NATO

In the summer of 2016, Donald Trump impugned the validity of NATO and suggested that if Russia attacked the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) he would take no action against Russia.  It was imprudent for Trump to say out loud what is probably a reality, but I believe that NATO has outlived its usefulness, and it is now a serious delusion that we insist on perpetuating instead of getting rid of it.  I am weary of the lip service we keep giving to Europeans that we stand ready to engage in combat for their sakes!  NATO should have been disbanded when the Berlin Wall came down!  Instead, stupidly expanding NATO into eastern Europe upon our instigation gave Putin the pretext he needed to do his territorial acquisitions.  It was a colossal diplomatic blunder, typical of guys who think with their Cold-War penises instead of their brains!  

Robin Williams once made the joke that "God gave Man two brains: one in his head and the other in his dick, but only enough blood to run one at a time!"  I fail to see that any of that action in eastern Europe is worth anyone in this country dying for or getting his/her genitals shot off, and at the risk of starting a much deadlier conflict!  I do not mean to suggest that we should turn our backs on what is happening in eastern Europe, but formal alliances imply things that I don't believe are realistic, and NATO is a Cold-War anachronism that should have been buried long ago!

INSTEAD, Clinton, Bush and Obama provocatively expanded NATO right up to Russia's back door, so now they have that pretext (THAT WE HANDED TO THEM ON A SILVER PLATTER) for accreting territory, like the Crimea and eastern Ukraine, for starters!  We bluster with tough talk, but the US isn't gonna do a thing except some more tough talk and maybe some sort of silly sanctions that will be honored in the breach by most of Russia's neighbors.  We rattle our sabers and talk tough, but that has rendered our credibility to zilch!  We are more than a day late and a dollar short in eastern Europe!  Then we go bomb somebody to show how tough we are!  The innocent "Collateral Damage" is meaningless to us!  THAT'S why the "wogs" hate our guts!  American foreign "policy" for the past 50 years has been to either provoke stupid pseudo-wars with tiny opponents we can supposedly conquer (but never do) or to swagger around, speak loudly and carry a meaningless stick!

NATO is just another provocative albatross around our necks, a set of potential broken-to-be promises.  I doubt very seriously if the US has any business threatening combat over Russia seizing whatever it may.  Not that I agree with their recent behavior, but in time they may come to rue the burden themselves.  Putin won't live forever, and there is no certainty that his successor(s) will pursue the same course of action as he.

I realize that anybody (but Trump) who dares impugn the necessity of NATO becomes a wounded political target.  But that's what SPINE is all about!  Once again we succumb to Conventional Wisdom because our Fearless Leaders don't have the courage to call out the sanctified fossils!  It's EXACTLY like our eternal blind support for Israel or those charities (like "March of Dimes") that NEVER DIE, despite their original raison d'ȇtre (like polio) being cured.  I well remember those cards handed out in elementary school to fill up with dimes in the cut-out slots, so polio could be "cured"!  I remember the photos of the kids in those dreadful "iron lungs" for the rest of their miserable lives!  I probably filled up 8-10 of those cards!  Now those money-grubbers at MoD have embraced BIRTH DEFECTS as their cause!   Clever footwork!  Charities are Big Money these days!

So much for Obama's (false) HOPE and (chump) CHANGE!  The sad fact is that Obama, for all his promises in 2008, is a willing prisoner of Conventional Wisdom!  I think that is what annoys me about him the most!  He truly inherited a mess, but he did almost NOTHING original to fix it!  He almost immediately bought into the usual (though utterly discredited) "Supply-Side" and Security-State nonsense, doubled down in central Asia, maintained the status quo, and never demonstrated the courage to REALLY try to change much of anything.  I think Hillary and her rutting husband (the "Blowjob-in-Chief"!) are EXACTLY the same.

DRAFTING

(The following was published as "Correspondent of the Day" in the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch on July 8, 2016:)

Although I am not a City taxpayer, I have business interests in the City of Richmond which are indirectly affected by the merchants' real-estate tax load.  So, I am interested in what is happening therein.

Your June 30 article about the contretemps over the present and future real-estate tax burden for Stone Brewing Co. raises issues that tend to support Donald Trump's complaint about inferior government negotiation of trade deals: that "our" negotiators cannot manage to address seemingly simple concerns adroitly.

The essence of the City dispute is the implicit taxable value of the real estate occupied by Stone Brewing and the resultant assessed-tax burden.  That multi-million-dollar brewery and restaurant were built via $23 Million in revenue bonds, guaranteed by and to be redeemed at taxpayer expense.  Stone Brewing gets to buy the property at the end of its 25-year lease for a "nominal" $25,000.00, so it understandably wants to be taxed only on the $25,000.00 valuation.  This could cost City taxpayers as much as $9.1 Million over the life of the lease.  They have been left on the hook for any deficiency by the City's Economic Development Authority, according to your article.  Those "wizards" who negotiated that nonsense are reduced to quibbling over the meaning of "nominal."  Apparently, Stone Brewing pays no rents for the property other than properly-assessed taxes.  This utterly avoidable issue defies common sense.  It demonstrates the folly of having communities compete with each other for "economic development" at taxpayer expense.

Why could not that obvious issue have been simply and effectively addressed in plain language at the outset?  What idiot wrote up that lease?  Someone or some entity needs to be held fully accountable to all City taxpayers.

WHIMPER, NO BANG

An item published at the Phys.org Website last year suggests that there may have been no "beginning" (nor "end") to our Universe, as there was no singular "Big Bang" but perhaps several "bangs" that kept spewing matter and energy outward, thus driving the known continuing expansion of the Universe, now attributed to a sort of anti-gravity "dark energy":

http://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html

I feel vindicated, since I have been suggesting as much for years!  The singular "Big Bang" theory seems to serve the earnest hopes and wishes of those who insist that there is a anthropomorphic, self-conscious being-force ("God") that created the Universe.  I think an eternal, infinite Universe, driven ever outward by multiple "bangs" tends to contradict such notions.  I am not here denying the existence of a Creation Force; I am merely doubting its humanoid nature!

Many physicists have concluded, on the basis of only what "background radiation" our instruments can CURRENTLY measure, that THE "Big Bang" occurred some 14 Billion years ago, but there may be reason to think that the Universe is at least a TRILLION years old or perhaps is infinite.  Recorded history has demonstrated, time and again, that our understandings (and the resultant age predictions) keep going farther and farther back as more sensitive instruments are developed.  In other words, we've come a long way, Baby, from Galileo's telescope (at least until the "experts" screwed it up by confusing metric and English measurements, as with the initial mis-focus of the Hubble telescope)!  And, we are definitely a long way from the estimate in the Hebrew Torah that the "Garden of Eden" story had its conclusive creational say about 8500 years ago!

It has simply made no sense to me that the Universe should have a presumed age, before which, simply, no TIME even existed!  I can grasp the notion of a sort of "black hole" singularity where all matter and energy and time itself are compressed into a single, finite point which then explodes, spewing creation outward.  Consider the sheer size and complexity of the Universe: billions and billions of galaxies in the night sky, our Milky Way galaxy, a medium-sized galaxy with millions if not billions of stars and solar systems, being 100,000 light-years across (a single light-year is 5.8 TRILLION miles)!  It is naïvely presumptuous to assert that NOTHING existed before "time" and "existence" itself were created with a sole "Big Bang"!

OF COURSE I cannot "prove" any of this, but I think it is healthy to doubt the Conventional Wisdom on this issue.  Others have certainly made a persuasive mathematical case for the "multiple bangs" theory!

This also ties into my latest "theory" of gravity, that gravity is not a force that PULLS matter together but is, in fact, a manifestation that astronomical bodies will expand AWAY from each other by the force of "dark energy" UNLESS they get too close to one another, in which case the all-surrounding "dark energy" PUSHES them together!  If we assume that such dark energy is as "efficient" as possible (most energies are), then it's a lot easier to push one bigger, conjoined body away from all the others than to push two separate, smaller bodies.  That dark energy favors convenient "gravitational" collisions, much as electrical energy searches for multiple juicy grounds (i.e., the cows standing under a tree) during an electrical storm!

(I really like exploding things!)