings were available. That made her pause for thought.
“Well, we’ve got to prepare a PowerPoint presentation,” she finally sighed, and we left it at that, although where she was going to find a lot of illustrations was an unresolved problem.
Two days later, SunShine was back on the phone. “Can you do the show tonight? We had a cancellation.”
So I did. Who could turn the poor thing down? But of course there was no time to prepare the PowerPoint, so it would just be 90 minutes… of me. And due to the time difference between here and the West Coast, I would be on at 1:30 on a Sunday morning.
So be it. No sacrifice is too great to benefit the cause of Cetacean Liberation!
When I finally got on the air with Dr. Suzy, I found a rather nice, considerate person who tried to balance her concern for animals who might be the victims of sexual abuse with a realization that my story was quite real and told us a lot, not only about dolphins but about humans. She didn’t try to squelch me, like Bubba the Love Sponge, or make fun of my zoophilia, like Howard Stern. For that I was thankful.
And, as the above recording shows, she actually knows a lot about the situation with dolphins… although she prefers bonobos, those cute little apes who have been known after spats to make up by having sex.
Malcolm J. Brenner 