A bright light

 I like to relax by watching YouTube videos about the Second World War.  No matter how awful the events, I know how it came out.  The victory was imperfect, especially for people in eastern Europe, but at least the identifiably evil Nazis were defeated.  A few of them were even hanged like the common criminals they were.  For a short time the world was a hopeful place.

This is not a hopeful world.  In 1945 America really looked like what Lincoln called it in the still uncertain midst of another war, the last best hope of earth.  Let's see what Lincoln's successor thinks of it now.

That's his Christmas message.  I can't wait for the second inaugural.  We'll want to learn if by heart like Lincoln's, semi-literate capitalizations and all.  Lincoln didn't live long enough to experience his dotage, which is what they used to call Alzheimer's, but I doubt if it could have been this demented.

Instead of the usual litany of name calling he doubles down on lunatic demands that sovereign nations surrender all or part of their territory to HIM.  He's predictably enraged that he won't come into office with a bag of forty people to execute, or a fresh set of judgeships to sell.  Note the date and time, just when normal people are opening presents or settling down to watch It's a Wonderful Life.  This is what a bare majority of Americans wanted for the foreseeable future.  The sheer hatred and rage, because eggs cost too much?

From the start of his political career to roughly 1944, Adolf Hitler couldn't say enough good things about the German people and their right to rule the earth.  They were a race of Siegfrieds and Brunnhildes with almost magical powers derived from their Aryan descent, their undeniable Kultur and their pure blood.  Then the war began to go badly and the German people demonstrated that they were not worthy of HIM.  Some historians posit that he withdrew troops from the east, where they were at least buying time for Germans to escape Soviet retribution, and ordered them into a hopeless battle in the Ardennes in December 1944 because he wanted to punish the "failing" German people.  It is known that he ordered the armaments minister Albert Speer to lay waste to the country's infrastructure, which would have caused several million more deaths.  In short, he no longer pretended to think about the Volk who had sacrificed so much for him.  

For all his noise, Trump sees America the way he sees everything and everyone else -- as a means to power and money.  Patriots don't drool on the flag, or use the National Cemetery as the background for a photo-op, or denigrate the highest military honor the country can give.  They don't order thugs to invade and sack the Capitol because they lost an election.  They don't threaten peaceful neighbors with assimilation the way Hitler threatened Poland and "Czechia."  Above all, they don't appoint people who have vowed to make the lives of Americans worse.

Voters in New Castle, Pennsylvania, went for Trump by a wide margin.  Now they're beseeching him not to cut their Social Security and food stamps benefits, as proposed by Co-President Musk.  "I think he knows it's the poor people that got him elected, so I think Trump is going to do more to help us," one resident told the Washington Post.  She has a 17-year-old son, so she's old enough to remember his first term.  How did that go?  Do people not understand that you have to have Democrats in Congress, too?  A president can't pull Medicaid increases out of the air.

On the contrary, he can shorten your life by putting public health in the hands of a (former?) heroin user with a worm in his brain and no scientific qualifications who thinks cell phones cause cancer and vaccines cause autism.  He can force you to live in your car, if you're lucky enough to have one, by appointing another HUD secretary who opposes affordable housing and protections for poor tenants ("bondage").  He can impose tariffs that will make food even less affordable.  He can dismantle the Department of Education so your son's school features more crowded classes and fewer library books.  He can privatize the mail so that in addition to choosing between "toilet paper and milk," you can't afford a stamp to write your Congressman about it.  Yeah, you voted good.  I'm sure it only seems like Trump doesn't give a shit about you unless you have a million dollars to donate to his "inauguration."

Look on the bright side -- maybe you can get a job cleaning people's houses after the woman down the street is deported to Honduras.   I'm sure your life will improve once Old Glory flies over the Canal Zone again.  And who needs WHO?  Pennsylvania is unlikely to stop promoting flu shots like Louisiana.  Those people are dumb, right?

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The world rolls along.  Russia and navigation have never been a comfortable mix.  An undersea power cable connecting Estonia with Finland was damaged and the Finns think they know what happened.  They boarded and seized a Russian ship which flies the flag of the Cook Islands.  I didn't even know there was one.

Meanwhile the Ursa Major, a Russian cargo ship, sank off the coast of Spain after a series of explosions in its engine room.  The company that owns it blames "terrorism," not the fact that it was fifteen years old, poorly maintained because of sanctions and never intended for ocean use.

In a haunting reminder of Korean Airlines flight 007 (1983), an Azerbaijan Airlines plane from Baku to Grozny crashed in Kazakhstan after veering off course, with 38 dead and 29 survivors.  It is strongly suggested that Russian anti-aircraft fire was responsible.

Thirty-six years after its publication The Satanic Verses is finally available in India.  It's not so much a victory for free speech as the Hindu nationalist Modi government sticking a finger in the eye of the country's Muslim minority, but they're pretending it's all about missing paperwork, which sounds more like Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

Better news for free speech comes from Arkansas, believe it or not, where US District Judge Timothy Brooks struck down a law that would require librarians to face criminal charges for providing "harmful" material to minors.  The attorney general promises to appeal, because of course he does.

Did you know Turning Point USA now books a comedian for its hate-&-greets?  Did you know Glenn Beck is still alive?  In Phoenix he got the mouth-breathers to boo for "Jackson and Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who destroyed us" and promise that Trump will "reverse this" and restore "true freedom"?  It was more incoherent than funny.  Sure, Emancipation Proclamation, Pure Food and Drug Act, national forests, all double-plus-ungood, but Trump is a yuge fan of Jackson and his Seminole wars and Removal Act.  He may also find uses for the 1918 Sedition Act severely limiting criticism of the government.  TR and Wilson despised each other.  Wilson would be shocked to his racist core to be lumped in with Barack Obama.  It's lucky for Beck that the TPUSA know as much about American history as they do about quantum mechanics.  Bring back Tony Hinchcliffe!